THE JOKE'S ON ME II: A BLACK COMEDY
Chapter 1: Hair Of the Dog
Harlequin's Hideaway, New York City Waterfront, 1975
I: Liv
Well, hello again, friends and neighbours?
How the fuck are you?
Me, I've been better.
Let me ask you a question, are you paranoid?
I am.
When things are going well, do you sit there and wait for the other shoe to drop?
And things were going well.
I got made in the JLA, I moved out of Wayne Manor to my own place, the place Paulie had been using for his hideout, I made the cover of Rolling Stone.
By myself.
Yeah, I went from being the mask community's biggest embarrassment to the new fair-haired boy, in what was probably one of the most devious, underhanded and ultraviolent acts of my entire career.
Now, that's what I call ironic.
But, the thing about it was, I started getting That Old Feeling, and I wasn't sure if it was paranoia, or premonition, or both.
I guess it was a combination of the two, because that other fucking shoe, it dropped, alright, like a fucking anvil in a Wile. E Coyote cartoon.
Okay, I'm gonna teach you a new word, today.
Won't that be nice?
Today's word is defenestration.
Deee-fen-esss-tray-shun.
Got that?
Good.
Say it to yourself a few times.
Now, we'll say it together, one more time.
Deee-fen-esss-tray-shun.
Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
Sounds like something Whitey Wasperson does to his lawn.
Now, I'll tell you what it means.
It means throwing a person out a window.
The funny thing about it is, when I got thrown out a window, you know, just as I was going through it, I was thinking about that word?
Wondering if it had a past tense, as in "I have just been defenestrated."
I was also thinking that this is what I get for suiting up on one of my nights off and doing a favor for a friend.
Sometimes you really can be too fucking smart for your own good.
Or maybe defenestration is divine retribution for the likes of me thinking impure thoughts about Captain America.
Two Weeks Before…
…he moved stealthily, just like an animal, so his presence always took her by surprise.
"No." she told him, but the word meant nothing to either of them.
She didn't mean it, she only said it for the sake of the propriety she no longer felt, at least not with him.
Vivienne let the towel fall from around her body, and she drank in the sight of him, from eyes hooded with lust.
His strong, barrel chest, the thick, muscular legs and arms, all covered with coarse black hair.
His piercing blue eyes affixed her to the spot, and all she could do was wait…
Jesus, don't they ever get down to business? I'm takin' this one back. If Logan really put you on the hook that long, you'd die waiting.
Lemme see if they gotta better story in this book…
OH BOY! HOT SHIT!
HERE'S ONE ABOUT CAP!
Boy, and I know I'm goin' straight to hell for it, but what I wouldn't do for a piece of him!
Steve's the one good thing I want to do before I die, yunno?
What's this one called?
The Many Lusts of Captain America, Sexy Sentinel of Liberty.
Many lusts, huh?
Sexy Sentinel of Liberty?
That sounds pretty good.
Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, where's the fucking part?
OK, this looks like it.
…slowly I peeled away the skin-tight red, white and blue suit, still warm from the heat of his body, until we were naked.
He was an old fashioned guy, so I think he was a little embarrassed when I got on my knees in front of his fabulous golden thighs.
Fabulous golden thighs?
Fabulous golden thighs!
FABULOUS GOLDEN THIGHS!
Fuck me sideways, I'll bet Steve does have fabulous golden thighs.
That's more like it.
"You don't have to. You don't owe me anything for saving you. Really" He told me, blushing.
"But I want to." I said…
Yeah, honey, me too. Boy do I want to, fuck yeah.
And that's just the way I always thought it would be with Cap.
He'd be all bashful, and ashamed of how he couldn't help but feel, and I'd be all over him like the stripes on the flag.
This is some good shit, this is what I was looking for.
…I leaned forward against his weak protests, and he put his strong hands in my hair and moaned as I closed my fist and my lips around his…
BRAAAAAAAAPPPPPPP! BRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAPPPPPP!
What?
WHAAAAAAAT?
OH FUCK YOU!
Fuck you, you goddamn radio, shit, this is my fucking night off!
"What? What now?"
"Harlequin?"
"GODDDAMIT, DAN, IT'S MY FUCKING NIGHT OFF!"
"You don't have to shout!"
"Well, I'm busy! I'm really busy! What is it? What the fuck?"
"The docks. It's right down the street from you. Literally. All you have to do is put your costume on, and there's only one man. I'm on the other side of town."
"Well, I'm right in the middle of…never mind. I'll take care of it."
Seems pretty innocent, right?
There's this fugitive he's been looking for, nobody special, just some jailbird out of county, he's holed up at a warehouse on the docks, here's the address, can I please go pick him up and run him in?
Simple.
Routine.
I know that Nite Owl didn't know that his jailbird had got together with a few friends.
Not that I never fought three guys at once.
I've fought ten guys at once, but I came prepared to fight ten guys at once.
I would have just gone home, but they had Rorschach, and they were about to unmask him.
He was unconscious, but you don't know Rorschach.
He lives in his mask.
Dan doesn't even know what he looks like.
I had to save him.
And, I mean, I didn't expect the cocksuckers to go easy, I expected a fight, and I got it, and I got all of them without having to pull my gun or my knife, not that I wouldn't have, believe me, but what I didn't expect, at all, was that there were four of them, and that the one I didn't see was the one I was after, and that he would push me out the window.
The window was on the second story and as I was going through it, I fired at the cocksucker who pushed me and I saw the light go out of his eyes.
I was pretty sure that was the last thing I was ever going to see, and you bet your ass I screamed all the way down; I think I might have screamed for Eddie, even though he wasn't there.
Eddie was off doing one of his USA All-The-Way commando missions, in the Bolivian jungle.
The ones he doesn't take me on.
When I hit, I blacked out, completely, and the next thing I knew, I smelled mildew, old carpet, and rotten meat.
Heaven wasn't supposed to smell like that, and Hell was supposed to smell like sulphur, and so I figured out pretty quickly I wasn't dead.
I opened my eyes, and I could see the moon and the stars overhead, and I heard New York in the background.
I looked around, because I could, and found that I had fallen into one of those giant industrial dumpsters.
It was filled up with old foam insulation and mildewed carpet and carpet padding and that kind of shit that you get when you're renovating some old building, just the kind of shit to give you a nice soft landing.
I looked up and saw that the guy who pushed me out hanging half-in and half- out of the window.
He was as dead as he was ever going to be, and I was still alive and well.
Thanks to my costume being pretty much a space-age boiler suit made from canvas, Kevlar, and just a little spandex, just enough for me to be able to move, because I hate spandex, being short, stocky and curvy I do not have the figure for it, the glass didn't cut me when I went through the window.
I mean I had the wind knocked out of me, and sure, in the morning my whole body was going to hurt, but as much punishment as it's taken over the years, my whole body hurts every morning, anyway.
Like Logan says, me and pain are old friends.
But still, even though I am alive and unharmed, here I am in a pretty shitty spot.
I'm covered in glass, and whereas none of it is in me at this time, if I make any wrong moves, and the glass is just so sharp and at just the right angle, well, I get skewered by a nice thick slice of WWII vintage plate glass.
Not good.
I'm in deep shit.
Well, the Lord isn't going to send the likes of me an angel and the Devil never comes from Hell to help anybody out, so it was all up to me.
I lay there for awahile, waiting for my breath to come back.
The pain began, but it was nothing serious; the kind of pain you get the night you have some minor car accident where the door behind yours gets cracked up because some nut is driving around in January in a Peugeot with bald tires.
But as I was lying there, I was thinking about Eddie telling me to watch what jobs I took when I had no backup.
I was thinking about how I had only gone out on my nights off in case of emergency, and that happened two, maybe three times since 1966.
And I could count on my one the number of jobs I went into cold, with no intel at all.
Dumb, dumb, stupid, dumb.
"Harlequin?"
I guess he must have come to, in the end.
I opened my eyes again, my head hurt and two Rorschachs merged into one.
"I'm alive. I'm alright, mostly. What were you doing in this shitstorm?"
"Comedian asked me to watch over you while he was gone. Walked here. Got here before you did. Ambushed. Were six of them. Knocked out."
"Yeah, that's when I got here. I would have just said, fuck this, and called the cops when I saw there were so many, but they had you, yunno? No time to call for backup."
"Thank you." He says.
"Going to get your radio. Excuse me."
He got my radio off my belt, it was already crackling.
"…come in Harlequin. This is Batman. Are you in distress? Over. Come in Harlequin. This is Batman."
"Hold that closer to me, Rorschach. Thanks. Roger that, Batman. This is Harlequin. I've just been defenestrated."
He didn't even have to think about it.
"How bad is it?"
"Not bad at all. Although, this one calls for a new tattoo. I landed in a big industrial dumpster full of cardboard boxes, rotten food, old foam insulation and mildewed carpet and carpet padding. Gave me a nice, soft landing. I've got glass all over me, though and I blacked out. I think I have a concuss….AAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGH!"
I dropped the radio.
It hurt so bad.
"HARLEQUIN!"
I'm in too much pain to do anything but try not to sob, and Rorschach took the radio.
"Arm's dislocated, Batman. She tried to move it. Didn't realise."
I'm cursing in the background.
"Ow, ow, shit, goddamn, owww, motherfucker, owww, owww my arm, Jesus, owwww…yeah, dislocated. Left arm. I won't be trying to move it again. Owwww…"
"I've got your signal, and I'll be there in less than five minutes. Over and out."
So, Rorschach gets on the radio, trying to raise Dan to fly over and get me, and I saw a light on the corrugated iron wall of the warehouse, but it wasn't the light from the Batmobile.
Now that the adrenaline had worn off, the pain, most of it in my arm, was starting in earnest.
I was pretty well out of it, I thought a giant robot had showed up, and I was wondering who had called the giant robot, until the giant robot's face moved up and Tony's face was under it.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"Tony." I said.
"Good. Then you didn't hit your head too hard. Stay very still, Liv. I'm going help take this glass away from you. Watch your hands, Rorschach. Now, Liv, does Bruce know?"
"He's coming. Watch my arm. Shoulder's dislocated. Again."
I dislocated it the first time the night I wiped out the New York chapter of the Friends of Humanity, beheaded their leader, saved the lives of three mutants, and almost died at the X-Mansion Infirmary of pneumonia, alcohol poisoning and more serious injuries than my dislocated shoulder.
Good times.
"I can see that. What the hell happened? Don't answer that. Save you strength."
The Batmobile got there a few moments later.
But, at least my brother and Pop were there.
Pop noticed blood coming through Rorschach's mask, and he made him sit down on the curb.
Dick took over picking pieces of glass off of me.
"I think it's dislocated again. My arm." I told him.
"That's how it looks."
"Hurts like a bastard."
This is when Nite Owl arrives.
He's upset.
I'm hurt, his partner's hurt, and Bruce is furious.
I think, at this point, everybody got into a fight, and I went out a little, but I woke up when I felt four pairs of hands on me.
"Trivelino?"
"Yeah, Pop?"
"Dan has a stretcher, and we are going to use that to carry you into the Owl Ship. But first, we have to lift you out of this dumpster. It's going to hurt, so, get ready."
"I'm ready. It stinks in here."
I've been beat up pretty bad a whole lotta buncha times, so I have to live with a lot of pain. Logan's taught me some of the pain management techniques he's learned over the years, and I was trying to put the meditation technique he learned from a Tibetan yogi into use.
But the pain from my arm when I so much as twitched was excruciating, so when they all lifted me, gently as they could, it felt like someone had smashed me in the chest with a flaming 10 pound sledgehammer, a pain that was swiftly ferried down the nerves in my neck and my arms and legs to the entire left side of my body.
I screamed, I couldn't help it.
Thankfully, I blacked out from the pain, because the next thing I knew I was all cleaned up, in my rooms back at Wayne Manor, wearing one of Eddie's shirts he throws out; I sleep in those, and my arm was in a sling.
Pop was there, with Alfred, and my doctor.
Eddie trusts Beast to keep his secrets, but I have a doctor I know will keep mine, too.
Dr. Donald Blake.
How do you think I got the Thor's hammer for being a true warrior?
He's seen all the scars.
"She's awake, sir." Alfred said.
"Already? How do you feel, Liv?"
"Sleepy. And in much less pain."
"That's because Dr. Blake had to give you a shot so he could fix your arm."
"Dislocated?"
"Yes, Miss Napier. Dr. Blake and I had quite a bit of trouble manipulating it back into place. Had you been awake, the pain would have been unbearable. It took some doing, but you'll be alright now. It shouldn't hurt as much. But you're going to have to wear that sling for awhile. And take a few days off."
"Anything else?"
"A few scrapes. A few bruises. A very slight concussion. Considering the fall you took, you were very lucky." Says Dr. Blake.
I yawned.
"I feel so sleepy." I said.
I think they gave me something to slow my Mustang down; I was pretty close to knocked out.
"Good. Now listen to me, Trivelino. I want you to rest. One week, no costume. I'd ask you to stay in bed for a day or two, but I know you won't do it." Dr. Blake tells me.
"Don't fight it. Go back to sleep, Liv." Pop told me.
"What about Rorschach? Is he alright?"
"He had a minor concussion. Go to sleep, Liv." He repeated.
"Somebody has to tell Eddie." I said.
As I was nodding off, I saw him and Alfred looking at each other, with expressions of worry on their faces.
As I fell out, I hoped it was me they were worried about.
But I had this feeling it wasn't, and I knew that wasn't paranoia.
It was premonition.
Author's Note: Uh-oh. Do Bruce and Alfred know something Liv doesn't? Something about Eddie they don't want to tell her right after she's been thrown out a window? But what could possibly happen to the Comedian? He's indestructible, isn't he? Well? Isn't he?