Below is an excerpt from ChapterV, "Don Quixote De Orlando: Master Legend." To set the scene, we're in a narrow, brick-walled back room in Gino's Pizza. (Master Legend, unlike other Real-Life Superheroes featured in the book, refused an "on patrol" interview, citing concerns for my safety.) I'm sitting on one side of a battered wooden table while Master Legend sits on the other. He's in full costume, wearing what appears to be a silver body suit covered with matching silver BMX pads, black gloves, a black cape, and mask, and a metal World War II army helmet. We've been talking a while, and he's just mentioned his RLSH group, "Team Justice."
PLEASE NOTE: To anticipate your question, the answer is "No, I'm not making this up. Master Legend is a real individual, and the following was transcribed directly from an audio recording of my interview with him."
"What's Team Justice?" I ask.
“Team Justice!” says Master Legend, almost jumping out of his seat with joy that I’ve brought it up. “Superhero (Another Florida RLSH) is gonna buy an army tank!”
“Oh yeah?”
Oh crap!
“Yeah.”
“You’re buying an army tank?
“Superhero’s buying an army tank for Team Justice. I have a motor home that I’m working on right now with bullet-proof sides and everything.”
“Cool.”
“I’m reconverting it, an old American Clipper with a 440 engine, one of the biggest engines Dodge ever made, and I can carry many of my superhero friends along with me, and we can sleep and there’s laying-down areas in the back.”
He’s suddenly become a little kid describing the tree fort he and his buddies are building: “And there’s gonna be a trap door and a rope ladder and no girls allowed and....”
“There’s even gonna be a mobile computer system to go with it so we can have our constant computer satellite system, but that’s still being worked on.”
By who? NASA? Is that an iPhone app?
“Who else is on Team Justice?,” I ask. “There’s Superhero….”
“Superhero, Amazonia, Fire and Brimstone, and um, I’ve also got Night Vigil who has joined forces with us, there is The Crimson Fist, who really came through for us on the staph infection mission.”
“Oh wow,” I say, less impressed by the sum of the parts than by the individual units “The Crimson Fist” and “staph infection mission.”
“But that’s your basic Team Justice. Oh, and Citizen Smoke, and a girl named Rift recently joined.”
“Any interesting missions recently?”
“We did the blood drive mission, where we gave blood, and it just so happened that Citizen Justice, myself, and The Symbiote, um, all have super-high iron content blood, and we went on a machine that separates your blood, it doesn’t take your regular blood, it separates special hemoglobins and red blood cells which get shipped directly. I watched it, it was like a Superman comic, they came to get our blood so fast, and I found out that, uh, and this is unbelievable, it’s unbelievable but it’s true, um, that they took a pound of blood out of me, a pound of blood out of my other friends. The other people, they just gave regular blood, but our blood was shipped right over and they took a pound of blood and saved nine little babies’ lives.”
Wow, he’s right! If that’s anything, it’s unbelievable.
“So, between the three of us, we saved a number of lives.”
“Nice,” I say. What else can you say about saving nine babies with a pound of your own superblood?
“So has being Master Legend led to experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise have had?”
“Yeah. I have friends all around the world. Israel, Hong Kong, China, Germany, India, Australia, Spain, Italy. I'm known all around the world and they love the fight stories. I was known as ‘The Man of a 1,000 Fights’ twenty years ago. Well, that number has gone up. I think that's how I first originally got where people really started to take notice of me, because of these stories. I went to jail for beating up a child molester – a behemoth of a man, a giant, a horrible horrible person – and I beat him to a bloody pulp. I had no choice but to save my brother's life at the time. The guy was a tree man that lifted logs as big as this table and threw them with one hand.
"Luckily, I’ve been enhanced with super-human strength. People joke about it, but I made a wish on Marie Laveau’s grave and I didn’t think it worked, but then me and my brother went into this mausoleum and the door, this thick iron door shut on us, and there was no escape. I heard some voices, hearts beating, and I could sense these spirits and they're speaking in a different language, ancient Latin, and I realized that I could understand that they were saying, ‘You will be trapped in here forever.’ I said, ‘No I'm not! If there is a time for the power, it is NOW!’ Then I jumped at the door, and I threw a flying kick and just knocked the concrete and the iron door hit the ground and everything and we were out of there.”
“Holy crap.”