Rangeman Talks to Some Kids

 Rangeman continued to walk all over NYC, wearing the watch which gave him superpowers,

swimming across the rivers, climbing trees and fire escapes and other structures to rescue cats, and spreading his superhero message: "Be nice!"

One day, in Brooklyn, he heard a bunch of small children yelling, "Rangeman! Rangeman!" He ran in the direction of the voices, trying to see what the emergency was which called for his superpowers. The children were pressed up inside a playground fence, jumping up and down and shouting his name. 

Eventually Rangeman figured out that there was no emergency, and that the children were just excited to meet him. "Okay, children," he said, "have you been being nice?"

The kids talked excitedly all at once about how being nice had accomplished so many amazing things in their lives. 

"It's great being nice, isn't it?" Rangeman asked, and the little kids jumped up and own and yelled their agreement. 

Then Rangeman noticed another group of kids inside the playground fence, a little way away, watching quietly. Nervous smiles, hands in pockets, a few pimples. These kids were older. Looked like junior high, maybe. Rangeman had already had some experience with kids in this age group. He knew they could be skittish. He knew that occasionally, kids in the junior high age group got the notion that being nice was uncool -- somewhat like Tony Stark, it suddenly occurred to him. Rangeman called over to the bigger kids, "And how about you? Have you been being nice?"

One of the older kids yelled back, "Did you really choke Tony Stark?" This question occasioned a ripple of nervous laughter among the bigger kids.

Rangeman sighed. "Yes, I really did choke Tony, a little bit. A couple of minutes after I met him. It was wrong for me to do that. Completely wrong."

Another one of the bigger kids yelled, "So why did you do it?"

"He was being a dick. A real dick. But that's no excuse! Tony has a lot of problems. Some people think billionaires don't have problems. But the truth is, Tony's parents both died when he was a kid, his dad had put a lot of pressure on him before that, he has a radioactive thing in his chest and he'll die if it comes out -- in short, children, he has a lot of exactly the same kinds of problems everybody else has. 

"None of that is any excuse for him being a dick. But him being a dick is also no excuse for me, or anyone else, to choke him. It's important to be nice even when it's very hard to be nice." 

After a short silence, the older kids all began shouting excitedly, about how he was right, about all of the problems which had been solved by their being nice, how awesome it was to be nice...

They fell silent again. One of the older kids asked, "Hey, Rangeman. Are you crying?"

"Yeff. I'm crying," Rangeman said, the fluids having turned the s in yes to an ff. Somebody tossed a package of Kleenexes over the fence. Rangeman said thank you, turned away to blow his nose, then faced the kids and said thank you again.

"Why are you crying?" one of the smaller children asked. "Are you unhappy?"

"No," Rangeman replied. "I'm crying because I'm very happy." He sensed that maybe the children didn't understand, so he explained: "Sometimes you get so happy that it's overwhelming, and it makes you cry. But it's not a bad thing. Not at all. You kids here -- all of you," he added, and waved his arms to include both groups, "are so awesome, that it makes me very happy."

A teacher had noticed that a grown man was talking to some children through the fence and approached to shoo him away, but as he got close he realized who it was. "Hey, Rangeman!" he shouted.

"Hi," Rangeman said back. "Outstanding bunch of children you have here."

"You got that right!" the teacher emphatically agreed.

"You got any cats need to be rescued?"

"No," the teacher said, "as far as I know, for now, all of our cats are good."

Rangeman walked away, and called over his shoulder, "Well, if that ever changes, you know how to contact me."

"That's right, Rangeman!" the teacher called back. But after a while he realized that, actually, he had no idea how to contact Rangeman.

Rangeman Meets Some Very Tough Guys

Rangeman went around, doing what he did, mostly telling people to be nice and rescuing cats from trees.

Turned out that a lot of cats got stuck up high in trees in NYC. Soon Rangeman was getting very busy with the cats. He was becoming more well-known. He was getting some respect from the NYFD, the normal go-to guys for cats stuck in trees. 

At first the firemen regarded him as a nuisance, a crazy person would just get in the way, possibly injure himself or the cat or one of them. But soon he won them over, above all with his absolute dedication to get the job done, his nothing-is-impossible attitude, and his rapidly-increasing climbing skills. Do anything strenuous all day long every day, and work out when you're not doing it, and chances are you might get very good at it. 

Now the firemen would see him from down the block as they rolled in, and they'd yell, "Rangeman, my man!" Sometimes now they'd just watch, confident he'd get the job done. If he was up very high they would stretch out those stretchy round bouncy things that fireman stretch out, just in case he or the cat fell. But he didn't fall, the cats didn't fall. He was getting very good at this. He hadn't been in bad physical shape before he became Rangeman, but he was definitely more cut now. 

One beautiful crisp afternoon he was just walking around, guarding his city, when someone called, "Hey, Rangeman!" He turned around to see half a dozen very bad-looking guys walking up on him, with lots of denim and shiny black leather and sneering faces, and three of them had handguns leveled at him.

The first group of thugs Rangeman had dealt with, the ones who were there during his transformation, playing keep-away with a lady purse -- those guys might have been intimidated by a hypothetical second group of bad guys who were clearly tougher and meaner. And the second group might have been afraid of a third group of bad man. But that hypothetical third group would still have nightmares about these guys who were pulling guns on Rangeman. Murder and intimidation just oozed from the pores of this fourth, non-hypothetical group.

Even before he spoke, it was clear that one of the three with the guns was the leader of the whole bunch. Rangeman wagged a finger at this one and said, "Hey now ! Be nice!"

The leader and a couple of the others laughed. Rangeman saw that one of them who wasn't pointing a gun at him had a gun in a holster at his waist, clearly visible over his knit shirt and under his black leather jacket.

"I'm not a nice guy," the leader told Rangeman, and some of his gang laughed some more. 

"And how's that working out for you?" Rangeman asked.

"We're doing okay."

"It looks like you all spend a lot on clothes."

"Oh, we got plenty to spend on clothes. We see something we want to wear, we buy it, we don't need to ask the price first."

"Uh-huh. But you don't look happy. You're laughing at me, but it sounds like hollow laughter." 

The head gangster stopped smiling and said, "You're giving me mental-health advice?! The guy who choked Tony Stark?!"

"I only choked Tony for a moment. Just to establish some boundaries. He was being a real dick, and I knew he knew better. I didn't choke him out, nothing like that. Any bad feelings about it were over with the same day."

"Uh-huh. TONY STARK DOESN'T EXIST," the lead bad guy yelled in Rangeman's face. "He's a fictional character, played by Robert Downey, Jr in movies, and drawn in comic-books."

"Yes, yes," Rangeman spluttered, "there are movies and comics about Tony and the other Avengers, but they're real. Stark Tower is right over there."

"Where?"

"Umm... You can't see it from here, the buildings on this block are blocking the view, and --"

"Wanna walk to where there's a view of it? It's imaginary! It's CGI in those movies! And your 'superpowers' amount to telling people to be nice, and saving cats, and getting your picture in the news every now and then, because --"

"The Rangeman has an altimeter in it! And a barometer! And an ambient-air thermometer! And solar panels that re-charge the batteries, and every 24 hours it synchs its time with an atomic clock in Colorado, and it's especially durable, even compared to other G-Shocks, and --"

"Wait a minute, an atomic clock in Colorado? What's up with that?"

"Yes, even if you turn off the synch, it's still spec'ed at plus-minus 15 seconds a month, so if the synch is on it's always within a split-second, AND it springs forward and falls back by itself!"

"Hey, now, that last thing," the main bad guy, "that I like. That's a real pain in the ass with watches." By now all of their guns were holstered. "Give me your Rangeman, Rangeman."

"No."

"No. huh? Just like that."

"You want it, you're going to have to take it."

All of the bad guys laughed at that, and now the laughter sounded more relaxed, less hollow.

"How much does one of those cost?" the boss of the bad guys asked.

A second bad guy spoke up: "That's a GW9400-1, right?" he asked, and Rangeman nodded. The second thug told the first, "Retail's $330. You can find them for less. Down to about $100 off of retail." The boss looked nauseous on hearing such a low price, but the second one went on, insisting, "it's not always all about the price. Maybe 99.9% of the time in life, but with G-Shocks..."

"So they're a couple hundred bucks, these things?"

"That particular model. There's thousands of models."

"THOUsands?"

"Thousands, boss. From $30 up to several thousand."

"Huh," the boss said, and turned back to Rangeman: "So you're risking your life over a couple hundred dollars."

"Like your guy just said -- not everything is even about money."

"Well, you're a brave guy."

"I don't know if am brave. But I have to act that way, because I'm a superhero. I have an important job to do."

"Superhero! There's no such thing as superheros! You're a great, big, huge, nice, somewhat charismatic crazy person!"

"Agree to disagree?"

The boss crook raised both his hands and was about to start shouting again. But then he lowered his hands again and said, "Sure." He turned to the second guy and asked, "You know where we can shop for G-Shocks?"

"Sure, Boss."

"For the fancy expensive ones?"

"Yeah, I know that too."

The boss turned back to Rangeman: "You want to come with us? We'll buy you a watch."

"Oh! Oh. Thank you very much," Rangeman said, "but --"

"But what?" 

"It's this time of day. I don't know why, maybe it's because the firehouse nearby is changing shifts, but this time of day I'm usually pretty busy."

"Okay. Some other time."

"Thanks, that would be nice."

"And, you know -- I like cats."

Hey, you know what?" Rangeman said.

"What?"

"YOU'RE BEING NICE!"

The other 5 crooks laughed at the boss. The boss looked confused for a moment. Then he smiled, shook Rangeman's hand and said, "You're okay." 

Random Notes

I've been screwing up some of my favorite songs, "Weird Al" style. The Who's "Eminence Front," for example: "People forget/ Forget they're hiding/ Behind an elephant's butt/ It's an elephant's butt/ It's a big one." 

And then there's "Family Affair" by Sly & the Family Stone. I've given it what I call the Goldilocks Treatment: "It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears/ It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears."

It has occurred to me that the Casio G-Shock Rangeman GW9400-1,

because of its size (large), shape (closer to spherical than most watches made since AD 1600), styling cues and startling range of technical capability (solar recharging, radio synching with an atomic clock, altimeter, barometer, ambient-air compass, a really nice backlight, etc, etc), could be nicknamed the Death Star. I am aware that Citizen has a watch called the Death Star, and I am unimpressed.

In my life I've only had one brand-new car, a 2003 Saturn Ion 1. I still have it. Lately I have begun to daydream that if I keep it long enough, like an original VW Beetle or a Pontiac Aztek, it will suddenly change from a cheap piece of junk into an expensive collector's item. I am aware that this is an unrealistic fantasy.

I've been looking at the footnotes in John Stoye's The Siege of Vienna, NY, Chi, SF, 1965, and almost all of the sources are in German, with a few in French. I found one in Italian. And I found one in Romanian, which impressed me for about a minute, the amount of time it took me to figure that Stoye could've had someone translate it for him. No Turkish, no Polish, no Hungarian, no Czech -- unless I overlooked something, which is possible. Even so, Stoye was certainly no Runciman. 

There are those who think Runciman's linguistic prowess has been greatly exaggerated. I am not one of those.

Rangeman Guards the City

Rangeman began to roam the entire city of Manhattan, pausing now and then to warn people to cut that out and be nice.

That was Rangeman's primary message: Be nice, you there! Stop that! Give that back! And so forth.

After a couple of days he noticed that his GW9400

was water-resistant to 200 meters, and so he decided that he better learn how to swim. 

And because he thought it was unlikely that he would have to rescue someone in a YMCA swimming pool, he didn't train at the Y. Instead, he would suddenly start running toward the nearest water, whether that happened to be the Hudson river, the East River, the confluence of those two rivers downtown, the Harlem River, or what have you.

And since he reflected further that he was not likely to get advance warning of emergencies, he also did not plan swimming sessions, but interrupted whatever he was doing, whether it was eating, talking to friends, reading or whatever, to run to the water.

He was not a very good swimmer at all. It's not always a long distance across the Hudson or the East river to New Jersey or Long Island, but at first it almost killed Rangeman.

That was not said metaphorically, the way that people say that some strenuous but routine task "almost killed me." No. He very nearly drowned several times. Once, a passing tugboat struck him several times, until he was unconscious. He eventually washed up on shore in Brooklyn, and he might well have died on that shore, had not a playful cat happened by and jumped up and down on his chest until he coughed up a large amount of water and regained consciousness. 

He brought the cat back home, took very good care of it, and named it Lifeguard. He was not completely without a sense of humour.

Progress in swimming was slow and painful, but he was improving. He knew that he had a bad instinct of holding his head up too high. He was starting to overcome that.

One thing which made the swimming difficult was the frequency with which boats struck him. Were they doing that on purpose? It was difficult for Rangeman to believe that they were.

RANGEMAN!

This is how an ordinary guy became the superhero Rangeman.

The ordinary guy lived in an apartment in NYC. There were three idiots who hung out on the front steps of his apartment building and harrassed people. The ordinary guy didn't have any reason to be intimidated by these  idiots, because he was a huge ordinary guy and strong as an ox. But he was very timid. He tended to go around with his head down and his shoulders hunched. 

One day he left his apartment and walked past the idiots, who were harrassing a young woman. They had taken her purse and were tossing it around, playing a game of keep-away. The ordinary guy hurried past, ashamed that he was afraid to do anything. 

Suddenly he was face to face with a gnarled figure in a hood who blocked his path on the sidewalk and glared at him. Lightning lit up the edges of his silhouette and thunder boomed as he looked at the ordinary guy and held up a Casio G-Shock Rangeman GW94001,

and said, "You really need this. I'll spare you the unboxing. Here," he said, and fastened it on the wrist of the ordinary guy, who suddenly became Rangeman. Thunder boomed again as lightning ominously lit the edges of things. 

Rangeman unhunched his shoulders and held his head up high. He turned around and returned to the entrance of his apartment building. "Give the lady her purse back and stop bothering her," he said. And because he was about as big as all three of the idiots put together -- and not fat. He was cut -- they did as he said and mumbled apologies and slunk away. The young lady gave Rangeman a big smile.

"Hey," the gnarled figure shouted, "I didn't just give you that watch. Hundred bucks. That's a good price. It's almost new."

Rangeman paid him and they parted with a friendly handshake.

A little while later, Rangeman was in Stark Tower, giving the Avengers a hand. Tony Stark pointed out a work station which had been set aside for him, with a desktop computer plugged into the big Stark/Avengers computer with its large screens looming over everything.

"Thanks," Rangeman said, as he took a few Casio gadgets from his backpack and arranged them in his station. "You all probably know that I'm autistic. That shouldn't be much of a problem, I hope. But I have a few quirks which I'd like you to respect. For instance, if you could just not touch anything in my station. I know it's silly, but it'll help me to concentrate and do a better job for you, and..."

And right on cue, Tony Stark, because he is a dick, because he had a traumatic childhood, had picked up a G-Shock which Rangeman had laid down in his station. "What's this -- Casio?" Tony asked, sneering at the inexpensiveness of the brand.

"Well, um," Rangeman said, "I've made a few modifications, but yes, it's a G-Shock..." and then Rangeman's voice trailed off, and he sighed and decided to just cut to the chase: he reached out, grabbed Tony by the larynx, and began to choke him just a little bit. "What's that, Tony?" he asked. "I can't make out what you're trying to say. Are you annoyed with me, because of the choking? Does it make you feel like I'm disrespecting your boundaries? Yeah, I can see how it might feel that way. Hey, imagine if you had specifically asked us all not to choke you, five seconds before I grabbed your larynx. That would've made it even worse, wouldn't it have? Are you getting my sarcasm, or have I already cut off too much blood flow to your brain?"

Tony let go of the G-Shock he had taken. Rangeman caught it in mid-air, set it back where it had been, and let go of Tony's throat. Tony gasped and bent over double as his face gradually returned to its normal color. Rangeman asked him, "Do you have a better sense of my boundaries now?' Tony coughed and nodded, nodded and coughed, and Rangeman shouted, "I HOPE SO!"

Once he had recovered his voice, Tony turned to the others and asked, "Were you going to step in at some point?"

"Why?" Captain America asked. "New Guy looked like he had the situation well in hand."

"Needed to be done." "I've been this close to choking you for months, Tony," others chimed in. Thor, Falcon and others. "Well done, New Guy!" "Wow, check out these guns! Oops, I'm sorry I didn't ask first."

"It's fine," Rangeman said, smiling, and even starting to laugh as the level of backslapping, muscle-squeezing, hair-tousling and general friendly rough-housing among big guys intensified. "It's obvious that you care and don't want to intentionally annoy me. And that alone makes a big difference."

"It DOES, doesn't ?!" "Did you catch that, Tony? Intentionally annoy other people less, get choked less!" "See how that works?" "I think New Guy's gonna be Employee of the Month!"