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CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT, ON KEYBOARDS
These days I'm free to sleep late, to spend the whole day cleaning house—caulk around a kitchen cabinet, install a new toilet-seat, soak the stove-knobs in yellow detergent. I can stay naked all day, and when all the copulating on TV has played out, I can step outside at 2:00 a.m. and look at the cathedral through the trees and let the rain cool me,| clean me. Afterwards, I can imagine that I am not unlike Captain Midnight. Can one indeed be a superhero if everyone laughs at you or pities you? When I play tennis, the girls are more talented. My power serves are wide or long, so we don't play for points. But sometimes, at the net, I can crack the ball across the court so fast and hard that only I can call it good. And for that the girls admire me. They'll even ask me where I get my clothes so they can shop there after work. Clothes. In this regard, Captain Midnight differs from the other heroes. Muscle-bound and straight-faced they wear metallic body stockings under their navy suits, but he wears tattered motley in carnival colors. Out of shape and out of fashion, but women don't seem to mind. So, let me tell you about Captain Midnight's Zoo. A warthog, a coypu, a water-buffalo, a baby hippo— all the animals in his menagerie are black or gray or covered with mud. They wander around uncaged. They may be dangerous. They could ruin your floor. You wouldn't pay to see them. But people drop by on the off chance that the Captain will be there and will decide to play Mozart. I heard him yesterday. He has two keyboards. On one, tuned like the upper register of a piano, he uses his left hand to play the right-hand part, using his right to hammer out the bass line on what sounds like an oompah calliope. No one else could play with such panache, and I sit here, naked, not thinking about breakfast or home-maintenance or even making ends meet, just wondering if I could live my life indentured to such a master. Then the phone explodes in my ear. Hello? Pause. No one expects my voice at this time of day. "Am I speaking to the man of the house?" No, this is his brother, Captain Midnight.
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