Brett Fowler
Barack Obama and Heath Ledger Have Nothing To Do With My Pop Culture Manifesto
“God dammit Jimmy. You were supposed to cancel my subscription,” Lois Lane grumbled to herself as her head tilted forth, her cerulean blue eyes fixated on the words, “Superman is Dead.” The tendons in her right hand contracted causing her to grip the Time magazine with some sort of despotic fury and then subsequently relaxed, her fingers dangling like one would imagine a corpse’s as she relinquished any grip she may have previously had on the magazine. It dropped to her apartment floor, soon to be embedded in a layer of filth amongst the five day old Chinese food and dirty clothes that lined her floor.
“Dammit Jimmy. Dammit,” she murmured resignedly.
Thinking to herself about the events that had unfolded in the previous days, weeks and months she thought of scenarios in which she could have saved him. There were a million and one ways of which she could have done it, she knew she could have saved him, she knew she could have. But her head hurt from thinking, from calculating, from processing over and over and over again the one way in which she didn’t save him. And that was that. He was dead because of her, or at least that’s what she sought solace in believing because it was impossible for her to wreak bodily injury uponthe dead. And Doomsday was dead.
From beneath the rubble that populated her apartment floor Superman’s head peaked out, lifeless and photographic though it may have been, Lois let herself believe for just a second that he was there in the room with her. But the second was fleeting and Lois realized that the pain had not fled away in that second. She realized that it may never.
Her head was pounding so loud that even the tell-tale heart would have been proud. She rushed to the bathroom where she unfurled the medicine cabinet door. Shuffling through her pill bottles she found the one which read “Valium” and quickly shoveled two pills down her throat, chasing it with the remainder of the bottle of her cheap vodka sitting beside her sink.
“Jesus!” she exclaimed noticing the sharp tingle in her throat and sensation of the inner lining of her stomach being torn apart by a $9 bottle of Taaka. “Never again,” she vowed. “Next time it’s tequila.”
Lois waltzed over into her bedroom, plopped her fit body down onto her purple satiny sheets with the TV, which had now been in a constant state of activity for the past 8 days, in front of her feet. She waited impatiently for the calm to sink in as the lyrics “Somebody save me/I don’t care how you do it/Just save me” exuded from the screen.
“Not that bullshit Smallville show again,” Lois mumbled, debating silently to herself who was actually hotter, Tom Welling or Superman himself.
As Erica Durance’s face flashed on the screen Lois disjointedly muttered “B-bbitch. You are the worst Lois ever. I am the best Lois.”
Disgusted at the inaccurate portrayal of her own life Lois sloppily grabbed hold of the remote and changed channels.
“Yoooou are the second worst Lois everrr,” she slurred to the Superman Return’s Kate Bosworth. “I am not that anorexic.”
Momentarily realizing in her spun-out state of mind that she had forgotten to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner Lois reached for her cell phone to dial for more Chinese.
“China, this is Lllois Lllane. I need reinforcements.”
“Lois?”
“Hey, you sound like Jimmy.”
“Lois, it is Jimmy.”
“Holy mother fucking crap! Jimbo how are you?”
“Lois, I’ve been worried sick about you! I’ve been calling you non-stop, did you not get my messages?”
Lois looked over to the answering machine on her mahogany-stained nightstand noticing that its neon red lights were blinking the numerals “35” in an almost melodic fashion.
“I think my answering machine is broken,” she replied.
“Lois are you okay? You don’t sound very well.”
“Hey will you pleeease pick up the Chinese food for me?”
“What are you talking about Lo? I don’t- have you been drinking again?” Jimmy inquired, slowly understanding that the revered Lois Lane had taken a tragic turn for the worst.
“No, absolutely not Jimmers.”
Lois briefly paused.
“I’ve been downing Valium and consuming alcoholic beverages,” she said.
“I’m coming over there right now! You need help and I need to make sure that you don’t hurt yourself again. Stay put and don’t do anything stupid for the next fifteen minutes, please Lo,” Jimmy pleaded.
“No! Jim-a-rooskie there’s no need to come over here. Rrreally, it is all good in the hood.”
“Please don’t pass out on me. Can you promise me that you won’t?”
“Is there Chinese involved?”
“If you don’t fall asleep, yes there is.”
“Done!” Lois exclaimed proudly as she hung up the phone, leaving a confused and immensely worried Jimmy Olsen on the other line.
Jimmy hadn’t seen Lois sober since the day the media had dubbed “Doomsday.” How could he possibly forget her face on that fateful day? It was strewn with a superfluous mixture of equal parts blood and tears as Superman lay dying in her arms. Inconsolable though she was, there was a fury that he sensed was brewing from within her. A rage that she could not have killed Doomsday with her own bare hands, that there would be no justice for Lois Lane, no not on this day, no not in this lifetime.
Superheroes weren’t supposed to die. She was supposed to grow old and senile and he was supposed remain eternally young. They were supposed to have kids and a white picket fence and when their children asked what their daddy did for a living he was supposed to reply, “I fly around and sometimes save the world.” They were supposed to be married on the roof of the Daily Planet and have tulips line the aisles with purple azaleas as their center pieces. They were supposed to bicker over how noisy Lois was in the mornings and the late hours Superman kept at night. They were supposed to live in holy matrimony for better or for worse. He was never supposed to die. That wasn’t a part of the deal. He was never supposed to die, and for that she could never forgive him.
***
It all started with a drink from a stranger, and from there on Lois’ drinking became virulent, nebulous and unwavering. It came as no surprise to Lois that she was predisposed to become an alcoholic. Her father was a mild mannered, albeit voracious drunk and the high tolerance which she had lauded herself so proudly on in her college years had been an early warning sign of an addiction yet to come.
Only two weeks had passed since Superman died when Jimmy Olsen found Lois Lanepassed out in a bar somewhere on Fifth Street and Main. He had stopped by for a beer after work when he spotted a brunette asleep at the bar, clad head-to-toe in flannel rubber ducky pajamas. Initially laughing at the site, then reeling back from this reaction upon the realization that it was Lois, Jimmy shook her motionless body in a desperate attempt to displace her back to her own apartment. The harder and harder he shook the colder and colder her body became. He desperately checked for a pulse; the rest was a blur of sirens and doctors and closed doors. Certainly there was a pumped stomach and a shot of adrenaline somewhere in the midst because Lois Lane had been pronounced legally dead for two minutes before she was revived.
And now, standing in front of Lois’ apartment door, Jimmy Olsen hoped that would not be the case again. He delicately knocked twice, then realizing that Lois was probably already passed out he began pounding uncontrollably at her door.
“What the hell dude?” Lois responded as she opened the door.
“Oh thank god you’re alive!” Jimmy exuberantly expressed.
“Yeah, how lucky. Hey where’s my Chinese food?”
“Oh shucks. I forgot to pick that up.”
“Ok well I’m going to go pass out again,” Lois said annoyed. “Goodnight.”
Looking defeated Jimmy prepared to exit the door. He was obviously unwanted and Lois was in no mood for playing nice tonight.
“You look like hell Lois. And you smell really bad.”
“Excuse me? You need to get the hell out of my apartment right now. I could be watching TV instead of breathing your geek breath any longer.”
“I get it. You’re angry, sad, confused whatever, but you need to deal with the fact that he’s gone. You need to come back to work, you’ve been gone for a month now and the longer you stay at home and isolate yourself the harder and harder it’s going to be for you to get better. I mean do you even want to get better?”
“When I died,” Lois paused, choking up,“When I died it was the happiest I’ve ever been in a while Jimmy. I felt absolutely nothing. There was no pain, no fear, no doubt, just nothing. And now that I’m back I want to feel nothing again and again and again and again. Just nothing.”
“That’s not true and you know it. You’re just afraid that when you take away love all that’s left is the pain. But you’ll feel love again, Lois, you’ll feel happiness again.”
“God your optimism is fucking killing me. You just don’t get it, do you?”
“I want him back just as much as you do, okay? I get it. I do, I get it. I would have sacrificed my own life in a second if it meant that he would have lived. I get it.”
“Where did he go Jimmy?” Lois thought out loud. “If he’s not here, if for some reason he can’t be in his own body, then where did he go? He has to be somewhere right? A person can’t just disappear like that, they can’t just go away forever.”
Jimmy stared silently into Lois’ eyes. He had no words of comfort for her, no grand-altering scheme that would set things right at last. What she needed was a hero and Jimmy Olsen was no hero.
“He would want you to live. If he saw you like this though, there would be some serious butt-kicking taking place. Clean yourself up Lois. If you aren’t into work tomorrow then I’m cancelling your cable subscription. Keep up the drinking and I’ll make sure that every clerk and bartender in town think that you’re underage- don’t you dare think for an instant that your Pond’s under eye cream didn’t pay off. Now go take a shower while I clean up this disaster zone.”
Confused at this new take-charge version of Jimmy Olsen, Lois stood there staring blankly.
“NOW!” he barked.
No, Jimmy Olsen certainly was no hero, not then, not now, not ever.
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