Spidermen

After my days work I ride the subway back to Hollywood, exiting the train at the Hollywood and Highland station. This stretch of Hollywood Blvd. is always filled with all sorts of out of work actors and musicians, who parade around or play their instruments in an attempt to wizzle money from the tourists. To me the most comical group are the "actors" who pick a particular character or public figure, dress as them and stand around in front of the Chinese theater waiting to be human props in photographs. For this service they are awarded some type of tip, the exact rate remains a mystery to me. Some of these people I see almost daily, so I am allowed the privilege and horror of watching the daily progression of a costume put to hard use. One man is a rather large Michael Myers, from Halloween. Michael has the rather difficult task of wearing a full body coverall and latex mask in the 85 degree heat. I have watched daily as the sweat stains grow.
One day I felt particularly blessed to have witnessed the universe as it reached down and changed the course of one mans life. I had noticed over over the months that Spider Man was fading in the sun. He was far to skinny, and his spider suit was beginning to fray at the ends. Spiderman was in a funk. One day as I stepped out of the tunnel I saw Spiderman, but not as I had come to know him, instead his Spider suit was deep blue and bright crimson red, the ends were tidy, this Spider works out and it shows. Spiderman soaks up the sun faster than Sheryl Crow at music industry gang bang, tips can't hit his fresh little hand fast enough.
I feel a little sick. I turn onto Orange Street, thinking about this new guy, what a prick. Isn't there a code amongst these cut throats? If there is already a Spiderman, be Superman if there is already a Superman, be Wonder Woman. There are plenty of available characters, don't take someone else's. Asshole.
Walking down Orange I chanced to witness something that I hope sticks in my mind the rest of my life. Overtaking me at a angry, purposeful gait is the Spiderman I knew before. He is faded, he is stained and frayed, he pushed the whole gig just a little too far. "One more summer, then I hang it up and head back to Indiana, just you and me Spidey, and the boulevard of broken actors."
As he passes me I see that Spiderman has removed his Spider head cover, his skin is as pasty as his costume is faded. He smokes a cigarette like a super hero. In his walk is the lust for revenge, the need to strike back at the assholes that lead him to this place, he's been fucked around by his share of evildoers, and he is just fucking ill about it.
As his stride puts Fifteen Feet between us he passes an older tourist cow coming the opposite direction, her face splits into the look we all know of the erroneously clever, and she says: "I didn't know Spiderman smoked!"
I wish that he'd grabbed her and thrown her into the chainlink fence screaming "Look bitch, there is a lot you don't know about Spiderman! He's One Fifty shy of his past due rent! His girlfriend fucks everybody but him! His parents won't even return his calls anymore. His cat scruffers is hungry! Spiderman has problems, and now that Asshat up there has stolen my fucking cash cow."
He should have put his cigarette out in her eye, but he never even broke stride.
If there is a God worth my believing in I hope that he went home to his studio apartment in the industrial section of downtown, I hope he crawled beneath the covers and rolled up against the wall he shares unknowingly with a toxic chemical storage area. The exposure over the years has forced his system to mutate, the next morning as he looks in the mirror he comes to see that he has become a mutant, half man half spider. He is vengeful and mighty.