I first met Superman a few years ago. He rescued me in a cable car accident – I mean, how stereotypical is that? We were all dangling there and I said (sort of to help the mood, which was getting pretty dark), “Gee, I wish Superman was here.” And a moment later he shows up. True story.
After he puts us down he asks me if I was the guy who called for him. (He probably knew and was just being polite.) I was a little reticent – l was worried he’d say something like “so you’re the little bitch on a ski vacation bothering me when I could be digging a canal across the Sahara?” – but he was totally cool with it and we hit it off and started to hang.
I’ve learned a lot about Superman in the ensuing years. Like, for example, he doesn’t think Tupac is alive or that Brady will win anything in Tampa Bay, and it turns out there’s a meteor out there that’s going to crash into Earth in about 17 million years but it’s not worth taking the trouble to deal with it yet. He’s like everybody else – he’ll put things off sometimes.
But the most fascinating thing I learned is Superman has “other” super powers. They don’t help him fight crime, though, so nobody hears about them. But they’re still pretty cool.
For example…
1. Super-empathy
He’s super-empathetic. There are a lot of girls who want to hook up with him -- he’s seen it all, believe me. But you can’t come on to him -- the way to his heart is by telling him about the failed relationship you just left. You can’t fake it, of course – what kind of a super-empath would he be if you could? But the Man of Steel has a surprisingly low emotional melting point.
I suspect he was hurt once and that’s where this comes from, but you can’t talk about it with him. I once asked him, “Is everybody or Krypton like that?” and he looked at me kind of pissed off and said, “How the heck should I know? I was a baby, dude!”
2. Picking the Right Line in Supermarkets
Nobody gets this right, right? The old guy in front of you can’t find his wallet, the harried mom with three kids on Ritalin forgot something in the back of the store, the checker doesn’t know what tomatillos are. It’s like playing poker with a deck of wild cards.
But Superman always gets it right. Sure, he doesn’t go into stores as Superman – people would be all over him and they’d invite him to cut in line, which embarrasses him. So he goes as Clark Kent. We were buying nachos and fixings to watch The Great British Baking Show one evening and I got on the 15 items or less line when he grabs me by the arm (just human strength) and whispers, “The guy ahead of you hardly knows where he is, and the checker looks like an idiot. Let’s go over there,” and sure enough, the guy stood there for ten minutes trying to figure out why the machine wouldn’t let him swipe, and by the time the checker straightened it out, we were already in the car heading home. “How did you know that?” I said. “Did you use your X-ray vision to look at the stripe on his card, or what?” And he said, real sarcastic, ”Like I have time to do that!”
In fact, he’s very good at guessing in general. Once we were at the TKTS booth in Times Square and we had to choose between two plays we didn’t know anything about, and I would have picked one about patients in a mental institution putting on a play for their doctors during the war, but thankfully he was there to stop me.
3. Floral Arrangement
You know that thing, Ikebana, Japanese floral arrangement? I mean, some people are good at it, but Superman – unbelievable. He just has an eye for balancing the spiritual and physical. And he gets all the concepts – the cusp between symmetry and non-symmetry, the use of space, the way he signals his intention through color, shapes, lines – all of it contributes to communicating the implied meaning of the arrangement. Or that's what he tells me – I just see flowers, you know?
“How did you get so good at this?” I asked him one day.
“Well, I had just finished fighting these mole people who had climbed out of the world’s deepest oil well. When I got back to my place, I was pretty beat and I needed a distraction, and I saw a program about floral arrangement on PBS. So I got started, and one thing led to another.”
But the truth is, although don’t tell him I told you, he cheats. If a bloom isn’t perfect or a stem looks weak, he can warm it up with his heat vision, and one time he had this orchid in the middle of his arrangement and I said, “I’ve never seen a flower like this before!” and he said, “Well, they’re quite common in the Virunga Mountains in Rwan –” and then he asked if I wanted a glass of wine.
4. Rhyming
This one’s incredible, because you can’t lay it off on his super-speed or heat vision or what have you. Superman can rhyme just about anything. I mean, you can give him a word and he can instantly rhyme it. You could just be sitting there and look at him and say, “Grocery!” and he immediately says “Rosary! No-sir-ree!” He just has this thing, a gift I guess you’d call it. Or once I said “Tachycardia!” and he said,
I want to get the part o’ya
That gives you tachycardia
How brilliant is that? And you know how nothing rhymes with orange? Well, once I looked at him and said, “Orange!” And he says – right away –
Foreign Jell-O
is orange yellow
And I say, “C’mon, that’s not a real rhyme,” and he says, “why not?” and I say, “Because it’s in the middle of a line,” and he says, “So, I suppose nothing in Hamilton rhymes, then?” And -- what could I say? – he had me. He really likes Hamilton, by the way. He didn’t spend $800 for a seat, of course – he watched it sitting in his apartment, using his telescopic vision and super hearing. Frankly, if he’d shown up, he probably would have been comped. He gets comped to a lot of stuff, and sometimes he takes it, but he still won’t go to Mets games.
5. Fresh Breath
Everybody has bad breath from time to time – they have some stomach thing, or a sinus thing, or they had a garlic pizza for lunch, you name it. But Superman? Never!
It’s unbelievable. I’d describe his breath as somewhere between mint and rosemary, a little sweet but still floral, kind of. The first time I smelled it I started looking around for what it was. And when I realized it was him, I didn’t know what to say. You know – complimenting someone’s breath like that, particularly his, it’s a little creepy. But then other people mentioned it and he came to me asking, “Like, is my breath oddly pleasant?” Oddly pleasant! He could eat a shit sandwich and they could still replace all those pine cone car things with his burps. Sometimes I even ask him to blow on whatever I’m cooking, particularly if it’s lamb.
And like he says sometimes, “what super power is more amazing than that?”
