Paul the Crime Fighter

Some of you may not know this, but my buddy, Paul “FooDaddy” Brand, is a crime-fighting hero. He has alluded to this fact once or twice in Blog posts, with rather vague remarks like, “I am a crime-fighting hero.” He’s very modest. I, however, recently had the opportunity to see this intrepid crime fighter in action and it was a sight to behold. So I beheld, and now I shall relate the experience to you.

The Big Foo

It was a dark and stormy night (well, actually it wasn’t, but if it had been, we would have gotten wet). Paul and I were standing outside of his apartment on 44th Street, discussing the pros and cons of being hit by a cross city bus. The odds were definitely in favor of the cons.

“You have to admit,” Paul said. “There are much worse things than being hit by a cross city bus.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Standing outside on a dark and stormy night like this?”

“It’s not dark and stormy.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m planning on writing about this on the Blog and I wanted to make it more mysterious.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Dark and stormy it is. Oooooh! Scary!”

“Don’t overdo it,” I warned. “I don’t want to endanger the believability of the story.”

Paul gave me an odd look that I have yet to decipher, but it was a look of which I did not like the looks. The look looked suspicious.

“Look,” I said. “I know it looks like we’re standing out here for no apparent reason, but…”

“I’m going inside,” Paul said. “I am going to play video games and eat Fluff.”

At that moment, a scream shattered the still night air. (It had stopped storming, but was still quite dark.)

“People should be more careful with those screams,” Paul observed. “Left unattended, they can be dangerous.” He brushed a shard of still night air off his sleeve and then fumbled with his keys. The door was unlocked, but Paul likes to fumble with his keys, because he thinks it makes a statement: lots of keys, lots of responsibility, lots of women. “It’s the size women are attracted to,” he said, holding up a huge ring of keys. Later, chuckling fiendishly, he confided in me that ninety percent of the keys were utterly useless. “However, if you tell anyone,” and here he brandished a cabbage at me, “I will deny everything.”

He opened the door to his apartment and started inside, but I stopped him with a restraining arm. “As a crime fighter, shouldn’t you check out that scream?”

“I already got in my forty hours,” he explained. “I’m not allowed over time. By the way, where did you get that awesome restraining arm?”

“Picked it up at a garage sale last week,” I said. “It’s come in handy, but I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the garage.”

“Give it to the Salvation Army,” Paul suggested and again started to go inside, but before he could do so, a large, unwieldy vehicle came screeching around the corner. Wondering aloud, Paul said, “I wonder why that vehicle is screeching?”

I shrugged. “Maybe its shorts are too tight.”

As we watched, the vehicle, which turned out to be an ancient, brown, rusted Grand Marquis with random parts dropping off every few seconds, came to a sudden halt. The doors of the monstrosity flew open and three large, hulking brutes bumbled (thanks to Paul and his dad for that word) out of the back seat. They grabbed a beautiful woman, who had been walking along the parking lot and had somehow gone unnoticed by both Paul and me, and threw her easily into the car. Then they all piled in after her and the car zipped away down the lot and around the corner onto the main road.

As I watched, Paul took on an amazing transformation. His eyes squinted and his jaw began to jut out. “I’m a crime fighting hero!” he announced, as a cape began sprouting from his neck. Suddenly, he was gone in a burst of light and fluttering cape.

In just a few seconds, he was back and not even breathing heavily.

“Wow, that was fast,” I said.

“Yeah,” Paul said, shrugging. “She wasn’t as fine as I thought.”

So that’s the story. I hope it thrilled you as much as it did me as I watched this heroic crime fighter in action. We can all sleep much better now that we know Paul the Crime Fighter is watching out for us!