Did you ever see graffiti somewhere really ridiculous and wonder, ‘How in the hell did they get up there?’ You did if you lived in the ‘Burgh.
THORPE WAS HERE. It was a triumphant proclamation and a defiant challenge that rang out in spray paint from the tops of suspension bridges, the glass-walled penthouses of Commonwealth Tower, the peaks of barge cranes moored in the middle of the rivers, and even the top of the dome at Yellow Jackets Arena. Many of the tags were so difficult and dangerous to access that the maintenance crews balked at painting them over, so they were left untouched for months or years. No eyes and no cameras had ever conclusively caught Thorpe in the act, but there was an urban legend that one night a cop saw him rappelling down the north tower of the Carnegie Bridge, 110 feet above the Mon. The cop got out of his car and ran down the maintenance access to catch him, but when he got to the bottom there was nothing but a dangling rope. When the baffled cop made it back to the deck, he found that Thorpe had been there, too, and had left a cheeky message on the rear windshield of the police cruiser.
Thorpe was making all sorts of people who desperately needed to be taken seriously look ridiculous; to them he was public enemy number one. But to the man on the street he was becoming a folk hero.
Eventually, Thorpe stopped tagging, but he was never caught and nobody ever figured out who he was. Nobody, that is, except for Torrent and X.
It was about ten days after the Grimalkin incident, which left me ambivalent about more than just the vigilante business. Mother Nature seemed to be having the same sort of mixed-feelings about the weather right about then, too, alternating between days of bitter cold and rain and warm, sunny days that foretold of spring. These warm stretches were a welcome reprieve from a too-long winter and they demanded activity outdoors, activity that did a lot to lift me from my funk. But the nice weather must have had the same sort of effects on the criminal element because there was a sudden rash of vandalism, muggings, and break-ins that called me to once again put on the mantle of Torrent.
Alex went back to patrolling with me regularly after I told him about what happened in Hazelwood. Once I overcame his skepticism, he was really excited about the whole affair - actually, thrilled might be a better word - and he cursed himself for not coming along that night. Having failed to come up with a better nom de guerre, he was still calling himself the Mysterious X. He had, however, put a bit more creativity into his outfit with the addition of a bold red scarf to cover his face in the fashion of the great mystery men. We went out every night the weather wasn’t bitter cold, and we found enough to keep us busy without having to go too far from home. We’d put the scare into some rock-throwing delinquents outside the Methodist church on Baum, and the night afterwards we’d chased off a couple of hoodlums breaking into cars down by the Quad at CMU. This night, the night we caught up with Pittsburgh’s most notorious graffiti artist, we were hunting for muggers around the shops on Walnut Street.
Walnut Street is a classic “high-low” crime area: safe compared to hellholes like Homewood or the Allegheny docks, with few incidents of violence, but still much higher than in the other parts of Shadyside. For that, I blame the Walnut Street Business Association for painting a big target on their own back. Most of the storefronts have signs prohibiting their customers from carrying any sort of weapon. In fact, the prohibition is written into their bylaws. The WSBA didn’t subscribe to any of the patrol services either, relying on their own “Prevention Force," which was perfectly toothless thanks to the unofficial prohibition on the use of force, even in self-defense. For example, a clerk at the the Antipodes Cafe, a snooty “exotic tea and coffee boutique,” was actually fired for fighting off a robber last year. The Post-Gazette quoted the owner: “I won’t condone the escalation of violence. That young man could have been seriously hurt or he could have seriously hurt the robber, and I don’t want to live with that on my conscience. We have insurance. We don’t need to do any of that…”
I can’t say for sure which toxic philosophy produces that sort of mentality, but the WSBA is stewing in it. But hey, what do I know? They’re still open for business, and people keep giving them money.
Anyway, there’d been at least one robbery attempted and one successfully completed in the past week. Both times the victims were women who’d been walking home alone after a night of shopping and dining. The Pittsburgh PD showed their usual commitment to public safety by sending a couple of cops to sit in the car, pick their noses during the daylight hours and skedaddle by six o’clock. Needless to say, they didn’t bust anyone.
Alex and I began our patrol around 8:30. We orbited the three-block area on our bikes, sticking to the dimly lit, tree-shaded side streets. Whenever we saw a woman walking alone or in a small group, one of us would ride a few blocks ahead on the look-out for predators while the other hung back behind them, waiting for the call on the walkie-talkie. We called this a deterrence patrol: if we saw anybody that looked shady, particularly if they were standing around in one spot or paying a little too much attention to the ladies, we’d roll up across the street from them and stare them down until they walked away. And they almost always did. Inevitably, a couple of them got belligerent and you’d hear some nasty remark about your mother or the way you’re dressed (my goggles were a favorite), but we wouldn’t say anything back, didn’t escalate anything, just stared at them quietly until they lost their nerve and moved on.
I was on my way back to rendezvous with Alex after a successful stare-down when someone screamed in the far off blackness. I was about to thumb on the walkie-talkie and call it in when the speaker crackled and Alex’s voice came through, tense and eager.
“I just heard a scream, maybe about a block from here. I’m heading north on Maryland Ave now. It might have come from around Summerlea Street.”
“Copy that. I’m on my way, X” I said. I flipped the electric assist on my bike to pick up speed on the flat and raced to meet him there.
The screaming pitched louder as I barreled through the darkness and I could clearly hear a desperate cry for help. My heart pounded in my temples. My legs pumped faster, so fast that my feet were falling off the pedals and I lost control of the damn bike; I nearly ended up going through the back windshield of a parked car. I throttled back the electric assist, but I had the momentum of the down slope, so I got there at almost the same time Alex.
Alex skidded to a stop and leapt off his bike, his red scarf whipping back in the wind. He dashed down the street, screaming obscene threats. My eyes tracked his direction and I saw two guys in half-silhouette man-handling a screaming woman. They were pulling hard on what must have been her purse, but the strap was caught, twisted around her captive arm, maybe.
“Stop! I can’t let go!” she screamed again.
“Shut up, bitch!” There was a loud snap and the woman went back on her rear end, yelping. The two thugs took off in a sprint immediately. They knew the Mysterious X was close behind them.
I throttled up the power assist again and shot off after them. They were good runners — I’d have never caught them on foot — but I was overtaking them quickly and so was X. Just as I passed Alex, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, springing forward, his hands open, arms thrust forward to tackle the hindmost mugger. The muffled wet-meat-slapping-pavement sound and the groaning told me he connected, but I had to keep my attention on the lead thug who had the bag.
I beat him to the end of the block by a good 25 feet, dismounted, and stood there blocking his path with my stun baton crackling. The little puke gaped at that. I mean you could really see the fear in his face. I thought for sure he was going to stop, but he didn’t. Instead he stretched those long legs of his over a low stone retaining wall and made to cut across the tiny front yard of the last apartment building on the block. I lunged sideways, stretching out as far as I could with the shock stick, but the lucky bastard snuck by and I landed in the dirt, swearing.
He probably would’ve gotten away if it hadn’t been for that motion sensor light that kicked on. It slowed him up a little bit, and it allowed me to see the spigot coming out of the wall of the house. I let my mind stretch out — yes, there it was. I could feel the water under pressure behind the ball valve. I concentrated on it, trying to push it open. The valve didn’t budge.
Instead, the pressure blew the loosened spigot right off the pipe-end! The spinning hunk of cast iron rocketed into the creep’s thigh just ahead of the spray of scalding water. He crumpled sideways onto the pavement, flailing and whimpering.
I pushed myself up out of the dirt and trotted off after him. He’d gotten up too and was limping away, his grubby paws still clamped on that purse. I called after him.
“That was no coincidence, shitbird. Now give it up before I really hurt you.”
He spun around, dug something out of his pocket and flicked his wrist at me. The tip of the switchblade glinted in the muted amber light of the street lamps. “We’ll see who gets hurt!”
I pressed on the baton and smiled as miniature whip cracks of lightning lit up my face. I wanted him to know I was really looking forward to what I was going to do to him.
Well, I never got the chance because in a minute he was down on the ground, screaming for mercy, and that little switchblade was kicked clear into the street. As quick as I blinked, somebody had run up behind him, put him in an arm bar and planted his face on the pavement, and there that somebody was, still leaning on him.
“Give up?” the stranger whispered.
“Yes! Ow! Ow! Ow! Yes, I give up!”
The stranger released his lock on the thug and pulled him to his feet with one hand. With the other he picked up the purse. “Get lost, then.”
I squinted at him. At first I thought it was X, but it wasn’t, and then I thought it was one of the neighbors, but something didn’t look quite right about him. He had eye black on — the kind outfielders wear — but it entirely covered the orbits of his eyes, and he had a black bandana tied around his head. A mane of long black hair curved down his forehead and over his brow, glistening with sweat. He was wearing open-fingered leather gloves and a tight compression shirt that showed off his physique. He was taller than me by half a foot and built like a linebacker in the chest and shoulders, but like a sprinter from the waist down. His torso tapered to a narrow vee at the waist and his legs were long and lean. I assumed he was a vigilante like us.
“Thanks, pal,” I said, and started to explain what happened. “This creep and his buddy stole that purse from a lady down the street, slapped her around a little bit, too.” I extended my hand and introduced myself. “I’m Torrent.”
He looked at me a moment, and I saw a thought come into his eye as the corner of his lip curled up in a smile. I knew right then I didn’t like what he was thinking. “Torrent, huh?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, and let my hand drop. I eyed him warily. “If you don’t want to hang around, I can take the bag back to her myself.”
“Can you really?” He let out a short, deep laugh and took off running.
I swore, then doubled back to grab my bike. As I started pedaling after him, I called out his description to Alex on the walkie-talkie and told him to hurry, because the guy was moving fast. Incredibly, he was still out-pacing me on the straightaway, so I switched the bike to full power and gave my aching legs a rest. I gained on him.
And then he did exactly what you’d expect: he jinked down an alley and I went flying past him.
By the time I got the bike turned around, I caught a glimpse of him leaping straight up, an easy six-foot vertical. Dangling from one hand was the purse, while the other arm, outstretched, snagged the bottom rung of a retracted fire escape ladder. He swung his body around the bottom of the ladder in one smooth arc and came up the other side, upside down, like an Olympic gymnast on the uneven bars. He hooked his toes on an upper rung of the ladder and then flipped backwards, righting himself and continuing the climb up to the first platform of the fire escape. He laughed with manic joy as he scaled the building.
I just stared, slack-jawed.
The brakes of a bicycle squealed behind me.
“What the hell?” It was X. He was staring up at him, just like I was.
“That bastard is the second coming of Tarzan,” I said.
Suddenly the jerk stuck his head out from behind the wrought iron ledge and taunted us. “Giving up already, tough guys? I’m just getting started!”
“Screw that guy,” X barked. “What’s he going to do, hide on the roof?”
Not a second later we saw him catapult himself from the ledge of the fire escape to the lower roof of the adjacent building, and then again to the next.
We followed him down the street, not by sight, but by his wild hoots of laughter. At the end of the block, he leaped from a low, gabled roof to a street lamp and then back down to street level. “Is this more fair for you?” he yelled.
“I’m going to break his face… if we ever catch him,” Alex vowed between panting breaths. I wasn’t so sure.
The street sloped sharply up a hill and then curved westward, running along the shoulder of an embankment. Beyond the guard rail yawned a gap of fifty or sixty feet, the bottom of which carried a spur of the railroad. A concrete road bridge spanned the gap, but it was a good six blocks away. Here there was only a narrow metal trestle, fenced off at both ends, carrying a gas main. You can already guess where we found our man.
“Let’s see some hustle, mystery men!” he yelled as he catapulted himself over the chain-link and landed on the trestle with barely a wobble.
“No way,” I said. My throat was tight and my stomach was already rolling just from watching him. He could have just ripped off the Crown Jewels, but there was no way I was following him.
“Hurry, damn it!” X yelled.
“Don’t be stupid! That’s suicide!” I yelled back. He knew damn well I was afraid of heights. But X was already scrambling up the fence and muscling himself over.
When he landed, he pushed his face against the fence and yelled: “Stop being a pussy!”
That settled the matter. I girded my loins and rushed the fence. The whole time I kept my eyes glued on the opposite embankment, thinking that if I just didn’t look down, if I just didn’t think about it, I could manage. The trestle was wide enough for two men bigger than me to cross, after all, and there was no more reason that I should lose my balance here than on the sidewalk. Those are the kinds of lies I told myself as I put my weight on the first cross-beam, and then the wind hit me and I swayed like a Jenga tower after the third shot of whiskey. I leaned forward to rebalance myself, hyperventilating as I imagined all the ways my bones could rearrange themselves after a drop of twenty feet onto talus. All the ‘Burgh’s surgeons and all the Burgh’s men couldn’t put Torrent back together again…
I felt X’s gloved hand land on my shoulder, anchoring me. “You’re OK,” he insisted. I was inclined to disagree.
He went off ahead of me. I tried to follow, but my feet may as well have been planted in concrete. It didn’t seem to matter though, because our foe wasn’t getting any farther. The fence at the other end was high and angled back over the trestle at the top. I didn’t think this would have posed any obstacle to this guy, and it probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t kept pulling loose from the posts and swinging back over the gap whenever he put his weight on it.
“Nowhere to run now, you son of a bitch!” X yelled into the wind.
“Don’t be stupid! What are you going to do, fight him on the high wire?” I yelled, hoping to talk some sense into him before he got himself killed. I took a few unsteady steps toward him, but then a fresh gust of wind whipped through the gap and knocked me off balance. I wobbled to the left, then lunged to the right, but I overcompensated and went tumbling. Everybody screamed, most especially me. At the same time as I slipped through the crossbars and my body rolled around the gas main, I saw the other guy drop from the sagging fence. I’m sure I felt bad for him, but as I was dangling there with just one arm bent around a rusty girder, I had enough to worry about. I tried to swing my legs up, but that just increased the pressure on my arm, and the pain was incredible. I felt my grip going numb from the lack of blood flow. I heard Alex yelling to me, saw him crawling towards me out of the corner of my eye, but he was too far away. I knew I’d had it.
Then I felt a tug on my belt and heard a strained grunt as I rose. Suddenly. I was high enough to wrap both legs around the girder and painfully swing myself back to the top of the trestle. I was spent both physically and psychologically, and I went limp. Then, looking down through that lattice of steel, I saw Tarzan Jr. swinging across the bottom of the trestle like it was an overgrown set of monkey bars. The lady’s purse was clamped between his teeth. Somehow, instead of plummeting to his doom, he had saved himself and then swung all the way back to save me.
I watched, slack-jawed again, as he brachiated back across to the far end of the trestle and then pulled himself up.
“On second thought,” he called to us, “maybe you boys have had enough for one night! Here, catch!”
He lobbed the lady’s purse at us, and X caught it between two hands. Then, one foot at a time, the stranger alighted onto a length of steel cable no wider than my thumb and tight-roped down to the middle of the decrepit utility pole that it anchored to the hillside. As he stepped onto the handhold, he gave us one more look.
“It wasn’t much of a challenge, but thanks for trying!”
Then he scrambled down the pole, whooping noisily and declaring to all the world that “THORPE WAS HERE!”
That wasn’t the last time we ran into him. Once we even got a good look at him from a picture Threads snapped. Alex recognized him right away - not somebody we knew personally, but somebody we’d all heard about. Somebody you heard about. What? You don’t expect me to out him, do you? The statute of limitations hasn’t yet expired on criminal trespass and defacement of public property, you know. All I’ll say is that everything makes perfect sense: his peerless athleticism, the chase, and his chosen alias.
Not long after that night, people stopped seeing new Thorpe tags on the sides of buildings. Most folks figured he’d been killed pulling one of his stunts. We knew better. Once in awhile we’d find some lowlife mugger knocked senseless with a ‘THORPE WAS HERE’ index card on his chest or scrawled on his forehead in permanent marker. See, it wasn’t about the graffiti any more than it was about a lady’s purse: it was about the challenge. We just introduced him to a worthier kind.