
Also by Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Them: Adventures with Extremists
The Men Who Stare At Goats
The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones
And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes
Jon Ronson
Riverhead Books
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York
2011
Table of Contents
Riverhead Books
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Ronson Ltd.
Cover and interior photographs by Peter Yang/AUGUST
Photograph of Phoenix Jones in the hospital by Jon Ronson
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Published simultaneously in Canada.
Some of this material has appeared previously in GQ.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
To Beth Taylor and Sarah Mirk
The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones
Phoenix Jones, real life superhero.
I am rushing through the night to the emergency room to meet a real-life superhero called Phoenix Jones, who has fought one crime too many and is currently peeing a lot of blood. Phoenix has become famous these past months for his acts of anonymous heroism. He dresses in a superhero outfit of his invention and chases car thieves and breaks up bar fights and changes the tires of stranded strangers. I've flown to Seattle to join him on patrol. I only landed a few minutes ago, at midnight, and in the Arrivals lounge I phoned his friend and advisor, Peter Tangen, who told me the news.
"Hospital?" I said. "Is he okay?"
"I don't know," said Peter. He sounded worried. "The thing you have to remember about Phoenix," he added, "is that he's not impervious to pain."
"Okay," I said.
"I think you should get a taxi straight from the airport to the ER," he said.
So here I am, hurtling through the night, still with all my luggage. At 1 am I arrive at the ER and am led into Phoenix's room. And there he is: lying in bed wearing a hospital smock, strapped to an IV, tubes going in and out of him. Still, he looks in good shape---muscular, black. Most disconcertingly, he's wearing an impeccably handcrafted full-face black and gold rubber superhero mask.
"Good to see you!" he hollers enthusiastically through the mouth hole. He gives me the thumbs-up, which makes the IV needle tear his skin slightly.
"Ow," he says.
Phoenix Jones, recharging in the hospital.
His two-year-old son and four-year-old stepson run fractiously around the room. "Daddy was out fighting bad guys in his Super Suit and now he has to wait here," he tells them. (I promise not to identify them, or his girlfriend, to protect his secret identity.)
He looks frustrated, hemmed in, fizzing with restless energy. "We break up two to three acts of violence a night," he says. "Two or three people are being hurt right now and I'm stuck here. It bothers me."
By "we" he means his ten-strong Seattle crew, the Rain City Superheroes. They were patrolling last night when they saw "this guy swinging at another guy outside a bar with a baseball bat. I ran across the street and he jabbed me in the stomach. Right under my armor."
Unfortunately the baseball bat landed exactly where he'd been punched a week earlier by another bar brawler holding a car key in his fist.
"A few hours ago I went to use the bathroom and I started peeing blood," he says. "A lot of it. So I came to the hospital."
I glance over at Phoenix's girlfriend. "There's no point worrying about it." She shrugs.
Finally the doctor arrives with the test results. "The good news is there's no serious damage," he says. "You're bruised. It's very important that you rest. Go home and rest. By the way, why do you name a pediatrician as your doctor?"
"You're allowed to stay with your pediatrician until you're twenty-two," Phoenix explains.
We both look surprised: this huge, disguised man is barely out of childhood.
"Go home and rest," says the doctor, leaving the room.
"Let's hit the streets!" says Phoenix. "I'll get suited up!"
Phoenix Jones
Phoenix didn't know this when he first donned the suit about a year ago, but he's one of around two hundred real-life superheroes currently patrolling America's streets, in Florida and New York City and Utah and Arizona and Oregon, and on and on, looking for wrongs to right. There's DC's Guardian in Washington, D.C., who wears a full-body stars-and-stripes outfit and wanders the troubled areas behind the Capitol building. According to Peter Tangen, the community's unofficial advisor, DC's Guardian has "extremely high clearance in the U.S. government. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody knows his name. Nobody knows his job. Nobody knows the color of his skin. I've seen him with his mask off. I've been to his house for dinner. But that's because of the level of trust he has in me."
And there are dozens more, like Salt Lake City's Citizen Prime, who wears steel armor and a yellow cape and is in real life "a vice president of a Fortune 500 financial company," says Peter Tangen. Like the majority of real-life superheroes, Citizen Prime undertakes basically safe community work, helping the homeless, telling kids to stay off drugs, etc. All are regular men with jobs and families and responsibilities who somehow have enough energy at the end of the day to journey into America's more needy communities to do what they can. Phoenix is reputed to be by far the most daring of them all, leaping fearlessly into the kinds of life-threatening situations the other superheroes might well run shrieking from.
Every superhero has his origin story, and as we drive from the hospital to his apartment, Phoenix tells me his. His life, he says, hasn't been a breeze. He was raised in an orphanage in Texas and now spends his days teaching autistic kids how to read. One night last summer someone broke into his car. There was shattered glass on the floor. His stepson fell into it, badly gashing his knee.
"I got tired of people doing things that are morally questionable," he says. "Everyone's afraid. It just takes one person to say, 'I'm not afraid.' And I guess I'm that guy."
So he retrieved from the floor the mask the robber had used to break into his car, and he made his own mask from it. "They use the mask to conceal their identity," he says. "I use the mask to become an identity."
He called himself Phoenix Jones because the Phoenix rises from the ashes and Jones is America's most common surname. He was the common man rising from society's ashes.
2.30 am. Phoenix says he wouldn't normally invite a journalist to his Secret Identity apartment but they're moving on Monday as their safety was compromised: "You walk in and out in a mask enough times, people get to know where you live."
It is a very, very messy apartment. Comic books and toys and exercise videos are strewn everywhere. He disappears into the bedroom and emerges in his full bulletproof superhero attire.
"Let's bust some crime!" he hollers.
Downtown is deserted. We see neither his crew nor any crime.
"How are you feeling?" I ask him.
"I'm in a lot of pain," he says. "The cut's still bleeding. Internally and externally. A couple of my old injuries are flaring up. Like some broken ribs. I'm having a rough night."
I glance at him, concerned. "Maybe you're going too hard," I say. "Aren't you in danger of burning out?"
"Crime doesn't care how I feel," he says.
Just then a young man approaches us. He's sweating, looking distressed. "I've been in tears!" he yells.
He tells us his story. He's here on vacation, his parents live a two-hour bus ride away in central Washington, and he's only $9.40 short for the fare home. Can Phoenix please give him $9.40?
"I've been crying, dude," he says. "I've asked sixty or seventy people. Will you touch my heart, save my life, and give me nine dollars and forty cents?"
Phoenix turns to me. "You down for a car ride adventure?" he says excitedly. "We're going to drive the guy back to his parents!"
The young man looks panicked. "Honestly, nine dollars and forty cents is fine," he says, backing away slightly.
"No, no!" says Phoenix. "We're going to drive you home! Where's your luggage?"
"Um, in storage at the train station . . ." he says.
"We'll meet you at the train station in ten minutes!" says Phoenix.
Thirty minutes later. The train station. The man hasn't showed up. Phoenix narrows his eyes. "I think he was trying to scam us," he says. "Hmm!"
"Can you be naive?" I ask him.
There's a silence. "It happens to the best of us," he says.
Does this guilelessness make him delightfully naive or disturbingly naive? I wonder. He is, after all, planning to lead me into hazardous situations this weekend.
4 am. We finally locate his crew on a street corner near the train station. Tonight there's Pitch Black, Ghost, and Red Dragon. They're all costumed and masked and, although in good shape, shorter and stockier than Phoenix. He stands tall among them, and more eloquent, too. They're a little monosyllabic, as if they've decided to defer to their leader in all things.
Pitch Black
Ghost
Red Dragon
They have a visitor---a superhero from Oregon named Knight Owl. He's been fighting crime since January 2008 and is in town for an impending comic book convention. He's tall, masked, and muscular, in his mid-twenties, and dressed in a black and yellow costume.
Knight Owl
They brief Phoenix on a group of crack addicts and dealers standing at a nearby bus stop. A plan is formed. They'll just walk slowly past them to show who's boss. No confrontation. Just a slow, intimidating walk past.
We spot the crack addicts right away. There're ten of them. They're huddled at the bus stop, looking old and wired, talking animatedly to each other about something. When they see us they stop talking and shoot us wary glances, wondering uneasily what the superheroes are covertly murmuring to each other.
This is what the superheroes are murmuring to each other:

KNIGHT OWL: "I've discovered a mask maker who does these really awesome owl masks. They're made out of old gas masks."


PHOENIX: "Like what Urban Avenger's got?"


KNIGHT OWL: "Sort of, but owl-themed. I'm going to ask her if she'll put my logo on it in brass."


PHOENIX: "That's awesome. By the way, I really like your black and yellow color scheme."


KNIGHT OWL: "Thank you. I think the yellow really pops."


PITCH BLACK: "I just want a straight-up black bandanna. I can't find one for the life of me."


PHOENIX: "You should cut up a black T-shirt."


PITCH BLACK: "Hmm."

Knight Owl, Phoenix Jones, and Red Dragon on patrol.
We're ten feet from the bus stop now. Close-up these dealers and addicts look exhausted, burned-out.
"Leave them alone," I think. "Haven't they got enough to deal with? They'll be gone by the time the daytime people arrive. Why can't they have their hour at the bus stop? Plus, aren't we prodding a hornet's nest? Couldn't this be like the Taco Incident times a thousand?"
The Taco Incident. Ever since Phoenix burst onto the scene some weeks ago with a short item on CNN extolling his acts of derring-do, the wider superhero community has been rife with grumbling. Many of the two hundred real-life superheroes out there, evidently jealous of Phoenix's stunning rise, have been spreading rumors about him. The chief rumormongers have been New York City's Dark Guardian and Washington State's Mister Raven Blade. They say Phoenix is not as brave as he likes people to believe, and he's in it for personal gain, and his presence on the streets only serves to escalate matters. For this last criticism they cite the Taco Incident.
"Tell me about the Taco Incident," I ask Phoenix now.
He sighs. "It was a drunk driver. He was getting into his car so I tried to give him a taco and some water to sober him up. He didn't want it. I kept insisting. He kept saying no. Eventually he got kind of violent. He tried to shove me. So I pulled out my Taser and I fired some warning shots off. Then the police showed up. . . ."
"I didn't realize he was a drunk driver," I said. "The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still"---I indicate the nearby crack dealers---"the Taco Incident surely demonstrates how things can inadvertently spiral."
"They're in my house," he resolutely replies. "Any corner where people go---that's my corner. And I'm going to defend it."
We walk slowly through the drug dealers. Nothing happens. Everyone just stares at each other, muttering angrily. It is 5 am. Our first night's patrolling together ends. I'm glad, as I found the last part a little frightening. I am not a naturally confrontational person, and I still have all my luggage with me.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and devouring Batman comics, introverted geeks like me tended not to actually patrol the streets looking for crimes to thwart. We were the lame ones, running shrieking from real-life danger, cheering Batman vicariously on from our homes. How did all that change? How did my nerd successors get to be so brave?
The Real-Life Superhero Movement actually began, their folklore goes, all the way back in 1985, in Winter Park, Florida, when a young man (whose real-life identity is still a closely guarded secret) built himself a silver suit, called himself Master Legend, and stepped out onto the streets. He was an influential, if erratic, inspiration to those who followed.
"Ninety percent of us think Master Legend is crazy," Phoenix Jones told me. "He's always drinking. He believes he was born wearing a purple veil and has died three times. But he does great deeds of heroism. He once saw someone try to rape a girl and he beat the guy so severely he ended up in a hospital for almost a month. He's an enigma."
The rise of the mega--comic conventions has surely helped fuel the movement. I remember a friend, the film director Edgar Wright, returning from his first San Diego Comic Con, saucer-eyed with tales of hitherto reclusive geeks wandering around in immaculate homemade costumes, their heads held high.
"It was like Geek Pride," he said.
But the community has really blossomed post 9/11 and especially during the recession of the past few years.
"It's in the zeitgeist of our nation to help strangers in need," says Phoenix's friend Peter Tangen. "Many RLSHs [real-life superheroes] were raised learning morality from comic books and have applied that to their everyday lives. It's our natural way of reacting to the challenges of the day."
There's no national convention or gathering, but Peter Tangen is doing all he can to make them a structured, self-respecting community, with a coherent online presence.
Peter's origin story is as remarkable as any of the RLSHs'. He is by day a Hollywood studio photographer. He's responsible for a great many of the instantly recognizable superhero movie posters---Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, etc. But he's always felt like a cog in the machine.
"I'm one of those guys that toils in obscurity," he says. "Nobody knows my name because you don't get credit on a movie poster."
When he learned there were people doing in real life what the likes of Tobey Maguire only pretended to do on a film set, it unlocked something profound within him. So he approached them, offering to photograph them in heroic, unironic poses. His hope is to de-ridicule them---make them seem valiant, worthy of respect. The project has become Peter's calling in life.
It is testament to Phoenix that most people had no idea their world existed until he came along. The CNN report praising his bravery has now had six hundred thousand YouTube hits. Something about him, and not the others, has captured the imagination. I hope to work out what that thing is.
The next morning I have coffee at a downtown Seattle café with Knight Owl.
"Last night might have been dangerous," I tell him, sounding annoyed.
"We ruffled some feathers." He nods. "When we walked past that bus stop there were people mumbling under their breath. It could have got out of control. I don't think they would have gunned us down. But they may have taken potshots and run. Still, shots fired would have been a crime. It would have been attempted murder in my opinion."
"Well, I'm glad none of that actually happened," I say.
Knight Owl used to be a graphic designer. "There was no promotion potential. I simply existed. It was thankless. I wanted something more with my life." So he joined the movement.
There is, he says, a bit of a superhero trajectory. When they start out they make rookie mistakes. Then they hit their stride. Then they not infrequently start to believe they have actual superpowers. Then they burn out and quit.
The first rookie mistake is to adopt a superhero name that's already in use.
"It's a general faux pas," he says. "Anything with the words 'Night,' 'Shadow,' 'Phantom,' those dark, vigilante-type-sounding names tend to get snapped up pretty fast."
"Have there been any other Knight Owls?" I ask.
"There was an Owl," he says. "The Owl. But he ended up changing his name to Scar Heart, as he'd had a heart transplant."
He says he chose his name before he knew there was a Nite Owl in the Watchmen comic, so when people online tell him, "You're a fucking fag and by the way, Knight Owl's taken---haven't you seen the Watchmen?" they don't know what they're talking about.
The second rookie mistake is to "get caught up in the paraphernalia. People should think more about the functionality."
"Capes clearly aren't functional," I say, "because they can get snagged on things. Is cape wearing a rookie mistake?"
"If you're going to do some serious crime fighting there'd better be a good reason for a cape." He nods. "And grappling hooks. No, no, no, no, no! What? You think you're going to scale a building? What are you going to do when you get up there? Swoop down? Parachute down? You're not going to have enough distance for the parachute to even open."
Grappling hooks was one of Phoenix Jones's rookie mistakes. He also had a net gun, but on one occasion it backfired and ensnared him and he fell on the floor and had to be cut loose by the police. So now he leaves it at home.
Then, at the other end of the trajectory, are the burnouts. I ask Knight Owl if he's worried about Phoenix. Maybe he could become a burnout.
"I think he should take his doctor's advice, rest up, get healthy, get strong," he replies. "The way he's going is a recipe for disaster."
I talk to Phoenix on the phone. He's frustrated that I never saw him engage in any proper crime fighting. I promise to stick around with him and give it another chance. He says a trip to the dangerous Seattle suburb of Belltown at 4 am on a Saturday night should do the trick. We make a date.
Meanwhile . . .
. . . San Diego. Wednesday night.
I've been wanting to see another superhero operation at work to compare Phoenix with, so I've flown here to meet Mr Xtreme. He's been patrolling most nights for the past four years, the last eight months with his protégé, Urban Avenger.
They pick me up at 9 pm outside my hotel. Both are heavily costumed. Mr Xtreme is a thickset man---a security guard by day---wearing a green and black cape, a bulletproof vest, a green helmet and visor upon which fake eyes have been eerily painted. His outfit is covered with stickers of a woman's face---Kitty Genovese. In March 1964, she was stabbed and seriously wounded in her doorway in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Her attacker ran away. During the next half hour thirty-eight bystanders saw her lying there and did nothing. Then her attacker returned and killed her. She has become, understandably, a talisman for the RLSH movement.
You cannot see an inch of Urban Avenger's body. He's wearing a weird, customized gas mask, green-tinted sunglasses, a red full-length hoodie, and long black leather gloves. Underneath it all he looks quite small and skinny. He says he's in his late twenties, has children, and works "in the food service industry." That's all he'll reveal to me about his secret identity.
He says he loves being covered from head to toe. "When I wear this I don't have to react to you in any way. Nobody knows what I'm thinking or feeling. It's great. I can be in my own little world in here."
"I know exactly what you mean," I say. "I was once at a Halloween party and I didn't take off my mask all night. It completely eliminated all social anxiety."
"Sometimes I wish I never had to take the mask off," says Urban Avenger.
We begin our patrol through the nice, clean, well-to-do downtown San Diego. We pass bars and clubs filled with polite-looking young drinkers. A few take pictures of them on their phones. Others yell, "It isn't Halloween anymore!" from car windows. Urban Avenger says he doesn't understand how Phoenix is forever chancing upon crimes being committed. He's so lucky.
"What are the odds?" he sighs. "I almost never see anything." He pauses. "Last October we got involved in breaking up some street fights."
"Five months ago?" I say.
"We haven't really seen anything since," he says. "It's been really quiet around here. Did you and Phoenix Jones patrol Belltown in Seattle?"
"I believe we're going to," I say.
"Google 'Gunshots in Belltown' and you'll come up with a hundred stories of gunshots being fired in, like, the last year," he says wistfully.
Some boys pass us. "Want some reefer? Ganga? Weed?" they quietly murmur.
"No, that's all right," says Urban Avenger, walking quickly on. The boys shrug and continue on their way.
"Good thing I got all that on video," Urban Avenger eventually calls after them, indicating a small camera attached to his shoulder.
"Crack? Heroin? PCP?" the boys call back.
"Did you really film it?" I ask.
"No," says Urban Avenger. We continue our patrol.
"I noticed that you didn't make citizen's arrests on the drug dealers," I say.
"We didn't have probable cause," explains Mr Xtreme. "All they did is say something. If they'd shown us crack rocks or marijuana it might have been a different story."
"You could have said you wanted to buy some and then they'd have got the drugs out of their pockets and you could have arrested them," I say.
There's a short silence. "That's true," says Urban Avenger.
As we reach the end of the patrol we get talking about burnout.
"I can relate to burnout," says Mr Xtreme. "All the times I thought about hanging it up. But what would I move on to?"
"The person under the mask really hasn't accomplished much," says Urban Avenger. "But as a superhero I can go out and do something. I can feel like a better person, kind of."
"If I wasn't trying to make a difference in the community, I'd just be sitting around drinking beer," says Mr Xtreme. "Watching movies, going broke, just being negative."
The real-life superheroes like to portray their motives as wholly benevolent, but if they were being driven purely by philanthropy they'd have become police officers or firefighters or charity volunteers. Something else is evidently propelling them---a narcissism. It's an odd sort of narcissism, of course, when the narcissist disguises their face, but the lust for fame and glory is unmistakable.
Only one of them, however, is achieving it: Phoenix Jones.
Back in Seattle he said he knew why he, alone, has captured the public's imagination. It's his bravery amid a community of superheroes who talk the talk but in practice basically don't do much more than hand out food to the homeless.
"When you wake up one day and decide to put on spandex and give out sandwiches, something's a little off," he said. "I don't call them real-life superheroes. I call them real-life sandwich handlers."
In fact there's only one other crew out there actively looking for dangerous scrapes, and that's the NYI---the New York Initiative. And so, in the days before returning to Seattle, I email to ask if I can join them. I receive a very non-comic-book response. Yes, I can, but only if I accord them ". . . professional respect by cooperating with our scheduling and more importantly our tactics in the field. . . . A bulletproof vest will be available for your use. . . . The scheduling is not negotiable. ---Zero, co-founder of the New York Initiative."
We meet for a strategy briefing outside a movie theater near Washington Square Park, Lower Manhattan, at 10 pm. There are ten of them. They don't look much like superheroes. They look quite intimidating, in fact, like a street gang, or some kind of private security detachment dressed entirely in black, with only cursory flashes of color.
"I look at it like a homeland soldier who has stickers on his helmet," explains Zero, a tall, good-looking, blond-haired man. "I'm an artist. I'm a fighter. I'm a radical. I'm in a state of unrest." He pauses. "I'm trying to promote a new term instead of 'superhero': X-Alt. It's short for Extreme Altruist. I think it's going to open a lot of doors for people who don't want to be directly linked to the superhero stigma."
"Is any of this because of Phoenix---" I begin.
"We're not going to comment on Phoenix Jones," snaps Zero, shooting me a look.
Before Phoenix came along Zero and his crew---headed by the veteran superhero of nine years' standing, Dark Guardian---were America's most famous RLSHs. But these days the media don't really want to know them.
They put a bulletproof vest on me and the night's maneuvers begin. The plan is to confront the pot dealers in Washington Square Park, those men who sell to the students at the adjacent New York University.
We enter the park at 11 pm. It is all very quick and efficient. A dealer is standing alone, looking incredibly startled and upset to see ten frightening men rushing toward him.
"Are you the police?" he says, in a small voice.
The superheroes surround him, shining torches in his face, screaming, "This is a drug-free park! A drug-free park! People, not drugs!"
They look like a pack of dogs chasing a fox. The dealer practically chokes with fright.
"You don't know anything about me," he shouts, running away onto the Manhattan streets.
Even though the operation seemed to me to unfold with a textbook precision, an embarrassed-looking Zero asks to speak to me quietly.
"It was a disorganized clusterfuck," he says, evidently furious with himself, like a virtuoso opera singer who does a flawless performance and then beats himself up. "Please don't write about how disorganized we were. If the dealers read it they'll think they can take us. . . ."
My night with the NYI leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These men just seemed menacing, with no fun to them. I don't want my superheroes to be bullies. I want goofy charm. When Phoenix Jones walks down the street passersby point and laugh and gasp. Whereas all the NYI seem to get are anxious sideways glances. I agree with Zero: there's nothing superheroish about them at all.
Seattle. Saturday night. Phoenix Jones is in a bad way. He's still sick from the stabbing and the baseball bat incidents and has now developed a fever of 102.5.
"I found out this morning I have tetanus," he tells me.
"You have to sleep," I say.
"No sleeping for us," says Phoenix.
I'm starting to like Phoenix a lot. For all his naivety, there's something infectiously upbeat about him. He's forever cheerful and positive and energetic. I ask him if he's addicted to crime fighting and he says, "Yeah, I guess you could put it in the addiction category. It's the highlight of my day. Addictions are normally detrimental to health. This is detrimental to my health."
He puts his positive spirit down to a stable home life: "Me and my girlfriend have been together since I was sixteen. I make my own money. To be a successful superhero, you've got to have your life in line."
This will be our final night patrolling together. Phoenix is still embarrassed about our essentially crime-free washout patrol of the other night and is hoping to show me something more dramatic. They're a small team tonight---Pitch Black and Ghost are his only companions.
We begin at 1 am in Pioneer Square. The bars are closing and drunk kids are piling onto the streets, but there's still a frustrating absence of crime. Phoenix notices a girl sobbing in an alleyway.
"Are you okay?" he asks her, bounding over.
"We're good," her friend says, quite sharply.
But then, from somewhere up the street, we hear a shout: "I'm going to fuck you, bitch."
"Let's go!" yells Phoenix. He, Ghost, Pitch Black, and I start to run frantically toward the mystery commotion.
"It's the YouTube guy!" a nearby teenager shouts delightedly. "Can I get a picture of you?"
Phoenix screeches to a halt.
"I'll be right with you guys!" he calls to us. He poses for the girl.
"Phoenix!" I sigh.
By the time Phoenix has had his picture taken, the potential criminal and victim are nowhere to be seen.
By 3 am we are giving up hope. Phoenix is reduced to suggesting we rent a hotel room, phone some prostitutes, and ask them on their arrival if they need help escaping the web of prostitution.
"I think the problem with the plan," I say, "is if a prostitute turns up at a hotel room and sees three men in masks, she's not going to immediately think, 'Superhero.' Plus, she may have to travel right across Seattle. It'll be an hour out of her night." They agree to abandon the idea.
Suddenly we notice a man across the street drop a small, clear bag onto the ground at the feet of another man.
"YAHTZEE!" yells Phoenix. He rushes across the road. "What did you just drop?" he asks them.
"Pretzels," says the man, picking the bag up and showing it to us.
There's a silence.
"Good!" says Phoenix.
We adjourn to a nearby café. "Aargh!" says Phoenix, in frustration.
Our very last hope, at 4 am, is Belltown. When we turn the corner into the district, everything changes. By day this place is nice---with bars and restaurants and art galleries. It's just down the road from the famous Pike Place Market. But now, at 4 am, the dealers staring at us look nothing like the exhausted old crackheads from the bus stop, nor the two-bit pot dealers from Washington Square Park. These are large gangs of wiry young men. They stand on every block. The police are nowhere to be seen. I take in the scene and instinctively take a small step backward.
"There's a possibility we could get into a fight," whispers Pitch Black. "If that happens, back off, okay?"
"What are you doing?" a man calls from across the street. He's part of a nine-strong gang.
"Patrolling," Phoenix calls back. "What are you doing?"
He, Pitch Black, and Ghost walk toward him. I reluctantly follow.
"You've got to respect people's block, man," he's saying. "You don't come down here with your ski masks on. What are you doing, getting yourselves entwined in people's lives? You guys are going to get hurt. You understand? You want to see our burners?"
I'm sure I remember from The Wire that a burner is a stolen cell phone. But that doesn't sound contextually right.
"I don't care," says Phoenix.
"You don't care?"
"Not really."
"Not really?"
"I've already been shot once," says Phoenix.
"I've been shot three times!" another member of the gang says, looking weirdly proud. "One motherfucker round here got shot in the nighttime. Innocent bystanders get shot here. Think about the bigger picture. You're putting your lives on the line. If you guys get killed, if you guys are in a casket, your mommas are going to be like, 'For what?'"
"Don't be a hero," another adds. "That superhero shit? This is real life! You're going to get hurt, fucking around." He pauses. "How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We're not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life."
I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they'll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me.
"I appreciate the info," says Phoenix.
Suddenly a gang member takes a step forward and peers at Phoenix through his mask.
"You're a brother?" he says. "You're a BROTHER and you're out here looking like THIS? You've got to be out of your fucking mind, man."
And then, it all changes. "I feel threatened right now," he says. "You've got ski masks on. I don't know if you're trying to rob me. A guy got shot last Friday in Belltown by somebody with a mask on. Is that you?"
"You don't have to be here," says Phoenix. "You've got choices."
"I've been in the system since I was ten years old!" the man yells. "I haven't got no choices! When your kids get older this is going to be the same shit."
"I disagree," says Phoenix.
"It can't be better!" the man yells. "This is it!" A silence. Then, "When I see ski masks I'm thinking, 'Are these guys going to rob me?'"
The nine men withdraw up the block to decide what to do next.
"Have a good night. Good meeting you," calls Phoenix.
They're watching us, murmuring to each other. Their problem is that nobody wants to buy crack in front of three men dressed as superheroes. While Phoenix and his crew stand here, the dealers are losing all their business.
Phoenix points to two packs of cigarettes under the windshield wiper of a nearby car.
"Those are indications that you can buy here," he says. "So I'm going to take them off and annoy the crap out of them."
He scrunches the packets up and throws them onto the sidewalk.
At this, one of the gang steps forward. If you were watching from across the road it would seem as if he just wanders past us. But in fact he whispers something as he does: "You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do."
"Thank you, it's great meeting you," says Phoenix.
"What's a burner?" I whisper.
"A gun," Phoenix whispers back.
The man loops and rejoins the others.
The streets are deserted. It's just the dealers and us. But then, miraculously, a taxi passes. I flag it. The superheroes all have bulletproof vests. I have nothing. I have a cardigan. I want to see how the drama plays out but I don't want to be killed. "I'll give you twenty bucks to just stay here," I say to the driver.
He looks around, taking in the scene in an instant. "No," he says.
"Thirty?" I say.
And then, suddenly, the whole gang, all nine of them, some with their hands down their trousers, as if they're holding guns just under their waistlines, walk toward us. I can't see much of Phoenix's face under his mask but I can see by the way his hands are involuntarily shaking that he is terrified.
"My shift is over," calls the taxi driver. "I need to go home now."
"Forty!" I yell. "Just stay there!"
"I don't care about the money!" the driver yells. But he doesn't move.
The nine men get closer.
"Are we leaving or are we standing?" says Phoenix.
"We're standing," says Ghost.
"We're standing," says Pitch Black.
"You're willing to die for this shit?" one of the men is yelling. "You're willing to DIE for this shit?" They reach us. "You guys are dumb motherfuckers," he says. "I don't even know what to say. You guys are fucking stupid." He stares at Phoenix. But then his voice softens. "If you guys are going to stand here and die for it I guess we're going to have to walk home. We should shoot your ass, but I guess we've got to go home."
And they do. They disperse. They go home.
"You won!" I tell Phoenix.
I can practically hear his heart pounding.
"They had the weapons, the numbers, but they backed down to the image of Phoenix Jones," he says.
"I'm going to bed," I say.
"We'll stand here for ten minutes and solidify the corner," he replies. "You don't want to stand with us?"
"No," I say. "I definitely don't."
I jump into the taxi. And when I arrive back at the hotel my legs buckle and I almost fall onto the floor.
5 am, Phoenix telephones. He's shrieking with laughter, babbling, hyperventilating, letting out all the adrenaline.
"That was ridiculously intense!" he's yelling. "In a few hours I've got to be a daycare worker!"
It is the next afternoon. There's a comic convention in town. I spot Knight Owl and one of Phoenix's friends, Skyman.
"Ooh, look, The Rocketeer!" says Skyman. "You never see Rocketeer costumes! That is PRICELESS! I gotta get me a photo of that! Ooh! Lady Riddler! Nice!"
Skyman approaches a Batman.
"Is that a real bulletproof outfit?" he asks him.
"No," Batman replies, a little apologetically.
"This place," I tell Knight Owl, "is full of costumed people who would never confront drug dealers in the middle of the night. You and Phoenix and Skyman exist in some shadow world between fantasy and reality."
"Yeah, man," Knight Owl replies. "What we do is HYPER reality!"
And then there are cheers and gasps and applause. Phoenix Jones has arrived. He is a superstar here. He sees me and we hug---two brave warriors who have been through a great adventure together.
"Thank you for making our city safe!" a woman in the crowd calls out to him.
"You're a very cool man!" someone else shouts.
I tell Phoenix it is time for me to leave.
"When you write this be sure to tell everyone that what we do is dangerous," he says.
"I think you're great," I say. "But I'm worried you're going to get yourself killed."
"Well, don't make it seem like I'd be dying for a choice," he replies. "I couldn't quit if I wanted. You know how many people in this city look up to me? I'm like the state's hero."
And I suddenly realize that I feel about Phoenix the same way everyone here does. I think he is an awesome superhero.
Phoenix Jones, REAL superhero.
As I walk out I hear a father whisper to his young son, "That's a REAL superhero."
"Are you a real superhero?" the little boy asks Phoenix.
"I'm real as you can get," Phoenix replies.
Afterword
Six months pass and then, one day in mid-October 2011, Phoenix is everywhere. My first thought when I see, via my Google news search, that 433 media outlets have in a matter of hours published articles about Phoenix, is that he must be dead.
It turns out that he isn't dead.

Self-proclaimed Seattle crime fighter "Phoenix Jones" was arrested early Sunday morning when he pepper sprayed a group of people leaving a club. Now, in the aftermath, his identity has been revealed. Phoenix Jones is actually Benjamin Fodor. He is 23 years old, lives in Seattle and is a Mixed Martial Artist. Seattle police detective Jeff Kappel said the group was leaving a club near 1st Avenue about 2:30 a.m. when Fodor, in costume, intervened.


"They were dancing and having a good time," Kappel said. "An unknown adult male suspect came up from behind and pepper sprayed the group."


---Seattle's Q13 Fox News Online, October 10, 2011

Hours later one of the partygoers---a woman named by the media only as Maria---gives an interview to a Seattle radio station, King/5:

"We were just walking down to our parking lot after having a good time in Seattle, when a little argument broke out between our group and another group, and all of a sudden we were attacked. I turn around and we're being attacked by these guys wearing Halloween costumes. He says, 'I'm a superhero' and sprays everyone. Nothing gives him a right to do that. That's harassment and assault."

"Oh, Phoenix," I think as I read these reports. "I put my life on the line for you. What have you done?"
I try to reach him but to no avail. He's in a jail cell somewhere in Seattle.
And then, a few hours later, a shakily filmed and chaotic thirteen-minute video appears on Vimeo. It turns out that one of Phoenix's group filmed the whole thing.
The video: It's late at night in some floodlit, industrial part of Seattle. The superheroes are patrolling, as normal, when one of them suddenly yells: "Phoenix! Look down! Huge fight!"
"Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!" Phoenix yells, clearly thrilled, running instantly into the midst of the altercation. "Call nine-one-one!" he shouts to his friends. "Call nine-one-one!"
That's the Phoenix I know. I bet it had been another frustratingly slow night for him, so the chance to shine courageously must have been quite the blessed relief.
As soon as Phoenix enters the fray---and it's hard to tell how violent the fray had been because the moment Phoenix arrives everyone stops fighting and just stares, baffled, at him---a small woman begins to repeatedly hit him with her shoe.
"You piece of shit," she yells. (This is the woman later identified as Maria.)
Everything becomes chaotic. A car zooms in and deliberately hits a pedestrian. It is presumably a car driven by one of the partygoers, and makes me suspect that the street fight Phoenix intervened in had not been a friendly little nothing thing, as the police and Maria had intimated, but something more serious.
"Where are the cops?" Phoenix yells. "We need the cops now. This is getting serious."
A young man races toward Phoenix and he responds by pepper-spraying him in the face.
"I got fucking pepper spray in my eye!" Maria yells at one point.
A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: "A huge group of people are fighting and there's pepper spray and superheroes and I don't know."
"Protect yourselves!" Phoenix yells.
"Oh my God, oh my God," says the nerdy bystander, and as I watch this from the safety of my home I think, "There but for the grace of God go I."
The video ends.
Phoenix is booked into jail on four counts of assault. He's released on bail the following afternoon. Two days later---a few hours before Phoenix is due to be arraigned in court---my Skype flickers into life.
"Phoenix!" I say, startled. "You're unmasked!"
"The police took my Super Suit," he says. He sounds sorrowful. "I was debating whether to show you my face or just these. . . ." He waves his biceps in front of the Skype camera. "Hey!" he says, pretending to be the voice of his significant biceps. "Remember me?"
"I DO remember you," I say.
Phoenix doesn't look like I'd imagined he would. All I'd had to go on was the muscular physique, so I assumed his face would be tougher, more stern or something. But, while handsome, he's also unexpectedly goofy-looking. He's wearing nerdy, quite effeminate spectacles, and has a strange haircut that looks like an upside-down bucket.
"That's an incredible haircut," I say.
"Yeah, it's like Kid 'n Play, the Black Elvis," he explains. "So. Anyway. The police stole my Super Suit. They said it was evidence of a crime. But if someone commits a so-called assault, you don't take their shirt and pants."
"It does seem punitive," I say. "What did you say to them when they took your suit?"
"I said, 'Really?' They said, 'Yeah, that way we can keep your big mouth shut.' It's been a rough road."
"How does it feel to be unmasked?" I ask.
"Extremely uncomfortable to say the least," says Phoenix. "They're not going to charge me with a crime. They can't. So I'm going to be sitting there in court in a few hours, unmasked, not charged with anything. It's ridiculous."
"Unmasked and named," I say. "Will people knowing your name now be problematic for the superheroism?"
There's a short silence.
"Wait," Phoenix says. He looks startled. "People know my NAME?"
"Oh my God," I think. "Nobody has told him."
"Phoenix," I say with concern. "Yes. They do."
"Hehehehehe!" says Phoenix. "I knew that! I'm just kidding you!"
"Oh, Phoenix!" I say.
I thought I'd find him humbled, perhaps even broken, but he's as enthusiastic as ever. He's convinced there's no case against him. "The police said they were frolicking and dancing," he says. "My video comes out and there's no frolicking, no dancing. They're trying to make it seem like I was out of control. What kind of guy who's out of control stands there and lets a girl hit him in the face thirty-six times with a shoe?"
"She says she was pepper-sprayed," I say.
"My pepper spray has orange dye in it," Phoenix replies. "So no way was she pepper-sprayed by any spray belonging to Phoenix Jones. So she can take that claim and . . . throw it away."
"But still," I say. "In hindsight would you do anything differently?"
"Yeah," says Phoenix. "Next time I'm in a situation like that I'm going to use more of my superpowers. I'm going to freeze time so I can make every decision right." He pauses. "No. I didn't do anything wrong."
Phoenix seems in high spirits. He has a new girlfriend---a superhero named Purple Reign. She looks veiled and impressive and an excellent match. He says the assault charge is nothing about the incident and all about a preexisting police agenda to shut him down.
"I dress up as a superhero and fight crime because I like to," he says. "They dress up as cops and don't fight crime because they like to."
But, he says, their agenda to disempower him by unmasking and naming him has failed: "You're not a superhero until you take the mask off. Think about it. Batman wasn't Batman until he was also Bruce Wayne. Phoenix Jones isn't Phoenix Jones until he's also the other man."
"Benjamin Fodor," I say. "Benjamin Fodor."
"You can't stay masked forever," he says. "I wanted to, sure. But now I can talk to kids in hospitals. I can check into any school in America. I can do a lot of stuff I couldn't do before. There are so many opportunities I never thought would open up. I can go in my Super Suit and meet the president of the United States if I want to. I can take my mask off and take photos with him."
"That might not be as easy as you think," one of Phoenix's friends murmurs in the background.
"They tried to take me out but they gave me a bigger voice," says Phoenix. "Everyone who thought I was crazy now sees I'm a man. I'm a man with a history of activism and no criminal record. I'm in great shape. Now everyone's going, 'Wait! He's a professional mixed martial arts trainer! Wait! He's CPR certified and trained! Wait! He's the main manager of an autistic home!' They turned me from a weird rubbered-out freak into an American Superhero. I think they thought they'd find someone who lives in his basement and doesn't have many friends and is sort of socially awkward, and instead they got a guy living . . ." Phoenix pauses. ". . . the American Dream."
Phoenix Jones. Unmasked but undimmed. As I write this the Seattle police are yet to decide whether to press charges.
A free excerpt from Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test . . .
It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he'd spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.
Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths' untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they'll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.
"Yeah," Gary had told me, "I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . ."
They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.
"When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them," Gary said. "There was like a 'This is bullshit!' And we got a rebound."
Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson---that's what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.
He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.
I had emailed Bob Hare to ask if he'd meet me and he'd replied that he'd be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn't included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.
This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob Hare, approached him for his autograph. Others looked skeptical from a distance. One care worker had told me earlier that she'd been sent by her employers and she wasn't happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis ("It's a huge label," she said) just because they didn't do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person's turn of phrase, a person's sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory.
I told Bob about her skepticism and I said I shared it to an extent, but that was possibly because I'd been spending a lot of time lately with Scientologists.
He shot me a grumpy look.
"We'll see how you feel by the end of the week," he said.
"So, anyway," I said, "how did all this begin for you?"
He looked at me. I could tell what was going through his mind: "I'm tired. Telling the story will take up a lot of my energy. Does this person really deserve it?"
Then he sighed. And he began.
In the mid-1960s, just as Elliott Barker was first conceiving his Total Encounter Capsule over in Ontario, Bob Hare was in Vancouver working as a prison psychologist. His was the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. Nowadays it is a prison-themed bar and diner where the servers wear striped prison uniforms and dishes are named after famous inmates, but back then it was a tough facility with a brutal reputation. Like Elliott, Bob believed that the psychopaths in his care buried their madness beneath a façade of normality. But Bob was less idealistic. He was interested in detection, not cure. He'd been tricked so many times by devious psychopaths. On his very first day working at the prison, for example, the warden had told him he needed a uniform and he should give his measurements to the inmate who was the prison tailor. So Bob did, and was glad to observe how assiduously the man took them. He spent a long time getting everything just right: the feet, the inside leg. Bob felt moved by the sight. Even in this awful prison, here was a man who took pride in his work.
But then, when the uniform arrived, Bob found that one trouser leg rode up to his calf while the other trailed along the ground. The jacket sleeves were equally askew. It couldn't have been human error. The man was obviously trying to make him look like a clown.
At every turn, psychopaths were making his life unpleasant. One even cut the brake cables of his car while it was in the prison's auto repair shop. Bob could have been killed. And so he started devising tests to determine if psychopaths could somehow be rooted out.
He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers. There was no shortage. Prisoners were always looking to relieve the boredom. He strapped them up, one by one, to various EEG and sweat and blood-pressure measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and he explained to them that he was going to count backward from ten and when he reached one, they'd receive a very painful electric shock.
The difference in the responses stunned Bob. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock was just the penance they deserved, and as the countdown continued, the monitors revealed dramatic increases in their perspiration rates. They were, Bob noted and documented, scared.
"And what happened when you got to one?" I asked.
"I gave them an electric shock," Bob said. He smiled. "We used really painful electric shocks," he said.
"And the psychopaths?" I asked.
"They didn't break a sweat," said Bob. "Nothing."
I looked at him.
"Sure," he added, "at the exact moment the unpleasant thing occurred . . ."
"The electric shock?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Bob. "When the unpleasant thing occurred, the psychopaths gave a response . . ."
"Like a shriek?" I asked.
"Yes, I suppose like a shriek," said Bob. But the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should.
It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they'd be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn't for years: psychopaths were likely to re-offend.
"They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before," Bob said. "So what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them."
He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.
Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we're on the edge of our seats anyway. If we're watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we're engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren't horrified. They're absorbed.
It seemed from Bob's experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness---as fascinating puzzles to be solved.
Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine.
"The editor returned them unpublished," he said. "He wrote me a letter. I'll never forget it. He wrote: 'Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people.'"
Bob paused and chuckled.
"Couldn't have come from real people," he repeated.
My guess was that Science magazine behaved coolly toward Bob because they believed him to be yet another maverick psychopath researcher running rampant in a Canadian mental institution in the late 1960s. Those places were the Wild West of psychopath study back then, with lots of big ideas and practically no regulation. It was inevitable that civil rights groups would eventually force a reining in of the experiments. And sure enough, disastrously for Bob, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s.
"Even mild ones," he told me. He seemed annoyed by the legislation even now, years later. "We could still startle them with loud noises but they couldn't be anywhere near as loud," he said.
Bob was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? Were there patterns of behavior? Would they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase, imperceptible to unsuspecting civilians? He devoured Hervey Cleckley's seminal 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity. Cleckley was a Georgia-based psychiatrist whose analysis of psychopathic behavior---how they bury their psychosis beneath a veneer of engaging normalness---had come to influence the field. Bob began quietly scrutinizing his own psychopaths, looking out for linguistic clues.
In 1975 he organized a conference on the subject.
"I invited the top people in the world who might have something to say about psychopaths," he said. "We ended up with eighty-five people. We took over a hotel in a ski resort near Saint Moritz called Les Arcs."
It began disastrously, Bob said, with one psychiatrist standing up and dramatically announcing to the group his contention that Bob was himself a psychopath. A ripple of shock passed through the conference hall.
Bob stood. "Why do you believe that?" he asked.
"You're clearly impulsive," replied the psychiatrist. "You can't plan ahead. You invited me to participate as a speaker in this conference only a month ago."
"I invited you only a month ago because the person I wanted to come couldn't come," Bob said.
"Oh, you're cold-blooded and callous," the psychiatrist said.
"Did he mean it?" I asked Bob now.
"Yeah, he meant it," said Bob. "He was a nasty man."
The purpose of the Les Arcs conference was for the experts to pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths' behavior, the verbal and nonverbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:

Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm


Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth


Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom


Item 4: Pathological lying


Item 5: Conning/manipulative


Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt


Item 7: Shallow affect


Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy


Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle


Item 10: Poor behavioral controls


Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior


Item 12: Early behavior problems


Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals


Item 14: Impulsivity


Item 15: Irresponsibility


Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions


Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships


Item 18: Juvenile delinquency


Item 19: Revocation of conditional release


Item 20: Criminal versatility

And first thing the next morning, we were going to learn how to use it.
Tuesday morning. The attendees milled around in the tent that was to be ours for the next three days. Some were Bob Hare fans. When he stood in a corner telling stories about how he "packs heat, because a lot of psychopaths blame their incarcerations on me," we gathered to listen. The tent stood next to a pretty tidal estuary. The peach silk drapes fluttered in the summer morning breeze. Bob brought up the occasion---now famous in psychopath-analyzing circles---when Peter Woodcock had explained that the reason he'd killed Dennis Kerr on his first day of freedom from Oak Ridge was because he wanted to know what it would be like to kill someone, and the interviewer had said, "But you'd already killed three people," and Woodcock had replied, "Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago."
Bob turned to me. "You see?" he said. "Short memories. Just like during that electric shock test."
Some of the people listening in chuckled wryly. But there were skeptics here, too. Psychiatrists and psychologists and care workers and criminal profilers and neurologists tend not to like being told what to do by so-called gurus of the movement. I could feel in the room a sense of "Impress me."
We took our places. Bob flicked a switch. And onto the screen came a video of an empty room. It was a drab, municipal-looking room painted in a blue so dull it was barely a color. There was a plywood desk, a chair. The only splash of cheerfulness was a bright red button on the wall. Into the room walked a man. He was good-looking, neatly dressed. He had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He moved his chair until it was underneath the red button. It made a slight scraping noise as he pulled it across the floor.
"Do you see what he just did?" said Bob. "He moved his chair to right below the panic button. He did it to intimidate my researcher, who's standing behind the camera. Just a little display of control. That feeling of control is important to them."
And the man began to talk.
We never learned his name, or which prison this room was situated inside. Throughout the morning we referred to him only as Case Study H. His accent was Canadian.
It all began, quite innocently, with the researcher asking Case Study H about his school days.
"I enjoyed the social atmosphere of school," he replied, "enjoyed learning and seeing new things."
"Did you ever hurt anyone in a schoolyard fight?" the researcher asked.
"No," he replied. "Just schoolyard shenanigans."
These were critical questions, Bob later explained, because the answers might inform Item 12 of his checklist: Early Behavior Problems. Almost all psychopaths display serious behavior problems as a child, Bob said, starting around age ten to twelve, like persistent bullying, vandalism, substance abuse, arson.
"I had a couple of incidences of fisticuffs," said Case Study H. "Well, one time I broke this kid's arm. It was really distasteful. I was holding him down and I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped. It was not something I wanted to happen."
There was, we noted in our assessment sheets, something weirdly disconnected about his description of the event: "I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped." It was like he couldn't properly place himself there.
Item 7: Shallow Affect---An individual who seems unable to experience a normal range and depth of emotions.
Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy.
Item 10: Poor Behavioral Controls.
I remembered a time I perforated my eardrum on a plane and for days afterward everything around me seemed faraway and hazy and impossible to connect to. Was that foggy sensation a psychopath's continual emotional state?
"One of my old buds from the FBI was investigating this woman, Karla Homolka," Bob had told me earlier. "She and her husband had videotaped themselves torturing and raping and murdering these young women. The police were taking her through the house where they'd cut up the bodies, carved them up, and Karla was saying, 'My sister would like that rug . . .' They took her into the bathroom and Karla was saying, 'Can I ask you something? I had a bottle of perfume here . . .' Totally disconnected. It was stunning."
Bob said it's always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it's fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery.
"What happened to Karla Homolka in the end?" I asked him.
"She's out now," he said. "They believed her little-girl act. Hair in braids. All sweet and lovely. Very convincing. She blamed it all on her husband. She did a plea bargain. They gave her twelve years."
Item 5: Conning/Manipulative.
Item 4: Pathological Lying---An individual for whom lying is a characteristic part of interactions with others.
Case Study H's video testimony continued. Around the time he broke the kid's arm he locked his stepmother in a closet---revenge for her trying to discipline his brother.
Item 14: Impulsivity.
"She was in the closet for nearly twelve hours. And then my father came home. He let her out. It was pathetic. She just sobbed."
One time, Bob said, one of his researchers interviewed a bank robber who told him how a cashier had soiled herself from fear as he pointed his gun at her.
"It was pathetic," the bank robber had told Bob's researcher, "seeing her soil herself like that."
I glanced at one or two of my fellow skeptics in the crowd. We were looking a bit less skeptical now. We took notes.
Item 6, I wrote on my pad. Lack of Remorse or Guilt.
"How did it feel to lock your stepmother in a closet?" the interviewer asked Case Study H.
"It felt invigorating," he replied. "It felt good. I had some power. I was in control."
Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth.
"I became the night clerk at a local place," he continued. "If people came in drinking, swinging around, if they wouldn't respond to politeness, well, then I would get physical with them. I beat a couple of people pretty bad."
"How did you feel about that?" the interviewer asked.
"I didn't really have any feelings about it," he replied.
We attendees glanced excitedly at each other and scribbled notes. I began thinking about the people I knew who didn't have as many feelings as they ought to have.
"Ever injure anyone badly enough to get them into hospital?" the interviewer asked.
"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't care. It wasn't my problem. I won the fight. No room for second place."
I was good at this, good at reading between the lines, at spotting the clues, the needles in the haystack. It's what I've been doing for twenty years as a journalist.
Case Study H reminded me of a blind man whose other senses had become enhanced to compensate. His enhanced qualities, compensating for the lack of guilt and fear and remorse, included the ability to skillfully manipulate---"I was able to manipulate those people that were close to me, for drugs, for money, using my friends, the more I know about them the better I am at knowing what buttons to push," he told Bob's researcher (Item 9: Parasitic Lifestyle)---and also an aptitude for not feeling bad about his crimes afterward.
"It was a business." He shrugged, recounting one robbery he committed. "They had insurance."
Psychopaths, Bob said, will invariably argue that their victims had no right to complain. They had insurance. Or they learned a valuable life lesson getting beaten up like that. Or it was their own fault anyway. One time Bob interviewed a man who had impulsively killed another man over a bar tab.
"He only had himself to blame," the killer told Bob. "Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night."
Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions.
All this was building toward the moment Case Study H would detail his most awful crime. His recounting of it began quite vaguely. I didn't quite know what he was talking about at first. There was a kid he knew. The kid hated his parents. It was a real weakness of the kid's. Case Study H thought he could get something out of this hatred. Maybe he could provoke the kid into robbing them and then they could share the money. So he started needling the kid. All his troubles were the fault of his parents. Case Study H really knew which buttons to push to rile a boy who was already on the edge.
"The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation," he told Bob's researcher. "I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings."
Eventually the kid became wound so tight he got a baseball bat, jumped into his car, with Case Study H in tow, and drove to his parents' house. When they arrived, "I sort of gave him that mocking look," Case Study H said. "'Show me.' And he showed me. He went into the master bedroom equipped with a baseball bat and I sort of shrugged it off. And then the beatings started. It was endless. It seemed to last an eternity. He came back into the hall brandishing a baseball bat covered in blood. I came face-to-face with one of the victims. He didn't look real. He just didn't look real. He was looking right at me. It was just a vacant expression. There were three people in the house. One person died. The other two were severely injured."
This was what happened when a psychopath got control of the emotions of a troubled, thuggish kid.
Bob's researcher asked him if he could go back in time and change things from his life, what would he change?
"I have often pondered that," Case Study H replied. "But then all that I have learned would be lost." He paused. "The hotter the fire when forging a sword, the tighter the bond on the blade," he said.
"Is there anything else you want to say?" said Bob's researcher.
"No," he replied. "That's it."
"Okay, thanks," said Bob's researcher.
The video ended. We broke for lunch.
And so passed the three days. And as they did, my skepticism drained away entirely and I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries. I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon, the kind of power that heroes of TV dramas about brilliant criminal profilers display---the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I'd been hanging around with Tony and the Scientologists. Instead I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths, contemptuous of, for instance, Norman Mailer.
In 1977, Mailer---who was working on The Executioner's Song, about the recently executed convicted murderer Gary Gilmore---began corresponding with a tough Utah prisoner, a bank robber and murderer named Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer came to admire Abbott's writing, and then to champion him when he was up for parole in 1981. "I love Jack Abbott for surviving and for having learned to write as well as he does," Mailer wrote the Utah Board of Corrections.
"Mr. Abbott has the makings of a powerful and important American writer," Mailer went on, promising that if the board paroled Abbott he'd give him a job as a researcher for $150 a week. Surprised, and somewhat dazzled, the Board of Corrections agreed. Jack Abbott was free. And he headed straight for literary New York.
This was no surprise. New York City was where his champions were. But even so, Bob said, psychopaths tend to gravitate toward the bright lights. You'll find lots of them in New York and London and Los Angeles. The psychologist David Cooke, of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, was once asked in Parliament if psychopaths caused particular problems in Scottish prisons.
"Not really," he replied. "They're all in London prisons."
It wasn't, he told them, a throwaway line. He had spent months assessing Scottish-born prisoners for psychopathy, and the majority of those who scored high were in London, having committed their crimes there. Psychopaths get bored easily. They need excitement. They migrate to the big cities.
Item 3: Need for Stimulation/Proneness to Boredom.
They also tend to suffer from self-delusions about their long-term prospects. They think if they move to London or New York or L.A., they'll make it big, as a movie star, or a great athlete, or whatever. One time one of Bob's researchers asked a grossly overweight prison psychopath what he hoped to do when he got out, and he replied that he planned to be a professional gymnast.
Item 13: Lack of Realistic Long-Term Goals.
(Unless the guy had been joking, of course.)
Jack Abbott thought he'd be the toast of literary New York. And, as it turned out, he was. He and Mailer appeared together on Good Morning America. He was photographed by the great New York portraitist, and wife of Kurt Vonnegut, Jill Krementz. The New York Times expressed gratitude to Mailer for helping get Abbott out on parole. He signed with the powerhouse agent Scott Meredith and was guest of honor at a celebratory dinner at a Greenwich Village restaurant, where Mailer, the editorial directors of Random House, Scott Meredith, and others toasted him with champagne.
And then, six weeks after getting out of prison, at 5:30 a.m. on July 18, 1981, Abbott stopped at a twenty-four-hour Manhattan restaurant, the Binibon. He had with him (according to reports the next day) two "attractive, well-educated young women he had met at a party."
Item 11: Promiscuous Sexual Behavior.
Although, in fairness, Item 11 may not have applied to that threesome. It is impossible to know if they all were intending to have sex. Because everything was about to be altered. Everything was about to get worse.
Behind the counter at the Binibon was a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actor named Richard Adan. Abbott asked to use the toilet. Adan said it was for employees only. Abbott said, "Let's go outside and settle this like men," and so they did, and Abbott got out a knife and stabbed Richard Adan to death. Then he walked away, vanishing into the night.
"What happened?" Scott Meredith said to The New York Times. "Every conversation I had with Jack we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him."
What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn't need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn't bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn't control his impulses.
"When the police finally caught up with him, you know what he told them about the guy he stabbed?" Bob said. "He said, 'Oh, but he would never have made it as an actor.'"
"These motherfucking psychologists and psychiatrists are going to tell the administration and the police what you are going to do next. Even Jesus Christ could not predict what the fuck his apostles were going to do."
These were the words of another of Bob's videoed case studies---Case Study J. We laughed shrewdly when we heard him say this, because we did now know. That cryptic, powerful knowledge of how to decipher and identify psychopaths and anticipate their next move, even when they were feigning normalcy, was ours now. What we knew was that they were remorseless monsters and they would do it again in a heartbeat.
As I sat in the tent, my mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I'm being honest, it didn't cross my mind at that point to become some kind of great crime fighter, an offender profiler or criminal psychologist, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead I made a mental list of all the people who had crossed me over the years, and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list of possibilities was the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair critic A. A. Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had recently written a restaurant column for The Sunday Times in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.

I took him just below the armpit. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone's close relative?

"Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy," I thought.
I smiled to myself and zoned back in to Bob. He was saying that if he were to score himself on his checklist, he'd probably get a 4 or a 5 out of the possible 40. Tony in Broadmoor told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.
Our three days in West Wales came to an end. On the last day Bob surprised us by unexpectedly flashing onto the screen a large-scale, close-up photograph of a man who'd been shot in the face at very close range. This came after he'd lulled us into a false sense of security by flashing photographs of ducks on pretty lakes and summer days in the park. But in this picture, gore and gristle bubbled everywhere. The man's eyes had bulged all the way out of their sockets. His nose was gone.
"Oh GOD," I thought.
An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of the amygdalae and the central nervous system shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It's the feeling we get when we're suddenly startled---like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark---or when we realize we've done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience.
"It is a feeling," Bob said, "that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing."
Bob said it was becoming clearer that this brain anomaly is at the heart of psychopathy.
"There are all sorts of laboratory studies and the results are very, very consistent," he said. "What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there's this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don't put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don't light up."
And with that our psychopath-spotting course was over. As we gathered together our belongings and headed toward our cars, I said to one attendee, "You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it's all because of their amygdalae? If it's not their fault?"
"Why should we feel sorry for them?" he replied. "They don't give a shit about us."
Bob Hare called over to me. He was in a hurry. He had to get the train from Cardiff to Heathrow so he could fly back to Vancouver. Could I give him a lift?
He saw it before I did. A car was upside down. The driver was still in his seat. He was just sitting there, as if good-naturedly waiting for someone to come and turn him right way up again so he could continue on his journey. I thought, "He looks patient," but then I realized he wasn't conscious.
His passenger sat on the grass a short distance away. She was sitting cross-legged, as if lost in her thoughts. She must have been thrown clean through the window a moment or two earlier.
I saw the scene only for an instant. Other people had already parked their cars and were running toward them, so I kept going, pleased that I didn't have to be the one to handle it. Then I wondered if I should worry that my relief at not having to deal with the unpleasant responsibility was a manifestation of Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy---"He is only concerned with Number 1."
I glanced in my rearview mirror at the good Samaritans rushing over and surrounding the overturned car and continued on my way.
"Jon?" said Bob, after a moment.
"Mm?" I said.
"Your driving," said Bob.
"What about my driving?" I said.
"You're swerving all over the road," said Bob.
"No, I'm not," I said. We continued in silence for a moment. "It's the shock of seeing the crash," I said.
It was good to know that I had been affected after all.
Bob said what was happening was my amygdala and central nervous system were shooting signals of fear and distress up and down to each other.
"They certainly are." I nodded. "I can actually feel it happening. It's very jarring and jaggedy."
"You do realize," said Bob, "that psychopaths would see that crash and their amygdalae would barely register a thing."
"Well then, I'm the opposite of a psychopath," I said. "If anything, my amygdala and my central nervous system shoot far too many signals up and down to each other."
"Can you concentrate on the road, please," said Bob.
"I came to you," I said, "because of this guy called Tony. He's in Broadmoor. He says they're falsely accusing him of psychopathy and he hopes I'll do some campaigning journalism to support his release. And I do have warm feelings for Tony, I really do, but how do I know if he's a psychopath?"
Bob didn't seem to be listening. It was as if the crash had made him introspective. He said, almost to himself, "I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
I looked at Bob. "Really?" I said.
He nodded.
"But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths," I said.
"Serial killers ruin families." Bob shrugged. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."
This---Bob was saying---was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn't function right. You're standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren't all the same. We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond.
Available now
To purchase The Psychopath Test, click here.
Also by Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Them: Adventures with Extremists
The Men Who Stare At Goats

