Dr. FIlth vs. The Surgeon

A baby squeaked with glee in a window of a condemned tenement whose potable water source was soon to be severed. Drug dealers leaned on the rails of the park next door, lifting heads to look out of cornered eyes. Cover is provided by two homeless drunks that may have once been city councilmen. Dr. Filth didn't feel much like being a superhero that morning, at least not while he was off the clock.

The old-timers preached superheroing was the second most sound profession after prostitution. For countless millennium, human stupidity and clumsiness had assured there would always be someone in need of rescue. These days, elaborate bells and whistles were installed on every machine and moving part to draw attention and scorn for any instance of operator error. Most superheros spent their days on office couches waiting for some kind of monster, alien, or diabolical terrorist plot.

Accidents still occurred, but Metro City now refused to pay for kittens in trees and children stuck in storm drains, and the stream of paying customers had all but dried up. Service employment was the only industry remaining in Metro City after the factories closed down and took the financial district with them. The well of money proved to be finite, and receded like the tide through the classes, until only the wickedest pack of scum and villainy were left on the top hoarding all the wealth. Blind to their precarious position, they continued offering services at inflated prices to a population no longer able to pay. An abundance of alcohol had staved off riots so far, but even unemployment was running out across beleaguered Metro City. The motto of middle-management remained “Screw You, Employee.”

Dr. Filth was not surprised when the Superhero Gang cut hours, he'd seen it coming all along. With people stretched beyond their means already for food and fuel, not much money remained to compensate for unforeseen rescue expenses. Most hero jobs went unpaid, much like Dr. Filth's electricity, personal communication device, and his rent.

Always keeping his eyes open for extra cash opportunities, Doc was pleased to find a note tacked to a light post offering cash payments in exchange for liver samples to be used in a research project. A map crudely drawn in Magick Marker led to an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Metro City. The compensation wouldn't cover rent, but would keep Dr. Filth in 40’s for the weekend.

Dr. Filth was greeted in by an olive-skinned man in a greasy jumpsuit smiled when Doc entered, wiping his grimy hands on a once-blue towel. He stood behind a wooden counter, smoke-stained and covered with dust but for a rectangle where a cash register once sat.

"Is this the place for the liver tests?” Dr. Filth asked, looking around the factory office that was largely caved in. The room appeared to have not been cleaned since long before the business picked up stakes and moved.

The greasy attendant beamed a smile, trying to take Dr. Filth’s hand. The attendant couldn’t speak English, but used a complex array of hand and body gestures to lead Dr. Filth down a hall past the office to a long chain of rooms, each with it's own operating table. At the end of the hall, the attendant directed Dr. Filth inside and handed him a card requesting the patient disrobe.

Dr. Filth did as he was told and waited on the table in only his Aquaman boxer shorts . Guns 'N' Roses played "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" from the speakers mounted in the corner. Dr. Filth was afraid this didn’t bode well.

After what seemed to be an interminable amount of time, a mostly-bald man in baby blue scrubs serpentine-danced in. “I do a pretty mean Axl,” the doctor said, jerking his body around in a rock star convulsion. “I haven’t been drinking enough this morning, though. My chemicals are imbalanced.” Wearing no gloves, the surgeon picked up a syringe, sucked in serum from a bottle, and jabbed the blunted needle in Dr. Filth’s exposed, fleshy back. “That hurt?” the doctor asked when Dr. Filth cries out, and then, “Yep, that was your kidney. It’s going to numb down your whole back enough for me to bolster the serum in a few minutes. Once we start, you won't feel a thing. Until then, it will probably hurt quite a bit.”

The surgeon spun out of the room, leaving Dr. Filth alone. The greasy mechanic paced back and forth in the doorway, looking in the room with sad eyes. “What have I gotten myself into?” Dr. Filth whispered to himself. Guns 'N' Roses ended and were replaced by Eric Clapton's rendition of the very same song.

The surgeon returned when the song changed to Warren Zevon's version of the very same song. He didn't look at Dr. Filth, laying out his operating tools on a metal tray before him. Even during the Wolfenstein Crisis, Dr. Filth had never seen so many scalpels and implements of cutting. “What’s with the corkscrews?” Dr. Filth asked.

“Face front!” replied the surgeon, pushing Dr. Filth down on the operating table. “This tape used to drive my wife crazy on road trips." With scalpel in hand, the surgeon beat his air-axe like there would be no tomorrow. “I've got 25 versions of this song on here. Guns N Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan and the Dead. You ever hear Dylan and the Dead do this song?”

Dr. Filth hated the Dead, but did not feel comfortable telling this to the surgeon. When he shook his head, the surgeon deflated. “Aww man, you’ve got to hear Dylan do this with the Dead, they kill… and I mean KILL this song.” Is that good or bad? “There was nobody out there like Hendrix, though. Let’s see if this still hurts.”

Dr. Filth recoiled in pain as the surgeon jabbed the needle in his back. The surgeon chuckled. “Need a little more, I see. All right, I’ll be back.” And the surgeon was gone. The greasy mechanic returned to his pacing, doing his best to keep an eye without making eye contact.

The song changed to Jimi Hendrix's version of the same song. The surgeon was already talking when he returned. “Jimi Hendrix was awesome, man.” He prepared another hypodermic. “I had some friends that knew him, and they told me he always tried to out-do everyone. You had one drink, he had two. You did two lines of coke, he did five. You dropped five hits of acid, he’d do ten. Myself, I’m good with one hit of acid.”

“I’m not so sure this is the conversation I want to be having with my doctor,” Dr. Filth said, and the surgeon laughed wildly.

“How’d that feel?” the surgeon asked.

“How’d what feel?” Dr. Filth asked.

“I think you’re almost ready for surgery.” The surgeon pushed Dr. Filth down on his stomach and snorted a line off Dr. Filth’s back. “How do your kidneys look, sonny?” he asked, tossing his head back and wiping the powdery white mustache out of his real salt-and-pepper mustache. Dr. Filth knew he was in trouble, but the surgeon had already pinned him down with a leather strap. “What about the heart? The lungs?"

Dr. Filth struggled against his bonds, but the surgeon was already busy with a second and third leather strap across his legs. “You’re not going anywhere, son, so stop fighting. I don’t want your kidneys, or your lungs. Hell, I don’t even want your liver.”

“You’re making a big mistake,” Dr. Filth said in what he hoped was the most imposing voice he could muster. “You don’t know who I am.”

The surgeon laughed. “Of course I know who you are! Why do you think you’re here?” The surgeon scraped his scalpel blade on a rough sharpening stone. “You’re a superhero. You don’t think I didn’t recognize you from the first moment? You’re on the telly all the time palling around with Stupendous Guy. I was at the parade when you bagged Adradian. I saw those thick, lustrous dredlocks, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I must have your hair."

That’s when Dr. Filth recognized the surgeon. “Dingo Eldritch Horror!” Dr. Filth bellowed. This amoral fiend lived under the Metro City Bridge with the chuds, dining on snips and snails and puppy dog guts, seated on a mountain of his own feces.

The song changed to Avril Lavigne's rendition. “I don’t go by that name no more,” said Horror, rubbing his hands together with glee. “Too easy to be captured with that name. From now on, I’ll be known as ‘The Surgeon!’” Dingo Eldritch Horror had been inactive some time, following the end of the Demongate Debacle, where Horror had faked the arrival of a deep-space cruiser in attempt to bring all world powers under his command. Unwittingly, he summoned a Pagazu from the Outer Realms, uniting Superhero and Supervillian alike to cleanse the insufferable evil from the Earth. After that, even the Legion of Badguys didn’t want Dingo. "Once I'm wearing the hair of Dr. Filth, no one will recognize me!"

“Not my hair!” Dr. Filth wailed, flexing every muscle in his body in a failed attempt to break out of the straps.

“I’m telling you man, it’s the most liberating thing in the world,” the Surgeon said, tracing Dr. Filth’s hairline with a marker. “ You’ve gotta just do it and get it done. Trust me, if you survive, you’ll thank me.”

The greasy mechanic came running in, waving his arms and jabbering on in an unidentifiable language. The Surgeon was annoyed. “What are you talking about? Did you look into it? Well, did you find anything? Can’t you see I’m busy?" The mechanic continued jabbering until the Surgeon sighed and crossed his arms. "Fine, let’s go.” The Surgeon put down his cutting tools and exhaled hard through his nose. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.” He stormed out with the greasy mechanic.

Dr. Filth pushed against his bonds, but was unable to move little more than his head and neck. His fingers could stretch about a foot from the operating table, missing the surgical tray by only a few short inches. Nothing was in reach that could help cut him free from the sticky predicament. If only there were some way to reach the Superhero Gang and alert them to his precarious position. Maybe Brain Invader would pick up a stray thought, or Reset Button could take them back to a time before Dr. Filth discovered the hand-drawn flyer. Avril Lavigne finished and gave way to the Lost Dogs' rendition of the same song.

“I used to love my long hair,” the Surgeon said upon his return. “There’s a point when it’s not there anymore, and you need to accept it,” The Surgeon resumed drawing lines around Dr. Filth’s scalp.

“If you touch my hair, I’ll kill you!” Dr. Filth protested.

“I’m taking the whole scalp,” the Surgeon replied. “Chances are, you won’t be growing any more hair when I get done, but it’s an entirely survivable operation. People would survive all the time when the injuns did it, and they were out in the woods where infection ran rampant.”

“Why are you doing this?” Dr. Filth asked, more to buy himself time than anything else.

“Look at my head!” the Surgeon exclaimed, pointing to his bald pate with the blade of the scalpel. “It was a sobering moment for me when I finally realized my hair was disappearing. I was at this party, see, and we had this friend. He wasn’t a photographer, but he was always taking pictures. This was back in the days of film. You kids today have your fancy SLR digital photo-manipulation machines. The camera is a better photographer than the doofus pushing the button. Back in my day, you couldn’t look at your image on the back of the screen, you had to know your machine and know it well. You could wait a week before you knew if your shutter was too fast or your f-stop was open too wide. This guy was good, he didn’t even use a flash, he’d just come into a dark room and start snapping away. Every picture was gold. After this slamming party, I went with some friends and relive the night. People like me lived the party for the first time through those pictures, if you know what I’m saying. So he’s got pictures of the dance floor we’re flipping through. There’s Margy, and Hillary, and Bob, and Dan, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘who is this big, dumb, bald asshole going wild in the center of the room. This guy is flailing and thrashing, and looking like he’s got some kind of medical condition. My friend snapped about a dozen pictures of this big, dumb, bald asshole. We’re all laughing about the picture a few minutes before I realized what everyone else already noticed." The Surgeon leaned in close to Dr. Filth's face, his white teeth glistening in the harsh office light. "I was that big, dumb, bald asshole." The Surgeon grinned a predatory smile. "How could I be so bald? I’m telling you, man, I’m old now, but I was just a kid back then. Not easy knowledge to cope with. I tried to live with it for a while, combing my hair back, combing it forward, combing it to the side. I wore hats, I wore hoods, one time I even wore the spray paint, but the older I got, the less avoidable the situation became. I was a big, dumb, bald asshole, and I was guaranteed to be such for the rest of my life.” The Surgeon knelt before Dr. Filth, so their faces were only inches apart. “Then I saw you.” He grinned wickedly and licked his lips, carefully caressing one of Dr. Filth’s thick, tangled locks. “I imagined what I’d do with a mop like this on my head. I wouldn’t need to be a surgeon any more, that’s for sure. This time tomorrow, my boy, I’ll have the band back together, and we’re on our way to open for Hendrix.” The Surgeon fell back into his air guitar, crooning in his scratchy voice, "Knock-knock-knockin' on Heaven's doo-oor!"

“Jimi Hendrix has been dead for decades!” Dr. Filth shouted.

“That’s a filthy lie!” the Surgeon protested, slapping Dr. Filth across the face.

Dr. Filth had only one chance. He convinced himself he was strong enough to break the bonds on the table. Flexing every muscle in his body as hard as he could, Dr. Filth strained against the leather straps, stretching them to their limit and beyond, his face turning purple and eyes bulging out with the pressure. The song changed to Bob Marley singing "Knock! Knock! Knockin' on Heaven's Door!"

Dr. Filth wasn’t strong enough though, and the Surgeon backhanded him once again. The Surgeon knelt by the table again and smiled. “We’ve delayed long enough. It doesn’t matter, even if Jimi is dead, me and the boys are headlining material. With your hair on my head, the sky is the limit for me.” The Surgeon threw his head back and cackled, scalpel held high, glinting in the blue overhead lighting.

Gunshots rang out, somewhere in the distance, startling the Surgeon jump to his feet.

“What’s that?” Dr. Filth asked.

“Sounds like my assistant,” the Surgeon said, voice distant. He grabbed a handful of Dr. Filth’s dreadlocks and yanking his head back. “Who knew you were here?”

“No one!” Dr. Filth said, wincing against the pain. “I saw the flyer this morning and decided to stop in before work. I didn’t figure liver tests would take long at all.”

“Wait here,” the Surgeon said, and ran out of the room.

Once more, Dr. Filth was alone. His eyes darted about the room looking for some means to escape. The new threat may not be promising to a superhero tied to a table. Of course, gunshots could mean an enemy of the Surgeon, and Dr. Filth felt the enemy of his enemy could most certainly be his friend. Still convinced he could break his bonds, Dr. Filth flexed once more, but the leather straps bit his flesh and drew blood. Groaning in anguish, he heaved his body to the side in an attempt to topple the table. If he took out the surgical tray, he ran the risk of putting a cutting implement in reach of his hands. He also ran the risk of putting an implement into his flesh, but that was a risk worth taking, especially if it meant keeping his hair.

The table was sturdy though, scraping slightly across the tile floor, but coming nowhere close to falling. Dr. Filth knew the commotion outside wouldn’t last long. If he didn’t free himself soon, the surgeon was sure to be back, and not likely to be distracted again. Dr. Filth couldn’t go through life as a bald man. He’d experimented with a variety of hats and headgear in the past, but could find nothing that fit into his superhero persona. Bureaucraticus had suggested Dr. Filth wear a mask, but Doc felt this was more of an insult than anything else.

“You’re just laying around? What am I paying you for?” asked Stupendous Guy, striding into the room, hands on his hips. “We’ve got a dangerous criminal holding a surgeon hostage, and you get yourself captured?” Stupendous Guy punched himself in the head twice. “Do you think I’m fucking stupid?! You’re lucky the surgeon managed to get himself free, if anything happened to him, his medical bills would have come out of your paycheck.” Stupendous Guy punched himself in the head once more to be sure. “The surgeon killed your captor though, you don’t have to worry about him coming back.”

“The Surgeon wasn’t a hostage, he was the mastermind!” Dr. Filth said. “Cut me loose!”

Stupendous Guy narrowed an eyebrow. “That’s not what he told me.”

“He was trying to steal my hair!” Dr. Filth wriggled on the table, banging it on the floor. “Cut me loose, we have to catch him!”

Stupendous Guy breathed in through his nose. “We’re not going to catch him.” Pursing his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth. “He uh… He left. He thanked me for saving him and drove off.”

“You let him go?!”

Stupendous Guy threw up his hands in confusion. “On my planet, we tell the truth! I don’t know when you’re lying! Ah, fuck it!” Stupendous Guy turned and stomped out of the room, leaving Dr. Filth alone again, still tied to the table. Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead began to play.

END