Former FOG! contributor Tea Krulos’ book Heroes In The Night: Inside The Real Life Superhero Movement has been released by Chicago Review Press and we’re honored to present an exclusive excerpt of the book after the jump.
 |
| Death’s Head Moth. Photo courtesy of the New York Initiative. |
It was a hot night in Richmond, Virginia. The Death’s Head Moth was staking out a drug dealer, watching him working an operation out of a parking lot. He was watching him and watching his drug deals, trying to get a sense of his rhythm and setup.
“A lot of times they work with a partner,” Death’s Head Moth explained to me later over the phone in a baritone voice with a slight southern accent. “It’s common to have one guy selling and another guy holding who goes to get the product, which gives them kind of a buffer zone. There’s a variety of different ways they do it. I staked him out and determined he was working alone.”
Death’s Head Moth then began to sneak up behind the drug dealer. His appearance is certainly designed for the element of surprise. His outfit and gear include a black spandex bodysuit and elbow-length gloves called hatch dominators, used by law enforcement for riot control. His feet are also protected with tall, tough steel-toed boots.
DHM also wears a “utility belt” that holds his two rapid-rotation batons. The batons have two handles, which makes them versatile defensive and offensive weapons. Other gear in the belt includes a collapsible grappling hook and rope, flashlight, and camera. He wears a padded shirt underneath a protective vest that can deflect blades, and a “protective metal nut cup.”
For imagery he has a skull and crossbones on the chest of his uniform, and a creepy, kind of spiky, dull metal mask. In a phone interview, I asked DHM about his spooky imagery.
“I find the frightening appearance to be to my advantage. There is something unsettling about not being able to see someone’s eyes and face. They can’t see my facial expressions and can’t really see what muscles I’m moving if I’m preparing to move.”
As he crept up on the drug dealer, the element of surprise was ruined by the crunching of glass from a broken car window beneath his boots. The drug dealer heard him. “He immediately turned around and punched me in the face. And then he began to yell and kick at me.”
Death’s Head Moth was prepared for this moment, he said. He sprayed the drug dealer with MK-4, a high-octane pepper spray. After being sprayed, the drug dealer coughed up a plastic baggie and spit it on the ground. Death’s Head Moth grabbed it and took off. The baggie contained crack rocks, which he dumped down a sewer drain. He felt his mask, which was wet, and he could feel something loose in his mask. The punch had broken part of his front tooth.
The journey to becoming Death’s Head Moth had begun about four years before. He had seen a report on an Indianapolis RLSH named Mr. Silent and it got his imagination rolling. “That thought of that guy out there gestated in my brain and I turned the thought over in my mind. I was thinking maybe this is something I could try—maybe I could do it,” Death’s Head Moth told me. “I started putting things together.”
Death’s Head Moth began to work out seven days a week and swore off fast food and soda. He practiced a variety of martial arts and “started working on pseudonyms and collecting gear.”
His imagery was inspired after his eyes fell on the movie poster for The Silence of the Lambs that famously features Anthony Hopkins’s face partially covered by an actual death’s head moth. He began sketching costume designs and was doing legwork on the streets. Soon he was patrolling. Some of the victories he claims are stopping a mugging, a rape, and a guy beating up his girlfriend, all of which were reported to police.
But why risk it? Why spend your Saturday nights scoping out drug dealers and potentially getting punched in the face, or worse?
“Because it needs to be done. I see these things going on everywhere, and I want to do something about it. I’m an objectivist,” DHM says. “Some of it is my upbringing. My parents taught me what was right and what was wrong. And that you can’t wait for someone else to do something.”
