hero...
A verily overused word these days. Everywhere you look its like a new animal on Ol' MacDonald's Farm... Hero, hero here. Hero, hero there... Everywhere you look a...
Hero. The word is not only overused, but misused. Most people being called heroes are really victims- which is desperately sad in its own sort fucked-up way, and I cant say that I'm setting out to make it all right, because I'm not... In fact I suppose that I am going to solidify myself as part of the problem. So yeah, fuck the solution and all it may represent. The solution is no fun, and I'm going to prove it because one of my greatest heroes (in my eyes) is a vagrant whose identity I have never known and whose exploits were wiped from known history. Yeah, he may also be seen as a criminal in most people's eyes, but to me he is as much a hero as any other hero is.
I call him 'There's A Bomb In There' Guy, or TABIT, as I will refer to him... And I pen these words now, so he shall not be forgotten. Local news programs and publications can purge their mainframes and databases and put it all in the memory hole to burn, but TABIT captured my interest the same way stories of Bonnie & Clyde or John Dillinger or Billy the Kid still captivate my interest... He is still out there too. Somewhere... Much like the infamous teen-age bank robbers, The Baby Faced Bandits (who are also an object of my perverse criminal admiration) TABIT wasn't caught.
"There's a bomb in there..."
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| CPD HQ |
The news had activated their Crime Stoppers to attempt apprehension of TABIT but that ended up not working... Turning to the public for tips is a last ditch effort to find any criminal... The news played copies of TABIT's voice from calls placed to Cincinnati Police Headquarters and Music Hall (which
incidentally are verily near each other downtown) prompting certain levels of evacuations but that was only the calls that the news shared. TABIT called several other locations too.
"There's a bomb in there..."
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| Music Hall |
The two calls share on Crime Stoppers both said the same sentence but the whole kicker to this was at the tail end of the message you could hear the beginnings of a laugh. I'm not sure if the laugh was cut off from the caller themselves, or by the authorities looking for a narc handover of a revolutionary, but it was a laugh. In subsequent replays of the message you could then hear how TABIT seem to be holding in whilst talking... Holding in a laugh... Holding in a large toke from a marijuana cigarette... It was unclear but my investigation and intuition had also identified TABIT's efforts were a hoax... There were not any bombs in any of the places he said there was and Im pretty sure, if there was, it would have been dramatically reported. No, this whole incident seem to be some guy having fun with a phone while sitting around getting stoned out of his mind with his friends.
"There's a bomb in there..."
And he got away with it! Instantly my list of heroes grew by one and I asked of myself and wondered aloud if this caller was, ultimately, someone I knew. I felt strongly it was, that I knew them (in some- even a distant way) but yet no one I could finger out of a line-up even if narcing was my thing... After all, a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid right? Right. So, for the next couple weeks or so, and even in more recent times, a repeated drunken 'rage phrase' chant could be "There's a bomb in there..." with reference by way of pointing (usually) to a door or bag and is always followed by instantaneous laughs. "There's a bomb in there" has become a rallying cry for certain times... Like a dams gate, once its opened, man, how the "There's a bomb in there" flow with each one being funnier than the last. The kind of funny where a few driblets of piss are let loose in your pants and where you and your friends are laughing so hard at something so inane and seemingly not funny to most, that those immediately surrounding you think you are laughing at them.
"There's a bomb in there..."
Madness. Yes, its a certain level of madness. I will agree. Explanations of the reasoning behind this whole hero perception of TABIT only seem to be on the level that they have with me and most (not all) of the company I keep, on a limited basis. Very limited basis. To be honest, I understand. Actually, I want it no other way. I find what I find in the things that surround me, despite what anyone else thinks. Humor is one of those things that has a line, a boundary, that is just begging to be tempted (as most lines are) and, as always, lives in the realm of being relative in its final definition. Hero is the same thing, defined, in my eyes, the same way. Some stoned guy who bucked the system by prank calling publicly sensitive areas in a time of heightened security throughout an entire nation during wartime, and seemed to do so a with an accompanying laugh, and got away with it! A prankster... That is a hero to me... If that's not OK with you then one of us isn't smiling.
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| there's a bomb in there |
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| there's a bomb in there |
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| there's a bomb in there |
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