2: A Phoenix Rises

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Restrictions apply. Novel.
In August 2021, I flew into Seattle to finally meet the infamous Phoenix Jones. We'd been texting back and forth, and he'd agreed to meet, so I booked a hotel for a few days.
On August 21st, he texted me saying he was free later that day. So I asked when was good for him, but he didn't respond.
In fact, he didn't respond to any of my texts that day or, or the next, or the next. While I was hanging around waiting for Phoenix to get back to me, I interviewed a few other Seattle superheroes and former members of his crime-fighting team, the Rain City superheroes, including one guy who'd known Phoenix since high school.
And they all told me variations of pretty much the same story. You can't trust anything that comes out of the guy's mouth.
He was charging people money per month for medical insurance that the teams never saw. He's got a drug problem, a gambling problem.
He's been disgraced from everyone else who's ever been on the team. He's a narcissist, sociopath.
He's just not a good dude. If just one of Phoenix's former teammates had been disgruntled, I think I would have been reluctant to judge him based on their falling out.
But everyone I talked to had a similar story, which made it hard to dismiss their assessment of his character. But I wanted to hear Phoenix's side of the story before I drew my own conclusions about him.
Eventually, I had to go back home. I didn't hear back from Phoenix until a full month later.
When he did surface, he texted to say that a good friend of his had just died of COVID. He had started a new job as a line cook, and his life was really crazy.
He said, I'm really sorry for being more flaky than I usually am. Phoenix said we could meet up.
So in October of 2021, I boarded another flight to Seattle for a second attempt to hang out with him. When I landed the day before I was due to interview him, I was amped up, nervous and excited.
I also had a cold. So I decided to take some NyQuil and crash early at my hotel.

I took twice the recommended dosage

because, you know,

why not?

And then I got into bed

and started to drift off to sleep.

A little after 10pm,

my phone rang.

It was Phoenix.

I answered. It was the first time we'd ever spoken.
He told me that he had some friends over at his place, and he wanted me to come over and hang out so we could build some rapport before our interview the next day. I said, of course, I could head straight there.
He told me he would text me his address, and he hung up. I got out of bed and started getting dressed, but all my movements felt sluggish.
This was not how I'd hoped to meet Phoenix, high on NyQuil. But when the bat signal goes up, you put on your super suit, and you rise to the occasion.
As I was getting dressed, he called me again. He said he didn't feel safe texting me his address, so he would come pick me up at my hotel.
I said that was fine and hung up, but it didn't make any sense. Unless he was going to blindfold me when I got in the car, I was going to know where he lived.
It all felt very strange and dreamy. He told me to meet him out in front of the hotel at 11.35 p.m.
It was cold and drizzly, so I bundled up and stood out on the street corner waiting. And then, at 11.39 p.m., I got a text from Phoenix that said, Hey, I hate to be super flaky here.
I'm having an issue over at my place and need to rain check.

One of my friends needs a ride home and has been drinking.

So I'll come at 1040 tomorrow so we can talk, if that's okay.

I replied, sounds good.

What I wanted to say was, are you fucking with me?

Was this some kind of trap?

I looked around to see if maybe he was sitting in a car,

like a detective on a stakeout,

trying to size me up or something.

I really felt like he was playing some sort of mind game with me.

Had his old superhero crew been right about Phoenix?

I'm David Weinberg, and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio,

this is The Superhero Complex, episode two of Phoenix Rises. I was really happy to be back in Seattle.
I used to live here in 2007 at the Panama Hotel in the International District. I rented a room by the week and worked at two restaurants as a dishwasher in Capitol Hill and a busboy in Belltown.
I left years ago, but walking the streets, everything felt familiar. My favorite restaurant, Tan V, was still there.
I went back to get my go-to favorite, a plate of grilled meats and vegetables and herbs served with rice paper sheets and a bowl of hot water to soften the paper and make your own rolls. The name of the dish had changed, but it was even better than I remembered.
I walked the same route I used to take to work, from the ID through Pioneer Square with its old saloons and red brick walkways, and then up First Avenue. It mostly felt the same.
There were a few new restaurants I didn't recognize. The Lusty Lady, a peep show venue where you sat in a booth and put quarters into a slot to look through a pane of glass that new dancers had closed down.
From there, I walked along the avenue past the iconic Pike Place Market where the fishmongers were packing up for the day. I made my way into Belltown to Black Bottle, a wine and tapas restaurant where I worked as a busboy.
The walk took me through the same neighborhoods where Phoenix and his crew did almost all of their patrols. I stopped at Black Bottle and had a drink for old time's sake.
Back when I worked there, I was friends with a few of the homeless people who hung out in the neighborhood. I took guitar lessons from one of them, a crack addict named Hans, who was really smart.
Occasionally, he would flip out at me

and yell a bunch of crazy stuff,

but I was never scared of him

or of any of the other unhoused people

who hung around Belltown.

But today things feel a lot different.

The number of people living on the streets

feels substantially higher than when I lived there.

In 2007, it seemed like there were

a few homeless people here and there,

but today there are several tent cities with dozens of tents all over downtown. After I finished my walk down memory lane, I wanted to see what my former neighbors in downtown Seattle had to say about Phoenix Jones.
Can I ask you guys a question for a radio story? It wasn't hard to find people who'd had interactions with him. People like these kids I met, outside of a rave.

Yeah, I've seen him

a lot. A lot, like,

bothering drunk kids on the sidewalk.

Stuff like that. What do you think about him?

I thought he was cool

at first.

And then I just thought he was annoying.

Because he wasn't actually, like, really helping anybody.

He was just being annoying.

Like, he would literally find kids that were too

drunk and passed out, or claim that

people who were about to leave were drinking

Thank you. He was just a jerk.
They told me he ended up being the real-life equivalent of a quote from the Batman movie. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I'm going to ask you a question for a radio story. Another guy I met worked at a restaurant downtown and had a few encounters with Phoenix.
One time I saw him, what was it, on the waterfront. And he was talking mad, he was talking mad shit to me and my friends.
And it was funny because, like, we work down there. What were you doing that made him want to talk shit to you? The guy told me that he used to hang out with some friends in a parking lot in Belltown when they got off work.
Smoking weed, kicking it, you know, all that dumb shit. One day, he was there smoking with his friends.
And Phoenix showed up. Him and his crew were, like, just staring at us.
gonna like he's gonna do something and we're smoking weed and we're in fucking Bell you know we're in fucking downtown in Belltown it was hilarious like dude and I read comic books I'm not gonna nerd out right now but it's just funny how there's plenty of superhero work plenty of people to, plenty of people to save, plenty of criminals to catch. And this motherfucker's looking at me smoking weed right now.
All of these stories made me wary of Phoenix. And I was upset, because the only reason Phoenix had agreed to do an interview with me was because we were paying him several thousand dollars.
I've been a journalist for 15 years, and I've never paid a source for an interview. It's generally considered unethical.
And I understand all the arguments against it. But I'm also aware that as a journalist, I have the power to shape how the world sees Phoenix.
And he will have to live the rest of his life with the consequences of how I portray him. Meanwhile, I not only get to walk away from the story when I'm done, I get paid.
Lots of people get paid to make this story. That imbalance of power doesn't always feel fair to me.
And I see a valid argument for paying people for their time. The issue I had with Phoenix was that after sharing all these stories from his former

teammates and from people around Seattle, I felt uneasy about rewarding him. But I also felt that

Phoenix deserved to tell his side of the story. And the only way that was going to happen was for me

to hand him an envelope full of cash. Phoenix was late, but he did show up to my hotel that morning.
He was wearing glasses and a blue plaid button-down shirt and black pants with a tactical belt that had a larger than normal canister of pepper spray, along with a few other gadgets. This was deep into the COVID pandemic, and he had a mask with him, but it was made of hard plastic.
It had an American flag and an eagle printed on it. I remember thinking that he looked nerdier than I was expecting.
I greeted him outside the hotel and then walked him to my room, a pretty standard chain hotel room with a window looking out into the courtyard. I rearranged the furniture

and set up a makeshift recording studio with a small table and a couple of mics. Phoenix actually kicked off the interview by asking me a question.
He wanted to know what other superheroes I had talked to. I've talked to Red Ranger.
Okay, cool. House in Service.

Yep.

Crystal Marks.

She's a clown.

Ghost. to Red Ranger.
Okay, cool. Justin Service.
Yep. Crystal Marks.
She's a clown. Ghost, Midnight Jack.
Okay. You talked to Ghost and Midnight Jack? Yeah.
Nice. And El Carrier.
Okay. Yeah, I was going to say that you probably only talked to clowns, but the list you actually gave is pretty solid I mean Justin Service is like me but Red Ranger

for example

right like

he actually puts himself

in the middle of scenarios

and situations

he's not trained

and he's not like

a skilled fighter

in any way shape or form

but just being there

is effective

Ghost

I've known him

since high school

one of the

best crime fighters

that

sidekick you could have

even if we don't like each other

effectiveness is effectiveness

I don't really care

like he's fucking great

at his job

so whether he likes me or not

you can go fuck himself

I'm sorry. one of the best crime fighters that, uh, psychics you could have.
Even if we don't like each other, effectiveness is effectiveness.

I don't really care.

Like, he's fucking great at his job.

So whether he likes me or not, I can go fuck himself.

Having critiqued the rest of Seattle's caped crusaders,

Phoenix wanted me to know that he was the only true crime fighter among them.

I have 315 stops.

315.

What does that mean?

Because you can't even stop it. Yeah, I have 315 crime stops.
Like, where a cop has showed up, arrested that person, and taken them to jail for the crime I have. I have 315 stops.
315. What does that mean? Yeah, for 315 crime stops, like where a cop has showed up, arrested that person, and taken them to jail for the crime I have.
I have 315, right? No one else has even 100. And some of those claimed 315 stops were pretty extraordinary.
I stopped a sex trafficking ring. I technically stopped a homeland act of terror.
I've been in 17 knife fights, and I've been stabbed twice. And the guy got shot and I had to end up stepping on his arm to stop the arterial bleed.
Over the course of the interview, Phoenix made a point to explain that he is not a normal person. What might cause you or I to run away in terror, he handles like a trained warrior.
Like this one time on one of his early patrols where a guy pulled a knife on him. The first guy who ever stabbed me on the street, I was like, hey, that was a good one.
You win today. I caught him next time and beat the crap out of him.
Like, you're not going to hurt me in any kind of physical way to cause me damage. I find it comical.
And don't even think about pulling a gun on him. This guy tried to kill me.
He pulled a gun and tried to chase me around the car,

and I took him down, obviously.

I mean, you have a gun at close range.

I'll win every time.

And then there was the time he was scouted by the federal government.

The FBI basically wanted to, like, make a list of all superheroes

and kind of their activities and what they do.

And I agreed to some things with the government.

The government agreed to some things with me,

and we went our separate way. Do you still have a relationship with the federal government? Yeah, of course.
Yeah. This was one fact I was not able to verify.
But in the moment, as Phoenix rattled off story after story of his crime-fighting exploits, I started to believe him. I think part of it is his charisma, which is undeniable.
And when he started talking about the intricacies of the law

and the justice system and law enforcement,

I realized he's one of the most intelligent people I've ever met.

And I kind of fell under his spell.

At one point in the interview,

Phoenix even turned me into one of his martial arts students.

Check this move out.

This is, so you make a fight stance,

you get that foot back, right?

So now, see how you can touch me?

Yeah.

And I can touch you, right? That's called 50-50. If I'm here, right, so you make a fight stance.
You get that foot back, right? So now, see, you can touch me, and I can touch you, right?

That's called 50-50.

If I'm here, right, and I take a half step this way,

now your hands don't reach anymore.

It's about the circumference and radius of a circle.

One thing that is undeniably true about Phoenix

is that he was a professional mixed martial artist,

and a damn good one.

In his 28 fights, he only lost five matches.

But there were other parts of the story I had my doubts about.

So after our interview, I set out to verify some of his claims,

starting with his origin story,

which, perhaps unsurprisingly,

sounds like it's been ripped straight from the pages of a comic book.

That's coming up after the break. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines.
We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family.
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Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.

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Every superhero has an origin story. Spider-Man, bitten by a radioactive spider.
Wonder Woman, carved in clay and given superpowers by the Greek gods. Captain America, a frail young artist infused with a super soldier serum.
And the story Phoenix Jones had been telling to the media for years sounded like one of those, a classic comic book storyline. Though it could also be the origin story of a supervillain.
I was wondering if we could just start at the beginning of your life and you could just give me your background, like where you were born and where you grew up and that kind of stuff. And I also want to apologize, I'm sure you've answered a lot of these questions a million times.
Actually, no, I haven't. Oh, cool.
Because I don't answer those questions. Okay.
We can start beginning my crime-fighting career. Phoenix said he wouldn't answer any questions about his life before he became Phoenix Jones, which surprised me because he had talked about his upbringing to other journalists in the past.
The one thing we know for sure is that Phoenix's real name is Ben Fodor, and he was born on May 25th, 1988. That's documented in court records, but after that, we're reliant on Phoenix's account.
And according to him, he was born in Texas, and he had four siblings, but he was the only one of them to be sent to an orphanage. He says at five years old, he was removed from the orphanage and given back to his parents.
According to that account, one day he was riding in the car with his dad when they stopped at a convenience store. Ben stayed in the car, and his father went into the store and never came back.
Apparently, he tried to rob the convenience store, but the store owner had a gun, and he shot Ben's dad and killed him. Ben was around seven years old at the time, sitting in the car alone until the police showed up and found him.
Later in his life, Ben says he learned that the man who was killed was not his biological father, and that his real father was a man who'd had an affair with his mother.

And that was the reason he was the only one of his siblings who was given up for adoption.

Ben has told journalists in the past

that his mom was also a criminal,

a drug dealer who got busted

trying to use her baby carriage to conceal illegal drugs.

In a previous interview for a book about his life,

Ben was asked about being the child

of criminals. This is what he said.
You have to make a choice. You can say, I'm going to be a

product of my environment and grow into a criminal and just be like everyone else. Or you can say,

no, I'm not going to do that. After the man he thought was his father was killed, Ben says he was put back into the orphanage where he lived for the next three years.
He says he had dyslexia and a speech impediment, and he was bullied a lot by the staff and other children. One of his only friends at the time was a kid who liked to torture animals.
But when he was nine years old,

he was saved from all the trauma and misery of his Texas childhood. He was adopted by a woman in Seattle, a wealthy widow who had several other adopted children.
He says that when he moved to Seattle and settled in with his new family, it was the first time in his life he felt truly cared for. Around that time, young Ben Fodor also discovered a new world that he fell in love with.
Something that would change the course of his life. Comic books.
I was in Nightwing a lot as a kid. I never really resonated with comics because they didn't really do anything I understood.
But Nightwing was something that I understood. Nightwing is part of the Batman superhero family.
Like Bruce Wayne, he doesn't have supernatural powers. He defends the innocent with his strength and agility.
Nightwing wears a black super suit with a blue chevron across the chest, similar to the gold one on Phoenix's costume. Batman and Robin, right? Robin eventually grows up and becomes his own superhero called Nightwing.
He's like, I don't want to be a sidekick in little shorts. I'd rather fight some crime.
He goes through and really trains, and he doesn't win a lot at the beginning. It's a grind for him.
And it was one of those things where I was like, I see that. I understand that.
You know what I mean? There are a lot of different versions of Nightwing that span several generations of the DC Comics universe.

But the one that resonated with Ben was the series that was written by Devin Grayson. Devin Grayson, man, she kills it.
And it's like really realistically believable. In March of 2000, Grayson became the first woman to create, launch, and write a Batman comic series.
And it's almost as if fate had set her on that path, given that she shares the same last name as Dick Grayson, the guy who becomes Robin. Nightwing is very interesting because Dick Grayson starts as Robin.
You know, he's there as a kind of Watson figure, Sherlock Watson figure. He's there so Batman can talk to him.
Robin was put in to give kids somebody to identify with.

This is Peter Coogan, a man with a very specific superpower.

Writing and editing.

I could join the X-Men, but I'd be running the writing center at the Xavier Academy. And much like the X-Men, he uses his superpower to help other people.

To enable them to better pursue their ontological vocation of humanization. In other words, he's an academic.
I do have a PhD in superheroes. Coogan teaches superheroes and comics at Washington University in St.
Louis. He's also the director of the Institute for Comic Studies, and he spent a lot of time thinking about Nightwing.
Nightwing works as a really interesting figure. He lost his parents, just like Bruce Wayne did, but because he had a parent figure, Bruce Wayne, and another parent figure, Alfred, he was able to become a more integrated adult.
Dick Grayson is healthier than Bruce Wayne. And so I think that's one of the things that Nightwing represents.
It represents a more healthy version of the superhero. He has chosen to become a superhero in a way that Bruce Wayne couldn't.
When Robin becomes Nightwing,

he moves to the suburbs of Gotham City to a rough neighborhood called Bloodhaven and becomes a cop. He does that because he wants to be part of society in a way that Batman both doesn't and can't.
Dick Grayson is available to be identified with as a healthier response to trauma than Batman. And I think that's what draws people to him as a character.
As a young kid, his parents died in a circus accident, right? Sure. But he could have done whatever he wanted.
Batman's is different, though, because when his parents die, he trains, but he has this financial backing, right? His, I guess, trauma allowed him to be Batman, right? Nightwing's making a choice. He goes to college, he has a girlfriend, he lives a life, tries to keep it all together, but he's no way traumatized.
Children personalize trauma. They always find a way to blame themselves.
Like, I could have done more, right? And that drives Batman, but that does not drive Nightwing. Nightwing was, I was helpless and I won't be helpless anymore.
And that resonates with me more. Why do you think it resonated with you? I think as a kid, everybody has a little sense of being helpless.
I certainly did. And training for a mission or a goal, something like that is just, it's like empowering.
Like you just feel this like energy that nobody knows. Ben Fodor knows that energy well.
Whatever helplessness he felt after being given away by his parents, he compensated for by throwing himself into all kinds of activities. I did double dutch for a while.
Won a bunch of skate competitions. I was a national bowling champion as well as martial arts.
There was also debate club, horseshoe throwing, and even competitive dance. He seems to have taken on every challenge he could in an effort to prove his worth to his adopted mother.
In fact, he's said in the past to journalists that he was driven to be the best at everything he could because he was trying to show her she made the right decision by picking him over all the other children at the orphanage. Everything I ever touched, if it was a competition for it, I wanted to try it.
Although Ben has shared the story of his childhood with journalists over the years, he's left out some key details, like the names of his birth parents and the man who he thought was his father, which makes it nearly impossible to fact-check his version of what happened. But I was determined to verify at least some of his claims.
If you go into the National Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame, I'm in hometown heroics for 300 games under 16. The International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame refused to release any info about Ben without his member number, which I didn't have.
But we were able to find his old high school by process of elimination and called up the old coach on the bowling team. She said she'd never heard of a Ben Fodor and then said to leave her alone.
But just before hanging up, she said that, hypothetically, if she were us, she'd call up the United States Bowling Congress and ask for member details. And they immediately gave us Ben's records.
And they verified that Ben, in fact, did achieve two perfect scores of 300 in bowling under the age of 16. That's 12 strikes in a row.
We started calling around to bowling alleys that were near where Phoenix lived, and eventually found a place called Kenmore Lanes. When the owner, Joanne, answered the phone, she said with a sigh, Ah, yeah, Ben Fodor.
I know him. Kenmore Lanes is just northeast of Seattle, not far from the shores of Lake Washington.
You don't realize just how massive it is until you step inside. Kenmore Lanes was the largest bowling alley in Washington, 50 lanes.
This is Wesley. He used to work at Kenmore Lanes.
When you walked in, it had like the old style of bowling alley, you know, beer on the tables, kind of dark, but it was like an enjoyable place where you can bring your family. It had the league nights.
When I first got there, you know, smoking was still allowed,

so it still was all smoky in there.

Once smoking was banned, it got a little cleaner, a little nicer.

Some nights would get a little rowdy, a little rough,

but most nights were just calm.

It was a really enjoyable place.

Wesley worked at Kenmore up until 2007,

when something happened.

I'm actually not allowed in Kenmore Lanes. I'm banned.
Self-inflicted stupidity. That's Joanne, the owner of Kenmore Lanes.
The story of why Wesley is banned from the bowling alley is for another time and place. We're here to talk about young Ben Fodor.
And more specifically, to find out if the origin story Phoenix is telling is true.

Yeah, I kind of do remember the first time I did meet him.

We always had people come in there, and I always like to give people, help them out, like give them discounts on bowling.

This lady came in once, and she had foster kids, and gave her some discount on some bowling. And I remember one of them was this little skinny guy, kid, wore glasses, looked a little nerdy, and he always enjoyed bowling.
And he kept coming back, and he just kept hanging around there, learning from people how to bowl. What was your first impression of him? Oh, like, he was a nerdy little kid that got picked on at school, a little insecure, didn't really know himself, you know, a little preteen.
I knew he was adopted. He had struggled with, you know, being picked on and bullied as a kid and not feeling accepted.
And so I think the bowling alley, like, he felt accepted there and, like, people wanted him. Wesley says that Ben wasn't a natural bowler, but he was focused.
He was there all the time, learning from people that worked there, just watching people bowl, hanging around, just picking it up. But yeah, he worked at it.
A few years went by, and by the time Ben was in high school, he was one of the top bowlers in his age group. According to Wesley, he went from being this shy, insecure kid to, well, the opposite.

Around high school, all of a sudden, this skinny little kid turns into this young man with muscles all of a sudden.

He starts filling out, and he starts bowling better, starts getting some muscle into his

ball.

The way he bowled is very exuberant, the way he would all of a sudden just throw the ball,

be all cocky, run down the lane, start showboating.

This is like a 15-year-old kid jumping around the lanes, yelling at his other competitors. Very enthusiastic in his bowling.
Ben wasn't just running up and down the lanes. When he hit a strike, he would run onto the lane itself, and taking full advantage of the slick wood surface, he would breakdance.
At the time, he had a flat top haircut, a la Kid in Play, and Ben would taunt his opponents after a strike by strutting around and showing off. Fear the flat top, baby.
What's that mean? He always said the flat top. He had that even before fighting.
He always had the big hair. And he would say, fear the flat top? Uh-huh.
He had a t-shirt, medium t-shirt, when he had the big frame.

The super small shirt said, fear the flat top.

This is Marty cocking.

He still works at the bowling alley.

He loved watching Ben.

Then again, he wasn't bowling against him.

Ben's opponents didn't love being taunted by a cocky kid.

He would beat people at bowling. So they always wanted to beat him, but it wasn't happening.

And then the dude's doing the worm with the flat top across the approach on you.

It's pretty frustrating.

Even in Phoenix's version of events, he's not exactly a team player.

I even got so good at bowling left-handed and right-handed that I didn't have to have a doubles partner.

I could bowl with myself.

I had an average with a left and right hand, so I was able to bowl doubles with myself.

Which was cool because I got two trophies every time I won. As Ben got older, he got more into martial arts and started training to become an MMA fighter, and he started spending more time at the gym and less time at the bowling alley.
And then one day, Marty saw a news segment about a certain masked vigilante who was roaming the streets of Seattle. When he heard the voice of

the man behind the mask, he thought, that sounds like Ben. Before he unveiled himself, I could tell the voice because I knew him pretty well as a kid.
When he realized that Phoenix Jones was in fact the breakdancing bowler Ben Fodor, Marty thought Ben had lost his mind. I thought he was crazy.
Why?

Because, I mean, it's just crazy. The stuff that goes on in Seattle is not something you really want to deal with.
As a person, I'm a pretty big dude, but I'm not going to go out there and risk my life when I have a young family, and I just didn't understand what he was doing. Do you remember the last time you talked to him? I saw him at the store.
He was actually buying diapers for somebody. Just a random person.
It wasn't even his family member, but it was somebody that needed help. I talked to him a little bit.
I was just like, do you have another kid? But he's like, no, I'm just helping out this family that needed some diapers. He literally had a cart full of diapers.
That was pretty cool. As crazy as it seems to find out that a guy you knew for taunting rival bowlers decided to put on a costume and attempt to fight crime, to Joanne, the owner of the bowling alley, it all made sense.
I wasn't surprised. Why not? First of all, it kind of fits his personality, in my opinion.
And secondly, he always seemed like a kid with a pretty strong sense of, I guess, a good moral compass. The Kenmore Lane staff watched Ben Fodor grow up.
They'd already seen him reinvent himself from a vulnerable little kid to the breakdancing showboat. But every superhero origin story needs a moment of transformation.
That key incident that inspires the hero to put on a mask and turn from man to myth. That's coming up next.
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There comes a time in the life of every superhero

when they transform from civilian to savior. For some, it's the story of how they got their superpower, like the scientist Bruce Banner, who gets exposed to gamma rays and becomes the Incredible Hulk.
And then there are heroes like the X-Men, mutants who are born with superpowers. You also have your Batman and Nightwing types

who are not blessed with supernatural abilities,

but achieve a kind of superhuman status through training

and an arsenal of fancy gadgets and weapons.

But what they all have in common

is that there comes a point in their life

when they look out at the injustice of the world

and say to themselves,

this has to end,

and I am the one who's going to take on this fight. For Ben Fodor, that moment happened in 2009 at Wild Waves, an amusement park in the suburbs of Tacoma, Washington, with roller coasters and carnival games, kids with wrinkled fingers shivering in line for water slides.
Phoenix had taken his son, and they'd just finished a day of fun. We parked our car outside the fence, and we were walking.
It was me and my son, and we were racing back to the car. Me and my son are running, and all of a sudden he falls, and I'm like, oh, that sucks.
So I went to pick him up and just starts gushing blood, like, everywhere, right? And I'm like, what's going on? I look, and he's got this big cut in his knee from, like, here to his knee's open and you can like see the bone. He's just gushing blood.
And someone had smashed my window and the glass was on the ground. He had slipped on that.
So I called 911 immediately, got an ambulance. It was like an ER trip.
Like he had to go. And I called the cops and the cops said, oh, but there's really nothing, you know, we can do.
I'm like, well, what are you talking about? Like the window was smashed. There's cameras everywhere.
Like what? Like, well, we don't really, you know, investigate that kind of thing. It's less than 500 in damage.
And it's a, your son wasn't hurt by an actual criminal. Your son was hurt by falling on the trap.
Ridiculous. Ben was furious.
Not only was he convinced that the assailant had been captured on one of the many security cameras nearby, he also had a key piece of evidence. When that guy broke my window, he had taken a rock and a ski mask and slammed it into my window.
And I thought I'd keep the mask to turn into cops for evidence, but the cops didn't want it, and they weren't interested in any kind of evidence. It was ridiculous how unhelpful they were.
Ridiculous. Ben stowed the mask in his glove compartment and decided that he would not rest until justice had been served.
I spent the next four months searching through publicly accessible traffic cams until I was able to figure out which car did it. Then I got a private investigator to track that guy's number down.
Then I went to his house and actually had a conversation with that guy and drug him to where my son was at and made him apologize. It was that moment when my friends were with me, which was Ghost and another guy, they were like, man, this is like Batman stuff, bro.
You just did Batman style stuff. And I was like, you know, we got like some free time.
Let's just go and Batman up our neighborhood because it sucks where we live. A few weeks later, Ben was outside a club in Seattle where he and his breakdancing crew, the Rain City Movement, were taking part in a competition.
My friend comes stumbling up, and he's got this big gash in his face, and I'm like, what happened? He's like, that guy hit me with a stick, and I'm like, well, no one's doing anything. It's crazy.
Like, you guys are stupid. But we got to do something, right? Then it just hit me.
I've got that mask. At this time, I'm not sure if what I'm about to do is legal or illegal.
I just know I'm about to do something. So I ran to my car and I throw this mask on, ditch the shirt, and the jeans, no shirt, and the mask.
And I take off after this dude. I chase him all the way down the street and I catch him.
Ben trapped the guy until the police showed up and arrested him. But before the cops left, they asked Ben if they could take a photo with him.
The cop and I snapped a photo. And the next day it said, Costume nerds attack crime in Seattle.
On the small right side corner of the Seattle Times. It was me, my arms folded and everything.
And I remember looking at it and I was like, yeah, that's going to stick. Now, there is, of course, the question of whether or not this origin story is even true.
And I have to admit that the first time I heard Phoenix tell it in an interview, long before I met him, I thought the story was preposterous. But when I heard it directly from him, in person, it all sounded a lot more plausible.
But whether or not it's true, I think there is something very telling about the way that Phoenix told me his origin story. In his telling, the moment he decides to become a real-life superhero is not when he takes down his first criminal.
It's not even when he takes down his second criminal. It's the moment he sees a photo of himself in the newspaper.
It just hit me, and I was like, costume superhero, costume nerd attack Seattle. Like, that's me.
I'm going to do this. Maybe it was simply that the validation of the outside world gave him the confidence to pursue the life of a real-life superhero.
Or maybe he got a taste of fame, and he liked it. Or maybe it was a combination of the two.
Either way, he was hooked. But now he needed a name.
Costume nerd isn't exactly the kind of moniker that strikes fear into the hearts of criminals. No, he needed something a little snappier.
Something like Phoenix Jones.

Phoenix always claimed that his early years had been rough,

much like those of his hero, the comic book character Nightwing.

And like Nightwing, Phoenix refused to let the trauma of his childhood define him.

Maybe that's why he was so unwilling to discuss it with me.

As origin stories go, it may well seem a little too perfect. But whether or not it's true, one thing is for certain.
Phoenix did undergo a radical transformation from concerned citizen to kick-ass costumed warrior. And you can't take that away from him, even if he's not the most reliable narrator.
Back in the parking lot at Wild Waves, Phoenix discovered that he had the power to fight crime by chance when he became a victim and could not get the help he needed from the people who were supposed to serve and protect him. In the future, things would be different.
He would no longer wait for crime to find him. From now on, he would place himself in harm's way, heading out into the night looking for trouble, hunting criminals and stopping them in their tracks.
Phoenix started out as one man with a mission, standing alone against the odds. But what he didn't know was that all around him in Seattle, there were people who shared his dream of defending the streets.

And when they heard about Phoenix Jones,

they would rise up to join forces with him.

So look out, bad guys, because Phoenix Jones is coming for you.

And soon, he won't be the only superhero in town. The Superhero Complex is hosted and written by me, David Weinberg, and reported by me, Amalia Sortland, and Caroline Thornham.
Production from Amalia Sortland and Caroline Thornham. Sean Glenn, Max O'Brien,

and David Waters are executive producers.

Fact-checking by Andrew Schwartz.

Production management

from Cherie Houston,

Frankie Taylor,

and Charlotte Wolfe.

Sound design, mixing, and scoring

by Nicholas Alexander

and Daniel Kempson.

Music supervision

by Nicholas Alexander

and David Waters.

Original music is composed

by Paul Hausden.

Special thanks to Peter Tangen, Willard Foxton, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvell, Beth Ann Macaluso,

Oren Rosenbaum, Shelby Schenkman, and all the team at UTA.