Anyway, with the appearance of the horns and tail, I called the only person I could think of: a fellow rodeo clown named Gerald. He and I had worked many years together. We weren’t actually friends, but we had shared a beer or two. Now, thirty minutes later and sporting a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon under one arm, Gerald, sans the clown make-up, appeared at my door.
And nearly dropped the Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Nearly. It would take a lot more than horns and a tail to make Gerald lose his grip on his beer.
Instead, he cowboyed-up through the shock and was soon sitting across from me in the living room. My ass was still sore from the new tail and, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure exactly how to sit with it, so I stood and paced. Gerald kept drinking until the shock wore off.
“Jesus,” he said again, for perhaps the tenth time.
“Yup.”
He motioned to my horns. “Those things real?”
I lowered my head, gave him a good look.
“They look real,” he said and drank a lot more beer. “You have anything to say about all of this?”
“Damn strange,” I said.
Gerald nodded. “Yup.”
It went on like this for another ten minutes as he examined my tail, running his hands along it, getting dangerously close to my backside.
“I don’t feel right looking too closely,” he said.
“Jesus, it’s just a tail, Gerald,” I snapped.
“Yeah, but it’s attached to your ass. Your shockingly hairy ass.”
I shook my head and continued pacing, my tail whipping about the small apartment. Once or twice the furry end smacked Gerald in the head. He said “hey” but kept on drinking.
“Well, it stands to reason...” Gerald finally said, after perhaps his eighth beer.
“What stands to reason?” I asked.
I had been pacing and panicking and wishing like hell I would wake up from whatever nightmare I was in the middle of. No such luck.
“Well, the bull that was about to hit you done disappeared.”
“What do you mean disappeared?” This, of course, was the first I’d heard of it.
“Well, most people were scattering for cover and not too many saw what I saw.”
“What did you see, Gerald?”
He took another swig of beer. “Just when the lightning struck, I thought you were done for, Carl.”
Truth was, so did I.
Gerald went on. “But when the lightning struck something very strange happened. You ended up on the far side of the arena, and the bull...”
“Yes?”
“The bull was gone. And...”
“And what?”
He shook his head and looked away. “Nothing.”
I roared. A great roar. So loud that my little apartment shook...and the popcorned ceiling actually popped. “Tell me!”
Quaking with real fear, Gerald said, “Okay, okay. Just relax Carl. Well, there was something else.”
“What, goddammit?”
“It wasn’t really lightning that came down from the heavens.”
I blinked. “Then what was it?”
“Well, it was a kind of lightning, I suppose. But it was mostly in the shape of, well, a man. A giant, lightning-shaped man. Then again, I might have been drunk at the time. In fact, I’m sure I was drunk.”
I thought about that as Gerald drank the rest of the case of beer. I thought about that even more as Gerald slept it off. I thought about all of it and more as I paced my small apartment, occasionally slapping the snoozing Gerald in the face and knocking over every goddamn lamp in the joint.
* * *
I spent that night in agony.
While Gerald slept off the Pabst, my body literally—and I mean literally—morphed into something bigger...and greater than it was before.
Perhaps even greater than anyone had been before, ever.
Why this happened to me, I don’t know. What exactly had happened to me, I still don’t know. No one knows, either. I’ve had some of the finest scientific minds study me. Hell, one mad scientist even put me in lockdown, determined to replicate me into an army of me’s. Except, of course, I had broken out and destroyed his island fortress. But that was a story for another time.
Anyway, the following morning, I had gone through a complete—and painful—metamorphosis. Yes, the horns and tail had been weird enough, but by the time old Gerald awoke from his beer-induced slumber, he might have thought he had awoken to his nightmare.
Nope, pal. This one is all mine.
For standing before him, naked if not for the stiff fur that now covered my body from head to toe, still breathing heavily and sweating from the growing pains of the previous night, was the creature—and some even go as far as to call me superhero—that is now known as The Bull.
Me. Carl the part-time rodeo clown.
“I’ve got to go,” said Gerald, and I never saw him again, although he went on to write a book about our friendship. Fiction, mostly. I should sue his ass.
To say that my life changed radically from that moment on is an understatement. I couldn’t go very far without having people either follow me or run in fear. Didn’t take the press long to figure out that the mother of all freaks was living in Rustic City. Hell, TMZ has staked out a permanent spot in the parking lot just opposite my apartment.
Yes, the press coverage alone was dizzying. And as my publicity soared, and as the medical establishment did their damn best to come to grips with what had happened to me, two things became evident:
One, was that the world actually needed me. It seems that almost overnight my services were needed. From saving whole families in fires (my thick bullish hide is impervious to flames, go figure), to stopping bank robberies (for some reason, the number of bank robberies seemed to shoot up in Rustic City).
Two, with my own strange transformation, there also appeared another type of monster. One that many would call evil geniuses. Or, worse, homicidal madmen bent on literally destroying the world. Some have speculated that the Universe needed an answer to the influx of coming evil. A sort of superhero yin to the evil yang. Apparently, I was the yin.
Why a bull, I don’t know. Hell, I could think of countless other animals that might have been more useful. But I am what I am.
What can I say?
I am The Bull, with my great strength and quick temper. Don’t get me started on seeing the color red. The Bull, with my razor-sharp horns that can literally tear through anything. The Bull, with my tail that I’ve mastered as a useful whip. The Bull, with my thick hide that protects me from bullets and knives and everything else in-between. No, I can’t fly, but I can charge quickly.