Post by WildKnight on May 26, 2015 12:15:32 GMT -5
Chapter One: From Humble Beginnings
The whole world loves an underdog story and at its heart, that's what this is. It is the story of a boy given nothing, who fought and scraped and refused to give up until he reached the top of the heap. It is my story.
May name is Alexander Luthor. You can call me Lex.
I was born in Metropolis' so-called Suicide Slum. I hate that name. People live down there, good people, hard workers, loving families. My Mother worked two jobs to keep us off the streets. She taught me right from wrong and gave me everything she possibly could. Sure, I knew some bad guys, but look at Bruce Wayne. He had every possible opportunity growing up, the best education, and look at him now... he's a reprobate. Its easy to give him a pass because his parents were murdered, but my Mother died when I was young, and my Father was killed by criminals the year following, and look at me. Calling a place "Suicide Slum" because the people who have to live there are impoverished only feeds into the worst instincts of man; it emboldens the criminal and gives excuses to those inclined to wallow in weakness, and it creates a tide against which those who would choose more must swim. If you disregard everything else that I have to say, please hear this; if you have been privileged in this life, do not do others the discourtesy of pointing out to them what they have not been given.
After my Mother's death, my Father sunk quickly into alcoholism. There was some insurance money, but I saw immediately that my Father was going to drink it away very quickly, and so despite being a very young man myself, I found a job as quickly as could. Because I was so young, I was forced to work for those who would employ someone so young, that is to say, I worked for criminals. This was in the days before cellular phones, and I was primarily responsible for carrying notes from one criminal to another. When they came to trust me, I was allowed to memorize the information rather than having to carry a note which could be intercepted by the police. Around this time my Father was killed, most likely by someone to whom he owed money, and I was left on my own. Now at this time I was in the employ of a man named Bruno Manheim, perhaps you've heard of him. He was the supreme crime figure of that neighborhood, a sort of Godfather-like character. Very charming man, highly intelligent, but completely ruthless. One day Mister Manheim called me to his office and told me that I could no longer work for him. You see, he liked me quite a lot, and he didn't believe that a life of crime was a good future for me. So there I was, 17 years old, jobless, uneducated, and without any real prospects. But in all the time I'd been working for those men, I'd been keeping a careful eye on my money, and I had begun to understand that earning money wasn't as important as what you did with it once you had it, and I had been investing. I owned pieces of half a dozen businesses there in my crime-ridden neighborhood, and I knew what it took to protect them from the criminal element. I saw that I could, based only upon what those businesses were earning me, pay to attend Metropolis Community College.
That, my friends, was the genesis of the Lex Luthor you know today.