This is another essay I wrote, a bit before the one I just posted. I do like this one better, I think. I don't think I ever settled on a title. In fact, I'm not sure if this was ever published or not. Any which way, here it is. Happy birthday, Dad.
“From far, from eve and morning
and twelve-winded sky,
the stuff of life to knit me blew hither:
here am I.”
I never thought I would ever be sitting here at my
computer writing something like this.
The story I would like to tell is far too complicated. So I shall tell another story, and shall
attempt to be brief.
Most children, at an early age, look up to their mother
or father, see them as heroes, as mythical demigods, invincible beings, what
have you. They are our providers; they
take care of us. In a sense, they are
gods. I was not an especially weird
child for seeing my father in this light.
When I was a little boy, Dad was the greatest man in the world. He was my hero. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up
(more on that in a minute).
Unfortunately, when young innocent children reach those dreadful teenage
years, for whatever nebulous reason, these same all-powerful adult figures are
suddenly, in the eyes of adolescence, regarded as uncool. They become the last people in the world some
teenage jizz-fitter wants to be seen with.
I don’t know why this is, but most of us know that it is.
I would be lying if I said I was not guilty of this same
outlook. I was nothing special, just
another naïve kid who foolishly thought I could rule the world (with what, I
don’t know). Sometimes, though, I’ve
wondered if there was more to it than that.
My older brother Devin and I were both very much into
horror films and comic books when we were kids.
I still love horror now. My
father noticed this interest we had and encouraged it in both of us. He rented us scary movies any sane parent
wouldn’t let their kids watch even after they had kids of their own. He bought us comics, told us spooky
stories. I can remember being so young
that I was barely able to write and I wanted to write stories like Dad. But I wanted to write scary stories. I wanted to remake Friday the 13th
Part 3 or something, only in words.
Hell of a goal, huh? But hey,
that’s how these things develop, right?
My father
gave me this old clunker of a word processor typewriter, the kind with the
little LED display about the length of a stingy stick of Juicy Fruit and the
body shaped like a reject from George Lucas’ model spaceship department. Where he got this machine, I do not
know. I do know that I typed on it a
lot, never much of anything special (I was just learning to write, let alone
type) until the day at my grandmother’s house when I completed my very first
short story. It was called, I believe,
“Ax Killer,” and it was a six-year-old’s conglomeration of bits from different
horror films, sewn painfully together with no plot, no characterization, nor
anything else of literary value.
Basically lots of “AAAHHHH!” with misspellings and little to no
grammatical usage. Still, I was proud of
all two and half double-spaced pages I had cranked out.
I took it to
my grandmother, who was in the kitchen with my brother, and handed the
masterpiece over with full confidence.
What happened
next? What was my first experience in
submitting a piece of fiction? My
six-year-old self was brought to tears as my grandmother dissected the piece,
ripped it to shreds, laughed at me, told me I didn’t put a period here, I had
too many Os in “bloody,” it was nothing but “AAAHHHH!” and “Let’s get out of
here!” It was terrible, it was foolish,
and, basically, I was stupid.
I can’t understand
why my grandmother would do such a thing.
To this day, I do not know.
That’s a whole other story.
I snatched
the pages away from my grandmother, ripped them up in front of her, threw the
bits and pieces at her, and then ran back to the living room, where I curled up
on the couch and cried.
I didn’t
write again until I was almost in high school.
For me, other
than being just another goofy teenage hoodlum, high school was rough. I wasn’t what you would call “stupid” but you
might say that I was “unwilling to learn.”
My grade point average was somewhere in the negative hundreds, I hated
the school I went to, hated most of the other students, most of the teachers,
and basically hated my life all around.
I didn’t read the books assigned to me.
I did not do my homework. I never
wrote in Creative Writing class. I got
to a point with my Algebra teacher where I could waltz in, make eye contact
with her, shrug, and walk right out again, at which point I would go to the
parking lot and smoke cigarettes. I did,
however, read my comic books and other various things, and took up playing
music, specifically the drums.
It wasn’t
until close to the end of my eighth grade year that something changed, however
small that change was. It was quite a
while yet before it would have any true significance. My English teacher, Lynn Woodard, decided to
take a break from the usual this and that, and told everybody to take out their
notebooks. For the first half of class
we were to write a short story about anything we wanted. For the second half we were going to read
them.
I don’t know
why it was that, for one of the only times in the past ten years, I decided to
put pen to paper that day. Maybe I was
just inspired. Maybe I’d filled my
cigarette quota and my jack-off-and-think-about-girls quota and figured it
might be a nice change. Whatever it was,
I wrote a story, connecting a random string of events with random nonsensical
dialogue. I understood stories. I didn’t understand writing them. I’d given up on that when I was six.
Like my
father, I can be painfully shy. When it
came my turn to read, I refused out of embarrassment. Miss Woodard did not relate to whatever my
problems were, but she did understand that I had my problems. She told me my story had to be read, and if
it made me feel better she would read it to the class for me.
I agreed,
hiding my face in my hands.
I can’t
remember what the story was called. What
I do remember was everybody laughing—not because it was terrible, but
because it was funny, because it was, as one classmate said, “entertaining as
hell.” I think it was the first time I
got an A.
My father
picked up my little sister Shannon and me from school that day. The usual bullshit ensued on the drive
home. “How was your day?” “Can I turn up the stereo?” Blah-blah-blah. “Oh, I got an A in English today.”
“For what?”
“A story I
wrote.”
With an
enthusiastic uptilt in his voice, Dad said, “No kidding?”
“No kidding,”
I said.
My father
drove along, smiling. He sought an
alternate route home, through a residential neighborhood. After a moment he asked if I had the story
with me. When I said yes he asked if he
could read it. When I said yes he pulled
over in front of some innocent, unknowing house.
“What’s going
on?” Shannon asked.
My father
looked at me with genuine excitement. I
took this to mean we weren’t waiting until we got home. I withdrew the story from my bag and handed
it over as he switched off the stereo. I
remember being terrified. After all, my
dad was a writer. A professional
writer. A famous writer.
He read the
story, laughed at what I believe were the appropriate moments. When finished he handed it back over to
me. “I love it.”
Like I said,
it was quite a while yet before it would have any true significance. But that moment, that one drive home, changed
something in me. And though I still
didn’t do well in school, I took a bit more to both educating myself and to
writing. I began running short stories
by my dad. He would always read them, no
matter how busy he was. Thing was, he
would not help me. Not in the literal
sense. He would not tell me about my
structure or about my characterization.
He would tell me things that seemed obtuse. With that great warm smile he would ease back
in his seat, place his hands behind his head and tell me things that,
unbeknownst to me, I was supposed to think about. To meditate on.
I can
remember, maybe two years before he was gone from my life, when he asked me to
join him in his office. I sat down
across from him, at first nervous that I had done something truly awful.
“I just
wanted to talk with you a little about your writing,” he said, “or your music,
or anything else you decide to pursue.”
He eased back and brought his feet up onto his chair (he couldn’t rest
them on the ottoman because his manual typewriter was sitting on it). “Keep at it,” he said. “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re wrong. If you know what you want to do and you keep
at it, you’ll make it.” He gave me some
additional writing advice, some of which I’ve taken, some not. One has to remember that even at this point I
was still a stupid, self-centered teenager.
But I never let those words evaporate.
They’ve remained with me always.
And as time has passed I’ve realized, just like when I was a little boy,
Dad is the greatest man in the world I’ve ever known. He is still my hero.
I went into
denial when my parents split up. I went
into denial when I knew my father was dying.
I immersed myself even more so into being a stupid goofball teenager. I wasn’t there nearly as much as I should
have been.
There are
certain regrets I have to live with. One
I don’t have to live with, thank God, is allowing my dream to be taken away
from me forever. I only lost it for
about ten years. With my father’s help,
I was able to reclaim it. And I’ll never
let another tell me that I’m wrong. Life
is too short, and this dream I nearly lost is the reason why I live.
“…Now—for a breath I tarry
nor yet disperse apart—
take my hand quick and tell me,
what have you in your heart.”
Featuring such masterful writers as Steven Brust, Kelly McCullough, Edward J. McFadden III, Lawrence Watt-Evans, S.D. Perry, with an introduction by George R.R. Martin, and an afterword by Neil Gaiman.