[Low Odysseys]

When I was in High School I had a black trench coat. This was a good ten years or so before Kebold & Harris fucked up that look for future generations of disgruntled teens. I didn’t want to look badass in my black trench coat (though I probably hoped it would help in that department) I wanted to look rumpled and world weary. In short, I wanted to look like I’d seen it all and had gleaned some small wisdom in my travels. Basically, I wanted to be a Chandler P.I. - and I hadn’t even read any Chandler yet.

I probably looked like a disgruntled teen- which is funny, because I wasn’t. I think I was a pretty good-natured teen, once you got past the raging hormones and the vast insecurities.

I wrote a lot of violent fiction- usually either superhero or Robert E. Howard inspired barbaric fantasy. I loved action movies and war movies. I had a secret stash of Guns & Ammo magazines- I was fascinated by firearms, but my mother had rebelled against her West Texas upbringing by being a loud anti-gun Mom. She let me have toy guns and GI Joes (reluctantly, I think, but I believe my dad, who grew up watching The Lone Ranger and Have Gun Will Travel and The Untouchables, had some influence over that), but she went so far as to tell me she’d rather I have Playboy magazines than Guns & Ammo. Hence the hidden stash.

(Mom, if you ever read this, I kept all my contraband beneath a loose board under the “guest” bed in my attic room. That was such a great room for a teenager)

Probably, I would have raised some warning flags if I had been a teenager in a post-Columbine world. So I’m pretty glad I came first, because I never actively wanted to hurt anyone. Except that one kid, Jason. Man, he was just evil. But then, he was also virulently hateful towards anyone different than him and reportedly HAD a cache of guns and knives etc. I, on the other hand, was just like every other teenager- I felt alienated. From what- I no longer have ANY IDEA.

Really, hormones are just a cruel fucking joke.

Well, ok, I DID have a few knives bought in Chinatown, a pair of brass knuckles, and a homemade goon stick: a thick broom handle drilled out and filled with heavy-gauge nails to give it weight, then wrapped up with grip-tape.

Why did I have some little arsenal? I may have grown up in Washington DC- and yes, it was during the period that the city gained and deserved the nickname “Dirty City”- but I lived in a good neighborhood. I didn’t have any enemies.

My best friend was Chris. He lived two doors up from me. His dad was a semi-retired Government guy from the State Department- we always joked that he was some kind of spook. He might well have been- they had lived in India and in Russia during the closing days of the Cold War.

Chris was like me, he liked trashy sci-fi movies and old westerns. We built a huge table in his attic for our Playmobil town, and later for our collectively purchased model trains- I think they were N gauge, or H? I don’t remember. Chris had a huge arsenal of homemade weaponry, knives and clubs and the like. I had a pair of brass knuckles that he was deeply envious of. When his family moved away he gave me a prize possession- a sword cane. I treasured it for a long time.

Now, WHY were we so heavily armed isn’t the point- we were teenaged boys, we were just fascinated with weaponry. As little kids we had cap pistols (and, frankly, even as bigger kids) and bb-guns and air rifles. We kept the air guns hidden from my mother with the porn.

The point is, we were text-book “Danger Sign” kids- in today’s environment. Then, in the mid to late 80s and into the early 90s, we were just kids. We listened to music our parents found annoying at best, offensive in the extreme (my mother kind of liked Guns & Roses and Metallica though). Comic books, video games, horror movies, knives and clubs and guns- and we NEVER got in any trouble. Not that kind of trouble. We weren’t bad, we weren’t bad-bad. We were just kids.

Am I overly nostalgic, peering backwards and sighing- as all father’s have sighed- that mine was the last truly open-range childhood, and my children won’t have the same freedom I did? I might be. But it feels that way.

One thing I didn’t have until I was much older, Role Playing Games- I don’t know if my mother remembers or not, but she (at least briefly) bought into that weird wave or paranoid fear that swept the US during the early 80s. The whole “Dungeons & Dragons is SATANIC, like that demon Heavy Metal Music”. I don’t know how she felt about Alice Cooper or Judas Priest, but she did tell me I couldn’t play D&D with my friend Anthony and his older brother. I was probably 7. I was pretty bummed, but my way of dealing with stuff like that was like many kids- I adopted my parent’s outlook without questioning it or developing my own opinion.

I think I was probably sixteen- maybe a year earlier- when my friend Shelby (who loomed into prominence in my life right around the time my friend Chris’ family moved away) introduced me to RPGs- the old Marvel system and D&D, and Paranoia (great game). He also had the most badass collection of Lego I had ever seen in my life.

Hidden in the air-craft controller tower in his Lego Space-Port (it took up his entire bedroom floor) was a secret compartment where he stored condoms. All kids hide something, I wonder what Sam or Grace will feel the need to hide from us? A World Cup poster? Michael Bay movies? Twilight?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under Raising Demons, neither hither thither or yon..., Notes to the Congregation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.