By Adrienne Jones
I’ve often been asked to explain my die hard devotion to horror, fantasy and science fiction. Funny, my fellow unreality connoisseurs have never found this unusual, as I’m sure they have their own history and reasons for being passionate about the genre. I’ve come to believe through my experiences with other hard core fans, that we share a brotherhood of understanding, an ability to appreciate the true value of fantasy in a way that others must not see. There are probably a million view points on this subject, and an equal number of personal stories. I’m not sure why I’m so often asked to explain my fetish. Perhaps I don’t fit the bill of what a science fiction fan is supposed to be, sitting in my parents’ basement playing video games with three cats named Kirk, Spock and Bones. Or maybe it’s just one of those attributes that splits society down the center, sort of like the way golfers think the ultimate happiness is being on the green, while the rest of us think the sport was surely invented as some sort of torture during war time to bore enemy prisoners to death. Same with speculative fiction I guess. Either it’s in you, or it ain’t.
But after multiple interrogations over the years, I started to second guess even myself, and wonder why indeed I find such relish in the creatively absurd. I began to do some soul searching. Being that I am a card carrying member of the ‘I had a messed up childhood’ club, delving into my past is not on my top ten list of things to do. But I had a specific mission; to trace the roots of my fantasy obsession. This would be my guiding beacon, and if I kept my eye on that light, I was sure I could avoid disturbing those other ghosts of the past I’ve worked so hard to bury. With this thought, I grabbed a shovel and started to dig through the recesses of my literary mind. Looking back now, I think my decision to explore this issue was based on a nagging insecurity that my interests were somehow frivolous and without substance. Are we, the fans of Spec fiction, frivolous people? Through my trip down memory lane, however, I came to acknowledge an opposite truth. Not only are my interests not based on frivolity, but they are quite possibly responsible for developing my intellectual and emotional mind at a time when it could very well have shut down completely.
My first word was ‘Batman’. This isn’t a joke. I have proof. It’s in a weathered pink baby book buried in a closet. You know the little journals our mothers bought to keep track of our first steps, first lock of hair and all that nonsense? Well, my mother was no Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to filling the thing out. There are lots of blank sections. But she did record my first utterance, in blue ball-point pen. First word: Batman.
This can only be attributed to the hugest creative influence in my life; my brother Bobby. Bobby is only a year and a half older than I am. Once he got past the sibling rivalry of my babyhood, and we moved up to a stage where he could be alone in a room with me without beating me over the head with a toy truck, I became his tiny protégé. Even as a preschooler, Bobby had a unique vision of the world, an imagination that could paint rainbows on the blackest of canvas. As his student, I was drawn into his world in my most formative years, just beyond toddler-hood. Of course being as young as I was, his imagination was often wielded at my expense, but that was just part of the bargain. (i.e. sharing Cheerios with me entailed handing me the ‘holes’ after each bite he took.)
My world became a whirlwind of aliens, monsters and superheroes. (With him always as the superhero, and I as the noble side kick.) If said super hero was one plucked from Bobby’s imagination, rather than one of his many comic books, then a side kick would be concocted for me from his imagination as well. We fought invisible demons, we fought neighborhood dogs, we fought worms dug free from our father’s garden. Whatever could be made into an evil foe, we battled. And we were always victorious, short of me ending up with skinned knees on more than one occasion. But there were other demons in our young lives that couldn’t be fought with a broken stick and a cape made out of a beach towel. Now don’t roll your eyes, this is not going to be a soggy memoir to my wounded childhood. But it is necessary to share a few details in order to accurately present the sequence of events that elevated fantasy to the level of importance it now holds.
My parents were a fiery couple, and they fought with the same passion and vigor as they loved. But at some point, probably while Bobby and I were busy saving the world from the evil wrath of the grasshopper beasts, the hatred began to over take the love. Perhaps it was the pressure of two professionals raising young children, one starting a law practice, the other working nights as a nurse. Perhaps it was the Irish-Italian mix. Perhaps it was too many cocktail parties, with or without guests. Who knows. Whatever the reason, they fought. And nobody in our family does anything half-assed. When they fought, they fought. Nearly every night, the screaming would awaken us from our bedrooms, and we’d meet in our rumpled pajamas at the hallway that connected our two doors.
We’d huddle together on the top step, trembling as we listened to the chaos ensuing in the kitchen below. Our parents, our stability, our world, crumbling before our eyes. The fear of the rug slipping out from under you at an age when so little else makes sense but the earth beneath your feet. On the outside, a pair of weeping children hovering in the darkness. On the inside, a black hole of despair, the end of the world. It was usually when the anger one floor down elevated to an unbearable volume, or an object was thrown, that our whimpers would finally give over to wails, and we were discovered, and made to go back to our beds. Night after sleepless night.
Eventually the nightmares of our wakened sleep leaked over into the day, and our parents’ wretched fighting was no longer reserved for the cover of darkness. A year and a half must have made a monumental difference at some point during this stretch, because there came a time when Bobby just stopped crying. Even though the madness continued to ensue. He did not cry. He did not tremble. After a time, he stopped reacting to the fighting altogether. I was not so immune, and one Saturday afternoon, while the parental units were busy shouting insults as they prepared lunch, I went to my brother’s bedroom door and knocked. If he’d found a way to shut out the world, then I wanted in. But Bobby did not answer his door. I knocked and I knocked, remembering Bobby’s threats to pummel me if I ever entered his domain without doing so. But still, there was no response. Finally, I pushed open the door and entered my brother’s room.
But Bobby was not there. My head twisted in all directions, surveying the empty room. It made no sense. I’d seen him go into his room just minutes before. Where had he gone? Then I heard a muffled laugh, and Bobby’s voice call my name. I glanced over at the set of drawers built into the wall. We lived in one of those houses with a ceiling slant in the upstairs bedrooms, as they had been built into what was once part of the attic. The drawers slid right into the wall, with nothing behind them but the eaves of what was left of the attic space, some insulation, a few floor boards. I didn’t know this at the time. I was too young to understand the dynamics of building structures, and I had never questioned what lay behind the drawers in my or my brother’s bedroom. But when one of Bobby’s shirt drawers began to open on its own as if by magic, my preschooler’s mind began to spin with questions. And Bobby had answers for all of them. They weren’t the right answers, mind you, but they were the answers he gave me. And I believed him.
The drawer slid all the way out, and dropped onto the floor with a thump. Then Bobby’s head appeared from the empty space where the drawer had been. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked me. Of course, I agreed, my heart thumping with excitement of the unknown. And as Bobby helped me climb through the passageway behind the built-in wardrobe, the angry voices of my parents seemed very far away. And once he pulled the drawer back in behind us, I couldn’t hear them at all.
The area was fairly large, as it ran the length of the upper house, from his bedroom down to mine. There wasn’t a lot of height, and it would have technically been considered a crawl space, but we weren’t all that tall ourselves, so we could easily stand upright. It was dark in the strange space behind the wall, but not full dark. There were…stars all around us. I gazed around in wonder. How could this be? We were shrouded by a vast black sky, with dozens of twinkling stars. I looked at my brother, who had plunked down on a board in the center of the room. He had supplies with him; a pile of comic books, a flash light, a can of coke and a bag of Oreo cookies. “What is this place?” I asked him.
He looked at me, then glanced upward and around the darkened space. “Do you see the stars?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. Of course I saw the stars. They were every where. “It looks like outer space,” I said.
He nodded as he crunched on an Oreo. “It is,” he said. “This is another universe. The only way to get to it is to step through those drawers. Nobody can find us here. Not even mom and dad. But you can’t tell anybody about it. Promise?”
I promised, and Bobby handed me a comic book and a couple of cookies as I huddled down beside him under the stars of this alternate reality, where we were safe. Of course, there really were no stars against a blackened sky. What gave the illusion of stars were specs of light peaking through the outer boards of the attic roof, places where the wood was not sealed as well as it should have been. The specs of light were dispersed above and around us in the darkness, giving the illusion of a canvas of glittering stars in outer space, like one of those movies you’d view in a dome shaped theatre at the museum of science. I suppose there was a small part of me that knew even then that I wasn’t really looking out into space. But my brother told me that this was an alternate universe that could be reached via a passageway behind a sock drawer. And I believed him. Because I wanted to.
I began to seek out the magical after that, and I was helped along in my quest with the introduction of a new baby-sitter my parents had discovered…the television. For Bobby and I, Sunday afternoons were our day to plop ourselves down in the den, glued to the tube, supplies of cookies and sandwiches in hand. It was the UHF channel that ran the science fiction, though we didn’t know enough to call it that then. It was simply our favorite programming; Creature Double Feature, The Twilight Zone, The Night Stalker. There were re-runs of the old Godzilla films, War of The Gargantuas, Planet of The Apes, Star Trek, Frankenstein Meets the Mummy, and so on. Our parents had no interest in such nonsense, so while the programs ran, they left us alone. It was our time, and it was our world, a world where nothing was certain, not even death, the rules didn’t apply, and anything was possible.
But in addition to the media candy, we still had our imaginations, and fantasy came back into play time and time again as we were growing up. We had three acres of land in our back yard, surrounded by woods, with a section to the rear beyond the rose bushes that we referred to as ‘the way back’. This was the area that went un-groomed, the lawn uncut, the woods beyond the property line wild and creeping in all around. Concord grape vines hung in a tangle intertwining with the tree branches, creating a semi-darkness even in the daylight. Insects twittered back here, frogs jumped, snakes slithered. It was, of course, our favorite place to play. Although my brother and I ultimately developed our separate groups of friends, our bands would join on the weekends for a hard core, serious game of Danger Island. The neighborhood children came to our yard to play, as we had the ‘way back’, and we had the games. These weren’t games that came in a box, or traditional rituals of hide and seek. They were detailed, sophisticated live action role playing tournaments, designed and moderated by my brother and me.
The basis of the game was like a combination of magic sorcery and a military style running of the gauntlet. Upon arrival, identities would be assigned to each child that wished to play. If the child was determined to be a ‘challenger’, he would be granted certain super powers which would give him limited immunity to the ‘wombats’ when attacked. The wombats were the children assigned to be antagonists, or ‘bad guys’. Their purpose was to try and distract the challenger characters enough so that they would fail in their quest to complete the obstacle course we had set up for them. Like the challengers, the wombats were also given specific character descriptions, complete with evil superpowers of their own, some that could counteract those of the challengers.
Looking back, the gauntlet we created was ridiculously dangerous for a bunch of children to be crawling about on. We’re lucky no one got killed. The starting point was a giant tree that had split and fallen over during a storm. The challenger character would begin by climbing this tree at an angle until he reached the top, stopping to recite magic rituals as assigned along the way. He would then be required to swing from a vine to the rooftop of a fort we’d constructed of scraps of wood--some gathered, some stolen. From there he’d have to jump onto a rope swing, cast himself off and land on a discarded mattress on the other side of the woods. Whether or not he made his target, he would then have to pick himself up, cast a spell or two, then run through a man made obstacle course, or ‘Passage of Hell’ which my brother designed to be particularly gruesome.
The ‘Passage of Hell’ was like a parents’ worst nightmare. There were strategically placed thorn bushes, cement tubes to crawl through, narrow enough to get stuck inside of if you weren’t careful, and even a bed of broken glass to walk across.
I also recall a period of two weekends where an actual dead skunk was part of the hell passage, lending an authentic stench of death to this dark part of the quest. Bobby was forced to discard the carcass however, when it began to spawn maggots, in turn spawning the neighborhood kids’ refusal to play the game until it was removed. Looking back, the only thing missing was an empty refrigerator with a locking door and a set of plastic bags to suffocate ourselves with.
In addition to the setting, we made up rules to further enhance the danger factor of the challenge. Each ‘wombat’ was allowed two intervention attempts throughout a challenger’s journey, and no limitations were put on the wombat’s tactics. In other words, if one of the wombat-kids saw fit to try and knock a challenger-kid off of the fallen tree while he was twenty feet up, this was allowed. It was up to the challenging character to use his own physical and ‘magical’ skills to save himself, and prevent falling from the tree, and possibly breaking a bone.
We were forced to modify our rules on occasion, when too many of the smaller children missed their mark and swung too far past the fort-top and ended up in the emergency room with broken ankles, sprained wrists, or rusted nails lodged into their asses. But as much as we abused them, the kids kept coming back to our house, to our yard to play Danger Island. It was fantasy made real for them, and the Gestapo-style seriousness my brother and I put into the silly charade made it realer still.
We ultimately got too old for neighborhood games, or at least we told ourselves that we were, and had to find other outlets for our entertainment. I can fairly say that this was the turning point that led to the development of our individual ‘talents’, if I can be so brazen as to call them that. For Bobby I won’t hesitate however. He is a talent, an artist, and now that he is an adult I stand in awe of his work. I think most talent starts as imitation. Bobby wasn’t a reader. He would not sit down and climb into a novel for hours the way I did. His passion was for comic books. Not just the super hero variety, but all different types. The wilder the better, and he’d spend hours going through them, pointing out the illustrations that tickled him, the way a certain alien creature was drawn, the differing styles of the artists.
He began to create his own drawings, his own fantasy characters, his own scenarios to set them in. And he was good at it. I couldn’t draw. I tried, but I could barely color inside the lines. I had little interest in comic books. The plots seemed simplistic to me, and while I could appreciate the artistry, they didn’t hold my interest. While I had a hunger for fantasy to match my brother’s, I needed more depth to my unreality, more meat. Even then, I could plow through a book in an afternoon. But the Nancy Drew mysteries were getting stale fast. I was a child of heightened sensory input, from my turbulent family life to the chaotic tapestry of imagination I employed for the sake of fun. I needed action. I needed my aliens. I needed my monsters. And then I found them. They were out there all along. In books.
I started going to the library and bringing home every book that looked interesting enough to either scare me, repulse me, or fascinate me enough into escaping from my own world into the pages between the covers. At this point, my parents started paying a bit of attention, and certain books of my choosing were taken from me, forbidden for reasons based on my youth, delicate virgin mind, or for the most commonly stated reason, that said book was ‘nothing but a piece of vulgar shit.’ I was able to sneak some science fiction, but my true saving grace ironically came from my mother. She was a closet horror junkie for a time, and while she was working, or napping, or after she discarded a book into the trash, I would dig it out and hide it in the secret universe behind the drawers.
Armed with a flashlight and a can of soda, I’d sit in the private universe introduced to me by my brother years before, and I’d read the forbidden texts of my mother’s beach bag. Coma, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Exorcist, Burnt Offerings, I read them all. My senses exploded like an aerosol can dropped into a burning trash barrel. I was far too young to fully understand some of the content, but this only added to the intrigue, the unknown, a whole new scope of unreality.
By the time a new wave of science fiction and horror films began to crop up, I was primed. It started with Star Wars, Close Encounters and the like, then moved on to more stimulating material. I sat glued to screen while other kids winced, watching the Alien pop out of the astronaut’s abdomen, or the Husky dog mutate into The Thing. Dolls possessed, bodies snatched, werewolves tearing out the throats of unsuspecting tourists, alien abductions, monster mutations, you name it. I was desensitized and loving every minute of it. While other kids turned away, I sat wide eyed, and wanted more. After all, it was small potatoes for a kid who’d grown up with passage to a secret universe behind a sock drawer.
As Bobby continued to draw his own fantasy characters, I began to write my own stories. My mind was fodder for the bizarre, and I’d had years of training in creating absurd scenarios and characters to go along with them. Occasionally, when Bobby could muster the patience to actually sit down and read one of my stories, he’d create drawings of my characters based on how he’d envisioned them, and I’d keep the sketches as an accompaniment to my tales.
Today, we continue to seek out the newest and most challenging forms of fantasy and science fiction to wet our insatiable appetites. For Bobby it is mostly in the form of films, magazines and artwork. For me it spills over into the novel market. I have my own beach bag now, and I no longer have to steal books and read them in a darkened attic by the hue of a battery operated flash light. Bobby does freelance artwork on the side, and I await the release of my pride and joy, my first novel, THE HOAX, being published this year from Mundania Press.
So now, having taken this trip back in time, I have a better understanding of this hobby I have that some find frivolous. I live in the real world. I have a real job. I make real money and I pay real bills. There is no secret universe to access through a passage behind my sock drawer. Only perhaps a few lost nickels and a bit of dust. But I know where to find the fantasy when I need it. And I can appreciate the purpose it serves, even if others cannot. Albert Einstein said that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. There are those who cannot fathom this. They are the ones who ask me, ‘How can you stand that stuff?’ And perhaps the turbulent road of my past has taught me to need more stimulation than the real world can offer. But in the end the truth is this. I would prefer a false universe of mystery and wonder, to a real world without imagination. Especially if it had comic books and Oreo cookies.