A Thousand Forgotten Influences

I’ve always felt fortunate to have kind and inspirational people around me, and yet never did I feel quite as inspired by them as I did through the various people I have never met. In fact, what I love best about the people I have known, it seems, is that they have introduced me to music, movies, and literature that has moved me more deeply than I can express. Perhaps it is that people can come and go, but their creations can remain forever. I loved my older brother Bob, but when he moved out and got married, the music that he had introduced me to remained. Rick and Tom were also older and did not always have that much time to share with an 8-year old boy, but their comics were always available to me.

Books, movies, music, those were my influences. Each wove stories for me, each brought me glimpses of lives and worlds far beyond my immediate surroundings.

I led a normal enough childhood. I spent many days playing baseball and football, and exploring whatever nature was to be found in my small part of the world. I spent my nights playing hide and seek, truth or dare, and even ding dong ditch (the game where you knock on someone’s door and run like hell). I played board games with friends when the weather kept us inside and made more than my share of prank calls. When on vacation I spent all the time I could at the beach or in a boat fishing.

And yet when I think back to my childhood, some of my most intense memories are of the basement of our home where the books, magazines, and records of my older siblings were stored. There I could adventure along with explorers of ancient civilizations and distant planets. There dwelt superheroes intent on defending justice, or monsters who sought vengeance on a world that had done them wrong. There were worlds under the sea and civilizations within the planet’s crust. There were giants and Lilliputians, sentient beings with many tentacles, and kind but misunderstood swamp creatures.

As I read through literally hundreds of horror magazines and comic books, I listened to the albums and 45’s that were part of my brothers’ collections. From such gems as Walk Away Renee and She’s Not There, I learned of love and caught glimpses of the mysteries that would be revealed to me when I achieved the mythic stature of a teenager. Motown and The British Invasion taught me of romantic love and through that, of a desire to be seen as noble and true in the eyes of another. I even managed to learn a little class consciousness through some of my favorite songs: Down in the Boondocks, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, and Tobacco Road.

Perhaps the world created for me by such stories did not grow more expansive as I aged—after all, how can the world ever be larger than our imagination—but the stories grew in depth. The books I started to read kept closer to reality but showed me how truly rich the real world can be. Gone were the days of creatures from outer space, and yet somehow I recognized that in such far-flung stories of superheroes and aliens I had also learned about nobility and relating to those we considered different from ourselves. Superheroes had super powers, yes, but they were also heroes. Their powers often failed them but even in their darkest moments they retained their moral code and their passion to do what was right. Mankind might have explored far distant galaxies but they still had to deal with the same questions we on Earth ask ourselves. And while they met many a menacing alien, there were as many more who were capable of teaching us a lesson about ourselves.

And so it was that I learned many of life’s important lessons from people I had never met. A thousand obscure authors and storytellers all but forgotten now by the world. It was more difficult to translate the lessons I learned on paper or in songs into real life—things were always so much more perfect and heroic in fiction. But in the end I learned that heroism and idealism were guiding forces. I feel a debt to each of those thousands, literally thousands, of strangers that brought me into their world of imagination and passion and made me see and feel and imagine things more deeply than I ever would have otherwise.

I want the world to remember their names. I want them to know that Jim Shooter, Michael Brown, James Warren, Robert Arthur, Gardner Fox, Jean Dutourd, Anthony Phillips, and so many more lived and created and inspired. I want to introduce such influences to a new generation so that they can experience the thrill I once felt, still feel when I cast my memory back to my youth. I want to keep alive all that was once so vital to me, and so I push on in that direction, hopefully making a bit of a name for myself so that I can reflect back on those who influenced me.

But even more than keeping alive the names of those who pushed me in the story-telling direction, I want to keep their spirit alive. I want to give to others what has been given to me. Not amusement and amazement only, but a sense of heroism and possibility as well. I write for adults, not for teens or children, but I feel it is important for everyone to keep alive ideals that we too often dismiss as naïve or impractical in our later years. Achieving a better world must first begin with perceiving and believing, and there is surely a better world possible than the one we’re currently constructing. I know that it is so, I have seen it in the work of a thousand nearly anonymous creators of wonder, and I will not let their inspiration fade away.

Batman, Frankenstein, and the Bishop of M sur M

By the age of five I had already been immersed in the world of stories. Too young to get much out of my older brothers’ comic books, I could nevertheless watch Batman on TV. And there I learned that there were good guys who were looking out for the defenseless people who were preyed upon by the bad guys.

That was the first lesson I learned from stories, that the world needed good guys to protect the rest of us from the bad guys, and Batman became my first role model. That is who I wanted to be when I grew, fighting criminals with a BAM!, POW!, and ZAP!

Oh, perhaps my perception of the world had already developed a bit beyond that. You see, I also had a fascination with horror films, the classics like Frankenstein, King Kong, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. From such movies I realized, even at the age of five, that sometimes the bad guys and monsters really weren’t that bad. Sometimes people ended up being the bad guy even though they were trying really hard to do a good thing, like Dr. Frankenstein. Sometimes a creature was taken out of its natural environment and brought into modern-day civilization, and were called monsters just because they didn’t fit in with what we considered “normal”. Sometimes a creature is created in disregard of all the laws of God and nature, and through no fault of his own, becomes something evil. That was the story of Frankenstein’s monster and the one I could best sympathize with. In many ways the monster was no different than any other human being, but because of his appearance and his inability to fit in, the villagers inevitably would come after him with torches and pitchforks. I could understand his desires to do good and make friends, and to me he was always the tragic hero in any story about him.

There was one story I encountered, however—and I couldn’t have been more than six—which continues to show me the power of stories. I remember wanting to watch something on TV and my older brother wanting to watch something else. He told me the story was by the same person who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and that was enough to sell me on it (I was fortunate to have much older brothers who would explain things to me rather than use their size advantage to get what they wanted). You see, the Hunchback was a character I knew from pictures I had seen in the horror magazines my brothers would bring home from the store despite my father’s disapproval. I’d never watched the movie but had seen pictures of the horribly deformed person having his shirt ripped off and being tied to a revolving wheel so the mob that surrounded him could all get a chance to see the agony in his face as he was whipped for whatever crimes he had committed. In him I could see a character quite similar to Frankenstein, and I half-suspected that what he was found guilty of was the crimes of being disfigured and not fitting in.

So I agreed to watch the movie. It started promisingly enough, a dark, stormy night with a large and brutish stranger who cannot find a place to stay the night. You see, in my eyes, all good stories started out with darkness and lightning and the threat of impending menace. And the person who nobody wanted to let into their society, well that wasn’t too far from any of the monster movies I loved.

Then someone told the scary-looking social outcast to try knocking on a certain door. And the big, bedraggled stranger, not wanting to sleep in the rain despite his obvious dislike for the society that would not accept him, knocked on the door and was welcomed in like a long-lost relative. He was seated at the table and treated as an equal, not unlike the way Frankenstein was treated by the lonely blind man who was unable to see the ugliness in his guest that others did.

But unlike Frankenstein, the big, scary-looking stranger could not appreciate the kindness that he was being shown. Perhaps he had more experience with the human animal and was unable to heedlessly accept kindness when all he had known was harshness. And so, after everyone else was asleep, the scary bad man awoke, and doing what bad men do, stole all the silver from the house of the man who was kind enough to share his food and give him a bed in which to sleep.

This was the time for Batman to arrive and put things to right. Batman would beat up the big bad guy and return the silver dishes to its rightful owner. And so he did, although actually it was police officers playing the part of Batman. They brought the bad guy, along with the stolen goods he had been caught with red-handed, back to the man who had been wronged.

It was at this point something occurred in the story that made no sense to me. This should have been the end of the story, the bad guy loses and the good guys win. But the man who had been wronged was a man of God, a bishop as it turned out. And when the villain was made to stand before him, the bishop did a bad thing himself: he lied. He told the police that the man had not stolen the silver dishes but that he, the bishop, had given them to him. Then he spoke to the bad man, who had a look in his eyes that showed he understood no more than me the behavior of the bishop. The bishop explained how the man had been his guest and that he should be released at once. With that the police left the scene and with it the story.

I couldn’t understand the bishop’s behavior, and so I asked my brother why he would do such a thing. He told me something to the effect that it was because the bishop was a man of God and that it is said that we should turn the other cheek and forgive those who had wronged us. I still didn’t understand and yet I knew some very deep and powerful twist had taken place in the story that I had so far been told. No longer was Batman the main character in the story, he had been dismissed by the bishop along with the police. Nor was Frankenstein the main character, for not only did the bishop accept him he absolved him of whatever crimes had made him a social outcast. He had transformed him from a monster into a man.

Since that moment, I have read an awful lot of comic books and watched a lot of horror movies, but I’ve never forgotten the story of the man who through kindness and faith saw humanity in the monster. And from then on, no story I’ve read can I consider a great and enduring story if it does not have some aspect of the bishop in it, relying instead on heroes and monsters.

P.S. The movie I describe was Les Miserables, which you can watch by clicking on the screen below: