The Comic Connection

[Dylan Wiles]

My favorite thing to do when I was eight years old was reading comics with my friend Rossi. He was my age but in many ways much older and oddly enough, one of my escorts into a bigger, more complicated world.

Rossi was the quintessential 'fat kid.' In later years he would go one of two ways: Overpowering bully or gentle giant. In that young year of 1956 it was hard to tell. He had reddish-blonde hair cut in a 'butch', which meant it was shaved down to within an inch of its life and it loomed over two tiny little eyes in a chubby face. His lips were too-full and his belly was already hanging over the waistband of his cut-off jeans. He was at all times barefoot, for it was deep summer, and there was always a ring of dirt around his neck. There was probably a similar deposit around my own tiny neck because I went everywhere Rossi went and did everything Rossi did.

But, like I said, when the days got too hot and the swimming pool was closed for cleaning, our favorite thing was comics. You could find the two of us with twin pink cuds of Double-Bubble gum snapping and sticking to our noses, water-cooler sweat on our brows, down on the floor of Rossi's den surrounded by the bright colored, 24 page foci of our shared passion. With smudged fingers we'd turn the pages of a Superman or a Donald Duck (they all got equal time --- we didn't discriminate) as we both became part of that world kids love to travel in.

I liked Rossi because he had a fine feel for the ridiculous that matched my own and I hadn't learned to be judgmental yet. Hadn't learned to put people in boxes according to size and weight and social skills. It was just me and Rossi on any given summer afternoon arguing the prowess of Aqua-Man vs. Batman, joking about Little Lotta and Baby Huey being the perfect couple, making our solemn well-thought-out declarations on the comparative merits of this or that super hero with all the somber tones of the true comic afficionado. Cicadas sang their summer song outside and nobody had ever heard of a personal computer or a 401K and Davy Crockett in his coon-skin cap was the guy we all wanted to be.

Kids stuff.

One day we snuck up to the attic to find what Rossi called 'growd-up' books. We were comic-ed out and needed more mature material to fire our imaginations. Or maybe the lure of the forbidden drove us there. Probably the latter. What kid exists that hasn't pushed a boundary or two every once in a while?

We crawled through the dust and cobwebs, sneezing and blowing over the junk and mildew that had been collecting up there for many years and found stacks of old Argosy's and Saga's and True's. Mens magazines. Not sexy or provocative in the general sense, but mags full of 'men's' tales. And there, in that heap of World War II relics his dad had likely been hoarding since his return from the war and before there even was a Rossi, we found stories of men on the high seas, men in the African jungles, men with big knives in their teeth saving beautiful third-world girls in scanty little dresses. It was all very exciting.

And then we found the stuff about the death camps.

I turned those pages slowly because this was. . .different. Horrible pictures of bodies. Emaciated, burned, twisted bodies. Real people who'd been terrorized, tortured and murdered. People stacked like so much cord wood. Piles of human remains.

It couldn't be true, because things like that just couldn't be. Somebody would come and stop it, wouldn't they? Somebody, maybe God, would fix it before that happened, right? Evidently not, because there was the evidence, right there in lurid black and white with terrible stories to go with it. It made me cry. In front of Rossi I cried and he cried with me. Maybe out of sympathy, maybe out of not knowing what else to do.

But I knew. And knowing. . .oh, man. . .knowing is hard.

It changed me. And I would never be innocent any more. I would never view another sunrise or a swing-set or a trip to the Dairy Queen for ice cream in the same way. . .ever. Because it was out there . It wasn't all cotton candy and red soda pop. There were things going on I couldn't understand, real pain in the world, people the same color as me being brutalized.. . . and Rossi and I never read comics together again.


10,000 miles and twenty five years later I read a book by an up and coming author named Stephen King. The name of the book was Danse Macabre and in it he described the very same scene I just depicted.

He told the story of his own personal memories of that same comic book fascination, the discovery of hidden horrors in the attic and what it did to him in terms of how he would view the rest of his life. It resonated through me like that fine thing that happens when a tuning fork reaches perfect pitch and you know it's right there. That's when I became a Stephen King fan. Not because of the stories he tells but because of that one collective memory we share.

I knew him better right then than I would ever know him through tens of thousands of words in dozens of novels. He and I had a connection. And more than that, I realized I had a bigger connection to the world out there. I wasn't the only one. Others before me had unsuitable and fantastical thoughts born of trauma and pain. Others before me came to that same common realization that we are all more or less connected at the core.

King and I are the same age. And it is entirely possible we were both making our discoveries at the same moment. Poking through some dark attic, involved in the same uncovering of bigger truths, 1500 miles between us but still on the same wave-length.

Stephen King has gone on to tell hundreds of stories, but right then, on the pages of that odd little book, Danse Macabre, he was telling mine. And of all the stories he's told, that is the one I like best.

I only saw Rossi one more time. The night before he left for Viet Nam. He had grown strong and upright and clear-eyed. He came into a bar I frequented and I knew it was him right away. We shared a pitcher of Coors and talked about. . . things. After the initial excitement of seeing each other again, catching up on the strange and surreal turns our individual lives had taken, we got down to brass tacks. I don't remember who mentioned it first but the subject of what we found in the attic came up around the third beer. We walked around it, circling it like a tandem team of wolves trying to decide the best way to come in for the kill and suddenly we both realized we were once more, maybe for the last time, on common ground. Surrounded by the juke-box magic of Creedence Clearwater, grown up in a Seventies world neither one of us could have ever imagined we were dually transported back to that hot steamy attic and for just a moment the years and miles between us evaporated. Once again it was just the two of us, remembering the time we both found out how bad, how awfully bad, it could really be.

We agreed it was a pivotal moment for both of us. That's all. We left it at that.

I hope he's still out there somewhere, Rossi. And I hope he remembers Superman and The Hulk and maybe, just maybe, he found that same passage in that same book and realized it was alright. Maybe he read that simple King story at the same time I did. It's not impossible. We are, after all, the same age. And maybe, light years later he knows for himself the simple connective truth of all humanity.

We are never alone

[tinkerjack]

Man you got balls, imagine mentioning stephen king on a serious literary site. You would get rode out of town on a rail. I like your style.
I hardly ever see him mentioned on places like litkicks. We read only good books. I was going to delete the got balls comment, but decided to let it ride. Dumb comment and all.

Just a ramble about Rossi. I don't know if two men can get any closer than running a sleeper team together. I had one partner in crime who reminds me of Rossi a lot. A great bear of a man, a friendly kind man. Sometimes you get a dispatch from hell, twelve hours late before you even leave, winter storms threatning and then you break down in the middle of far left texas. Nothing fazed him. Cheerful in the face of all. But we had to get a motel room together and he asked me, well he just mentioned that he could not watch slasher movies after his experiences in the south east asian war games. Then he told me a story about having a couple beers with a friend. And then he told me about going outside to his car because a mean drunk did not like his shaggy appearance. THe drunk had blood in his eye, but no idea it was going to be his own blood. All I could say was, "I would stay out of bars." He nodded his head to that. Not sure what I am saying here, just a ramble about male violence and alcohol. Lots of friendly bars I am sure. Nothing to do with your post.

nice write.

[Zlatko Waterman]

A fine, precise and well-crafted memoir.

Thanks for showing it to all of us.

--Z

[tinkerjack]

one note about truth, That bit about a couple of beers with a friend, that part rings false to my memory. I think he was drinking alone. It might have been better if he had been with a friend. The last I heard about my partner was that he was in a hospital in Utah, one Halloween night someone had tied a cinder block to a rope and hung it off an over pass. I heard he was doing ok. Such a large strong man they think that is what saved his life.

[iblieve]

Hi Dylan we meet again. I love the descriptive way you write capturing the wonder of discovery in a child and sometimes the ones that really shake us and stay with us. As for Stephen King, well I love his DARK Tower series it is my favorite. Show me a literary critic that has sold as many books as him and I will concede they have the right to judge his writing. Good to read you again my friend. "C"

[Dylan Wiles]

Like I told Tinkerjack, when you or I or anyone else is shipping triple platinum to Doubleday we can criticize Kings writing. Also pointed out I didn't have any balls.

How you been? And the Missus?

See you soon. I posted two or three articles here, have a look.
Love
D