When I was nine or ten years old, I lived among a thinly disguised psychotic little group of alien beings laughably referred to as a family. This pathetic, dysfunctional neurotic little tribe of psychic pygmies inhabited a big sterile empty house on a heartless tree-lined street in a heartless upper-middle class section of the heartless, sprawling sub-urban wasteland known as Los Angeles.
The wide empty streets of big lonesome desperate lawns – if they could reasonably be called streets – were always very well kept, studiously devoid of any sign of day to day human activity… Life, if it occurred at all, appeared to happen only in secretive dry whimpers behind closed doors.
The whole desolate hell-scape lay frozen in a dying child’s oversized nightmare of blackness, seclusion and terror. Oh, the hope-bashing, soul-vomiting, mind-shattering screaming brutal emptiness, the bottomless torturous monotony of those big cold white-walled empty looking houses! Such evil fucking insidious monumental insults to human dignity! High walled barriers standing there on that accursed earth’s barren landscape without art or class or character or soul, spartan fortresses of ice whose only real purpose seemed to be to guard againsit the slightest threat of any unwelcome sign of human contact or interaction. No trace of warmth or feeling – ever. Dead fucking reptilian mausoleums of lizard shit.
And there I was, ten years old and as powerless as a fucking goldfish over the screaching mediocracy of that world… Knowing it. Hating it. Wanting to destroy it. Not knowing how…
Even now, almost half a century later, just thinking of that place makes me want to shit on the human race for ever inventing such places to live. Not a good little stroll down memory lane here.
Needless to say, I wasn’t a very well adjusted kid. No no no. Very bad attitude. Right from my very first day at school. I hated everything and everybody and didn’t mind letting them all know it. They obliged me by hating me right back, and so it went.
My favorite word as a child was “cringe”. I even had a comic book character I used to draw called “Captain Cringe.” He had the power to make people cringe and shrivel up and die just by looking at them. Awesome! He was cool and he was powerful. He was a bad motherfucker and he was in control of shit. Always. Captain Cringe knew the score. He was everything I aspired to be in life. Captain Cringe. One bad motherfucker with a bad attitude.
Comics were my big escape and I read, collected, catalogued and hoarded them with a mad compulsive passion. Those crazy little multicolored panels packed with life and adventure lured and held my attention totally and obsessively. Primal and compelling, the pages of the comics drew me in and held me in their spell like jungle drums. Magic. I was hooked like a dope fiend and I spent the best hours of my nightmarish childhood mercifully lost in that multicolored forest of amazing panels of fantasy.
The comics were my whole life, my only real link to humanity. They exploded off the pages and deep into my thirsty immagination in big forceful lusty iconic images. They allowed me to experience a world I longed to know outside the prison walls of that white vacuous nothingness. And I read them for my very salvation in drooling bug-eyed fascination.
The gorier, sicker ones were my favorites. The more violence, depravity and morbid demented plot twists, the better. Yeah.
My comics were my scared icons and they took me away every day to much better places than the shitty white-walled lunatic hell I came from. Sacred motherfuckin multicolored icons, living treasures of art and passion and life in a dead, dry, ugly void.
Living in that hollow white marble tomb of a neighborhood, I would catch fleeting glimpses of various neighbors from time to time, usually from afar, across an ocean of manicured lawn or an endless driveway, as if seeing some alien life form from behind glass in a laboratory or something. Never more than a
faint smile or a weak furtive nod to indicate that these fuzzy shadows of people were any more human and alive than the brilliantly vital animated super characters who shouted out from the pages of my beloved comics. Yeh, I loved my comics.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.
Yes! Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning…I have cringe powers…
my cringe powers are in retirement. Thanks for another peek into your past JS.
I wish I could make people cringe! Oh wait…