THe Illustrated Man I'm Not...Yet

Childhood memories have the tendency to get muddied over time. I have vague images floating around my head of the major events; going to see my newborn brother at the hospital, my fist day of kindergarten, the time I got spanked for throwing a rock at the side of a UPS truck, and the times with my dad before my parent’s divorce. It is hard to tell which of these are accurate, and which have been added to by a lifetime of hearing family stories and staring at old photos. There is one set of images that remain clear to me though, the mental pictures of my grandfather’s tattoos.

My grandfather is like many of our grandfathers, I suppose. He is a loving, but quiet man, who spent our family gatherings sitting stoically in his easy chair, trying to watch an old western on TV, while his children and grandchildren carried on around him. Like many of his generation, he moved from the rural south to Michigan to find work in the factories that churned out Chevrolets and Buicks by the tens of thousands in the 50’s. In all respects he was as many of my friends grandfathers were, except for one. During his time in the Army, on leave in Japan from the front lines of the Korean war, he slipped away from the MP’s and sat for several hours, half drunk, while an old Japanese tattoo artist marked him forever with American Eagle on his chest, and a pinup girl on his forearm. While I know now that many soldiers and sailors received tattoos during WWII and the Korean War, the other veterans that I was around during my childhood were not among them. Only my grandfather was marked in such a way.

 

It was fascinating to me as a kid. I could not fathom how they did not seem to fade. I tried to copy him by drawing crude illustrations on my arms using ball point pen, only to find that they would smudge throughout the day, finally being erased at bath time. I didn’t understand how they got there. If pens were not the culprit, as I had learned through experimentation, then my seven year old mind was at a loss as to how else one would produce them. He never even really mentioned them. Even though he spent most of the summer lying in the sun, shirt off, trying to deepen a tan that already made him look less like the descendant of Irish immigrants that he was and more like an immigrant from South America who spent his life working from dawn ill dusk in a California field trying to make a living for his family. They were simply there, as if he were born sporting an Eagle and shield on his chest like some sort of miraculous birthmark.

While the mystery of the tattoos faded with age and education, my fascination with them did not. I would pour over tattoo magazines while I loitered in the bookstore of the local mall, waiting for my mother to finish trying on dresses in the next shop over. I would keep an eye out for other people with tattoos as I walked down the public beach on vacation, trying not to stare when I spotted someone with tattoos of their own. And, I would try to come up with some ideas for the tattoos that I would get once I came of age. I would do all of this despite my mother’s insistence that getting a tattoo was not the sort of thing that respectable people did. I would spend the time trying to sketch out ideas even though the media portrayed people with tattoos as the dregs of society. I would do all of this dreaming and sketching and scheming because I knew, despite my mother’s admonitions, and society’s scorn, that tattoos are an incredible, and ancient, art form that I wanted to take part in. What I did not know was that it would be many years before I managed to get a tattoo of my own.

I did not get my first tattoo until I was 30. While I had wanted one my whole life several things kept me from taking the plunge. The earliest opportunity was in college, the time when many people get inked for the first time. I went with a friend to dingy tattoo parlor in Kalamazoo my second year at college. It was my first foray out of the fantasy world of half-assed sketches and glossy magazines into the real environments were tattoos were actually done. While I was excited to finally see what went into getting one, the reality of what I encountered pushed my desire back a bit. The place in question turned out to be one of the worst examples of a fly by night tattoo operation that I have ever encountered. The artists were smug. They were obviously too used to tracing butterflies onto the hips of barely legal sorority girls for quick money to care about doing anything that could be considered art. The shop itself was dimly lit and it reeked of stale beer and smoke. All in all, it was a thoroughly uninviting place. But, my friend was determined to have his arm wrapped with a trendy tribal band, and I was his ride, so I sat in the lobby for two and a half hours while a disinterested, biker looking, tattoo “artist” marked him for life. I hope, for my friend’s sake that he continues to be happy with his tattoo these many years later, but I know that if I had given in to my own desire to have a tattoo at that age, without fully considering what it was that I was getting, I would be trying to find a real artist to correct and cover that early mistake today.

The second (and third, and fourth, and so on) chance I had to get a tattoo came during my own time in the Army. During my time at Fort Gordon, Georgia, after basic and during training for my military occupation, I had several friends that would venture into Augusta on the weekend, find the closest shop that they could, pick a tattoo off the wall, and have it done. Some guys got the trendy (at the time) tribal armband. Some got a vaguely patriotic design (usually a flag or eagle). And some got what passed for a traditional Japanese style dragon or tiger in Georgia. Some of these tattoos looked good, but most of them looked like shit.

My perceptions of the quality of these tattoos were reinforced by my friend and bunkmate Zack. Like me, he was a few years older than the 18 and 19 year olds we were surrounded by. Unlike me, he had several tattoos, mostly of skulls and skeletons. While these motifs were not what I was into, they were without a doubt of a much higher quality than the ones our friends would show up with after a weekend of freedom. We would look over these new markings, give the guy a halfhearted compliment, and then goof on them once they left the room. For me it wasn’t that the tattoos were of poor quality, many of them were not, but it was that the tattoos had no meaning at all. Why would you get barbwire around your arm? Why would you pay money for a dragon on your back? Why would you pick anything off the wall, on a whim, and have in carved into your body forevermore? It was during this time that I decided to put real though into my choice, so that when I did decide on a design, it would be something that had real meaning, and not be something that I would shrug my shoulders at and blame on youthful indiscretion in my later years.

After my time in the military, I bounced around a bit. I was unemployment for a while. I worked as a “mid-decade” census taker in my township for a few weeks. I even landed a pretty good job at the cable company, before I was laid off due to cut-backs. I had no real idea of where I was going, or how I was to get there. As much as I bitched and moaned about military service, it was comforting to have a purpose in life. I was, for better or worse, serving my country. If not for the protracted wars we found ourselves involved in (speaking both broadly as a country, and narrowly as an individual who spent a year in Iraq) I probably would have stayed in the Army, making a career out of it. But, the prospect of repeated deployments and possibility of violent death a half a world away made me reconsider. I exited military service after three days of “readjustment training”, half assed and half hearted classes on how to find a job in the civilian world, without a plan. Eventually I settled on going back to college to get a degree in accounting. Despite my assurances to my family that I had a plan, and despite my seeming confidence in that plan’s feasibility, I was flying blind still. It was the best option at the time, but I still had no overreaching plan about what I was to do with my life.

It was this feeling of being lost, and without direction that gave me the idea for what ended up being my first tattoo; a compass. I passed this decision off to my friends and family as being related to my love hiking (partly true) and my time in the military (not at all true) because to tell them what it really meant to me was a bit embarrassing. Who wants to tell their loved ones that the tattoo they were about to get was representative of the feeling that I was lost, and that I desperately wanted to find my way in the world again. This sort of sentiment may be tolerated in an 18 year old, but in someone fast approaching their thirtieth year, with a family to support, it may point to some sort of failure in character. To me though, it stood for hope. Hope that no matter how confused the path, or unclear the trail, there way a means by which one could find their way. Having that decided, I looked for examples in tattoo magazines and on old maps, finally settling on a compass rose taken from one of Magellan’s nautical charts as my starting point. I then searched the websites of the hundreds of tattoo shops in Michigan looking for the one that could turn my idea into something concrete. I settled on a small shop in Ann Arbor that I found quite accidentally after asking a girl in a store where she had received her tattoo.

When I met with the artist, I was immediately impressed not only with the quality of his work, but with his overall demeanor, and the demeanor of his staff. This was not the shady, dirty, fly by night tattoo shop that I had been dragged to while I was in college, but a clean, professional shop that put one at ease when you walked through the door. I discussed my ideas, scheduled my appointment, and left feeling like I had made the right decision. That feeling was confirmed a month later when I went back down to have the tattoo done. While different from the source material in many ways, the design that my artist came up with was exactly what I was looking for. It was a traditional take on the compass rose, but it still had enough variation from the norm to make it feel unique. The colors are black and red, and it sits on the inside of my left forearm, reminding me always that there is a way, even if that way is not clear.

Book Nerd

The first day of kindergarten did not go well for me. I still don't know if it was my haircut, my last name, or the ridiculous striped shirt my mother dressed me in that did it, but from that day onward I was lumped in with the outcasts. I remember seeing some of the other kids playing in the back half of the room near the huge bin of red cardboard bricks. They had built them into some sort of fort and were staging a battle with G.I Joe's atop of them all. I walked over, eager to join the fun even though my own action figures were at home, safe in their carefully labelled Tupperware containers, and asked if I could play too. They asked my name. I told them. A few snickered. I was offered Scarlet with a smirk. "Here, you can play with the girl." Much laughter. My face grew red. I was a nerd from there on out.


At a big school you may have the chance to grow out of your early role. Every year brings the chance that they will put you in with another group of kids, or that the district will redraw the lines sending you across town, or that the bullies will grow tired of tormenting you and move on to the foreign kid with the odd smell and funny accent. But I did not go to a big school. I went to a small catholic school on the south side with the same 40 kids from kindergarten through seventh grade. It sucked.

Being a nerd was new to me, interacting with kids outside of my family was new to me, and it took me quite some time to figure out just what you were supposed to do while being a nerd. It wasn't my fault that I didn't catch on quick; it was that the other nerds weren't much help. A couple were your classic, thick glasses, high-water pants variety. Good at math and science. Couldn't throw a ball properly. Physically and socially awkward. I didn't really fit in with them at all. This was back before my eyes started to go bad, so bonding over the perils of keeping your glasses safe while being tortured for your lunch money was out. Likewise, I was not very good at math; a sad fact that has dogged me through adulthood. So being the traditional, stereotypical nerd was out. A couple of the others were into hockey. It doesn't seem like this would banish you to the ranks of the perennially unpopular, but at our school football was king. I had more in common with these kids, but I did not play hockey. It was way too expensive for the son of a cop and a private music teacher, or so I was told. There were a few others here and there: the poor kid, the kid who smells funny, the aforementioned foreigner. And it was not limited to boys. No No, there were outcasts among the girls as well, but their society was as closed to me then as it seems to be today.

So there I was. Left to fend for myself. Discovering what it meant to be one of childhood's undesirables. Despite not being very good at math or science, I excelled at reading. This was in the days when they would group you according to ability. The good readers, most of us nerds, were given actual books to read. The slow readers were given Hop on Pop. I quickly found that reading was the best, and sometimes only way, to escape from the uncomfortable situation I found myself in. Pledge of Allegiance. Attendance. Math class. Getting flicked in the ear with a pencil. Science. Getting hit in the neck with a spitball. Lunch. Sitting alone. Recess. Getting pushed off the swings so someone else could use them. But then, after lunch, silent reading time. This was my refuge. This was what made the day worthwhile. A half an hour to sit at my desk and forget all of the crap around me.

So, instead of trying to puzzle out the reasons behind my unpopularity, I retreated into books. It started with the terrible Matt Christopher books, which would let me imagine myself as an athletic kid who hits the game winning home run or scores the touchdown in overtime. From there it was on to Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown, where I could imagine myself solving crimes in my neighborhood. A big evolution happened when I snuck away from the young adult section of my school's tiny library and discovered the classics. Sherlock Holmes, Moby Dick, and Great Expectations were all on my reading list in the third grade. Melville's tome was responsible for me getting called to the principal's office that year and being accused of pretending to read it, as the teacher and aforementioned principal could not get their heads around an eight year old reading page after page about the rendering of whale fat. But, I was reading these books, and while I may not have comprehended a few of the words or grasped half of the symbolism, I loved them. They were my friends in ways that the kids around me were not.

My love of books has stuck with me through adulthood. Science fiction like the Star Wars novelizations and Issac Asimov got me through middle school. Kerouac and Bukowski, through high school. Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg got me through a particularly bad streak of romantic disasters in college. And, as incongruous as it may sound, J.R.R. Tolkien helped me through Iraq. In between I have read more books than I can ever hope to remember; in genres ranging from sword and sorcery to the Greek Classics. They still remain my refuge. They still help me escape the trials and troubles of everyday life. They still hold their magic.

I hope they always will.

I've a secret...

There is a secret I have that I have been keeping to myself for quite some time now. It is not, as some of the more depraved among you may think, some deviant sexuality. I don't have a thing for feet. It is also not some bizarre physical oddity. No tail hides under my pants; no sixth toe inside my shoe. Nor do I have an unhealthy obsession with Twilight, although that does hit a little closer to the mark. No, my secret is a bit more mundane, and a in some ways a bit more embarrassing. It began, innocently enough, with a book; The Lord of the Rings.

Let it be known, if it is not already, that I am a nerd. "What's the big deal?" you may ask, "There are plenty of nerds nowadays." This is true. The ranks of nerddom have swollen lately with all of the big budget, Hollywood comic book adaptations and the advent of the computer age. But, true nerds know, if you have never cowered on the playground, lunch money clutched tightly in hand, or if you have never lost a friendship over which was better, DC or Marvel, then you are no nerd. You are a Johnny Come Lately to our small, lame party. I was a nerd from the way back. I read comics. I obsessed over Star Wars and Trek. I lost much lunch money to those gifted with clear skin and athletic ability. My credentials are impeccable.

The Lord of the Rings was not my entre into the world of the unpopular, that had been made years earlier whilst reading the bad novelizations of the Star Wars movies in third grade, but it was my introduction to a certain sub-sector of nerdiness, fans of fantasy. Sure, everyone is well aware of the sci-fi aficionados, and of the comic book fanboys, but often overlooked are the sword and sorcery set. These are the kids who dream of dragon slaying and noble quests, the ones who can quote both Beowulf and Robert Jordan, the ones to whom Gary Gygax is a hero. They gained some notoriety with Peter Jackson's films; a little more with the Harry Potter series, but they remain still largely in the shadows. Their brand of nerdiness is even looked down upon by other nerds. What could they possibly be into that brings such scorn and derision from even their fellow outcasts you ask; two words, Dungeons and Dragons.

I know; I can hear the laughter from here.

It was not a quick route from average sci-fi/fanboy nerd to closet D&D nerd for me. My path was not paved with gaming manuals, but with novels. The Lord of the Rings trilogy led me to Tolkien's other works. Then on to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and Terry Brooks' Shannara series. Finally, I came to the vast array of Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms novels. I first picked them up with little knowledge of the game. I saw them as a good way to indulge my fantasy habit. I had grown accustomed to long, multi-part stories and these books fit the bill perfectly; there were literally hundreds to choose from. I was in a little corner of nerd heaven, but I was still not in that darkest of corners occupied by the role players.

I had made brief forays into the realm of role playing before; nights at summer camp playing Magic the Gathering on borrowed cards (mostly critiquing the artwork like any good comic nerd would do), minutes stretching into hours spent flipping through the pages of the AD&D Player's Guide at the bookstore trying to figure out what the hell THAC0 meant, and reading strange threads on early AOL message boards filled with talk of multisided die and character class. But, I kept all of this at arms length. I could recognize that being into the X-Men and Star Wars could be, if not understood, at least tolerated by most of my peers. And, I hoped to capitalize on a change of schools in the eighth grade by forcing myself out of the role of nerd and into a role that gave me a better chance of keeping my lunch money and perhaps getting laid (adolescent hormones were in full swing). So I buried my interest in D&D the game, and hid my love of D&D the novels through both high school and college.

Oddly enough, my real introduction to D&D came while in the army. My company had been tasked with the unenviable task of providing an honor guard to the various funerals of veterans around Kansas. This task involved sitting in a van, driving for hours on end, providing a final honor to those who had served before us (which took about twenty minutes on average) and then climbing back into the van for hours more driving. I was in a signal company, and signal units are mostly made up of nerds of one kind or another; at least 75 percent nerds anyway. It is where they put the guys who score high on the standardized tests. I mostly slept at first on these trips; Kansas is extremely boring to drive across. After a few days of sleeping entirely too much, I decided to relinquish the back seat and stay awake to see what the other guys were doing for 5 or 6 hours at a clip. Much to my amazement, they were scribbling in notebooks and rolling oddly shaped dice into a shoe box.

I, of course, demanded an explanation to this odd behavior. They explained that they were playing D&D. I didn't hesitate to join in. It took an hour or so to explain the basic rules to me, and I joined the game on the ride home. Granted, this was not the most sophisticated of gaming sessions, it is a bit hard to get fully into role playing while leaning over the bench seats of a government issue van, but it was fun, and nerdy, and a great way to pass the time. It quickly became a habit with us. We would take turns running the game, argue about the proper application of the rules, and, generally speaking, fully expose our nerdiness without shame or self consciousness.

The game followed us home, and we set up a weekend session where we could more fully indulge in the strange, fantasy world we were creating. Books were bought, dice were rolled, and Chinese food was consumed en masse. When we were all deployed to Iraq, our Monster Manuals and D20's came with us. We found guys from other units that wanted to join in. We welcomed the chance to escape the war by imagining ourselves fighting goblins and evil wizards. Was it nerdy? Extremely. Was it embarrassing? At times. Was it instrumental in keeping me and my friends sane while we were trapped in an insane situation? Without a doubt.

So there it is; my admission of being a fan of Dungeons and Dragons. I don't play it that often anymore; I just don't have the time at this point in my life. But, I still read the novels, and I still buy the game manuals. Some of you may laugh. Some of you may shake your heads in bemusement. Some of you may even say, "Holy shit! Him too?" Whatever you may say, know that this game, this supremely nerdy game, sits in a special place in my heart, and that I am not alone in m love for it. I know one or two of you that feel the same. But, I did keep it quiet. Aside from the occasional paladin joke to sniff out the other super nerds, I kept it for myself. No more though. I am proud to be a nerd; even if it is a variety of nerd that has still not found its place in the burgeoning world of accepted nerddom.

My First Comic

When I was a kid my mom would pack me and my brother, with grandma along for good measure, into the car and plow up I-75 to Higgins Lake in Northern Lower Michigan. There was a ratty lakeside cabin that we would rent for a week or two from the American Legion that became our regular vacation spot over the years. I still don't know if this was because of the relatively inexpensive nature of the place, or because my mother's best friend from high school owned a similar, but nicer, cabin just down the shore. Probably a little of both.

The good things about the place was that it was right on the lake, had a sandy beach running a far as a 10 year old could walk in either direction, and there were usually a bunch of other kids around to hang out with. The bad things were that there were only two bedrooms for four people, there was no shower, and there was no cable. The bedroom issue was addressed by having my younger brother share the bed with my mother while I slept on a tiny roll away cot in the room with my grandmother; I guess we deferred to her age by giving her a bed to herself. The shower situation was not so much of an issue for a kid. Two weeks away from the rigours of personal hygiene was fine for my brother and I, but my mother and grandma would inevitably drag us a mile down the road to the state park where we would sneak into the public shower houses to scrub up well enough to last a day or two. As for the cable, well, there was no help for that. For those two weeks my brother and I, kids who had never known life with less than fifty channels, were seemingly thrust backwards in time to the days of the three national networks and PBS. But that was fine, after a day or two we got used to the idea of limited television.

Overall it was the kind of vacation spot where a kid was left to be a kid. It was miles from town, miles from the closest convenience store, and miles away from any of the things that conspired to make life complicated for the awkward, unpopular, ten year old that I was at home. My brother and I would swim, play in the woods, try to catch chipmunks in hastily rigged traps that would make Wiley Coyote wince, spend endless hours redirecting the flow of a small ice cold spring that ran into the lake next to the cabin, and try our level best not to kill each other arguing about all the previously mentioned things. My mom would sit on the beach and read cheap romance novels. My grandmother would knit or cross stitch. We would all take it easy and enjoy the sun.

The problems came with the rain. There was absolutely nothing to do in that tiny cabin, so we would load into the car, at this point spattered with sap from the pine trees that surrounded the place, and head into Grayling to shop. To be truthful, shopping is not a an accurate description of what we would do. There really weren't any stores to speak of. Grayling is not really a resort town, or at least is was not back then; I couldn't say how it is now. It had, as far as I remember, a grocery store, a Ben Franklin (sort of a craft/discount/general store) a K-Mart, and a Big Boy restaurant. Maybe a McDonald's; I can't recall for sure. Sometimes we would take a little longer drive and head to Houghton Lake where there was a huge craft store. Mostly though, we trekked into Grayling for groceries, dinner out and for something to do in the rain.

It was on one of these trips to the grocery store that I bought my first comic book. Breaking away from my mom and grandmother, I wandered over to the magazine rack to look at the comics. At this point in my life I may have had a few comics to my name; Batman and Superman were as familiar to me as any other kid. But I can't really recall ever picking one out for myself before this point. As I scanned the jumbled rack of Ladies Home Journals, Better Homes and Gardens, and People magazines I finally came to the small selection of comics presumably placed there to keep unruly out of town kids like myself from tearing up and down the aisles of the store. The comic that grabbed my attention was Uncanny X-Men #251. I remember this because I am a nerd, but I also remember this because of the cover; a drawing of Wolverine, crucified on a giant X, atop a mountain of skulls. Maybe it was the quality of the artwork. Maybe it was how different it was from the tame, kid friendly comics which were all I had ever seen up until then. Maybe it was the way that the drawing of a crucified superhero clashed with the Catholic imagery I had always been told was sacred. Whatever it was, I had to have that comic.

I really don't know how I managed to convince my mom to buy it for me. She is perplexed by comics and superheros today, and this is after my brother and I have spent the last twenty years stuffing every spare inch of her house with comics, action figures, sci-fi novels, and all other sorts of nerdy paraphernalia. However I did it, and it most likely involved whining and subtle threats of a mid-market meltdown, I left the store with the comic book and a new obsession that would stick with me well into adulthood. I spent the rest of the day reading and re-reading its multi-paneled pages trying to figure out just what in the hell was going on. It wasn't like the kidcentric Batman and Superman books I had read in the past; with their self contained stories and simple plots. No, this was a comic that demanded my full attention and intellect (such as it was at ten). It wasn't until later on, when I had some money of my own and a comic book store to spend it at, that I was able to collect all of the issues leading up to that one and finally figure out what the hell was going on in that one book that had grabbed my attention.

I still have that comic. It sits in a Mylar bag, compulsively organized and catalogued along with hundreds of others. My brother seems to have been more partial to DC Comics Titles, where I have maintained a fascination with the X-Men series and Marvel comics in general. Between us we have thousands. He has many more, having parlayed his love of comics into a career. But, despite all of the various titles and issues that I have bought and read and loved over the years, that issue is special.

You always remember your first.