Fragments of Shadow

The clock said 4:57 when gunfire woke me from strange dreams. I think it was a revolver, or at least I counted five more shots after the one that woke me.

I lay in the dark, not knowing what happened, who was shot or why, or if the gunman was still outside. I was afraid to turn on the light, to draw attention. Still half-asleep, tangled in the vestigial strands of my dreams, my fear was amplified to an almost paralyzing level. If I moved, if light shone out the window, they would come for me. They would come for Kat, asleep beside me.

So I lay there, trying to go back to sleep. In the dark, the crack of the shots loomed. They became other gunshots, echoing from childhood. My father teaching me to shoot in the mountains of Arkansas. The deafening sounds of the pistol that would eventually take his life reverberating through the foothills while he drilled into my head that someone wanted to hurt me, hurt us, and that I had to be able to defend myself. Shades of the fear I felt when I hid under the bed while he volleyed fire with the men who came to repossess our car added to the fear I already felt.

Six gunshots in the darkness became all of these shattering moments in my head.

Now, in the sunny morning light, I know I should have called the cops. I should have done something. But I was afraid in the dark of my room, where shadows lingered and swelled rational self-preservation into irrational terror.

I understand the villagers of gothic horror so much more, now. As the sun set, they locked their doors, fearful of every crack and thump outside. The sounds of night creatures transmuted into the snarls of werewolves and the howls of vengeful spirits. In the dark, alone, it’s easy for your rational mind to run away and hide.

To wait for sunrise.

It’s crazy when you think about how much the world has changed in such a short time. When I was born, way back in 1976, there were barely even home computers. There were no mobile phones. Now we carry phones in our pockets with more processing power than the supercomputers of the ’70s.

Louis C.K. says it best:

Thirty-four years ago today, I was born. Today, I thought it might be fun if we talked about things that shaped us. Movies, books, music… It’s all fair game. I’ll start:

Sherlock Holmes

I learned to read on classics. Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, etc. But none of them grabbed me like Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Brains over brawn appealed heavily to me, since I was tiny and easily bullied. I mean really, I was tiny. I wore a size 2-toddler shirt until 8th grade. But beyond Holmes’ combustible wit and deductive skills, he could hold his own if things came down to a fight. My parents were judo instructors and, thanks to my size, I was a perfect fulcrum. Things rarely got that far, but when they did, I usually got out of it pretty clean.

I had a friend, named Kevin, who was also a huge fan of Holmes. He was a husky boy, muscular in the vague way school bullies generally are. But he was my friend, not a bully. Of course, he fancied himself Holmes, and me Watson, but whatever.

We used to watch Mystery! on PBS every week, he in his room, me in mine, tethered together by the telephone line. Of course, we’d both read all the stories, but Jeremy Brett’s Holmes was perfection. We talked about the changes we noticed between the story and the show. Kevin wasn’t my only friend. He wasn’t even my best friend. But he was the only one I could share Sherlock Holmes with.

I even wrote horrible stories about Holmes’ descendent and his assistant, Chip Watson. I’ll get back to him, but it’s my birthday, so I’m going to cut this short.

What about you? What shaped you?

When I was nine, my dad took me to live with his parents for a while. I’d grown up in Denver and Tampa, so it was my first real experience living on a farm and, for reasons I’ll get into later on down the line, it was a stressful, crazy time.

My grandfather Del was a ghostly presence, even then. He woke up early to do farming chores, then worked a normal job at a factory, then came home and did more farming. The main image I have of him is a grimy, sweating man in a light blue work shirt sitting in a ratty la-z-boy watching John Wayne movies in the evening. His glasses were thick, and his hair was always combed tight against his scalp, like Franklin Roosevelt, who took office a month after Del was born.

My grandmother  Patricia, on the other hand, was a constant presence. She was always there, taking us out to pick blackberries, or burning off the inevitable ticks we picked up in the process. Even if she was out working, she was within shouting distance of the ramshackle house we lived in. The strange thing is, I have less of an image of her burned into my head. I remember her hair was curly, and she wore an apron over old-fashioned dresses.

It was the most traditional environment I’ve ever experienced. In many ways, it was more like I’d been transported to the 50s than it was like 1986.

These were dark days. My dad’s mind had never really recovered from Vietnam, and this was deep in his final spiral. I spent a lot of time inventing stories with G.I. Joe figures (old-school giant ones, my modern Joe vs. Cobra toys were back in Tampa) and creating my own little newspaper. I buried my head in the sand.

One day, my grandfather took me down into the tornado shelter. He’d set up a makeshift desk in front of one of the low concrete benches and on it, there was an antique Royal typewriter.

“That belongs to your grandmother, so you take care of it, y’hear?” he said. “Figured you make a newspaper, you oughta do it right.” That shelter, cool and dark, safe under heavy metal doors… That fussy old typewriter… That was the first time I truly escaped into writing.

After my father’s death, his family blamed my mom for it, and I lost touch with them. I visited them once, years ago, but we never really got past the estrangement.

I just found out that Delano Otto Simmons died on December 31st, 2009, followed by Patricia Glenn Simmons on June 10th, 2010. You’d think that the attenuated relationship would make it hurt less, but somehow, finding out so belatedly hurts even worse.

They were family, no matter what stupid, broken drama had accreted between us, no matter what walls had been built by misunderstanding and pained memory. I’m sorry we never really repaired things, grandma and grandpa.

Farewell.

In my day, men pretended to be robots, and we liked it!

My dad was a Vietnam vet. The war messed him up, that’s no surprise… He had a screwed up knee that meant lots of trips to the VA hospital when I was little. And of course, back in the dark ages of the early 80s, before iPods and iPads and hell, even before Gameboys, we had to make our own fun.

Let’s just say that the VA hospital was not exactly designed for entertaining small children, at least not in the wing where I spent most of my time. In fact, aside from the odd copy of Highlights or an illustrated Bible, there was nothing. Well, nothing aside from the hall-cleaner.

The hospital  had an automated cleaning system, like the massive evolutionary ancestor of a Roomba. It came from behind a black metal door, and plowed down the halls on a system of rails near the floor. Seriously, this thing was like a zamboni mated with the rat-things from Snow Crash. And it had an eye.

An oscillating red eye, sliding back and forth like the front end of the Knight Industries Two Thousand or, far more important to me at the time, a fracking Cylon.

Yes, in my mind, the Cylon war had reached Earth, and the shock troops were scrubbing the floors at the VA. So I did what any good Jedi–

What? I was five. Bite me. If it was in space, it was fair game.

Anyway. I did what any good Jedi would do. I attacked the cleaners with my inflatable lightsaber. Down there in the bowels of the hospital, people rarely walked the halls. So when I heard movement in the hall, I ran out to do battle with the Cylon before it retreated back into its base. My mom didn’t care because, seriously, inflatable lightsaber.

And then, one day, everything changed. I heard the noise in the hall. I grabbed my trusty lightsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age, and I ran out into the hall to catch the mechanical villain. Only, it wasn’t the cleaner.

It was a Cylon.

Seriously. There was a silver-and-black Cylon Centurion standing in the hall all red-eyed and “by your command.” I lost my shit. And I did what any good Jedi would do. I unleashed holy hell on that poor Cylon.

It turns out that a guy in a Cylon suit had come by the children’s ward, much like the Imperial 501st do now, dressed in Stormtrooper gear. One of the nurses had mentioned me, and he came all the way over to that wing of the hospital to try and entertain me while my dad was in surgery.

My mom had to pry me off of him.

And the next month, when Darth Vader made an appearance at Cinderella City, the local mall? She made me leave my lightsaber in the car.