Fantasy
I started reading fantasy when I was a kid. I have always been drawn to magic, to swords, to dragons and to the epic.
I mean, come ON. Reality just can’t compete with Larry Elmore, Tony DiTerlizzi, Todd McFarlane, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Salvador Dali.
So, to spend a few minutes psychoanalyzing myself here, I am a victim of epic fantasy. I have been looking all my life for the artifact, the portal, the power, the deity, the super-suit, the One Ring that would separate me from all of you. I wanted to be infected like Louis, banished like Bruenor, orphaned like Kal-El… I would’ve settled for being slingshot over the rainbow like Dorothy if it would just free me from this ridiculous, mundane life.
I got started on comic books, then Choose Your Own Adventure books, then a very broad sampling of world mythologies. The Greek stuff led me to Homer who, I think, Mrs. Sanders passed over to me in third grade almost as an act of terrorism: “Please, kid, just shut up and leave the poor librarian alone.” (She was nowhere near as cool or solicitous as Mr. Starling, nor could she play the harmonica.) (Further, her daughter was ugly and a bad teacher.)
Of course, the story has been told a thousand times, but in 1983, at the age of eight, I was a rabid consumer of cartoons… so what should be introduced but the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Man, this thing had it all: Fantasy with an archenemy! Magic! The funny-voiced Yoda-esque Dungeon Master! Blasted landscapes! The appearance of the victory of evil and a resurgence of heroism! I was so hooked. What’s worse, there was more: this cartoon was based entirely on a game, and it was a game I wasn’t old enough to play yet! Oh, forbidden fruit!
My cousin Chris is one year older than I, and I desperately wanted Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted to own it. I wanted to read it. I wanted to play it. I wanted to write it. I wanted to live it, but I was accustomed to not getting the thing I wanted when I was a kid. I never needed anything, but my family never had an awful lot of surplus lying around, either; what I wanted was usually trumped by what we needed. I was mostly alright with this; I mean, I probably sulked about it quietly and Skeletor probably got a more-vigorous-than-usual thrashing from He-Man a time or twelve over it, but really, I didn’t have anyone to play D&D with anyway.
July of `84 came around, and as usual, I was at my cousins’ house in Jacksonville for Chris’ birthday when he received the red Dungeons & Dragons box. The one with the Larry Elmore red dragon busting off the box art. The one with the one single warrior confronting the mighty dragon, mano-e-draco, set to either die or to take the unbelievable hoard of gold and be a deserved king! The one I had lusted after ceaselessly for over a year (remember, please, that I had just turned nine).
Chris unwrapped it as I salivated, and he unceremoniously tossed it aside, utterly unimpressed. I do not recall what else may or may not have actually occurred during the remainder of that day. Some months later, I inherited the mostly-complete box from Chris and therein lay what would ultimately become the end of any semblance of rational life for me.
No, I didn’t become the kid that Patricia Pulling was talking about, but 25 — now nearly 35 — years later, let me tell you what I have become.
I have cohabitated with numerous women but never married. I have held jobs — great jobs — but never settled into a career. I have had friends and friendships come and go, hobbies and lifestyles, cities and states of residence, tastes in food and drink, addictions and habits, even lifetime hopes and dreams: they’ve lived lives and died uncelebrated and unmourned deaths in my own epic quest for greatness.
I have never married because I have never known true, mutual, equal, deep, abiding, all-forgiving, all-accepting love like Orpheus and Eurydice or Tristan and Isolde or Odysseus and Penelope. I am good at several things, but certainly cannot be considered the Hephaestus of any given discipline. I have had friends that I would take a bullet or dispose of a body for, but we’ve always somehow managed to grow apart after a time. Almost anything’s good enough for right now, but nothing’s right enough for a permanent decision, it seems: even Dungeons & Dragons has been supplanted completely by Pathfinder for me.
