I never met my father. I know of him. I was told he was a minister who drank and yelled and was an absolute brute of a man. He took off after the birth of my youngest sister. (apparently he thought creating a family was like a drawing on a piece of paper. If you didn't like what you drew, you could just discard it and start over.)
And so he did. He left me and my two sisters and my mom and took off for parts I'm not concerned about. I have no memories of him nor do I have any concerns or passions.
My earliest memories are of my step father. They involve the five of us living in a terrible two bedroom apartment in a rat infested tenement in East New York Brooklyn.
My stepfather was not much of a prize himself. He fixed air conditioners and refrigerators, He smoked weed, drank beer, but he shaped me. Indirectly, mind you, but he shaped me.
He took us to the movies alot in the 1970s, and saw some of the most iconic films of the decade not on TV, but in a large theater. Shaft, Superfly, Jaws, Earthquake, Towering Inferno, The Exorcist, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, King Kong (1976) Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind..(should i continue?)
He also indirectly contributed to my imaginary universe by starting me off with comic books. He was so sick and tired of me finding his stash that he just gave up and got me my own.
They were all Marvel books, Micronauts, Spider-Man, Shogun Warriors, Captain America, it was a small stash, but it grew. I tried to show my appreciation for what he did by trying to strike up comic book conversations with him. But he was an adult, and i was just his step son, and I was more of an annoyance to him than anything else.
The idiot.
I would always begin the conversation the same way; I would approach with a copy of the Fantastic Four, its group's leader Reed Richards had just used some complicated word that I had no hope of understand on my own, and I would innocently go up to the man and ask what the word meant, and the answer was always the same..Look it up yourself!!
and i did, figuring that I was doing what he wanted like a faithful little step son, and not seeing it as the brush off that it was...As time passed and i grew into a teenager, (my stepfather was kicked out of our house and our lives in 1981) I realized what it was he did to me....
and appreciated it.
It's a self reliance thing, you see. But there was more to it than that. It wasn't that he had indirectly taught me a lesson, it was that he indirectly shaped me in a way. The thinking went like this...Comic Books with complicated words forced me to go to a dictionary, and improved my English. Comic books with scientific concepts compelled me to learn about science, and history, and philosophy and all those other wonderful things.
My comic book collection kept me off the streets, away from drugs and gangs. I learned respect and appreciation for my mom and for the strength and resolve she showed in raising 3 kids successfully in 1980s Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, all the influences of crack and crime and bullshit, and this tiny, frail woman managed to keep us away from all of it..It wasn't easy, (then again, I don't think any life trial or tribulation is supposed to be) But it got done. She steered us clear, kept us safe, and showed more heart than any fictional character i had ever read about.
And so all of those things, My father, step father, comic books, films, crime and drugs, my mom, all of them someway in some aspect contributed to who I eventually became..and i have placed all of those aspects onto my pages.
As a writer, I am a chef. My kitchen is anywhere with a surface for writing or typing. My ingredients are my imagination, and a good pen, and a spiral notebook and a good laptop. And i stir, and I craft, and I bake and broil and I add a little sci-fi, and some fantasy, and some urban flavor and some politics and a host of other things, and eventually what comes out is....
Well, we'll all see together very soon.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a few words to look up.
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