|
The Smile of the Fool © Thomas S. Roche
I've been writing stories since I could hold a crayon; the first pictures I drew were narrative. These quickly blossomed into 32-panel comic books of increasing complexity. Soon I was turning out my trash-culture chapbooks regularly. I chronicled the bizarre adventures of Biff Nolton, interstellar fighter pilot, moral crusader with a cleft chin, grenade-chucking blaster-wielding bad-ass motherfucker. Biff was a sort of Buck Rogers rip-off, inspired by Saturday-morning serials, which makes me sound a helluva lot older than I am. I took Biff's adventures seriously -- saving the world, liberating the oppressed, flying interstellar fighter craft at breakneck speeds and generally kicking mondo alien ass. But there were elements of humor in Biff's portrayal, elements of the smart-ass epic antipoet I was destined to become if a Mack truck didn't grind me under its tires crossing the street one day on my bike. My Biff was the Fool of the tarot, perhaps blissfully unaware of the doom which awaited him, keeping up his smart-assed comments even in the face of certain doom. But always leading a charmed life, because he would endure and evade all attempts to bring him down. There were elements of parody in those early works, though to call them early works seems hopelessly pretentious and at age six I could hardly have uttered the word parody, let alone, say, have constructed a telling satiric morality play with elements of Shakespearean drama. I was a kid, a fucking kid. All that half-assed pseudointellectual stuff comes later in life, when we learn that in order to be allowed to dream our dreams, we have to convince people we're smarter than they are. The task of the writer in today's economy: To convince people that they are supposed to read what the writer has to write. Ideally, you must convince a lot of people all over the world, including those who speak Estonian and Hindi, that they are supposed to read what you have to write, and thus one day cheerful publishing-company accountants in three-piece suits will show up at your apartment rolling wheelbarrows full of money and carrying Nobel Prizes. That's how it works. Trust me, I've read Writer's Digest.
But when I was six, I didn't understand these complicated geopolitical and economic factors which have since come together to form the late-twentieth-century global-village literary-intellectual zeitgeist. Man, I just wanted to kick some fuckin' ass, blow away some Satan-worshipping Nazi aliens, liberate the oppressed, save the world, get some pussy. I didn't call it pussy, of course, but that's what it boiled down to. Biff, like Buck, like Kirk, like Flash Gordon, always rescued the girl, as well, and even if I didn't yet know what Biff and that crudely-rendered flat-chested stick figure with long hair and no ass were going to do in the back seat of the interstellar fighter plane, I had seen enough James Bond movies and soft-focus scenes in Star Trek to know that they sure as hell were going to do something. And it was something of which, even at that tender age, I wanted Biff to get a little. Of whatever it was he was supposed to be getting.
#
It always astonishes me when adults think that children are not sexual. It's as if acknowledging the sexuality in children's actions would become a license for adults to manipulate and use them inappropriately -- as if adults needed such a license. Or as if adults who manipulate and use children in nonsexual ways, which includes every set of parents I've ever encountered, are somehow protected by the moratorium on children's sexuality. Well, I'm not going to go into a debate on that shit, because there's too much blood to be shed over that issue, too many children suffering and dying in silence in a society that will neither acknowledge their sexuality nor protect it from abuse by adults or, just as importantly, other children. But what little I do know, I know about myself. My behavior was not sexual -- not in that context. It hadn't been translated yet, by my body, into sexuality. But the alphabet of sadomasochism was there in my early years as much as it is now -- the vowels and consonants of a society built on nonconsensual power exchange. Even as sheltered as I was from the realities of the world's struggles, I knew that the guy in tall black books with the riding crop could kick your ass if he wanted. And there wasn't a goddamn thing you could do about it.
#
But what's notable here is that, while Biff was going through his complicated rituals of destruction and rescue, he always found time to fall into the space aliens' clutches. My aliens were not multi-tentacled psychopaths that gibbered and drooled slime. I came of age well after Weird Tales but well before the little gray guys in mirrorshades showed up on keychains around the world. No, my aliens were human and, I swear I am not making this up, in some of the comics I drew these aliens were Nazis. My moral fiber having been bred not on Jesus and Moses but on The Magnificent Seven and Hogan's Heroes, The Longest Day and The Guns of Navarone, and tempered by my older sister's explanations of what happened at Auschwitz and Treblinka, I superimposed upon the alien threat the mark of the worst evil I could conjure -- the very face of the Devil, spewing totalitarian vitriol. Maybe it's just that in my primitive drawing style, a swastika was about the only recognizable symbol of evil that I could manage. But I thought up complicated explanations for why the aliens were Nazis -- Hitler had escaped Berchtesgarden on a teleportation beam; the aliens had preserved his brain in a jar; Hitler was an invading alien in the first place only pretending to be an Austrian, and Nazism was, after all, a virus from outer space. But whoever it was wearing the tall black boots, the main factor is that these aliens, both female and male, would kick Biff Nolton's ass with the abandon of Emperor Hirohito with a fourteen-inch strap-on. Biff would get his ass kicked, his jaw busted, his body swathed in contusions and broken flesh. He would almost be consumed in the conflagration of his crash-landing fighter plane; he would battle his way unarmed through enemy soldiers and finally be taken in chains to the fortress of the evil alien Lord; he would fight through seemingly insurmountable odds; he would endure the agonies of the damned under the cruel implements of his captors and never, never, never give up the safeword, oops, I mean secret plans of course. Sound familiar? Sound like fun? Sound like last weekend?
#
These games I played with myself, these binder-paper epics of proto-sexual illumination and obfuscation, were obviously never intended as erotica. They certainly weren't perceived as such by the adults I showed them to, most of whom chuckled and made comments about how creative I was, occasionally saying things like "I thought these were aliens -- why do they have swastikas on their foreheads?" Nowadays, I don't show my stories to adults. And the aliens don't have swastikas. And I am well aware of the details of what James Bond was doing with his girlfriend in the back seat of the Aston-Martin (and maybe with "Q" when the cameras weren't rolling). I have no doubt about what Buck Rogers and Wilma did in the back of the spaceship. I even teach classes on it. And my characters, most of the time, get much more than a little. But the structure of those power relationships hasn't changed in my fantasies, any more than it's changed in the real world. On the one hand that's depressing: No matter how much progress we seem to make as a culture and a species, there are still guys in big black boots with riding crops -- and the sad, terrible thing is that they are not, ever, aliens. If they were, we could just deport the motherfuckers to Venus and be done with it. But the shape of those boots, the texture of that riding crop, still become to me exactly what all my fears became in those early days of suffering and confusion. They became my fantasies. Because the process of suffering and surviving, the experience of being dominated and standing my ground, the process of resisting evil, is what everything in my life, from paying the rent to buying immortality with Fiction Stamps, is about. There are those in the real world who will get their ass kicked by Satan-worshipping alien motherfuckers in tall boots (or cops or soldiers or priests), without the barest hint of their consent, and it goes without saying that they won't like it one bit. Meanwhile, the sufferings of real-life people can fuel my darkest fantasies -- which should seem like bastardization, theft, irreverence -- but it doesn't. Because for me sex is about resistance, it's about strength, it's about struggle, it's about perseverance -- it's about victory. And only through defeat, through submission, through surrender, can I know the taste of that which I most fear. Know its taste, savor its texture, relish its agonies. So when the real live blackbooted motherfuckers come to kick my ass, I can spit that surrender out of my mouth. And kick their asses instead. With the smile of the fool on my face. © 2001 Thomas S. Roche |
|
