October 05th, 2024

​                             I Could Have Been Him.

I Almost Was: Reflections on the Perils of Reclusiveness 

When I was a kid and living in the city, there was a little moviehouse in the neighborhood that held a special place in my heart. It’s still there, and still retains some of its former magic, but most of that for me at this point is tied up with memories, the magic of nostalgia. It looks pretty much probably as you might imagine. Art deco tiling on the façade, with a flatiron-shaped marque protruding out into the street. The signage is ringed with bulbs that glow softly in the evening and take on a more majestic cast very late at night, after the movie’s over.
I saw some really cool movies there as a kid, and I also saw some stinkers. Sometimes an objectively good movie didn’t leave much of an impression, while an objectively crappy one did. If you get stoned with friends before going to see a movie—especially if it’s your first time getting really high—it’s likely to be a good experience, regardless of the quality of the movie. Also, since I was only eleven or twelve when I started going there, my thumb’s up rating was as much contingent on whether or not there were boobs in the picture. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” for instance, while objectively pretty good, became great when Dracula’s weird wives showed up and displayed their big breasteses (h/t David Allen Grier.)
One movie I saw there—which was great and featured big breasteses (or at least big booties)—was “Crumb.” For those who don’t remember it, this was a documentary about the legendary underground comix artist Robert Crumb. It dealt with the strange trajectory of his life and work, his initial embrace by a wide audience for his contributions to pop culture, and his eventual repudiation of it all. There’s a darkness and honesty to the man’s cartoons, which cut through the cuteness and kitsch common to popular art, and find something much darker beneath. His views of sex—and women—as well as race, disquiet and repel a lot of people, but are channeled honestly and unfiltered from the id with candor and passion. That he demonstrates technical mastery in his craft—his insanely detailed crosshatchings—makes him impossible to dismiss, even by those who hate him. His critique of America is more poignant than didactic, as is his gimlet-eyed evisceration of cultural massification. “Once upon a time,” his work seems to say, “there was real music, and there were real clothes, real food, real cities with real people. Now all that’s gone.” And yet the resonance of that former enchanted world lives on his work.
What I most remember about the documentary is the peek into his personal life, specifically his homelife and childhood in midcentury Philadelphia. His father—like a lot of World War II vets—liked to drink and liked to beat his children, or at least the boys, whom he thought were soft. The mother apparently had her own private demons, probably availing herself of “diet pills” (re: meth) and cooking sherry while publicly playing the role of dutiful hausfrau. Robert and his brothers Charles and Maxon spent all their time up in their treehouse or their bedroom, retreating into the world of comic books. They were also obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” and the movie version from the 50s. Eventually they started drawing their own comics.
Art became an outlet for Crumb’s creativity and it eventually grew to become not just a means of expression, but an obsession, and finally a means to salvation. For Charles, however, it seemed to curdle from an obsession into a means for him to retreat further and further into himself. Eventually, his artwork ceased to reflect not only the world around him, but to eschew even the influence of other artists. He finally retreated to his bedroom and began to succumb to hypergraphia, compulsively scribbling illegible micro-scripts so tiny one would need a magnifying glass to even read them. I suspect, actually, that the scribblings ceased eventually to even be words, and were instead just patterned scratches, more like the choppy waves one sees on a polygraph.
Sometime around the film’s midpoint, Robert returns to his childhood home and finds his brother, now middle-aged, still at home, still living with his mother. His body and mind have atrophied, and his hygiene has lapsed. He has even lost his teeth and doesn’t bother to wear his dentures for the filmed interview. Still, there is something not just charming about him, but a preserved bit of innocence. Beneath the corpulence and lax and atrophied muscle are bits of that youthful handsome face even. And as with many people at the end of their tether, his sense of humor is not just strangely intact, but in some ways enhanced by the mordancy of his predicament.
It's a sad scene, one that’s stayed with me because I think I was almost Charles Crumb. I suppose there’s always time for me to still get there, to retreat within myself to the point where my body and mind go. That said, I came closest to losing it all in my early twenties, so close in fact that I still get scared thinking back on those days.
I was fairly normal maybe until the age of fifteen or so, at which point I felt myself retreating deeper and deeper inside my shell. I spent more and more time reading and writing, and less time engaging with the world. Like a lot of young men, I masturbated constantly, but my fantasy world began to have less and less to do with actual girls.
 I don’t think, by the age of fifteen or so, that I was capable of having a conversation with a female. The internet porn didn’t help, neither did constantly smoking weed, or my parents’ divorce, which saw me moving from city to city.
At last (in those aforementioned early twenties)—still smoking weed, spending too much time looking at porn and still writing—I knew something had to give. I’d lost the few jobs I’d ever had, none of them impressive (pizza deliveryman, factory worker, laundry press operator.) I was still living at home with my mother, our relationship growing not just strained, but weird, as we tended not to spend much time with anyone but each other. I was overweight, out of shape, and smoked so many cigarettes that I felt winded even at rest.
I decided something had to be done. I remembered a strip mall I used to drive past all the time while delivering pizzas around the burbs. In the plaza was a U.S. Army recruiter station, between a framing shop and a Kinko’s, if I remember correctly. I went in there and signed up, “took the bounty,” as the Prussian general urged Redmond Barry in Thackeray’s legendary picaresque. The fact that I was a schlubby weirdo who got winded simply by talking didn’t discourage the recruiter. He had his quota to make, and I was a (sort of) live body. Small wonder that recruiters have the highest suicide rate of anyone in the Army.
After signing on the dotted line, he informed me that I was now in the DEPS, or the Delayed Entry Program. I had a few months to get myself in decent enough shape to go to basic training. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t end up being beaten to death with soap in socks by my fellow recruits who would no doubt sense I was a mama’s boy not up to snuff...
Fast forward almost twenty years and here I sit, in front of this computer, at 1:22 am, staring at the screen and wondering if I made the right choice. Neither my body nor my mind are in what I would describe as great shape now, as the War did a number on me. But I still think I made the right choice, or at least a choice that seemed like the right one at the time.
I never believed in the War (I have to fight in Iraq in order to keep my constitutional rights in America?) but I still believed I had to endure it. For some reason I still can’t explain it, even to myself, let alone you.
I had to get the hell away from home.
It’s not that my life with my mom was uncomfortable, mind you. If anything it was maybe a little too comfortable. I was growing used to hiding from reality, losing myself in a Plato’s Cave of false pleasures. A steady diet of marijuana, weird femdom porn, and H.P. Lovecraft hardbacks followed by daily games of Scrabble with one’s mother does not a healthy mind make. Throw in two packs of Marlboro Red 100s per day and a deep dish pizza per meal and you can see how this movie ends. Probably with a heart attack in my mid-fifties, a bathrobe tie snagged around my neck, and a Barbie Doll in my rectum.
“You broke my heart when you joined the army,” my mom told me, recently. “It killed me.”
She likes to tell me that a lot, and I understand where she’s coming from. Her brother joined the Marines as a young man, and was in constant danger while over there. The Vietcong put bounties on medical corpsman, offering incentives to any Cong who brought back some of their dog tags.  
As a young woman, my mother watched the nightly newscasts and the documentary footage, searching for her brother’s face among the many corpses.
Our media was much more savvy and cynical in the early 2000s and was careful to hide the bodies—refusing eventually to even show the flag-draped coffins being loaded onto the c-17 and c-130 troop carriers. Still, she knew I was over there, and that I could get mangled or die in my quest to get my GI Bill money and (maybe) make a man of myself. Whatever the hell that even means.
I had to do it, and tell the old lady as much whenever the subject comes up.
“Mom, I had no choice. If I’d stayed with you, it would have gotten to the point where I started calling you ‘mother,’ and eventually made a suit out of your skin after you died.” Maybe I could even seat her skeleton in a rocker chair, dress myself in her sweater and a wig, and find a Janette Leigh to stab.
She laughs at this, because it’s crazy hyperbole, but I thinks she also gets where I’m coming from. She’s seen “Crumb” too, and remembers how sadly things ended for Charles.
It’s not my intent to pick on him and if it comes off that way, I apologize. He appeared to be a bright and sensitive man in a world not filled with bright and sensitive people, nor one built for them. “If you let them kill you,” Bukowski warned in one poem, “they will.”
In the case of Charles Crumb, they did.
Eventually, Charles took his own life, as the documentary “Crumb” informs us in the film’s closing title sequence.
That stayed with me, and maybe even spurred me to get my ass in gear. When faced with the choice of kill or be killed, I opted for the former option, picking up my rifle for very convoluted, not patriotic reasons.
 Regardless, I think about Charles, and that movie, whenever I head back to midtown to catch a flick at that theater.
Rest in peace to Charles, and everyone else who took their life. I can’t say that I blame you. I can only say that I still have a little bit too much fight left in me to join you just yet. Things could always change, for the worse, though, which is why I also don’t judge you.