A Walking Tour [Archive]

[originally published on February 10, 2013]

When I visited Dublin in 2008, I learned of something called the James Joyce Walking Tour, a casual stroll that follows the journey of Stephen Dedalus, the young hero of Joyce's Ulysses, as he wanders about The Pale.  I had not read Ulysses, so when taking the portion of tour that I took, the landmarks lacked any literary significance.  But when I returned to the States, I was inspired by my trek through Dublin to visit the local library and check out a copy of Ulysses.  It seemed only right to read this great novel with the added insight of having actually visited its landmarks.  

The other day I was going through my Facebook photos when I came across this picture of myself in Dublin next to the statue of James Joyce.  That's when it hit me ... if taking just a portion of The James Joyce Walking Tour inspired me to slog through Ulysses, perhaps a similar walking tour of Emporia, Kansas, the setting of Pitch, would inspire others to read my book.  

It just so happens that I have a number of photos of Emporia that I took in 1994, about a month before I got sober. I had taken them on a Friday, my day off at the time.  I was drinking that day and feeling nostalgic, so I went out and purchased a disposable "widescreen" camera to document my favorite landmarks of the town, places where many "meaningful" events of my life had occurred.  In hindsight, none of the events were of interest to anyone but me, but when I drank I tended to over-romanticize my past, the way 20-something male writers only write about the women they have bedded (and 20something women only write about the men who have cheated).

Anyway, I ramble.  Here, without further adieu, all it's glory, is the official Matthew Krause Pitch Walking Tour of the historic borough known as Emporia, Kansas.  

You've been warned ...


The Towers

Our tour begins at the Towers Complex, a dormitory on the Emporia State Campus that was referred to as "Twin Towers" by students when I was in school (only now, looking at a campus map, do I realize that "Twin" is not part of its official name).  In the novel Pitch, our young narrator, Travis Lembeau, lives on 4th Floor North (the tower on the right in this picture) in the northwest corner next to the fire escape (which was my room when I lived there in 1984-85).  

A bit of history: 4th North was notorious for housing the rowdiest group of boys each school year.  We trashed our lounge nightly, crawled out the south window to play handball on the roof above the lobby (that section of roof between the two towers), vandalized the women's floors upstairs, and left the fire escapes littered with hundreds of beer cans.  It got to be a tradition for incoming freshmen: if you lived on 4th North, you had a reputation for cretinism to uphold.  Rumor has it that the reason 4th North was switched from a men's floor to a women's floor in the mid 1980s was because each incoming crop of 4th North men became progressively harder to control.  I'm not sure if that was the case, but at some point the gender of the floor did change, and in fact, in 1988, the time my character Travis lives on 4th North, I believe the floor had already switched to female.  That is an inaccuracy in my novel with which you will have to contend. 

The Party House

Travis meets Melanie Claypool, the woman he will eventually marry, at a party held at a fraternity house on the corner of 15th (I think) and Highland, catty-corner from the Towers Complex parking lot.  This house had a notoriety on par with 4th North when I was in school, and during my first week of classes at ESU, I meandered over to this place for a kegger that quickly got out of control.  I stood on the porch watching people dance in the street pictured above, just as Travis does in the novel, and like most angst-ridden 19-year-olds, I contemplated the emptiness of my existence.

I am not sure when the house was torn down, but it was some time before 1994 when this photo was taken (note, it is a vacant lot).  I recently looked on a map and saw that 15th no longer goes east past Highland (that section of road to the lower left of the frame).  Today, that road is a driveway into the Sauder Alumni Center.  But when I was a reckless youth, 15th led to a row of houses where cheap apartments could be rented, and many a party was held along that row.  At least I think it was 15th ... I could be totally wrong about this.  God, growing old and stuff ...

Silent Joe

In the novel, Travis rises early one morning and takes a jog, heading west along 15th and then cutting north along Wooster Drive to jog past Trussler and Singular Hall.  The building on the right in the photo is Trussler, I believe (it could be Singular, for all I know).  That road on the right that is lined with the row of trees is indeed Wooster.  The road in the foreground that runs along the bottom of the screen is 15th, and that small structure you see beyond the SPEED LIMIT 15 sign is Silent Joe.

Silent Joe is a bell tower, so named because the bell was only rung when the ESU Hornets football team won a game. I'm not saying the team was bad because I didn't follow football at the time (and I'm too lazy to dig out my old yearbooks from the garage).  All I know is that Silent Joe did not ring often when I was there, and whenever the team did win, the guys made jokes and said, "How 'bout then Horny-Nuts?"  

Another legend of Silent Joe has to do with that space back in the bushes on the right side.   Apparently, this was supposed to be a great spot for late-night extracurricular activities when the weather cooperated.  Rumor has it that many a couple snuggled in those bushes for a tryst after the bars closed, more for the adventure of it than anything else.  Was I ever in on a late-night bounce alongside Silent Joe?  Hey, I'm a married man; I have no sins to confess.


Wooster Lake

More of a pond than a lake, this small body of water in the center of campus was named for Lyman Wooster, former biology/geology teacher at Emporia State back when it was called the Kansas State Normal School.  You can see my Towers dorm room in this photo, or the room above it anyway.  The North Tower is the far tower, and I lived on the farthest corner of the western face.  The top floor is the eighth, so count down and you will see that my room is blocked by the tip of a tree.

The most interesting thing I can say about Wooster Lake is that at the end of the school year, students dumped their aquariums into it, and the subsequent fall you could see giant goldfish gliding about just below the surface.  The other interesting thing has to do with Wooster Bridge, from which this photo was taken.  Read on, Macduff!


Wooster Bridge

Legend has it that if you kiss someone on Wooster Bridge at midnight, you will marry that person.  Travis and Melanie kiss on this bridge ... not sure if it's midnight.  I tried to kiss a number of girls at midnight on that bridge but only succeeded with one.  She recently celebrated 25 years of marriage to another guy (also a friend of mine), so I guess the legend is bullshit. 

Plumb Hall

This is not the front facade of Plumb Hall but rather the back entrance at the northeast corner.  It was the means by which I entered this building, which was sort of my home away from home.  The English Department is on the 4th floor, and I did a couple of plays in Albert Taylor Hall on the main level.  Not much to say about this photo other than the fact that I rode my mountain bike down this row of stairs quite often, just to annoy the other students.


Bruffs/Night Movies/The Attic/Bruffs again

It's a bloody tragedy that this building burned to the ground several years ago and is now nothing more than additional parking.  When I was in college, this was one of three or four go-to places for the discerning 20something alcoholic.  I enjoyed this place so much that I even set a small scene there in my novel, when Travis waits and watches baseball while Melanie attends an AA meeting further down the street.

Too many adventures here to mention.  I drank too much beer, I fought too many men (and lost most of the time), I fondled too many women (and got slapped all of the time), I danced the white man shuffle so poorly that I became something of a joke to the patronage.  But I did watch baseball here sometimes, and enjoyed their hamburgers, and drank their beer.  I have this bizarre memory of trying to watch a game somewhere in 1993, and the sound system of the place was blasting loud grunge rock of the time by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, et al.  I was crouched along next to the pinball machine, watching the game on a tiny TV suspended from the ceiling, and next to me, a rather large bearded man from the music department was playing pinball.  He was clearly a voice major, for he sang in the most beautiful operatic tenor.  What was he singing?  Each and every song that was playing on the sound system.

Imagine, if you will, trying to watch a ball game while Luciano Pavorotti played pinball next to you singing "Even Flow" by Pearl Jam, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "The Day I Tried To Live" by Soundgarden, or "Plush" by Stone Temple Pilots.  Just close your mind and picture that a minute.  I'll wait right here while you descend into madness.  In fact, maybe I'll listen to some old Stone Temple Pilots on YouTube while I wait ...

The House On Exchange Street

I lived here.  It was my whole world for many years.  I did not start following sports until I had roommates who made me watch football here.  The first Super Bowl I watched from start to finish was at this house (January 22, 1989, Super Bowl XXIII, Bengals 16, 49ers 20).  My roommates and I used to sit in lawn chairs on that patch of roof next to the porch with our stereo cranked up playing KISS and old Van Halen.  It was a good place to live, a good place to die.  Thankfully, I never died.

And in the back yard was ...

The House Behind Exchange Street

My first ever apartment was in the basement of this house.  You can see that weird angled structure on the left side of the brown house in the frame ... that was the stairwell to the basement.  A few years later, I moved to the ground-level apartment.  I parked a sporty 1983 Dodge Omni under that carport on the right.  On warm spring days with summer closing in, I would sit on the porch on the left and drink beer with my friends.  When a local vagrant came down the alley to fish in the dumpster for cans to cash in, I would give him all of my empties and a couple of beers to boot.  My friends told me I wasn't doing him any favors, that I was just contributing to his alcoholism and his poverty.

Maybe I was.

I did a lot of writing here.  Back in those days, I drank and I wrote, and on occasion I slept.  The place was something of a dump, but it felt like the Taj Mahal to me.  When I had a day off, I liked nothing better than going to the local mom'n'pop video store, renting a stack of VHS tapes, and spending the afternoon watching movies with my friends.

I had a lot of weird things happen here.  I had a couple of break-ins, but all they ever stole was my first edition hardbound copy of The Dark Knight Rises.  Later, a friend of mine told me she knew who had stolen this rare graphic novel, a guy she had been seeing who bragged about it, so one night when she was at his house she stole it back for me.  The guy was later arrested when he was caught stealing a license plate since his own had expired.

As you can probably guess from this walking tour, nothing much happened in Emporia while I was there, at least not enough to write a book about.  The crazy thing about fiction is we must take those moments that perhaps resonate only with ourselves and work them into a narrative context.  As I said in the afterword of my novel, Emporia was magical to me when I first arrived.  It was the first place I lived away from the town I grew up in, and thanks to some really fine instructors at ESU, I was exposed to a lot of culture I might have otherwise missed.

Today, I return to Emporia, and realize it is just a small town in Kansas, a fine town to be sure, but certainly not the Paris of the 1920s that I imagined it to be way back when.  Still, like Abbie Hoffman's enigmatic Woodstock Nation, Emporia travels with me always.  

One of my favorite instructors, Dr. Mel Storm, once told me that when I left Emporia for graduate school at Kansas State, it was one of the best things that could have ever happened for me.  In hindsight, I realize he was correct.  Nevertheless, at the time, leaving Emporia was almost as hard as putting down the drink.  To punctuate my time there, I got a DUI the night before I moved my things north to Manhattan.  It was as if a part of me wanted to sabotage the move.

In hindsight, I guess I didn't know how to leave Emporia.  Just as I don't know how to end this walking tour.  So I guess I should just pull the Band-Aid off and be done wi--

The last five months of a good man ... [Archive]

[originally published on February 5, 2012]

This is my father.  He was born May 11, 1926.  He died December 17, 2012.  He was buried December 21, 2012, the day the world was supposed to end according to the Mayan calendar.  In the photograph, he is on a fishing trip in the Quetico in Canada.  He is telling a story about the fish he almost reeled in that got away.  

My father was a storyteller, and a good one at that.  As such, I managed to follow in his footsteps in that regard.  What occurs below is a story of sorts, told not so much for the pleasure of the telling but to put it in perspective for myself.  I have taken awhile to put it together because the last five months of my father's life are still a blur, like a bad dream I had while sleeping through the worst disaster in the world.  Or something as mythic, poetic, and ultimately pretentious as that.  Here we go ...

THEN AND NOW

This is me on July 22, 2012.  As you can see, I am smiling.  I just lost my day job three days earlier, but I also received word that my novel Pitch had won first place in the Balboa Press Fiction Writing Contest and was going to be published.  

My father was going into surgery the following Wednesday, but he felt confident, as did the surgeon (who I still believe would say anything for a quick commission voucher).  

On this day, I held this vision of the future, of my wife and I visiting my parents the following autumn and Dad taking us all out to dinner to celebrate the publication of Pitch.  

That was what Dad liked to do when good things happened to his children. 

This is me on December 21, 2012, exactly five months (minus one day) from the date of the color photo above.  I do not know if I look older, but I certainly do not look happier. 

On this day, we buried my father.  It was Friday.  Dad had died on Monday, December 17.  

On Tuesday, December 18, I began compiling a video montage of photos and clips of Dad set to music, to be shown at his funeral.  

I began at 4:00 p.m. Tuesday afternoon and worked until 6:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, December 19.  Then my wife and I got in the car and drove 1330 miles to Kansas for Dad's funeral.  

It took us 23 hours because of the ice and snow.  

That is part of the reason I looked this way on Friday.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

This video depicts what Hermosa Beach looked like on July 22, three days before Dad's surgery.  The photo of me smiling above was taken in Sharkeez, what used to be my favorite spot on Pier Avenue.  I was happy in the photo because I had spent the day on the beach with my wife, and then we had gone to Sharkeez for lunch.  Baseball was on the television, the Dodgers were still in first place, I believe, and if memory serves, they were winning that day.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

One week later, my wife and I went to Hermosa Beach again with my friend Greg Yoder and his family.  I had a good time playing with my Action Movie Effects app on my iPod Touch, as you can see in the video above.  It was a beautiful day, and I was happy, and all was well. Mom was trying to text me, but without wi-fi, I did not get the text.  It read: Call me! Your father is in critical condition!

It just so happened that July 29, 2012, was my parents anniversary.  They had been married 62 years.  I was going to call them later, assuming Dad was recovering from his surgery just fine since he was always a tough old bear.  I had no idea that Mom was trying to text me.

At about 2:30 that afternoon, I was laying down on a towel in our cabana (featured in video above, right).  I was using my back-pack as a pillow.  As I lay there, I heard something buzzing in the back-pack--my cell phone.  I dug it out to answer it.  It was my brother, Shane.  He told me that there had been a major leakage from Dad's surgery, resulting in septic shock.  Dad was in cardiac arrest and having kidney failure.  Shane and Mom had made the call to have Dad shipped to a Wichita Hospital, where doctors would fight to save him, although the prognosis was grim.

My wife and I left the beach, feeling helpless.  We went to Sharkeez to try and eat, but as we were looking at the menu, we decided that it would be better if we left the beach, went home, packed our suitcases, and drove to Kansas to be with the family.  We headed to the back exit of Sharkeez, which opened to the parking lot where we were parked.  One of the kids working there at Sharkeez stood in our way.  He told us that we could not go out the back, that we would have to go out the front and walk all the way around the building.

I walked down Pier Avenue shouting and cursing this kid, and Sharkeez, and humanity.  It was the only thing I could do to keep myself from breaking into tears.  It should be noted that I have never gone back to Sharkeez since that day.  

February 5, 2013

I am big on dates, on numbers, on marking the passage of time.  For example, 22 years ago today, I got sober the first time, crawling into an AA meeting with a court-appointed counselor threatened to pull me out of graduate school and put me into mandatory treatment.  It only lasted two years, then another year of outdoor practice brought me back into recovery for good.

Much time has passed since I began this chronicle of the last five months of my father's life.  I think when I get to that moment, sitting in Sharkeez, wondering what to do--a moment punctuated by a rude employee refusing to let me go out the back way to get to my car--I find that I vapor-lock.  

It was July 29, 2013, my parents 62nd anniversary, and from that day until Dad's funeral on December 21, 2012, everything is a whirlwind, a pastiche of awful moments chronicled only in photos.

The view from the 6th Floor of St. Francis in Wichita, Kansas, taken from the elevator wells while heading back to the parking lot after another long day with Dad.  Beautiful sunset, gazing out at my old stomping grounds, wishing I was anywhere but here.

The view from my seat in Dad's hospital room, gazing back out into the hall towards the nurse's station.  Not sure why I took this photo.  I think I was in awe of the ugliness of the moment and didn't think I would later believe it real if I did not document it. 

The parking lot in Susan B. Allen Memorial in El Dorado as I waited for the transport, which was bringing Dad from Wichita back to his hometown, where he would later die.

Moving Dad into SBA.  All of us were telling ourselves that this was a good thing, and I guess to have him closer made it so, but no one truly believed this was the start of some miraculous recovery.

On 12/12/12 at exactly 12:12, I did this screen capture of the face of my iPod, using my own image as the wallpaper.  I was hoping there would be some sort of positive mojo in the numbers (12 disciples of Christ, 12 Steps of AA, etc.)

Five days later, my father died. 

This is the wallpaper I have on my phone today.  I just now took the screen shot.  Notice the time ... I did not plan that.  I am told that when you see the recurrence of 11:11, the Universe is trying to tell you something.

Storyteller

I told you my father was a storyteller.  I told you that he is a reason I am a storyteller too.  Below is one of my favorite photos of the two of us.  As you can see, Dad is telling a story, and I am listening, clearly enjoying it.  My Mom is sitting in the shotgun side of the car.  When my wife snapped this picture, I don't think any of us had any idea of how important it would become for us.

Epilogue

Back in the 1950s, when my father was refereeing high school basketball games in Western Kansas, someone turned this ring in to the lost and found.  Nobody claimed it.  Weeks later, at the end of the season, when the lost and found was being cleared out, someone gave it to Dad, and he put it in his jewelry box and forgot  about it.
  
In 1994, when I got sober, Dad found this ring, polished it up, and gave it to me.  I used to half-jokingly refer to it as my "Spirit guide."  

It's not a joke anymore.  

Peace.

Confessions of an American Coward [Archive]

[originally published November 2, 2012]

When I was a senior in high school, our government teacher came up with a creative plan for our major research paper.  Every student would be made to sign a contract, which outlined an agreement of which grade the student wanted on the paper and what he was willing to do to earn it.  If he didn’t sign the contract, that student failed, simple as that.  To this day, I feel that the contracts were wrong, but like everyone else I signed it all the same.

After we were a few days into the research process, a good friend of mine named Harry came up with an idea for a funny political cartoon about our government teacher.  Since I had some modest art skills, I drew the cartoon, a parody of the movie poster for 1980s Flash Gordon, depicting our government teacher as a leather-clad Ming the Merciless.  A second friend, Paul, made photocopies of this political cartoon and covertly pinned it up all over the school.  So began my first taste of activism.

Late in the day of our cartoon’s distribution, I was called into the Vice Principal’s office.  It seemed that one of the teachers had turned in the cartoon to the front office, and since the VP was my former art teacher, he recognized my style of caricature art and immediately knew that I was cartoon’s artist.  

In the VP’s office, I was harangued, insulted, criticized, and verbally abused.  I was threatened with a timely three-day suspension, which would mean I would miss key finals in three of my classes, and since this was near the end of the school year and I was only an average student, missing those finals would mean I would fail those classes.  As a result, I would not be able to graduate, not be able to walk across the stage with my classmates, and to add insult to injury, I would not be able to participate in the high school musical, Oklahoma, in which I had a key part (our theater instructor was already scrambling to replace me). 

What did I do?  I buckled.  I ratted out my two friends, the VP spent most of the afternoon threatening and attacking us (a pretty traumatic form of mental torture as I recall it now), and finally he decided to go easy on us and issue 15 hours of detention as our punishment.  I breathed a sigh of relief, of course.  I could take my finals, participate in Oklahoma, and still walk across the stage in May.  Never mind that our government teacher’s forced contract was wrong and possibly in violation of contract laws about coercion.  Our protest was squelched without much protest at all because I was too concerned about my own comfort to stand up for what I felt was right.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working with some audio interviews from a graduate student writing her thesis on the growth of atheism and agnosticism among her generation.  One of the interviews was with a young man who had tried to form a student atheist organization in his high school.  He had gone through the proper channels, even gotten an instructor to sponsor the group, but once he began circulating flyers inviting other students to join, he was called into the office by his fundamentalist VP and run through the wringer.

Now, I love and believe in God, so I do not agree with this young man's believes, but I do believe he has every right to form his group and meet with other like-minded students.  He even got a teacher to sponsor the group, as I said, so he had navigated the process correctly.  Nevertheless, his efforts were thwarted by religious teachers and administration who could not stand the idea of students having an opposing view.  

The young man admits that he could have pushed for his right to have this school group, but in the end he gave in, took down the posters, and disbanded the organization.  What was the deciding factor?  He was told that if he went forward with his atheist student group, he would not be allowed to participate in commencement exercises.  “I wanted to walk the stage,” the lad admits, so his own personal comfort superseded his fight for personal expression.  

Why do I share these two stories?

Two weeks ago, I watched the documentary A Whisper to a Roar at a North Hollywood theater and stayed afterwards for a discussion with the film’s writer/director Ben Moses.  A Whisper to a Roar chronicles the stories of democracy activists in five countries--Egypt, Malaysia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe--as they fight against oppressive dictatorships, risking imprisonment, torture, and death to bring freedom to their people.  It is a compelling film, and I found myself trembling afterwards, not only from the witnessed horrors at the hands of these brutal regimes but from the inspiration I drew from the democracy activists themselves as they refused to bend when faced with insurmountable odds.

One of the most inspirational figures in the film is Roberto Patiño, a young student who founded VotoJoven in Venezuela, which “promotes youngsters' registration to vote, continuous participation, and monitoring of electoral processes” (A Whisper to a Roar website). 

Roberto is a charismatic young man, passionate about freedom and hungry to advance the cause of democracy in his country.  He clearly loves Venezuela and is willing to put everything at risk for the individual liberties of his fellow citizens.

When speaking to Ben Moses after the film, my friend asked about Roberto and if he continues to be safe.  Moses informed us that Roberto’s life is in danger every minute of the day.  This was terrifying to me, especially since A Whisper to a Roar documents with an unflinching eye some of the tortures that were inflicted upon activists from all five countries in the discussion.  The idea that Roberto risks such horrors to advance his personal cause is mind-blowing to me.

But then I thought of myself, and of this young atheist I mentioned.  How quickly we two cushy American kids gave in, simply because we were faced with some minor discomforts.  Let me look solely at myself for a moment.  Suppose I had stood my ground on principle and let myself be suspended for three days?  So what?  I fail a couple of classes, but I can make them up in summer school.  I don’t get to walk across the stage during commencement, but all these years later that seems like a minor sacrifice.  And sure, I don’t get to participate in the school musical, but let’s get real here.  For guys like me, high school theater was an exercise in ego-stroking, not an opportunity to polish my skills as an actor (which are minimal at best). 

Is it such a small price to pay to do what's right?

In his book Everyday Survival, Laurence Gonzales examines how the more comfortable a people become, the more blinded they are to the very real dangers surrounding them.  He cites as an example the western tourists who stood on the beaches in Thailand in 2004, watching the approach of a massive tsunami, and were subsequently sucked out into the ocean depths because they could not mentally process the danger.  Likewise, in 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted, tourists actually moved into the evacuated area and camped because they had never seen an active volcano before (many of them died under a cubic mile of debris).  Hell, in my home state of Kansas, whenever a tornado touches ground, there are dozens of blind fools standing on their porches to watch.

I would like to hope that I am not so foolish as to stare down the wrath of God, but perhaps in smaller ways I am just like the ignorant victims discussed in Gonzales’ book.  Unlike Roberto Patiño, I have never had so much at stake that I was willing to put everything at risk.  I grew up in America, in a comfortable home with loving parents, with an understanding that my rights would always be protected and my liberties would never be compromised.  Perhaps that is why at 18 I crumbled so easily when my high school VP threatened me with a few minor inconveniences.

Would I have the strength of a Roberto Patiño or any of the other activists in A Whisper to a Roar?  Would I be able to gather in a public square, march against armed guards, and risk imprisonment or worse?

I honestly do not know.  As Americans, we go about our business, looking over our shoulder while assuring ourselves that it can’t happen here.  And that’s kind of frightening to me.  We are far too comfortable  when kids abandon principles so they can participate in commencement exercises.  And we clearly know very little about personal sacrifice when a little girl like Jessica Ahlquist is praised as “courageous” because she got a school prayer removed from a wall (I was rather annoyed by the “brave little girl” moniker attached to Jessica since she never really risked anything of substance for her petty little cause).

The best I can say is that I do believe it can happen here, but I hope that it does not.  But if it does, if I am called to the test, I hope I have the stomach for the challenge.  I hope I can stand up for what’s right the way Roberto Patiño et al. do in A Whisper to a Roar.  At the very least, I have A Whisper to a Roar as a reference, a touchstone, and if forced activism is in my future, there are plenty of role models in that film that provide a blueprint for courage.

I send my thoughts and prayers to these people daily.  Perhaps some day, I will able to send more.  In the meantime, I hope I can honor them as they honor me, as enthusiasts for freedom and as fellow human beings.

For more information about A Whisper to a Roar, please visit their website: http://awhispertoaroar.com/

Let the Right One In: The Company of Children [Archive]

This piece about one of my favorite films, Let the Right One In, was originally posted by me on a Salon.com blog on February 7, 2010. When I deleted my Salon account, I thought this piece was lost forever, but a fellow fan of the Let the Right One In, who has built an entire website devoted to the film, recently contacted me explaining that he had made a copy of the piece and that he wished to post it on his own website.  I had no problem with that, but upon rereading it, I realized it was a bit wordy and over-written, so here below is a slightly better edited version for your education and enjoyment.

I was on one of those message boards they have on IMDb, where people can post topics and start online discussions about the movies they love. On a board devoted to the Swedish film Let the Right One In, which I and many others have dubbed “Twilight for grown-ups,” one of the adult men opened a thread where he admitted a strong attraction to actress Lina Leandersson, who plays the child vampire Eli and was herself 12 years old at the time of shooting. “I’ve never felt this before,” the man said. “Is something wrong with me?”

At once, other posters on the board called this man out, labeling him a pervert and a pedophile. I refrained from posting anything myself, but I do admit sharing the sentiments of the others on the board … at first. It was only when I reflected a bit on the film (which is one of my favorites) and the startling performance by Lina Leandersson that I began to at least appreciate what I believe the man meant to write but failed to articulate.

First of all, I cannot speak for an anonymous poster on a message board, but I can speak for myself. And before I turn my attention to the young Ms. Leandersson, let me explain what I find attractive when it comes to women in movies.

I am not really one to fall into the mainstream male’s obsession with sex goddesses. There are many actresses out there who are indeed beautiful, but I personally find few of them attractive in the sense that I lie awake pining for them. I am not aroused by actresses because of the way they look; I am instead aroused by the characters they play.

For instance, I’m not really "turned on" by Meg Ryan, although I do think she is beautiful, but I am extremely turned on by Sally Albright, the character she plays in When Harry Met Sally. I do not know Meg Ryan personally, but she is a talented actress and gives such a charming and honest performance in this film that I do feel that I know Sally Albright. As such, when I first saw When Harry Met Sally back in college, I actually pined for Sally Albright, wishing-–nay, praying–-that a girl like her would come into my life some day.

Who else has turned me on in movies?

I like Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ms. Allen is cute as a button anyway, but Marion is the kind of woman I’ve always found attractive–-tough, resourceful, minimal bullshit, but not so strong-willed that she forgets how to be a woman. I always thought Indy was a schmuck for letting her get away, and one of the reasons I liked the last Indiana Jones movie was because Marion returned and Indy finally did right by her.

Tracy Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. James Bond always has his pick of the most beautiful women in the world, but there’s something about Tracy that makes him want to settle down, and Ms. Rigg does a wonderful job of letting the rest of us see just what that “something” is.

Catherine Chandler (Linda Hamilton) in the 1987-89 TV series Beauty and the Beast. A smart, principled woman with reserves of tenderness that allow her to see past Vincent’s beastly appearance to his poetic soul. Sadly, Ms. Hamilton eschews her more feminine side as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, making me forget Catherine all to quickly.

All of this goes to illustrate what I think is often overlooked in most sex symbols. When it comes to celebrities, we don’t fall in love with the people themselves; we fall in love with their personas.  When I go to a movie, I am not paying just to see a certain actor or actress; rather, I am wagering the price of a ticket that I might get to experience that wonderful moment when a talented performer meets a well-written character and manages to make movie magic (something Meryl Streep seems to do almost effortlessly).

So … back to this issue of 12-year-old Lina Leandersson and the message board poster who found her so attractive.

Let’s get this much out of the way: Lina Leandersson is a lovely little girl, currently blossoming into a beautiful young woman. But at the time she made Let the Right One In she was very much a child, a little girl.

I do not think our mysterious poster is harboring the thoughts of a pederast where Lina Leandersson is concerned. Rather, I think that Eli, the character she plays, touched something in his heart as it did mine, and like me he has found the character to be haunting and unforgettable. There is something very appealing about Eli and yet something very tragic, and that is what makes her so unique and Lina Leandersson’s performance so special.

For those of you who have not seen Let the Right One In, it is a love story of sorts between two lonely creatures: A 12-year-old boy named Oskar (Kare Hedebrandt) who is so brutally bullied at school that he retreats into homicidal revenge fantasies; and Eli, who appears to be a 12-year-old girl but is really a 200-year-old creature of the night (there is more to her than her vampirism, but that is one of the movies best-kept secrets). What starts out as a series of casual conversations in the playground outside their block flat grows into a cautious friendship, arousing within Oskar and Eli a hunger for human connection.

It must be stated that Eli is not a sexualized creature for reasons that go well beyond her vamprism. However, because of her unique situation, she has been forced to call upon her sexuality numerous times in order to survive. Although an immortal, Eli still has the same vulnerabilities as other vampires, such as not being able to come out in the daylight (she won’t sparkle like Edward Cullen; she’ll burst into flames). At the same time, she is trapped in the body of a child. Finding a place to sleep and an adult to protect her is no easy task.

When we first meet Eli, she is traveling with Hakan (Per Ragnar), a broken, withered old man with the kind of unhealthy appetites that might turn our stomach. Hakan clearly desires Eli (in the book, he believes he is in love with her), and Eli keeps him at bay with the promise of sexual favors provided he do her bidding. This bidding not only entails proofing their apartment from the sun and guarding Eli during the day, but also the unsavory task of stalking and murdering victims for Eli, draining their blood so she does not have to go on the hunt herself (the main reason for this is so that Eli will not go out and create other vampires, but when she is forced to do her own hunting, she violently twists her victim’s head off after feeding before she can infect the entire body).

As unsettling as this may sound, the film is actually quite beautiful, handling its more violent elements with grace and aesthetic distance while keeping its focus on this friendship between Oskar and Eli. Although she does awful things, Eli is not a monster but a fractured little soul who has forgtten how it feels to love and be loved. And although Oskar’s homocidal ideations are frightening at first, his eyes flicker with such loneliness that we realize he has not been lost just yet.

Let the Right One In resonated with me, and not just because I like horror movies. I found myself identifying with Oskar from the outset, sympathizing with him during his torment, longing to protect him from the evils of his life, and nodding with understanding when he stood alone in the playground, stabbing a tree with a knife and pretending it was one of his tormentors.

It was because of this connection that I totally welcomed Eli into the story. I saw Eli as Oskar saw her, and I sensed his great relief when he came to realize that there was another in the world who wanted to understand him. We have all craved this kind of intimacy in our lives at one time or another, but at the tender age of 12, that unsteady precipice before puberty, our desire for a connection is almost painful. 

What person wouldn’t be attracted to Eli? She is like that perfect invisible friend. When I was 12, I would have gone to the ends of the earth for someone like Eli to come into my life. In fact, while watching Let the Right One In, I was reminded of the scary stories my brothers told me when I was child, tales of a girl named Patty who had allegedly died in our house before we moved in and whose spirit now dwelt in our attic. Rather than being terrified, I imagined that Patty’s spirit would come down into my room at night to play with me.

That is what I thought when this film introduced me to Eli. Of course I was attracted to her, not as an unstable adult to a child, but as the fragile 12-year-old who sometimes still lives inside, a vulnerable little tike who would have loved to have a friend like Eli. As I said, I saw her through Oskar, and I sort of saw myself through both of them … an interesting idea as I think about it, because my favorite passage from the book is about Oskar having a similar experience:

Eli turned her face to Oskar’s, said:

“I …”

She closed her mouth. Then pressed a kiss on Oskar’s lips.

For a few seconds, Oskar saw through Eli’s eyes. And what he saw was … himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love.

For a few seconds.

There are fans of the book that find this to be one of its beautiful passages. It is many times more beautiful than anything I have read in Twilight. In a few short sentences, author John Ajvilde Linqvist illustrates what it is that attracts us to others, that in fact makes us love them.

We see our best selves through their eyes.

I saw myself as Oskar while watching this film, saw myself through Eli’s eyes, and felt that intense connection to her well after the film had ended. That, I think, is what the message board poster was trying to say. Not that he lusted after a 12-year-old girl and wanted to do awful things to her. But that he remembered what it was like to be 12 years old, to be alone, to feel advancing changes of puberty on the horizon, and to look at someone your own age, feel those first pangs of attraction, and wonder how it would feel if the two of you were friends.
That doesn’t mean he is a pederast. That means that where he was concerned, the movie worked its magic. And isn’t magic what we’re all looking for anyway? 

The End Of The World [Archive]

[originally published December 27, 2012]

One of the big scientific events in 1973 was Comet Kohoutek, which according to the world’s leading astronomers was to attain perihelion the day after Christmas that year.  At first, this was exciting news, but as Christmas and Kohoutek drew closer, religious nut-jobs came wriggling out of the cracks like fat cockroaches.  One such nut-job was a pastor named David Berg, who announced that Kohoutek had come to destroy the world on Christmas morning.  Berg claimed that he had been visited by Jesus Himself, who promised to deliver Berg and his followers to heaven just before Kohoutek struck. 

Mom assured me that it was all a big lie, that David Berg was something we called a “crackpot,” but I still I lay awake on Christmas Eve, not listening for the clip-clop of Santa’s reindeer but counting the minutes until God’s rogue comet destroyed everything I knew or loved.  Of course the world and I survived, but that did not stop the fear.  Kohoutek had opened up the floodgates.  Gone were any thoughts I may have had of a comforting Jesus, to be replaced by the pissed-off über-warrior of a Jonathan Edwards sermon.  David Berg and his successors had polluted my Messiah. 

One Saturday night during my sixth grade year, I noticed Mom sitting down to watch an independent film shot in Des Moines, Iowa, which was being sponsored by one of the churches in the nearby city.  Before the film began, the pastor of the church that presented the film appeared on the screen to give us a chilling introduction.  I did not recall all of his words, but one concept hung in the air that night like cigarette smoke:  Jesus was coming back very soon … and he would come as “a thief in the night.”  The film we then saw bore that very title--A Thief In the Night.  I was absolutely terrified.  

Long before the immense popularity (and financial prosperity) of the Left Behind series, A Thief In the Night was the first “Christian-made” film to exploit the campfire horror stories of Revelations.  The plot of the film is straightforward:  Patty Myers (Patty Dunning), a free-spirited non-Christian, awakens one day to find that her very Christian husband has been whisked away by the Rapture (the moment in Christian eschatology when Christ comes to take up his followers into heaven).  With all the real Christians gone from earth, The United Nations forms a global fascist organization called UNITE, forcing everyone to take “the mark of the beast” so that they can be identified.  Those who refuse “the mark” are put to death, and pretty soon Patty finds herself on the run with a bunch of creepy men in UNITE pith helmets hot on her heels.  At the end of the film, Patty is cornered on a bridge, and these crazy UNITE thugs throw her to her death.  Suddenly, Patty awakens in her bed, relieved to discover that it was all a dream.  She goes to the bathroom and discovers that her husband has indeed been raptured, just like in her dream, and she collapses in tears, shouting “No!  No!  No!”  The final shot is of a ticking clock with the title reading THE END … IS NEAR!

A Thief In the Night was followed by three sequels that I have managed to avoid:  A Distant Thunder, in which Patty and friends are arrested and given a choice to accept “the mark” or be put to the guillotine; Image of the Beast, in which Patty meets her demise (in a terrifying scene that some horror critics have compared to the films of Lucio Fulci); and The Prodigal Planet, which I know little about but I understand is the equivalent of beating a dead horse.  The movies are low-budget in terms of acting and production values, but they still pack a punch for impressionable children.  One of the reasons for this is that they remove the last safety valve viewers have when watching horror films--they suggest that they not be dismissed as “only a movie,” that they are, in fact, a depiction of what is in store for us in the very near future.  As such, End-Times movies, for the Christian, are like the disturbing ending of The Town That Dreaded Sundown (in which a real-life serial killer who was never caught by authorities is seen sitting in a movie theater--perhaps yours!--watching the very movie that you just saw!).  

It took me years to get past the nightmares brought on by A Thief In the Night.  Popular Christian culture, lathered into frenzy by Watergate, the Cold War, and a Recession, did not help matters much.  Suddenly, the End Times were everywhere.  Hal Lindsay was among the first to run with the ball, as his The Late Great Planet Earth (which put current events in the context of Biblical prophecy) was a bestseller.  Around the same time, my Baptist friends in school were pushing Jack Chick’s creepy comic book tracts like heroin, beautifully drawn little narratives about sinners suffering eternally in Hell and wishy-washy Christians enduring the post-Rapture Tribulation after being left behind.  I specifically remember opening a Chick Tract once to an image of a Christian strapped to a table, being tortured with electric shock and ordered renounce his faith.  

In the summer of 1979, I signed up for church camp, something I had been doing since the seventh grade.  Church camp, if you’ve never been there, is a week-long wilderness retreat for teens where they can commune with kids their own age, learn a bit more abut God’s love, and have a little break from the parents.  By the time I had finished my sophomore year, I had made a few friends at church camp and looked forward to seeing them every June.  But the 1979 camp retreat was a little different.  In normal summers, that number of teens in attendance usually rose to around 30 or 40; in 1979, our numbers were exactly nine--four boys and five girls.  With such a small group, our so-called Christian counselors had to get creative with the lessons, and one afternoon, they came up with the most disturbing “educational” exercise I have ever experienced.  

It started when one of the youth ministers--let us call him Steve--revealed himself to be an apocalyptic nut-job.  He had read Revelations thoroughly and was well-versed in the popular opinion of how the End Times were going to be played out.  One afternoon, when I was talking to him about high school and how tough it was to fit in, he stopped me in mid-sentence and ordered me to stop worrying about it.  “There’s a good chance, Matt, that you won’t be graduating from high school anyway.”

I could not believe my ears, so I asked him why.

“You just finished your sophomore year,” Steve said.  “That means you’re on pace to graduate in 1981.  Jesus will come back before 1981.  If you’re a Christian, you’ll be part of the Rapture, and if you’re not, then there probably won’t be much need for high schools down here anyway.”

I was terrified all over again.  How could this be?  Steve later explained how Jesus said that the generation that “witnessed the budding of the fig tree” would be the generation to see the Lord’s return.  The budding of the fig tree was the birth of the nation Israel, which happened in 1948.  According to the Bible, a generation of judgment is 40 years, but within that time, Jesus will come back and call up his church, leaving the rest of mankind in Tribulation for another seven years.  So, 1948 plus 40 equals 1988.  But subtract the seven-year Tribulation, and what do you have?  1981.  I could already see new nightmares coming.  

As if Steve’s prophecy wasn’t bad enough, he then had to initiate a lesson surrounding the End Times.  One morning after breakfast, he called the nine of us teens into the lounge.  “Each of you is going to be given an identify for role-playing purposes,” he said.  “We are then going to place you alone in the storm shelter.  While you are there, we ask you to imagine that the US and the Soviet Union have engaged in global nuclear war.  You are in a fallout shelter.  There are nine of you, but you only have enough supplies for six.  That means that three of you will have to be cast out of the shelter, to be sent to your deaths by radiation sickness.  Your assignment is to decide which three that will be.”

It was traumatizing enough to be a teenager, to maneuver the caste system of high school.  Now Steve wanted us to up the ante, to place our pathetic high school politics in an end-of-the-world scenario and imagine how we would react.  I was already sick with fear because of Steve’s mathematical Judgment Day equation.  I was already falling into depression because the world would end before I got out of high school.  Now Steve wanted us to experience the horror, to confront ourselves with the hard decisions we would have to make in the face of the coming holocaust.  If church camp was about making a connection through God’s love, I never felt more distant from it than I did at that moment.

If I had to blame anyone for my fifteen-year departure from God and subsequent comfort taken in alcohol, I would blame the apocalyptic Christians.  Despite what they may say, the bill of goods they are selling is a world without faith.  As Chris Hedges points out in his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, the Christian Right today preys on the weak through a theology of despair.  They seem oblivious to Jesus’ most urgent command to Peter (deemed so important that the Lord repeated it three times) to “Feed my sheep!”  

The Apocalyptic Christians do not believe the sheep are worth feeding or the world worth saving.  They celebrate the calamities in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, all the time pointing to chapter and verse that reinforces their belief in a day of reckoning.  As Hedges states on alternet.org, “Believers … clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge.”

For the longest time, I wanted nothing to do with God.  The Apocalyptic Christians had scared me away from Him.  And that was the worst thing of all.  It doesn’t matter how much good they think they are doing; the fact is, any doctrine that compels a man to flee from God is not a healing doctrine at all.  Rather it is an ideology of sickness, destruction, exclusivity, and judgment.  And its bitter message of anger and hopelessness is worse than anything any non--believer has ever tried to tell me.

*   *   *   *

On Friday, December 21, 2012, the world was supposed to end.  For me, it did, for that was the day I attended the funeral of my father.  When I got sober back in 1994, it was my father who took me into his home, my father who listened to my alcoholic blatherings without judgment, my father who stayed up late in the night, sitting in his easy chair and talking me through my fears.  We had our issues, and we butted our heads, but it is through the grace of God, the miracle of the Twelve Steps, and the patience of this fine and amazing man that I was able to pull through the early days of withdrawal.



Everything written in this entry that appears above the asterisks was part of a blog I originally posted on Facebook back in the Spring of 2007.  When my father read this blog, he wrote an eloquent letter to me lamenting the fact that I was raised with such fear.  He assumed accountability for this fact and assured me that had he known what was going on at church camp, he would have addressed the issue at the next district meeting for the Church of Christ.  

My father did not fear the End Times.  He did not even worry about them, nor did he worry about heaven or hell.  My father approached the Bible with the same analytical mind that he approached Math and Science, which as an educator were two of his passions.  He taught a Sunday school class, and every Saturday night he prepared for his lesson by dissecting the Scriptures to determine the nature and intention of the prose before him.  What he came up with after years and years of this painstaking process is that Jesus came as a demonstration of Love, offering us a blueprint for how to live, and Dad did his very best to follow that blueprint.

Dad did not read the Left Behind series, nor did he preach about the End Times.  He did not ostracize those who may have believed differently, nor did he reject those others (atheists, homosexuals, etc.) who may have been abandoned by other so-called Christians.  My father lived a life intent on honoring Christ, and nowhere in Christ’s teachings did it say anything about picketing funerals, blocking the doors of abortion clinics, or terrifying young minds with tales of a vengeful God who champed at the bit to issue a terminal beat-down on Judgment Day.

My father helped save me from alcoholism, but more than this, he saved me from fear.  He was the kind of man who made you feel comfortable, who treated all others as if they were friends, who viewed life through a filter of quiet joy, and made even his enemies live in peace with him.  I remember bringing some of my outspoken atheist friends home to meet my parents, but in my father’s presence they were humble and respectful, not out of fear but because he was so gentle and kind that he made you crave his acceptance.  Never were they judged or called to the carpet for their beliefs or lack thereof.  If these people were going to Hell, they would never hear it from my father.

The Mayan Apocalypse has come and gone, but for me it was perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift of my life.  Everything in the world now looks different, and I find that I cannot return to my previous state.  Yes, the world did end for me on December 21.  Nothing about my life can ever be the same.  In a way, that’s a good thing.  I now have an opportunity to honor my father in death in ways I did not honor him in life.  I can now look at the example he offered with unbiased eyes, and maybe, just maybe, I can try to be a little bit more like him.

So even though my old world ended, it can be replaced with a better one.  I think Dad would have liked to think of it that way.  My only regret is that once this blog is posted, I cannot look forward to another heartfelt letter from him, talking me through my latest fears.