The Night The Bad Guys Won

Yes, I know the girl's name starts out as one thing, and ends as another. It ain't her real name anyway, and I decided to leave this one unedited... I wrote it during my student teaching experience, upon hearing a rather disturbing conversation between two teenage girls. One of them was quite certain that it was perfectly safe to go to a certain party. After all, those boys wouldn't DARE try anything funny! She knew their NAMES!

Me? I know better.

______________________________________________

First of all, this ain't a funny story.

No, seriously. Not funny. Kind of sick, actually. Certainly offensive. Especially to women, most likely.

But it's not funny, nor is it intended to be. To anyone. If it is anything, it is an object lesson, and not a real pleasant one.

Still curious? Wanna keep reading? So be it. You Have Been Warned.

*****************************************

The seventies were burning out rapidly, not much left of them, and I was, I believe, fifteen at the time.

It was Saturday night. I hadn't had any particular plans for that evening, except perhaps for checking out the new Saturday Night Live, but the show had been kind of lame since Ackroyd and Belushi left, that last season, and Sam had shown up unexpectedly at the house, and asked, "Wanna go to a party?"

An hour later, as it grew dark, I stood on the porch of someone else's house, holding a beer, and wondered where the party was, and if it was coming anytime soon. True, the beer was cold, and free, but beer does not a party make. I knew the other guys at the party -- my high school was small enough that everyone knew everyone -- but none of them were guys I hung with, and aside from Sam, I had nothing in common with 'em. Jocks, mostly. Someone's folks were out for the weekend, and the house was at Sonny's disposal. And where were all the chicks? You can't have a party without chicks!

This seemed to be the consensus with the other guys at the party, too. Most of them were older than I was, juniors and seniors, and they ignored me, for the most part, beyond a brief "hey, how's it goin."

Not my idea of a wild time, really. Sam knew people, though, and circulated relentlessly. Me, I stood on the porch and wondered how long Sam was going to want to hang around.

...so I was the first to see when El Blotto pulled up out front ... with Shellie in the car with him.

I perked up. Shellie? Hm. Perhaps this party might manage to amount to something after all.

Most guys would not regard a party with twenty guys and one girl as being a real interesting affair. I would normally agree... unless the girl was Shellie, or someone like her.

Shellie was something special, you see. Freshman, a year younger than me. Couldn't have been more than fourteen... but you wouldn't know it to look at her. Long honey-colored hair, the face of an impudent goddess... and a remarkable set of hooters, much observed by young men and envied by young women.

No, seriously. Ask any ten guys from my old high school at random, mention the name "Shellie," and they'll say, "Oh, yeah, Torpedoes Away?" She had the knack some girls seem to have of defying gravity with 'em, and filling out a T-shirt or sweater very nicely.

She knew this, of course. She'd figured out how to hypnotize guys with her hooters around age twelve, and had been refining her technique ever since.

Shellie was the subject of no little debate and speculation among my peer group. Was she or wasn't she? Did she or didn't she? No one knew. There were, of course, those tyros who swore they'd been in her pants since day one, but no one of any credibility had ever claimed to have made it as far as first base. Two guys I knew had gone out with her, and not gotten anywhere, and not much cared for her attitude. Apparently, she measured affection in terms of dollars spent and gifts given, before she made up her mind about whether or not she liked you.

El Blotto draped his arm around her, and laughingly hustled her into the house. I raised an eyebrow, and followed. Perhaps this party might turn out to be interesting, after all. How long would it take her to drink enough beer to seriously entertain the idea of taking her top off and dancing on the table? Another girl had done this at a party the previous month, and my friends and I had very much regretted we hadn't been there for that one. Perhaps I'd be privy to an even better show, with some patience...

Within the hour, sure enough, she had been convinced to dance on the dinner table. It hadn't taken too long to get her good and schnockered; apparently, she didn't have much taste for beer, but she did rather like homemade wine coolers. I found out later that there hadn't been any wine in the house; what she was drinking was a mix of Kool-Ade, lemon soda, and some kind of clear booze -- vodka, perhaps.

It did have the desired effect, though. She'd gone fairly quickly from wondering why she was the only chick at the party to giggling madly and agreeing to repeated demands to dance on the table. She wasn't bad at it, either, even without a brass pole to cling to... but her top remained firmly in place. Lots of hip wiggling and jiggle action, but she seemed comfortable enough dressed.

"Take it off! Take it off!" chanted her drunken chorus.

"I don't wanna," giggled Sherrie. "It's cold in here!"

"Take it OFF! Take it OFF!"

"YOU take it off!" she laughed.

...and at that, one of the football players roared a mighty football cry, and snatched Sherrie from the tabletop, and ran away into another part of the house, while she giggled hysterically from over his shoulder.

I was irritated. The floor show had been prematurely terminated. Man, if they'd left her alone, who KNOWS what she might have been ready to do? Glumly, I went and got myself another beer, and went out on the porch to drink it. The music was too loud, and I was never all that wild about Thin Lizzy, anyway.

The song was "Jailbreak," by the way. Over and over and over again. Someone really liked "Jailbreak," by Thin Lizzy.

So I stood on the porch and drank my beer and wondered where Sam was, and how long I was going to have to hang around before he finally felt like going home, and whether or not I was going to have to drive.

"Hey, dude," said the Turtle. "You're missin' the show."

I glanced around. Turtle was leaning out the front door. He didn't have his shirt on.

"Nothin' personal, guy," I said, "but I didn't come all the way out here to see YOU with no shirt on."

"I'd worry about you if you did," he grinned. "Seriously. You in, or not?"

"In on what?"

"Come check it out," he leered. "She's gonna do us. All of us."

"Sure thing. And then she's gonna sprout wings and fly home."

"Hey, man, you were invited. If you don't wanna, well, that's your trip."

"Seriously?" I said. "You're seriously sayin' she's gonna pull a train of what, twenty guys?"

"That's what she came here for."

"Seriously?" I said. Somehow, this didn't seem quite right. I mean, nobody had EVER gotten to first base with this chick, verifiably, and now allofasudden after five wine coolers, she's ready to take on the whole football team, plus coaches, manager, and waterboy?

"Come see for yourself," the Turtle said, and he vanished back into the dark, loud cavern of the living room.

This I had to see.

One of the back bedrooms had two doors leading into it. It was empty, aside from a mattress someone had yanked off the bed in the master bedroom, and flopped on the floor, but enough light leaked in from the hall that if you looked in either door, you could plainly see what was going on.

Sherrie was lying on the mattress. She appeared to be nude, but it was kind of hard to tell, what with El Blotto on top of her. El Blotto was dressed, but had his pants around his ankles.

At first, I thought Sherrie was unconscious, but at one point, she moved, although it seemed kind of feeble. It didn't really look like two people having sex. It looked kind of like El Blotto was trying to restrain her, actually, although she didn't look like she was putting up much of a fight. Somehow, she didn't look anywhere near as lively as she had ten minutes earlier on the kitchen table.

I leaned closer. El Blotto was talking to her, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. She replied in a kind of whimper, but I couldn't hear what she was saying, either.

And then, three guys walked past me, into the room, and began to undo their pants. They lined up neatly, and waited for El Blotto to get out of the way.

A minute or so later, Sherrie happened to look up... and notice these guys... and I heard very clearly what she said, then. She shrieked like a banshee who'd just stepped on a land mine.

At that point, El Blotto DID restrain her. His actions and body language changed, rather sharply.

So did hers. Rather than the relaxed, limp kind of posture she'd had a moment earlier, her eyes were now quite big and bugged, and she was furiously trying to bring her legs together and get some traction with her feet, a move which was made rather difficult by El Blotto's presence between her legs.

El Blotto leaned down and began speaking in her ear. I couldn't hear what was said, but her reactions told me, pretty plainly, what was happening here. She had assumed someone wanted to play grabass in the back room, and was drunk and dumb enough to allow this... but now the rest of the gang wanted to play, too.

...and they were GOING to play. Whether Sherrie liked it or not. The only choice she had was the Hard or Soft Option.

Cooperate, or suffer.

Her eyes got even bigger, as El Blotto spoke in his low voice. They darted back and forth, panicked, resting temporarily on every face she saw.

Mine included.

"Uh," I said.

A couple of guys in the hall looked at me.

"Uh," I said again. "Uh... hey, is this a good idea?" I said. I immediately wished I had said something different.

"You got a problem with it?" said a guy whose name I didn't know.

"Uh... well... partyin' in someone's mom's house is one thing, man, but this... man, this is going too far, don't you think?"

The statement made perfect sense to me, and I was mildly surprised to see that the looks on the faces of the other guys in the hall did not seem to agree. In fact, a couple of them looked downright hostile.

"Bitch wants it," someone said.

"Are you nuts?" I said. "Man, look at her. She's scared shitless, in there. I bet nobody told HER what the deal was--"

In the room, Sherrie yelped. I don't know if she heard me talking, or if someone did something in there, or what. I glanced in at her. She looked at me.

She looked at me.

"Man, this is no good," I said. "Take a look at her--"

Suddenly, someone grabbed my by the collar, and swung me into the wall, away from the door. "You are NOT going to mess this UP, man!" It was dark in the hallway, and I couldn't see who had spoken. Suddenly, I seemed to have five guys surrounding me... and the looks on their faces were not sympathetic.

I couldn't believe this. "Are you guys SERIOUS?" I said. "Man, this is a friggin' crime, guys! This is--"

"She's not YOUR girlfriend!" someone snarled, accusingly. "What do YOU care?"

"Bitch wants it. Look at her. Bitch wants it."

"You do NOT want to mess this up, man."

I looked at the faces of the guys around me. Boys, really. The eldest of them might have been eighteen. I knew them all. I went to high school with all of them. And I was coming to a realization that I did not like, that in fact was beginning to frighten me.

These guys were going to friggin' rape a drunk fourteen-year-old girl.

For being drunk, and stupid, and having big boobs.

And, worse, they were prepared to stop me from interfering. Violently.

Guys I went to high school with. Guys who played football. Guys I had in some of my classes.

Who WERE these people?

"Guys," I said, sounding weak, wussy, even to myself, "think about this, man. She does NOT want this. Man, you could--"

"I think you need to go now," someone said, pushing into the crowd. He took my arm and dragged me into the living room.

I glanced around. Where the hell was Sam? I couldn't see into the back bedroom any more, too many guys in the way. What was happening back there? Was SAM in there? What the hell--

The guy who had grabbed me shoved me roughly onto the front porch. In the porch light, I could see who it was. He played football. Won a couple of scholastic awards, too. Had his picture in the paper. A senior.

"Look, man," he said, "this is going to happen, one way or another. Now if you want in, say so. If you don't want in, you need to leave."

I stood there and stared at him. I still couldn't believe what I was seeing. Were these guys CRAZY? "Man, they put you in jail for this shit," I said.

"Nobody's going to jail," he said. "She showed up, she got drunk, she took us all on. There's sixteen guys who will say so, too. Our word against hers."

I stood and stared at him.

He anticipated what I was thinking. "Man, you could have got your ass handed to you in there. I saved it once. I ain't gonna save it again. You open your mouth, and it's STILL sixteen against you and her. It's gonna happen, one way or another. And the only difference you'll make is whether sixteen guys kick your ass or not."

We stood there and stared at each other for a minute.

What I wanted to say then, was, "Do you realize you're inflicting an act of physical and psychological torture on a fourteen year old girl, dude? You realize, you're scarring her for life? And that's assuming you and the rest of the Jackass Squad don't knock her up in the process, because if that happens, at least one of your drunk asses is going downtown, man."

But I was young, and stupid then, and my knack for words was not then what it would become. What I managed to say was, "Man, what about her?"

And "This ain't right, man. You know this ain't right."

He looked at me there, on the porch, as the june bugs battered themselves stupid on the bare porch lightbulb, and for a moment, I dared to hope he might actually have an attack of conscience... that maybe I'd made a difference.

"You're drunk," he said. "Go home, dude."

And he closed the door. And locked it.

I stood there. After a few minutes, the porch light went off, and the music volume went WAY up.

I stood there. Nothing happened. Finally, I walked away. It occurred to me to find a rock or something and start bashing windshields. I actually went so far as to find a good sized rock before I realized that I was three miles out of town, and that if these guys realized what I'd done, they'd catch me halfway back there and beat me stupid. Hell, they were drunk, too. They might kill me, even without meaning to.

And it still wouldn't do Sherrie a bit of good.

So I dropped the rock and walked home.

********************************************

Sherrie didn't come to school for a few days after that. When she did start showing up, the word had circulated pretty well about her wild and wanton behavior at the party the previous weekend. Lots of knowing looks and looking-down-the-nose at her. More than a few lewd propositions and jokes. LOTS of very public party invitations.

I noticed she never wore her pink "Foxy Lady" tank top to school any more. In fact, she seemed to have radically changed her style of dress. For the rest of the time I knew Sherrie, you would never be able to tell she HAD boobs, from the way she dressed. Long trousers or slacks, never skirts. Heavy, baggy sweaters or sweatshirts. She took to wearing a jacket a lot of the time, even in the hot South Texas climate, out of season.

No charges were ever brought against anyone. No complaints were ever made. I wondered what I would do if I were brought to testify, but no one ever asked me to. Once, a guy bumped me in the hall hard enough that it felt like a body check, and muttered, "keep your damn mouth shut," but that was all anyone ever said to me about it.

Sherrie had smiled a lot, back in the day. After the party, I never saw her smile again. Every tyro at the school had dates with her, though, in which she performed like a wildcat, again and again, into the night... but none were verifiable. The guys whose word was good said that she always turned down dates. In fact, she didn't much seem to want to go out with anyone. Ever. She was never seen at parties or social gatherings any more, or in extracurricular events. It's like she simply went to school... and then went home... and stayed there until forced to go to school again.

She was a junior when I graduated. I have no clue what happened to her after I left town. Her reputation still flourished, though, nurtured and embellished, and passed on to each new freshman class.

*************************************

I'll be thirty-nine this year. This happened a long time ago, but in some ways, it haunts me still. I can't say I got it as bad as Sherrie did, but I certainly got the same choice she did: cooperate or suffer.

She and I learned the same lesson that night: that just because you think you know someone doesn't mean you know someone. And even if you do know someone, you can't necessarily count on them being the same guy you know when he's drunk and in the middle of a mob.

And sometimes the bad guys win.

I still feel a little ashamed of myself for not doing something, for not speaking out, for not charging in, singlehandedly, and saving the day, with my strength the strength of ten because my heart was pure.

And a little voice in the back of my head says, quite rationally, "And you would have been beat bloody and perhaps killed, by sixteen drunk and dangerous guys. And you wouldn't have saved the lady fair."

And then the other little voice pipes up, "Yeah, but you could have at least tried."

PRAVDA

Long time ago, there was this thing called a Soviet Union.

Their main newspaper was called "Pravda," which is Russian for "Truth," but also sort of meant "Official Truth," or perhaps "Take it or leave it, this is what the politicians let us print."

Which tells you something about the Soviet Union.

Anyway, their president, or Premier, served a lifetime term. Which meant that sooner or later, he'd die in office. And when the Premier went into the hospital, the news services immediately began speculating.

The Russian news service was Tass, and they didn't speculate. The Premier was FINE, you hear us? FINE! He's FINE! He's having a WART removed!

And then, the dance would begin, as official news services, unofficial news services, leaks, spies, and everyone else began leaking their own version of what was happening.

He's got a cold. He's got pneumonia. He's got cancer. He's already dead. He has a brain embolism. He was poisoned by his political enemies. He was assassinated by Western agents. He died a month ago, and this is his body double. He's in a vegetative state. He had a stroke. He had a heart attack. He spontaneously combusted.

And so on.

Eventually, Tass and Pravda would agree: The Premier has died, of perfectly ordinary natural causes, and the Politburo is in session to democratically choose another Premier. But it would TAKE a while to get to this point, amidst the shitstorm of misinformation, speculation, and general crapola. The illness of a Soviet Premier was NOT a time for straight answers!

And it disturbs me to be seeing this same phenomenon.... decades after the fall of the Soviet Union...

... in America.

I'm not saying Trump is dead, or that he's even going to die. Lots of people recover from Covid-19, even old people who are complete assholes.

But the blatant similarities disturb me greatly.

I hate HTML

If anyone knows how to cut and paste text and force Blogspot to insert breaks in between text blocks, I sure would like to know. The ENTER key won't do it, and there doesn't seem to be a tool on their toolbar that will accomplish this.

The Fireflies

Many years ago, I worked at an adolescent residential treatment center (a sort of juvie therapy thing) out in Sattler, in rural Texas, some thirty miles from Austin. Out in the hill country, rural and isolated.

Lot of our kids were urban toughs, from Houston, that someone thought might be able to manage probation with some therapy, right?

I worked the afternoon and evening shift, and one night in the summer, I saw a familiar thing outside... and so I checked... and then I rounded up all the kids and said, "We are going outside."

There was much complaint and refusal; it was dark out, and we are NOT going for a hike, or to play volleyball or whatever, we wanna watch TEEVEE!

I killed the TV and said, "The TV will be turned back on ... IF everyone in this cabin goes out and stands on the porch for THREE MINUTES. Every one of you. You don't even have to get off the porch. Stand or sit on the porch for THREE MINUTES, and I will time it. And if EVERY ONE OF YOU (there were eight in my cabin) is out there, standing on the porch, in three minutes, I will come back in here, turn on the TV, and shut the hell up."

They grumbled, but got up and headed for the front door. And when the door opened, they were gobsmacked.

It was the most fireflies even I had seen in years. All OVER. It was like looking into the night sky, a starfield, in blinking fluorescence. The kids in back had to shove the kids in front aside in order to get out and see; the ones up front were just standing there with their mouths open.

Houston's a major city, with a population in the millions, and light pollution to the point where it never gets very dark, even miles from the city. Sattler, on the other hand, had a population in the hundreds at the time, and practically shut down the streetlights after eight PM. You could look up and see the Milky Way smeared across the sky. And the fireflies were numerous enough that they literally lit the common area and volleyball court with their eldritch greeny yellow glow.

The kids stood their, stunned and silent. None of them had ever seen anything like it.

I timed myself. Three minutes. And 180 seconds later, I went back in the living room, and turned on the TV... and muted it. If they wanted sound, they knew how to get it. But I wanted to see who remembered.

A half hour later, I took a twelve pack of diet sodas out on the porch and asked who was thirsty. The boys were all amenable... and then Robbie The Car Thief asked, "Has it been three minutes yet?"

"It's been half an hour."

Robbie spewed Diet Sprite over the railing. "Why didn't you call us back in?"

"I agreed to turn the TV back on in three minutes. I did so. You could have come back in any time you wanted. I didn't tell you to stay out here. You seemed entertained. Didn't want to interrupt you."

Robbie was unmollified, and rose to his feet. Darryl the Former Crip said, "Sit down, man. You in that big a hurry to watch "Full House?" TV'll be there. Sit down. You blockin' the show."

Robbie looked angry. And then he turned around and looked away from Darryl and I and out at the courtyard. And he sat down and sipped his drink, and said nothing more.

And we all sat and watched the fireflies dance for what didn't seem like a very long time after that.

I remember now why I didn't like this site...

.... because if I'm going to not be posting giant goddamn text blocks that it won't let me edit and space, I'm going to have to go in there and retool the HTML, inch by friggin' inch.

Thanks, Facebook. Fuck you, Zuckerberg.

A Symbol of WHAT?

Farrah Bonnot posted this thing about an older gent who wants to start a "patriotic walking group." Y'know, for exercise. It would start with the Pledge of Allegiance, and then they'd walk around the neighborhood. For some reason, I envisioned a bunch of older folks and pensioners marching through the neighborhood. Perhaps whistling the "Star Spangled Banner." Maybe the guy in the lead is carrying a flag. Maybe they ALL have little flags. Now Farrah's take on this is "Why is it a PATRIOTIC walking group?" MY take on it was "Why do I find this vaguely threatening? Not quite in a white bedsheets and pointy hoods and burning crosses sort of way, but kinda sorta if not in that ballpark, then certainly hanging out at the refreshment stand?" And I sat and thought about it. I grew up in a time where the American flag was a symbol of American pride. It's at the head of the classroom. It's ubiquitous on the Fourth of July, and flown on every float in the Fourth of July parade. There's one over every ball park, and most used car dealerships. The American Flag was a GOOD THING. Once upon a time. Funny thing? This past Fourth of July, I didn't see flags on every door, like I used to, back in the day. In fact, the only flag I saw in my neighborhood was the Blue Lives Matter flag that one guy down the street and around the corner has on his flag pole, the monochrome flag with the one blue stripe.... flying above his TRUMP 2020 sign stuck in his front yard. When... in my mind.... did the Stars and Stripes quit being about hot dogs, apple pie, and good living and governance? When did it become a vague threat? Is this what black folks talk about when they talk about Confederate flags? I'm seeing what they mean. It's an ugly feeling. And all the more so because the American flag USED to be a GOOD thing, to me. All the more so when the flag bearers also wear FUCK YOUR FEELINGS T-shirts. When did it start being about the loudmouth screaming I FEEL THREATENED! I FEEL THREATENED! at the old lady who asked him to wear a mask in Costco? When did it start being about I HAVE RIGHTS I HAVE RIGHTS! because you can't send your kid to school without vaccinations, regardless of who else it hurts? When did it start being about ALL LIBTARDS WANT TO TAKE MY GUNS MY GUNS MY GUUUUUNS? Or NOT MY PRESIDENT! Or FAKE NEWS! Or just screaming at those Other People that they hate hate hate so much, so very much? When did my perfectly good American flag become a SYMBOL OF HATE? When did the flag bearers become.... my ENEMIES? And who MADE this decision? It sure wasn't ME. How did this come about? And more importantly, WHY? And what am I supposed to do about it?

Shaka, When The Walls Fell

So I created this blog a decade ago, and lost interest. Haven't been here in ages. But today, it rises from the grave, because I have got to have a place to rant, and Facebook has decided that this whole "long form essay" thing, my preferred form of ranting, is just not... cost effective, or profitable, or compatible with whatever their Vision For The Future is, and fuck these assholes anyway.

I won't be posting here EVERY day, but if I've got something I am particularly fond of, this is where it will wind up.

Thanks to all of you for your attention and support.

Barbarians At The Gates

Being An extended multi-part ramble

With lots of digressions and sidetracks
***************************************

Recommended Reading: Conan The Barbarian, by Robert E. Howard(accept no substitutes)Pretty much anything else by Robert E. Howard, with special attention to any introduction, which will invariably be by another author

(Or-- for those of you who just want to rent the video: The Whole Wide World, starring Vincent D'Onofrio as Robert Howard and Renee Zellweger as Novalyn Price)

******************************************

Just got back from Cross Plains, Texas. There is absolutely nothing in Cross Plains worth the five-hour drive it took to get there... except Conan the Barbarian, of course. Oh, and Black Vulmea, El Borak, Breckenridge Elkins, Sailor Steve Costigan, and a great many other two-fisted types of fellows. They all live there, y'see, and they come out to play on this of all weekends.

Y'see, Cross Plains was the home of Robert E. Howard. THIS guy:

Howard was arguably the King Of The Pulp Fiction Writers. He created Conan the Barbarian in the 1930s, while writing for a pulp magazine, Weird Tales, and Conan remains his most well-known literary creation. He created a great many other heroes, of course, and poured out a truly insane flood of fiction between 1924 and 1936, in addition to correspondence with other pulp writers, notably H. P. Lovecraft, that often reached an exchange of two or three LONG letters a week.

The folks of Cross Plains thought he was just as strange as suspenders on a snake. He couldn't hold down a real job to save his life -- utterly hated timeclocks and supervisors -- but starting in 1929, he started pulling down as much money writing as quite a few folks were making in the oil fields. He had to, y'see. His mother was tubercular, and he apparently paid quite a few of his parents' bills.

He was well known for his habit of loudly ranting his stories aloud as he typed them, occasionally leaping up from his typewriter to beat the hell out of some imaginary enemy, or hack at them with a sword he apparently kept on the wall nearby. In a little tiny town, where the only air conditioning was called "the window", such behavior is noticed.

In 1936, his career was taking off. He'd published in many of the major pulp markets of the day, he was accruing good notice, his income increased every year, he'd just closed a book deal with a British publisher, and his career was poised to take off like a rocket... and his mother entered her final coma. Robert's father, a doctor, knew she wasn't likely to survive more than a day or so, and that she would likely never wake up. Robert, upon hearing about this, went out back behind the house, sat in his car, and stuck a pistol in his ear and blew his brains out. He was thirty years old.

Yeah, I know. Weird guy, huh?

Sometimes, I think I know how he felt. I grew up in a little tiny dusty out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere cow town in Texas, too. I know that imagination is, in such places, considered at best frivolous and useless, and at worst, is considered a liability... marking one as an odd duck, a weirdo, the sort of fellow that it doesn't pay to get involved with. Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge -- you can get knowledge out of a book, but where do you get imagination if you haven't got any? Well, in little tiny oil-and-ranching towns in Texas, they get along without it, for the most part, and don't miss it much. In the town where I grew up, the main source of literature was the paperback rack at the local pharmacy, and three fourths of what you'd find there bore the names of Louis LaMour, Zane Grey, and Harlequin. That was pretty much what one read where I grew up... if one read anything at all.

I was an imaginative kid. Hell, until my teen years, I was lucky to have one foot on the ground at any given time, and not even that if there was a stiff breeze blowing. In any school today, you wouldn't have noticed me at all, but in this particular cow town in 1975, I was a weird kid indeed... and I wrote. Worked for the local paper all four years of high school, and even won a couple of awards for it.

...and during that time, I discovered Conan. The comics, first, of course, followed by the old Lancer paperbacks with those great Frank Frazetta covers. I was astonished to think that the guy who wrote them came from Texas, too... and in the 1930s? Yow. And he didn't write WESTERNS? Jeez. I thought EVERY writer from Texas wrote westerns... (well, actually, Robert Howard wrote westerns, too, but I didn't know that, then...)

...and then, he killed himself? Because his MOTHER was dying? Whatthehell? As a teenager, I couldn't decide if this was incredibly gothic and romantical, or if the Creator Of Conan The Barbarian was in fact just the biggest wuss since Casper Milquetoast....

...so I decided to go where the facts were.

I'd heard about Cross Plains via the Internet, a couple years ago, when Project Pride first got started. Turns out that the town had decided, back in the early nineties, to restore the old Howard home and turn it into a museum, and they started Project Pride as a sort of local charity to collect the money and organize the manpower. They have a web site, and advertised a local "Barbarian Festival" every year in June. I made a mental note to see exactly where Cross Plains was, and to investigate...

************************

We finally found the place a couple weeks ago, when we went up to northwest Texas to investigate college opportunities for The Kid. Cross Plains is about fifty miles more or less east of Abilene. An oil boom town during the twenties, it began kind of drying out during the fifties, and today is a remarkably tiny little place with next to nothing to speak of. Of the nine points of interest marked on their city map, one is a Dairy Queen, and another is a Subway sandwich shop.

The downtown has developed that kind of dried-out look that downtowns get when a Wal-Mart opens nearby, but for some reason, the surveyors, real-estate agents, insurance salesmen, and lawyers haven't moved into the storefronts yet. In Cross Plains, they won't, either. The Wal-Mart is thirty miles away, in Brownwood, and there just aren't enough local professionals to want to move into those storefronts. One of the businesses on the main street is a blacksmith, by the way, which gives you some idea of the town's nature right there.

We drove through in May, but didn't stop long. I just wanted to have a look at the place. Did they have a sign reading Welcome To Cross Plains, Home Of Conan Author Robert E. Howard? Did they have commercial tie-ins? Barbarian Burgers? Hyborian Dry Goods? Shoes And Sorcery Footwear? I remembered when a local boy from my hometown played with a pro team that actually made it to the Super Bowl one year... when I was in high school. His name is STILL on the "Welcome To" signs on the edge of town. Hell, Crystal City has a statue of Popeye in front of the town hall, just because they grow spinach there! Did Cross Plains have anything like that?

No.

Just that dried-up, dessicated main street. Two main roads, Main and First, and a scattering of side streets. Population, about a thousand. Most of the ones I saw seemed to be over fifty.

THEN we saw it -- the local Community Bulletin Board: Ah, THERE we were... they DID recognize him! See? "Barbarian Festival," right under the word CALENDAR. And right behind it, the library! And on the side of the library, a mural!

...but as I backed up to take the picture... I glanced across the street, to the left. There was another mural there, on the side of the building facing the library. This is it:
Ah. Hm. Well. Big talk for a town whose major industry seemed to be empty storefronts. As I stood and looked at this new mural... celebrating the joy of rednecks, oilworkers, cowboys, cactus, and dry red sand, I felt this weird sense of deja vu... I felt like I'd come home.

I didn't much like the town I grew up in. It was tiny, dusty, backward, and way the hell and gone away from anything at all interesting. It had three seasons: Cold (about two months) Wet (about two weeks) and Hot (the rest of the year). It was a community and culture that valued hardheadedness, hard work, and as little actual thought as possible. Simply reading books marked you as an odd fellow, and reading fiction books that weren't written by Louis LaMour marked you as a downright peculiar fellow, which was that much worse.

In short, "feeling at home" was not the warm comfortable familiar feeling most of you associate with the old home town. To me, "coming home" implied a sensation of "This place sucks!"

I noticed that on the big Cross Plains mural, there was no sign whatsoever of Robert E. Howard. There hadn't been any mention of him on the "Welcome To" signs, either. The most famous local citizen... creator of a character who's spawned two movies and a TV series, not to mention a cartoon show, a flood of comics, dozens of books that are STILL in print, almost seventy years after his death, and an entire GENRE of spinoff material, starting with a zillion old Italian sword and sandal movies and ending with Xena, Warrior Princess and the Everquest phenomenon...

...and if it weren't for the painting on the side of the library, you'd never know he ever lived there. They had a local celebrity... but they apparently didn't much feel he represented the town very well. He wasn't "local spirit." Sure, he was big in Peoria, big author, got made into movies and TV shows, but what did that mean to a bunch of local rednecks?

They were ashamed of him. The ones who knew about him at all, anyway.

But, still... there was the Barbarian Festival. Project Pride. This HAD to mean SOMETHING. If they were ashamed of their peculiar local boy, why hold a festival honoring him?

Then again... we're talking a little teeny town out in the middle of nowhere, which in Texas is a mighty big piece of real estate. How much of a festival could it be? I envisioned some sort of weird Community Center luncheon with elderly VFW members and Shriners wearing viking helmets, eating finger sandwiches, and trying to sell Frazetta prints and Arnold Schwarzenegger videos to half a dozen bored teenagers who'd driven up from Brownwood, desperate for something to break the monotony of life in the Great Fried Empty...

I had to find out. And... the weekend of June 8 ... I would.

***********************************************

We stopped in Brownwood, first, to secure lodgings and to hunt for Greenleaf Cemetery, where Howard is buried. I figured if we were going to be there, we might as well do the whole thing, right?

Brownwood's a small city some thirty miles south of Cross Plains. It's got Howard Payne University, where Robert Howard took some business courses (but wound up dropping out of college because he didn't see much point in taking classes he didn't like). Unfortunately, Brownwood was hosting a Gun And Knife show that weekend at the civic center, so we had to hunt around a bit to find a motel that wasn't packed (Texans will drive for HOURS to attend a good Gun Show). I once again tripped over my age, in the process... some part of me is forever outraged that you can't get a motel room anywhere for $25 a night, any more...

We found Greenleaf Cemetery fairly easily, and the Howard gravesite even more so -- you drive on the road you came in on about halfway back, then look around for the State Historical Marker.

The marker is just off to the right of this picture.

This marker has got it wrong, though... to the best of my knowledge, Robert Howard wasn't much on science fiction. He loved heroic fantasy stories, though, and wrote more of that genre than anything else (although his boxing stories come close to matching the number). His main thrust was ANYTHING studly and two-fisted. I figure that the people who provided the information for the marker were local folks... to whom "fantasy" and "sci-fi" mean the same thing -- "anythang what can't couldn't not happen, nohow."

Oh, yeah -- poet. Howard wrote a fair amount of poetry, too, and not-bad poetry at that. Much of it was collected and published by Arkham House after his death. Man... all that, and poetry, too. Talk about being the "kiss of death", socially speaking... no WONDER the local folks thought he was weird...

I thought it was kind of interesting that the stone's been there since 1936 (when Robert bought the plot -- he'd apparently been thinking about suicide)... but the marker wasn't put up until 1993. Why not? Conan had been big business since around 1984, when the movie came out. Normally, small towns LIKE having a local celebrity, someone they can namedrop on. Why not Robert Howard?

Well... because pulp authors are not the kind of authors one can normally be proud of. This ain't Steinbeck, you know. Furthermore, what did the guy write about? Barbarians, pirates, boxers, ghost stories, Indiana Jones adventurers... oh, yeah, and a few cowboy stories. Steinbeck he definitely wasn't. On the other hand, it's been said that few authors have truly captured the West of the 1930s the way Howard did -- the oil boom of the 1930s spawned a Texas that was nearly as wild and woolly as the one of the 1840s, with oil roughnecks taking the place of cowboys AND the Indians! Gamblers, dance hall girls, local sheriffs, gun and knife fights, and a murder a night...

In one of his stories, Howard remarks on a job he had in Cross Plains, delivering dry cleaned clothes all over town... and he remarked that the dresses of the prostitutes came to symbolize to him what the oil boom meant: fine, colorful clothes, light and beautiful as dreams, rich with joyful promises... but stained with nameless filth.

It's a good turn of phrase, and says something about Howard as well as the era.

**********

After a good night's sleep, we made the run into Cross Plains on Saturday morning, to make the Postal Cancellation at the Post Office. This was apparently a big thing, since their post office wasn't normally open at all on Saturday... so we returned armed with a map this time. The points of interest included the Howard House, the place where the guy grew up and died, which they have only recently (within the past ten years) renovated and turned into a museum.

Only a couple years ago, they applied for and got the Historical Marker. It hasn't been installed yet, though. But the house wouldn't open until 10 a.m., and the Post Office would start their special REH cancellations at 9, so we headed down to the PO early, to avoid the rush. I'd brought a stack of postcards, and a book that I'd hoped I could get stamped as well...

Interesting thing about the Post Office rush, though... there wasn't one.

There was NO one there except the postmistress and her assistant, who may well have been her husband. They were quite polite, and a little at a loss when I proffered a stack of postcards. I hadn't stamped them -- I'd thought that they would simply stamp them "Paid" and then apply the commemorative Howard cancellation. They didn't seem equipped for this, and asked if I would like to buy stamps, instead. I said, "Sure." They began hunting around for 21-cent postcard stamps. They didn't seem to have any handy. After a few minutes, postcard stamps were found... and then I saw the size of the cancellation.

Apparently, these cancellations were never meant for postcards. They were intended for full-sized envelopes, and were never actually intended to be MAILED -- you were supposed to show up with STAMPED ENVELOPES, which would then be hand cancelled, providing you with a souvenir, right then and there, for the low low cost of a first-class stamp.

I hadn't known that; we didn't even see what the cancellation LOOKED like until we bought a paper that morning in Cross Plains. Some people out there are going to get very impressive postcards from me where part of the message may not be readable... but they WERE graciously willing to stamp the book, although they could NOT cancel anything that didn't have POSTAGE in it... which is why there's a stamp in the picture below, as well as a red line I added in Paint (it's illegal to post pictures of uncancelled stamps, and the fellow tried to obscure as little of the stamp and cancellation as possible...)

This is a hardback book, by the way, which gives you SOME idea of how honkin' huge that cancellation is...

While going through this little drama, another couple walked in, and asked me where I had bought my postcards. I regretfully informed them that I had brought them with me from home... but, still, at least I wasn't going to be the sole tourist who'd showed up for this circus...

After finishing at the post office, we still had more than half an hour, so we drove around Cross Plains, getting a feel for the place. It didn't take long. About ten minutes, in fact.

The main thing I noticed was the streets. The main streets are named Main and First. The rest of the streets are named ... well, Second, Third, Fourth, and so on... and the cross streets were Avenue A, Avenue B, Avenue C, Avenue D, and like that. We were about ready to go back to the Howard House when I finally saw a street named Cypress, and burst out laughing. Finally, a street with an actual NAME!

It frankly confirmed a lot of what I'd been thinking about the actual inhabitants. These hadn't been imaginative folks. They had an oil boom going on, and they were in a hurry and to heck with real street names, Avenue A will work just fine...

By now, a few people had gathered at the pavilion to the left of the Howard House, and a school bus had pulled up. The information we had said that there would be a guided tour of some of Robert Howard's favorite haunts in town, and we decided that would be as good a way to kill an hour as any, so we parked and walked up to the pavilion.

Immediately, a half dozen people were ON us. Welcome! Was this our first time? Had we registered? Well, no, actually we hadn't... we were kind of planning on playing it anonymous... but with so few people here, we stood out. Our Hawaiian shirts didn't help much, either... most everyone else was dressed like rednecks, except for the tourists. We stood out like peacocks in the chicken coop. Meekly, we submitted, got nametags, and signed the guest registry, and went into the house to see what there was to see.

The house was interesting, though. They'd gone to the trouble of trying to duplicate what the house had looked like in 1936, as closely as possible. Author L. Sprague de Camp, the guy who co-wrote all those Conan novels in the sixties, had apparently wound up with a fair number of the Howard family possessions, and had donated many of them back to Project Pride. I was informed of this, kind of relentlessly, by the horde of Project Pride people in the house who were only too anxious to tell me all about it.


The heck of it is... Cross Plains really hasn't CHANGED that much since 1936. Really! I mean, we walked around the yard before entering the Howard House... at one point, it occurred to me I was likely standing about where Robert Howard shot himself... when I heard something make an odd noise. I looked up. Off in someone's back yard, facing into the Howards' back yard, a donkey looked back at me. Somewhere else nearby, I heard chickens cackling.

This isn't something you hear or see too much around Texas National Historical Sites, you know? Much less your average "museum".

On the other hand, it does give you a creepy feeling of versimilitude. A couple of times, I found myself feeling like Robert Howard was about to walk IN and ask me just what the hell I thought I was doing, poking around his house?

The house was... interesting. For one thing, it's quite small. Too small, in fact, for more than about five people to tour at once, not including the horde of relentlessly informative little old ladies, commenting on which furniture items and knickknacks are authentic Howard items and which are simply donated items from that same time period and so on.

This may give the impression I didn't much care for the tour. Truth is, I did. The tour guides didn't yammer; they were very specific and to the point, and it was stuff I wanted to know. Every little item in there gave me the feeling I was that much closer to the man himself... but if you're the type who wants to be left the hell alone to look at things, this isn't a tour you would like.

Robert Howard's room was teeny; it had been part of a porch that Robert and his father had walled in to make it part of the house. It was the size of a walk-in closet, barely enough room for the narrow, bunklike bed and the little wooden table that had his typewriter on it (well, not HIS typewriter, but the exact same model. HIS typewriter is in the hands of a Howard collector in California, they tell me. I got the impression they were a bit miffed at him for not offering to donate the thing back to Project Pride).

Looking at this tiny, cell-like room, it was hard to imagine that this was the place that had given birth to ancient temples, lost cities, the Jewels of Gwahlur, the splendor of Ophir... I mean, if you put convicted killers in that room, the ACLU would be all OVER you... but this is where Robert Howard forged entire worlds.

Much of the museum -- the hallway and kitchen walls, anyway -- were given over to old photos of Howard, his family, and Cross Plains.


The kitchen in particular was interesting, because one wall was taken up with old pictures of the town during the oil boom, when Howard was a kid ... and a glass case packed with original Howard books and magazines... old Weird Tales, Conan comics from the seventies, and a fair number of paperbacks (including several of the pastiches by Robert Jordan, which Robert Howard had nothing to do with, I noticed with a grin).

In the dining room, an excited lady was telling us all about this new book -- an original copy of Howard's first novel, first edition, only seven copies left in the world, and a fellow had donated one of them to the museum(!), when a fellow came in and announced that the town tour was to begin. We dutifully trooped out and got on the bus... an old school bus, belonging to the Cross Plains schools.

I’ll call the guy Mr. Beame. He had inherited the Howard property, and acted as a sort of unofficial emcee for us throughout the whole experience. I won't bore you with the town tour -- you had to be there to appreciate that -- but what Beame had to say struck some chords.

"I was an adult," he said, "before I knew who Robert Howard was, or what he did, or that he'd lived in this town. I grew up here, but I'd never heard of him. I'd heard of Conan, of course... but never knew that his creator had lived here."

"Really?" I thought. "Gee... wonder why that is...?" Well, pfft. I knew why that was, and Beame confirmed it with his next statement.

"People around here just didn't talk about Robert Howard," he continued. "I don't know why. Maybe it was the stigma attached to suicide back then. Maybe it was that he wrote strange stuff, the sort of thing no one local would want to read. Maybe it was just because so many people thought he was crazy... but I guess Cross Plains might have been a little ashamed of him. People around here just don't talk about him much."

My wife raised an eyebrow, and kicked my ankle, down low where no one could see.

We cruised away from the Howard House. I hadn't noticed before, but the place across the street was a "monument outlet"... it sold tombstones.

We saw the remains of the old icehouse where Howard and his friends used to box when he was a teener. We saw his girlfriend's house (yes, he DID have a girlfriend, at least one -- see the movie THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD for details), and Beame pointed out the inaccuracies in the movie while showing us the house. We also saw the dry-goods store that a Mr. Lay had owned and sold to go into the corn chip business, copyrighted the word "Fritos", and became OverLord Of The Snacks...

Made me wonder if anyone ever talked about Mr. Lay locally, or if they were ashamed of him, too.

There were only about ten people on the bus. The tour took maybe forty minutes, and most of that was Mr. Beame, reciting local history and quoting from Howard's books. We did have one odd moment, though -- at one point, Beame remarked to us that when couples came on the tour, it was usually one Howard fan and one person who had no idea what all the fuss was about, and who among us were the Howard fans? How had we come into contact with Robert Howard?

When it came to my turn, I remarked how I'd read Conan comics, then read the Conan paperbacks, and discovered pulp horror paperbacks... H.P. Lovecraft, who led me back to Robert Howard, and after that I was hooked...

...and Mr. Beame tried to go onto the next person... and my wife promptly stood up and began reciting HER history! SHE wasn't the silent partner, by ghod! SHE'd discovered Howard before I had, and she was gonna TELL us about it!

Mr. Beame looked a little surprised, as did most everyone else on the bus. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, and succeeded, mostly.

We cruised past the school where Novalyn Price, Howard's girlfriend, had taught. To this day, there are three buildings, right next to each other -- the elementary school, the middle school, and the high school. All right there. Altogether, they take up less room than my old high school did. Their football team is the Buffalos, by the way (Not the Barbarians?)

After the tour, we went back to the Howard House... all ten of us. Shortly thereafter, a horde of people showed up. Turns out WE were the yokels... all the SERIOUS Howard scholars, as well as the interested locals, had been over at the high school, attending a panel discussion on "The Influence Of Texas On Robert E. Howard's Works." It had been part of the program, but we'd ignored it, since we weren't technically "registered guests". Turns out we could have gone if we'd wanted -- it was free.

So was lunch, which surprised me. Buffet lunch, make-your-own-sandwich, ham or cheese or both, with pickles, onions, chips (Lays, I wondered?), and cookies. Free sodas, free ice water. No, no, it's all free, but a donation to Project Pride would be greatly appreciated.

We postponed lunch briefly to go check out the souvenir shop -- they had the back room of the Howard House set up with purchaseables and collectibles. I'd hoped to be able to buy some paperbacks, but they didn't have any, unfortunately -- apparently, they sell out too quick. They did have a variety of booklets about Howard and the town, and one of his short stories for sale, as well as Project Pride T-Shirts (Conan's ghost in the sky, wielding sword, hovering over the Howard House) and a LOT of artwork, posters... and postcards, all at extremely reasonable prices. They even had freebies, various flyers and xeroxed items, for the really cheap tourist, I guess.

I was amused, and kind of touched, to see a photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan The Barbarian on the wall. It wasn't for sale. Arnold had autographed it for Project Pride, with his best wishes and hopes for their success.


My wife and I discussed this over the free lunch. It was like... they were learning NOT to be ashamed of the guy... to CELEBRATE him, instead of wanting to kick dirt over him and forget him... but they still weren't quite sure what to do with him. Beame had said as much during the tour -- "I attended NecronomiCon in Providence, Rhode Island, and they did a tour of Lovecraft's Providence, and I thought it might be a neat idea," he said. "I don't know why anyone would want to drive around looking at Cross Plains, though -- we don't have the architecture that Providence does -- but people seem to like it."

We pretty much bought everything we wanted at the souvenir shop. We spent less than twenty bucks. Not because we didn't have any money, but because everything was extremely reasonably priced. It was WEIRD. Didn't these folks have enough sense to GOUGE the tourists? I wound up dropping more in the donation jar than I would have paid for lunch for two at most delicatessens.

Then again, maybe that's what they were aiming for.

We hung around after lunch. The local library would be opening at one, and they promised to be opening the Howard Archives, a collection of his original manuscripts and old Weird Tales pulps, and old Arkham House first editions of his works.

I took more pictures in the house, ran across some Lovecraft freaks, had a nice chat. They were kind of mystified, too. Why was everything so cheap? Why did everyone seem to want to be your friend?

In time, I figured it out. They were small-town folks, that's all. I think Beame might have been the only one of the people in Project Pride who'd ever been to a sci-fi or fantasy convention. They knew they might be able to soak the tourists for a pretty penny for Barbarian Burgers, plastic swords, and idiotic little laminated pasteboard deodorizer Conan dangles for your rearview mirror... but they didn't wanna. Maybe they were just a little one-horse charity in a one-horse town with their tiny little museum devoted to a dead guy that the town STILL wasn't quite sure what to make of...

...but they had CLASS, by ghod, and persons of quality don't act like that. This is the Robert E. Howard Museum, not a circus, and not a cheap curio shop. We do have a few T-shirts and posters if you want them. Take it or leave it.

It had been so long since I'd seen a tourist attraction like that that I'd forgotten what it was like. Hell, even the Alamo souvenir shop will sell you your own hat if you put it on the counter. This wasn't like that.

Maybe we should put little old ladies from small towns in charge of more stuff.

**********
Lunch came and went, and the wife and I anxiously awaited the opening of the library. The Cross Plains library is teeny. I think we may have as many books in our house as they do in the entire library... which is located in one of the storefronts downtown. I had desperately hoped that they would have some Howard books for sale there; I'd been frankly disappointed that they didn't have much of Howard's actual work on sale at the Howard House.


They did have nearly every paperback Howard's stuff ever appeared in, though. They seemed to be missing some of the Lancer/Ace paperbacks, the ones with the Frank Frazetta covers. I could see why. Those are worth money on the secondary market. Admittedly, I'd think the folks of Cross Plains would be honest enough not to swipe library books, but still... even if you lose it, the cover price is only, what, fifty cents? They had the entire Baen Howard Library, the Cthulhu paperback, and even some small press stuff.

One thing DID bug me. A lot. An official part of the Howard Collection ... are a number of Conan comics, both the regular four-color comics and the larger black-and-white Conan comic magazines. Now... I can see why. The first 27 issues (I think) not only were based directly on the Conan novels, but had some of the greatest fantasy art ever done, by Barry Windsor-Smith, back when he walked among mortals and drew comic books. The magazines' Conan stories were usually written by the comics people, but they often featured backup stories that WERE written by Howard -- my particular favorite being the Solomon Kane stories -- and illustrated by Marvel Comics artists! Ah, glorious geekery!

A brief aside: When I was eleven, I remember having my Conan comics confiscated from me by a little old lady teacher with grey hair and bun, who sternly lectured me and was no doubt certain she was saving me from this EVIL COMIC FILTH-TRASH...

...and now, segue to 26 years later, and I am standing in this tiny small-town library, complete with a little old lady librarian, who is helpful and smiling and showing you the treasures of her beloved library... and then gestures at a shelf full of COMIC BOOKS. At least one of which was the same issue I’d had confiscated in the incident in question. Go figure.







The back room was even better. A number of original Howard manuscripts were available to the public for perusal. My wife promptly slipped on a pair of the white cotton gloves you were required to don if you wanted to touch them, and dived into a Howard detective story that was never published...







I, on the other hand, turned to this amazing collection of original Weird Tales magazines, laid out on yet another table. I'd only seen old Weird Tales in a couple of book and paper shows, always under glass or in plastic, and selling for insane amounts of money... and here was a table, groaning under a huge pile of them. At one point, the librarian took one out and flipped through it, showing us the ads and illustrations.

It was so brittle, the table of contents page broke off in her hands. The guy behind me actually whimpered when it happened. I suspect he knew what that magazine would cost at one of those book shows...

I desperately wanted to go through all those old Weird Tales, looking at Howard and Lovecraft and Derleth and Quinn, seeing them the way they'd originally been seen by the world... but I was just too scared. I could see accidentally dropping the thing and watching it explode into a thousand bucks worth of light brown confetti, right there at my feet. Instead, I picked up a first edition of SKULL-FACE AND OTHERS, from the first Arkham House printing. I'd never read the story, "Skull-Face", but I'd seen a LOT of illustrations from it in various art collections, and I'd always wanted to read it... but it's not in any of the Howard books I currently own... and here it was.







I glanced over at Chaosia. She was lost in the manuscripts. We had time. Why not?

And I sat and I fell into the dark world of the 1920s, with one of Howard's perennial two-fisted heroes, Sailor Steve Costigan, I unraveled the mystery of Kathulos, villain of villains, next to whom Moriarty looked like an accountant and Fu Manchu looked like a drag queen... Kathulos, aka Skull-Face, the mad Egyptian crimelord... who at one point escapes Costigan simply by removing his mask, stepping into a sarcophagus, and crossing his arms! The man's face is literally a LIVING SKULL!

"Kathulos of Egypt!" he cried, laughing maniacally. "Kathulos is older and greater than they dream! I am Kathulos of Atlantis, American fool, and your world will be MINE!"

Ohh, the joy of it all...

In time, Chaosia put down her manuscripts, and I set aside the first editions. We had planned to be home tonight, and it was a five-hour drive back home.

The library didn't have much for sale; a few hardback Conan collections, and a hardback Black Vulmea collection, which surprised me -- I didn't know anyone had collected Howard's seven-seas-and-pirates fiction. The book I wound up buying, in fact, wasn't a Howard book at all ... it was "One Who Walked Alone", by Novalyn Price Ellis. She'd dated Howard during his last few years, and had kept extensive journals, since she'd wanted to be a writer, too... which was one of the reasons she dated Howard, who literally made his living writing for pulp magazines. This had marked Howard as lazy, peculiar, and obstinate by the locals, who didn't understand a man who didn't do "honest work", regardless of how much money he made...

...and her book is probably the best look we have today at what the guy was like. It's not like he had a lot of friends, and the ones he did have are dead. I felt it was as good a way to get to know the guy as any.

The drive home was uneventful; Chaosia and I passed the time playing roadkill bingo and looking for odd or obscene signs to take pictures of.

...and that's my story, that's What I Did On My Summer Vacation for you all. It occurs to me that today, as I finish this, it's exactly sixty-six years ago today that Howard killed himself. He was very distraught about his mother dying... and, having read Ellis' book, I suspect he may have had bipolar disorder as well. A shame... and a waste.

But... while his work sits on my bedside table... while his barbarians laugh and slay and drink and wench through a hundred movies, a thousand stories... while Pulp Fiction is today regarded as a unique form of literature, instead of the "garbage" it was once considered...

...can we really say he's really gone?

Don't think so...

The Last Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft covered a lot of interesting and seminal themes with his writing, but one he liked a LOT was the idea that some things were just too weird for the human mind to handle.

"I dare not relate that which I saw, because you would go mad from the knowing, and I from the telling!" It's not an EXACT quote, but his protagonists often said similar things. Remember the famous Jack Nicholoson line, "You can't handle the truth?" Well, Lovecraft's favorite trope was that "The truth is so insane and horrible that the human mind would come apart like a house of cards in a typhoon if you REALLY knew what was going on!"

In short... NOBODY could REALLY handle the truth!

And his stories are full of characters who become more and more creeped out as they discover what's going on, to the point where most of them go completely fruity-gumballs and die or end up in an insane asylum... or retire quietly and live out horribly damaged lives, tortured by the horror of what they have seen. The horror. The horror...

Since most of his stories revolved around NOT seeing the monster, this means that most movies based on his work tend to have kind of a tough time. There have been quite a few decent ones -- From Beyond, Re-Animator and its sequels, The Dunwich Horror, and even a pretty-good version of The Call Of Cthulhu -- but most Lovecraft adaptations (The Curse, Cthulhu Mansion, Necronomicon, The Unnameable) kind of fall flat.

Which brings us to The Last Lovecraft... a comedy.

Is it a good movie? No. It is not. But in a weird kind of way, it may be the single truest adaptation of Lovecraft's THEMES that I've ever seen in a movie.

Because the longer I watch it, the creepier it gets. The more uncomfortable it makes me. The weirder and more horrific it becomes.

Not the monsters. The actors.

I can sum up the plot, without spoilers, fairly easily: "The coming of Cthulhu and the Elder Gods is nigh. The Stars Are Right. The world will end soon, and humanity will be done for... unless the last surviving member of the Lovecraft family (a nerd) can put a relic to proper use and stop the Apocalypse from happening, with the help of his even nerdier friends. But our heroes are pursued by Deep Ones and worse things..."

When I heard about this, naturally I was interested. I'm a Lovecraft fan from way back. But this movie... this one is just... wow. You see... the monsters... aren't scary. The people are.

The movie shifts back and forth between following the monsters who are pursuing our heroes to get the magic relic so they can bring about armageddon... and our heroes, who are trying to figure out how to use the relic while staying ahead of the cultists and monsters. The viewpoint shifts back and forth between these two camps.

And you know what? The monsters and cultists are actually pretty comforting. They're guys in masks and special effects makeup who ham it up and act like monster bad guys in a million other B-movies. It's like old home week. Family reunion, even.

... while the nerds? The nerds are the most unlikeable, awkward, geeky, socially maladroit (even with EACH OTHER) dweebs that you ever saw at a Star Trek convention, or gathered around a gaming table. These are the guys who, apropos of nothing, walk up to you in a comic shop, assume you are their friend, and start telling you about their D&D character. These are the nerds that made me give up going to conventions in the first place, the kind of people I don't really wanna be rude to, but would cheerfully chew my leg off to escape from a conversation with. The kind of geek with NO social skills, and a worldview that's skewed enough to make you feel like you're on drugs just from standing too CLOSE to him, you know? Especially the guy in the middle of the poster above. I could practically smell his BO as I watched the movie...

...and as I watched the movie... I realized that this was intentional on the part of the moviemakers. The monsters aren't the monsters in this movie.

We are.

I'm going to go do something more comforting now. This may be the single scariest Lovecraft adaptation I've ever seen...

"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

1985 was a whole different world.

AIDS hadn't hit yet; the Sexual Revolution was still going strong. President Reagan's wife Nancy told us all to "Just Say No," but most of us weren't. A lot of us hadn't figured out that the seventies were over. If you want pop culture details, I recommend "1985" by Bowling for Soup.*

But this blog is about gaming, and to some extent, computers. We had both in 1985, but they were pretty different from what we know now.

There were games, sure. Dungeons and Dragons was eleven years old by then, and the first edition of Advanced D&D was still going strong. Magic: The Gathering and the Vampire games were still to come by years.


There were computer games. Sort of. Most of the best games you'd see were in the arcades at that time, but for the few who had personal computers back then, you could find a few items.


I'd cut my teeth on ADVENTURE, for the Atari 2600, the old cartridge-based console that pretty much created home console gaming as we know it today. No hard drive, no internet connection, and all of 16 kilobytes of memory. That's KILOBYTES, son, not megabytes, not gigabytes. But what did we know? We thought it was awesome, because it was the cutting edge of technology at the time.














The box is on the right. The actual gameplay screen is on the left. YOU, the player, are represented by the little green square at upper right; the arrow thing you are holding is your magical sword. The yellow thing at lower left is the Grail, the object of your quest; get it back to your Golden Castle, and you win the game! Unfortunately, you have a red duck -- er, DRAGON, to contend with. In this screen, he is very likely charging at YOU, the player; however, since the chunky-pixeled icons could only be rendered ONE WAY, you're holding your sword backwards, and the duck-dragon is charging at you butt first.

Did I mention you can only hold one item at a time? If you charge down and butt the grail with your square little body, you will automatically drop the sword. Luckily, the dragons in this game are so dumb, he'll likely charge into it and kill himself. If he doesn't, though, he'll bump into you, ROAR loudly, and then eat you; your square yellow selfness will be visible in the little hole in his belly. And then you can hit RESET because you've just lost the game.

That was the state of the art in 1980. It had improved a tad by 1985... but not a hell of a lot. ZORK was still the big dog as far as computer fantasy gaming went. It was quite good. It was also completely text based... NO graphics whatsoever.
It was considered hot stuff because it could parse text; you could literally type in English what you wanted to do, and the game would figure it out and let you do it.


It's also worth noting that ZORK and its sequels were still in print for YEARS after the first one came out in 1980. We were still pretty far back along the tech curve; processing power was doubling every few years, sure, but this was not a rapid process when you were starting out with mere kilobytes of memory. Hell, the first computer I ever owned that had an actual hard drive wasn't until 1999.

I do remember the first home computer game I ever played that had actual graphics. It was 1985, the computer was the Tandy ColorComputer (and it should tell you something that Radio Shack was still a player in the computer manufacturing and sales biz at the time), and the game was Dungeons of Daggorath.

Snazzy, eh? Vector graphics! Actual colors! Yowza! Admittedly, the graphics didn't actually MOVE -- although there was sound. No music; this was beyond the capability of the system or the speakers.

You'd type MOVE FORWARD (or M -space - F - space - ENTER) and you'd move up, square by square.

Upon reaching a door, you'd type OPEN RIGHT, indicating you were using your right hand to open the door, and the screen would change. It was essentially creating the illusion of movement by simply drawing a new picture every time you did something. Your computer still does this, but at a framerate of 24 to 30 pictures every second. The old Tandy CoCo had a framerate of... um... about one picture every two or three seconds, if I recall correctly. It was not fast. It seemed downright glacial by today's standards. But it was magic, back in the day.

Oh, look, we're being attacked by a troll. The troll did not move. His pose never changed. You could tell he was moving towards you because his hazy silhouette would appear in the distance, and then he'd suddenly appear -- one square closer to you -- until he was in your face, as he is now, and it was time to fight.

Behind him, you can see the distant form of a snake. The snake will wait patiently until the troll is out of the way before attacking you. This wound up being one of the keys to the game: once you'd become powerful enough, weak enemies like snakes and spiders COULD NOT HIT YOU, which meant if there was a spider in the way, the Troll or Knight (lord, we were terrified of knights) would have to simply stand there behind the spider, waiting for the spider to die, before he could move up and hit you. So long as you had armor and shield and were tough enough -- and had a spider behind you -- you could explore the dungeon in relative safety. It was also handy to save empty potion bottles and discharged magic rings -- if you threw them down on the ground in front of you, the enemy HAD TO PICK THEM ALL UP BEFORE ATTACKING YOU.

This is how I killed my first Knight -- I dumped all my stuff on the floor except my sword and shield, and waited. When a knight found me, I beat the crap out of him while he was picking up all my stuff. I finally managed to kill him, just as he was picking up the last item.

The second knight was easier. And note that we had to find all this crap out by trial and error. There were no hint books, no cheats, and no Internet to go and look stuff up on.

This brings me to the real topic that made me sit down today for yammer: the story I read in 1985. It was published in Dragon magazine that year -- issue 97 -- and was pure science fiction. In it, a young girl is trying to make money so she can attend this exclusive music school in Austin. Her method of making money is rather unorthodox: she is playing a game called "Catacomb" on her computer.

Catacomb isn't just a simple computer game, though. She's connected to thousands of other players, all over the country, and many of the people she meets in-game are ACTUAL PEOPLE, avatars of players from other places! And in Catacomb, it is possible to slay monsters, take their treasure, and either buy better gear in-game... or trade it for a fraction of its value in real American money. This is how she hopes to make enough for tuition: by slaying monsters in an "online" game you play on a "web" of other computers.

I don't think today's youth can imagine how incredibly unlikely all this sounded back in 1985.

Sure, we knew about computers. We were cheerfully dropping quarters in them in our free time to play anything from Video Poker to Spy Hunter. In fact, that year, a dungeon-type arcade game, Gauntlet, was quite popular with a lot of people I knew. But playing over a web of computers? How would you connect them? Telephones? The long distance fees would beggar a king!

Shows what I knew. In the SJG game Car Wars, autoduellists could keep in touch while on the road using Elmay (short for electronic mail), a computer text that could be transmitted and recieved within seconds. Suuuure. Why use Elmay when you could just call someone up? And the idea of a game where you could actually sell your in-game treasures for real money? Ha, ha, ha!

Sure sounded like science fiction to me. But the guys at SJG were a lot more plugged into the world of computers than I was. And, apparently, so was Henry Melton.

You want to know what the world of online gaming looked like from the far distant world of 1985? The author of Catacomb, one Henry Melton, was kind enough to post the entire text of the story on his web site. Here's the link: http://www.henrymelton.com/0/h10.html

So go see for yourself.

*The lyrics to the song "1985" by Bowling for Soup can be found here: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/1985-lyrics-bowling-for-soup/88197b61f74bdd2748256eca000a86a3