When Stevens Elementary Published My Haunting Childhood Lit

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming (hopefully) memoir A Portrait of the Doofus as a Young Man

I published my first book when I was 8. Entitled Dinosaurs (Jan. 1989), this illustrated debut was published by Stevens Super Stars Publishing Company. Dinosaurs masquerades as a straightforward informative text about dinosaur facts but on the second to last page the tone changes drastically. “They didn’t have anything to eat,” is all that is written and underneath those haunting words is a giant empty circle. Then the book returns to harmless fact on the last page. If only Franz Kafka, who said “we ought only to read the kind of books that wound us,” was around to read Dinosaurs. Naturally, Stevens Super Stars Publishing company wanted more from me after that and I was contracted to write two more books.

The first was Mrs. Reed, about a woman with a pig who finds twin cats in New York City and tries without success to find their owner. Continuing to explore mortality as I’d done in Dinosaurs, by the end, everyone–animal and human alike–are dead. First Loon, then the cats (never having been reunited with their owner, despite the ad Mrs. Reed places in the paper) and then Mrs. Reed herself. Everyone, everything gone—poof! Mrs. Reed, a woodwind being blown into by this author to sound the song, Carpe diem, readers! For you too may too not find the owners of the lost cats.

The last book was My Grandma Mary’s Catfish (June 1990). This way my first foray into the adventure story. Grandma Mary sets about on a mission to save a catfish from a shark after she becomes reunited with the turtle her father had kicked out of the house and the turtle tells her of the catfish’s situation. On her journey, Grandma Mary uses the resources she has packed to survive encounters with a seal who is “acting wild,” a homicidal whale and a drowning seahorse. At the end, Grandma Mary saves a goldfish from a shark and feels she has succeeded, showing not that the rising star of Stevens Super Star Publishing Company failed to notice that he had accidentally changed the type of fish central to the plot and title of the book but that he has masterfully manipulated the narrative to convey the horrors of mental illness à la A Beautiful Mind: Grandma Mary doesn’t notice the difference because she is of course suffering from Alzheimers. 

Publishing prose may have been my bread and butter but poetry was my jam. There was nothing to me like grabbing a pencil and one of my parent’s legal pads and filling the page with 6 or so obscenely-large scrawled lines in AABBCCDD rhyme scheme. I covered all of the big subjects: Love, Peace, the Earth. I also covered The Cafeteria, A Can, Cub Scouts, Crime, The Toad, The Pencil, Soccer, Baseball, and The Circus. When it came to matching words of the same sound, even when those words didn’t convey much of anything about the subject, I was unmatched.

Best Friend

My best friends name is Willy.
We always play alot.
We always play soccer.
He’s not much of a talker.
We sometimes jog with his sister.
We rearly play twister.
That’s all I have to tell
and I hope I told it well.

Did I need to have a line where I lied about Willy’s social disposition? Or a line discussing what we did not play Yes. Because the ends (which need to rhyme) justify the bends.

My most memorable poem, however was my free verse masterpiece, A Penny, written for everyone who has felt like the lowest form of currency.

A Penny

A penny is not many
A penny is something but not much.
A penny with a president sitting on top.
so little in ways.
so big in others.
A penny is real special.

Not thinking about pennies the same way now, are you, reader? Boom! Poetry-ed!