Originally written in April 2010 for a grad school magazine writing class
I proposed to the first girl I had sex with. Or, perhaps more accurately, the first girl who had sex with me.
Now, to be clear, I didn’t propose because she had sex with me. It wasn’t some passion- or lust-fueled spur-of-the-moment post-coitus decision. In fact, I had proposed months before the actual sex had taken place. I genuinely loved this girl and wanted to spend my life with her. At least I thought I did.
My heart thudded in my chest, pounding so loudly I was certain her father and stepmother could hear it in the next room, through the thin walls of the trailer they lived in. My mouth felt dry and scratchy, as if coated with sandpaper, and my palms were slick with sweat. I was all fried nerves. I don’t remember my fumbling fingers pulling the ring from the right front pocket of my jeans, but I know I went down on one knee.
When we met, my America Online screen name was TheCrow331, so named for my favorite film of my high school years and the date its star was killed in an FX mishap toward the end of filming. Hers had something to do with angels. We quickly bonded over the gothic angst of our youth.
The film spawned a host of merchandise, from T-shirts and posters, of which I had many, to statues and jewelry, including a sterling silver ring etched with the film’s tagline: “Real love is forever.” Thirty bucks plus shipping and handling later, I held what would become her engagement ring in my hand.
She cried when I slid the already tarnished metal band over her finger, nodded her head. A skittish laugh lodged in her throat as she looked at me through tear-streaked glasses. She might have even squeaked out the word, “yes.”
She was a musician. Her plan was to major in music in college, though whether she wanted to get a degree in performance, composition or education, I can no longer remember.
When she applied to Youngstown State University so she could attend the Dana School of Music, one of the oldest music schools in the country, I applied, too. It didn’t hurt that the school offered a minor in creative writing and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be accepted by my first choice, the University of Iowa’s highly-regarded Writers’ Workshop.
But, even if Iowa had accepted me, I knew I wasn’t going there. I was following my girl to Ohio.
The first few months of our freshman year are a semi-vivid blur, like a VHS tape on fast forward, full of false starts and the premature giddiness of being on our own. We were clumsy and awkward, yet to find one another’s rhythm. But we’d get there, I thought. It just takes time.
She dropped out of the music program midway through that first year and moved back home to her mother’s. I don’t remember why, exactly. Somewhere between arriving on campus and when she left, she lost her passion. And with her abandoning me at a college I was only attending because of her, I lost mine as well.
We probably spoke every day, using those same screen names that had brought us together. But the immediacy and ease of the Internet couldn’t make up for the growing distance between us. Even our every-other-weekend visits were lackluster. We were already going through the motions like an elderly couple who have been together for 50 years.
The school year ended and, after one final, fervent night together, I moved back home.
We spoke once after that first year of college. Maybe twice. I don’t remember what about. We never did break up. We simply drifted apart, stopped talking.
She still has the ring, as far as I know.
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Marvelous
Originally written in May 2010 for a grad school magazine writing class
The elevator door slides apart and I step through. The only thing that tells me I've come to the right place is the large cardboard standee for Iron Man 2 sitting in the corner of the otherwise sparse lobby. There are glass double-doors in front of me. I walk up to the door and pull the handle. It doesn't open. I notice the receptionist sitting at her desk on the other side of the door. She waves me back. I release my grip on the handle and the receptionist reaches underneath the desk. I hear a CLICK, pull open the door and step through.
I’m in New York City, my first time, standing in the 11th floor offices of Marvel Comics, which are located in an unassuming building on 5th Avenue, a few blocks from Times Square. From the outside, the building looks like any other that lines this stretch of Manhattan. I probably would have walked right past it had my cousin Adam not been with me. Adam has lived in New York for about 10 years now, and without his guidance I would have been lost as soon as I stepped off the Peter Pan bus at the Port Authority bus terminal.
I’ve come to New York, to Marvel, to interview for a summer internship position, which was the furthest thing from my mind when I applied to go to graduate school at Emerson College in Boston. Hell, it was the furthest thing from my mind up until a few months ago, when I started following one of Marvel’s editors on Twitter.
Her name is Jennifer Grünwald (@jengrunwald) and she’s worked at Marvel since 2002. She was having an “open-question-ask-me-anything” day, and I asked her how a person goes about getting a job at one of the two big comic book companies (the other being DC Comics). Within minutes, she replied, “@oyboy Well, aside from applying as one would do for any job, there's always an internship. (Which is how I got hired!).”
I hadn’t thought about interning at a comic book company while in grad school. As much as I love comic books, and I’ve collected them for about 20 years, it didn’t seem to be a realistic possibility. I had interned at a comic book company once already, in Los Angeles, while an undergrad at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. It was a small company called BOOM! Studios, and I drove across the country to work there during the summer of 2007. It was an enjoyable and educational experience. I had never seen the industry from the publishing perspective before. I was even offered a job, but I had a year left before I received my bachelor’s degree, and that was more important to me at the time.
Grünwald encouraged me to apply for an internship and see how it went from there. So I did. That was on March 18, a Thursday. I filled out the internship application over the weekend and submitted it. On Tuesday, March 23, I sent a tweet out into the ether: “Registered for the fall. Spring might be tough, but the fall should be a breeze. Still hoping for the summer internship. C'mon, @Marvel!”
Someone at Marvel was listening.
Less than an hour after sending that tweet, I received the following response from Ryan Penagos (@Agent_M), Marvel’s website editor: “@oyboy You're a Journalism student? What department did you apply to? I need a good journalism intern for Marvel.com.”
Now, I’ve had an email address for almost 20 years. I’ve been online in some form or another for more than half my life. I’m comfortable with technology in a way that used to worry my parents (especially after my father would receive a $300 bill from AOL). But even I was amazed by the rapidity of Twitter.
I quickly tapped out a response to Ryan on my phone: “@Agent_M I had applied for editorial, but I'm really open for anything. I have a big interest in the industry in general.”
From Ryan, an hour later: “@oyboy Yup, saw your application. We'll see what happens.”
Two days later, on March 25, I received an email from Sara Del Greco, Marvel’s internship coordinator. She asked me when I would be able to schedule an interview.
I was flabbergasted, nearly speechless. In the span of a week I had applied for an internship at Marvel and been asked to come in for an interview. Perhaps not all thanks to Twitter, but I know it helped. My immediate thought was, This wouldn’t have been possible five years ago. Maybe not even two years ago.
My email back to Del Greco basically consisted of, “Whenever you want me to come in for an interview, I’ll be there.” This was Marvel. The big time. I wasn’t about to let a little thing like a class schedule or the 200 miles between Boston and New York get in my way.
The first comics I read as a child were published by Marvel, though I was ignorant of the fact at the time. I was unaware of things like publishing companies and writers and artists. All I knew was the four-color images that popped off the page dazzled me. I just liked the stories. Later, when I realized this was a job, that people sat around writing these stories and drawing these pictures, I hooked. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write. And I wanted to write comics.
I’ve never been able to pinpoint what it is about comics that has fascinated me for so many years. It long ago stopped being about the requisite superhero characters. Spider-Man, Superman and Batman were fun when I was younger, but as I got older I didn’t care so much about the characters I was reading as I did about who was writing them. I became enthralled by the process and sought out examples of comic book scripts wherever I could find them. Some I found online, and later a company called Titan Books published two volumes of “Writers on Comic Scriptwriting,” featuring interviews with some of the biggest names in the industry, along with examples of their scripts. Those books became bibles to me, so much so that the spine is cracked on Volume 1 and pages have started falling out of Volume 2.
I learned that some writers write very intricate, detailed scripts, wherein they describe everything from the characters’ facial expressions to the pattern on the wallpaper. Most comic books are 22 pages. One writer, Alan Moore, often wrote 100 pages of script for every 22-page comic book. Other writers are very sparse in their descriptions, sometimes only a paragraph or two per page, entrusting the artist to lay out the pages to best tell the story. It was the process of taking pages of dialogue and description and turning them into coherent, monthly serials that enchanted me, and I wanted in on the magic.
I’ve gone to a number of universities and colleges, lived all over the country, from Los Angeles to Boston, and the one constant throughout all those years has been comic books. I’ve lugged my collection back and forth more times than I care to remember. If there was one opportunity I was going to drop everything for and jump at, it was working at Marvel or DC Comics.
And here I am, April 2, slightly more than two weeks since I first inquired through Twitter about working at Marvel, waiting for an interview. The kid I used to be, the one who sat on his bedroom floor surrounded by stacks of comic books, all perfectly enshrined in their plastic bags and cardboard backings, flipping through stories he’d read countless times before and would read countless times since, he was crazed with excitement, bouncing off the walls inside my chest.
I calmly sit in the waiting area, across from a wall display filled with new comics, the way a doctor’s office has copies of Sports Illustrated and People, and fill out the internship application paperwork. I fight to stifle a grin every time I look up and see the life-size Hulk statue glowering at me from just inside the entrance to the offices.
The elevator door slides apart and I step through. The only thing that tells me I've come to the right place is the large cardboard standee for Iron Man 2 sitting in the corner of the otherwise sparse lobby. There are glass double-doors in front of me. I walk up to the door and pull the handle. It doesn't open. I notice the receptionist sitting at her desk on the other side of the door. She waves me back. I release my grip on the handle and the receptionist reaches underneath the desk. I hear a CLICK, pull open the door and step through.
I’m in New York City, my first time, standing in the 11th floor offices of Marvel Comics, which are located in an unassuming building on 5th Avenue, a few blocks from Times Square. From the outside, the building looks like any other that lines this stretch of Manhattan. I probably would have walked right past it had my cousin Adam not been with me. Adam has lived in New York for about 10 years now, and without his guidance I would have been lost as soon as I stepped off the Peter Pan bus at the Port Authority bus terminal.
I’ve come to New York, to Marvel, to interview for a summer internship position, which was the furthest thing from my mind when I applied to go to graduate school at Emerson College in Boston. Hell, it was the furthest thing from my mind up until a few months ago, when I started following one of Marvel’s editors on Twitter.
Her name is Jennifer Grünwald (@jengrunwald) and she’s worked at Marvel since 2002. She was having an “open-question-ask-me-anything” day, and I asked her how a person goes about getting a job at one of the two big comic book companies (the other being DC Comics). Within minutes, she replied, “@oyboy Well, aside from applying as one would do for any job, there's always an internship. (Which is how I got hired!).”
I hadn’t thought about interning at a comic book company while in grad school. As much as I love comic books, and I’ve collected them for about 20 years, it didn’t seem to be a realistic possibility. I had interned at a comic book company once already, in Los Angeles, while an undergrad at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. It was a small company called BOOM! Studios, and I drove across the country to work there during the summer of 2007. It was an enjoyable and educational experience. I had never seen the industry from the publishing perspective before. I was even offered a job, but I had a year left before I received my bachelor’s degree, and that was more important to me at the time.
Grünwald encouraged me to apply for an internship and see how it went from there. So I did. That was on March 18, a Thursday. I filled out the internship application over the weekend and submitted it. On Tuesday, March 23, I sent a tweet out into the ether: “Registered for the fall. Spring might be tough, but the fall should be a breeze. Still hoping for the summer internship. C'mon, @Marvel!”
Someone at Marvel was listening.
Less than an hour after sending that tweet, I received the following response from Ryan Penagos (@Agent_M), Marvel’s website editor: “@oyboy You're a Journalism student? What department did you apply to? I need a good journalism intern for Marvel.com.”
Now, I’ve had an email address for almost 20 years. I’ve been online in some form or another for more than half my life. I’m comfortable with technology in a way that used to worry my parents (especially after my father would receive a $300 bill from AOL). But even I was amazed by the rapidity of Twitter.
I quickly tapped out a response to Ryan on my phone: “@Agent_M I had applied for editorial, but I'm really open for anything. I have a big interest in the industry in general.”
From Ryan, an hour later: “@oyboy Yup, saw your application. We'll see what happens.”
Two days later, on March 25, I received an email from Sara Del Greco, Marvel’s internship coordinator. She asked me when I would be able to schedule an interview.
I was flabbergasted, nearly speechless. In the span of a week I had applied for an internship at Marvel and been asked to come in for an interview. Perhaps not all thanks to Twitter, but I know it helped. My immediate thought was, This wouldn’t have been possible five years ago. Maybe not even two years ago.
My email back to Del Greco basically consisted of, “Whenever you want me to come in for an interview, I’ll be there.” This was Marvel. The big time. I wasn’t about to let a little thing like a class schedule or the 200 miles between Boston and New York get in my way.
The first comics I read as a child were published by Marvel, though I was ignorant of the fact at the time. I was unaware of things like publishing companies and writers and artists. All I knew was the four-color images that popped off the page dazzled me. I just liked the stories. Later, when I realized this was a job, that people sat around writing these stories and drawing these pictures, I hooked. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write. And I wanted to write comics.
I’ve never been able to pinpoint what it is about comics that has fascinated me for so many years. It long ago stopped being about the requisite superhero characters. Spider-Man, Superman and Batman were fun when I was younger, but as I got older I didn’t care so much about the characters I was reading as I did about who was writing them. I became enthralled by the process and sought out examples of comic book scripts wherever I could find them. Some I found online, and later a company called Titan Books published two volumes of “Writers on Comic Scriptwriting,” featuring interviews with some of the biggest names in the industry, along with examples of their scripts. Those books became bibles to me, so much so that the spine is cracked on Volume 1 and pages have started falling out of Volume 2.
I learned that some writers write very intricate, detailed scripts, wherein they describe everything from the characters’ facial expressions to the pattern on the wallpaper. Most comic books are 22 pages. One writer, Alan Moore, often wrote 100 pages of script for every 22-page comic book. Other writers are very sparse in their descriptions, sometimes only a paragraph or two per page, entrusting the artist to lay out the pages to best tell the story. It was the process of taking pages of dialogue and description and turning them into coherent, monthly serials that enchanted me, and I wanted in on the magic.
I’ve gone to a number of universities and colleges, lived all over the country, from Los Angeles to Boston, and the one constant throughout all those years has been comic books. I’ve lugged my collection back and forth more times than I care to remember. If there was one opportunity I was going to drop everything for and jump at, it was working at Marvel or DC Comics.
And here I am, April 2, slightly more than two weeks since I first inquired through Twitter about working at Marvel, waiting for an interview. The kid I used to be, the one who sat on his bedroom floor surrounded by stacks of comic books, all perfectly enshrined in their plastic bags and cardboard backings, flipping through stories he’d read countless times before and would read countless times since, he was crazed with excitement, bouncing off the walls inside my chest.
I calmly sit in the waiting area, across from a wall display filled with new comics, the way a doctor’s office has copies of Sports Illustrated and People, and fill out the internship application paperwork. I fight to stifle a grin every time I look up and see the life-size Hulk statue glowering at me from just inside the entrance to the offices.
Unnatural
Originally written in April 2010 for a grad school magazine writing class
Last weekend I took a bus from Boston’s South Station terminal to the Port Authority in New York. During the 200-mile long, four-hour trip, I looked out the window perhaps two or three times. I can tell you more about the young boy sitting next to me than I can about anything that rushed by as the bus rumbled along the interstate.
The boy was Jewish, and had dark, curly hair. He was a Red Sox fan. He carried with him in his blue backpack a book of Garfield comic strips and a 2010 sports almanac. He ate matzo and was excited about Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury’s 70 stolen bases in 2009. While the Red Sox were his favorite team, he liked the Yankees, too, especially Derek Jeter. He was traveling with his father and brother to Pennsylvania.
Of the world outside the 45-foot-long bus in which I sat, I saw thin, stick-like trees alongside the interstate, still bare from winter. Some evergreens. A number of small creeks and ponds that may have had names, though I wasn’t in any position to know them. It was a bright, crisp morning, the sky cloudless and almost painfully blue. A chill in the air I thought would burn off by the afternoon. And that’s it. That’s all I can remember.
Nature is an abstraction to me. I’ve always fancied the idea of it, and liked it in a general sense. I have nothing against Nature. But when it comes to actual real-life experience, I demur. I used to tell myself it was for no reason other than lack of opportunity to be around Nature, even though I knew that wasn’t true. I’ve had plenty of chances to enjoy all that Nature has to offer, from offers to go camping with my brother and his family in the Badlands of South Dakota to all the times I’ve driven across the country.
On the last family vacation I remember with any sort of clarity, my parents piled my brother, sister and I into my father’s sedan and drove us to South Dakota to visit Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, a once-bustling mining town turned old west tourist trap. We stood in silent awe of the great stone faces of presidents’ past for a few minutes, maybe as many as five or 10. We spent more time indoors, in the museum.
The last time I drove the 1,500 miles from Omaha to Los Angeles, I took pictures through the dirty, bug-smeared windows of my beat-up ’99 Dodge Avenger. I propped the camera on the steering wheel or pointed it out the window beside my head and snapped photos of cloud formations, of the wide-open prairies and cornfields of western Nebraska, of the distant mountain ranges of Colorado and the dry, arid desert of Utah and Nevada. I dubbed the collection of 107 photos, America @ 80 MPH.
Aside from pulling off the road for gas and bathroom breaks, it never once occurred to me during my eight-to-12 hour driving sessions to stop the car, to get out and walk around. I had places to go, people to see. I cared only about my destination, the journey be damned.
When I’m driving, I can only move forward. Deviating from the endless asphalt path is anathema. I don't pay attention to the Natural world around me, just the highway in front of me.
When I tell people I’m from Nebraska, their eyes light up with thoughts of vast acres of cornfields and cows, roosters crowing, signaling the start of a new day, farmers plowing fields before dawn. And this pastoral scene is true of much of the state, but not Omaha. I was raised in the suburbs of an honest-to-God city, with rush hour traffic and skyscrapers, street gangs and drug problems.
Omaha has its fair share of parks and green open spaces, and a “world famous” zoo, but mostly there are roads. Streets paved with asphalt and concrete in constant need of repair. I remember the field behind my middle school, tucked away behind West Center Street, lush and verdant, before it was bulldozed to make room for a shopping mall. And later a movie theater. And a Best Buy. And numerous other big box stores.
There was another field alongside L Street, stretching between 120th and 132nd streets, not far from my house. Driving past, it almost looked like a miniature forest. Tall oak trees bunched together, nearly 12 square blocks of grass and shade. The land was owned by some technology company that had its office park hidden away behind the trees. Then, a few years ago, the company sold the land back to the city, which promptly designed plans to rip up the trees and drown the field in acrid black tar.
Now, where the trees once stood, sit even more box stores, selling you anything and everything you could possibly desire. Nature once again forced to give way to commerce.
Of course, I never went to either of those fields before they became shopping centers.
Last weekend I took a bus from Boston’s South Station terminal to the Port Authority in New York. During the 200-mile long, four-hour trip, I looked out the window perhaps two or three times. I can tell you more about the young boy sitting next to me than I can about anything that rushed by as the bus rumbled along the interstate.
The boy was Jewish, and had dark, curly hair. He was a Red Sox fan. He carried with him in his blue backpack a book of Garfield comic strips and a 2010 sports almanac. He ate matzo and was excited about Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury’s 70 stolen bases in 2009. While the Red Sox were his favorite team, he liked the Yankees, too, especially Derek Jeter. He was traveling with his father and brother to Pennsylvania.
Of the world outside the 45-foot-long bus in which I sat, I saw thin, stick-like trees alongside the interstate, still bare from winter. Some evergreens. A number of small creeks and ponds that may have had names, though I wasn’t in any position to know them. It was a bright, crisp morning, the sky cloudless and almost painfully blue. A chill in the air I thought would burn off by the afternoon. And that’s it. That’s all I can remember.
Nature is an abstraction to me. I’ve always fancied the idea of it, and liked it in a general sense. I have nothing against Nature. But when it comes to actual real-life experience, I demur. I used to tell myself it was for no reason other than lack of opportunity to be around Nature, even though I knew that wasn’t true. I’ve had plenty of chances to enjoy all that Nature has to offer, from offers to go camping with my brother and his family in the Badlands of South Dakota to all the times I’ve driven across the country.
On the last family vacation I remember with any sort of clarity, my parents piled my brother, sister and I into my father’s sedan and drove us to South Dakota to visit Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, a once-bustling mining town turned old west tourist trap. We stood in silent awe of the great stone faces of presidents’ past for a few minutes, maybe as many as five or 10. We spent more time indoors, in the museum.
The last time I drove the 1,500 miles from Omaha to Los Angeles, I took pictures through the dirty, bug-smeared windows of my beat-up ’99 Dodge Avenger. I propped the camera on the steering wheel or pointed it out the window beside my head and snapped photos of cloud formations, of the wide-open prairies and cornfields of western Nebraska, of the distant mountain ranges of Colorado and the dry, arid desert of Utah and Nevada. I dubbed the collection of 107 photos, America @ 80 MPH.
Aside from pulling off the road for gas and bathroom breaks, it never once occurred to me during my eight-to-12 hour driving sessions to stop the car, to get out and walk around. I had places to go, people to see. I cared only about my destination, the journey be damned.
When I’m driving, I can only move forward. Deviating from the endless asphalt path is anathema. I don't pay attention to the Natural world around me, just the highway in front of me.
When I tell people I’m from Nebraska, their eyes light up with thoughts of vast acres of cornfields and cows, roosters crowing, signaling the start of a new day, farmers plowing fields before dawn. And this pastoral scene is true of much of the state, but not Omaha. I was raised in the suburbs of an honest-to-God city, with rush hour traffic and skyscrapers, street gangs and drug problems.
Omaha has its fair share of parks and green open spaces, and a “world famous” zoo, but mostly there are roads. Streets paved with asphalt and concrete in constant need of repair. I remember the field behind my middle school, tucked away behind West Center Street, lush and verdant, before it was bulldozed to make room for a shopping mall. And later a movie theater. And a Best Buy. And numerous other big box stores.
There was another field alongside L Street, stretching between 120th and 132nd streets, not far from my house. Driving past, it almost looked like a miniature forest. Tall oak trees bunched together, nearly 12 square blocks of grass and shade. The land was owned by some technology company that had its office park hidden away behind the trees. Then, a few years ago, the company sold the land back to the city, which promptly designed plans to rip up the trees and drown the field in acrid black tar.
Now, where the trees once stood, sit even more box stores, selling you anything and everything you could possibly desire. Nature once again forced to give way to commerce.
Of course, I never went to either of those fields before they became shopping centers.
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