Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [104]
I was supposed to be in school during these moves, but my father was not overly concerned with such niceties. Sometimes, after we first moved into a new area, he would keep me at home for several weeks before enrolling me in the local school. If it was spring, he’d figure it wasn’t worth enrolling me at all and would keep me home until fall. There were numerous ways in which these prolonged absences from school weren’t all that good for me, but the one area I felt it most immediately in was math studies. In the late 1950s, second or third grade math levels might vary considerably between two school districts, especially school districts in different states. I would move into a school in Seattle, and they would be teaching the basics of division, when I barely knew how to carry my ones when adding multiple numbers. In theory, teachers should be helpful or patient with a confused student, though I don’t remember many who were, or who were inclined to make exceptions. Most just figured I was dumb or lazy about math. Or perhaps they knew that my father was something of a perennial floater, and that made me the roving son of a roving man, which made me hardly worth their trouble. In any event, I never became too adept at math, never developed much affection for its intricacies. Its laws and mysteries intimidated me, and I felt like I must be stupid after all, because I couldn’t figure out the arithmetical rules and regulations that other kids seemed so quick to understand.
However, when it came to reading, it was a different matter. My father had taught me to read long before the first grade. He would sit me on his knee at his desk, pointing at words in picture books, teaching me to recognize them and how to master the logic of their shapes and the pronunciation of their letters. It’s true, he wouldn’t read to me at night— maybe because he wanted me to read to myself. And read I did. Reading became one of the activities I loved most in life. It was something I could do alone, and of course it was a great method of escaping the reality of the life around me. The first stories I remember falling in love with were EC crime and horror comics, and comic book adventures by Carl Barks—the man who wrote the great 1940s and ’50s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge tales for Walt Disney’s comics. Barks was a smart man— he knew the scope and meanings of the ancient mythological tales inside and out, and he transformed them to the world of talking ducks with a wit and moral integrity that cost the original stories none of their depth or wonder. After Barks, it was an easier step to appreciate not just the adventurism of Jack London, Jules Verne, or Alexander Dumas, but also the full-breadth drama and incredible longing that one found in ancient epics like the Iliad or the Odyssey, or some of the other Roman and Greek legends. A few year later, I would form a deep passion for horror writers, like Poe and Bram Stoker, and the ghost stories of Henry James and Émile Zola and Ambrose Bierce. I didn’t always understand the language of what I read—and I certainly didn’t get some of the more subtle themes of the stories—but the world these people described was a world I felt at home in.
In the evenings, I would sit on a sofa in the living room, near where my father worked, and I would read my comic books, or the Scribner hardbacks of books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped! or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with their lusty N. C. Wyeth illustrations. Then my father would turn out his desk lamp and join me on the sofa, and he would turn on the television. He had a regular slew of shows he liked to watch— mostly crime fare, like The Untouchables, Richard Diamond, Highway Patrol, and The Defenders, or Westerns, like Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Maverick, and Have Gun, Will Travel. Unlike my mother, my father would never try to stop me from watching the horror films I loved, and he always seemed to know fascinating anecdotes about Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff that had the effect of humanizing the men behind the monsters. (Which was hardly necessary,