Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

Eventually, I will come to the point as I take you on a spin through the paint mixer of my brain and dip you in the mish-mash of my nostalgia, but not quite yet. For now I speak uncensored, unfiltered, and full of madness.

Thoughts, like electric grasshoppers, jump in space and time.

When I was a child, in the fifties and early sixties, the world was full of magic, but not everyone could see it. For some the world was gray, and it could be that way for me too, unless I turned my head just right and looked for some well-lit crack in my universe so that I might peer into another that was full of color and commotion and a sense of wonder.

My mother opened the secret door first and showed me other worlds were there, and then she backed off and left it up to me to go inside and look around. She showed it to me by reading to me, fairy tales and funny animal stories from comic books, all manner of children’s stories, and pretty soon I could read, and I could do this long before I went to school, and for no reason I can clearly explain, once I learned to read, and realized the alphabet helped accomplish what I was reading, I wanted to make letters and find their order and make words and sentences and paragraphs and pages and finally, stories, and books.

But the first things I read with great enthusiasm and wanted to write, and also wanted to illustrate, were comics. I loved DC comics especially, for here were refugees from another universe, brightly colored in panels with magnificent heroes and rocket ships and monsters and most importantly to me, people who wanted to be honest and good and make the world around them a better place to be.

So I’ll say it again, and let me testify: I loved comics, and they introduced me not only to brighter and weirder worlds, but they crossed up worlds. Westerns sometimes blended with horror and science fiction and action and mystery, and sometimes my heroes, like Batman, traveled through space and time, or hung out with my favorite alien, Superman. There were men who were given powers because they were good and just and brave, like Green Lantern. Oh, man. I tried to be good and just and brave for just that reason, hoping some alien dying from a rocket crash might pass to me a power ring and a lamp with which to keep it charged.

“In brightest day and darkest night” and all that. I was primed and ready, waiting on my alien.

I sometimes wished I might find a chemical formula, if just by accident, that could be tasted by me, or that might drench me in such a way (perhaps by lightning bursting through my bedroom window and striking my chemistry set), that when it was all said and done, I would develop the ability to run at top speed, so fast I might have to wear a special red costume compacted inside a ring. I could call myself The Flash. I could vibrate through solid matter, run up walls, dash across the ocean without getting my feet wet, break the sound barrier, the time barrier, and if I was real lucky, I’d get to battle a giant super intelligent gorilla who lived in an invisible city full of other gorillas. Man, the possibilities.

As for Wonder Woman, well, I wanted to be heroic enough that she might like me. Back then I wanted to ride in her invisible plane and go to her secret island. I hadn’t yet figured out there was something else about her that attracted me as well. That skimpy costume, for example, or what was under it, and the fact that her island was secret.

But Batman was my favorite hero. He was a regular guy. He learned about all manner of things because not only was he pissed off over the murder of his parents, he was a genius. He studied chemistry, astronomy, all the sciences. He was a gymnast and a martial artist: Judo, Jujitsu, Karate, boxing and wrestling (these were about all the martial arts the reading public knew of in those days), and he was good looking and had money and the women lined up for a mile.

Yeah, baby. I wanted to be Batman.

I didn’t have the money. I thought I was okay looking, but nothing to look cool in a tuxedo at a charity benefit. In fact, I had never seen anyone in a tuxedo, or anyone who wanted to wear one. The only charity I knew about was us. We were poorer than the proverbial one-legged church mouse with a respiratory problem. I did study all the disciplines Batman studied, in a small child sort of way. I read books on chemistry and rocks and astronomy and insects and the human body, and before I realized my dad was in fact an excellent wrestler, a fair boxer, and a hell of a former country self-defense fighter, I read the one book I could get on weight training, exercise and self-defense. I don’t remember the title, but it was mostly about exercises and lifting weights, and in the back were a few self-defense techniques. I probably got it from the Gladewater library on our trips there to visit with my cousins, returning it when my mother or father went in that direction. My dad tended to do that a lot, as he was a troubleshooter for a company, gone now, called Wanda Petroleum.

But, what I’m trying to tell you in this long-around-the-block manner, via the alleyways with a look in the trashcans and a glance at the sky, is, I wanted to be Batman, and I tried. Even to this day, that character has influenced my life, leading to a thirst for knowledge. I never mastered the disciplines Batman knew. After I found out how to make baking soda boil over, my chemistry skills hit the wall. When it comes to math, once I run out of fingers and toes, I’m done. I still look at the stars, but I remember very little beyond: Oh, pretty.

What Batman did for me, though, was make me understand that the world was bigger than I knew, that there were things beyond getting out of high school and going to work and waiting for retirement. Like Batman, I wanted to be something special.

And, it would be pretty cool too if I could learn to throw a batarang.

One last time, ladies and gentleman, I’ll testify, shout it from the rooftops: I loved comic books.

Mae and Pete Green, who ran a kind of general store in my little town, one of the last of its kind, sold me comics on a regular basis, all in color and full of spandex or whatever costumes were made of in the fifties and early sixties, for a dime. Kid crack, jacked to the max. In the back of the store, half the cover page cut off, were unsold comics that were not supposed to be sold, but were in fact raffled off for a nickel a book. There were a few old pulps there too, and a lot of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. I thought that store was a little slice of heaven and for a few coins I had been given the keys.

And my mother, bless her heart, she used to sew me Batman suits with cardboard inside the ears, though, in time, this didn’t keep them from drooping until I looked a bit like a sad ear-cut Doberman with a constipation problem. She made for my nephew, who was close to my age, as my brother was seventeen when I was born and married not long after, a Robin suit. We were pretty damn cool, right there in Mt. Enterprise, waiting for crime to happen.

We did a lot of waiting. Back then there wasn’t much crime in our part of the country, least that we knew about. Though our bank was robbed on occasion, and I remember hearing about that, thinking, well, where the hell were we? Not only did we not know about the robbery, unlike Batman who always seemed to be patrolling at just the right time, we wouldn’t even have had our costumes with us if we had. It happened midday — admittedly not a classic time for our Bat hero — but no one sent up a signal or nothing. It was over and done with and we were at the house, enjoying our summer, either watching TV or wrestling in the yard, climbing the apple tree, pretending it was a spaceship. Hell, except for the Bat cowl, when all this happened, my suit was in the wash.