So I’m at my friend’s place and her daughter is showing off her candy haul to me excitedly and explaining how much she got of each type of candy (including an ungodly number of Coffee Crisps, but if you’re going to get a lot of one type of fun-sized bar, you might as well get a good one) and when she gets to the lollipops I recoil in shock, because now they are making “fun-size” Tootsie Roll Pops.

I mean, seriously? Fun-sized lollipops? These things looked like little candy pellets on tiny sticks. These would not even take one lick to get to the centre. It would have been cute if it wasn’t so clearly a total destruction of my youth, which was far more awesome than any present childhood because the damn Tootsie Roll Pops were at least the right size.

Apropos of nothing, here is a Halloweeny video for everybody: the Pet Shop Boys with “Heart,” which has a Dracula in it. And get this: the Dracula is actually Ian McKellen, which I only learned very recently, and which explains why this Dracula is such a swinging dancer.

I had an interesting experience this weekend at a yard sale on my street. While digging through a bin full of kids’ clothes in hopes of finding some for my two-year-old son, I had a Spider-Man t-shirt thrust into my hands. “Trust me,” said the father of the boy whose old toys and clothes were being sold, “when he turns three he’ll be demanding that you get him one.”

It’s true; my neighbourhood is full of kids, and nearly all of the boys routinely wear clothing with logos or images of superheroes; Spider-Man is easily the most popular, but I often see Superman, Batman and occasionally Wolverine. Love of superheroes seems to be an almost universal phenomenon among boys of a particular age. At the same time, it’s almost certain that few of those boys will wind up being regular or even occasional comics readers. This presents us with a paradox: superheroes are more prominent in popular culture than ever (particularly kids’ culture), but fewer and fewer people are reading comics – and almost none of them are kids.

I don’t need to tell you what you’ll see if you go into a typical comics shop: adults, and not even particularly young ones. Sure, you’ll see a few teens, but odds are they’re there for whatever anime and manga the shop sells – and you certainly won’t see anyone under thirteen. This isn’t a new problem, and lots of people have discussed the reasons for it and possible strategies for addressing it. But I’d like to raise two points that I’ve never heard mentioned. First, that the loss of the children’s market is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what kids’ comics are for; second, that the paradox I describe above is not actually a paradox, in that the omnipresence of superheroes in media and merchandising is actually a cause of the loss of the children’s market.

Let’s start with the purpose of comics. Not the purpose of comics for you and me, or the purpose of comics for the kid who might theoretically read them, but the purpose they serve for the parents who might conceivably buy a comic for their child. For parents, comics are not an entertainment medium; they are a distraction device. Think back to your earliest childhood experiences with comics. Here are mine: being bought comics to keep me quiet at restaurants while we waited for the food; being bought comics to keep me quiet in the car while we drove to the cottage; being given comics in my Christmas stocking to keep me quiet while my parents slept a few more hours… getting the picture? So long as the content isn’t explicitly offensive (are you reading this, dismemberment fans?) parents don’t care what’s in a comic so long as it distracts Junior for a reasonable amount of time. Once you look at it that way, you see why comics for kids don’t work today. You need to go to a special store to buy them, and the price-to-value ratio is terrible – especially when you compare them to an in-car DVD player or an iPhone. (There’s a reason the NFB’s free library is one of the top iPhone apps.)

That covers the parent side of the equation, but what about the kids? Children can whine hard enough to overcome nearly any parental reluctance to buy something, so if they’re so keen on superheroes why aren’t they demanding comics? Because they don’t particularly want to read Spider-Man comics; they want to be able to project themselves onto Spider-Man as a fantasy figure, and they don’t care whether they get that fix from movies, TV, the Web, their t-shirts or Underoos. This is where it gets counter-intuitive: rather than leading kids to comics, the merchandising is satisfying a need that once only comics could meet (of course, it doesn’t help that in many cases the media versions are better than the comics ones.)

So what can comics publishers do to get kids reading comics again? Well, they’re not going to do it by publishing kid-friendly comics in the traditional format; as good as those individual comics may sometimes be, they don’t meet parents’ value-for-cost analysis, and they don’t meet kids’ need for superhero fantasy any better than do other sources they can access more easily. What they need to do instead is make printed comics that are bigger and cheaper (imagine a scaled-down version of Marvel’s Essentials line) and sell them everywhere: gas stations, convenience store, grocery stores – you know, everywhere you used to buy comics. Or they can give up physical comics and concentrate on the Web – or, what’s really the most rational option, give up on comics entirely and simply license the characters.

When I was ten, McDonald’s Monopoly came to Canada for the first time.

First off, when you’re ten, McDonald’s has a major impact on your entire life. Our local McDonald’s – the one just down the street from my school, St. Clement’s – got a drive-thru when I was eight, and for all of us this was an amazing thing. (My mother complained about it for months. She suspected it would cause traffic accidents. She was not correct.) When I was nine, they built a Playland in the basement of the McDonald’s, and by god you better believe that, regardless of the fact that at nine we were definitely stretching the possibilities of what Playland could offer, we played in that goddamn Playland like there was no tomorrow.

It wasn’t that we didn’t understand that McDonald’s did contests. But prior to McDonald’s Monopoly, we had never really known a contest that was really understandable on a kid level. It was always your basic sweepstakes for a plane trip or something, and you had to fill out a card. You know. Adult stuff. (Kids never want to fill out cards. You give a kid an entry requirement of ten jumping jacks, that’ll work. But a card? No.)

McDonald’s Monopoly was different. You collected pieces to win prizes, and they were Monopoly pieces! We all knew Monopoly. Most of us hadn’t yet realized that Monopoly is a terrible game, so additionally we all liked Monopoly. And the prize was a million dollars. When you’re a kid, you understand a million dollars: it is money forever. This was relatable. So we all started collecting pieces.

Now, as adults, we know that McDonald’s Monopoly is just your basic lottery draw. One of the properties in any given set is rare: Atlantic Avenue and Marvin Gardens are a dime a dozen, but Ventnor is as rare as a high-value scratch-and-win ticket. That’s how the prize system works. But the thing about being nine is that you don’t understand that, not at first anyway. You think all you have to do is get Ventnor Avenue and you win the trip to Disney World, and clearly someone must have it, because you have the other two.

An schoolyard black market in McDonald’s Monopoly pieces arose almost immediately. Trading was fast and furious: everybody had two or three pieces, and some people had as many as six or seven. The smarter kids soon realized that piece-for-piece deals were mediocre compared to “a piece and something else for a piece and something else.” My best trade, in retrospect, was Illinois Avenue, Tennesee Avenue and Park Place for St. Charles Place and a COBRA trooper. (My reasoning was that COBRA had lots of troopers, so when I played with GI Joes I clearly needed more COBRAs. The trade brought me my second – who never actually had his own gun, so he had to borrow the other trooper’s pistol. I never actually got another basic COBRA trooper. Cobra Commander thus had two flunkies, which later in life would make The Venture Brothers‘ 21 and 24 resonate for me.)

However, I was not the best trader in the schoolyard. That honour went to Sammy. Sammy wasn’t especially brilliant at haggling or quicker on the draw than average, but he had one advantage the rest of us did not: both of his parents worked, so they brought home McDonald’s for dinner a lot. This meant that Sammy ate a lot more McDonald’s than the rest of us. We were relying on the one family trip per week or every other week to Mickey D’s, plus begging for game pieces when we went there after school.

Sammy, on the other hand, got the equivalent number of game pieces that the rest of us might get in a month in the first week of play. This meant two things: firstly, he had a lot more pieces to bargain with. And secondly, he figured out much sooner than the rest of us that the game was not a simple “collect pieces of equal rarity to get a prize,” but that it was instead a lottery and that all the pieces that weren’t rare were completely worthless. What this meant, in practice, was that Sammy was willing to trade multiple pieces for absolutely anything else he considered to be of value: baseball cards, comics, toys, you name it. He sometimes asked for a piece, presumably just to keep up the illusion of piece equality for as long as he could.

Sammy’s dominance in the market demanded challenge, and my friends and I tried our best to match his seemingly inexhaustible supply. We went after school every day, asking for free pieces. After a week, the McDonald’s stopped giving out free pieces, so we upped the ante, buying small ice cream cones. (Which were thirty-nine cents, just to make you sick at the sense of inflation over time.) Two weeks later, the McDonald’s stopped giving out free pieces with small ice cream cones, so we upped the ante again, buying regular hamburgers – but hamburgers cost seventy-nine cents, and that was too expensive to be a daily purchase for schoolkids in the mid-80s.

The black market lasted about a month. That was about as long as it took us to realize the true nature of McDonald’s Monopoly. Sammy, by that point, had cleaned up on a level previously undreamt of on the schoolyard – he was the Proposition Joe of St. Clement’s, except nobody shot him in the end. The pieces we had collected were thrown out, worthless. When McDonald’s Monopoly came back the next year, we were not enticed. We had been burnt.

We knew now that Ronald McDonald was not a friendly clown. He was a lying bastard, and Grimace, Birdie, Mayor McCheese, Captain Crook, the McNugget Buddies and the Hamburglar were his willing accomplices, his McDonaldland Mafia. And, thanks to McDonald’s, we were never that young again.

When I was ten I went to war.

Not war in the actual sense, of course. My war was with the kid down the street. His name was Derek, and he was a year younger than me. This might make me sound a bully, but believe me, this was anything other than the case. When Derek moved in, initially we tried to make friends. We both liked Hot Wheels. This was a firm basis for a friendship.

However, me taking offense at blackcurrant jelly on a PB&J at his house snowballed into blood feud in short order. (Derek’s family was of Eastern European descent and blackcurrant jelly was only beginning to really enter into the Canadian market.) As anybody knows, it only takes the slightest insult – and personally, I think choking at the unexpected mix of blackcurrant¹ and peanut butter is definitely pretty damn slight – for children to form inviolate hatreds. After the Blackcurrant Incident, Derek hated my guts. I didn’t understand it, but one thing about kids hating you, when you’re a kid, is that it’s incredibly easy to reciprocate.

It really only took one-half a heaved brick for my confusion to curdle into hatred. (Well, it was a whole brick, but it was only half a throw.) And because wars inevitably escalate, friends got dragged into it. However, friends-of-warring-friends have varying degrees of interest. In my case, my friends were willing to cooperate in missions of espionage when they came over to play (tipping over of bikes, careful theft of basketballs, that sort of thing), but they weren’t emotionally invested beyond wanting to support me in my Ahab-like quest as much as they were able, which was not a lot. They didn’t live down the street from Derek, after all. They weren’t Queequeg and didn’t need to bring along their own coffins.

Derek, on the other hand, had friends who were invested. He befriended another Chris and Jason. Other Chris and Jason hated me. Not personally, you understand; I was a mouthy kid even then but hadn’t yet mastered the art of personally offending people for life.² Other Chris and Jason hated me impersonally, the way they hated anybody in my year at school, because Other Chris and Jason had been in my year until they were left back just before Derek moved to Toronto in the summer. When Derek met them, they were given a cause. It wouldn’t last forever, of course. Just long enough.

(Incidentally, I feel it worthy mentioning that Other Chris and Jason’s experience is one of the reasons I’ve always felt that leaving back poor students is counterproductive. Yes, it sucks that students who don’t entirely understand what they’ve been taught get advanced regardless, but Other Chris and Jason got to feel marginalized at the age of nine. So far as I know neither one had any education past high school; I believe one of them didn’t even finish. They weren’t dullards. They just got told, right off the bat, exactly how much society thought of them. I don’t see how it helped. I particularly don’t buy the “leaving them back helped all the other students” argument, because if they were disruptive in class it was just a matter of transferring the problem to a new bunch of kids. And they weren’t particularly disruptive before they were left back.)

Other Chris and Jason, combined with Derek, formed a terrifying unit. Jason was athletic, Other Chris had a particularly criminal sense of inventiveness, and Derek was, even at that early age, a master of covering ass. An example of this happened when I was riding home on my bike, around the corner where Derek lived. I was still at the “ride on the sidewalk” age, so it was easy for Other Chris to run out into the sidewalk suddenly. I hit the brakes (coaster bike, push the pedals in reverse), which gave Jason, hiding in the bushes across the street, the chance to run across it and jam a broomhandle into my spokes. This led to about five minutes of shoving me around while I sat on my bike saddle (I wasn’t going to relinquish my bike), which was exactly the amount of time available before Derek’s mom arrived home from work. Really, you have to admire the precision.

Another time, down at the park, the traditional “water pistols filled with Kool-Aid” attack went awry for Derek and his crew. Water pistols filled with Kool-Aid are a great weapon when you’re a kid: you get your target in trouble if he’s wearing anything the Kool-Aid will stain (and he probably is), the sugar attracts mosquitoes and other bugs, and of course there’s the soaking factor combined with a little unpleasant stickiness. Unfortunately, my friends and I knew the woods behind the park better than Derek did (and Other Chris and Jason didn’t live near the park so they didn’t know it at all), so it was easy to run, jump the creek right next to the log we knew was almost entirely rotted out, get our feet wet and continue. When Team Derek gave chase, they naturally tried to run across the log, which snapped. In retrospect, it’s probably lucky they didn’t break anything.

I wish this story ended with a dramatic flourish, but it doesn’t. Kids lose interest in things over time, and kid-wars are no exception; eventually Jason and Other Chris found better things to do with their time as they got over being left back as best they could, and my friends had never had much interest to begin with, exhortations of “I got your back” aside. Derek and I eventually just learned that giving one another dirty looks was a lot easier than carrying out “missions” to spray each others’ pet cats with water pistols.³

It’s part of growing up: with luck, you realize when bullshit is bullshit.

1. As a sidenote, nowadays I love blackcurrant anything. I was introduced to Ribena in my early teens. Go figure. [↩]
2. As opposed to now, of course. [↩]
3. Although this is an awfully satisfying activity, regardless of age. [↩]

Everybody has a couple dozen “times I nearly died.” Most of them are uninteresting. For example, this one time I was walking home, didn’t realize a light had just turned red, and nearly got hit by a bus. It missed me by about six inches. But so what? Everybody has a couple dozen stories like that. (Or is dead.)

But my good “time I nearly died” story is from when I was eleven. I have previously mentioned how, when I was a kid, our annual family vacation was two weeks at the Maine coast. Kennebunk, Ogunquit, Saco – but eventually it became Old Orchard Beach, every year like clockwork. Walt Disney World was often said to be “sometime in the future.” I have never yet been. Moral: parents will lie to you to preserve their twisted vision of your innocence.

But do not let the lack of Epcot bring you down: Old Orchard was a pretty great place to vacation. I generally got tired of the beach after three or four days and would go exploring around town. Luckily, Old Orchard had plenty of neat stuff. It had a decent and charming little library, with giant scholarly tomes on the history of Blondie and Popeye, and a pretty decent – if eclectic – comic books section. I read The Dark Knight Returns for the first time at that library, and also Chuck Colson: Born Again, the infamous Archie Comics propaganda piece about the douchebag Nixon conspirator who found Jesus right about the time he went to prison for being a douchebag. Except in the comic book, it was all a big misunderstanding!

It had a church which played movies every night for a lousy dollar admission, and not shitty old movies that no thirteen-year-old would want to see but seriously good movies, like The Princess Bride and Who Framed Roger Rabbit!? and Driving Miss Daisy and Beetlejuice. I saw Glory on the big screen for the first time in that church, and it blew me away. (Still does. If you have not seen Glory, what the hell is wrong with you?)

It had an old-timey ice-cream and penny candy emporium, much like the gay thing Taylor Doose had in Gilmore Girls, except that this one wasn’t fake and old-timey for the sake of being old-timey. It was old-timey because it was old, and care had been taken in its upkeep. The owner was a bitter old man who hated children, and it was not until our third summer there that I discovered, thanks to a local kid, that this was because he had not realized that his candy stick assortment was right underneath the always-open window that he could not see while he was serving customers. If you went in and bought a chocolate bar, with a little planning and an accomplice it was incredibly easy to swipe half again the bar’s value in grape and cherry and lemon candy sticks. To this day, I am undecided if the old guy was genuinely not aware of this and blamed all his problems on a plague of shoplifters, or if he knew about it and put his cheapest candy under the window in order to drive up sales of everything else.

It had a gigantic amusement park and fun-pier with several enormous arcades. This was, to me, well worth the trip alone; in later years and later vacations, I became a pinball fanatic and could get an hour’s worth of play out of two dollars on some of the machines. My favorite was the Bally Midway Doctor Who pinball machine, closely matched by the Data East Star Trek and the Midway Star Wars – some of the greatest pinball machines ever made. I’m not nearly as good now, when I see a pinball machine gathering dust in a bar somewhere. Nobody is as good at pinball as they are before they turn twenty.

It had a Catholic church. I know this because my mother, on any vacation we took, could unerringly find a Catholic church so that we would not miss Sunday mass. This seemed staggeringly unfair to me.

It had tons of Quebecois kids, whom one could play with quite reliably despite the obvious language barrier of them barely speaking English and me barely speaking French. Every summer I would befriend one Quebecois kid about my age, and we would hang out, intuitively building sandcastles or dams (there was always a river or creek leading to the beach that was worth trying to dam, although as one might expect, we never entirely managed it) or setting off water rockets or fireworks. When I was ten I discovered the M-80, which in my adulthood I figure were purchased and sold by the local general store illegally, as they had been illegal for over a decade before I ever saw one. It is testament to my uncanny skill with explosives that I never blew my face off with one of the damn things.¹ In any case, the Quebecois kids never stopped me from doing any of this. It’s entirely possible that they tried to but the language barrier got in the way; mostly we used our bilingual mothers to translate for us when needed, and we’d never tell our mothers we were playing with firecrackers.

It had strange brands and franchises who were of course surely mundane, but whose unfamiliarity to my Canadian upbringing made them seem exotic and special. It might seem ridiculous that a Laverdiere’s or a Waldenbooks could seem special, but they did. I always insisted that, when on vacation, we get several Stouffer’s french-bread oven pizzas. I had seen the ads for them while watching The Cosby Show. Similarly, I demanded that we try Lender’s frozen bagels, which sparked a lifelong adoration of the (non-frozen) bagel that has not ceased.² My father was more interested in the local delicacies: lobster, birch beer, lobster, crab cakes, lobster, and lobster.

It had Shaw’s, one of my favorite grocery store chains ever. Shaw’s had the most fantastic jumbo cookies, which by themselves were great, but then one summer we came back and I asked to go along on the initial grocery shopping trip (as I always did), and Shaw’s had gone to the devil well of pure inspiration: no longer were their cookies packaged in the standard twist-tie paper sacks, but instead were arrayed flat on upside-down Frisbees and Saran-wrapped in place. Thus, you bought the cookies and you got a free Frisbee! (And it was really a free Frisbee: the cookies weren’t any more expensive.) My mother was possibly more impressed than I was; my mother has always had an innate love of anything she can consider a bargain, and a free Frisbee definitely qualified. I am dead sure that if I went to my parents’ house right now and rummaged through the “outdoor sports equipment” bin, I would find three or four of those Frisbees.

But ultimately, I would get bored with everything else and go back to the beach, because when you are a kid the beach is pretty awesome. I was old enough to know not to fuck around with the riptides around the rocks that would drag you out quickly. I knew not to poke the jellyfish. I was eleven, and I knew what was what, so my parents generally let me roam while paying attention to my younger siblings. This was a mistake, for although on the surface I seemed smart, I was of course a spastic idiot.

How spastic an idiot was I? Well, let me put it to you this way: I decided to float on an air mattress in the water. Fine and good. But, I reasoned, the waves wouldn’t let me float properly, they’d keep getting seawater in my face. So I pushed the air mattress out beyond the wave breaks (I was up to my chest in water at this point), hopped on, and just lay back and relaxed for a while.

I have no idea how quickly I floated out; I lost track of time. What I do know is that at some point I decided it was time to go back to the house and get a cookie, so I flopped off the mattress

- and promptly sank down about five or six feet before I was able to start splashing my way frantically back up to the surface. I didn’t touch bottom. I don’t think I could have managed to touch bottom at that point even with sustained diving effort. It’s hard for me now, as an adult, to judge how far out I was, but I’d guess probably about three hundred feet or so. To a kid, it seemed like a couple of kilometers. (The metric system in Canada took, but only fitfully. We measure a person’s height in feet and inches; short distances in feet; the distance from home to the cottage in kilometers.) The point was – even though I wasn’t endlessly far away from land, I was a long way out. In retrospect it is actually kind of amazing that the lifeguards didn’t notice me or do anything.

Suddenly I regretted reading all those ZooBooks.³ Especially the one about sharks. Yes, I reasoned, it was unlikely that a great white shark was anywhere nearby, because great white sharks didn’t hang around the Maine coast so much. Then again, I had to admit, it was awfully unlikely that I had managed to get out here in the first place, and yet, here I was. This was not a day to mess with the odds. The odds were not my friend.

I was so worried about sharks as I began slowly paddling back to shore (fitfully, afraid of sharks hovering below the surface wanting to bite off my hands) that I didn’t realize that clouds had swept in overhead while I was relaxing. Big, dark clouds. The lifeguards on shore were waving people in now. It wasn’t raining, but you knew it was going to rain, and soon. But the rain wasn’t the issue: the problem was that the storm-swells, the giant waves, had already begun in advance of the rain, because this storm was coming in from offshore. The storm itself would last the next day and a half, absolutely drenching the whole of southern Maine in typhoon-quality downpour, and would eventually prove to be very cool to watch. But that was later.

The waves started getting bigger and bigger, and I wasn’t near the breaks yet, and I didn’t yet know that the breaks were already six feet high. All I knew is that the swells were getting bigger and I was going up and down, it seemed, more than I was going towards the beach. I started paddling harder, figuring that the sharks had probably taken off for someplace calmer at this point.

I’m not sure when I hit the breaks, but I know what happened: I was overtaken by a particularly massive wave and swept to shore. I swallowed about half a gallon of seawater and my eyes stung like motherfuckers. In later days, I would dramatize the situation to my friends by claiming that what actually happened is that the swell rocketed me up into the air, and I grabbed both ends of the air mattress and glided down, using it like a parachute. (I even drew a picture of it for art class, when we did our “what we did on our summer vacation” art projects. My self-depiction was quite magnificent.)

Of course, that was total bullshit. What happened is this: I nearly drowned, lost all sense of direction on the way, and in fact when the wave deposited me on the beach spent several seconds trying to crawl back into the surf because I thought I was headed for drier land. I am pretty sure a lifeguard saw me as he cleared people away from the disaster-level waves, but since he never tried to save me I can only assume he thought “well, at least his death will improve the gene pool.”

Eventually I managed to get enough breath to get to my knees, only to be smacked in the face by another six-foot wave. If I had been prepared for the wave, getting smacked by it would have been fun. However, I was very obviously not prepared for it and was shoved back onto my ass, choking down yet more seawater and possibly a small crab. Luckily, though, this time I was shoved backwards enough that I was now out of the breaks. My air mattress was behind me, having been blown to safety quite some time previous.

At this point, my mother came along, dragging one of my younger siblings and carrying my baby brother. “Chris, come on, what are you waiting for?”

“I nearly drowned just now, Mom.”

“That’s nice, dear. Come on, it’s raining.”

“Really, Mom. Lucky to be alive.”

“It’s raining, dear.”

Top comment: I think the time I most feared for my life was when I was on a class trip to France and me and a couple friends thought it would be a good idea to sneak up the back side of a Benedictine monastery so we wouldn’t have to pay to get in, but it was on the edge of a cliff in the mountains. So we were climbing around on the edge of the cliff trying to find a break in the fence, when suddenly I realized that I was one misstep away from a very terrifying and painful death, and was like, “I am retarded! Get me out of here!” and climbed down and paid the 5 euro or whatever. – Karen

1. If MythBusters had been around then, I probably would have used the M-80s to imitate Adam and Jamie in some manner. “Can an M-80 blow up a car? Let’s bust that myth!” [↩]
2. Unlike my love of the french-bread oven pizza, which I have since learned to be crap. [↩]
3. Aside: the modern ZooBooks lack a certain sense of dignity. My Zoobooks were old-school ZooBooks, with the big, blocky, Roman-esque font. Like this one, except not in Spanish. [↩]

When I was seven my mom started sending me to day camp.

Day camp was like the for-cheapies version of summer camp – and my mother, who was a zen master of thrift, loved a good deal. She liked it because you could send one’s kids to day camp on a selected set of weeks, as the day camp – run out of a nearby middle school – offered different “sessions,” each with a theme (pirates, ghosts, cowboys, that sort of thing) and a different Big Fun Trip for the kiddies, and she could stagger around the annual family vacation (two weeks in Maine, a state I would gladly absorb into Canada as a province were I given the opportunity). Be that big fun trip to African Lion Safari (a concept I thought was amazing then and am still impressed by, although I have to wonder where they put the lions in the wintertime) or CentreVille on the Toronto Islands (WARNING: incredibly lame music on site, and also it sucked a lot less when I was a kid) or just a trip to the local Chuck E. Cheese (I always asked for the Chuck E. Cheese session, which never seemed to conflict with our vacation), it was always pretty awesome for a seven-year old.

Of course, from my mom’s perspective, the price of the day camp sessions was probably justified by getting me out from underfoot. But I digress.

The second year I was there, when I was eight, during one of the sessions’ free-time periods, a bunch of us put aside the dodgeballs and discovered that the school in which our day camp was situated had left their music room unlocked. Now, you might think that leaving a large number of musical instruments in the hands of seven-to-nine-year-olds might be a recipe for disaster, but we hardly broke anything. This was mostly because of Felix. Felix had bushy brown hair and a weird sort of combination of cleft lip and overbite, which resulted in him looking something like a chipmunk. His younger brother (whose name I don’t remember) had almost exactly the same features, so it looked like Felix had a younger clone following him around.

But none of that mattered, because Felix was a kid with a dream. Felix saw the musical instruments – recorders and xylophones and tamborines and a ukelele and many others – and turned to the rest of us, busy investigating to see what all these things did when you hit them with a mallet. He had no mallet in his hand. Instead, he had a gleam in his eye. And he said:

“We’re going to start a band.”¹

He had plans almost immediately. Every day at noon, the day camp counsellors would explain to us in the school’s gym/auditorium while we ate our bagged lunches what activities we would be doing that afternoon. Felix ignored the “gym” portion of that fact and focused on the “auditorium.” There was a stage. Felix knew he wanted to be on that stage. He went to one of the counsellors and quickly negotiated a performance: our band would appear after announcements that Friday. This gave us four days to practice.

I immediately decided that I was not going to perform badly, so that limited my options, mostly because I already knew that I was not very good at playing the recorder. However, I found a snare drum, and immediately figured out that no matter how much I might suck at playing anything melodic, I sure as shit could hit the drum really well. I immediately declared myself the band’s drummer and “chief percussionist.” I also experimented with playing the drum while using a pair of maracas as drumsticks. Clearly, I was an avant-garde drummer, ahead of my time. Had Buddy Rich ever thought to use maracas as drumsticks? I imagined myself explaining to Buddy Rich, “well, I thought that the drum made sounds and the maraca made sounds, so why not make two sounds with every swing?” And then Buddy Rich would introduce me to the Muppets.

Felix, for his part, had taken up the ukelele. It may have been elemental wisdom on his part – realizing that no matter how shit you are, you can strum a ukelele and nonetheless not sound like total crap. Of course, it might also have been that Felix was powerfully involved with his visions of rocking that auditorium, and even at nine he knew you can’t rock an auditorium without a guitarist. And given that he was, after all, only nine, the ukelele was practically guitar-sized. He practiced his jumping-strums and rocking out on his back, and although I didn’t know it at the time – as I didn’t really start following popular music until my teens – looking back on it I now understand that he was aping Angus Young.

The other band members fell into place quickly. Martin, a kid I knew from school, had three triangles of different sizes and pitches. Another kid named Oscar reserved the xylophone. Two boys whose names I never knew volunteered for recorder duty.² And Felix’s little brother – well, he was going to do something, that much was clear, but what he would contribute remained unclear. I decided not to worry about it. I was concentrating on my drumming-with-maracas. So firmly was I concentrating that I didn’t notice that more people were joining the band, until we numbered about nine different kids.

The first creative schism arrived soon after that, when we debated the band’s name. I particularly wanted to call the band “The Rock Robots.” It made sense. We would rock, and also I liked robots. However, Felix – who had more experience with popular music than I – declared that to be a “baby name,” and insisted that we call the band Adventure. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, people like robots.” But Felix would not be swayed. And really, when we were famous and meeting the Muppets, I reasoned, we could always change the band name later, much like how the Beatles had eventually become Wings.³

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning. Felix had gotten his first taste of power and discovered that he liked it greatly. He demanded that the recorder players “blast” on the recorders. “We’re gonna rock!” he would say, over and over again. Privately I started to question his judgement, both because of his clear dislike for robots or because he refused to tell anybody what his little brother’s role in the band would in fact be. “It’s a surprise,” he would say. “But Felix, if we don’t all work together,” I would respond, having watched the episode of Reading Rainbow where Levar Burton taught us about teamwork three times, “we won’t be organized and the band won’t be good.”

He looked at me with disdain. “Just make sure we’re all in sync. [Little brother's name that I forget] will sing over top of it.” I decided that this wasn’t the time to create drama. (Also, I wasn’t sure what “in sync” meant and I had to ask my mother that night.) But I kept wondering where this band was going. Felix was bringing in more kids from other parts of day camp I barely knew. Martin came up to me the next day and informed me that he was quitting the band because one of the new kids had wanted to play triangles. Felix, I learned, had decreed that the new kid would be our trianglist. He had offered Martin the job of backup singer, which is pretty insulting when you consider that our ostensible lead singer hadn’t informed us yet as to what he would be singing.

But the next day was the last straw. I had been practicing diligently with my maraca-drumming combination, when Felix came up to me, all excited.

“Look what we found!” It was a small Casio keyboard synth, the sort of crappy thing that could only impress a middle-school-aged-kid. Naturally I thought this was the most awesome thing ever. We had a keyboard! We could have cool synth grooves! Like Culture Club!⁴

“And look at this!” Felix pressed a button, and the keyboard started producing tinny electro-drumbeats. Instantly my self-preservatory instincts kicked in. I expressed guarded enthusiasm, and pointed out that the drumbeats wouldn’t hurt when I was doing my extended maraca solo. Felix looked at me, not quite understanding.

“Don’t you see? Now we don’t need drums. This will be our drums.”

I knew where this was heading, and promptly quit the band before I could be reduced to backup singerdom.

The next day was performance day. I felt grim jealousy as I sat down in the auditorium, eating my peanut-butter sandwich (with crusts, because I was a big kid now and only babies got crusts cut off). I wasn’t in the band any more. It was entirely Felix’ fault that I wasn’t going to get to hang out with Buddy Rich. Martin sat next to me, having had a full extra day to get over losing a shot at stardom and thus being far more relaxed about the whole thing.

The counsellors wrapped up announcements. “And now,” the lead counsellor said with a flourish, “one time only, a very special performance by… Felix and the Adventure!” I’m not sure when Felix got his name put into the band name, but he had managed it somehow. The stage curtain swept open as the kids sitting and eating lunch applauded, because – well, are you going to not clap when you’re eight? Even I clapped, although not for any reason other than to impress Julie, the counsellor on whom I had a crush, with my coolness and grace under fire.

On stage, Felix was already rocking out on his uke, jumping up and down, forgetting to strum it more than a few times. Well, most of them, actually. Oscar stood behind his xylophone, frozen in terror. The recorder kids (now numbering four) were doing an impromptu dance, none of them quite getting the steps in time with each other. The new trianglist, Alex, was dinging his triangle madly – if anybody was going to get blamed for the band tanking, it wasn’t going to be him. (I glanced over at Martin, who looked back at me and nodded as if to say, “well, you have to respect him. That’s triangle.“) There were three other kids there I didn’t even know, one trying to make noise on a trumpet (and failing), one holding the maracas I intended to use as drumsticks but not shaking them with any effort (as a maraca expert, I was not impressed), and the third with a tambourine doing his best Betty Cooper impersonation.

Topping this was Felix’ little brother. He had found a microphone somewhere, but the mike wasn’t plugged into anything. It didn’t matter because, much like his big brother, he was in the zone. He stood at the forefront of the band, posing and stretching and gesturing like a preteen version of Steven Tyler. His eyes were shut, helping him through his performance. He wasn’t singing anything, though. He was just doing the poses and gestures, and occasionally emitting a high-pitched keen.

Nobody was laughing, but that was only because we’d get in trouble if we did. And maybe it was because we all knew that, whatever else, at least Felix had the balls to live out his dream. No, not really, it was the trouble.

A girl I vaguely knew looked over at me and Martin. “Weren’t you a part of this band?”

I instantly knew that this was a time for damage control. “I was originally. But then I saw where they were going with it and got out.”

Martin jumped in with a quick “me too.” The girl lost interest in us as Felix’s little brother jumped from the auditorium down to the gym floor – a whole four feet! – and started doing the whole “point the mike at the audience and get them to sing the parts along with you” shtick. Except, of course, he still wasn’t singing.

I shuffled a little closer to Martin. “I think we got really lucky on this one.” I said it quietly, so nobody would hear us.

“Yeah.” His voice was equally low.

And I never joined a rock band ever again.

Top comment: I imagine this was prompted by MGK drinking a glass of liquor in front of the fireplace in his library full of leather books, dangling a pipe from his other hand and wearing a bathrobe, imagining that Animal would concede he was the better drummer upon meeting the Muppets. – GL

1. If you want proof that I was always a precocious child, this is it right here. Because I joined a band when I was eight. Most of you waited until you were teenagers to do that. But here I was, the Doogie Howser of the Failed Musical Attempt life experience. [↩]
2. One will note the lack of girls in this band. Rest assured, it was not sexism at hand, but rather I think that seven-to-nine-year-old girls weren’t so goddamned stupid as to think musical excellence would arrive in four days’ time. [↩]
3. I was unclear on musical history for a long time. [↩]
4. My general musical ignorance aside, everybody knew about the musical importance of Boy George and “Karma Chameleon.” Although I thought the song was called “Comma Chameleon,” which confused me. [↩]