Although I watched such wonderful programs as Muppet Babies and Fraggle Rock as a child, the thought of them never entered my consciousness during my times of fear and distress. After my parents tucked me into bed at night and I was left alone in the darkness, Scooter didn’t come around to tell me that it was going to be okay, Fozzi Bear didn’t appear at the foot of my bed to tell me some jokes or say, “Wakka Wakka!” And the Fraggles never invited me into their tiny world that was apparently placed behind my bedroom walls.
What comforted me enough to fall asleep in the darkness was not the idea of fluffy puppets or any other Jim Henson creation. Instead, what helped me drift off to sleep was the idea of zombies and homicidal maniacs roaming the streets and breaking into my house. I’d hold my blankets tight against my chin and imagine that my door was made of steel with a deadbolt lock. My parents would be unable to save my older brother in the next room, or even save themselves. Their brains would be eaten and hoarded over by the undead, unfortunately, but these zombies weren’t going to eat my brains. No sir! Placed loftily on the second floor of my house, the zombies would need to stand on each other’s shoulders in order to get up through my windows. And even if they did manage such a feat, I imagined I had steel gates that came down to cover the windows. I would frequently place such infamous madmen as Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees on the other side of the door to test its durability. Freddy would slash at my door with his glove of knives, creating huge sparks. Jason would hack at it, breaking his machete. Sometimes I would even get Leather Face in on the action, but not even his wicked chainsaw skills could get him through.
Every night my bedroom changed from a simple play area into an isolated haven safe from all the dangers my imagination could conjure. I got some great sleep that way.
As the years went on, the simple hook and eye lock that my parents used to lock me in my room when I was being bad was transferred to the inside of my door so that I could keep every one out. The safety of my room extended to all hours, where I wrote, drew cartoons, and read without being interrupted. Not only was I keeping zombies out at night, I was keeping the living at bay during the daylight hours, and I could not have been happier. From saving up my allowance and my paychecks, I could afford to build a small empire of material possessions in my little room. I had an “L” shaped desk that wrapped around the far corner of the room with a computer resting at its adjunct. I had a two-line phone in order to receive pertinent updates regarding my friends, as well as a large bookshelf whose top half held my MAD magazines, while the lower half displayed my PEZ dispenser collection. I had it all, not to mention a mini-refrigerator and cable on a twelve inch television that allowed me to play all my video game systems. It was all right there for me. If I needed the answer to an academic question, I consulted the Internet. If I wanted to know what was planned for the weekend, I’d pick up the phone. Need a root beer, Mike? Open the fridge, bottom shelf. I could satisfy all of my wants before they may have ever been wants. It was, to me, my Eden.
I was seventeen years old and nearly complete in my isolation when my parents decided to move us 25 miles northwest to a town called Harleysville. The parameters of my new living arrangement completely disrupted whatever comfort I had in my hometown. The new bedroom was much too small to fit most of my stuff. My desk and mini-fridge were transported to the basement of my parents’ new house along with my bookshelf. The bookshelf became a tool-shelf where my father would place various drill bits, screws, and hammers. The PEZ collection was thoughtlessly poured into a box. The 150 issues of MAD Magazine were bundled with twine and stuffed into the closet. This new house was not my house. It was my parents’ house. That much was certain. My room of safety was no longer a physical place that I could go. And in that strange turn of events, my room became a metaphor, a place on an ethereal plane that was all mine to visit.
It was much more spacious, this new room that appeared in my head. The walls were made of dark blue cavernous rock, like those in dungeon number one in the 1986 Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda. The room was lit by the fire in the fireplace as well a 1930’s era bank lamp on my large oak desk, the bank lamp being chrome with a green glass lampshade. There were two doors in this new room that I created. The front door was a four-panel wooden door, kept secure by a hook-and-eye lock, while the rear door was more or less a bank vault door: a meter thick, with a large, cylindrical turning mechanism for access. The most important part—the piece that really tied the room together were the bookshelves. Large black bookshelves lined all four walls, seven feet high. However, these bookshelves did not contain MAD magazines or PEZ dispensers, no no no. These shelves held volume after volume of every thought, question, comment, interaction, and philosophy I have ever had. It was the entire memory of my life, manifested in a mental image of a place safe and familiar to me. Not only did this room hold an infinite amount of information, it was portable!
Where ever I went, my room went with me. It’s where I tucked myself away in my senior year at a new high school. Yes, I would be asked to stand and recite my background on the first day of class, and physically I might have looked present, but I really wasn’t there. I was inside my room, watching episodes of Seinfeld, eating popcorn. During my lunch period, it may have seemed that I was sitting at the far end of a table by myself, looking melancholy, but actually I was sitting by the fire, feet propped on a leather ottoman, reading about my first kiss. Inside my room all of my troubles and insecurities were manageable, and I never felt as strong or as capable as when I was locked inside my own room, ready to take on anything that came my way.
I had thought that the room was a defense mechanism for the move from Glenside to Harleysville and that it would disappear as quickly as it appeared, but it stuck with me even after I graduated high school. From high school to college, from new house to shared apartment living at my university in Philadelphia, I still had yet to have my own space back, so the room remained. However, the upkeep of the room and its subsequent safety would be threatened by a pint-sized sweetheart named Trish.
Patricia-Marie, to be exact. I was 22 and in my sophomore year of college when I met her. Originally from Vermont, Trish went to college in Maryland and just so happened to be taking summer classes at the school I was attending. Not only did she just so happen to be taking classes the same summer I was taking them at the same university, she also was living a floor above me in my apartment complex. Were I a fatalist, I would say that there were too many coincidences for our meeting not to have taken place, especially since on the first night we met, we went to a karaoke bar with some friends and Trish sang a Phil Collins song; the same exact Phil Collins song that just so happened to have been stuck in my head for hours that day: his 1984 hit single Against All Odds. After she slurringly serenaded me with the ballad, I asked her why, out of the hundreds of possible songs to choose from, she chose that one.
“Um,” she said, “because Phil Collins fuckin’ rocks!”
Even though I’m sure it wasn’t the first time in history that the serendipitous musical styling of Phil Collins brought two people together, it was still special to me. Patricia-Marie may have gotten sick out to the parking lot a few minutes after the song, but it was too late. I was in love with her.
It was Trish’s personality that really made her one of a kind. A great practitioner of puns and cheesy sarcasm, they gave her a vibrancy I had never seen before in a woman, and never had I felt on such an equal level with someone else. Movies, television shows, music, and contempt for nearly all other people were things we shared. Yes, we had our differences, but they were minute and fun to bicker about back and forth in order to entertain ourselves.
Before my friends had met Trish, they’d ask about her, inquiring about her personality and I would try to relay my feelings for her to them by trying to describe her laugh. Her laugh was one of my favorite things about her. It wasn’t the most feminine laugh, but it wasn’t rigid either. I’d tell my friends to imagine a man walking down a busy city stree
t and yapping on his cell phone. Bumping into others, oblivious of the people around him, the corner of his briefcase jabbing people as he forces his way through the foot traffic, ignoring all forms of social congeniality…let’s say, in his selfish rush, he steps out into the traffic and WHAM! He gets nailed by a speeding taxi and is flung high in the air. While skyward, his mind will race, life flashing before his eyes, and he will recount every mistake he ever made, every instance where he belittled someone, hurt someone, abandoned someone, abused an animal and all of it will hit him as hard as that taxi and as a comeuppance, on his descent back down to the pavement, he will hear nothing but the sound of Patricia-Marie laughing on the sidewalk. That’s how great her laugh is, I’d tell them. It can be playful, sarcastic, even taunting. I’ve felt all three prongs of her laughter and it was something I could listen to all day. If that anecdote didn’t sell them, I’d just say about Trish, “She’s me. But funnier. And with boobs.”
. Trish was a woman of short stature, but she drove the largest car I had ever seen: a gray 1996 Cadillac Deville. She’d slap on her oversized sunglasses that nearly covered the top half of her face and barrel down Broad Street in that beaten up ol’ Deville. To passersby, it must have seemed that the car was driven by a ghost, but if they looked hard enough, they’d see Trish’s small knuckles gripping the top of the wheel. The car matched her personality so fittingly I couldn’t imagine her driving anything else. She would come over to my apartment and say casually while taking off her shades, “I got into a car accident on the way over,” and before I could ask about it, she’d say, “I hit someone from behind at a red light and then they just drove off!” then she’d start laughing at the absurdity of it. Nothing was so serious that it couldn’t be laughed at or mocked before being dealt with.
Trish and I were together for a year and we kept our relationship steady while she moved back to her college in Maryland and I stayed in Philadelphia. We’d talk on the phone twice a day, and every time she would greet me with a faux Chinese accent. “Herro?” she’d ask before hearing my voice. “Oh, Herro!”
She graduated a year before me and moved to Philadelphia in the spring. My safe room nearly collapsed upon itself one day in June. I picked her up outside her apartment, flicked on the radio and made a left onto Broad Street. The Rolling Stones song “Beast of Burden” came through the speakers and she turned up the volume. She said, “I’d like this song played at our wedding.”
She said it so simply, so matter-of-factly that it hardly registered a physical reaction. But in my head, in my room of safety, the walls began to shake with a tremendous force, the words reverberating and creating cracks in the foundation as the sound waves penetrated my room of safety, “our wedding…our wedding…our wedding… our wedding…”
Caution lights descended from the ceiling cascading a yellow glare around my room. Over a loudspeaker, an automated female voice cautioned: “You now have…15 minutes… to reach…minimum…safe…distance…”
I jumped out of my office chair by the fireplace and saw that the knob of the front door was turning ever so slightly. I picked up whatever I could in the small amount of time I had, and made a rush for the back door; the bank vault door. The room behind the vault door was incredibly small, dark, and terribly uncomfortable but at least it was impenetrable.
What happened outwardly was that I quickly became a tense ball of anger. Of course it made sense that Trish and I would be together for such a long time, but having her vocalize it left me short of breath. Instead of doing the mature thing, instead of talking about my fears with her and working on them, I completely shut down all emotional responses to Trish and was feeling suffocated behind that vault door of mine. I wasn’t ready. I was nowhere near ready to handle the responsibility of a completely serious relationship. I knew that after graduating college, I was going to lead a life of menial dead-end jobs while I privately worked on manuscripts and got rejected by publishers and agents. It was a rough road ahead of me, and I felt that it needed to be taken alone. I needed my own personal space to make it happen. Love, I thought, is a reward after you achieve your dreams. Marriage, kids, a suburban home…that all has to wait until I get my career in order, and when would that happen? I didn’t know.
My means of internal lockdown was displayed through annoyance over everyday things, aggravation towards others who occupied my time, and reluctance towards caring for anyone other than myself. It’s not that the relationship failed, it’s that I failed the relationship.
After Trish and I ended, I would still try again with others, but it’s always the same thing. The door to my room is opened and they find it void of humans. Safely tucked behind the vault door, I can hear them rummaging around, looking for me but I am nowhere to be found. Only after the sound of their search subsides and I hear the door close do I open the vault door to stretch my arms out and give a good scratch. The room will be slightly different but still familiar. Nothing is so damaged that it cannot be repaired with some dedication, but the room is somehow prettier than before, the shelves now adorned with inside jokes, the memories of the time spent with someone; something as simple as a laugh or a greeting on the phone.
Once I graduated, I joined the workforce full time, and after a year I was able to save up enough to move out of my parents’ house. Slowly but methodically, my studio apartment on the outskirts of town is replacing the room I have in my head. Finally, with a small physical space to call my own, the room inside my head and the physical room that I live in are becoming indiscernible. My entertainment area contains all of the video game systems I had as a child and young adult. I got my old bookshelf back and it now barely holds all the books of my collegiate career, my diploma displayed in the center of the middle shelf, collecting dust. The bottom shelf holds unsold and undistributed copies of my self-published books that I cannot seem to give away. My work space is by the window with scraps of my life written on various stray pieces of paper, shriveled with sopped up coffee stains and underneath old beer caps. For motivational purposes, I have a Rocky Balboa bobble-head as well as the last sentence in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” printed and framed. The Rocky statue is there to remind me to constantly get up after being struck down, the Kafka is there to remind how me short life is in the long run.
This wistful type of existence I have made for myself greatly motivates me. The yearning I feel for things lost drives me to be a better person and a better writer, to be able to go back and dissect every pertinent memory until it is exhausted. The pang of loneliness that I feel every once in a while is oddly comforting, like a warm blanket. It’s only after writing this one piece do I realize that the door to my room has to be opened from the inside, and of my own volition. Nobody can do it for me.
I am trying, though. I have acquired a small addition to my family; a hermit crab whom I have named Chauncey. I figure that if I am going to begin to care for something other than myself, I’ll start off small with an animal that is metaphorically just like me. What also aids my emergence are online social networks and digital communication that keeps me vaguely in touch with the outside world. From my computer I can still connect with people that I care about and give them good wishes at a distance that is comfortable to me. I still technically talk with Trish even though I haven’t heard her voice in nearly five years. I find myself constantly thinking of puns and bad jokes to send her so that I can at least let her know that I am still around, still plugging away. I do miss her. I think I’m allowed that. I have become a small nagging voice on her shoulder, whispering homonyms and subtly letting her know that I will open my door one day.
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