exploiting my youth – Page 2

The Quest Begins Anew

From 1974 until 1977, when I was between six and nine years old, my dad was the minister at Youngstown, Ohio’s First Christian Church. This was a position which came with some strange perks: the church owned a literal mansion, the Myron Israel Arms home, which they called the “Disciple House,” and my family lived in this building for several months after moving to Youngstown from New York City, while we sought an affordable place of our own. Some of my memories of this time include sleeping on a tiny mattress placed in the center of a cavernous, empty room with marble floors¹; the bathroom that adjoined it had been furnished sometime in the 1920s in elaborate Art Deco tiling and still had a toilet whose tank hung on the wall overhead and flushed with a pull-chain².

The church building and the Disciple House were right next to the Butler Institute of American Art, which I visited often to see the fantastic scale models of masted ships, some tossed in realistic resin waves³. It was also surrounded by the Youngstown State University campus, whose Modernist library I wandered through freely; there was no security in those days, and I explored anywhere that wasn’t locked. As I recall the library had a floating staircase and that seemed like something straight out of The Jetsons.

One day when I was gadding feral⁴ about the campus, I discovered under a bush a discarded YSU yearbook, the 1972 Neon. The book was in tatters, and many of its pages had been cut to ribbons (presumably to remove personally-relevant photos), but what remained was intact, and so I flipped through it; to my kid mind, whatever this book was, it looked like it was probably full of adult stuff, and that made it enticing. There was a color section of grainy art photos of students staring into sunsets, or their post-degree futures, or whatever. There were stiff group photos of the Math Club and the Libertarian Society (which had four members).

But then, without warning, near the end of the book there was a many-paged comics section—but not a ha-ha funny comics section. It was a weird fantasy story drawn in the style of Frank Frazetta, featuring a bare-chested barbarian who walked through blasted landscapes strewn with corpses, and who confronted an antagonistic wizard. Interspersed between fantasy panels there were brief vignettes, drawn in a much more cartoonish style that recalled Vaughn Bodē⁵; these featured (mildly) satirical scenes student life on the YSU campus.

At the end of the story, the wizard opens a dimensional tear and spirits the barbarian away into the present-day university, where the barbarian, not understanding what happened, or why he is surrounded by disaffected hippies, smites everyone dead with his sword. In a final two-page spread he stands alone amidst yet another field of carnage as the entire scene dissolves into the John Tenniel illustration of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, being six or seven, I had no context for any of this. My child-mind saw only death and destruction involving the campus I was currently inhabiting. Looking about, I saw the students wandering to class, long-haired and bell-bottomed, apparently un-smitten by barbarians. I was shaken to my core. What even was this? Why would someone draw this? I was nearly as upset as I was after sneaking a peek at an issue of National Lampoon and reading a photo comic that featured a mother shooting her kids in the head.⁶

So of course, I did the reasonable thing: I took the yearbook home with me and hid it in my bedroom where my parents couldn’t find.

At first I would regularly steal furtive glances at my contraband for the illicit thrill of its wrongness. But over time, I looked at it less and less, and eventually the yearbook was lost—a casualty, I suspect, of one of the many flooded basements my family suffered after moving to a ranch home with terrible drainage. By that time, I was no longer discomfited by the comic, understanding it to be a pastiche of sword and sorcery tropes; but I did wonder about how it came to be, and who the weirdo responsible was.

Okay, so to cut to the chase that I’m sure you’ve anticipated by now, a few years back I recalled this bit of childhood trauma and I searched online to see if any record of it existed. At the time, I didn’t even remember the title of the yearbook or its specific year, but after a bit of digging I found an online repository of digitized YSU stuff, and lo and behold, after scanning through several PDFs, there was the Barbarian of my youth. And after I re-read the story (and found it neither as frightening nor as confusing as I remembered, I checked the yearbook credits to see if I could find the cartoonist and there he was: Val Mayerik.

If that didn’t make you gasp, you probably weren’t reading comic books in the 1970s, so I will explain: Mayerik was a comics artist who initially made his name in fantasy titles, working alongside and sometimes with P. Craig Russell and Barry Windsor-Smith; eventually he transitioned to illustration, particularly work for TSR games and Magic: The Gathering. But it was in 1973 that he achieved his place in comics history by being the original artist to draw Steve Gerber’s creation Howard the Duck, in Fear 19. The YSU book I had discovered dated only one year before.

Howard's first appearance — Howard the Duck’s first appearance, drawn by Val Mayerik, Marvel Comics’ *Fear* 19 (December, 1973)

If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m someone who holds onto childhood obsessions, particularly when they’re only half-remembered. Time and again I have attempted to track down a movie, book, or comic that thrilled, horrified, or confused my young mind. These fragments of mental effluvium had their origins in a pre-Internet world, making them difficult and sometimes impossible to recover. Most of the time, when I’m successful in identifying and re-acquiring the artifacts of my memory, they turn out not to live up to expectations. But every once in a while, I am genuinely delighted by the outcome of my search—and the discovery of a young Mayerik’s contribution to my mind’s warping is one of these times.

Or, you know, linoleum? I was a kid, in my mind it was marble. ↩︎
The building was sold to YSU in 1983 to be used for alumni relations and its stately halls were divided into fluorescently lit cubicles. ↩︎
In 2005 the Butler Institute purchased the Disciples’ church building and it is now home to folk art and Americana collections. ↩︎
As all proud Gen-X kids did. ↩︎
This is me editorializing after the fact. No way was I a cool enough kindergartener to know who Vaughn Bodē was. ↩︎
I don’t know what issue this was and I don’t want you to tell me. ↩︎

The Early Writings of John McCoy (2nd edition)

A Facsimile Edition; with commentary by the author

I published the first edition of this commentary in 1997, having just learned how to code HTML from a disreputable Usenet post. The website that this work first appeared on, ungh.com, has long ago evaporated with the rest of the Web 1.0.

Recently, however, I recalled the essay in a dream¹, and fortunately I was able to find a .doc copy languishing in the recesses of a forgotten directory on a floppy disk that had fallen behind a shelf in my basement².

It’s been nearly 20 years and the wisdom of old age³ compels me to revisit and enlarge this seminal work. So I present here the second edition, with newly scanned facsimiles, enlarged commentary, and new annotation.

A note on the text:

Fortunately for scholars, the original MSS for the works discussed here arrive to us in almost pristine condition, thanks to their having been cached in the remarkable School Days edition #566, produced in 1966 by the WinCraft corporation of Winona, Minnesota⁴. In addition to my earliest writings, this folio contains many other historical items, including report cards, numerous second and third place ribbons, and a certificate awarded for “knowing and making the letters correctly in the daily use of legible manuscript handwriting.”

Perhaps the most important artifact of the twentieth century.

I Sit in It

Written in Mrs. Kubasko’s p.m. kindergarten class, Harding Elementary School, 1974.

I Sit on It, #2 pencil on ruled Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″

Text:

~~Jo Johl~~ John.
IS I Sit in it
Meet me
See Mat on it

Notes:

From 1974 until 1977 I attended Harding Elementary School in Youngstown, Ohio. Although today it seems strange to me that there should have been a public school named after the second-most hated President of the United States⁵, at the time I was just happy to be sharing my blocks with Nora, the little red-haired girl who was my first real crush. We would almost exclusively use these blocks to design elaborate traps, which is an interest that I now recognize as one of the stranger symptoms of autism⁶.

I Sit in It is the earliest extant MS in my handwriting, and it demonstrates many of the themes that would mark my later work. Written in first person, the story is plotless, simple, and relies upon suggestion for its effects. The most obvious questions for the reader are: “What is ‘it’? Why does the narrator sit ‘in’ it, while Mat is ‘on’ it? Where are we to meet?” Although these questions are ultimately unanswerable, they are essential to the story’s meaning. By the promise of rational answers and the lack thereof, the reader is led, koan-like, to a new level of understanding. It is only when the familiar categories of “in” and “on” are deconstructed that enlightenment begins.

The true subject of I Sit in It, then, is the mutability of identity. Note the strikethroughs at the top of the page: Jo becomes Johl becomes John. And then, a final period after John announces the completion of the metamorphosis. But should we assume that this teleology is valid? It seems unlikely.

The Missing Bird

Written in Mrs. Wren’s first grade class, Harding Elementary School, 1975.

The Missing Bird (recto), Crayon on Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″

The Missing Bird (verso), Crayon on Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″

Text:

THE “MISSING
BIRD” BY John McCoy
Once there was a bird.
He had a mother. She said, “Hop,
and fly.” He hoped, and fell.
His mother cood not find him,
and askek mrs. owl. “Look behind th⁷
tree.” she said. and there he was!

Notes:

Mrs. Mathilda Wren, my first grade teacher, claimed to have served in the armed forces during wartime⁸. She also had a pair of decorative plastic mushrooms on her desk which she claimed were poisonous. The poison was so strong, she said, that a child need only touch the fungi to die a painful death. Today I believe her intentions were to keep her students’ hands off of her belongings, but the result was a horrified classroom of six-year-olds. Why would anyone keep something so dangerous on their desk? we wondered. What if we brushed against the mushrooms by accident in the midst of show and tell? Eventually, the brighter students in the class realized that the mushrooms posed no real danger, and they terrorized the rest of us by threatening to force us to touch the forbidden objects.

Some of the anxiety of this situation is no doubt reflected in The Missing Bird, a story which at first appears to be straightforward, but which reveals a sinister underbelly upon closer examination. Although baby animals are often separated from their mothers in children’s literature (see P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother? [1960] or Eric Hill’s Where’s Spot? [1980]), it is not so typical for the mother herself to be the author of the separation.

The reader must decide for themself whether the mother truly believes that her child can fly or if she is malicious in her instructions. The central tragedy of the fledgeling bounding forth only to plummet, Icarus-like, is vivid no matter what the mother’s motivation. The chance misspelling of “hoped” instead of “hopped” is felicitous: just as the bird, we too hope for the best as we venture into the world, only to be brought low by gravity.

Owls are traditionally figures of wisdom, but the sensitive reader will question the narrative value of the tacked-on character of Mrs. Owl. Why can’t the mother see for herself where her child is? She knows he must have fallen near the tree. Perhaps the mother isn’t really looking.

The Restaurant

Written in 1976 or 1977, location unknown.

The Restaurant (recto), #2 pencil on white Kraft paper, 8″ x 10.5″

The Restaurant (verso), #2 pencil on white Kraft paper, 8″ x 10.5″

Text:

There was a restaurant where a man
who sold pencils would stop every
day to eat breakfast. And all the
morning he would shout out loud to
him self as if he wanted everyone
to hear. There was also a threesome
that had a favorate table to eat
at. To day, however, as they where sitting
down, they noticed a lady 6′ tall,
long-black haired, coming in. They
shuffled around nevously, collecting
cups, plates, and silver ware, and sat down
making it appear as if they just had
breakfast. Then, the lady sat down
drank half a cup of coffee, and
then began talking to herself.
Not outloud, like the pencil-
man, but in a soft murmur.
The threesome left by the
backdoor. And even after the
tabe was wiped & cleaned, the
lady still looked on, still
clutching the half-emty
cup. The pencil-man glanced over,
saw the lady, and ran out the
door. The lady soon left.

The next day, the threesome had
just finished breakfast when the lady
came in. They left. The lady spotted
the pencil-man talkig outloud and
went to the chair next to him. “It’s
to cold outside! The birds are
freezing, dam⁹ it!” said the pencil-
man. “I know nobody wants to, but
somebody’s got to feed the birds!”
“May I have some tea, herald?” asked the
lady. The man grabbed the teapot,
poured the lady some. “I ain’t nobody
named herald,” the man said.

The next day the man & woman
came together. The threesome left
for good. The man & woman began
to talk together. They left and moved
into an apartment together wher
all the do is tall softly to one another.
And the restourant will never be the same.

Notes:

No writings save for notebook pages of cursive handwriting practice remain from Mrs. Vernarsky’s second grade class, which is a shame, because that means I won’t be able to point out that Mrs. Vernarsky had an enormous beehive hairdo (except in this sentence). When I try to remember what I wrote in her class, all I can remember is being caught drawing “Big Daddy Roth”-type hot rods, the kinds with monsters and big chrome exhaust pipes¹⁰.

Even if there is no surviving literary record of my second grade year, its importance to my personal development should not be underestimated. It was in the second grade that I was found to be nearsighted, and the resultant eyewear immured me from my playmates. Oh, they still traded their Now ‘n’ Laters with me, still dropped their Scooby-Doo valentines in my box, but dodgeball was forever changed.

It’s informative to look at a report card from this time. While I always got good marks for “Health Habits” I was slipping in “Rules and Regulations,” “Respects Rights,” and the notorious metric of “Plays Well With Others.” This, then, was the beginning of of my Bad Boy phase:

Small wonder, then, that alienation should be the major theme of The Restaurant. None of its characters are able to communicate with one another, preferring instead to shout or murmur nonsensically—or, in the case of “the Threesome,” to abstain from discourse entirely. Although I cannot recall my initial conception of The Restaurant, its obvious models are Sartre and Beckett, perhaps by way of a particularly bleak skit on Zoom.

For example, the ostensible protagonist, “the Pencil-Man,” craves attention from an indifferent world, but is paralyzed by his own incompetence. “Feed the pigeons,” he admonishes, but why doesn’t he just feed them himself? Surely there is complementary bread at the restaurant. At least the Pencil-Man is given a possible motivation by the narrator: he wants somebody, anyone to hear. When “the Lady” makes her appearance, she is described objectively, blankly, as though she were a suspect in a police line-up: “6′ tall, long-black hair.” But what is her crime? Merely her attempt to connect with another human. “Herald,” she calls the man, and in the misspelling we may see the Pencil-Man as John the Baptist, another abrasive hairy man who shouted a lot. The Pencil-Man, however, is unwilling to take the role of martyr; he instead offers tea, as though a participant in a Zen Buddhist chadō ceremony. Thus we see the contrast between Western and Eastern paths to transcendence.

Although they strike up a relationship, romance does not seem to be a remedy for the alienated Pencil-Man and Lady. Theirs is a sexless relationship, in which all they do is talk softly to one another. This would seem to indicate communication, but it is a communication devoid of either action or context. How will they survive? Who will sell the pencils?

Perhaps the most enigmatically fascinating characters of all are “the Threesome.” In contrast to the narrator’s clinical portrayal of the Lady, the Threesome are given no description, not even to differentiate them from one another. Are they men or women? Are they lovers? Why are they so threatened by the arrival of the Lady? Possibly they represent dissolution of identity, the generic, interchangeable personality of Late Stage Capitalism. If so, their aversion to the Lady makes grim sense. The Threesome attempt to absorb the Pencil-Man into their hive mind, only to have the Lady encourage his eccentricity. Theirs is the true tragedy of the story, as they are unable to even enjoy their breakfast, preferring the imitation of eating to true nourishment.

And the pigeons? What of them?

Not really, but it sounds poetic. ↩︎
This is a bald-faced lie. Why would I even write such a thing? ↩︎
Not a lie per se, but stretching things. ↩︎
Still in operation as of 2025, although these days as a purveyor of sports memorabilia. ↩︎
As of 2021, Harding is only the third most hated. ↩︎
This correlation is posited in some versions of the self-administered “Aspie Quiz,” see https://rdos.net/aspeval/#925 ↩︎
Unclear whether the “e” was omitted intentionally or if it was drawn on the table alongside the MS. ↩︎
Vietnam? Korea? WWII seems unlikely. Most likely of all was she was fucking with us dumb kids. ↩︎
Such fire! ↩︎
This was when CARToons Magazine was at the height of its popularity and there always seemed to be an issue being passed around by the boys in class. Looking back, I am confused by my interest here because I have always been indifferent to cars. But I do like “Big Daddy” Roth. ↩︎

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet

One summer’s day when I was nine or ten I walked into the children’s book room of the small public library in my small midwestern town. The children’s room was in the oldest part of the library, which used to be a single-family Victorian house, and in spite of renovation the space still felt homey in a way I couldn’t express. A shaft of light streamed in through a high window, catching motes of dust and falling on an old wingback chair. There was no one else there—my town had a dearth of readers, at least of my age. On top of a shelf was displayed a copy of James and the Giant Peach; the original edition with the real illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. This was a book of whose existence I was aware (from lists in Roald Dahl’s other books) but which I had never read. I took the book to the chair and leafed through it and for just a moment, Burkert’s luminous, gauzy illustrations coupled with the sunbeam and I had a sensation of flight and of being unmoored in time. I was entirely alone, and I sat there, a long while, until my mother came looking for me.

Ever since, I have chased after that emotion, whatever it was. I haven’t found it, but I have found other moments as profound and as hard to categorize. When I was a teenager I spent an afternoon walking through snow following rabbit tracks farther and farther out of town. When I hit a stand of trees I looked up to see a flaming sky, more red than I could imagine, as the sun hovered low between branches; it was past dinnertime, and I felt acutely aware of the earth’s rotation. There have been other moments.

Early this year, looking for some answers to depression, lack of direction, and some other troubling personal issues, I had a psych evaluation. I was suspecting a diagnosis of ADHD. Instead, the analyst told me I have a High-functioning Autism, formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome (before the publication of DSM 5). This came as something of a shock to me. I was 52 and had never suspected. Asperger’s has only been a diagnoses since 1992, and I was in graduate school by then. When I relayed this information to friends and family, I found that some shared my surprise, but other shrugged and said it figured. I thought about my social anxiety, my tendency to be quiet and then speak in stuttering bursts, my inability to hold eye contact, and eventually I realized that yeah, it pretty much figured.

The thing I think about most is the number of times in my life people have said to me, “John, I passed you in the hall and you didn’t even look at me,” or “John, I sent you an email and you never responded,” or “John, is something wrong? You’re not looking at me, and you look upset.” Actually these observations have often been made by others to my wife, Marina, who has dutifully and patiently told everyone that yes, John likes you, it’s nothing you did, that’s just how he is. When you get to know him, he’ll talk your ear off.

I worry about my diagnosis. I don’t want to be rude to people, I want them to like me. I don’t want to be awkward. Why did I never suspect this basic fact about myself? Is it something I can compensate for, or is this just me? Can I be present for friends and family, or am I always going to live in my head?

I was discussing my anxieties to a good friend over Zoom—he was one of those who was entirely unsurprised by my revelation. He had for many years dated a woman with HFA, and he found her delightful. “It’s a wonderful gift you have. You have all these interests and ideas and you live this interior life that is rich and expansive. You give everyone else a different perspective.”

Yes, I said, but I also confuse people. And I push them away, and I need so much time to myself.

“But you care about other people. And they can feel that. And the rest you can work out.”

Shortly after this conversation I was on a morning COVID walk with Marina—we have spent the long days of pandemic isolation becoming minutely familiar with local parks—and I through the trees I had a fleeting glimpse of the library and the sunlight and the peach, and something like the memory of flight. I realized that my solitary childhood reveries were also a gift from this condition, and I realized that whatever challenges my mind may pose, it has more moments to give.