I’ve always found peanut butter sandwiches to be a comfort food. I used to come home from school and have a sandwich and a tall glass of milk while I watched the afternoon cartoons. My father was the same way. He would come home from work and often the first thing he would do is make himself a snack. His favorite kind of sandwich was peanut butter and honey and I think all the honey he ate is what lead to him to get sweeter over the years. My mom on the other hand always loved mustard with her peanut butter. Whether her version of the snack influenced her personality is still a matter of debate but I can honestly say sometimes I was more scared of her than my dad. The biggest trial in my childhood was choosing whether to put honey, mustard, or either grape and strawberry jam on my sandwich. I even found myself splitting the sandwich into four sections and combining a little bit of everything on the bread so that I could have everything I wanted. Today, I still come home from work and make myself a peanut butter sandwich but over the years I’ve grown accustomed to the bitter taste of mustard complimenting the peanut butter. This ritual is one of three things that has always stayed constant in my life.
The second thing that has always remained the same as I’ve grown older is my love for superheroes. As a kid, I would watch cartoons that featured my favorite heroes or I’d spend hours in my room reading my newest comics. Luckily for me, as I’ve grown older the superhero renaissance really started to take off. Due to this renewal of mythos, I felt as if the world still had so much to offer and that good people always triumph over the trials in their life. To this day I’m still a hopeless romantic when it comes to a man in tights fighting for justice. Throughout my twenties, I had a wide variety of friends that ranged from potheads and party-goers to republicans and church-goers. My contact list was incredibly diverse and it wasn’t a surprise when one of my safer, more responsible, friends hit me up to check out Marvel Universe Live, an elaborately costumed “Disney on Ice-esque” performance starring some of the most popular superheroes at the time and was typically meant for kids 12 and under. Of course I wanted to go because I was a hopeless nerd hoping for a chance to take a peek at Starlord’s phaser. Eventually the night came and went and the performance was a blast. My little group enjoyed a hulking dose of wholesome entertainment that only a Disney production could provide. There were pyrotechnics and motorcycle stunts and heroes swinging all around the stage on wires doing kicks and flips. At the end, the good guys won and the heroes saved the day. We were feeling happy and delighted, the type of felling one might get from putting four different flavors on a peanut butter sandwich. Then we got to the parking lot. As much as we may wish for life to be as wonderful as the two-hour performance we had just seen, life has a twisted sense of humor. We searched up and down the aisles of the parking lot with my keys up in the air frantically pushing the “lock” button on the key pad hoping to hear the little “beep beep” noise that my car always made when I had lost it. It was hopeless though because we had realized the car was gone. Now, a lot of thoughts went through my head including wondering if the Green Goblin had swooped in to hijack the car, however that didn’t make sense since the goblin rides on a cool flying skateboard type thing and this type of crime seemed below him. Also, he wasn’t real. The true threat of the night was much more sinister and unforgiving. My car had been towed away and was being held ransom at an impound lot. The third thing to remain constant in my life is my response to bad situations. I am always hit with a mixture of anger and sadness and I tend to get quiet in bad situations. As we searched for an Uber and got a ride to the impound lot I was quiet, contemplating what I might be able to say to the villain who had stolen my baby. A bunch of curse words and $240 later we had rescued my car from the evil tow-man’s clutches and we were on our way home. No, good things don’t always happen to good people and sometimes no amount of fighting will change the course of events that we wish we could change. Sometimes we must realize that life is a lot like a peanut butter sandwich. We can try as hard as we want to turn mustard into honey but a bitter situation doesn’t have a sweet taste however, even a bitter sandwich can still taste good. As we drove home we made a list of all the good things that had happened that night. We realized that it was a good thing that we had the money on us to pay to get the car back. We talked about how we had just seen a great performance and how we were lucky to have gas to get back home. No, this wasn’t a sweet situation but it wasn’t all bad either. I felt like a kid again that night as I went from excited to despair. Once we rounded the corner to my street and pulled the car into the driveway I sighed and accepted that bad things happen to good people. I got out of the car and locked the doors behind me as I went inside, reached into the cupboard and found the bread. After this stressful day, I was going to need a peanut butter sandwich.
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My name is Erick and I am an entertainment junkie. It all started just before the turn of the century when my parents loaded up their car with me, my siblings, my grandparents, and a few cousins and took us to the movies. This car wasn’t a car but rather it was a box on wheels, the type that most pedophiles would drive and it could hold a significant amount of people. I remember this detail not because as a two-year old I was concerned with proper seatbelt safety, but rather because the first movie I can remember watching was screened at a drive-in theatre. For the younger readers, there once was a time when, to see a movie, a family had to leave their house and journey to wherever they were screening the film. In the 90’s a drive-in movie had one flat cost per vehicle, no matter how many cousins were squished in the back seat. So, in the year 1999, I sat on my parents lap and watched Disney’s Tarzan.
Flash forward to now and I am addicted to many different mediums, searching for entertainment. It can be said that in 2017 any exploration of the world ends at a person’s doorstep but I couldn’t disagree more. Numerous times have I been taken on a journey to a far-away land without leaving my couch. I’ve explored Skull Island with Kong and the galaxy with Star-Lord. I’ve gone to Atlantis and Mars and I continue to explore every day. Some of my greatest adventures have come in the form of musicals. In fact, one of my favorite musicals is an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables. In this musical, a thief named Jean Valjean starts a new life by avoiding his parole and his story leads us through a wonderful cast of characters during the French Revolution. I learned from the protagonist that we all must face ourselves one day and have a “Jean Valjean moment.” That is, a moment in one’s existence where they ask themselves “who am I” and “what am I doing” to rise from the predicaments they have put themselves in. In my life, I have had a series of J.V. moments. One of the most notable times I had to ask, “who am I” was the summer I gave my first blowjob. As a writer, I have learned not to lead with such allegories that may be deemed inappropriate by a general audience, however I also stated early on that one of my favorite musicals has a thief, brothel-owners, a prostitute, and a lot of premature death so keep in mind that no subject is off the table in my story. So, it was the summer before my senior year of high school and I was feeling rebellious. A friend and I had gotten pretty good at staying out late and offering sex in exchange for gas money and food. Yes, we were underage and yes, we could technically be considered prostitutes, but for all intents and purposes so far, I had just played the part of the pimp with my friend (who we will call Gale) doing the dirty work. This changed when we were 60 miles from home, with almost an empty tank of gas, and Gale decided she didn’t want to have sex with any more guys. Suddenly, I was going to have to get into the game. At this time, I was still considering myself a bisexual man and I had come out to Gale only because she is the type of friend that likes sex and drugs and you must too in order to hang with her. I was desperate for friends at 17 and one thing lead to another and suddenly here I was soliciting sex for money. For anyone who knows anything about Craigslist personal ads, they may know it’s usually only guys who post them. No woman is stupid enough to put themselves in danger with a sex-driven stranger so we found a guy and we made a deal and decided that I would be giving him a blow job for 20 bucks. I wasn’t prepared for what I got caught up in emotionally. Gale was in the back seat of the man’s car and he had decided he wanted to make out with her while I did the other work. He leaned his seat back and unzipped his pants and for the first time I was putting a penis inside my mouth. No, I wasn’t sure I was gay and no, I did not enjoy doing it contrary to what many people would assume about a gay man. It was seven a.m. after a long night of being out with Gale. I remember the time because while she was sucking the man’s face, his alarm kept going off every five minutes. I can’t look at Lorde’s song “Tennis Court” the same way because that was exactly the tune that was playing while I was at one of my lowest points. It was almost a half an hour later and this guy just couldn’t get off so eventually he paid us the money and admitted he was late for work. We parted ways, I filled up the gas tank, and Gale and I were on our way home. In the car, we sat mostly quiet for almost an hour. At this point I was more confused with who I was than just 24 hours ago. “Who am I?” I wondered. I was about to go home and sneak into my room where my parents assumed I had been the entire night. I was a lying to myself and to others but I wasn’t sure how to change who I was during that time. When I got up to my room and into my bed I decided that I was done doing anything to seem cool. I decided that I had one year left before I had to face the real world, and I was going to be my best self. I didn’t figure out who I was in that moment, nor do I think Jean Valjean only had one moment of self-realization in his own life. What was important to me was that I was going to change the path I was on and become better. I pulled up my blankets and turned on the music on my phone. “You’ll Be in My Heart” from Disney’s Tarzan was the song of choice that morning. I always wanted to be better at keeping a journal. I think at a young age I already knew that just regurgitating what I did that day was boring and nobody would read it. See, I always wrote with the intention that someone would read what I put on the paper, whether it was because I had published it myself or because I died and my children and grandchildren were reading what I had written. I owed it to them to write solid content. So that’s why 12-year old Erick started to write his own autobiography. Flash forward almost a decade later and that’s exactly what I’m here to do again.
By the time I’m popular enough that some publisher cares to print my story, I will have already forgotten most of it or heaven forbid, I died without being able to tell it. So being in my twenties I decided now was the best time to rehash what I wrote when I was 12 and expand what happened to me in the last two decades and narrate what will happen in “the best years of my youth.” When I’m thirty I want to be able to look back and say that I have a story for every topic that could possibly be discussed. I want the stories to be honest and pure and stand up for themselves. I have met about million people in my lifetime and each one has contributed to this story. Going forward, these personal essays won’t always be chronological and the characters won’t always go by a real name, but the events and meat of the history will always be truthful to real life. Fiction has a place and a time but there’s nothing like real life. It can’t be duplicated and is unique to everyone. Some may ask, “why do you write about yourself, won’t you look back and be embarrassed by what you said or did?” Truthfully, no. I don’t have any regrets in my life and the stories that I share always have meaning to me and hopefully to someone else too. So welcome to what I call 90’s nostalgia for gay men or “Gameboys and Gay boys.” |
Erick L. Graham Wood
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