"The Secret Origin of Clark"
There's a concept called the Doctrine of Unintended Consequences. It's really just that same old idea of cause and effect. Just another way of saying that for every action, there is a reaction, and a reaction to that reaction. And on and on and on...
The evidence is everywhere:
The flip of a coin in a modest midwestern home I've never been to in the spring of 2000 will lead me to place a Brian Andreas print between two Spider-Man posters in a day or two...
The recitation of a Joe Kelly quote -- a reflection on cause and effect and it's impact on the veracity of free will -- muttered in the backroom of the Raytown Library during the fall of '98 cost me two dollars in late fees for Harold and Maude last May...
And a flower given to me in the first months of my freshman year in high school has blessed me with a strange fascination with sparks...
We're all caught at the cross section of a million causal chains... trapped in the tangled web of the lives we've touched that touched us back. And every once in a while, when we take a break from our squirming and wriggling on Anansi's tapestry, we start to look back and think we can pinpoint the crucial moments in our lives that have led us down the paths we thought we chose. Hindsight being 20/20 (if not 20/10), we're pretty sure that we can pick out the days that changed our lives forever... That we can discover our own secret origins.
There are two moments that really stick out for me.
One is that hot and humid June afternoon when I turned on the tube and watched Spider-Man: The Animated Series for the first time.
The other is a fuzzier memory. I remember a screen door slamming shut, and my father seeming upset... From what I've been told, that was the day that he stopped living with us and went to Turkey.
*
When I was younger, my sister Ja'nelle and I would visit my father during both Christmas and the summer. Those were the two times in the year we were guaranteed to see him.
That all changed in the Summer of '94. At the time, my father was stationed at Mahlstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. (If I remember correctly, his decision to move there had been largely predicated upon the fact that when he was called and asked if he wanted to take a position in Montana, we had all been watching A River Runs Through It, which is set in the fourth largest state, and which he took as a sign... so perhaps this nonsense is hereditary indeed.)
As usual, Dad drove to Kansas City to pick us up in June, but when he returned at the end of the season, he only brought Ja'nelle back.
The '94-'95 fiscal year will be remembered for a number of key cultural events. Nicole Brown Simpson and her... friend... Ron Goldman were killed in a rather brutal fashion, but apparantly not by O. J. Simpson... unless you eschew the results of the criminal trial for the civil one that found him financial liable for those deaths. Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump hit the American cinema, as the release of The Mask continued one time lone-white-guy-on-In-Living-Color Jim Carrey's journey to become a $20 million superstar... NBC premiered a quirky little sitcom staring six no-name actors entitled Friends... And comic geeks across the nation were shocked and appalled to find that the creative minds of the current Spider-Man titles had completely taken leave of their senses as the ill fated clone saga began.
Of course, I didn't know any of this in August. And if I did, I surely didn't give a damn... least of all about that Spider-Man business.
No... all that mattered to little Lenar Clark -- who'd recently turned twelve-years-old -- was the prospect of spending a year with the man who called him Narzy.
*
Throughout my life, I've been dogged by the accusation that I'm dreadfully unoriginal... and in another attempt to dodge the blame for this all too apparant character flaw, I think that I'll make the suppostion that it may have a little something to do with my name.
My father once told me that he named me Lenar because it was his middle name and when he was younger, he'd always wanted to be called "Lenar," but for reasons he's never elaborated on, that didn't work out.
I, of course, hated the name, because as had been pointed out to me by numerous classmates, it wasn't really a name. Maybe if my parent's had had the good sense to toss a "d" at the end, or replaced the "n" with a pleasing "v" or "m" I could have salvaged some dignity. And in all honesty, I would have much rather been named "Corby Junior," because my oldest and dearest ambition has always been to truly be my father's son.
But as it stands, the earliest stories I write (largely reworkings of my favorite movies and cartoons from my childhood) all feature "Leon Clark"; I spent my days in St. Bernadette Elementary with the unfortunate and high unimaginative nickname "Lenerd"; and the one time I asked my Nana how she came up with Lenar, she said it might have been in a movie she watched once...
And so, it should come as no surprise that when I came to Paris Gibson Middle School that fall, I was sure to make the request that I be addressed as Clark.
*
I had two best friends that year. At school, there was Ben Buchanan, a clean cut kid from the ritzy side of town with whom I could always discuss the latest episode of Lois and Clark (which was in its second season, i.e. the show's prime). Ben was basically the proto-Smith.
And at home, in the streets of Mahlmstrom Air Force Base, there was Justin Johnson. Justin was a big guy with one hell of an annoying little brother and a bit of a violent streak. We spent most of our time playing pool down at the Youth Center. I don't remember how we became friends, and somehow it seems rather unlikely that we would have, but damn if we didn't have some great times. Which I guess makes him the proto-Bredenkoetter.
*
And of course, there was a girl.
Her name was Stephanie Gilreath, and her dad had just been posted at Mahlstrom following a long stint in Tennessee. She had a bit of an accent, and she was tall as an Amazon. I used to make a fairly lengthy trip to the outskirts of the base to play tag with her and the other kids when she was living in the Temporary Housing section.
What I really liked about Stephanie was that she shared my naivete. Middle school is the beginning of the big push toward pretending at adulthood, but neither of us seemed all that enthralled by the prospect. And that was never more evident to me than the day I was in the toy section of the Base Exchange -- which is basically a military Wal-mart -- looking at bikes when she walked in with her family, and I overheard her trying to sell her dad on the idea of getting her a board game called "Don't Wake Daddy" for Christmas.
I remember thinking to myself, Isn't that a game for six-year-olds? and then My god, she's got the soul of a child... this is so the girl for me.
*
I got my first paid writing gig that year. The Great Falls Gazette would pay fifteen dollars to any kid who wanted to write a movie review for the Lifestyles section. Ocer the course of my stay in Montana, I reviewed Angels in the Outfield (in which Tony Danza turns in what is arguably his greatest performance to date as borken down baseball player Mel Clark), as well as the delightful animated feature The Pebble and the Penguin (which you've no doubt never heard of).
It was my review of The Brady Bunch Movie that got me in trouble. I panned the flick, but I did it for all the wrong reasons. I just didn't get that it was a send-up... or at least I refused to acknowledge that it was supposed to be a send-up. Well apparantly, one of the local radio station's morning show DJs read the review and called me on it. I didn't hear the show myself, but the day they printed the article, I had classmates tellling me that someone said on the radio that I had no idea what I was talking about.
Christopher Barnes, the young actor who played Greg in the movie probably ended upi having the best revenge on me a few months later. He did the voice of Peter Parker on a stupid little cartoon that actually changed my life.
*
We didn't have FOX. A month before school started, the local affiliate went out of business, and nothing stepped up to replace it, which meant no Power Rangers and I only got to see the first episode of The Tick.
And tragically, no Simpsons.
Instead, I watched the first (and in my opinion, best) season of a silly little sitcom with that chick from Ace Ventura which ended up becoming pretty popular. CBS's sleeper hit Due South had me aching to become a mountie, and The John Laroquette Show kept me in stitched (though it's second season surely didn't have the edge of its first one).
But most importantly, that was the year I discovered Seinfeld.
And it was a great time to discover Seinfeld. I(t was the season that brought us "The Race" and "The Opposite," but the moment I realized I'd be a Seinfeld fan for life was the afternoon after I watched a rerun of "The Junior Mint."
If you're unfamiliar with the episode, it's the one where Jerry's dating a girl whose name he doesn't know, though he's been told it rhymes with a female body part. So when she finally calls him on it, he makes a wild desperate guess at "Mulva" and then she walks out. A minute afterward, he goes to the window and shouts down to her "Dolores!"
I was walking the dog (literally, not figuratively) the next day when I finally got the joke.
"Clitoris," I said at the dinner table that night. "Dolores rhymes with clitoris."
"Yes, very good Narzy," my father replied. "Very good indeed."
*
We had a great morning routine.
My father would go swimming every morning, and by the time he got back, I'd have some English muffins toasted and waiting, and we'd eat breakfast and catch Bewitched on TBS, and Dad would drone on and on about how Elizabeth Montgomery had been such a sex symbol in the 60's.
We Clarks tend to take our television a little too seriously. Perhaps I should mention that Clark is an Old French name that means "scholar".
Perhaps not.
*
Stephanie gave me the "Let's just be friends" speech pretty early in the fall, so I moved on to this girl in my shop class named Katie Conner.
There's this cycle in my life, in which every once in a while, I become obsessed with a girl who I know almost nothing about, and she usually turns out to be completely wrong for me. Katie was a textbook case of that.
She was snobbish, self-centered, and completely lacked imagination. When we switched from shop to art class, there was a week in which she was on crutches, and everyone said that she was faking it, and it's more than likely that they were right. If I'd ever taken the chance to sit down and talk to her, I'm pretty sure I would have been disgusted with her a human being... but man did she have nice tatties.
*
The base had a junior basketball league, and Dad decided to coach my team. Under his tutelage, I learned a lesson that's been key to my special brand of comedy for years: the prat fall.
My father's secret strategy was to play upon the delicate sensibilities of the referees.
"If someone blows past you, you've got to flop to make it look like you've been fouled," he said to me in hushed tones before our first game. "The flop will see us through."
And so, I spent a good chunk of my time throwing myself of the floor and rolling around.
We didn't do so well.
But I took that same philosophy with me to the afternoon juggling class the school sponsored the week we took the Iowa Basics Test. During the last session, everyone in the class had a juggling competition, with rewards going to both the best juggler and the juggler who needs most improvement.
I pretended to trip while juggling scarves and went down like a sack of shit. I was a shoe in.
*
On a snowy afternoon in early March, I decided how I wanted to die.
Stephanie had asked me if I'd come to her softball practice, and during home ec, they handed out surplass kiwis, and I ate mine whole, skin and all. It was a long walk to the base softball field that afternoon, and it's started snowing, but I was so sick from the kiwi it never occurred to me that they'd cancel the practice until I reached the empty field.
I was so tired I just dropped down to my knees and flopped face down into the gathering snow.
I'm not sure how long I was out there in the great white quiet, but I remember it being so peaceful and beautiful that I'd hoped it'd never end...
*
On the long drive back to Kansas City, my father and I talked about religion.
If our fathers are indeed our models for God, then I think God is a huge Star Trek fan, He's got a great sense of humor, and I wish more than ever that I knew how to really reach Him.
It's funny.
My father gave me the name he always wanted. I was supposed to be the boy he didn't get the chance to be. But I would have been more than happy to be Corby Lenar Clark Junior, because all I ever wanted was to be him, and my greatest fear is that I've somehow let him down.
But whenever I get the chance to really sit and think about, the more I realize that I'm exactly who I want to be.
I am my father's son.
*
When I got back to Kansas City, all I wanted was to go back to Montana.
Instead, I got contact lenses, and went back to Catholic School. And after I watched Spider-Man for the first time, I mourned what I perceived to be the Death of Clark by buying lots and lots of comic books.
My high school friends refused to call me Clark... most of them still do. It wasn't until that first FIG meeting on the third floor of McDavid Hall that my surname finally won a battle that began a decade earlier...
*
My dad was an avid Asteroids player in college. He played it all the time... Enough to know the great secret of the game, which he shared with me when we found an old Asteroids machine at the White Grouse Inn during our Christmas vacation:
Don't shoot at an asteroid that's coming at you.
It's not exactly "With great power comes great responsibility," but it's come to mean a lot to me... because my father was playing Asteroids when I realized I was Clark.
I was eight-years-old, sitting in his study, watching him blast errant space-debris into pixelated motes of cosmic dust when one of those random alien vessels pooped up and blew him away.
"ARGH!" my father wailed in disappointment. "Come on, Clark!" he then said to himself. "You're better than this!"
The End
There's a concept called the Doctrine of Unintended Consequences. It's really just that same old idea of cause and effect. Just another way of saying that for every action, there is a reaction, and a reaction to that reaction. And on and on and on...
The evidence is everywhere:
The flip of a coin in a modest midwestern home I've never been to in the spring of 2000 will lead me to place a Brian Andreas print between two Spider-Man posters in a day or two...
The recitation of a Joe Kelly quote -- a reflection on cause and effect and it's impact on the veracity of free will -- muttered in the backroom of the Raytown Library during the fall of '98 cost me two dollars in late fees for Harold and Maude last May...
And a flower given to me in the first months of my freshman year in high school has blessed me with a strange fascination with sparks...
We're all caught at the cross section of a million causal chains... trapped in the tangled web of the lives we've touched that touched us back. And every once in a while, when we take a break from our squirming and wriggling on Anansi's tapestry, we start to look back and think we can pinpoint the crucial moments in our lives that have led us down the paths we thought we chose. Hindsight being 20/20 (if not 20/10), we're pretty sure that we can pick out the days that changed our lives forever... That we can discover our own secret origins.
There are two moments that really stick out for me.
One is that hot and humid June afternoon when I turned on the tube and watched Spider-Man: The Animated Series for the first time.
The other is a fuzzier memory. I remember a screen door slamming shut, and my father seeming upset... From what I've been told, that was the day that he stopped living with us and went to Turkey.
*
When I was younger, my sister Ja'nelle and I would visit my father during both Christmas and the summer. Those were the two times in the year we were guaranteed to see him.
That all changed in the Summer of '94. At the time, my father was stationed at Mahlstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. (If I remember correctly, his decision to move there had been largely predicated upon the fact that when he was called and asked if he wanted to take a position in Montana, we had all been watching A River Runs Through It, which is set in the fourth largest state, and which he took as a sign... so perhaps this nonsense is hereditary indeed.)
As usual, Dad drove to Kansas City to pick us up in June, but when he returned at the end of the season, he only brought Ja'nelle back.
The '94-'95 fiscal year will be remembered for a number of key cultural events. Nicole Brown Simpson and her... friend... Ron Goldman were killed in a rather brutal fashion, but apparantly not by O. J. Simpson... unless you eschew the results of the criminal trial for the civil one that found him financial liable for those deaths. Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump hit the American cinema, as the release of The Mask continued one time lone-white-guy-on-In-Living-Color Jim Carrey's journey to become a $20 million superstar... NBC premiered a quirky little sitcom staring six no-name actors entitled Friends... And comic geeks across the nation were shocked and appalled to find that the creative minds of the current Spider-Man titles had completely taken leave of their senses as the ill fated clone saga began.
Of course, I didn't know any of this in August. And if I did, I surely didn't give a damn... least of all about that Spider-Man business.
No... all that mattered to little Lenar Clark -- who'd recently turned twelve-years-old -- was the prospect of spending a year with the man who called him Narzy.
*
Throughout my life, I've been dogged by the accusation that I'm dreadfully unoriginal... and in another attempt to dodge the blame for this all too apparant character flaw, I think that I'll make the suppostion that it may have a little something to do with my name.
My father once told me that he named me Lenar because it was his middle name and when he was younger, he'd always wanted to be called "Lenar," but for reasons he's never elaborated on, that didn't work out.
I, of course, hated the name, because as had been pointed out to me by numerous classmates, it wasn't really a name. Maybe if my parent's had had the good sense to toss a "d" at the end, or replaced the "n" with a pleasing "v" or "m" I could have salvaged some dignity. And in all honesty, I would have much rather been named "Corby Junior," because my oldest and dearest ambition has always been to truly be my father's son.
But as it stands, the earliest stories I write (largely reworkings of my favorite movies and cartoons from my childhood) all feature "Leon Clark"; I spent my days in St. Bernadette Elementary with the unfortunate and high unimaginative nickname "Lenerd"; and the one time I asked my Nana how she came up with Lenar, she said it might have been in a movie she watched once...
And so, it should come as no surprise that when I came to Paris Gibson Middle School that fall, I was sure to make the request that I be addressed as Clark.
*
I had two best friends that year. At school, there was Ben Buchanan, a clean cut kid from the ritzy side of town with whom I could always discuss the latest episode of Lois and Clark (which was in its second season, i.e. the show's prime). Ben was basically the proto-Smith.
And at home, in the streets of Mahlmstrom Air Force Base, there was Justin Johnson. Justin was a big guy with one hell of an annoying little brother and a bit of a violent streak. We spent most of our time playing pool down at the Youth Center. I don't remember how we became friends, and somehow it seems rather unlikely that we would have, but damn if we didn't have some great times. Which I guess makes him the proto-Bredenkoetter.
*
And of course, there was a girl.
Her name was Stephanie Gilreath, and her dad had just been posted at Mahlstrom following a long stint in Tennessee. She had a bit of an accent, and she was tall as an Amazon. I used to make a fairly lengthy trip to the outskirts of the base to play tag with her and the other kids when she was living in the Temporary Housing section.
What I really liked about Stephanie was that she shared my naivete. Middle school is the beginning of the big push toward pretending at adulthood, but neither of us seemed all that enthralled by the prospect. And that was never more evident to me than the day I was in the toy section of the Base Exchange -- which is basically a military Wal-mart -- looking at bikes when she walked in with her family, and I overheard her trying to sell her dad on the idea of getting her a board game called "Don't Wake Daddy" for Christmas.
I remember thinking to myself, Isn't that a game for six-year-olds? and then My god, she's got the soul of a child... this is so the girl for me.
*
I got my first paid writing gig that year. The Great Falls Gazette would pay fifteen dollars to any kid who wanted to write a movie review for the Lifestyles section. Ocer the course of my stay in Montana, I reviewed Angels in the Outfield (in which Tony Danza turns in what is arguably his greatest performance to date as borken down baseball player Mel Clark), as well as the delightful animated feature The Pebble and the Penguin (which you've no doubt never heard of).
It was my review of The Brady Bunch Movie that got me in trouble. I panned the flick, but I did it for all the wrong reasons. I just didn't get that it was a send-up... or at least I refused to acknowledge that it was supposed to be a send-up. Well apparantly, one of the local radio station's morning show DJs read the review and called me on it. I didn't hear the show myself, but the day they printed the article, I had classmates tellling me that someone said on the radio that I had no idea what I was talking about.
Christopher Barnes, the young actor who played Greg in the movie probably ended upi having the best revenge on me a few months later. He did the voice of Peter Parker on a stupid little cartoon that actually changed my life.
*
We didn't have FOX. A month before school started, the local affiliate went out of business, and nothing stepped up to replace it, which meant no Power Rangers and I only got to see the first episode of The Tick.
And tragically, no Simpsons.
Instead, I watched the first (and in my opinion, best) season of a silly little sitcom with that chick from Ace Ventura which ended up becoming pretty popular. CBS's sleeper hit Due South had me aching to become a mountie, and The John Laroquette Show kept me in stitched (though it's second season surely didn't have the edge of its first one).
But most importantly, that was the year I discovered Seinfeld.
And it was a great time to discover Seinfeld. I(t was the season that brought us "The Race" and "The Opposite," but the moment I realized I'd be a Seinfeld fan for life was the afternoon after I watched a rerun of "The Junior Mint."
If you're unfamiliar with the episode, it's the one where Jerry's dating a girl whose name he doesn't know, though he's been told it rhymes with a female body part. So when she finally calls him on it, he makes a wild desperate guess at "Mulva" and then she walks out. A minute afterward, he goes to the window and shouts down to her "Dolores!"
I was walking the dog (literally, not figuratively) the next day when I finally got the joke.
"Clitoris," I said at the dinner table that night. "Dolores rhymes with clitoris."
"Yes, very good Narzy," my father replied. "Very good indeed."
*
We had a great morning routine.
My father would go swimming every morning, and by the time he got back, I'd have some English muffins toasted and waiting, and we'd eat breakfast and catch Bewitched on TBS, and Dad would drone on and on about how Elizabeth Montgomery had been such a sex symbol in the 60's.
We Clarks tend to take our television a little too seriously. Perhaps I should mention that Clark is an Old French name that means "scholar".
Perhaps not.
*
Stephanie gave me the "Let's just be friends" speech pretty early in the fall, so I moved on to this girl in my shop class named Katie Conner.
There's this cycle in my life, in which every once in a while, I become obsessed with a girl who I know almost nothing about, and she usually turns out to be completely wrong for me. Katie was a textbook case of that.
She was snobbish, self-centered, and completely lacked imagination. When we switched from shop to art class, there was a week in which she was on crutches, and everyone said that she was faking it, and it's more than likely that they were right. If I'd ever taken the chance to sit down and talk to her, I'm pretty sure I would have been disgusted with her a human being... but man did she have nice tatties.
*
The base had a junior basketball league, and Dad decided to coach my team. Under his tutelage, I learned a lesson that's been key to my special brand of comedy for years: the prat fall.
My father's secret strategy was to play upon the delicate sensibilities of the referees.
"If someone blows past you, you've got to flop to make it look like you've been fouled," he said to me in hushed tones before our first game. "The flop will see us through."
And so, I spent a good chunk of my time throwing myself of the floor and rolling around.
We didn't do so well.
But I took that same philosophy with me to the afternoon juggling class the school sponsored the week we took the Iowa Basics Test. During the last session, everyone in the class had a juggling competition, with rewards going to both the best juggler and the juggler who needs most improvement.
I pretended to trip while juggling scarves and went down like a sack of shit. I was a shoe in.
*
On a snowy afternoon in early March, I decided how I wanted to die.
Stephanie had asked me if I'd come to her softball practice, and during home ec, they handed out surplass kiwis, and I ate mine whole, skin and all. It was a long walk to the base softball field that afternoon, and it's started snowing, but I was so sick from the kiwi it never occurred to me that they'd cancel the practice until I reached the empty field.
I was so tired I just dropped down to my knees and flopped face down into the gathering snow.
I'm not sure how long I was out there in the great white quiet, but I remember it being so peaceful and beautiful that I'd hoped it'd never end...
*
On the long drive back to Kansas City, my father and I talked about religion.
If our fathers are indeed our models for God, then I think God is a huge Star Trek fan, He's got a great sense of humor, and I wish more than ever that I knew how to really reach Him.
It's funny.
My father gave me the name he always wanted. I was supposed to be the boy he didn't get the chance to be. But I would have been more than happy to be Corby Lenar Clark Junior, because all I ever wanted was to be him, and my greatest fear is that I've somehow let him down.
But whenever I get the chance to really sit and think about, the more I realize that I'm exactly who I want to be.
I am my father's son.
*
When I got back to Kansas City, all I wanted was to go back to Montana.
Instead, I got contact lenses, and went back to Catholic School. And after I watched Spider-Man for the first time, I mourned what I perceived to be the Death of Clark by buying lots and lots of comic books.
My high school friends refused to call me Clark... most of them still do. It wasn't until that first FIG meeting on the third floor of McDavid Hall that my surname finally won a battle that began a decade earlier...
*
My dad was an avid Asteroids player in college. He played it all the time... Enough to know the great secret of the game, which he shared with me when we found an old Asteroids machine at the White Grouse Inn during our Christmas vacation:
Don't shoot at an asteroid that's coming at you.
It's not exactly "With great power comes great responsibility," but it's come to mean a lot to me... because my father was playing Asteroids when I realized I was Clark.
I was eight-years-old, sitting in his study, watching him blast errant space-debris into pixelated motes of cosmic dust when one of those random alien vessels pooped up and blew him away.
"ARGH!" my father wailed in disappointment. "Come on, Clark!" he then said to himself. "You're better than this!"
The End
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