The First Question...

"...once the sands of time scatter to the wind, it's gone. The squandering of time is the ultimate slight against God."

“Do you watch movies?”

This is the question my friend, Numa Walter, asked me back when we were baby-faced eighteen year olds, setting up a display at the Wax-Mart where we suffered as reluctant employees. Back then we were aimless boys trapped in the purgatory that awaits children transitioning from childhood to adulthood. It is the question that launched our two decade long brotherhood. It is only now that I recognize that that moment was an “absolute point” in my life, the moment that catapulted me in the direction of my purpose for existing. Because it was the the question that would eventually lead me to my love of storytelling.

I used to draw comic books in high school. I was never good enough to be Jeph Loeb or Tim Sale, or my favorite mangaka, Akira Toriyama, but I enjoyed coming up with characters and conflicts for them to overcome. I also loved that my friends enjoyed them. As much fun as I had spending my free time bent over my desk designing characters, sneaking white printer paper from printers at school, using a ruler to shape the comic boxes, not once did I ever consider this to be my raison d’être. I was a teenager; I never even considered my own mortality.

In my senior year, it dawned on me that I wasn’t good enough to pursue a fruitful career in this medium. I couldn’t draw buildings, landscapes, animals, cars, bicycles, and my perspective drawing was laughable; I took art my entire school career and the only thing I learned was that I was no Monet.

I found myself on the verge of graduating high school and going to Florida State University, having absolutely no direction, no clue what I was going to do with my life. It was the first time I was faced with an existential crises, before I knew what an “existential crisis” even was.

I was not prepared for college life. I experienced a culture shock that shook me to my very core, and I failed miserably. I flunked out of my first and only college semester in FSU, and had to return home with my tail tucked between my quivering legs, an utter failure. 

In an attempt to stave off spiraling down deep into the abyss of depression, I got what was supposed to be a summer job for a new local Wal-Mart. It’s there, where I met Numa, and where, through Numa, my love of cinema was born.

I was uninterested in making new friends. I wanted to work, go home and bury my head under my pillow. It was Numa who broke the silence, and in doing so, broke through my guard, and it all started with that question: Do you watch movies?

Up to that point in my life, I had seen a few movies. E.T., Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Problem Child One and Two, but that’s all they were to me: movies. 

Growing up, I rarely went to the movie theater. Any movie I did watch, was either a Disney Channel original movie, or rented from Blockbuster. The first movie I remember desperately wanting to watch in the movie theater was Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. That was in 2002. It was such a big deal! Finally! Spider-Man on the big screen. There hadn’t been this much hype for a super-hero movie like this since Tim Burton’s Batman (or so that was what I heard). 

I begged my mother to take me to the movie theater when it premiered. I was 15, didn’t have a driver’s license so I couldn’t drive myself, also I didn’t have money. My mother was pregnant with my little sister at the time, she was tired from work and the stress of carrying her third child in her mid 30’s.

I didn’t get to see Spider-Man in theaters.

I didn’t get to watch the movie until it came out on DVD. No popcorn, no surround sound, no big screen. Just me sitting in my room alone, watching the movie over and over, then over and over with commentary. Then over and over again. 

I didn’t want Numa to suffer through that mind numbing explanation. So when he asked: Do you watch movies, I answered: I’ve seen some.

“Do you watch anime?” He asked.

Sure, I said. And listed off the names of the anime’s that I grew up on: Dragon Ball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing, Ronin Warriors, basically whatever was on Cartoon Networks Toonami rotation. Then he interjected and asked the question that launched our friendship off the ground.

“Have you ever seen Akira?”

Immediately, I was transported to my early high school days. Akira is considered by many to be Katsuhiro Otomo's mangum opus. It is a cybernetic punk anime, sprinkled with science fiction and social commentary, the story being an allegory for the fallout from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - where Akira represents the bombs and Tetsuo is the aftermath. Before I watched Akira, I had only been exposed to pop anime. It wasn’t until an old high school friend of mine, William Steif, let me borrow the movie that I realized I knew absolutely nothing about anime.

Akira was the first Japanese animated movie I saw with that kind of compelling storytelling and vivid imagery. I never knew how popular it was, or its significance and impact, not just in popular culture but in film as well.

I looked at Numa, renewed light in my eyes. 

From that moment on, Numa treated me like a blank canvas. He offered to bring me movies to watch and get my thoughts on. The next day he came in through the Wal-Mart sliding doors with a stack of VHS’s under his chin. He slowly eased me in with movies like Ransom by Ron Howard, The Professional and The Fifth Element by Luc Besson, and Brother by Takeshi Kitano. 

When I first went to his house, Numa's father had an entire wall stacked with VHS tapes. You would’ve thought that they were built into the structure of the apartment.

Numa’s house quickly became my safe haven from the whirling world outside. We’d sit in his room and have double feature viewings. Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master and Operation Condor. On a gloomy, rainy day, he popped in Se7en and Fight Club by David Fincher. Next he’d show me Amor Es Perros by Alejandro Gonzales Inaritu, and Nine Queens and The Aura by Fabian Balinksy. He taught me the importance of directors like George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, John Woo, Wong Kar Wai, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Lee, to cinema. Days we weren’t working, we were watching movies, and I couldn’t be happier.

The more film we watched, the more I felt drawn to this world. It wasn’t until Numa showed me the films by directors of the French New Wave that I felt I had found my purpose. Jean-Luc Godard, Francios Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jaques Demy, original students of film who, during their youth, were influenced by directors like Orson Wells, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Akira Kurosawa. The French New Wave directors were true autuers, who managed to make impactful films that illuminated the human condition all on shoestring budgets and guerrilla-style filming, with the city of Paris as their backdrop. I wanted to do this. I wanted to tell stories in the same vein. 

In hindsight, it all made sense why I would be drawn to filmmaking. It’s the supreme form of visual storytelling. I got the same feeling watching a movie and writing my own scripts that I got when I used to draw my little comic books for my friends. I felt - and still feel - as long as you have a good story, complex characters, and something to say, you could film a movie on a phone and I’d watch it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the discipline to commit to filmmaking or screenwriting. I spent years prioritizing the wrong things, and I paid for it dearly. I inexcusably wasted so much valuable time, that can never be made up; once the sands of time scatter to the wind, their gone. The squandering of time is the ultimate slight against God.

When I got married and had children of my own, all the notions of filmmaking were put aside. I was happy with my wife, I love my children, but there was a part of me that didn’t feel completely fulfilled. There was a dark cloud that remained above me, a vacuum in my soul I was unable to fill. 

Then the pandemic happened.

Sheltering-in-place forced me to reevaluate myself, and where I was in life. I had my own family, a stable job, a roof over our heads, but there was nothing I built from the ground up with my own hands that I could point to and say I did this. At my core, I wanted to create something my children could hold in there hands long after my flesh had perished.

I came back to film, but the desire to film had all but evaporated. I considered giving screenwriting another shot. I enjoy screenwriting, but the thing that pains me about it is that in the off chance that you sell a script, once it’s gone it no longer belongs to you. The studios can change the characters, change the concept, the tone, or they can shelve it all together. In screenwriting, it is frowned upon to be too descriptive, a guideline I had trouble following. Knowing this filled me with even more dread. I couldn’t pain myself to write something that would never see the light of day in the way it was intended.

Then Numa let me borrow 1Q84, a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. At first, I was intimidated by the heft and length of the book; the last book I tried to read that was that thick was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the content was so dense, I had to stop.

However, I challenged myself.

Read one chapter. See how you feel.

I opened the book and from the first sentence, I was swept away. Murakami's prose, his structure, his characters all jumped off the page and touched my soul. I finished the book in about a week. That led me to read The Stranger by Albert Camus. Both of those books left me profoundly shaken. It's a cliche image but I would lay awake at night, the soft glow of the TV washing over me, thoughts turning over in my mind, all triggered by the words strung together by incredible authors. Then a small thought:

Why not try writing short stories?

It was a whisper in the silent dark. I never considered writing prose, short or long form, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense for me. I love sitting alone, thinking about story ideas, making notes, outlining, backstories, writing the first draft, then crafting the second, and polishing the final draft. Most importantly, I wanted to tell profound stories, the type of stories that made people unable to sleep at night, pondering the meaning of their existence.

The next day, I bought Stephen King’s book On Writing, and told myself if there was anything in that book that dissuades me from writing, I will put all of these childish dreams away and focus on a job in the conventional sense in which I could still find joy, like Television Production.

I read the book cover to cover and came to this conclusion: I am going to write.

Stephen King’s book was ripe with gems for aspiring novelists: polish your diction and grammar, you can write what you want but without the proper grammar no one is going to want to read it. Don’t use three words where one will do. Right believable dialogue for believable characters. But the most important lesson I learned from was infuriatingly simple: If you don’t read, you can’t write.

That’s exactly what I did. 

Every choice I made from that point forward was in service to writing. Reading every book I could get my hands on, classic and contemporary, good books, bad books, I consumed them all (and continue to do so). Each book I read deepened my love of literature. Orwell, Fitzgerald, Plath, Hemingway, Natsume Sōseki, Phillip K. Dick, Alexander Dumas, Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, I was overwhelmed by how behind I was; there are so many books to read, and not enough time in my lifetime to read them all, but as Murakami put it in his book, Novelist as a Vocation, it isn't enough to read books, you have to enjoy it. Otherwise, what's the point? Why waste more time?

When we’re children, we have this idea of what our future is going to be. Many of us realize those dreams, most of us don’t. For those of us who don’t, that reality is often a hard pill to swallow. No one is content with mediocrity but we tolerate it, either for the sake of surviving the day, or merely to bring home income from a hard day’s work to support spouse and our children. 

I am no exception. For so long, I deviated from the path I thought I was supposed to walk. I’ve seen more downs than ups. When I wasn’t loathing myself for living a worthless existence, I was having panic attacks about mortality. Specifically, dying without accomplishing anything with the time allotted on this Earth.

My love of cinema saved my life. Through the inexplicable emptiness and anguish, sitting in the dark movie theater bathed in silver light watching films like Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, and Pan’s Labyrinth, filled my heart with joy and guided me through the darkness. Years later, literature has done the same. 

At this moment, I am on the verge of publishing my first novel, Halcyon Suicide, a story about a purposeless man forced to face and overcome his inner demon. It’s nearly midnight as I finish my first blog post for my website, Loblolly Pines Publishing, a company I founded for the sole purpose of publishing my novel, and future novels, but also in the hopes that maybe one day I can publish novels for other writers out there who need an outlet for their voice. 

Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I am not someone who likes to talk about myself, I do not think much of myself, and do not react well to adulation. Yet, I do not feel ashamed or embarrassed to admit that I am proud of this accomplishment.

My aim has never been fortune and glory. In fact, I wholeheartedly do not expect to be successful as a novelist. I purely love the art of storytelling. No matter what comes of this venture, if I can reach one person and do for them what Numa, Murakami, and Camus, have done for me, I would’ve fulfilled my purpose. 

And to think, my journey into the world of literary fiction started with one simple question.