Anita Jones is a character in several of my books, but she also represents a girl from my own childhood who was as much of a regret for me as she was for poor old Charlie Brown.
Anita Jones, of course, is not her real name. You can’t even look at the picture and tell by what she looks like who I am secretly portraying. But the thing is, she was definitely real to me. And I would still be horrified to have her find out how I really felt about her.
She was not my first crush. I mooned over the beautiful Alicia Stewart (also not a real name) from second grade through sixth grade. But Anita was always right there. Often right behind me and to my left whenever I turned around on the playground. Not looking me in the eye, but probably looking at me until I began to turn. I know I looked at her whenever she wore dresses or shorts. She had beautiful peach-colored legs.
There was a time when, in Music class, the boys were forced to ask a girl to be a dance partner in the square dancing lessons that Miss Malik was giving us. My best friend Mark had asked Alicia to dance with him, so my number one choice was already taken. And when it was my turn, Anita looked at me with those wonderful brown eyes and heart-shaped face. And I… was too embarrassed to pick her. Then everyone would know how I really felt about her. So, I picked my cousin instead. My heart was lodged in my left shoe for three days after the look I saw on her face. Not my cousin’s face. The brown eyes and heart shape.
Then later, when I was on the high school bus to Belmond, Mickey Schmidt (we never called him Michael because I was Michael) made a joke that embarrassed me.
“Have you ever been caught masturbating in the bathtub?”
“No,” I told him, in disgust. Anita was in the seat across the aisle listening.
“It’s a good place to do it in, then, ain’t it.”
I turned as red as any maple leaf ever managed in late fall. She was smiling at me.
“I would’ve liked to have seen that,” she said. “I bet you even have a lot of hair down there.”
I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been so embarrassed that my head might’ve caught fire.
But thinking about that humiliating moment on the bus later, I realized that she had actually been brave enough to admit she was thinking about my genitals. I had never asked her on a date or sat beside her in Art Class as I should have. My life might’ve been very different if I had. Even if I had asked her to dance.
But somewhere in the Multiverse, a parallel me is probably married to a parallel Anita. And I bless them for what might’ve been. At least, it’s lovely to think so now.
Catch a Falling Star 
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, autobiography, being alone, characters, commentary, humor, imagination, insight, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as book review, book reviews, books, fiction, writing