Tim is a character created in 1974. He began not as a character in a story, but a drawing of a boy wtith no pants or underpants on, but wearing a striped t-shirt, white with wavy blue horizontal stripes that were three fourths the size of the white stripes. It was an almost-portrait of a boy named Dewey ( or possibly something that began with the letter “T” because I make it a rule to never use real names in true stories about my actual past) that I had been watching from three tables away in the library during study hall. If you are thinking like a psychologist, you are probably thinking this sounds like a homosexual thing, but I promise I am not now nor have I ever been gay. I only have sexual fantasies about brown-eyed girls. It was the willowy and vulnerable shape of him, the quiet mystery of his quiet behavior and even quieter patterns of speech. I saw something of myself in him. A nerdy something about him that connected him to the thing that happened to me at the age of ten, and at that time was hidden from me by my traumatic amnesia. He represented the part of me that had been lost when the Big Bad Wolf in the forest caught me and ate my innocence completely.
I was never a friend or acquaintance of Dewey. He was a freshman when I was watching him as a senior in high school. We did not have PE class together, so I never saw him naked. The no-pants thing was not about him when I drew him. I never showed that picture to anyone. It was private, a thing completely about me in my own mind. I didn’t know anything about Dewey as a person, and his only personality in my estimation is what I imagined into him. So, he began fictional life as only a picture. In 1995 my oldest son was born. In a few years, the empty vessel that was Tim became more of my son than he was about me. My son inherited some… or most of my abilities as a liar, storyteller, imaginer, and devious thinker. Tim Kellogg, son of an English teacher, and grandson of a wise handyman who could do a little bit of everything, became full of fifty-percent son and fifty-percent father. He was both a portrait of my son and a self portrait.
So, what’s the purpose of writing about where this character came from and who I modeled him after? As you get older and closer to death, you have to come to terms with a few hard truths. I will probably never be read widely as an author during my lifetime, and probably promptly forgotten as soon as I am gone. But, as a writer, I know in my very bones that it is in my DNA to need to tell a story. I have to make meaning in coherent sentences and paragraphs about the greater reveals of WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN AND MOSTLY… WHY? Life is not to be lived in a trance, unable to burble about anything but your own pleasure and pain. Life is tragedy… comedy… romance… and reverance. And the story has to be told… and rewritten and retold. We are not real people until we allow ourselves to believe our own lies.
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5
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.
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