Art is a form of creative expression hinged on emotion. This emotion swirls and twirls in the artist's mind, and it is their challenge to project that emotion in a conceivable form. Inspired by a video game, I once projected the passion of fun and victory on a little sheet of construction paper at the age of six. I felt the emotion of jubilation and achievement upon completion.
However, when Mrs. Calvary, the squirrelly, eye-darting battle-axe of McLaughlin elementary made a paranoid assessment from this particular piece of art produced by what she perceived as a hell-spawn...that emotion was fear...palpable, witch-trial fear. However, my emotional response seemed less complex:
"What the hell did I do?"
Doodling has been a favorite pass-time for me all my life. As a toddler, I had a concept of perspective that translated on paper as a bunch of people with big feet, long towering legs, and tiny-heads. After all, I crawled around all the time so this is just what I saw. From Batman, to choo-choo trains, I loved to draw. But there was one event that happened in the day where I set the pen and paper aside, and devote my full undivided attention to.
Game Spectating.
I looked up to my older brother, Chris. We shared the same taste in music, entertainment, and we critiqued the game together as he played it. It never got old for me. I found it better than most TV and I frequently envisioned myself as the player in this colorfully pixilated bloody fantasy world where you readily ate food off the ground and sprinted backwards firing a never-ending arsenal of weapons.
As if the game said, "Wolfenstein 3D, you are an American prisoner of war in World War Two on a secret mission to assassinate Hitler! You bust out of captivity for freedom, and these Nazi fascists are gonna pay! Are you a bad enough dude to take them out?
"Hell yes" we thought.
As thrilling as it is replacing entertainment from Tom & Jerry food fights to "Juiced-up super soldier railing down rows of SS with a Chain-gun" at age five, Wolfenstein lacked grit and other-worldliness. Not supernatural enough, it failed to scare me. Level after level, the same flat chasm with occasional flares of Eagles and Swastikas reminded me that the hero traversed through the belly of the beast. I needed a game that took me worlds away...put me in the shoes of a one-man-army mortal hero up against tremendous odds, ready to crap his spine out in fear of what stood around the next corner. I needed something...
...Awesome.
I remember the day that Chris showed me something incredible that he discovered on Dad's computer. Like a hidden jewel in a text-based treasure-chest, he stumbled across the file plainly named "Doom.exe" with the intent of looking for something titled significantly less intimidating. He had discovered a digital, first-person-shooter utopia. An ideal playing field with massive, rugged-looking space-stations tattered and littered with what appears as layers of conflict and bloodshed. A wonderland where we played through layers of carnage and technology thickly constructed in layers of awesome.
Compared to Wolfenstein a year earlier, it would be like comparing your backyard to a rainforest; you go from something familiar and simple, formulaic environment, to this immense, alien, almost threatening entity. Threatening in an unknown way, majestic and awe-inspiring at the same time...a place like nothing we had ever seen before.
Door after door, lifted hiss-after hydraulic hiss, we encountered massive structures, puzzles, traps, overwhelming, powerful demons. Hellish Imps of nightmarish murderous intent pressed me to deplete my entire arsenal before being overrun. We got to do something that no one could ever do in real life. We pumped rockets indiscriminately into explosive barrels conveniently stacked around waves of demons. All of this right from our home, where we harmed no one.
Doom would always be remembered as one of the first games I played alone on Dad's computer. With little effort I had it down to a science; hop into the room, pan around, spot an enemy, strafe-and-shoot, then look for items and secret doors. With stress I dealt with jerks in school, I chose Doom as a method to vent my frustration. I chose Doom as my digital solitude.
It launched me into gaming...and I could not stop thinking about it. In school, my mind filled with thoughts and played with possibilities about the later-announced Doom Two. "What would be different? What new guns will they provide? How fun will it be? I had to know."
I thought everything else seemed so boring in comparison.
One day in school, I talked to other kids about Doom to see if I could relate with any of them. I discovered their parents limited them to the Nintendo Entertainment System with the old-school Super Mario Brothers and Duck-hunt games. Some had never even seen a video game. I pondered ways to enlighten them. I wanted to show them my paradise. My retreat from figurative hell to digital hell. My words could not convey my message to a fascinated audience. An audience now infatuated with this wonderful world. Their parents remained scared of these games and I felt a responsibility to show them, but how? I wanted to bring them to the game or bring the game to them.
I proceeded by drawing the game to my best ability. I displayed images of epic victory and graphic violence. My work challenged me and enlightened my peers. My brother saved up enough allowance to buy a magazine which featured artistic covers for the game, which gave a visual reference to base the main-character's appearance.
The most awe-inspiring cover compared to anything I had ever seen before: the wicked, menacing half cybernetic-half ancient "DOOM" letters loomed above a lone, battle-scarred space marine. He fended off hordes and hordes of Arch-Vile. Horned demons clawed at the green armor-clad hero centered on a hellish mountain. The space marine's Plasma Gun ripped through one particular demon and painted his fellow Arch-Vile behind him in a splatter of green blood. I needed lots of greens, reds, and fire colors.
All of this, of course, done to the teacher's orders; she failed to actually specify what to draw on that day if I remember correctly. Bluntly, she told the class to draw what we looked forward to do when we got home. As she perused across the tables of her students, she expected a pattern of subjects, ranging from playing with the family dog, or playing football with Dad.
She might have thought, "There is little Susie drawing a doll-house...or maybe that's her house. There is Tommy drawing a soft-ball...he sure does like sports! There is little Geoffrey using lots of red. He seems to be using a whole lot of ...red. ...what-the? Okay, there's a lone green man in the middle...wearing a helmet and armor...he appears to be holding a large board...or...no...wait a minute...that's a weapon. And that mass of red in front of him...that pile of pink mass...what-the! Oh God!"
Allow me to introduce you to Ms. Calvary. She began her first year as principle of the school, and she knew my name well. I acted a bit of a smart-ass regularly at that time. I used my intelligence to mess with the teachers and students indiscriminately. I passed the time waiting for dismissal by including elaborate pranks, jokes, sabotage, and daring feats of escape as a regular routine for me. I familiarized myself with the contents of her office and I remember vividly, that she sure did like Jesus. Waaaay more than anyone I had ever met before.
On that day, I remember my drawing laid neatly on the center of her desk. A portrait made in Crayon of the triumphant space marine, rocket-launcher tube still smoked, surveyed a pretty damn impressive array of dead demons. I figured if she hated hell as much as any Christian, she would like it because the good guy has clearly won with ease, which implied that evil made manifest remained frail, and very dead. In hindsight, I realized I missed the point completely.
This nervous little buck-toothed principle sporting a thick, disturbingly stereotypical mousy country accent somehow convinced herself I seemed possessed by demons. She thought I had become one with Satan's infernal legions. In the game, bosses predominated satanic, which sparked a thought in the back of my mind that her foolish paranoia could get me qualified being rendered as the final boss for the Doom saga in the future. One man's trash could have been another man's treasure, just as her repulsion could have been my juvenile flattery...my response? "Sweet!"
Horrified, Mrs. Calvary clutched onto her cross necklace and erratically called me out of her office. She misinterpreted my incredibly out-of-context response as prosecuting proof to her suspicions. Calvary demanded a parent-teacher conference. She directly accused my parents of poor guidance, to which my Dad promptly responded he established, as we grew up, distinct boundaries between fantasy and reality. "Love imagination, just know that there is a lot of stuff in movies and games that you should never do or say." My father said.
My brother and I understood the difference and the circumstances. However, the demeaning school faculty insisted we children were complete morons. Based on our father's guidance, we were perfectly capable of discerned fantasy from reality.
Calvary, in her stubborn, jittery paranoia, insisted I be assigned a counselor to explore deep corruption on my psyche. She needed a judgment on my sanity.
No surprise to anyone but her and some three or four members of the school staff, the counselor confirmed my sanity. "He is a healthy, smart kid, with an incredible imagination, only translating a harmless video-game onto paper," the counselor reported.
Calvary nodded professionally, and weighed her options, which left her no logical choice but to exile me from her school. I transferred to a school for the mentally and emotionally challenged.
So there I sat, with my wonderful new classmates like Jeffery, the lonely, slow-thinking country kid with the shaven head. He proudly exclaimed our fictional twin-like brotherhood to complete strangers because we shared different variations of the same first name. CJ, the slouched-over scrawny kid that, when denied anything, would bite one hand and hit himself in the head with the other while he cried very loudly. Lastly, I remember Stephen, the attention deficient hyperactive disordered Cambodian kid that literally darted around class for no other reason than to dart around the class like a cat. When Stephen got in trouble and spent time in the prison-like magnetically locked time-out room roughly the size of a closet, he stripped completely naked. Then somehow climbed just high enough in the empty room to see out the plastic window designed to be at a height that only teachers can look through. Only a kid, and already felt numb to insane behavior like streaking. I remember the frequent warning used in the classroom, "There goes Stephen...he's...doing it again," Said CJ.
Not until middle school, I learned the full story as to why Calvary exiled me from a comfortable school with good friends, good teachers, and good school-work. During middle school it finally hit me that all of the trouble came from my drawing of the triumphant space-marine and his fallen foes. I felt a strong dislike towards a squirrelly mop with wide, fear-filled eyes, and a quivering lip failing to mask two shovels of buck-teeth. My feelings evolved into a strong resentment and hatred towards Mrs. Calvary.
I felt comfort knowing that I would never see her again. I felt comfort knowing that despite her efforts I still succeeded academically while in my free time honed my violent, "demonically" inspired pixilated killing-sprees. This time, instead of in innocent fascination, I played for fun.
In a way, I am grateful for the minor setback; it taught me the power within art, and my ability to produce it. It taught me that my talent in drawing can be so profound it can change where I go, like a sail-ship I have not yet learned to control. Calvary and the rest of the paranoid faculty suppressed something that I loved to do, and that suppression may have fueled me to delve deeper into it. If not for the "Doom Incident", I might not have pursued an art major instead of an associate's degree in something else or joined the military blindly.
The "Doom Incident" became a profound turning point for me; a fumble in my education that only enhanced my personality. Now I have caught up in school, and I feel it suits me perfectly.
My hatred towards Calvary wilted into pity; I surmise her life must be incredibly boring. When she calls in another boy into her office, armed with a horrifying drawing of gore and violence on the back of a test packet, she must wonder somewhere in the back of her mind what happened to the evil one from McLaughlin.
At some level she knows I am at home, playing Doom Three with a smile on my face.
GG
