4 Boy

In sixth grade Jack and I also began drawing female nudes at school, pencil outlines of the body, naked paper dolls, to which we added hair, eyes, lips, navel, breasts, and nipples. Then we would ask our classmate Connie to contribute the genital detail Jack and I could not, having never seen it, and Connie would add the tiny vertical line, only an eighth of an inch long, at precisely its proper place on the smile of the pubis. One afternoon on our short walk home from school, I remember, Jack and I carefully loosened from a lawn near the sidewalk a small slab of sod, dug a shallow hole, and in it we buried two of such drawings we had just completed at school that day. Then we covered our buried treasure with its rug of green grass.

Who might find it?

For me at least the strange, secret thrill this gave me had nothing to do with sex—at that age I still had not experienced sexual feeling—but only with the mysterious taboo surrounding the female anatomy. The oldest of three sons I had no idea what girls had down there and no good way of finding out. Much more interested in comic books, games, and sports than in girls, it was not until I entered seventh grade that I discovered sex and even then only because in order to be accepted and to fit in I felt compelled to imitate the interests and behaviors of my friends and of the new boys and girls I had met in junior high. In elementary school I much preferred cartoons. Tales from the Crypt, a comic book of horror my parents did not permit me to buy or even to borrow and bring home, was also available in the Overbey collection, and to me it was the most thrilling of all.

Two of its tales of the macabre I have never forgotten.

In one of them a man accepts a wager that without harm he can walk sideways through the twisting narrow corridors of a labyrinth, its walls lined and set with horizontal rows of razor blades. Just two or three turns into the maze, not long after the gambler has begun the test, his every step a baby step, slow, careful, wary, his antagonist releases a frothing, rabid doberman pinscher into the maze, and the panicky gambler, screaming, turns in his terror to run in order to escape the mad dog, the fine keen blades slicing the flesh of his upper arms and shoulders now squared to run, too wide for safe passage, their skin striped and laced with thin red lines of blood in the final frame of the story.

"No, no, no, nooo!" he cries, running, bleeding, his face a grimace.

In another tale a boy, playing baseball with his school mates in the sandlot beside the mansion of a sinister, reclusive, hideous old man, clubs a home run which breaks a window in the house. The boy's worried playmates demand he go alone to retrieve their ball. There the old man introduces him to the undead, demons he calls the boy's "friends." They perform magic and treat the boy to cookies and ice cream, and the man also grants the boy three wishes which he swears the boy may exercise at any time. The man returns the baseball, and he sends the boy home. Almost immediately the boy finds reason to access the first two of his three wishes, but they go horribly wrong. When he hears his parents quarrel over money, he wishes for wealth. Instantly a fortune appears on the doorstep of the family home—but the money is soon discovered to have been stolen from the local bank, and the boy's father is arrested and jailed. The boy's second wish, made in hope of correcting this misunderstanding, only compounds the problem and, when to his mother the boy confesses his role in this incomprehensible family predicament, she disbelieves him yet nevertheless blames him and even scolds him and punishes him for the tragedy that has befallen the family. Finally, isolated, lonely, guilty, crying alone in his room, the distraught and distracted boy thoughtlessly makes his third and final wish.

"I wish my friends were here," he pleads.

Instantly the demons, legions of ghouls, rise from wet graves, from hell, to feast on living human flesh. Shuddering inwardly, I reread this story every time I visited Mike to explore his collection of comics, and its plot and its images privately haunted me and secretly thrilled me for many months.

Horror.