Watching Bill and Ted Face The Music was such a weird and profoundly emotional experience for me today. As a fan of the first two films, of these characters (I watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, owned the trading cards, and even played the NES game despite how ridiculously convoluted and stupid it was) it was such a satisfying feeling to get to hang out with them and watch as they and their daughters tried to unite the planet and save reality. What I hadn’t anticipated was the company I would have when the third part of this amazing trilogy would finally arrive, the existence of my own two children. I don’t know if it was the hope that two fictional characters exude when reality is far more myopic and cynical, the fact that they are middle aged men with two kids in their mid-twenties, while I am thirty-three with two of my own children so it made me feel old and nostalgic, or the one thing I hadn’t considered…Bill and Ted helped me get through a particularly horrible year (well, until 2020 because lets face it nothing is going to hold a candle to this suck fest) 1998.
There is a reason I picked that particular year as the climactic arc for this book. I’ve always been a particularly lonely kid. My grandma used to complain all the time that my parents kept me behind gates more than normal parents should. My parents would counter that since I was a quiet natured kid it did no harm…” Look! He’s totally happy all by himself in an empty room with two toys and no companions.” I then grew up as the kid who when the neighborhood kids weren’t home or got sick of me for being too winey (admittedly, I was a winey kid. An old friend used to joke that I had a timer before I’d just turn into a moody crying mess) would sit in his grandparents’ den watching hours of cable television and movies. Loneliness is as much ingrained in the pop culture I imbibed as it is my day to day life. In 1998, (I’ll spare the details) I went from being the youngest of three to an only child. There was an incident with the family, fights went down, I found myself sitting in a courtroom while my family fought my parents, and I spent most of my summer break (having survived two yeas of Mrs. V-you’ll learn about her when you read…she is also VERY real.) All alone, getting nostalgic for the life I had before 1998…when I still had a family or at least the idea of one. I lost my grandparents (both of whom were my greatest advocates) and subsequently my childhood. I dealt with it by watching T2, Starship Troopers, and the Bill and Ted movies religiously. Living off of Instant Breakfast (mostly at 4 am when my parents were asleep and I’d watch after hours HBO television like Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions) or begging my dad to track down outdated trading cards and magazines at comic book stores around the area. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was trying to get my childhood back through nostalgia…and while I was able to amass all these things that reminded me of the childhood I believed I had, the loneliness of owning the stuff without the actual childhood? That really sucked. So, I did what any glorified latchkey kid would do in that situation. I decided to give up on reality and live vicariously through the fictional characters of movies and television shows I loved. I didn’t realize how detrimental this was until many years of therapy and trying to figure out…I have a wife and a baby…why am I still so fucking lonely? Because 1998 wasn’t the year I lost my childhood. 1998 was the year that I lost me. That bucktooth, soup bowl haircut, leg braces wearing, dorky little goofball who knew the whole world was laughing at him and making fun of him…but it was okay because even if Mrs. V would convince all of my friends’ parents to stop allowing their kids near me (a combination of loving horror movies and having a teenage sister with baby convinced her that I was going to be a criminal or serial killer) losing the two most important people in my life (my grandfather died the following year and I never got my chance to say goodbye), and being fully aware at 11 years old that I didn’t have anyone…my friends were being encouraged to make new friends, my family had a restraining order against my dad, my oldest sister who returned was such a fucking mess over trying to basically raise me, little Eddie just decided…I don’t want to be here anymore. For twenty-two years I hadn’t heard from him. Then one night in September of 2017, he told me that he had a story he wanted me to write and rather than think I was going crazy I just listened to him. When the book was completed by the summer of 2018…I lost him again. When the book continued to be rejected by hundreds of literary agents (the fifth rejected manuscript) I just knew he was lost forever. By December of 2019, when Atmosphere Press had reached out to me (specifically, Nick) and they wanted to publish this story (I was SO fortunate as this came right before Christmas and I had also published a short story and a series of poems) I couldn’t help but want to scream his name and show him the e-mail. That was impossible…because he is me. There isn’t some perpetually stunted eleven-year-old version of me hiding out there, there is just me. Then Bill and Ted Face The Music was going to come out the same day as my book….it just felt like fucking kismet, it really did. These characters and these films that got me through 1998, helped me survive myself from high school until now…holy shit, they’re coming back the same day this book does? Well, they decided to show up early while my book arrives TUESDAY (like an idiot I keep saying Monday, Monday, Monday! No, September 1st is Tuesday). Anyway, so I’m watching the movie (both times) and that loneliness came back, that sadness, that where is this going? What if no one reads the book? What if being a writer wasn’t my destiny? What if the book comes out and being a writer isn’t my destiny and I spend the rest of my life having no idea what I was meant to do and I have to figure it out as a wage slave until the day I die? Then he showed up again. Little Eddie only…. now he’s three and one. He exists in their eyes, in their smiles, and in their affection for grown up Eddie. I couldn’t help but feel mad at myself that I have this booking coming out, these amazing little boys, a phenomenal wife…what the fuck is going on with me? Why am I so fucking lonely and sad? Because I never got to say goodbye to my childhood. I never got to say goodbye to that kid, I never had the chance to tell that kid that in time…everything will be alright. So, like Bill and Ted I don’t know if the one thing I spent my whole life working toward is going to unite the world and save reality….but then I look at my sons and think, but it already has. It united little me with myself and saved my future reality. I’m sure these read like the writings of a lunatic but I am fucking telling you…that little boy is out there and I’ll be damned if he doesn’t get the hug he always deserved. I know he's out there, in there, he's somewhere because I haven't felt this way since 1998.
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