Chapter 27: Learning to Read

My father had shown me how to use my gift for writing but my mother gave me the gift of reading. Aside from giving birth to me, it was the nicest thing she ever did for me.

My reading material of choice was one hundred percent comic books. The brightly colored pictures and funny stories were my sanctuary from my mother’s endless drinking and the chaos surrounding my parent’s divorce.

There was something soothing, simple, and calming about the well-ordered worlds found in the panels of a comic book. Illustrations captured the essence of a scene with a minimum of detail. I spent countless hours closed up in my room looking at my comic books. If a book didn’t have pictures, it wasn’t worth my time.

My comic collection was the stuff of legend. I was the proud owner of nearly four hundred comics of every description from Uncle Scrooge to Classics Illustrated. It was a full spectrum collection.

It was too good to last. Fate and my mother had other plans.

My funny book cocoon unraveled the day I came home from the eighth grade and found that my entire library of comics had vanished. My mother had thrown them all away. Every last one was gone.

“Dennis, I’ve had it with you and your stupid comics. You’re fourteen years old. It’s about time you started reading real books. If I see another fucking funny book in this house, I’ll rip it to shreds,” Joyce said.

That was it. There was no mercy and no exceptions.

I sulked. I pouted. I threw temper tantrums. I deployed and used every trick in the book. Nothing I tried worked and neither Joyce nor my stepfather would relent. The ban on comics was as fixed in stone as the commandments Moses had carried down from Mount Sinai.

It took me about a week to burn through all five stages of grief.

Denial wasn’t an option. My comics were gone and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

The next stage was anger. I was already chronically pissed at my mother so getting more angry over missing comics was like throwing a piece of kindling into a raging bonfire - dramatic, but pointless.

For a brief time, bargaining looked like an option but that also was an illusion. Bargaining with my mother over comics was as senseless and as effective as screaming at a brick wall.

Next came depression and I moped about. I could have successfully auditioned for the “Woe is me” poster child. Depression was, for lack of a better word, depressing. It sucked and, adding insult to injury, it was as boring as hell.

Finally, there was acceptance. Like it or not, I was now living in a comic-free world.

I discovered reading mostly by accident. It was a Saturday morning and my paper route was completed. I had nothing to do and all day in which to do it. I was taking a shortcut through a vacant lot. As I squeezed between two fence posts, I spotted a ragtag paperback copy of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine sticking out of a trash pile.