When I was five or six, my sister and I and the other kids on the block would run outside and play Sea Hunt the moment the show was over. One of us would be Mike Nelson, ex-Navy frogman turned underwater troubleshooter, and the rest of us would hide and await rescue. Whenever I was Mike Nelson, I would always be distracted by and worry endlessly about, say, a broken shoelace or an ant crawling down the back of my neck—off I’d go on a sustained crying jag. I always used to wonder how Lloyd Bridges battled sharks, octopuses, moray eels, manta rays, alligators, giant sea turtles, Aqua-Lunged badmen, and rapture of the deep but never got bogged down in minutiae from his own life, why he never appeared to feel lonely.
Toward the end of elementary school, I kept a record—dozens of yellow, legal-size pages—of Robin’s “Holy” outbursts, his alliteration and assonance, his fast riffs in sharp contrast to the laconic Batman. Holy homicide, Batman. Holy hurricane, Batman. Holy whatever, Batman. One day, oddly (characteristically, self-destructively), I sent my one and only copy of Robin’s exclamations to the producers of Batman; I thought they might want to have it, for some reason. (I thought it would connect me in powerful, mysterious, and irrevocable ways to the show I spent all week thinking about.) I got back a letter thanking me for my interest, along with an autographed photograph of the laconic Batman. I never watched or wanted to watch the show again. I stuttered slightly worse than usual for a few days, then returned to my usual rate of disfluency.
At twelve, I couldn’t not turn friends’ names into nicknames based on the names of famous people. Ethan Saunders was “Satch,” because of Satch Sanders, the Boston Celtics reserve forward to whom Ethan bore no resemblance whatsoever. Jim Morrow became “Agnes Moorehead,” or “Aggie,” for short. Gary Goodwin was “Gookus,” after the Philadelphia 76ers mediocrity Matt Guokas. Everybody hated me for doing this, but the interesting thing (to me, anyway) was that the nicknames always stuck, often for years and years. We couldn’t stand—I couldn’t stand—our unamplified little lives.
Childhood consisted for me mainly of a set of experiments about faith and perception: believing that if I hid my face in my hands, not only could I not see anyone but no one could see me; sitting with my sister in the back of the car, pretending—as they pulled up alongside us—to recognize people in other cars, waving madly at them, getting them to pretend to recognize us and wave back; writing my name, “in cursive,” over and over and over again, trying to make my signature look impressive enough to appear at the bottom of checks.
Movie titles often consist of a two-word phrase such as Stone Cold or Striking Distance or Dead Reckoning: a moribund metaphor literalized until it becomes a violent pun, the point of which is to persuade the viewer that life—which sometimes seems banal, predictable—has hidden reservoirs of excitement and terror.