A CHANGELING CHILD
(1942–1961)
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
—from “the stolen child,” by william butler yeats, 1886
NARRATOR: In 1942, pagans were a thing of the past. Gods and Goddesses were what people had believed in centuries earlier; wizards, witches, and unicorns were found in the fiction section of the library; magic was just a stage trick; and fairies lived only in fairy tales.
And in 1942 many Americans were as just as indifferent to the future as they were to ancient history and mythology. Science-fiction authors were writing about space travel, atomic power, computers, and other upcoming wonders, but they weren’t being taken seriously. That kind of stuff was considered to be, in the real world, centuries away or impossible.
The United States had just endured the Great Depression and was entering World War II. All that really mattered to most people was the present, and it was bleak. It was in that world that Charles and Vera Zell met and began a family together. Their first son was born on November 30, 1942, and they named him Timothy. He would grow up to be a Pagan and a Wizard, raise Unicorns, marry a Witch, and change his name to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart.
CHARLES ZELL: I was born at home on Labor Day, September 7, 1914. We were poor. I had to put cardboard in my shoes in the winter when there were holes in them. My father was a barber, and when the Depression hit, he was out of work for seven years. I determined when I was quite young that I didn’t want to be poor the rest of my life. I wanted to go to college. I graduated from high school with honors. I was very active in Boy Scouts, became an Eagle Scout, and because of that I met a chap who helped me get into Lehigh University. I got a scholarship, and I got a job waiting on tables in a fraternity house for my meals. I played football, basketball, and tennis, all varsity.
I graduated from college in June of 1938 and took a job as a salesman with Rust Craft Greeting Cards. On July 28, my father died in my arms of lung cancer. In December, Rust Craft sent me to St. Louis, where in June of 1940 I met my first wife, Vera. We were married that October 15. When the war broke out, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. That was in September of 1942. My wife was pregnant. Tim was born on November 30. When I got the news of his birth, I was so excited that on the obstacle course that day, for the first time I scaled the wall!
VERA ZELL: My father, also named Charles, was a dentist. And he was a naturalist. He knew the names of birds, insects, and flowers and that sort of thing. He would take yearly ten-day fishing trips that Tim would have enjoyed. He had a flower garden and a fruit-tree orchard in the back, and he grew asparagus and tomatoes. He died in our home of coronary thrombosis on November 17, 1941, a week after Veteran’s Day. Tim was born a year later, on November 30, 1942. He was the most beautiful baby in the nursery. Even the nurses said so.
CHARLES ZELL: I was sent to Officers Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, and became a second lieutenant. Tim’s mother and grandmother drove out and stayed with me for six weeks in Dumfries. Then I went to Camp Elliot in San Diego to teach machine guns for six months. Tim and his mother went with me. We were together until he was nine months old, then they went back to the Midwest. I didn’t see him again till November 1945.
I went overseas with my battalion. I was sent to Guadalcanal in the South Pacific to join the Third Marine Division regimental weapons company as a machine gun officer. I was in on the invasion of Guam, and survived that. I was in on the invasion of Iwo Jima, where they raised the flag. I survived without being wounded, but most of my buddies were either wounded or killed. I was with my very best buddy when he got hit by a mortar shell and lost his arm. I got him down to the beach and evacuated him.
NARRATOR: While Charles Zell was in the South Pacific fighting in the war, his wife moved back into a big, old Victorian house with her mother and sister in Kirkwood, Missouri—a suburb of St. Louis. At that point in American history, it was not uncommon for extended families to live together. Their living situations were comparable to the way the Addams Family lives in the TV show and movies, with the grandma, uncle, cousins, and assorted oddballs who just happened to drop by all under the same roof. (This was how Tim Zell spent his first few years; and since growing up and leaving his family, that is how he has lived most of his adult life.)
Immigrants often lived in households of this kind. They had come from countries where deep-rooted traditions, customs, and folktales had been handed down from generation to generation. But things like that were being lost, or left behind, as people become assimilated into the new world. Tim Zell’s family traditions were passed on even more directly, since he considers himself to be the reincarnation of his mother’s father.
OBERON ZELL (OZ): My mother’s father had died of a heart attack the year before, and his room in the Victorian house in Kirkwood was made into my nursery. My first memory is of awakening in my familiar room, and there was my family gathered around me. I looked up at them, and they were all looking at me kind of funny. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t articulate what I was trying to say. They made funny noises, and I got more and more upset. Finally I raised my hands in front of my face, and they were little, tiny baby hands.
I freaked out and started screaming. I had awakened in the bed that I had died in. I went straight from one life into the next one. It was a direct transmigration. Obviously there was a time gap of a full year, and the birth itself, but I have no memory of any of that. It was like I had gone to sleep the night before, and I awakened the next morning with the same people around me.
As I became more verbal as a child, they would often tell me, “That’s just the kind of thing your grandfather would say!” I always felt like, from the time that I was able to talk, that I was somehow older, wiser, and more mature than they were. I never quite could get it that I was the child and they were they adults. It always felt the other way around.
For my first three years, the only people in my universe were my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt Betsy (who never married). So my whole life revolved around the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone—the Triple Goddess of Celtic lore.
My mother’s folks were Presbyterian, but I don’t recall ever being taken to church in those early years. But I was baptized. I remember that distinctly because I didn’t want it to happen. I screamed and fought it, but they did it anyway. It was very traumatic.
My early years were haunted by recurrent nightmares of dying. I remembered time and time again in my dreams the sensation of dying. It was like falling down a well. The world got smaller and smaller and disappeared. Sometimes I would even get that feeling when I was awake, and I’d have to kind of blink and shake myself.
I was very telepathic. A lot of the time I heard their thoughts as clearly as words. And I just took that for granted as perfectly natural. They didn’t have to speak directly in order for me to understand them. I did not distinguish between spoken words and articulated thoughts.
When I was around two or three, there were some women over visiting. I was upstairs in my room, and I remember hearing this commotion of voices. I came down the stairs, and I looked at all these people that I didn’t know. There was this noise that hurt my ears. I put my hands over my ears, but it wouldn’t go away because I was hearing it inside my head as well. And I yelled out, “Be quiet!”
All these faces turned and looked at me. They stopped talking, but the babble got louder. I looked at them and for the first time understood that their mouths weren’t moving, and therefore they weren’t speaking, and yet I was hearing them.
I ran back upstairs, hid under the covers, and tried to shut out the commotion that was inside of my head. And that was the last of that. I learned the difference between a thought that was in my head and a thought that was coming into my ear.
My grandmother was very intellectual, so reading was valued highly in my family. I was probably about three when I started being able to read for myself. My mother had been reading me these books, and she would trace her finger along as she was doing it and I would learn it. At first I was just kind of recognizing words, but before long I could read them myself.
NARRATOR: Timothy Zell’s religious education after that point came not from his elders, or from other people he knew who were in a position of authority, but from books and direct observation of Nature.
OZ: When I was very small, my mother got me the Childcraft books, which were put out for kids by the World Book Encyclopedia. There was a whole series of them on different themes. My favorite was the one on world mythology. The very first things I read were Roman versions of the Greek myths, before Dick and Jane or anything else. I’ll never forget reading about “Pluto and Proserpine” as a child. These stories introduced me to lots of important concepts, one of them being that there were multiple deities, Gods, and Goddesses of all kinds. So I didn’t start off with the assumption that there was only one God; I started off with the assumption that there were many deities worshipped among many people. Later on, when I learned about Christianity, it was not like, “This is the only God.” It was just one more story, about one more God.
My father came home from the war in 1945 and became a traveling salesman with Rust Craft Greeting Cards. After four months, he was transferred to Pennsylvania. That’s where I really came into my identity. We had this little house and I lived upstairs, where I had my own room and my own desk. My dad and I were very close during that time—he used to tell me wonderful bedtime stories. And there were woods and fields all around us that I used to spend much of my time exploring. I would go hang out with animals and climb trees. I would merge so totally with the place that the animals came to accept me. I would just sit at the base of a tree for hours and hours till the deer would come and graze right next to me without being alarmed. I would climb up into the branches of a tree during the bird-nesting season and just sit and watch them lay their eggs and raise their babies.
VERA ZELL: Tim could spend hours watching a little bug crawling up a wall. Literally. He would go out under the porch and follow the bugs or ants.
OZ: My lifelong interest in Magick and Wizardry was ignited when I first read stories of Magick as a child—such as in fairy tales and the Greek myths. In particular, I was deeply imprinted by the early animated Disney movies featuring magickal characters and happenings. Fantasia (which had come out in 1940—two years before I was born) had a huge impact on me. Of course, I loved the whole “Rite of Spring” evolution sequence, with the dinosaurs. But it was the “Pastorale” that really captured my soul. The final scene, when Nyx draws a veil of night like a blanket across the Arcadian sky, and we see a crescent moon which, as we zoom in, resolves into Diana drawing her bow and releasing a meteoric arrow . . . well, that arrow plunged straight into my heart, where it has lodged ever since!
I didn’t have any social sense at all as a kid. I got along great with animals, but I never really formed close friendships with other boys. I just didn’t understand them—or trust them. And this was reciprocal; I was like a “pink monkey.” One time, in second grade, this kid whipped out a pocket knife and slashed the back of my thumb, coming very close to cutting it off. I still have a big scar there, and my thumb has been double-jointed ever since. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would do such a thing. The lesson I got was that there were bizarrely cruel people in the world that I would somehow have to deal with.
I always liked hanging out with girls more than boys. In second or third grade I had two girlfriends, which was the beginning of my lifelong polyamory. They were both named Carol. One of them lived at the bottom of the street; the other lived at the top; and I lived in the middle. I kept trying to get them to be friends so that we could all three be together and do things.
NARRATOR: Another son, Barry, and a daughter, Shirley, were born into the Zell family. The three Zell siblings all grew up in a time of prosperity and economic growth. Women who had worked in manufacturing jobs during the war were replaced by men and sent home to raise children, and the men made lots of money and spent it on new consumer products (televisions, refrigerators, washers and driers, etc.) for their new homes that were being built in the new suburbs. Extended families were being split up, as every couple had to have a house of their own and a garage with two new cars in it. Older relatives had to live alone and take care of themselves.
It was also a time of conservative politics and conformity. The Soviet Union, America’s ally in World War II, quickly became America’s new enemy, as politicians began talking about the threat of Communism. Any American who had left-wing or liberal political views was perceived as a possible danger to national security, and freedom of speech and thought was actively discouraged. While the Zell children were still in grade school, U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy began what became known as a political “witch hunt” against alleged Communists and sympathizers that would ruin many careers and lives. In 1953 playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a dramatization of the Salem Witch trials that was actually an allegory for McCarthyism, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the resulting blacklisting by the government. Citizens were encouraged to act and think alike, dress alike, and move to identical homes in the suburbs.
OZ: In the spring of 1951, when I was eight, my father got transferred to the Midwest. They had a nice big home built on a large double lot in Crystal Lake, Illinois—a bedroom suburb northwest of Chicago. We moved into the new house in July of 1952, and I lived there from fourth grade through high school. Our house was only a block from the lake, and each of us three kids had our own room. And this place was like the neighborhoods where families that were on TV lived, in shows like Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. I was in high school during the exact same era and setting that all those 1950s high school movies were set in.
My parents joined the Congregational Church, which is a very easy-going, white-bread-Protestant kind of thing. It seemed mostly to consist of social clubs, bake sales, potluck dinners, youth groups, retreats, and things like that. Although my folks were evidently quite active in the church, I don’t recall them talking about religion at home. However, I got really into Sunday school. I took confirmation, and I still remember the most important lesson: Christian means “Christ-like.” So Christians are supposed to be like Christ. The question then becomes, what was Christ like? I took that in rather deeply, and I think I have actually lived in a very “Christ-like” way, even though I eventually came to identify myself as Pagan!
Unlike my parents, who also joined the country club and had many friends and parties, I wasn’t much of social person. But I was definitely into the religious thing. I read the Bible as mythology—like the legends of Jason, Heracles, Odysseus, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and all the other stories I had been reading. I got involved in the pageants they would put on for Christmas and Easter, which were the only times I went to actual church services. I usually got the part of narrator, and I loved it. This is where I discovered that I had an aptitude for theater—which I really got into in high school and college.
I read the Bible from beginning to end. There were all these things in there that I thought were really bizarre, but fascinating. But since I’d started out reading Greek myths, it never occurred to me that this was any different, and was supposed to be the one and only true way. And eventually I had this major epiphany: I realized that the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, was the story of a specific people—the Jews. This was all about them as the “chosen people” of their tribal God, Jahweh: their origin mythos; their history; their commandments and rules; their kings, prophets, and prophecies; their messiah; their redemption.
But I wasn’t Jewish! My ancestors were Celts and Teutons. The Bible was not the story of my people or history at all—and thus it simply was not relevant to me. Indeed, I realized that my people were the ones continuously mentioned throughout the Bible as the “other people” that the presumed Jewish readers were not supposed to emulate. This realization precipitated my liberation from Christianity, after many years of total immersion in it. And eventually, of course, in seeking my own ethnic religious heritage, I came to identify as a Pagan.
At school every classroom had shelves along the window side. And on these shelves they kept the World Book Encyclopedia. This was the same encyclopedia that was associated with the Childcraft books that I had read before. So I would always come in and take a seat right next to the bookshelf. And so, one volume at a time, I read the entire World Book Encyclopedia.
When I got to volume D, there were dragons and dinosaurs. I’ll never forget my reaction on opening up that two-page spread of Charles Knight’s famous mural from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago of a triceratops facing off against a tyrannosaurus rex.
And there it was—wow! Suddenly a major-leap epiphany occurred to me: dragons were real! Once upon a time, real dragons ruled the Earth! That was really profound, and it’s only gotten better over the years as we’ve discovered that dinosaurs were not reptiles at all, but warm-blooded and intelligent and related to birds. It’s made the dragon stories even more fascinating. The existence of dinosaurs validated the stories of dragons in a sense. This was the reality behind the myth. At least that’s how I felt as a kid. Now, I think there is actually a lot more to the dragon legends. But nonetheless, this was a significant epiphany.
So, from that point on, I saw all myths through a double lens. One was the story itself, and the other was the reality behind the story. I became like a “myth detective,” trying to ferret out the truth behind the mystery. Eventually, this led me to re-create Living Unicorns, dive for Mermaids . . . and write A Wizard’s Bestiary.
NARRATOR: Tim Zell discovered science fiction at an early age and looked to the genre for inspiration. While at that point it was still mostly considered to be lowbrow entertainment, for Tim the sci-fi library books he was reading weren’t merely imaginary tales but visions of possibilities. (He also had a crush on the local librarian-lady, which helped to keep him going back for more.) He read the “juvenile” novels of author Robert Heinlein as they each came out, and Heinlein became a significant childhood mentor, teaching what it means to be human.
Heinlein, and other science-fiction writers, were also helpful to Tim as he tried to understand psychic experiences that he had as he was growing up, and as he began to explore the possibilities of telepathy and the expanded possibilities of the human mind. Tim even tried psychic experiments with his younger brother and sister, and freaked them out in the process. (His photographic memory gave him something of an advantage in the situation.)
OZ: Science fiction took me to the next phase of my magickal training, providing many different scenarios of imaginative possibilities—including those of psychic abilities and the future evolution of humanity. Robert Heinlein wrote a short story called “Lost Legacy” (in Assignment in Eternity, 1953) in which he mentioned specific techniques for developing psychic abilities. So I started doing some of those exercises. I read about psychokinesis and started using that as a focus. At that time my family was into playing board games together. I spent hours of practice trying to control dice and coins as they were tossed. I got to be so good at it that my brother and sister complained that I was cheating. I guess I was, technically, although I was using a skill that I worked hard to develop. But it was a skill that went beyond the parameters of the game. I thought it was like somebody being really good at shooting hoops after a lot of practice.
In high school I studied hypnosis and self-hypnosis, and practiced these on myself and other kids. I came to the conclusion that hypnosis could be used to enhance one’s psychic and other abilities, because you could tell someone when they were hypnotized that they could do something, and then they could do it. I got to point where I could control pain and didn’t need anesthetics.
But there are side effects to these things that you don’t necessarily realize at the time. For example, the control over pain that I mastered severely reduced my empathy. I didn’t experience other people’s pain any more than I did my own. Later I went through a long period of having to re-learn a sense of empathy.
CHARLES ZELL: Tim was very strong. He didn’t look strong, but he was. He spent one summer at the Carson Long Military Institute in Pennsylvania, and they had to engage in sports all the time. I went there to visit one weekend, and he had broken his hand hitting a guy while he was boxing. Sometimes kids would pick fights with Tim because he was different, and, strangely enough, he would always come out on top. So after that they left him alone.
He was very bright. His problem in school was that he was so bright that he often corrected the teachers when they were wrong, particularly in English. His mother had been an English major, so he was very well versed in correct English. The only problem I had with Tim in school was not his grades—those were fabulous. It was his conduct as a student.
One of his tricks he did when he was maybe ten or eleven years old. It was the middle of the winter, and when the teacher opened the desk drawer a mouse jumped out at her. Of course all the kids knew it was Tim. I was called to school, and I said to him, “Where did you find a mouse in the middle of winter?” There was two feet of snow on the ground! He said it was easy. He knew so much about Nature, even at that age.
When Tim was fifteen, I had him tested at the Illinois Institute of Technology. They didn’t even want to test him. They usually didn’t test anybody that young. But I had some contacts, and I called in my chips. I wanted to see what was happening. They tested people who had high IQs, and I knew he was brilliant. For three days he not only did very, very well at it, but he also knew which test he was taking and why. So I’d meet with him for lunch and say, “How are you doing?” And he’d tell me all about the test. And I’d say, “How do you know so much about the test?”
And he’d say, “Oh, Dad, I read about that years ago!”
When it was all over, the head of the school called me and said, “You have a very interesting son. His tests are just off the chart!”
And I said, “Well, what should I do?”
And he said, “Just stand back and let him go. Don’t interfere with him. Just understand that he is one of a kind.” And he is.
OZ: From the ages of ten through twelve, I had to go back and forth from Crystal Lake to Kirkwood, Missouri, for months at a time. This was for extensive orthodontic work, as I had really bad buck teeth. I lived with my maternal grandmother, whom I called “Gogi,” and my Aunt Betsy, both of whom I loved dearly.
But my memories from those times are quite confused with memories of my former life as my grandfather in that same house and yard—such as that of the giant alligator snapping turtle I recall befriending, who hung out in the asparagus patch. I named him “Rastus,” and at the end of the summer, we took him down to the St. Louis Zoo, where I would go to see him every time I went back—even into the 1970s, with Morning Glory. I would identify him because he was the biggest turtle there, in with the alligators.
But a few years ago, when I asked my mother about this, she told me: “That never happened to you. It was your grandfather who brought home a big snapping turtle from one of his fishing trips and kept it for a while in a big tub in the backyard, before giving it to the zoo. He called it ‘Rastus.’”
Fairly early on in my childhood, I discovered animal skulls, and I became really fascinated by those. I decided I wanted to collect the whole set, so I started working with road kills to get the skulls. In the process of this, I became interested in the rest of the anatomy as well. I was taking biology classes in school, so I started doing dissections. And as I learned to dissect various critters in biology class, I applied those techniques to road kills. This was a precursor to the idea that I would someday become a surgeon. I had excellent hand-eye coordination and got pretty good at being able to tease out the blood vessels and the nerves from the flesh.
I dissected everything I could get ahold of. Then I preserved the skins, saved the bones, and cleaned the skulls. Each one was like a unique vessel for the soul of the creature. I was more intrigued by the skull structure than I was by the external appearance.
These were what I would now call “Wizardly Studies”—the study of arcane, obscure, little-known, forbidden, and esoteric knowledge. I was fascinated with the stars, and I’d often lie out on the ground (or on the roof) at night studying the constellations, spotting planets, watching meteors, and so on. I read all the books I could find on astronomy and visions of future space travel.
I would shine a flashlight up into the sky to try and signal the flying saucers to come get me and take me home. I felt like an alien in human society—a “stranger in a strange land.” The weird thing about this was that I did feel I belonged to the planet. I felt totally at home in Nature and with animals. But I did not feel as comfortable with people, and didn’t really feel like I was one of them.
Our house was on the periphery of town. Nearby there were fields, a marsh, a lake, and a forest. There was a big, sprawling golf course a block away that had lots of woods in it. When everybody else went to sleep, I would take off my pajamas and sneak out of my bedroom window late at night, especially if there was a full moon, and go running around naked in the dark. This was a whole world that was mine alone—totally unpopulated by humans. The animals that would come out at night were unafraid. There was something totally magical about that—my “secret life.”
This was when I found a lot of critters, because they too were “children of the night.” I was always dragging in strange new “pets.” I brought home a screech owl that I called “Archimedes”—after Merlin’s owl in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. I had a white rat, lizards, salamanders, toads, frogs, box turtles, water turtles, crayfish, a possum (which I named “Pogo”—the first of many possums I’ve had in my life), and a little brown bat I called “Boris.” And my mother let me keep them all in my bedroom—everything but snakes. She was remarkably indulgent about that, I eventually came to appreciate.
VERA ZELL: One time Tim’s father was cleaning out the garage, and he picked up a hatbox and it was absolutely writhing with snakes. Tim was taking care of them and feeding them.
He had a terrarium full of praying mantises, and an ant colony. And he had a whole beehive that he had ordered by mail. He took it to school for show and tell, and they all got loose in the room. You can imagine the chaos that caused!
OZ: One time the housekeeper left my bedroom door open while my mother’s bridge club was in the living room . . .
VERA ZELL: All of a sudden the girls started screaming, and here was this bat flying around the room. They were all crawling under the tables. Another time they went to use the powder room that was closest to where we were playing bridge, and there was a screech owl in it. They came screaming out of there fast!
CHARLES ZELL: Whatever he was involved in, we encouraged him to do it. I said to Tim one time, “If you build a better mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door.” So he built a very unusual mousetrap and put it in our garage, where it filled up with mice. He took me literally.
OZ: But I was very disappointed that the world didn’t beat a path to my door. The concept of marketing wasn’t included in the adage! In later years, I came to see my whole life like that—constantly building better metaphorical “mousetraps,” and waiting for the world to show up. But first, as I later came to understand, you have to get their attention, and that’s the part I’ve never quite mastered.
NARRATOR: The adolescent Tim Zell was what today would be called a “science geek,” though the word geek didn’t mean the same thing then as it does now. American life was changing rapidly, and the changes included what it meant to be a teenager, and how to describe the way teens behaved and interacted with each other. What was happening with Tim and people his age was a new cultural phenomenon. As the Baby Boomers grew up, they found themselves in the unprecedented position of not having to go directly from childhood to assuming adult responsibilities. They were the first generation of American teenagers to have their own culture—their own music, movies, and a new form of entertainment called television (with lots of new shows for adolescents who had time on their hands).
But Tim Zell was different from other teenagers. He was thirteen when Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show—the perfect age to be when rock and roll was being invented—but it meant nothing to him. He didn’t listen to Buddy Holly or Little Richard; he didn’t go see James Dean movies; and he hated The Catcher in the Rye. Tim was, instead, the kind of student who joined the debate team, did all of his homework on time, excelled in his lab classes, and created his own science projects. One winter Tim built an igloo in the backyard of his home based on reading he’d done about the Inuit (polar Eskimos), and it was so authentic that teachers would bring their classes for tours.
OZ: Another year I built a sod house in the field in back, like the pioneers used to build out on the Great Plains. I built treehouses and forts. I would totally get into these things. I would read about something, and then I would want to do it. I read about Stone Age technology and learned woodcarving and flint-knapping to make spears, atlatls, arrow points, and stone axes.
My father got me into the Boy Scouts, and I really enjoyed that. I got really good at woodcraft—things like tracking, trapping, fishing, building fires, camp cooking, making shelters, and how to survive in the woods. I learned to identify all the plants and animals. Many years later I did a two-week vision quest in the Oregon woods with only a pocketknife, and I survived just fine using my Scouting skills.
Insofar as I hung around with other kids at all, I mostly hung around with girls—especially when the girls and boys became more differentiated. I had very few male friends, and none of them really close. I was oblivious to peer pressure, and never got into the guy-culture thing of sports, cars, rock and roll, and stuff like that. Since that wasn’t my crowd, I never had the slightest interest in doing any teenage drinking or smoking cigarettes. I just never felt any particular desire to be like other kids, which is unforgivable in teen culture. From being in church pageants I’d learned about drama, so I then began to try out for the plays in high school. And I always got accepted—often for leading roles. I got into all the other aspects of theater in addition to acting—working on sets, props, costumes, and makeup. I loved costumes, and my mother taught me to sew so I could make my own. When I was a junior in high school, I created a costume based on the human-fly character that Vincent Price played in the horror movie The Fly. I made a giant fly head with big bulging papier-mâché eyes and movable antennae and mandibles. All this was the best possible preparation for eventually becoming a Priest and ritualist, where I still apply those skills.
That put me in a very different social context. I began seriously dating two girls simultaneously, Judy and Sharon, who got into a considerable rivalry, as often happens. This culminated over who would be the first one to actually have sex with me. That turned out to be Sharon, and it happened right after the end of the semester, at the beginning of summer vacation, in the back seat of the car. I was sixteen, and I thought this was the best thing in the universe! That summer we made love all the time—every place we could find.
I absolutely loved sex, and I determined that this was something I wanted to study and practice as much as possible and get really good at! It totally transformed me in so many ways. Sharon said she’d “made me a man,” and I think that was so. Up till that point I’d been obsessively body-modest around other people. And that all just disappeared.
NARRATOR: The fun came to a quick halt in the fall when Charles Zell sent his son to a college prep school for his senior year, where students were closely supervised. Once again the teenage Tim found himself with no friends, and though he had a girlfriend, he was unable to spend time alone with her.
But the future he had grown up dreaming about was rapidly approaching. As a result of the space race against Communist Russia, the United States was emphasizing science education, and Tim would get a scholarship to the college of his choice when he graduated from high school. Other “science geeks” and science-fiction fans like himself would receive similar opportunities, and they would go on to help create the computers, cell phones, and Internet that are in use today. And Tim Zell would go on to create his own church.