A SAD TALE OF TEENAGE DEMENTIA

By Truth or Derrick

 

“Mommy, do you think they have ‘Star Wars’ in heaven?”

 

It was the most pressing question of my childhood.  And since this week my childhood came out on an all-new four-disc DVD set, it seems appropriate to reminisce a little bit.

 

Question: Truth or Derrick, remember when you were a kid?

 

Answer: (nostalgic sigh) those were the good ol’ … actually … no!

 

Truth or Derrick is officially panicking.  He has lost valuable pieces of his memory.  He can no longer remember anything but brief spasms of his childhood.  He is so worried — he is speaking in the third person.

 

There are basically three things that I can actually remember from my life before sophomore year of high school: “Star Wars,” “Lego” and “Let’s get dangerous.”

 

Beyond that, I only remember brief, painful, and sometimes very disturbing flashes.  But here I am now, a senior, and I finally have the zeal, ambition and that healthy scoop of journalistic impulse to find answers to the real questions: “Where on earth did my childhood go?” and “Who the heck was that thin, sinister waiter from ‘The Olive Garden’?”

 

It is a chilly morning, like most mornings.  I am not yet old enough to trot off to school with my siblings, but I can walk with great proficiency.  A short distance away, a woman stands in her nightgown, holding a liquid-filled cylinder.  I don’t know what the cylinder is, but I know that I want it.  I run after her, through the rooms of the cold house, into the garage, but she has a purpose: to destroy the thing for which I long so badly, and she wants to do it in front of my very eyes.

 

Mom! I scream at her within the frozen confines of my incommunicative brain.  Why are you holding my milk bottle over the garbage can?  Nooo!  Mommy!

 

It drops into the dank refuse.  And with it, so does two years of my childhood.

 

Jump ahead a few years.  I, having small feet, now share a sock drawer with this angel of bereavement who prematurely buried my bottle into the rubbish.

 

After years of being ripped into this new life where I needed to survive on my own, without my bottle, and trust no one, I naturally tried to get the socks I would inevitably need entirely on my own.

 

As I diligently climbed the shelves, I made it to about the third shelf before I could see what was lurking on top.  The massive television set diverted my attention from climbing and before I knew it, I was in the air, falling onto the nearby bed, the television set now molesting the innards of my cracked skull.

 

My mom rushed in on response to my violent screams to find me on her bed, twitching.  Soon, I was in the sink, the neighbors packing me down with enough bags of frozen peas to control a flash flood.

 

But it was too late.  I was losing with each drop of precious child-blood (they just don’t make blood like that as adolescents!) another year of my remembered existence. And now, it remains the last real memory of my childhood.

 

So where did it all go?  Have I really lived in the same house since I was a baby? Why do I keep having horrible dreams that aliens are chasing me?  Why does my backyard have a crop circle burned into the grass?  Is it just the sun magnified through my kiddy-pool or … signs that we are not alone?

 

Was my love for “Star Wars” just a scam by “them,” an implanted explanation as to why I have spaceships and laser guns all over my bedroom to this day?

 

Maybe I wasn’t the fan I remember myself to be.  True, I still have fake buttons drawn onto my bedroom windowsill, with which I pretended my room was a spaceship.  I still have in my closet the most accurate Jedi costume ever designed by human fingers, which I wore for five Halloweens in a row — starting in the 7th grade.

 

But maybe those creations are no more real than the cardboard lightsabers I constructed before I could afford the “real” plastic kind?  Maybe I traveled the galaxy, serving as a spy kid for the government, carrying massive guns and flying powerful speeders.

 

Maybe I died that day with the television set, but an alien caught my soul on its way to “Star Wars Heaven” and returned me to Earth just two years ago.

 

Or maybe I just have a bad memory.