Back in high school, I did a lot of writing. It was an escape from all of the things I was dealing with in life. I wrote poetry, short stories and plays. I even tried to write a novel, but I never got past the second chapter. The novel was called "Carson Falls", and it was about an idyllic town in West Virginia that didn't know what happened on the other side of the mountain. One day, the village idiot walked up to the top of the mountain and looked down to the other side. He found that the world had been destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. When he came down to the village and told the people what he saw, they didn't believe him. It would have made a good book.
Most of the poetry I wrote was about my awful life. Very few friends. Being suicidal. Extremely dark stuff. Some were songs that were recorded later on. One in particular was a song called "Albert Frankenstein". I was about me with horrible acne. I showed it to my father, and he asked if I had written it about me. Of course, I lied. I did a lot of lying to my parents. I think they knew the truth.
The fun stuff in my repertoire were the plays. My best friend in high school was a guy named Richard. He and I would save our lunch money and spend the time in the Flora library writing or playing chess in the New York Times. He would take the news magazines and write funny captions to the pictures. I would write one-act plays. One series was called "Uncle Don". He was the host of a children's TV show. He was also a little crazy. He would have guests on his show that were either Communists or activists. Uncle Don was arrested and put into prison, but he still did a show from there using other inmates as guests. When I joined Kilbourne Park Baptist Church, there was a family named Wise who sort of adopted me into their family. I spent a lot of time with them. Mr. Wise was an attorney in Columbia, and his whole name was A. Birge Wise. I wrote a short play about him called "Birge for the Defense". The hook for the play was the line: "What's a Birge?" We sat around the breakfast table and read the play. Everyone liked it, except Mr. Wise thought I was making fun of him. Maybe I was. I just loved that family. I also wrote a very bizarre play called "The End of the Moon". Somebody at school had written a play called "The Beginning of the Sun", so I took that one and made everything the opposite of the other one. It was kind of science fiction about the moon crashing into the Earth and killing everyone.
One of my favorites was a series of short stories called "Captain Soul". He was a superhero crime-fighter who wasn't very successful. He was more interested in being cool. He had a sidekick named Samson who was a six-foot chicken. Samson couldn't speak, but all criminals would faint seeing this chicken. Then, Captain Soul would come in and take credit for capturing the bad people. As long as he would feed Samson, the relationship was good. And no, I was not on drugs while writing it. Although, it probably would be better for the readers if they were on drugs.
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