Fall 1973: Have You Had a Squirt Today?

When I was a kid, whenever I had the flu or an upset stomach, my parents would force-feed me 7-Up, the carbonated lemon-lime flavored soft drink.

As a direct consequence, I hated all lemon-lime flavored soft drinks.  I wouldn't go near them unless I was sick.

I still won't.

So I have never actually tasted Squirt, the grapefruit-flavored soft drink that gave 7-Up some competition in the 1960s and 1970s, before fading to the obscurity of the "off-brand" aisle.

But when I was going to Washington Junior High, my friends Dan and Darry and I had some fun with the name.  We were just becoming aware of some other things that squirted, so we greeted each other with dirty-sounding questions like:

"Have you had a Squirt today?"
"Want a taste of my Squirt?"
"Little Squirty has a present for you."

Little Squirty was the advertising mascot, a small blond boy carrying an oversized phallic symbol...um, I mean pop bottle.

Was the company aware of the dirty connotations of its product?

Maybe. This ad is captioned "When taste grows up, Squirt shows up."

The nerd in the striped swim suit and lollipop likes those other soft drinks, but once you grow up, you get muscular and start looking at ladies (or, in the case of the middle guy, your male friends).

And you suddenly find yourself wanting a Squirt.







Little Squirty was quite attached to that bottle, wasn't he?

Maybe he was trying to figure out a way to get to the Squirt without a bottle opener.  Hint: treat it like Aladdin's Lamp.

See also: My Junior High Fantasies of Paul Getty Jr.; and He'll Eat Most Anything.

Spring 1979: Why I'm Not a Novelist

When I was in high school, I thought of becoming a writer.  After all, my friend Darry and I wrote a heroic fantasy novel back in junior high, I was the editor of our literary magazine, and I published an article in the Rock Island Argus.  

What changed my mind: Well, several things, but mostly a class in Fiction Writing, my freshman year at Augustana.  We met once a week to analyze a "model" short story or novel, and then we criticized student writing (you had to submit three times).
  
Bernard Malamud, “Black is My Favorite Color."  “Charity Quietness sits in the toilet eating her two hard-boiled eggs.”  If you still have the stomach to continue after such a disgusting opening, it's about an old Jewish guy in love with a black girl, who won’t marry him because he’s Jewish.  And old.

Student Submission: "Temperature Inversion."  A man and a woman gripe because it's too hot to have sex.

Me: "Werewolf Planet."  Two anthropologists in the future discover that a “primitive” species actually has developed intergalactic travel.  Kind of interesting, right?

Wrong.  “Terrible!  Awful!  Don't demean yourself with that sci-fi trash!”

Rule #1: Modern Literature must be about the dull, boring lives of people living in New York.

Flannery O'Connor, “Good Country People."  A Southern woman is depressed because she lost a leg as a child, so she majors in philosophy.  A traveling Bible salesman convinces her to climb up to the hayloft for a romantic evening, but instead he steals her artificial leg. Disgusting!

Student Submission: "Chicken T***s"  An adult woman has an affair with her uncle, who dumps her over fried chicken. (By the way, birds don't have t***s; "breast" is an old word for "chest").

Me: "The Island in the Sky." A boy befriends a grade-school bully, and they fall asleep reading comic books. Kind of touching, right?

Wrong!  "Terrible!  Awful! There's a happy ending!  Where's the misery?  Where's the tragedy?"  

Rule #2: Modern Literature must always be depressing, preferably with death at the end.

J.D. Salinger (left), "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."  A man kisses a five-year old girl  and then kills himself while his wife waits.  Disgusting!.

Student submission: "Hand Sandwiches." A guy's wife is cheating with his best friend, so he assaults the friend and cuts off his "hand."  

Me: "The Letter."  In the 1930s, a guy dies of polio, and his best friend keeps his last letter in his pocket at all times.  Forty years later, the friend is dying, and the ink on the letter is so faded that a nurse in the hospital thinks it's a blank piece of paper, and throws it away. .

It's about a dull, boring life, and it's depressing. A sure-fire hit, right?

Wrong!  "Terrible!  Awful!  Where's the emotion?  Where's the men longing for women?"

Rule #3: Modern Literature must always be about heterosexual desire or romance.

I went on to major in literature, get a M.A., and almost a Ph.D.  But, except for unavoidable required classes, I never read or write Modern Literature.

Spring 1976: Marrying Donny Osmond

In grade school, there were lots of tv programs that my friends and I would turn over heaven and earth to watch -- Batman, Lost in Space, Mission: Impossible --, but in high school, not so much. I liked Barney Miller, but if a cute boy invited me out for pizza, I wouldn't think twice about missing it.

But Rita, a sophomore who got saved during the fall revival, never missed the variety show Donny & Marie on Friday night, no matter what was happening at school or what kind of spectacular night out she was offered.  She would go out after 8:00, when the show was over.  If you arrived early, you had to sit down, shut up, and wait.

She had to watch to support teen idol Donny Osmond (starring with his sister Marie, one of several brother-sister acts of the era).

Donny was her future husband.

This was no mere teen idol crush; it was a simple statement of fact.  One night Rita was alone in her room, listening to Donny sing “Go away, little girl. . .I’m dating someone else, I must be true,” and it dawned on her that she could be that “someone else”! So she knelt by her bedside and asked God in Jesus’ name to give her Donny as a husband.

 John 14:13 says, "Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do.” The Bible is God’s Word, isn’t it?  God doesn’t lie, does He? So, as certain as the sunrise, she would someday be Mrs. Donny Osmond.

She left the details of their meeting to God, but most likely Donny would come to Rock Island for a concert, and she would be sitting in the front row, and their eyes would meet. Afterwards, he would invite her to his dressing room and try to brainwash her into the Mormon cult, but she would turn the tables and win him for Christ. He would vow to use his talent henceforth for God, not Satan, and ask her to marry him.

She had to stay faithful to her future husband, so she couldn't possibly date other boys.  But we could be "just friends."

During my sophomore year, Rita and I went out frequently as "just friends," often to Jim's Rib Haven, which was just around the corner from her house.

 Most Saturdays Darry and I took the bus downtown to study at the library, and then visit her.  We sat on the floor in her bedroom, gazing at the many posters of Donny on her walls and listening to his records.  We discussed the relative dreaminess of current teen idols -- omitting Donny, of course, since anyone who questioned his superlative dreaminess was likely to get ejected from the premises.

We talked about Becky’s future as Mrs. Osmond, and, playing along, I talked about my future with Todd, the boy I had a crush on.  I even used God's Infallible Promise to make sure that I would someday "get" him.

And it worked!  In June 1976, I spent the night with Todd at music camp.

During my junior year, Rita and I drifted apart.  We chatted when we ran into each other in the hallway, and sometimes sat together in church, but not much else.

As far as I know, she never lost her conviction that she would one day marry Donny Osmond.

After all, she used God's Infallible Promise.

Todd's story continues here.

Golden Cities, Far: The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

I discovered The Lord of the Rings in junior high, and thought it the best thing ever written. Heroic fantasy!  Elves, dwarfs, and wizards fighting the Dark Lord in an alternate Medieval world!  Infinitely superior to sword and sorcery (about mighty-thewed barbarian heroes in an ancient world), and to those dreary naturalistic novels that teachers were always pushing at us.  Even better than science fiction.

During the spring and summer of seventh grade, my friend Darry and I started working on our own alternate Medieval world -- if we couldn't find a "good place" in our world, why not make one of our own?   We developed a gazetteer-full of new countries, wrote historical timelines spanning thousands of years, compiled detailed genealogical charts, and learned to speak a dozen languages of Elves, Dwarves, and Men. We got ideas from fantasy novels, myths, folklore, the histories of obscure countries, and anything else we could get our hands on: we named the country of Runoe after Runde Island in My Village in Norway, and the forest-dwelling Colemonas after Coleman camping equipment. We worked fervently, every day at lunchtime and after school, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, during holidays.


Fantasy worlds must be used as the setting for novels, so by eighth grade we were working on a plot about a Midwestern teenager named Jim swept away through a time-space warp to the world of Toulbium, where he gathered companions to fight the Dark Lord.

Everyone we told about the story screamed “You’re plagiarizing The Lord of the Rings!” But we patiently pointed out that Jim traveled west, not east like Frodo; that he got hiscompanions by accident, not through the Council of Elrond, and that the Dark Lord’s land of Moraine was bounded by dark forests, whereas Sauron’s land of Mordor was bounded by mountains.


Every Saturday we took the bus downtown to Readmore Book World to spend our allowance on heroic fantasy novels.  Between 1969 and 1974, Ballantine published 65, bright, shining paperbacks with evocative titles: The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Broken Sword, The Wood Beyond the World, Beyond the Golden Stair, Golden Cities Far.  

But there was a problem: the cover art often showed naked women.  Beefcake was highly stylized, when you could find it at all (here the Welsh god Manawyddan wades across the English Channel).

And another problem: they were unreadable, with stilted Medieval diction, boring characters, and clichéd plots.

The biggest problem: the male heroes were entirely obsessed with goddesses, fairy queens, and damsels in distress. With the exception of Tolkien and maybe C.S. Lewis, heroic fantasy was nauseatingly heterosexist.  The Well of the World's Desiring, the Goal of the Quest, the Reason for Living is a man falling into a woman's arms.  No bonding, no gay subtexts, no gay symbolism, no nothing.

Even the cover of Imaginary Worlds, a survey of the fantasy genre, morphs into a woman's face

It's no better today.   No matter if it is print fiction, a movie, or tv (as in Legend of the Seeker, top photo).  There may be a few battle maidens and Amazons who fight side by side, but men are always questing after women.

Even in naturalistic literature, as I discovered in my college class in Fiction Writing.