Charlie was a geeky, scrawny, bookworm of a kid – buck toothed with a shock

of straw colored hair. While other kids could be found outside playing football,

baseball or kick the can, Charlie was just as likely to be found in his bedroom

with a book. Not that he didn’t play with the other kids, it’s just that he was

terribly uncoordinated and as I said before, scrawny. The one physical attribute

that Charlie did have was a modest amount of speed, not great speed, but above

average swiftness. This was somewhat handy in a good game of tag or to avoid

bullies, but one good bump was enough to leave him a pile of skin and bones akimbo.

But if God didn’t bless Charlie in the arena of athletic prowess, he more than made

up for it by giving Charlie an imagination that was a continuous source of

amusement and entertainment and the furnace that kept Charlie’s imagination roaring

was fueled with books.

Charlie was a mental escape artist at a young age. Books and imagination

were the tools of his trade. He was raised in a Catholic family with two older

brothers and three younger sisters. His was a somewhat precarious position in the

sibling food chain. Charlie’s father believed that boys’ getting physical with boys

was acceptable to a level, but under no circumstance, none whatsoever, was it

acceptable for a boy to get physical with a girl. So when the usual amount of

jockeying for position took place to establish sibling dominance – not unlike a

pack of wolves – Charlie’s slight stature and younger age had him getting pushed

around by his older brothers, but he was unable to pass that behavior on down the

line because there were only girls down the line, and once again that was not

acceptable under any circumstance even when he was provoked or the victim of an

outright attack. That’s right. Charlie got it from both sides and had no place to

turn to give it back. But when he felt overwhelmed by the inevitable process of

establishing his place in the external world, Charlie would invariably escape to

his internal world where he was always alpha dog.

Very early in his life, Charlie learned he could escape the annoyances and

discomfort of reality by beating a retreat to the safety of his consoling daydreams

in the kingdom of his mind. There, Charlie was always in control. He was the envy

of all. Everyone did his bidding, unlike his actual life where he was anything but

in control and often felt overlooked and overshadowed by almost everyone.

In grade school, the way Charlie most easily got the attention he seemed to

alternately crave and disdain was to play the clown. Charlie never consciously

developed this strategy of stand up comedian and silly antics enacted in the hopes

of making his classmates cast notice, if not bestow favor, upon him. He seemed to

just innately gravitate toward this path as if he was genetically predisposed

toward it. Like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, he did not give the matter

much thought. It simply seemed as if this was the role he was born to fulfill. He

wasn’t even very funny. Mostly what he did was try to copy what he found funny in

others. Charlie would steal other people’s routines, whether from a friend or

sibling or something he saw on television. If something struck Charlie as funny he

would make a mental note to assimilate the material and pretend it was his own. So

it seems Charlie was something of a fraud from an early age as well.

However, as often as Charlie was acting out to gain attention, he was

hiding to avoid the very same. Although looking back, it doesn’t seem Charlie was

so much avoiding attention at those times as he simply was very comfortable without

the attention. Charlie read an enormous amount in his formative years, all manner

of books and authors. He was especially drawn to stories of adventure and far away

places. Melville’s “Moby Dick” and London’s “Call of the Wild” were examples of

novels Charlie lost himself in at an early age. Charlie once told me of a very

distinct memory he had of reading Moby Dick while in his third grade class and when

the teacher discovered what he was reading she was so impressed that she sent

Charlie down the hall to another teacher to show her what he was reading. Charlie

said he could recall fairly bursting with satisfaction at being singled out in this

fashion. It was around this point in Charlie’s life that another life long source

of pride and pain came into his awareness. Charlie was book smart. He had

potential. All of his teachers said so.