Initialization

I made two New Year’s resolutions for 2015:

1. Start my Goodread’s blog to promote my newest novel Cigerets, Guns & Beer available on Amazon, Nook and iBooks.

2. Start being honest with readers about my life.

The second resolution was prompted by an entry I’m writing for a blog called The Story Reading Ape because, quite frankly, I hate writing personal details about myself. My book biographies should make that plain. For instance, this is my bio for Cigerets, Guns & Beer:

“Phillip T. Stephens is a mythological character who evolved from a spin-off cult of the Church of the Subgenius called Our Lady of the Lady of the Lord of the Subtransgender in the late 1970s. In Subtransgender mythology Stephens was Bob Dobbs sidekick who dreamed of surpassing Dodds as the universe’s top salesman. In order to do so, he sold the Xists on plans to convert the earth to transgender only condos, which would, in essence, put a kibosh on the entire Subgenius sales pitch. Needless to say this subjected Stephens to the wrath of Bob who short sold all of Stephens’ shares in America Online, causing the recession of 2000 and reducing Stephens into a clone of Pewee Herman. Many followers believe Stephens can now be seen as Jim Parsons on the Big Bang Theory with no awareness of who he truly is, but they are, of course, completely misguided.

“The Church of the Subgenius in no way acknowledges Our Lady of the Lady of the Lord of the Subtransgender, or the existence of the author himself for that matter.”

Clearly, you will probably sense a small degree of exaggeration here. But, as I explain in the Story Reading Ape, my shyness came at a young age.

I was a pitiful child born to an itinerant Baptist minister who was himself the son of an itinerant Baptist minister who was also the son of an itinerant Baptist minister who fled from Europe to avoid persecution at the hand of his father who was a prominent Catholic Bishop who was the son of a Pope.

As you might guess I was raised on table scraps and dogma, with no social skills whatsoever. This meant I was too shy to introduce myself to girls and victimized by the jocks in gym class who laughed at the Bible I was required by my faith to carry in my gym shorts underneath my jock strap so I wouldn’t be tempted to evil.

The girls would laugh as they chased me naked from the shower into the girls’ locker room, naked and clutching my Bible to my jewels, the one thing I was man enough to keep the jocks from taking away. But that didn’t stop my father from a Biblical tongue lashing every night at home, flaying my conscience with verse after verse about honoring thy father and modesty and plucking my eye out to avoid temptation.

Dinner at my home consisted of chipped beef on toast while my parents would pick pages from the Bible at random and make me recite the third verse down. At family gatherings everyone would argue whether Jesus drank real wine that was spiritualized by God so that the alcohol wouldn't make him drunk, or if he turned it into grape juice first; whether Jesus was God from the moment he was conceived or the moment the Holy Ghost descended on him at his Baptism; whether the disciples were saved from the moment they chose to follow Jesus as his disciples, after Jesus was crucified, after he was raised from the dead or only after he ascended into heaven.

We were taught to read the Bible with kid gloves, turning each page tenderly at the tip so as not to damage it, because this was the Word of God. This was His Living Presence on Earth where He Physically Dwealt Among Us. To damage the scripture was tantamount to damaging God (although that wasn’t a possibility we discussed openly because it would lead to a contradiction with the belief that God is All Powerful). Our Bibles were as pristine as they were the day we purchased them.

My parents were members of the Disciples of Christ Redeemed in Blood, my grandparents members of the more liberal Disciples of Christ Redeemed, one uncle was a member of the Disciples of the Risen Christ Redeemed, another of the Saints of the Risen Christ Redeemed by the Holy Sacrifice.

To get away from the arguments, and the family, I would hide in my bedroom and read the comic books I hid in my closet, stories of Superman and Batman, Spiderman and my favorite heroes, the Fantastic Four. I wanted to be Sue Storm, not because I felt like I was a woman inside, but because she could turn herself invisible at will.

Sue Storm used her invisibility to fight the forces of evil. I never really considered my family to be the forces of evil, I just wanted to hide from them. You see, all that arguing about the minutiae of the Holy Scripture made me hate my faith and doubt it too.

I had the first issues of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Spiderman in my closet and I treated them as gingerly as I treated the Bible. I didn’t know this was considered keeping them in collectable condition at the time.

Then, in junior high, I met like minded friends, Steven Emory, Wulf Eldrid and Paul Lyons (nicknamed Cubby) who loved comics as much as me. We would meet after school and discuss the comic books and one afternoon it started. The arguments. Cubby would insist Superman’s heat vision would incinerate the sun, Steve would insist it would merely be absorbed into the surface. Steve would insist Reed Ricard’s arms would simply continue to stretch on the other planet if warped through the Enterprise’ transporter beam; Wulf insisted they would be disintegrated. Then it would get gross: Steve was convinced Superman could have sex with Lois Lane (something I had never thought about); Wulf said his sperm would shoot out the back of her skull (the thought made me shudder). Cubby was convinced Reed Richard’s penis would disappear when he had sex with Sue Storm; Wulf was convinced she would twist like a pretzel around it. After that they would argue over who was greatest: Superman or the Hulk, Captain America or Batman, the Justice League or the Avengers?

The more they sounded like my family the more I realized that Jesus was a lot more believable than Superman and these guys were arguing just as much over Superman. What a blow to my faith.

But next to the comics stand at my local drugstore was a stand for paperback books and when the price for comics went from a dime to 12 cents, I could get a book for only twice the price. And books had sex and a lot more violence. Mickey Spillane, Elmore Leonard, Philip K. Dick, thick books like Shogun by James Clavell and a wonderful mind fuck of a science fiction book called Out of the Mouth of the Dragon by Mark S. Geston that rewired my brain forever.

By the time I got to high school I was doubly cursed. Girls no more wanted to date guys who could quote scripture at random than they wanted to date guys who could argue whether Superman could have safe sex or would blow out the back of a girl’s skull. Much less the guy who would get pounded in gym class because his religion required him to wear his Bible (this again may seem a little contradictory considering the fact that we were supposed to keep our Bibles in pristine condition, but these were tiny Bibles and we wrapped them in cellophane, which was much cheaper than the traditional lamb skin). Day after day I suffered through teenage girl giggles and jokes about what I was “packing in my pants.”

So you can see why I would rather lock myself in a room and write fictional stories than actually expose my tender psyche to readers who might mock me and expose me once again as I was exposed as a child.

It took more more than forty years after I graduated from high school to overcome that shyness to finally take one of those stories, Cigerets, Guns & Beer available on Amazon, Nook and iBooks, and publish it as an eBook. So I finally achieved my first New Year’s resolution.

As to my second, I’ll have to work on it.