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When I was thirty-seven years old I returned to college and was asked to write a CLAST essay from a list of subjects. One in particular tickled my proverbial fancy and, as fate would have it, won me a scholarship in the College Honors Transfer Program. The assigned subject was to "Tell why you admire a specific fictional charcter." This is the essay, which I wrote in about five minutes...
Why Do I Admire a
Specific Fictional Character?
(© 1991 by Benjamin Robert Taylor)
Of the veritable pantheon of fictional characters I have enjoyed and emulated throughout my life, those that had the greatest impact on my psyche were the Saturday and Sunday morning teevee and comic strip characters of the nineteen fifties. I remember in particular a comic strip hero named Steve Canyon - a Cold War fighter pilot who was as rugged as his name, and who was always ready to push the envelope, all alone, at the edge of the planet's atmosphere. Pretty cool. My Dad had been an M.P. in General Chenault's Flying Tigers, (the Korean era Fourteenth Air Force, not the pre-WW II mercenaries that flew for the Nationalist Chinese in Kun Ming,) and Steve Canyon was only the first of many comics that he and I would read together on the living room floor every Sunday morning after church.
The role models for children back then weren't poorly educated sports heroes, but self-reliant, resourceful individuals; like the ahead-of-their-time-in-the-E.R.A.-department heroine and hero in another of my Sunday morning childhood addictions, Fireball XL 5. Venus & Steve Zodiac were the main characters in this marionette-starred teevee space romance. I clearly remember having been moved by the logic, courage and compassion they displayed in dispatching hostile aliens and the like. Yes, I preferred the persona of my Sunday morning friends to those of Matt Dillon or the Cartwrights, or any of the other weeknight cowboys, cops or robbers of the time. If there was a single fictional character that inspired me to become the independent, nature-loving and opinionated man I am today, however, it will have had to have been the subject of what was, to me, the only teevee show that couldn't be missed each week. Fortunately, it was aired on that freest day of the week to a grade-schooler in the nineteen-fifties - Saturday.
My Saturday morning (not-so-secret) alter-ego was Tarzan! O.K. I know I said that sports figures were not my heroes and Johnny Weismuller was an Olympic Gold Medalist in swimming, but he wasn't my hero; Tarzan was. When I watched him save lions from evil hunters, enjoy familial comeraderie with Cheetah or speak confidently to elephants, I became the loinclothed Lord of the apes. When I asked my Dad why everyone didn't live in tree-houses and have chimpanzees fetch their food, he admitted that there was no good explanation. When Mom would apply aloe vera leaf to my sunburn, she called it "Tarzan's medicine." : Mighty ju-ju. So powerful, in fact, as to have remained in the vanguard of my consciousness through my independent adult studies of traditional Chinese medicine and homeopathic self-diagnosis and treatment. (We do, after all, live in the only industrialized nation on the planet whose government fails to provide free health care to all.)
As a youngster, though, such political machinations meant little to me. It was more important for me to emulate my demigod through that highest form of flattery - building a tree house of my own. As I became older, and discovered the financial needs of junior high school social life, I went to work during the summer months in my Dad's construction business. At fifteen I earned an honest four fifty an hour, and was able to buy myself a used car as soon as I was licensed to drive. More important than that, though, were the building techniques I was learning - techniques that I was certain I would one day employ in the building of an elaborate and self-sufficient tree house. By the time I graduated from high school I had discovered Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars and merged my space age idols with the neolithic "Lord of the Jungle" to come up with the composite fictional character I truly admire most; Tarzan the Space-Man.
As my life progressed, I earned my Real Estate salesmans license, but still dreamed of picking my breakfast from trees and showering beneath a waterfall. As I suffered through vocational school to earn an architectural drafting degree, I explored radical new building methods such as Professor Heibertz' technique for "growing" concrete from seawater and Bucky Fuller's autonomous geodesic domes - going so far as to meet and interview the man for whom the third known form of carbon is named. When the prime interest rate rose to twelve percent in nineteen seventy-eight, however, I left my Dad's construction business to pursue another dream.
It was while teaching photography and oil painting at the Connie Gordon Art Center on Miami Beach that I met the owner of an eight acre island in the lower Florida Keys. A deserted tropical island. I wasted no time in getting permission to live on and "improve" the property, and quit my job, packed my belongings and took a Greyhound bus to Summerland Key, where I made arrangements to be taken to the island I had never seen in waking life, but only in the dreams of a worn-out-from-tree-climbing six year-old boy who had never grown up. I remained on that island for seven years.
In that time, I learned from hands-on experience how to build a solar still for making fresh water from the sea, how to construct a bio-gas digester to turn toilet waste into cooking gas, and how to use the wind to keep a bank of batteries charged for such luxuries as refrigeration, lights, communications and entertainment. I learned gardening skills and rudimentary herbal medicine. I cataloged sea life and subsisted on a diet of mainly stone-crab claws and lobster. I even had abeautiful Jane, whose real name was Kristin, and who lived with me in that paradise for four years. Just as I had become the ape-man in the participatory teevee-watching imagination of my youth, in what was perhaps the greatest achievement of my adult life, I became, for those few wonderful years that I shall never forget, the fictional character that never was; Tarzan the Space-Man.
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