A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Spirits

Two of the neighborhood kids, Willie and Todd, joined my brother Matt and me in a game we had invented. We’d make a quick buzzing sound and become a “spirit,” which was like a superhero. There were good guy spirits and bad guy spirits, and each one had a special power.

Matt’s main spirit, The Claw, had a dangerous weapon called the Brain Hold. There was no defense against this hold but Matt was fair by not doing it all the time. He’d often yell, “Brain Hold!” whenever he was going to do it. I had one spirit that was so fast he could run around the house several times and not look like he was moving at all. I had to tell my friends when he was done running. I imagined that this spirit might have a female sidekick, but there were no girls who would play with us. Todd’s sister was about our age, but we all teased her because she wasn’t pretty and her name was Sissy.

At night, in our bedroom, Matt and I would talk about what our spirits were going to do next, and discuss maybe killing off some of our old spirits for new ones. It was highly dramatized and loosely scripted, like the professional wrestling we watched on Saturdays. The show, Big Time Wrestling, was a weekly ritual for us. This was before wrestling became glitzy and hugely marketed. Some of the popular Northwest wrestlers like “Playboy” Buddy Rose, Jimmy Snuka, Jesse Ventura, and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper even came to Kennewick and wrestled at the high school sometimes.

I was going to make up a spirit with a super brain to combat The Claw and his famous hold, but Willie and Todd moved away and we stopped playing.

That’s when Matt and I began reading books about Bigfoot.