Our Present Gods and Monsters

On terror and salvation

1989 was the last year of my childhood.

My grandfather had died the previous year. I never saw the house he and my grandmother had shared again. I had loved visiting them. Their house was a warm, pleasantly musty-smelling place with an attic full of wonders to explore, and I was allowed to come into my grandparents’ bedroom on Saturday mornings, climb up onto my grandmother’s bed, and watch cartoons with her while my grandfather read the paper.

There had been a strawberry patch in the back yard full of tiny, fragile berries that my grandmother served with whipped cream. I found a nest of baby rabbits under a rosebush next to it one day, and I remember running inside to tell her about it. After she had followed me outside and bent down to see, she told me gently to be careful not to touch them; if I did their mother would smell the unfamilar human scent on their fur and reject them. Awe-struck, I studiously avoided the slightest physical contact with the nest or the earth around it, occasionally going outside to peer down at it from above to check the progress of the kits, until one day I looked in and found it empty.

My parents’ divorce was finalized the next year, in 1990. My father moved to a house in the same neighborhood to be close to me and my brother, but neither house ever felt like home to me, and I spent as much time as I could elsewhere. That year, as well, I was noticed by a boy my age who lived down the street from my father’s new house, whose father had taught him to befriend neighborhood children and bring them back home for him.

Steven King’s “It,” starring Tim Curry, first aired in 1990 as well, and I have often wondered if Curry’s magnificently terrifying portrayal of Pennywise the Dancing Clown ushered something into the world that had not been there before. The power of the demonic Pennywise to warp reality, first subtly, then in progressively more obvious and unspeakable ways, is the power of stories over children. I wonder if by displaying that demon’s power explicitly, first on television and more recently on film, we as a culture have made a mistake that is deeper and more fundamental than it appears.

Language and imagery is how gods are made manifest. We define their forms through the stories we tell children, and by telling them stories that overwhelm their senses entirely through the magic of IMAX and Dolby surround sound, we impress the gods we make into their minds in a way that cannot entirely be undone. My mother has told me of how a film called Day of the Triffids filled her with dread when she was young. I glanced at it once, and dismissed it. The special effects were primitive, and the music seemed hokey; I could not understand how such a ridiculous film had frightened her. But looking back on the original four-hour television version of It, I do understand. What is on the screen is not the only ingredient. The unformed, plastic brain of a child is fertile ground for the seeds of terror.

Photo by Chris Ensminger on Unsplash

But there are other gods.

Gods older than The Clown, as I have taken to calling the terror-god of domination and control that stole my childhood from me, have never left us. Unlike The Clown, the old gods were never truly ours, and thus cannot be dismissed in the same way. The Clown, at the end of the day, is a human creation.

The oldest of the old gods is The Wolf. He entered my life when I was twenty-three, seemingly by chance.

(I do not believe in chance in the way I once did. While history can never be foreseen precisely, the very intricacy of The Dance is proof enough to satisfy me that that things can never happen other than as they do. There is mathematical elegance to creation, and it requires a perspective that is impossible for any human to achieve in order to fully grasp its rhythms. I do not claim to be the exception to that rule. I am aware that there is a pattern, and sometimes I can even glimpse the edges of what is to come, but it is not given to the living ever to see the whole of it.)

When I first encountered The Wolf, he wore the form of a big, still man with a crew cut and small eyes like those of a Native American. He had a thick frame then, with big arms and a barrel chest, but I have seen him since, and he has looked otherwise. Sometimes he is tall and rangy, other times stocky and compact. Sometimes I see him smile easily at me from the mirror. All Wolves are one Wolf.

I first heard of him through a friend who had stuck with me after the dissolution of my old social circle. Together we puzzled over what kind of a man he must be. He was a kind of ghost then, in those early days, when the internet was first becoming democratized, and we were not the only ones to wonder. I didn’t meet him for another year, when he broke with the student he had been “working with,” as he always put it. He had had students before, and he broke with all of them after a while. He saw the world a certain way, and it was not a way that permitted many compromises.

He lived on the top floor of a house filled with books and toys and the tools of his art. He brewed us coffee and we smoked cigarettes and talked for a while. I showed him the knife I was carrying at the time and he looked at it for a minute before telling me things I had not known about it, about the man who made it, and about the context in which it was designed. He showed me how it was intended to be used, and corrected the way I carried it. It was the first time a man had taken an interest in me that did not involve taking something from me.

The memories I have of the five years I spent at his house are of a second chance at a childhood. I learned to do basic movements as if I had never used my limbs; how to stand, how to walk, how to hold myself. I learned to perform tasks correctly and conscientiously, and I was never made to feel small or afraid. The things I learned were not ones I would have thought to teach a child, nor were the methods by which The Wolf taught me ones I would have thought to use, but they were the right ones. The sensations were different, too; the smell of gun oil, and occasionally of cordite; the pain in my wrists from rolling a rattan hoop around them for what seemed like hours at a time; the elation when a lock sprang open under my fingers, the unfamiliar satisfaction that I took in the bruises and bumps and scrapes I brought home with me.

The change in the way I saw myself was more gradual than the change in the way others saw me. I did not know how to interpret the way people reacted to me after only a short while under the tutelage of The Wolf, and I became perhaps cockier than I should have been. But maybe that was only natural. It passed after the predictable consequences of behaving that way were brought home to me.

I have not seen The Wolf as I knew him in many years, and I know I never will again. The way it ended was the way it always ended for him and the way it often ended for me in those days. He had taught me what he needed to teach and I had learned what I needed to learn, and the nature of our relationship had changed. There was an event, a misunderstanding that was neither entirely his fault nor entirely mine, and it was over as suddenly as it had begun.

But when I see his face in mine, or hear a note in my voice that I used to hear in his, I am comforted. I know there is a Wolf in me now; I know that at my best, and at my most honest, I am a vessel for something older than The Clown. Something unapologetically wild, in the purest, most wholesome sense of the word.

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