Storytelling: A Lost Art

One of my earliest memories is riding a bus on the way to 3rd grade in Flushing, Queens New York with 3 boys surrounding me and, right on the spot, making up a story that kept them jaw-dropped and absolutely on the edge of their naugahyde padded seats. I don't recall what the stories were about, but I had this gift of telling an engaging yarn at an early age.

This talent was a definite ego boost for a skinny, short, different-looking Japanese-American kid who wasn't good at sports and who got bullied and beaten on a regular basis by the Puerto Rican and German immigrant neighborhood kids. So I retreated into books, fantasy, TV, and drawing.

My father was a gifted artist and industrial designer who's own fetish was cars, be-bop jazz, and science fiction (pouring through novels by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Silverberg, Bradbury, and countless others like comic books). He worked for Chrysler in Detroit when I was born designing interior dashboards and rear ends, those fifties curvy, chrome-laden, sparkling doo-dads cars the era was famous for.

The first story I can recollect was concocted during summer camp when I was 7-8 at a YMCA sleepaway camp that had spider-webbed, beetle infested latrines with no plumbing that just reeked so bad I didn't go to the bathroom for the 2 weeks I was imprisoned there. No way, Jose.

These were the carefree summer days of bug juice (so watered down and spiked with sugar the taste was nearly imperceptible), bug-hunting, sports (ugh), swinging by a rope into fetid lake water with your feet stepping on unspeakable slime, camp wars (catch the flag against a neighboring camp to break up the growing monotony and keep the kiddies from outright cannibalism), and those overnight camping trips, complete with marshmallow roasting (why was mine always burnt?), half-cooked hot dogs, gassy beans cooked in the can, campfires, and -- you guessed it -- teenage counselors trying to scare the piss out of us young-uns by telling ghost stories.

This was, by a landslide, my favorite camp activity. In an earlier post I already recounted my childhood obsession with horror movies. Well, sitting under the stars with the dark, foreboding woods all around, hellish creatures howling and chiggering in the not-so-distant distance, stroboscopic bats (winged rodents, fa-chrissakes!) flitting in the trees, all this was enough to make any red-blooded pre-pubescent city kid quake with anxiety and bone-chilling willies.

I was enraptured by these ghost stories. They spoke to me like the Lord whispered to Moses on the Mount. Like Shoeless Joe intoned Kevin Costner. I cannot express how exciting, how breathless these verbal, real-time, your-mouth-to-my-ear exchanges seemed to me.

Against the flickering, yellow light of the cracking wood fire, the long, dancing shadows against the trees, the perceived isolation of the deep forest, what happened those nights played out entirely in the mind's eye, each detail exaggerated one-hundredfold, each person projecting themselves as the protagonist, emotions and adrenaline redlining.

I took in how the storyteller would slow down or quicken their description, how their volume would cascade to a pin-drop whisper, only to be followed by a shouted word that made everyone scream and jump out of their skin, grabbing one another for dear life. It was like a horror movie taking place inside your head, with you seeing each close-up, every shot and cut. It was a primal, epiphanous experience pour moi.

After the stories concluded and the teen counselors went off to smoke pot, chug Old Milwaukees, and engage in sloppy, drippy condom-less sex, we campers were herded into our pup tents like pathetic yard dawgs. But we were too wired on marshmallows and bug juice and fear to even contemplate sleep. We lay in our sleeping bags listening to the satanic night creatures rustling around us, and tossed and turned helplessly, feeling as if our heads would explode.

I tried to read my Mad Magazine by flashlight inside my sleeping bag and, once finished, fidgeted like a jitterbug on crystal meth. I sat up and found my other two tentmates wide awake, too young to engage in any felonious mischief or have any concept thereof. One of them, I can't remember their name (shame on me yet again), asked me if I knew any stories. I guess they were used to having their mommies read them a Grimm's Fairy Tale at night. I shurgged, said, "Sure."

Right there on the spot, my mind filled with residual horrific images, I concocted this open-ended twisted tale of a pack of three boys who got lost in the woods, unable to retrace their footsteps or lock on to anything familiar.

As I spoke I could feel my storytelling powers at work, luring these two young minds like trout to fisherman flies, like moths to the flame. Their eyes widened and their hearts raced as I embellished every point: the young hikers' desperation, their wanting to go home, their tearing, swollen eyes and wavering voices.

The three froze in their tracks as one boy noticed blood drops on the ground. "Must'a been a coyote killed a bird or somethin'," the brave one said to the others reassuringly. Then the nervous Nelly asked, "But where are the feathers? What about the bones?" The brave one shucked him off, "You sissy freak. Coyotes eat birds in one gulp, like big snakes."

The three trudged on until they spotted a house through the thicket of trees. They ran, racing against each other, for the shelter. The brave one pounded on the rotting front door, screaming for help, noticing the crumbling decay of this shack literally in the middle of nowhere. When no one answered, they slammed all their weight against the door until it crashed open.

It was dark inside. Slits of light through boarded-up shattered windows. And the first thing that assaulted their senses like a screaming banshee was the smell. A stultifying stench of rotting flesh. They instinctively covered their noses. The Nelly vomited all over the pocked, slimy floorboards.

Then they all spotted it. A pool of blood in one corner of the bare room. The drooping ceiling above had one big, crimson stain, a maddening drip-drip-drip, and the sound of a beating heart beneath the floorboards.

The door suddenly slammed closed -- and they were thrust into blackness. Something grabbed their legs from below.

My two tentmates screamed so loud, counselors came rushing in, demanding, "What the hell happened? You okay?"

As the two others caught their breath and steadied their trembling, I sat smiling like the cat who ate the canary. In that instant I realized my destiny was sewn. I would tell stories. It's what I was meant to do.