I'm not sure what it was that made my childhood fantasies abnormal. It was, of course, odd that I would spend every available moment in a trancelike state, meticulously adding details to the alternate world I had created. And it was also odd that I conscripted people from the outside world to take part in my adventures, even and escpecially those who would havenothing to do with me in reality. But perhaps the most bizarrre thing about my creative detachment was that it lasted well into my twenties. Even in college, I would spend tedious classes polishing scenarios until the exact position of every participant and the order of their actions was decided, final, and real.

I went through several imaginary lives in this way. The first major one that I remember involved an incredibly posh clubhouse that I built for my friends and me. Our club was/would have been called The Caracals after a species of cat I found particularly intruiging. A string of successes at game shows had allowed me to purchase for our use:

Individual go-karts with high-speed tennis ball servers as weaponry
Animatronic lions and pythons to discourage snooping
That most critical element of all, a large scren TV on which to view missions.

Of course, these attributes made The Caracals an irresistible club for all of the other boys around my age. I was the leader, but my highly developed sense of noblesses oblige prevented me from lording it over those who wished to join. And in the real world I would sit in my chair during church and draw diagrams of where exactly the water balloon traps would go and how the secret door to the garage would open.

Around the time of puberty, this fantasy evolved into an even more elaborate version hinging on the development of super powers in certain of my peers. At first, we were known as The Color Kids, each of us having a color based name that creatively described our powers. I was Blackstreak, a super speedster, and my biography indicated that I was "The master of all martial arts moves, both complcated and simple, from the rabbit punch to the back-brain kick!" As people joined, which happened without their knowledge as I decided to like them, each was given a statistic sheet with an appropriate weakness, a specialty, a ranking in the group, and all the other things one might expect to see on a collector's card. And I became rather good at drawing people in heroic poses wearing their color coded uniforms and using their powers to eradicate evil. My cousin, Ben, was the coolest person I knew, so naturally he was Whitesnap, my second in command. Jay Haller was Grey Storm, who controlled weather; Eric McIntyre was Red Flame, master of fire, and cetera. Of course, none of these people had any idea that they were super heroes. This entire world was kept in heavily documented confidence in a notebook that held, not only each persons profile and pictures of them in action, but also specifications of our equipment, descriptions of our individual vehicles, and blueprints of our top secret underground base, copmlete with enormous computer screen on which to recieve missions. This lasted for years, but gradually, my standards slackened and I ran out of colors. I think the last member of The Color Kids was the dubiously qualified Magenta Hawk.

At which point, most people would simply have learned to operate in the real world, but this was not in my skill set. I was an excellent leader of super hero teams, but not such a great striker-up of conversations. And not only was I insecure relating to my peers. I was also gloriously unhygenic. I don't think I learned to comb my hair until I got married. I still break out in a rash if I pay full price for clothes.

So the fantasy world evolved yet again, still with the super powers, but without the limiting colors. Each member of this team was given a number and wore an identical yellow unitard with a big visor to obscure his or her real identity. My powers were now based on electricity, and included super intelligence, lightning reflexes, and the occasional electric burst. This last power was unpredictable and rarely used; after all, omnipotence is no fun to imagine. Each of my coheroes was given a numerical identity that corresponded to their ranking (I was known only as "One"). Since I had by this time learned to use a computer, I kept all information regarding powers, ranking and the like in a spreadsheet rather than a notebook. I would choreograph our battles like movie screenplays until everyone at whom I was mad had met some sort of unpleasant end. Afterward, the surviving members of the team would return to base and be debriefed on our enormous mission screen.

Oddly enough, it wasn't until I lost my leg that I stopped doing this. I just couldn't imagine myself leaping around and kicking villains and transgressors in the head anymore. IT was a simple feat to imagine being struck by some form of radiation and developing amazing powers, but for some reason it was and is beyond my capacity to imagine simply running anymore. If I was to fantasize, I would have to be relegated to the role of receptionist, stuck in the underground lair while the others saved the world, and answering the police commissioner on the by now astronomical computer screen when he called with a mission.

"There was a little boy," he began, "Who was very smart and very energetic, but was also very disobedient." I could already smell my Dad's handiwork in this parable. His friend Dan Draley, whom I admired a great deal, had offered to tell me a story. now, I expected something along the lines of the song he had sung earlier that night to entertain us children, a rousing ragtime number called, "Broccoli Brains." Evidently, Broccoli Brains was upset. Nobody would let him play baseball because he was a giant stalk of broccoli. To the surprise of none of us who were listening, when they did let Broccoli Brains play, he won the game for them.

But this story, of which I was to be the sole beneficiary, was shaping up a bit differently. To begin with, the boy was clearly intended to be me. In addition, there was no anthropomorphic vegetable, and the story was therefore boring. "The little boy never listened to his parents. He would just stare at them when they asked him to do something and do the exact opposite." Again, I recognized my own charming characteristics. "One day the little boy was running across the street without looking. 'Stop,' his father yelled, but it was no use. A truck came and smashed him into the concrete. So you see, Brandon, it is very important to listen to your parents. They know things that you don't know, and it could be a matter of life and death. Goodnight, now!" With this he shut the door and extinguished the light behind him.

I disagreed with his analysis, however. The moral Dan drew from the story was that children should always listen to their parents, but really the opposite was true. If the boy hadn't heard the Father, if he had just kept running, the truck would have missed entirely. Instead, when the Father yelled "Stop!", the boy did. In the path of the vehicle. Of course, this is not the meaning intended by the story, which may if fact have been apocryphal, but it is indicitave of two things about my religious upbringing.

Firstly, The Witnesses take only what they want to out of any given story. In the course of rereading the Bible, I am astonished by how many things which I assumed to be canonical were simply made up (Nimrod and the tower of Babel) and how many disturbing details were glossed over (Lot and incest, Noah and drunkeness, Abraham prostituting his fucking wife for personal gain). To be a Witness, a suspension of disbelief is necessary that makes me wonder how I ever did it.

Secondly, My parents ruled by fear. "You behave, or you'll be run over by a truck!" is an excellent summary of the messages my siblings and I recieved throughout childhood. Sadly, this message was erroneous and, in reality, did nothing to teach me how not to be run over by a truck, which is something that I would have done well to learn.