Day 1 – My First Crush Wore Rubber

My memory is not, let’s say, good. It wouldn’t be too far to say that it has the retentive qualities of your average titanium brick. It takes something on the order of a laser drill or an atomic bomb to make any impact on it. Yes, I manage to remember from day to day that I am married, and that I have a son, and that I live in Silicon Valley and even what my address is– mostly. But when it comes down to names, dates of birth, zip codes and phone numbers, there’s always that half-second of frozen panic while I try to figure out what the answer is. Then there are the times when I start out at home and then magically end up at work, with an entire intervening period I can’t really account for.¹

In case you’re wondering, this really doesn’t have all that much to do with my first crush except as an introduction to explain why I’m a lot better with visuals, and by “a lot better,” I mean that I’m not actively worse. And so when I tell you that I met my first crush in the summer of 1977, and can clearly remember watching him stride through a cloud of smoke, pause long enough for us to register the fact that he was a good 20 feet high and looked fantastic in platform boots — I shit you not, the guy was huge — and knew that he would be the man I would eventually marry, you are welcome to take that with a grain of salt.²

I was 3 years old, and my father had decided that it would be a good idea for me to go with him to one of the first showings of Star Wars.³ Why he thought this would be a brilliant notion is anyone’s guess; sci-fi was never one of his passions, though in later years he really got behind the idea of Knight Rider. I can only imagine that someone told him the movie was a knock-off of a Kurosawa film, or suggested it had some kind of kinship with the Three Stooges, his personal heroes.

3 years old is maybe not the best age to be taken to a movie of this type. My father may have reconsidered after a certain point, and taken us out of the theater. I have no clear memory of seeing the rest of the show. Didn’t matter. I was in love.

Seriously, I think the way Darth Vader won my heart wasn’t his snazzy dress sense — elevator boots or not, he looked outstanding in a cape. What 3 year old doesn’t love a cape? — or even his height. Or even the fact that his head was modeled after a praying mantis on crack. I think it was the first man he strangled that really did it for me. There was something in the way he crushed that guy’s trachea like an empty 7-Up can and tossed him aside that made my little heart go thumpity-thump.

It’s probably just as well I can’t remember watching the rest of the film. It would have been a complete disappointment by comparison.

For days afterwards, I muttered to myself in the hobbit hole of my room, working out little explanations for his costume and the backstory that went into making him Darth Vader. At the age of 4, it occurred to me that in order to be an appropriate Bride of Darth Vader, I would also need to be bad-ass. Also, tall. To the bemusement of my parents and neighbors, I promptly began trying to stretch myself by dangling off of anything I could find. A poorly understood snatch of overheard conversation had led me to believe that gravity had a permanent stretching effect on the human body. My father and mother were 5’6″ and 5’7″, respectively. Nonetheless, I had hopes I would someday grow to a respectable 6’2″.^{4, 5}

“It’s just a phase,” my father told my mother, when she ended up having to untangle me from the bannisters for the umpteenth time. To me, he said, “Noodles will make you taller. You should eat more noodles.”

My mother gave him an exasperated look. My father’s lifelong ambition was to transform the family menu into one based purely on noodles and beer-related fried goods. And beer. He fought a losing battle against my mother, who persisted on buying groceries that didn’t originate in a factory.

“It stands to reason,” he told me. “Noodles are long. So if you eat them, you’ll be long.”

I really was a gullible child.

I eventually put height on the back burner as a project to be tackled later, and concentrated instead on killing people with my mind. There wasn’t, I think, any malice in the project. Certainly the concept of permanence as it related to death never actually occurred to me. I imagined, I suppose, that after I had killed someone, they would stand up, dust themselves off, say something congratulatory like, “Jolly good! That was a real privilege. Really felt those brain waves crushing my throat, hah hah! Aren’t you the precocious one? I must congratulate your parents,” and then shake my hand, end scene.

My parents were at the center of Japanese transplant social life in Seattle at the time, and the Consul-General of the Japanese embassy would occasionally drop by, along with assorted judges, politicians, professors, doctors — and in the middle of the festivities, they would occasionally find me standing rigid as a board in the midst of them, one arm outstretched, with my hand in the claw-like rictus that is de rigueur for inflicting Sith Lord strangulation on the deserving.

They were generally very nice people, and Japanese courtesy prohibits the kind of frank and biting observations that are more customary for Americans. They would regard my bulging eyes, the look of obvious strain on my face, and pat my head kindly. “She’s growing so tall,” they would say. “Doesn’t time fly? How old is she now? Four years old? Such a big girl!”

“Another phase,” my father said a bit worriedly.

“Your daughter,” my mother said, “is getting strange.”

“But the noodles are working,” he said, ever the optimist.

In fact, I was a big girl. Certainly too big to be having the kinds of accidents that straining to strangle someone with my mind tended to cause. When I committed to psychic murder, I committed myself whole-heartedly, body and soul — and the body, led to believe that the brain needed more muscular control than the bowels, would start redistributing energy appropriately.

Or … inappropriately, as it turned out.

My parents never really understood what all that was about. In time, I gave up. The threat of having to return to diapers was not something that sat well with a nascent Sith Lordess’s dignity — not knowing the female form of ‘Lord,’ I satisfied myself with the obvious alternative — though I was pleased to have discovered the reason for one of Darth Vader’s wardrobe choices, at any rate.⁶

Footnotes

1. I mean, I know I must have driven, because I own a car and I drop my son off at daycare on the way in and it’s a 30 minute commute — but you’d think that at least some speck of memory would cling, lint-like, to my mental jacket, wouldn’t you? Instead of which, I come to myself in the middle of a meeting, answering some question posed to me with the sudden realization that I’m not wearing any shoes. (Back)

2.In case you’re wondering, I didn’t actually marry him. He was already pretty old at the time, and by the time I actually got married, he was 71. The man I ended up marrying is very nice, and is actually young enough to remember what his meat and two veg look like, much less where he saw them last. Most of the time. (Back)

3.The standards for good parenting were different back in those days. My father had a sunny conviction that children were durable and could only benefit from exposure to all sorts of experiences. He may be right. I got to watch people being strangled to death on screen, and turned out fine. Meanwhile, my son is carefully sheltered from violence and disasters, and he’s scared of the fish in Little Nemo. (Back)

4. At that age, I was hardly to know that this type of gravitational plastic surgery is only effective on boobs and butts. (Back)

5. Also, while in my mind I am tall enough to straddle entire galaxies with a single step, and crush the planets between my thumb and forefinger — technically, I never did quite make it to 6’2″. Quite. But I’m DAMN CLOSE. (Back)

6. My current husband is not able to strangle grown men with his mind. Sadly, neither am I. However, we are also not required to wear rubber trousers. In the grand scheme of things, I consider this a reasonable tradeoff.