No. 6
Teenage Mallrat
In junior high I was the leader of the nerds. That sounds stupid. Scratch that. In junior high I was friends with this group of socially awkward kids that were into comic books and whatnot and I was the most extroverted of the bunch. I planned things and everyone got on board, no questions asked. I had zero friends in sixth grade and got teased a bunch ‘cause of my weird SoCal/Cuban accent which makes me sound like a Brooklynite via Malibu Rum. But in seventh grade Alex Solis was my best bud.
Every Saturday Solis and I would get dropped off at the South Costa Plaza mall to hit up the comic book store but most importantly the movie house across the street. The first flick we watched there was ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS. We howled in our seats. Gotta do this again. I’d make an itinerary: what time pictures started, their runtime, when they got out, how much time we had before the next flick we were totally gonna sneak into, etc. I got very good at it. We’d watch two to four movies every Saturday. Didn’t matter what they were. We’d viddy everything. Sometimes twice. Never got caught. And then we’d do some mall ratting: hit the McDonald’s, loiter with our refillable drink cups, max our time at random shops (testing those Sharper Image massage chairs to the limit), you name it.
Eventually we built a crew of outcasts.
By this point I’d gotten into the Columbia House hustle. Sign up. Get twelve CDs for a penny. And then you had to buy one a month at full price or whatever it was, and the full price was twice the amount that stuff cost in stores. But I never paid for any of them. If you invited a friend you got an additional five CDs yourself. And I did that. Got a bunch of school kids to join. And I slowly started building my CD collection. But here’s the thing: they didn’t have my social security number. They had no way of proving I was me. So, what’d I do? Started making up names: Cosmic Cosmo, Joris Brown, Lingo DePingo. So not only did I get my five per, I got the thirteen that each of these fictional people signed up for, and I had them all shipped to my dad’s office next door to the house.
My dad, livid, “What is all this shit? Who’s Cosmic Cosmo? You’re getting notices that these people owe Columbia House and BGI money! What do you think you’re doing? You want to get arrested? Is that what you want? Because I’m not paying for any of this shit!”
“How are they going to arrest me? They don’t have my picture ID, they don’t have my social security number. They can’t prove I’m any of those people.”
My dad paused. “…you have a point there.” Then, “But you need to stop this shit. And now!”
I signed him up and he got a bunch of music he wanted and never protested again.
Hey, man, if you believe Cosmic Cosmo is a real person without doing any sort of background research and you’re shipping them free stuff, sounds like that’s more your problem than mine. This was no mom and pop. This was big business. F- ‘em.
Across the house on Seventeenth Street was a dollar store. And I’d pick up stacks of blank VHS tapes and cassettes. The VHS tapes I filled with movies I’d dub rentals onto via two VCRs; the birth of my movie collection. And the Columbia House CDs I taped to cassette. I then would photocopy album covers via my dad’s office printer and sell these bootleg tapes out of my backpack to kids at school. And that’s how I got my comic book and theatre money. I also never ate at school. My dad would give me five bucks a day for lunch. I’d pocket it. And starve. I was really undernourished and sick all the time but f-that. I had to get the latest Wizard comics magazine and the next issue of Uncanny X-Men, goddamn it! And go to the movies! These things are important!
And I loooooved Marvel Comics. My brother Angel tried to get me into baseball cards. And I’d collect them. But I’m not much of a sports enthusiast. He saw I was an awkward kid who had a hard time making friends. I was always on the living room floor, inches away from the TV set. He was trying to expand my interests. But I just didn’t care.
Saturdays they’d have Hannah Barbara reruns and I’d watch them. I’d race from school to catch the SUPER MARIO BROS cartoon, doubled with THE LEGEND OF ZELDA one, and I’d have a field day eating my Super Mario Bros/Zelda cereal while tuning in. The cereal came in one box but two bags separating both properties. It was kinda cool. And don’t get me started on the REAL GHOSTBUSTERS or the hours of NINJA TURTLES I taped on VHS. I somehow figured out how to tape stuff off the TV with the VCR without anybody showing me.
“We were stupefied. You were a whiz kid,” my mom says.
And if I ran out of tapes, well, I might as well use one of these home videos in exchange. You’d pull the tab off at the front so you couldn’t tape over them, as you did with cassettes, but, hey, wait, if I stick a piece of paper there it could take the tab’s place. And, oh, man, did I get in trouble. I erased a lot of valuable family memories.
My dad as a result, “Me cago en tu alma!” [“I shit in your soul!”]
I’d watch my recorded episodes over and over. I collected them. And my favorite ones were the TO BE CONTINUED ones. Because that meant there was more to the story! Man, did I love cliffhangers.
And then the X-MEN: ANIMATED SERIES came out. And I swapped out collecting baseball cards for collecting X-Men trading cards. Each episode of the X-MEN cartoon lead into the next. Long-form storytelling! I went bananas. I used to play the infamous Chris Claremont-inspired X-Men arcade game all the time and that’s the only knowledge I had about these spandex-clad superheroes before this…
See, my dad had a gambling habit. Legend has it my mom almost broke her water while pregnant with me during an impromptu trip to Vegas. He just dragged her out there. But he’d give me a wad of cash and let me play arcades while he went off to the gambling tables or whatever and my mom would hit the slots. I spent hours and hours and hours at the arcades. The Simpsons arcade game got me into THE SIMPSONS, the X-MEN one got me to watch the highly anticipated cartoon show.
Angel noticed the X-Men trading cards. I don’t like baseball? Fine. He takes me to this comic book/collector’s convention at the indoor mall that would eventually become The Block in Orange. Around the time “The Death of Superman” came out there was this big comics boom. Copies of Superman’s death were selling like hotcakes and people were flipping them for huge profits. Enter the age of multi-cover variants and superhero crossovers. My brother collected comics for their potential value; I started buying them for the value of their stories. I’m not going to say I got obsessed but the serialized storytelling format, and how the books themselves were better than the cartoon adaptations I was watching on TV really grabbed me. The characters had such rich histories. How I could not be enamored?
But the one that really hooked me was this reprint of Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man’s first ever appearance, his origin story. I got it at an airport when I was flying solo to North Carolina to visit Angel during a winter break; he had moved because of his career. I re-read the thing over and over. I had no idea that’s how Peter Parker became Spider-Man. And the tragedy of it all: his arrogance, his selfishness because he had always been this kid that was bullied around (just like me) who now thought of himself as a hot shot with these amazing powers gets his uncle killed for not stopping the robber who would eventually do the deed. I wasn’t used to stories like that. I featured this exact same comic in JERRY POWELL during a flashback depicting Jerry’s “origin story”: little Jerry is sitting with his nose in a comic book while his mom fills the entire house with gas.
My dad would rent two to three movies every other night at Blockbuster. I’d watch whatever he’d check out, of course. Name an early ‘90s Hollywood movie, I watched it. And the next morning, especially on Saturday mornings, I would rewatch whatever I really dug before he had to return the tapes.
One day I go in with him to pick out movies and I see this colorful comic book-ish poster on display. It’s for a flick out soon on video. And I’m just in awe. The thing actually resembles a comic book cover. But what really captures my attention is the illustration on the poster’s bottom right corner. It reads “In this issue… STAN LEE.” And let me tell you, I was going through a Stan Lee phase. And here he was, in a movie!!!
“[Stan Lee], the creator of the most important titles in comics history.” – Brodie Bruce, MALLRATS.
I immediately bolted up to the Blockbuster counter. “When are you going to have that movie?!”
“Which movie?”
“That one with Stan Lee!”
“MALLRATS? Uhhh… let me check. Ummm… I think in like three weeks.”
Do you understand how long those three weeks took? Do you? Everyday I’d come in. “Is MALLRATS in?”
“No!”
And then three weeks later, “Is it in yet?”
“I think it’s been delayed.”
The following week, “Is it in now?”
“Sorry, duder. Someone rented it.”
“FUCK!”
Everyday I’d pop in and the movie was checked out. What the fuck was going on here? But I ended up making friends with the employees. And, man, did they hook it up later. Any poster I wanted, any display I wanted, they saved for me. When Universal re-released all their classic monster movies they gave me the four cardboard cutouts of Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolf Man, The Creature, and Dracula. I had them all up in my pop culture wallpapered room. And my evil ass had a blast with them too. Because I’d put the Wolf Man, for example, in unsuspecting parts of the house. I’m laughing as I’m typing this. I’d hide it behind the shower curtain, in my parents’ closet, behind doors and it was always met with, “HOLY SHIT!” or “VETE P’AL CARAJO!” [Translation: “Go fuck yourself!”]. It would scare the living shit out of everybody because you’d just see this figure there, a shape you wouldn’t expect, in a dark corner of a room you’re entering. I’d cackle from my room and my dad would bolt in, hurling the cutout at me, “You’re going to fucking kill someone one of these days! Giving me a fucking heart attack!” Sometimes I would spook my dad’s clients. “You’re going to get my license revoked!”
And, honestly, sometimes it would also backfire on me because I’d forget where I’d place them.
You’d walk into the bathroom and on the left was this huge rectangular mirror above the sink. To the right was the shower/bathtub. I’d peel the shower curtains just right and sneak The Creature in there. My parents would be gone. It’d be late at night. I’d switch the lights on as I’m entering the bathroom, catch a glimpse of something in the mirror and scream, “AH!!!!!”
And my mom also got me back. Several. Goddamned. Times.
I was such a little shit.
Anyhow. One day I say, f-this, I’m buying the MALLRATS VHS. And I did. I am so stoked to watch the movie. And I throw it on and I’m just sitting there going… uhhhhhhhh….
Because all these people do is talk talk talk. I’m not sure I’m even following along. This is so boring. But then, some of the jokes start to land. “She was going down on me at the time!” And I begin to laugh. Really hard. Especially because of Jay and Bob. And then I see what Brodie does at the mall. His refillable drink cup. His love of comics. How he just lounges around all day, spouting useless trivia. My jaw dropped. I pointed at the TV. “Hey, that’s me! I’m Brodie!” And to this day, Brodie is in my top ten all-time favorite movie characters. I didn’t even care that Stan Lee was in the movie anymore. This was the first time I had ever seen anything that I actually related to. And that’s all I’d ever wanted, to be able to relate. As an overlooked kid who felt so out of touch with reality this movie meant the world to me. I could not stop watching it. And Solis became a fan too. And then eventually I would have classmates come over to slurp some soda pops and chomp down cheap frozen microwavable Tina’s burritos (my dad, “What, am I feeding your entire school now?”) while I would show them my favorite movie discoveries of the week.
I then got into the habit of glancing at everyone’s reactions during the movies. And this a cold hard fact for me: you can tell a lot about a person by how they react to movie scenes or a characters’ actions. Volumes are spoken this way. Really intriguing stuff. Ammo once said to me that during my movie nights I’d spend more time watching people’s reactions than the movies themselves. Explains the inclination to want to create my own.
From the age of seven I was taping everything I found interesting on the ol’ home video camera. Then we got a mini cam and I began to compile hours and hours of footage. My parents would sit down to watch this stuff and my dad would complain that I was wasting tapes filming nonsensical shit. One tape had me just observing Luis sitting around on his couch, minding his business. My dad, “What the fuck is this? The Luis Cuenca Affinity hour?” I’d tape my dad shaving, sometimes he’d be nude and I’d laugh and nab him incognito and then show laughing family members via the viewfinder. “What is this? What are you watching?” he’d casually join us. Then upon realization, “Are you fucking kidding me?!?”
Mahahahaha!
One day it was raining and I love rainy days. I spent some time on Seventeenth Street filming cars driving by with their headlights on, zooming in on flooded areas, watching twigs floating and then going down the sewage drain. Riveting stuff here, folks. I edited using my two VCRs and managed to add a soundtrack to the footage. It was a Bush song. I think off SIXTEEN STONE. I don’t remember which. But I played the song while I taped the cut footage off the TV. And, look, I made a music video. Hey, that was pretty cool.
And then one day in eight grade I was sitting in class, head in the clouds as usual, scribbling stories in a notebook. The teacher turns the TV on. I look up. This group of kids who sort of lived in my neighborhood had just turned in their homework assignment. But instead of typing up some regular old thing, they made a video with their camcorder. And it was creative. And original. And funny. And it made the other kids laugh. But me? I didn’t laugh. No. I just stared at the TV, eyes wide open. And under my breath I went, “…holy shit…”