by Daniel DeBrun
It was a huge wave-less waterbed that’s wood frame and headboard were made of mahogany. It had been finished with an almost black wood stain and a glossy polyurethane coating. Multiple blankets, none of them matching or correlating in any particular way, were keeping me warm and perfectly comfortable. Fifteen or so candles of various colors and sizes were meticulously placed on the waterbeds grand headboard and scattered about the bedroom giving off a radiant glow that would give anyone a sense of peacefulness and serenity. I had absolutely no clue how much this setting would influence me for many years to come.
I was brought up in a mediocre suburban city just outside of Chicago, Illinois called Batavia. The winters were almost like what you could considered a “frozen tundra”. A landscape of bare-naked trees that looked like death, and with the exception of an icy blanket of pure white snow every so often, the ground consisted of dead brown grass or tilled up remnants of cornfields. Summer was hot, sweaty and sticky. I thought of it as the shit hole, armpit of America. If it wasn’t for the cool crispness of autumn, with its broad array of earthy colorful leafs falling down, or springs amazing budding of new leafs and flowers, I surly thought I was being reared in Hell.
I had always been an extremely physical kid, a ruffian, somewhat of a tyrant, but only in a very competitive way. Any chance I could get I would be off into the neighborhood, involved with pickup football or blacktop basketball games. Hardly the type of person that one would have considered studious, I was more street smart then anything. I would have never picked up a book unless I was forced to, until a day that I can still so vividly remember, during a language arts class in sixth grade. “I have finished grading the papers, class.” Mrs. Mc Alpin said. “I’m quite pleased to say that mostly all of you have done very well.” She added. “But there is only one of you that received a 100% and that is, Daniel De Brun.” I was shocked. For the first time in my life, my name was called aloud in class for an academic praise, and not to subdue some random act of silliness. Mrs. Mc Alpin had asked me to stay after class that day. She told me that she would be entering me into a program that included about twelve academically gifted students from the entire population of the school. From this point on, I would leave my regularly scheduled class at the time, and join up with the gifted class every day for an hour.
After that year in school had passed, I possessed a new love of poetry and reading, but at the same time I, as I always had, lived with a lack of parental supervision. I literally watched and read anything that my heart desired. Influenced by my older friends in the neighborhood I rented the movie “The Doors”. I was mesmerized by Jim Morrison’s deep monotone voice. He didn’t even have to sing his lyrics.
Speaking with his poetic language, soft and slowly, would bring listeners into some sort of a daze. My friends had been correct. The movie and music from “The Doors” was like no other. Jim Morrison was a star among rock stars, in my own little mind.
Seventh grade literature class provided freedom to explore any poet that we wanted to. By that time, I had developed sort of a passion for, “The Doors”, and the lyrics that were in their music. Jim Morrison officially became my study icon. I loved the freedom, and inquired into a poetry book that incased hundreds of Jim Morrison’s poems. I have a poem in my head that I still to this day can recite:
“Let me tell you about Texas radio with a big beat. Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god. Wandering, wandering in hopeless night. Soft driven slow and mad, like some new language. Reaching your head with a cold sudden furry of a divine messenger. Out here in the parameter, there are no stars. Out here we is stoned immaculate.”
I found myself in that “all too comfortable” position. Lying in my waterbed, with a small library of acquired biographies and books about Jim Morrison and “The Doors” stacked on the oversized Mirrored headboard. This is where I absorbed a lifestyle that resembled one of Jim Morrison’s. I couldn’t tell you if my decision to follow the path of a rock star into wild experiences was made consciously or subliminally. With ether regard, I surrounded myself with friends and acquaintances that also venerated venereal exploration, indulged in a vast array of psychedelic drugs, and regularly breathed marijuana. I had completely lost a connection with what had driven me to reading and poetry a few years earlier. If I had been influenced by a more responsible group of kids, or even took it upon myself to revere a more amenable subject, I probably wouldn’t be a thirty year old college freshmen as I write today.
Daniel DeBrun is the current Web Master of the Elektraphrog web site. Daniel will graduate from State College of Florida with an A.A. and plans to transfer to one of the area’s art schools to pursue a degree in Web Design and Interactive Media. Daniel is father to the most amazing two boys on the planet, Austin and Aiden, and has almost been married for two years. He has been part of a “Three Time State Champion” wrestling team (placing third individually), spent three years working avionics on the B-1b Lancer, B-52 Bomber, and the B-2 Stealth bomber for the United States Air Force, and spent a few years working in casinos in Las Vegas as a Blackjack and Roulette dealer. Daniel has also done Hollywood extra work in a movie called “Race to Space” starring James Woods and Annabeth Gish, and recently took on the leading male role at Lemon Bay Playhouse in the stage performance, “Cheating Cheaters”. He currently works as a student assistant in the remedial reading and writing lab, and in the computer information systems lab for State College of Florida (Venice). Daniel is proud to be part of State College of Florida’s online literary arts magazine!