What better way to begin than with the bones. The dinosaur bones embossed on the cover of Jurassic Park, to be precise, a book my sixth grade teacher banned on sight for nebulous reasons. The Catholic school distributed a dusty list of proper books for children to read, but I had breezed through all the boy-dog-death books I could stand. I refused to fetch another from the school library. And so I found myself hiding in the empty church hall, secretly reading the suppressed sci-fi novel – an outlaw with malicious intent to read all the popular genre fiction I could dig up. For all the Catholic Church’s ability to psychologically transmit thousands of years of guilt upon their subjects, they were less adept at understanding the simple art of reverse psychology. The nuns and priests who grimly forbade even the slightest subversive pleasure or vice became my accomplices in a literary journey to the world of drugs, sex, murder, and irresponsible genetic engineering of long extinct reptiles.
To fully understand the scene, one must go back to the year 1992. It was a topsy turvy year – Kriss Kross wore their clothes backwards, Right Said Fred’s shirt had been deemed not sexy enough, and Sir Mix-a-Lot finally revealed the truth about the size of backside he preferred. The Soviet Union collapsed. At a Catholic grammar school in Napa, California, I entered the sixth grade as a straight A student and left with all C’s. I started the year in the good graces of the teacher, a dogmatic former nun who spent her weekends protesting in a lawn chair outside Planned Parenthood. Our relationship took a hit when I threw a Warriner’s grammar book at her after she kicked me out of class for chewing gum (allegedly). Even though the book missed her by a wide margin (poor throwing ability landed me a position switch from third to first base that year) she really took it personally that I would intend her harm. After that I couldn’t stay out of trouble. I got into a fight with the class bully and served a two day suspension. I called my math teacher an asshole (accurate) and got permanently removed from the gifted program. I became just the sort of at-risk pre-teen youth who would dump Old Dan and Little Ann for the decadent pop-sci pleasures of Dr. Ian Malcolm. My uncle read the book and gave it to me because “boys love dinosaurs.” I really didn’t see the glamour in reading about Chaos Theory and gender-bending frog DNA – that is until such ideas became illicit.
My literacy sponsors at home supported my newfound quest for all the Crichton and Grisham and King and Clancy I could stomach. My literary sponsors at school viewed a gaudy pocket paperback as the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes rolled into a shirt sleeve. Their attempts at suppression only hastened the desire for more banned books. They tried taking them away and donating them to the library, but my mom worked there and snagged them on their way back. They tried detentions after school, rosary readings during lunch, and early morning cleaning duty. None of it worked. None of it sated my newfound desire to see Muldoon’s naive raptor hunt or Dennis Nedry’s sweet, slimy demise. Most of all, I needed more of Dr. Ian Malcolm’s crackpot theories and graphs that flattered my intelligence. The school sponsors of literacy did everything in their power to destroy it, but the book found a way. They tried so hard to see if they could prevent me reading that they never wondered if they should.