What Batman, Swearing, and Cigarettes Can Teach Us About Reading
The Batman movie came out in 1989 when I was eight-and-a-half-years old. I didn’t know who Batman was, but I saw the commercial and knew it was very important I see it.
My parents were unsympathetic. It’s rated PG-13 for a reason, they said, and I cried in the living room where my brother watched TV and both my parents sat in reading in their recliners.
My parents went to library weekly. When I was nine-and-three-quarters they stopped checking out books for me and had me get my own card, mostly so I could go the library with my brother who was four years older than me, liked gun magazines, and wouldn’t be caught dead there, or anywhere else, with our parents.
This is how I found myself in the adult section staring at a novelized version of the Batman movie. I pulled it from the shelf, and the cover looked the same as the movie poster.
Score, I thought, and walked over to show my brother who told me I was a loser, and to go away.
I checked out the book, brought it home, and put it my nightstand as an act of defiance. When my mom saw it and said nothing I was ecstatic. I had won. I’d busted through my parent’s draconian wall of control. The feeling was fantastic, and it only got better because, there, on the first page, was the word ‘shit’.
My world exploded. It didn’t make sense. Books were nice things. Every book I’d ever read was nice. To me, reading was a nice thing that nice people did when they were being nice. Swearing was not nice. No, in my little boy mind, swearing was cool.
I never checked out another book from the children’s section. I started checking out books with cool covers. Fantasy books. Sci-fi books. Books with international intrigue, car chases, double crosses, and sex. Books where flawed, foulmouthed characters strayed from the path of good only to end up doing right in the end.
At twelve I was reading all the time. My parents, who would not let me watch TV after 9:00 p.m. or see R rated movies, recommended Vonnegut.
Throughout school other kids would say books were dumb, and I’d tell them about the gun fights in L’amour’s westerns. When they complained about Romeo and Juliet my freshman year, I showed them Vonnegut’s hand drawn pictures in Breakfast of Champions.
A few years ago I asked my mom why she and dad never censored what I read. She said they were just happy I was reading. That it was important to them.
I once read the number one risk factor for a kid to take up smoking is to have at least one parent who smokes and figure the same logic applies to reading.
That we live in a society where kids are made to pretend they do not swear when they’re around adults, and vice versa, is a subject for another blog. But I will say I know I started reading for the same reason most kids start smoking. I thought it was cool.
I’m not so naive as to think parents will let their kids read books with adults themes just because my own experience was a positive one. They should, though, because there was a point in my childhood where I was reading challenging books, not because they were challenging, but because I wanted to. And it wasn’t because I wanted to learn new words, increase my rhetorical skills, or achieve a better understanding of history and human relationships. Sure all that happened, and I was happy for it. But learning wasn’t my goal. My goal was to read shit that was cool, fun, and interesting. The learning came as a happy accident.
Saul Lemerond is teacher and writer. He received his bachelor’s degree in English-Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and his Masters in the same from Central Michigan University.
He’s currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His book, Kayfabe and Other Stories, is available at Onewetshoe.com and Amazon.com.
He has several other stories, podcasts, and blog posts scattered across the internet that can be found with a Google search of his name.