Picklehelm Memories

At the time, I had started to think about becoming a writer. I didn’t see it as working in cross purposes with my ideas that I would go on to become an international lawyer at the International Criminal Court. It simply was my plan B. I was being smart. I was hedging my bets. Being creative appealed to me just as much and creating stories that people would read and building a business around it. It was fun, creative, and provided a helpful break from the drudgery of my International History class.

The pattern was fairly straightforward: leverage the talent of your friends for future promises of tremendous profits and have a solid plan to generate those dollars. In that way we got a little out of control. Comic books take a long time to produce. Our pattern of writing for 3 hours every night and getting a friend to work on art as we concepted and completed scenes would take months to finally complete itself. We were cash poor and needed a way to produce money in a timely fashion. That was when we decided to start making t-shirts and skateboards. We struck something with that. While we spent months working on comic books we could go to fairs and such and peddle our t-shirts. They came in three designs which, unfortunately, I cannot find any longer to post here.

It was fun, getting together in what should have been a modest dining room in my friend’s apartment working on all our projects. Another of our friends had a passion for music despite working at the local meatpacking plant. So, we started a record label. The Flautist in me was excited to be doing something musical and we knew tons of musicians around which we could create shows and merchandise (after all we knew a new t-shirt brand that had just opened up) and we thought it would be a good way to exploit his talents as well. You can hear some of his work below:

He was and is a brilliant musician who was learning to produce. I think he eventually went into the military. We signed a few bands, we rehearsed. I trained them in music theory and did the best I could to do what I could with the sound. There is a lot of talent waiting to be uncovered wasting away in retail and meatpacking plants. It was a fun camaraderie atmosphere and for me, it was important because not only did I think we had the potential to go big time but it was formative for my writing career. I had thought about being a writer but I hadn’t spent much time being creative in my 2 years of political science.

I was raised with a single ethos about school: when you’re young you go to school and school is your life. You don’t have any other life because you have school. School comes first before anything else. Are you awake? Good, you can be doing something for school. Add in the fact that I was homeschooled and you can imagine how I approached College and life. So, faced with a structured graduate program that didn’t let me go as fast as I wanted or thought I could go (thank god) it left me with plenty of down time that I had to fill with something productive that would “guarantee my success.” My freelancing business as anemic at best so in the evening hours I was in the dining room with my friends creating in a kind of collective. It was guerilla. We found the cheapest most ratchet hosting possible at $6.00 a month and sometimes it was a struggle to scrape together those meager funds. Funding of course, was the biggest problem and we were all broke with not great prospects besides this company. I know I had pinned my hopes and dreams on this company and our interesting and eclectic ideas.

Doing this gave me a chance to pick up some critical writing skills: how to write expressive, unique dialogue and how to plot. I had great ideas and premises for things but I had no real skills to create the moments that tell the story other than to simply tell you, “It’s X and Y and they do this!” But no way to create that world and take the reader into the moment. My writing partner had the opposing problem. He had great ideas and could plot very well but could not write dialogue. Between my ability to describe scene and his desire to plot we started to write and I started to learn how to write dialogue. I bought the Writer’s Digest book on Dialogue and got busy. Once we finished the first one, we were hustling to any shop that would take us. I represented several months of work and for the first time in my life I could hold my work in my hands.

We produced 2 comic books before I packed up the bulk of the company and departed to try to make it a real business. Two things made things harder: I had to move about an hour away and my life was moving on towards my time in fashion and nightlife in Denver. The distance didn’t seem like it would be a problem at first but after several months of trying to make it work and a bad car accident later, it was becoming obvious that it just wasn’t going to work out. There were also mentors and associates who were in my ear on the matter as well. If I wanted to go and do the things that I dreamed of, this just wasn’t the vehicle for it. When I started calling friends involved and talking with them about the situation I was surprised at the response of people who encouraged me to depart.

So I left, I took most of the company with me except the comic books and I went on my own path. 3 months later, thanks to a complete lack of funding the entire enterprise collapsed both amongst myself and my former partner. I did get my dream of fashion week and it wasn’t quite everything I had envisioned but it was successful. People really did come and really did enjoy fashion but it took every resource, favor, and begging phone call that I could muster to create and certainly every financial resource that I could muster as well. That left me tired and broke. I stood in the 3 Lions Bar in Denver with a stiff drink after the last night of fashion week, tired, sweaty and realizing that I was fairly well ruined and that spelt doom for my company. The aftermath was fairly messy. My life after that didn’t get much better for along time and there were some dark days following. Fortunately, it has been long enough now that I can look back on those early nights working in his dining room with fondness and I could hold my copies of my comic books in my hand and know that no matter what happens.

After it all ended everyone went off on their separate ways as did I. I kept freelancing as that was the only way I could make money and by 2013 I had started to write in earnest and I discovered the mature writing voice that I now exercise everyday. Sometimes I miss it. I did get sad writing this. It seems like a bygone era. My business partner recently joked, “Oh you’re writing about how not to write comic books.” I don’t know if I’m writing about that so much as I’m recapture that youthful verve and possibility that one tends to lose as one ages. It’s not just a pleasant memory, it is a pleasant Picklehelm Memory.