One Story, Building: A Memoir on the Power of Story

Introduction

One lazy day during my junior year of high school, the teacher gave us a free period to do as we pleased while she worked at her desk. Our boredom eventually gelled into a game of charades. We wrote our own clues on scraps of paper and placed them, facedown, onto a desk. Whoever’s turn it was drew a clue and acted it out—silent or talking, we didn’t much care.

Horse?

Yeah.

The principal!

Totally.

And so on like this for a while, until eventually it was time to replenish the clues. What I did next embarrasses me terribly. I wrote my own name on one of the scraps and put it secretly in the pile. All the wearisome anxieties of teenage insecurity are represented by that simple, selfish act.

Wes Young. Who am I? And, equally important to me at the time: who am I to them? I wanted feedback, and here I’d stumbled into a unique mirror-mirror on the wall.

If this action was telling, the next bit told even more. A classmate eventually drew the card with my name on it. I froze, hoping he wouldn’t recognize the handwriting. He didn’t. Neither did he start acting. There was an awkward pause, an eager anticipation among the competitive crowd of guessers, a quick chuckle, and—nothing.

I don’t know, he finally said. I mean, I don’t know what to do.

I should have seen this coming. Had I drawn the card myself, even I couldn’t have acted it out, for I didn’t know what self of mine there was to act. One might as well have told a liquid to Shape up! as tell a young Wes Young to be himself. In those days, my fluid personality, like so much water, knew only how to mold to its surroundings and then reflect like a pool what was already there. But a boy is meant to be a man, not a pond, and I was a man drowning in a sea of too many personality options, too many imitations. In truth, a charade actor who drew my name in those days would do well to check the last movie I’d watched or book I’d read to find out how to be me—if one could rightly call it me. What my real self was, even I did not know.

To be clear, mine was a happy childhood. Good home, great parents. This isn’t that sort of memoir. But even in the best of circumstances, growing up is a complex road.

Also, I am not famous. I have neither climbed Everest nor won the World Series. My life might be of regional or personal or comical interest, but that’s all. The point, though, is that it provides a convenient and convincing bit of evidence for the argument of this book. A case study is more about the theory being proven than the person, the case, being studied. So too with this memoir. I use myself because I am a subject I know intimately and have full access to. Other cases might equally work (I doubt any could work better), but their stories are not mine to tell. I am shy about writing of others in any identifiable way, and have deliberately avoided it in this book.

This memoir explores the power of narratives in our world, and shows the particularly strong influence they had in shaping my self, especially in the formative years from two to twenty. Humans crave story. A child is born into a world he knows not, and parents give him context through story. An amnesiac wakes in his ward, knowing nothing and nobody, until a loved one tells him the story. Characters, whether fact or fiction, live out their lives on book pages and TV screens, lending context and meaning to our own waking narratives. In my life, I think they gave an inordinate amount of context.

Stories were always the key that fit my lock. I loved them. As a kid, when the Atlanta Braves had a rain delay, and the local cable network filled the slot with The Andy Griffith Show, I rejoiced. To this day, I’d rather watch Field of Dreams than an actual baseball game. Stories were and are the currency of my mental exchanges, often even surpassing logic. For instance, if I have a load of cold groceries in the trunk of my car and am worried that a stop at the library might take too long, my mind does not go to anything so logical as the science of milk and eggs, pasteurization and salmonella. Instead, it reverts naturally to a narrative: If I had bought these at a grocery in Warner Robins, I wouldn’t think anything of a thirty-minute commute home. Or again, If I suffered a flat tire and had to change it, I wouldn’t throw out my groceries because of the delay. And so, thus convinced, I stop at the library.

As a kid, I did not recognize this story potency even when it was right in front of me. In truth, it’s an easy thing to miss because stories are by nature transparent. They are lenses. I remember once, as a kid, falling headlong into a season of science. It was a passion that lasted several years, and seemed clearly my life’s calling. I would be a scientist. I would invent and experiment. I would, best of all, have a laboratory. Not satisfied to wait until adulthood, I began my experiments right away. I acquired toy test tube kits and log books and all the typical paraphernalia of a dreamy young scientist. For one experiment, I tested a hypothesis I’d formed about objects in motion—we’d been studying Newton in science class at school. I proposed that an object moving one direction and then reversing and going the opposite direction must first, if only for a microsecond, stop entirely.

For my experiment, I hung Dad’s 8mm video camera above the wooden desk in my room. I aimed it downward so as to record the flat surface from a bird’s-eye angle. I then took an object and slid it forward and backward on the desk as the camera filmed. I did it several times slowly, then several times quickly. Afterwards, I reviewed the tape on the little box television we kept upstairs. I still remember that recording, not so much because it proved anything about motion—it didn’t—but because of how blind I was to something so obvious. The object I chose for the back-and-forth slide happened to be a book, and more than that, it was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I tell you truly, I did not pick that object deliberately, but my subconscious must have been at work. The fact is, my science kick in those days was almost wholly attributable to my reading and watching Frankenstein. I was obsessed with that story, and there, mid-experiment, was the mystery right in front of me. I saw nothing, for I had not yet learned to see stories as stories.

Narratives were uniquely cloaked for me because I was eventually to become a storyteller myself, and the writer-calling is peculiarly hard to spot. Were I called to be, say, a baseball player or a fireman, then we’d have recognized the telltale tendencies easily and early.

Man, that boy just won’t stop throwing the ball around, will he? or He sure likes those toy fire trucks, doesn’t he? But to be called to storytelling, this is a path fraught with one red herring after another. Neither the kid nor those closest to him see it. One month he plays at ship captain or submarine commander. Perhaps he ought to join the Navy. The next week he is a secret agent. He should try the FBI. Then a scientist. Then a musician, hockey player, fisherman, golfer, gangster, and school teacher. On and on it goes, with his passions and pseudo-callings ever changing depending on what book he most recently read or what movie he most recently absorbed. He’s like Barney Fife after the Glenn Ford movie played at the Mayberry theater—the very next day demanding a security check at the Mayberry Bank! I totally get that, and will only add that in life it’s even more diverse: Glenn Ford saving the bank one week, John Wayne robbing it the next. Such a boy seems mercurial and flighty, and he is, but the answer is as solid as it is elusive: He loves stories. He’s a storyteller.

Imagine, by way of analogy, a kid whose actual calling is to become a telescope maker. Years go by, and everyone misses it. They think for a while that he loves stars, will make a fine astronomer, for he keeps looking at the sky through his telescope. Then later that he loves ships, will make a great sailor, for he keeps staring at the sea’s horizon. Or the moon, or the mountains, or the deer across the meadow. Because a telescope is, by nature, a thing meant for viewing other things, identifying an interest in telescopes themselves is uniquely difficult. So too with stories, which are not any one thing, but are humanity’s scope for viewing and contextualizing all things. Unseen, yet through them, all else seen. Story itself, and the hands that craft it, are as invisible as glass. Think about it, can you name the screenwriter of the last movie or show you watched? Yet these invisible hands, typing away at their keyboards, are running the world.

They certainly shaped my life, as you will see. The power of narratives on my young self was so intoxicating that I came of age as a sort of multiple personality, oil and water and two dozen other streams besides, all unmixing.

Unmixing, but not unbridged. Woven through this memoir, let the reader understand, is the One Story that differed in substance from all the others, the one that eventually overwhelmed and redeemed them all.

This account is entirely true, as I remember it.

PART I

Motion pictures have a very definite place in the fabric of community life, and an important role to perform. They lift the dull cares and worries of everyday life from the minds and shoulders of the masses, and for an hour or so transport them to a make-believe world outside themselves, thereby relaxing and refreshing the mind and body.

—from the Souvenir Program for the Grand Opening of the Vogue Theatre in Cochran, Georgia, August 27, 1951

20,000 Leagues

My family’s one childhood pilgrimage to Disney World was marked, beyond anything else, by a single ride: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage. The attraction featured actual, half-submerged Nautilus submarines moving along underwater tracks. Inside the sub, below the waterline, passengers sat in two narrow rows, backs to the middle, faces toward the portholes. I loved this ride. Through the watertight glass I saw undersea divers, sunken shipwrecks, cases of golden treasure, and, of course, a giant squid. It was the film come to life, an immersion into the world of Nemo. This attraction ended its twenty-three-year operation in 1994, but it wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm from this seven-year-old. I rode and re-rode and re-rode that ride until the employees probably began to wonder what I was up to. And my parents, having paid good money for a day at Disney, had to be wondering if we would ever actually see the rest of the park.

Wes, how about Dumbo?

Or Peter Pan?

"Or anything else?"

To which I replied, pointing at the submarines, Again!

Even a detour to the restroom was too much delay for me. This led, unsurprisingly, to our discovery that the theme park version of Nemo’s ship had no head, no toilet. Mid-ride, well out to sea, I told my dad the bad news: I really need to go to the bathroom.

Yaaargg.

The scenes out the portholes were the same as the first dozen rounds, but now all I could think about was getting relief. I shook my feet, crossed my legs, uncrossed them again, loosened my belt, tried different positions in the seat—all of little