When I was a child, all I wanted to be was a cop. I could probably blame my parents for letting me watch Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Turner & Hooch as early as kindergarten, but I’ll blame it on my overactive imagination. Still, that is what I thought policing was all about: running around making snarky remarks, shooting and getting shot often, and generally kicking ass with very few consequences. In the third grade, I even wrote a sprawling cop tale titled LAPD that filled up 78 pages of a spiral notebook and followed the adventures of my adult detective self - the “#2 cop in the world” as I put it so modestly in my story - pursuing a ruthless serial killer named Jason Travers, who, among other things, brutally murdered my character’s longtime girlfriend Kasey Crawford (her name derived from the then hottest model in the world Cindy Crawford whose poster even then I had on my wall - always the lover of women, I was). The story was chock full of inconsequential violence, adult language, and gratuitous nudity - yet, when I showed off my twisted story to my teacher, she only praised me for my motivation, and when I showed my peers, they showered me with enthusiastic praise as well as their own confusion with what they had just read (and why there hadn’t been more Ninja Turtles in it).
It was around the fifth grade that I came to adore the Alien movies and decided that perhaps my future lay in the life of not just a cop, but a space cop. Besides, if Back to the Future II and Blade Runner were any indication, by 2015-19, we would certainly be in space, and if we were in space, then is was unquestionable that space cops would be needed - a priority even.
So then came my fifth grade novel Alien Havoc - my very first typed affair that followed the space cop that was my future self who stumbled across an alien ship chock full of aliens completely ripped off from the world of Ellen Ripley (with a touch of influence from the 1995 arguable soft-core porno Species, which I somehow convinced my mother to let me rent on VHS after riding my bicycle 8 miles to the nearest movie store and having the clerk call home asking for permission - “Yeah, mom, it’s sort of like Aliens only newer”). My new novel, I felt at the time, was my magnum opus, a brilliantly crafted examination of not only my character, but also the thoughts of the queen alien as well, bouncing back and forth in a third person narrative between our two characters.
It was fucking terrible.
But hell, what eleven year old didn’t imagine a life of glory, of traveling in space and fighting aliens, of getting the girl after a few potentially mortal wounds. Naturally, this desire would stick with me, even as I shed the silliness of my childhood and replaced it with the silliness of my teenage years. I expected, as a graduating senior in high school, to still go into the field.
But I had no idea. I wondered, at age eighteen, if being a cop was reasonable. I had no idea. I applied everywhere for every program that I could imagine exciting. I applied and was accepted to Embry-Riddle for the Aeronautical Science program to be a pilot, California State Long Beach for Film and Video Production to become a filmmaker, Cornell for English to become the writer, UPenn for political science to become to youngest president, John Jay in NYC for criminal justice to become a cop - in other words, I was 18 years old and had no goddamn clue what I wanted to do, except that I wanted to do everything. I had big plans even if I hadn’t yet made them. Eventually, I left my small town in Pennsylvania, my country boy upbringing, to pursue a dual major in criminology and sociology at Florida Southern College, a small college situated between Orlando and Tampa Bay that forced me to go to a Sunday church service twice a semester (I skipped once and they knew… goddammit, they knew). With this degree, my hopes of a crime fighting related future were still intact and I had visions of working for the DEA, maybe, just maybe even the CIA if I could con my way into it - that is before after a few semesters I transferred back to a crummy ol’ state college back home in PA leaving behind my life of year-round tans and bleached blondes in hopes of securing the high school sweetheart and in turn completely altering my major to the education field, which she was also in at her own school. We’d be two peas in a pod, two teachers, sharing vacations, sharing stories - how sweet, I had thought at the time.
It was a strange, strange turn of events for a young man who had once said as a teenager: “I will never ever be a teacher. Too predictable of a life.” Ask the eleven year old me if I would be in my mid-twenties and back in the area that I grew up back in a rural school, and that eleven year old me would only laugh. “No,” he would say, “If I’m not in space at that point then it’s only because I’m dead.” Well, I’m alive. And I’m not in space. Yet.
