For a good dose of Vitamin C and a refreshing thirst-quencher on a hot day, Tang was the drink of choice in the early 80’s. Their advertising campaign was apparently brilliant, but what the heck did I know at the time? All I do remember is one particular commercial in which a kid my age poured himself a tall glass of Tang. He walked away to put the pitcher back in the fridge and when he returned, his glass was empty. The Tang... had disappeared!!! Now, of course the mentality of the commercial was that while the kid was away, somebody else drank his orangey delicious Tang. I did not get that. To me, it simply meant that Tang was magic. You pour it in a glass, you walk away, and it disappears.

After two excruciating weeks of begging my mom, the magical ade finally appeared in our refrigerator. I was a big boy. I didn’t wait for anybody to pour it for me. I was very secretive, not wanting my parents to know what I was up to. If they had seen a cup sitting around, they were likely to have dumped it, so I put my full cup of Tang under the kitchen table and walked away. For a tense five minutes I specifically avoided the kitchen, giving the Tang time to work its wizardry. Finally when I couldn’t take it any longer, I walked as fast as I could without attracting attention, crawled under the table, and... saw that my glass was still full. It had not disappeared. It had not gone down an inch. Surely something was wrong. I hadn’t given it enough time. I walked away (for longer this time) and when I came back, it was still there. In this moment of defeat, I had received the first blow that would eventually lead to my fall. I had discovered that magic -- real magic -- does not exist.

Already off-balance, I would soon receive my second blow. This was a time when breakdancing was the thing, Michael Jackson defined "cool" and Thriller was the hottest video on MTV. Boy, did I want to be like Mike. More than that though, I wanted to be a zombie. Those guys were IT. They sang, punched through walls, climbed out of graves and walked around, acting very scary. They moonwalked for crying out loud! What kid wouldn’t think that zombies were the coolest things on earth?

After Thriller became old hat, I needed a bigger zombie fix. Walking through the horror section of our local video store, I passed a movie that immediately caught my eye. There was a very scary-looking man on the front of the box, and the title of the movie spoke volumes: Zombies. Again, I begged my mom to let me rent this movie, but she kept balking, giving me that old "maybe next week" delay tactic. In retrospect, I cannot fathom how any mother would let her 5-year-old watch this movie, but I was nothing if not persistent, and after weeks of badgering, Mom finally caved. I had never been so psyched. Thriller was a 10-minute music video. This was a whole movie full of zombies. I pushed play.

It took me far less than 10 minutes to realize that these were not the same kind of zombies that danced with Michael Jackson. These zombies were EATING PEOPLE! All that the zombies in Thriller ever did was look menacingly at Michael’s girlfriend, but these guys were tearing arms off of men, gouging women’s eyes out, and eating everybody’s guts! Picture the gross-out factor of Night of the Living Dead times ten. What the hell had just gone wrong with the universe? Compounded with the fact that I had also recently developed an irrational fear of fire, I was overflowing with nightmares. Blow number two knocked me backwards until I was teetering on the very edge. The world wasn’t like a cartoon or a Disney movie. There was evil -- genuine evil.

Trying to maintain my balance wasn’t easy the summer after kindergarten. I went to daycare with my friend Wyatt. The kid had two older brothers who, of course beat the shit out of him constantly. He was ultra-tough simply as a matter of survival. But since he had no prayer of winning a fight against his brothers, he instead had to manifest his aggression against the kids his own age, myself included. Wyatt was a tricky kind of bully because he was your best friend right up until the moment that he turned on you. After a week or so of subtle torment, I decided I’d had enough.

My battle-plan was simple. When I was bad, my parents spanked me. It hurt. I learned not to do those things that would get me hit and thus hurt. When my younger sister was being a pest, I would hit her so she would to stop. It hurt her. She cried. She learned not to bother me. So simple logic here: if hit equaled hurt, and hurt equaled termination of said behavior... The final straw came when Wyatt tried to take my Atari paddle. I was smack dab in the middle of Pitfall Harry and wasn’t about to throw down. I hauled back and punched Wyatt in the arm. His response was the last thing I expected. He laughed. He actually laughed. My blows had no power over him. In fact, after that, it seemed that the more I tried to prevent him from picking on me, the more he seemed to get a kick out it.

This final blow (combined with the previous two) sent me tumbling from the precipice of innocence. Not only was there no magic in the world, but there was actually the complete opposite of magic: evil. And as if those two weren’t bad enough, this last incident had shown me that sometimes, when evil happens, there is not a goddamn thing you can do about it. It all amounted to one final conclusion which many a kid has uttered: "It’s not fair." At first it’s said as a whine. "Not faaaaiiiiir." They are still trying to come to grips with this new and unpleasant feeling. Eventually, the whining lessens and it becomes a more conversational (or, at the very most, an aggravated) statement.

But, finally, we all give in to the reality of the situation. We accept that shit will happen. We realize that there is no magical solution. Often times there is no solution at all (magical or otherwise). But, by then we have recovered enough from our fall to realize that while it may not be fair, we have to be a grown-up and meet life face-to-face.