They surround me when I sleep on the blue corduroy couch in the half-finished basement back home where I go to migrate as the summer heat in my bedroom is no longer tolerable with a box fan on full blast. They stare at me with their multi-colored spines, titles ranging from infamous to utterly unknown.
I can’t tell you exactly when my personal DVD obsession began but I can tell you where the obsession came from: my Dad. He used to work at Suncoast, a now-defunct (as they all practically are) mall video store. It was a job I was meant for but born too late to have.
Dinosaurs and monsters were early subjects of my obsession. I became utterly fixated on toys, books, movies, etc., which featured dinos or monsters, no matter the quality. Jurassic Park III and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters were ritualistic after-preschool viewings.
I was allowed to watch most things in our extensive collection. But despite David Bowie’s titular song being one of my first favorite songs, Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People was off the table for its explicit eroticism. I could (and often did) watch the original film from the forties. But I was permitted to watch Kuroneko despite the brutal assault and murder scene within the first ten minutes. Turns out that scene was more brutal than I remembered (more than I care to describe; viewer discretion advised). I only discovered this when I rewatched the film while writing my First Year Research Seminar paper on another J-Horror childhood favorite, Hausu (a film where you too can witness a piano eat a woman!)
The most alluring of these forbidden films was John Carpenter’s The Thing. The DVD we had was really nothing special. SteelBooks and limited edition releases weren’t as big with the collector market as they are now. We just had a basic DVD with the classic, cold poster on the front cover. This was another case where I was allowed to watch the original (the 1951 The Thing From Another World), but not the eighties remake. My Mom was afraid that the visceral dog death would give me nightmares. Typical excuse.
My Mom was the warden at the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women for most of my childhood, so she sometimes had to be out of town for correctional conferences. One of these trips came around when I was seven years old. The moment she stepped out of the house, dragging her black carry-on suitcase behind her, I began to plot my escape from the cell of not knowing what all the fuss was about this Thing.
I sat on the living room carpet in the middle of the three sunbeams coming through the front door. I was taught to pray to a similar trinity of light, so I interpreted this as a good sign. I turned to my Dad, who was sitting in his brown, pleather chair browsing Facebook.
“Can we watch The Thing?” I asked. I’m sure I plastered the sad eyes I often practiced in the mirror onto my face. He didn’t answer for a couple seconds. I thought he was for sure going to shoot me down. But then he stood up.
He walked over to the tall shelf closest to our old, heavy TV, and reached for the DVD. . “Do not tell your mother I let you watch this.”
~
I came out as asexual to my Dad in the Target dollar section.
I never had real crushes growing up. By “real,” I mean real people. I certainly have plenty of fictional crushes. Highlights include:
- A triangle in a tophat (Gravity Falls)
- A polygonal woman who only speaks in insults and business lingo (ƎNA: Dream BBQ)
- An eldritch tree monster that sings opera (“Over the Garden Wall”)
- The manifestation of a man’s desire for punishment donning a metal triangle (what is up with me and triangles?!) on its head (Silent Hill)
- A shirtless freak with perfect teeth (No, I’m Not A Human)
- Hate Pillar (“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”)
Incredible taste, I know.
But that’s all fiction. The closest I ever got to kissing anyone in real life was in the fourth grade. As it does in elementary school, some miscommunication culminated in my classmate Josh and I being surrounded by the rest of our class on the recess field. They spun around us in a layered circle with an almost choreographed dance, pleading for us to “KISS! KISS! KISS!”
Josh and I spent five minutes whispering through gritted teeth trying to figure out how to fake a kiss before everybody lost interest and disbanded, leaving us alone in our confusion and discomfort.
I didn’t get why everybody cared so much. Sure, Josh was an acquaintance. We traded Five Nights At Freddy’s keychains a couple times. But I didn’t like like him.
I never like liked anyone.
Four years later, I discovered the term “asexual” by complete accident. I came across the term “demisexual” (a microlabel on the asexuality spectrum) as a search recommendation while looking up Demi Lovato. From there, I fell upwards into the arms of an angel cloaked in monochrome with a purple sash. And while holding me in their porcelain-smooth arms, they told me everything was going to be okay.
At Target, my Dad stood across from me as I picked up each miniature Pride flag in the dollar bin and explained what they meant. I went through them one by one until I found the four-striped, mostly monochrome flag with its singular purple stripe at the base. I held it up, took a breath, and said:
“This is the asexual flag. Which is what I am.”
My parents are both pretty open-minded, but I was still afraid they wouldn’t understand. By that point, I had been going back-and-forth about whether I even wanted to tell them for a few years. I figured it would be as good a time as any since I was about to start high school, supposedly a time for new beginnings. Maybe coming out would be the first step towards becoming more comfortable with carving the shape of my life ahead of me.
Still, I had been terribly anxious since eating my club sandwich at McAlister’s Deli an hour earlier, second-guessing my plan to come out (even hoping that I could avoid it if they were out of my flag in the dollar bin).
My Dad simply said, “Okay.”
And he bought me the flag. It’s still in my room at home, balanced in the crest of my antique secretary desk.
~
My Granny gave me a portable DVD player when I was five so I would stop hogging the TV watching Generation Three My Little Pony and Cats & Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore when we visited her house. I took that player home with me eventually and it lasted me a little under a decade. In 2015, I took it to Florida and performed a one-person show in the hotel of the final chapter of “Over The Garden Wall” while the episode played on the tiny screen behind me. The only other thing I remember about that trip is making my Mom buy me six Warrior Cats books at the Barnes & Noble in Destin. All of which I had to haul home in my red, blue, and yellow suitcase.
I’ve always had my little hyperfixations. Warrior Cats was nestled inside my frontal lobe from the fourth to seventh grade. I’d gather all my cat plushies into a basket and drag them outside to throw around under the big tree in my grandparents’ backyard, pretending they were at war.
Chucky, the slasher villain, was one of my imaginary friends in the third grade. Whenever my class was pulled down the hall to attend Mass every Tuesday, I would imagine that he was running around the altar and parkouring across the ceiling beams. I have to this day never seen any film in the Child’s Play franchise.
Despite my extensive list of specific obsessions (see above list of fictional crushes), I’ve had a more general interest in collecting since I was trusted with a debit card. First, there were long sprees at independent record stores. But once that became too expensive, I broke up with the wax for bound paper, and a different kind of disc.
Half Price loves to see me coming. I’m often called a book addict by my friends. I have no idea why. It’s not like I go twice a week. It’s only once! Usually…
Found in many shopping centers with shitty parking lots, Half Price has everything I want.. They’ve got books that aren’t actually at half price, especially if they’re Harlan Ellison paperbacks (I can’t believe I spent twenty bucks on a singular mass market paperback of Paingod once.) But I’ll give them a pass since they have cheap Blu-Rays and DVDs. (Ignore that I spent seventy dollars on my copy of Possession during one trip a couple years ago. They’re usually cheaper than that.)
I have followed in my father’s footsteps. I have about four-hundred films packed into my shelves. The collection keeps spreading, growing like a pretty mold across my dwindling shelf space. I have no plans of stopping the spread.
~
In such a sex-and-romance-obsessed society, it’s sometimes hard to explain that I have no personal interest in those subjects. For me, it’s like having a salisbury steak slid in front of me, and I cannot stand salisbury steak, but everybody around me is constantly talking about how delicious it is. I could never eat the meat.
I had been plagued by the question, “Do you have a boyfriend?” since I could hold a coherent conversation with another person. My Mom even used to joke about me having a boyfriend sometimes, especially around Valentine’s Day. It was a bit I never found funny.
Those kinds of jokes stopped after I came out.
I consider myself lucky for that.
My asexuality (and later realized aromanticism) has not prevented other people from developing crushes on me. One person even asked in writing for “JUST ONE CHANCE ALLIE I BEG!” But despite the Devil In Miss Jones poster nailed on my wall and the section of vintage pornos on DVD at the bottom of my bookshelf, I remain just as repulsed at the idea of getting just a peck on the cheek as I was in fourth grade. I guess whatever wire in my brain that was supposed to be attracted to other people decided that boutique Blu-Rays were far sexier.
~
When I was three, I found a small, orange-and-yellow dinosaur toy in my preschool’s parking lot. I believe it was meant to be an Allosaurus. The mold the company used made it look like a chunky chimera of carnivorous prehistoric beasts. I loved it for what it was. It only left my side when I placed it on the light wood bookshelf across from my converted crib to look over me while I slept. I took it to school in the front pocket of my blue overalls and let it go ahead of me on the slide. I brought it to the park in Brown County, Indiana where we rolled around in the bug-infested leaves after staring at the confectioners at the candy shop in town making Red Hots all afternoon. Though I already had the exact same dinosaur toy at my house, I had found this one. I fell in love with this little orphaned toy.
When I love something, I like to keep it close. I like it within my grasp.
It’s probably why I have a giant, talking Bill Cipher plush at the foot of my bed. It’s why I sit across from my The Thing poster, the same art that was on the DVD my Dad sold a long time ago and I later found at Barnes and Noble for $9.99.
When I like a movie, why should I have to rely on what streaming has in stock for a limited time? You think physical media’s dead? Well, if the end of the world comes, don’t come crying to me when you can’t watch The Black Cauldron on Disney+. Me? I’ve got four copies.
When I’m home, I sleep not in the embrace of some romantic partner, but within the comforting, collective gaze of my favorite shitty slashers and A24 collector’s editions. Phantom of the Paradise sits below the entirety of Twin Peaks. The unknown Goatsucker under Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. They all have a home on my shelf. The only thing “allo” about me remains the tire-scuffed Allosaurus watching me from beside my Fire Walk With Me themed lava lamp. I am content.
So I sit amongst the discs that reflect rainbows when angled just right. If I look closely, I can see my angel in the circular mirror. They have the same glasses as me.
