Some people are cultured. So are bacteria. From this comes cheese, hundreds of varieties of cheese, some bitter and bold, others putrid and slimy. The nobility of any particular cheese is mostly a matter of personal taste, though serving a slice of American at a wine tasting would be unthinkable. American cheese doesn’t belong in high society. On the other hand, if you were to find yourself before a little silver trailer on 30th Street in Philadelphia and told the cheesesteak guy “hold the Cheez Whiz, pass the Camembert,” you’d be lucky to survive the encounter. There’s no room for fancy cheese on the streets of Philly.
When people are cultured, the results can be as varied as the catalogue of cheeses. So too are the means by which people become cultured.
I was cultured by El Fantastico.
My cousin and six years my senior, El Fantastico died of heart failure at the age of 36. He weighed well over 300 pounds, ate junk food non-stop, smoked pot every day he could, drank liberally, and was as lazy as a hippopotamus on the Nile. He never graduated from high school, never had a high-paying job, and never married.
That was sixteen years ago. I’ve outlived El Fantastico by ten years, have multiple degrees, a well-paying job, a wife of 25 years, and a great family. Still, a day doesn’t go by that something of El Fantastico doesn’t touch my life, or the lives of my three children.
El Fantastico loved everything truly “cultured” in life. When I was ten, he introduced me to music. We’d sit for hours listening to the smooth grooves of Sam & Dave, the psychedelic spasms of Arthur Brown, and the sorrows of the Moody Blues. His record collection was as immense as he was. He listened to everything from Ray Charles to Queen to Aerosmith, all vinyl, hundreds and hundreds of records to be re-catalogued and revisited.
And there were the classics: the seminal zombie films Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, the groundbreaking science fiction of Forbidden Planet and Star Trek, the comedy greats George Carlin and, of course, Monty Python. We’d stay up late to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus on public TV. Once a year, they’d show Monty Python and The Holy Grail on Memorial Day weekend. What would I be today without the Holy Grail?
El Fantastico was also a collector of rare things. His vast comic book collection educated me in everything Marvel. Back then I could tell you the names, alter egos, and origin stories of superheroes most people never heard of. We all know of the Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, and Thor. But do you remember Luke Cage Power Man? Or how about the Iron Fist? Galactus and the Watcher? The Brute and Howard the Duck? There were so many. He collected only the best: comics of Marvel and EC, and sometimes Atlas. Never anything so pedestrian as DC. I think it was the art that drew him to comics. He loved the brilliant colors and fantastic poses and immense emotion in those old comic book frames. (Yes, I learned art from El Fantastico. Have you ever seen a Frazetta? No? Check him out. El Fantastico had several, right between his posters of Boris Karloff and Farrah Fawcett.)
When I was eleven or twelve El Fantastico taught me to play chess and Risk. He was a master at anything that involved strategy, especially board games. I don’t think I ever beat him in a serious game. He loved to win, and if he was losing, he loved to cheat. Sometimes I wonder if he enjoyed cheating more than winning. To him that was the best kind of joke. The only time he was serious was when he was lying, and when he grinned without looking at you he was cheating. Honesty wasn’t something I learned from El Fantastico.
Later, we rebuilt the core of his turquoise 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 from the ground up. Since El Fantastico was skillfully lazy, I had the honor of doing most of the work, and learned about motors and transmissions and axles and bearings. When it was running, we’d cruise Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak and have the kind of exalted fun you can only have rumbling down a late-night road in a classic muscle car.
By the time I was fourteen, we were going out more than staying in. That was before cable TV or cheap video tapes. If you wanted to see a movie, and it wasn’t on broadcast TV, you went to the theater. There were Three Stooges Festivals at the Main and sci-fi double-features at the drive-in. Downtown, the Prudential ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show every Friday and Saturday at midnight for years. By sixteen, I’d seen it 29 times. You want culture? Visit a long-running late show of Rocky Horror.
Finally, before we grew apart and I went my own way, El Fantastico became the live-in caregiver for six mentally handicapped adults. He had the entire basement as his apartment, which he filled with all that was El Fantastico: comics, music, art, movies, games, and friends. The large man tenderly cared for his charges, ensuring they were always safe and had everything they needed. More than that he treated them like brothers and sisters, drawing them into the world of El Fantastico, enriching their lives just as he had mine.
I can’t think of much that El Fantastico left that prepared me for success. But, man, he lived. We lived. I wouldn’t trade the years in that cerebrally hedonistic wilderness for anything.