So, Mr. Krueger walks into a sixth grade classroom...

I like to think I didn't come from a broken home, I'd rather think I come from a bent home. Regardless, I don't think I need to stress anymore the fact that I was a strange child growing up.

See, my father was a good parent, I never lacked food or a roof over my head nor did I ever lack amenities: I traveled the world, got whatever toys my heart desired, whatever books or comics I wanted, I merely had to ask, same with video games.

The tradeoff was that while I knew I had a father somewhere, he was like the Loch Ness monster, or bigfoot: A legendary creature which I rarely ever saw. He was very busy at work, and when he wasn't at work, he was socializing with the people from his job. And failing that, he fraternized with the women from his job...y'know, in the biblical sense of the word.

Thing is...I needed him. I wanted my dad to pay attention to me, I wanted him to look at me and sorta be proud of me and my achievements. I wanted to be his friend.

It never happened.

And I thought there was something wrong with me, I thought it was because I was a huge nerd that liked reading about dinosaurs and evolution and shit and because I wanted to be a paleontologist or a writer, instead of a football player. Whatever the reason, I was convinced he didn't like me, that he was ashamed of me. And so, I tried everything to get his attention: I tried engaging him in conversation and he'd get bored, I'd go with him to watch bullfighting, despite me hating it, I'd watch football with him on television, despite the fact that at the time football bored me to tears. In short, I tried everything I could think of to get close to him, and failed miserably every time, as he hardly ever noticed that I was alive. The only thing that pleased him was when I got good grades at school, which back then was all the time.

Eventually I got tired, and when I found out he was fooling around with other women behind my mother's back, my frustration with him, teamed up with my rage over him cheating on my mum. To make matters worse, my family suffered a huge economic setback and I had to leave my posh high class elementary school, and go to a less exclusive place, thus losing all of my friends. The new school was a hellhole and everyone hated me.

I withdrew from the world, finding it too harsh and aggressive compared to what I was used to. I retreated into books, comics, video games, and movies, and started hating interacting with people. I became increasingly angry and frustrated with a rapidly changing world that my young mind could not keep up with. I became more violent, convinced that the world was out to get me, and that violence was the one and only answer these awful people understood in order to leave me alone.

Thing was, I was good at hiding it. You wouldn't notice just how screwed up in the head I was unless you took the time to be an ass to me. Once, shortly after I bought the Batman: Knightfall trade paperbacks, one of my classmates stole them from my backpack when we were out for recess. He even bragged to me he'd taken and hidden them and that I was never going to find them, because he'd hidden them so well.

I went to the bathroom and had me a very bitter fifteen minute long crying session; life was so unfair. Why did everyone hate me? So I went back to class, and when school was out, I saw said classmate with his back to me, completely alone.

I rushed the guy, and he went flying face-first toward the pavement, whereupon I started kicking the everliving shit out of him. At some point, I sat on his chest and started pounding on his face, my shit completely lost, screaming in his face he was going to give me my comics back or I was going to follow him to his house and I was going to kill him at night while he slept. I was just so fed up with people being dicks to me, because I didn't do anything wrong to people.

He tried to get me in trouble for that, but the school didn't give a shit, because whatever had happened between us, it had happened outside, so it was no skin off their ass.

They did keep an eye on me though, I remember the principal looking at me like I was something that had crawled out of a rotting log after taking a look at my classmate's now unfortunate looking face.

Another thing I feel I must make clear is that said elementary school was a somewhat religious institution. Prayer was observed before English class, and the entire school attended mass on Fridays; if your family belonged to another religion (or had none at all), you remained at school, you could not stay inside the classroom, you'd stay in the schoolyard, if it rained or if it was cold, well tough shit son, this wouldn't happen if you'd joined jesus' flock. You also could not talk to your fellow non-catholic classmates, you could not stand up, and you certainly could not go to the bathroom. Two hours, every Friday.

That shit got old after six months.

Another feature the school offered were "Morality" classes: Every Thursday, a lady would go and teach us the magic of jesus through arts and crafts, songs and other hippie shit like that. These were compulsory, even if you were part of the "Children of the Damned" club that didn't go to church (apparently the idea was to indoctrinate us against our parents' wishes). This lady...holy shit. Y'ever seen that guy Ned Flanders, from The Simpsons? This lady made him look like a serial rapist, that's how sheltered and naïve she was.

At that point in life, despite our impoverished condition, I still could watch cable TV, and as luck would have it, Halloween was around the corner, and that was the year I was exposed to "A Nightmare on Elm Street". Now, by then I was seriously into everything horror related, I had a sizable collection of Stephen King novels, and had plowed through eight Friday the 13th movies. My greatest dream and ambition was to be a renowned horror novelist.

This was also the year I was introduced to the wonders of the human reproductive system, you see, I lost my virginity at thirteen in the year 1994, which is...err, another tale for another time. As far as I know, my mum never found out about it, but maybe she suspected it, because she and my favorite cool uncle gave me the sexuality talk, and my mum bought me a biology book which explained all about pregnancy.

I dunno why, but back then, pregnancy fascinated me as much as it frightens me now. My brain just couldn't parse the whole "There's a human being inside another human". I imagined what it was like, how weird it looked to me and holy shit it must be so painful.

And to make things more complicated, a couple of years before, mum had bought me a typewriter, to support my writing habit. I wrote incessantly, I would buy paper with my allowance and I'd write the most horrible, violent things my tiny brain could come up with. This led me to win my old school's literature contest three times in a row, and I somehow came to think I had some sort of talent for writing horror.

All of these things coalesced into an almighty train-wreck, which began when the morality teacher opened her yapper and told us to make a drawing on our special "Art Notebook". "Draw whatever your imagination tells you to", said the lady.

You know where this is goin' don't you?

All of it came together in my head at that moment: My daddy issues, my anger, my desire to write horror, my new found obsession with sex, my confusion over pregnancy. And despite I've never been good at drawing, I felt I needed to express myself, to somehow put the things that were rattling around in my mind without using five thousand words on a sheet of paper.

So I made this horrifying drawing of a monster based heavily on Freddy Krueger, because, like pregnancy, I was fascinated and terrified by him. My monster had gigantic claws and huge gnashing teeth, and I kinda sorta decided to depict him disemboweling a pregnant woman, ripping the fetus out of her womb and devouring it.

Yeah.

So, teacher decides to collect our notebooks for grading them, stops by my desk and takes a look at my objet d'art. Y'know those automotive crash test videos where they smash a car against a wall at very high speeds, and then they play back the crash in slo mo, and you can see the car crumple like a cheap aluminum can? That's how this lady's face reacted to my drawing. It crumpled. It went from smiling to shocked, to horrified in seconds, but it also seemed to happen in this kinda weird slow motion.

So she starts to cry, takes my notebook and sprints, I shit you not, fuckin' sprints toward the principal's office. Before I can make out what the shits is going on, I'm in the principal's office, fat bastard is yelling at me if I think my little drawing is funny, so I just tell him the truth y'know, that I want to be a horror novelist like Stephen King when I grow up.

Fat bastard tears the page off my notebook, and throws said notebook at my face, it hits me full on and he says he wants to talk to my parents, he phones them, and an hour and a half later, mum's having a shouting match with fat bastard.

Fat bastard summons the school's resident psychoanalyst, who is also a deeply devout catholic, and I get locked up in his office with him for an hour, he bombards me with questions about me, my life, my family, the things I like, and why I made that drawing. I figure that by being honest with the guy, my plight might be better understood, so I level with him, I tell 'im to the best of my abilities that I feel like my life is out of control, that I'm confused, that things are changing way too fast, that I'm sad I left my old friends behind and that I feel lonely and hated by everyone.

As I tell him this, the feelings inside me just start piling up, and then they start to snowball, things start to tumble faster, and faster out of my mouth, and before I know what's happening, I start having a full blown psychotic breakdown in front of the guy, and I start trying to laugh and cry loudly. Guy then calls my folks inside and says he believes I might be possessed by satan, or perhaps another, minor demon. Because all of those horrible cartoons I watched had opened a pathway to my soul for him. Says he can call a few friends in the church that he knows well, move a few influences, but it's going to cost y'know, the whole requesting ghostbusters to come to Mexico all the way from the vatican, and shit.

I'm not fucking kidding here. This happened. Wish it hadn't, but it did.

So mum and dad tell the guy he's full of shit and to go fuck himself, which leaves us back at square fucking one.

Fat bastard says I'm expelled unless I go to a psychologist that can fix me, and we're left with little choice. We go home and dad then decides now is a good time to punch me in the face for the first time in my life. His hands're big, he connects. There's like a fuckin' fountain of blood pouring from my nose, at least from my perspective. Fortunately, he says, he's friends with a psychologist he knew from his old job, so I have to go there, unless I want to go to public school, where I'm certain I'll be eaten alive.

So I start going to therapy, for like the fourth time in my life. Right? And this psychologist starts to come to some interesting conclusions: All my abnormalities, all my issues, are either my mother's fault or just plain inventions of mine. She claims she can tell that I've made up all those times I saw dad cheating on mum, because according to her I do it to get attention, because I'm apparently jealous of my dad and want mum's attention to focus on me and that I want my dad out of the picture.

She elaborates that I'm spoiled, and that I need to be disciplined, she suggests my possessions be taken away, so I can learn that my behavior will not be rewarded, she says six months of being deprived of the things I like will be enough to set me on the right path. So dad complains that there is no place where my stuff can be stored other than my room, because hey, we're poor and we can't exactly afford another place to store my crap, where I can have absolutely zero access to it. Wouldn't you know it, the psychologist graciously offers to store my belongings in her house until I get better.

Obviously I go ape-shit and turn into a screeching dervish of rage and swear words, dad decides to hit me again, but this time he's in a good mood so he just slaps me to shut me up, Mum says nothing because we're talking with a mental health professional and she assumes this experience will make me more normal.

So away goes all my stuff: My comics, my books, my video games, my movies, my television. Everything. My posters come down from my walls. All of it ends up at the psychologist's house, which apropos of nothing, has a son my age, by the way. Jus' sayin'. My room ends up being four white walls and a bed. I withdraw from the world even more, and retreat into my own imagination. I stop talking at all. I become uncooperative at the psych sessions. Shrink gives me a Rorschach test and my answer to her question of what I see on the cards is always "An ink stain".

Two months go by of the same bullshit. Tell ya the truth, I got used to it. Days became these drab, gray blurs, everything was quiet, I didn't do badly at school, hell, when my classmates found out what I was going through, even they had a little compassion and felt bad for me, one of them even said my drawing had been "sweet". Even the douche that stole my comics said he was sorry, that he'd sorta gotten me into this shit.

At home, everything was just silence. And boredom.

One day after a session, the shrink says she wants to talk to my dad, so he tells me and mum to go wait in the car. We're halfway there when I remember I left my jacket at the shrink's office. I decide to go back. I open the door and are greeted by my dad's naked ass, and I see that my dad and the psychologist are fucking. Like, on the floor and everything. So they both freeze and just stare at me like a deer about to get run over by a car, the shrink then takes the initiative puts her finger to her lips and gives me the "shh" sign. At that moment, all the shit I had bottled up inside just sort of erupted, and I start yelling at the top of my lungs for my mum to come see this. They start scrambling to get dressed but only get in each others' way, by the time mum makes it there, both are still partially naked. Mum just shakes her head, says she wants a divorce, and demands the shrink to give me back my stuff.

As it transpired, the psychologist never had any intention to give me my shit back. Half of it, she'd already given to her kid as gifts. Mum threatened to sue her, and the bitch had the brass balls to plead for mercy: How was she going to tell her kid that she had to take away his presents? Mum told her to tell him the truth, that his mother was a whore and a thief, and that it would even build up his character a bit. We both laughed.

I never got all of my stuff back. Bitch gave back most of it, but not all. Her kid kept my Game Gear, Turbo Express, and Atari Lynx. He also kept my Neo Geo and all of the games. Bitch was evil, but not stupid, she knew how expensive a Neo was, especially with all of the games. In retaliation, I stole my dad's old golden Rolex, which like my Neo Geo, was a holdover from the time when we'd been well off. I sold his watch for dirt cheap and I was still able to replace most of my Neo Geo stuff. The bitch also kept a bunch of my comics, though mostly it was the Image stuff, like Gen13 and a whole bunch of Liefeld stuff, which her kid was really into. She kept a bunch of my books for herself and like twenty or so Super NES games, including stuff like Final Fantasy III, Super Metroid, and a brand new copy of Earthbound, which had been recently bought for me and I'd not opened, much less played.

I never hid from my dad that I'd stolen his watch, I did it with the full intention of being caught, because I was so pissed at him. He never said anything. One day, the whole family sat and talked, and talked, and talked for an entire weekend, and we decided upon a few things: That we'd fucked up royally as a family, that we were going to give it another try, that if dad tried any of that shit again his ass was grass, and that we would never talk about it. He never tried any of that shit again, or at least was careful enough not to get caught, and to never involve either me or mum in his crap once more.

So, yuh, that's the time me and Fred Krueger made a teacher cry. It's not exactly my best anecdote, but there it is. More or less. Hope you enjoyed.