The Legend of Skulls

I have skulls. Boy, do I! I have fifteen or so ceramic skulls on display in my home, a skull incense burner, skull keychains, skull T-shirts, skull scarves and skull patches. I wear a skull necklace and have numerous skull earrings, as well as skull-headed stationary, skull-emblazoned business cards, skull flags, skull lighters and lots of other skull-oriented paraphernalia. And for the coup de gras, in the upper left hand corner of my personal checks, where most folks display their monogram or some sort of logo, I have -- you're way ahead of me here -- a skull and crossbones. "Well, what sort of psycho-pervert-weirdo-Satanist-long-haired-hippie-freak is this Lyle guy, anyway!?!!" Okay, for starters, I am NOT a Satanist. Nor do I "dabble" in the occult in any shape, form or fashion. As far as the other labels, well.......the jury is still out.
But it is natural for most people to associate skulls with negative concepts. In our culture, and numerous others, a skull and crossbones is symbolic of poison and death. Pirates of old used a skull and crossbones on a sable field (the "Jolly Roger") as a symbol of the death they so freely parceled out, both wholesale and retail. And so on. But a symbol means what it means to you -- regardless of how anyone else perceives it. And events in our lives, both positive and negative, can often form associations with a given symbol that forever changes one's perception of it.
My fascination with skulls, and especially the skull and crossbones, came about as the result of two completely separate and unrelated events, the first of which occurred in 1973. I had just turned 18, and moved out of my parent's house to share an apartment with two friends. One of the first things I had to do soon after my birthday was to open my own checking account. A mundane task to most of us, for sure -- but I was eighteen. Perhaps you remember from your own past those first tentative steps along the road that leads from adolescence to adulthood; the pride, the quivers of fear that you steadfastly refused to acknowledge -- but mostly the excitement of starting out on a life on your own. Though there were others, opening my first checking account will always be, to me, the alpha-point of my emergence into my own identity. My heart pounding with an odd combination of glee and terror, (for I understood that I was entering into my first legal contract, and would be obligated by law to be liable for charges and fees and stuff like that) I filled out the requisite forms, and then asked the nice bank-lady if it would be possible to have something up in the corner of my checks other than my initials. She provided me with a huge ring-binder to peruse, and went off with my paperwork to do bank-stuff. I was astounded at the variety of symbols, logos and icons that were available to choose from. You must understand that I had no idea what I was looking for. I simply knew what I didn't want; I didn't want something ordinary. I wanted something that would tell people that I was not ordinary; that I was Lyle Johnson and no one else; that I was different. Something that, when I wrote a check for groceries at the local Safeway or Piggly Wiggly would, more often than not, cause the checker to think, if not vocalize, "Well, that's unusual!" As I thumbed through the pages, I noticed a leering skull and crossbones. I actually flipped two or three pages past it while thinking, "Who in the world would put a skull and crossbones on their checks?" before it hit me. NOBODY. I flipped back to the page, and there it was, grinning at me as if to say, "I dare you!" When the bank-lady returned, though my tongue kept wanting to stick to the roof of my mouth, I managed to squeak out, "Could I get this one?" I fully expected to be frostily glared at, sternly lectured on my abominable bad taste and sent to my room. But she didn't bat an eye as she replied, "Of course. Now do you want that with the 'Antique' background, or perhaps our new 'Scenic Views'....." For the next few years, the skull and crossbones on my checks was the only one I had, and was merely an affected oddity. Something different. To me, it symbolized nothing more than, "Hey! Weirdness going on here!" That was all to change but a scant six years later.
In the early spring of 1979, I was newly-discharged from a four-year stint in the U.S. Army, married for almost five years and had a 2 1/2 year-old daughter and a brand new career as a telecommunications technician (90's terminology for "Phone-Man".) My wife and I had a mutually-agreed-upon system: on Saturdays, I would get up with our daughter and let Linda sleep in; on Sundays, Linda would get up with Joell and take care of her until I deigned to roll my lazy ass out of bed. On Palm Sunday, 1979, I was blearily awakened shortly after 7am to the sight of my wife holding my daughter in her arms in the hallway outside our bedroom, yelling at me. Almost immediately, she disappeared in the direction of the front door, and it was only then that her words finally penetrated my sleep-sodden skull -- "FIRE!!! Get out! I've got Joell!" Fire. Right. Here we go again.
Upon my separation from the Army, my family and I stayed with Linda's parents for a few months while we got oriented and arranged for our own apartment. During this period, I awoke one night to a noxious metallic smell and screams of, "FIRE!!" coming from everywhere. With visions of "The Towering Inferno" playing wide-screen in the back of my mind, I gathered my small family and joined the other six of my in-laws who lived in the house in an anything-but-graceful exit from the structure. As we barreled down the stairs and out into the 20-degree December night in a state of mindless panic, I think my daughter and I were the only two who were not shouting "helpful" advice to all the others. It was a zoo. We stood freezing in the street for an hour or so while the fire trucks came, bravely entered the house, and then finally came out to tell us that the gas line leading to the house had frozen and broken a valve, which caused the pilot-light on the stove top to shoot up and burn the paint off of most of the Vent-A-Hood. And so, we all survived.
Now, months later, as I struggled to get into my robe and shake off the groggy vestiges of sleep, I was certain that this was but another over-reaction, possibly due to the sensitizing effects of the first fire. I casually shuffled barefoot towards the bedroom door to check out this latest disaster, and possibly pour some water on it, when I became aware, simultaneously, of four facts. Item: The air not only stank, it hurt. Every breath I took stung my throat and lungs, and each succeeding breath was significantly worse than the one before. Item: My eyes were watering noticably. Item: It was hot, and getting hotter -- fast. Item: The roaring in my ears that I had attributed to not being fully awake was getting louder by the second, and was not quite drowning out an endless series of random pops, cracks and snaps. I was not nearly so complacent as I stuck my head out of the doorway and looked left to where the living room used to be. That's right. Used to be. What lived there now was a huge wall of fire, roaring and snapping insanely, seemingly bigger than the room itself used to be (It was. The fire had already burned through the ceiling and was now working on the roof far above.) Now thoroughly convinced of the seriousness of the situation, I streaked for the front door foyer, intending to touch the floor exactly once in its eight-foot length as I exited via the front door, which I was certain Linda had left open for me. It was at this point that I was unpleasantly confronted with one of the peculiar effects of closed-dwelling fires. If the fire is hot enough (and this one was apparently an overachiever in that regard) it will heat the surrounding air at an astonishing rate. Heated air expands. Expanding air moves. Fast-moving air is called wind. Wind blows things. The door was closed. By the time this fact had penetrated my consciousness I was in free trajectory from my last leaping stride. I hit the door hard enough to knock the wind out of me, but managed to grab the doorknob as I bounced back. It saved me from backpedaling into the blaze, which was already advancing down the hallway towards the bedrooms. Unfortunately, I instinctively reacted as most everyone does when they have the breath knocked out of them -- I gasped in a great lungfull of air. It was a mistake. It felt as if I had literally inhaled the business end of a blowtorch. I may have screamed, I honestly don't know. The pain blotted out everything for a second or two. As I came to awareness of my surroundings, leaning on the foyer wall, still clutching the doorknob, I knew where I was and what was happening, but the constant inhalation of smoke and fumes had begun to take its toll. There was a grayness creeping into the edges of my perception; a feeling of detachment. This realization jolted me like the shock of plunging into ice-water and I leaped at the door, frantically twisting the doorknob. I must pause here to tell you about my doorknob. The apartment complex we lived in had installed on all the outer apartment doors a doorknob that I now refer to as, "the deathtrap doorknob." To lock it, rather than pushing and turning a central button, you pushed the entire doorknob in about a quarter-inch and turned it. To unlock it, you rotated the knob (without pushing) until it popped out a quarter-inch, then turned it (again, without exerting any forward pressure) until the latch drew back. A very simple operation under normal circumstances. Try it sometime when your brain is gibbering in terror and you have about a pint of adrenaline coursing through your system. It's like trying to thread a needle during shock therapy. On my first frenzied twist of the knob I struck the "stop" of the locked position, realized what had happened, and twisted wildly in the other direction, waiting for the knob to pop out. Which it didn't, of course -- I must have passed the "pop out" section at light-speed. I reversed again, and went back and forth, my agitation growing with each failure, for about three weeks. In real time, probably no more than a few seconds. Finally I thought, "To hell with this, I'm only on the second floor -- I can jump out the bedroom window, and if I break a leg, so be it." I whirled to race back to the bedroom and found that I had suddenly run out of options. In the 10 or 15 seconds max that I had been in the foyer, the fire had swept completely past, cutting off my retreat, and was visibly advancing toward me. Even as I was turning, I could feel the skin on my face tightening with the radiated heat of the flames. The gray cloud in my mind was closing in, and it was at that precise instant that I knew I was going to die. Not at some misty time in the far future, but right here, right now. And not only was I about to die, but I was about to die horribly, in agony. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was 24 years old.
I cannot prove it, nor can I be 100% certain in my own mind, but to this day I believe that it was the acceptance of my impending passage from this world that enabled me to save myself. This was the point at which I have read of and heard countless accounts of someone, "having their life pass before their eyes", or seeing visions of a tunnel with a bright light at the end, or hearing beckoning voices. None of these happened to me. What happened was that a curtain of calm descended upon me. The fear and panic vanished in an instant. What I felt I can only describe as a kind of "wistful regret" at the things I would never see or do. Nothing specific, just a general sorrow for what might have been. As if I had hours to do it in, I reached behind me without even looking and found the doorknob again. Using only my fingertips, and just enough pressure to create friction, I slowly turned the knob until I felt it pop out. I smelled my hair beginning to burn. Even so, I did not hurry. I continued gently turning the knob until I felt the latch draw back fully. The gray cloud was turning to black. I pulled delicately towards me on the knob and the door moved with my hand. At that point, the unearthly calm that had possessed me fled. I spun, jerking the door open, and bolted, smoking and choking, out into the morning. As I felt my legs go out, I managed to grab the railing at the top of the stairwell, narrowly avoiding an uncontrolled plunge down the concrete steps.
I came away from the experience, not so much a changed man, as I was a more focused one. There are thousands of people who have experiences similar to mine. That is to say, not only having a harrowingly near brush with death, but having it happen in such a way as to give them at least a few seconds, if not more, to be cognizant of the horror that was about to occur. Almost any rational adult will freely admit to you that they know they are going to die someday. But the difference between that casual statement of intellectual awareness, and the act of being there, and honestly believing your time has come, is like day and night. And those who have stood in that mind-numbing place, and survived to tell the tale, almost universally agree on one thing -- it makes you re-evaluate. Things and ideas that seemed so important the day before, when compared to life itself, are revealed as smoke and trivialities. I have been a very positive person all of my life, but even so, I realized that there was so much that I had taken for granted. And there were so many wrong-headed ideas that I had accepted and gotten comfortable with for no better reason than, "everybody says so." Not the least of which was the concept that, "it always happens to the other guy." This is a very true statement, as long as you realize that, to every other human being on the planet, you are the other guy.
During the next few days, I did a lot of hard thinking about what I really believed in, and what I thought was important. It was a week or so later, while buying groceries, that it all came together. My groceries had been rung up, and I pulled out my checkbook to pay for them. As I flipped open the cover, my eye caught the little skull and crossbones in the corner. Time suddenly froze. As clearly as Sir Richard Burton's rendition of Hamlet's soliloquy, I could hear its words in my mind -- "Yeah, pal, I'm still here with you. And I'll continue to be here, every second of every minute of every day for the rest of your life, just over your shoulder. And you'll never know when I'm gonna pounce again. Might be fifty years from now, might be in the next five minutes. I ain't sayin'. But we got unfinished business, you and I. Don't you forget it." And I never have. I'm human, and therefore imperfect. I still, on occasion, take people, events or things for granted, without consciously realizing how important to me they really are. But it happens a lot less than it used to. And at the core of my philosophy of life is a burning desire to grab every moment that goes by, and to wring from it every last drop of life that I possibly can. To let as little as I can of the mystery, wonder and joy of being alive get away. And should I ever momentarily forget the things that are truly important in this life, I always have my little friends around to remind me. My affinity for skulls is a celebration of life, love, friendship, laughter and peace of mind. Occasionally I will notice one of my skulls watching me, and in my mind will tell it, "Don't worry -- I'm not wasting it." And you know something? The grin I get back isn't evil at all, but approving.
Having read this far, permit me to thank you for doing so. Even if you disagree violently with my views, you have nonetheless allowed me to fully express myself, and that is my satisfaction. And who knows? Perhaps someday you'll catch a glimpse of a skull and crossbones on a can of pesticide, and remember having read this. And remembering, you just might be reminded anew of how precious and amazing life is, and how quickly and without warning it can be taken away. And maybe, just maybe, you'll seize the moment, and take the time to do something really special for yourself or someone you care about.

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