“It is not a rank on my brother to say he has certain mental disorders known as emotional problems and he is often called a fag and has had to run for his life on many occasions. He is a gentle person and this is a juvenile delinquency world. He is a Sagittarius and sometimes a freakster.”
A foreword by the Incredible Marlys, which begins “The Freddie Stories” by Lynda Barry.
Lynda Barry was born in 1956 and grew up on the same street in Seattle throughout her childhood. Much of what she writes is based in the time frame in which she grew up, some of the events in her work being sort of autobiographical.
Her topics range from being the white girl desperately wanting acceptance in the Soul Mama club to being nine years old and standing with a bunch of other kids chanting “naked ladies, naked ladies, naked ladies” over a neighborhood boy lying on the lawn awaiting a boner.
She has also built up a cast of characters which originated in a strip in 1986 titled, “The Night We All Got Sick,” where Marlys, her brother Freddie, and cousins Arnold and Arna all got sick from food they ate at the carnival.
Over time, Marlys, Freddie, their older sister Maybonne, Arnold and Arna developed into distinct characters with their own quirks and experiences. Calling Ernie Pook’s Comeek a comic strip seems somewhat inaccurate. While often funny, the strip also shows many of the very painful realities of growing up, often with the flavor of a less tolerant world of 35 years ago.
Freddie is the youngest of the Mullins siblings. Despite Maybonne’s teen angst and Marlys’ constant demands for everyone’s attention, Freddie seems to have the worst time of it. It begins with Freddie being an “accident.” Arna describes Freddie in a 1987 strip in the compilation, “Down the Street.”
“None of us was an accident. Only Freddie. Personally, I think it made him a lot different from us. Also, I think if a fairy tale was ever going to happen in real life, who it would happen to was secretly Freddie. Just look at the facts: he couldn’t even stand to step on a bee. Sometimes it would make you want to slug him. And sometimes you did.”
Freddie is the most misunderstood of all the characters. He seems out of place wherever he ends up. The family moves a lot, and he has a difficult time adjusting. He has an uncanny knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time constantly, and as a kid having a rough time becoming aware of his sexuality, he is teased incessantly and cruelly.
His mother has a particularly hard time coming to terms with Freddie and eventually sends him to live somewhere else because she can’t handle him. It is said as well in 1999’s “The Freddie Stories” that the father, Mr. Mullins, who has been out of the picture since we meet these characters, was also homosexual. “In February she quit talking to me. ‘The sins of the father,’ was the last thing she said. Dad was a fag. Is, was, I cannot tell you.”
“The Freddie Stories” is an intensely dark recount of a period of about a year of Freddie’s life. It begins with Freddie becoming entangled in Arnold’s friend’s act of arson which leaves a woman dead. Freddie feels responsible for the death, even though in actuality he had nothing to do with it. For weeks everyone he sees doesn’t have a face, but a flaming skull.
Then Freddie starts a new school. He makes friends with the kid behind him, who admittedly torments him but seems to enjoy his company anyway. Then the kid dies in his sleep from choking on a peanut. Freddie’s only friend is now dead.
Freddie begins to slip into a depression which winds him up in special ed, alienates him from his family, and makes him feel literally disconnected from his own body.
One day he and Marlys are walking to school. A kid named Mullard starts to call Freddie a “retarded fag.” Marlys kicks him in the shins. Freddie’s world goes black.
They end up in the principal’s office for Marlys’ kick and Freddie’s bite that left Mullard with stitches.. Finally, Freddie is happy. He is happy he bit the kid. He is happy Marlys stood up for him. Things begin to change; Freddie has hope. He becomes “El Fagtastico.”
“‘When Columbus told people the world was round some people thought he meant round like a pancake. El Fagtastico lives! El Fagtastico, dude-dude, lady-dude, lady-lady, dude-lady, I am all of these things!’
‘You are not!’ shouted Mother. ‘You are hurting me!’ screamed Mother. When the world was born so round, did it hurt the universe? Mother locks herself in the bathroom. Maybonne is slightly flying. She says she is crashing and that she gets the roundness of my information but please shut up.”
Freddie begins to accept and embrace who he is. This does not change loneliness, this does not change that his mother doesn’t seem to like him anymore. However, it is positive. There is hope. El Fagtastico lives.
The strip “Incurable,” printed in the Feb. 10 issue of The FREE PRESS, shows even more how Freddie has evolved. In this incredibly metaphorical strip, Freddie emerges from a closet which serves as his chrysalid in his demonstration of the life cycle of the swallowtail butterfly.
His cousin Arnold is a rough-and-tumble teenager, a tough guy, kind of a jerk. He understands the torment that Freddie will continue to receive in accordance with meanness that many kids exhibit towards people who are a little different. Because he doesn’t want Freddie to get hurt he wants to somehow cure him of being homosexual. Freddie, however, does not seem particularly interested. Perfectly content to just be who he is.
“Freddie stands by the window in the sun, waiting for his wings to dry.”