Some years ago, I was living in a basement in Wheaton Maryland, and trying to date this cute guy who lived nearby.  I knew him from a gay BBS we were both on.  One day he invited me over and we sat around chatting for a bit, and he popped this cartoon he said he really liked into his VCR.  It was called The Brave Little Toaster, and on that basis alone I think I’d never have so much as touched it.  It just sounded like one of those suffocatingly cute children’s things I used to absolutely hate when was a child myself.  But it caught my attention instantly.  There was, I could tell right away, an insightful, and playful, and very very smart mind behind it.

There’s a scene in the movie I still distinctly remember.  The little toaster is walking through a grassy field (on its four tiny little toaster legs) and it walks past a flower.  The flower glimpses its own reflection in the toaster’s chrome sides and instantly perks up, attracted to the beautiful reflection it sees.  No, says the toaster (I’m trying to recall the dialogue from memory here…), I’m not a flower.  But the flower doesn’t understand.  It leans closer to the reflection it sees, utterly entranced…delighted…yearning…  No, says the toaster again, distressed.  That’s you, not me.  I’m not a flower.  And the toaster walks away.  And all the flower knows is that the beautiful flower it saw just walked away from it, and when the toaster looks back, it sees the flower wilting. 

It was just a little toss-off scene in the film, not really bearing at all on the action.  But the depth of it stunned me.  And I thought to myself A gay man wrote this…

But my attention was also distracted at the time, ironically, by the cute guy in the room with me, who would soon walk away from me too, and I never looked closely enough at the film credits to know who the creator of all this magic was.  Well, now I do. 

Alas and damn… 

Sci-fi Writer Thomas Disch Commits Suicide

Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.

The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression.

Awarded many honors for his fiction, including two O. Henry awards, the genre-bending Disch also published more than a half dozen books of poetry, a whimsical Child’s Garden of Grammar (1997); a history of speculative fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998); and the Brave Little Toaster series for children.

It got him.  His other half died and it got him.  I could feel it myself that week, like a dark shadow hovering over the earth, patiently watching for stragglers.  And, reading Anna Quindlen’s review of the book The Brave Little Toaster was based on, makes me wish I’d read it first before seeing the movie…

The publisher optimistically says ”for both children and adults,” but what would the average 10-year-old make of the information that flowers can speak only in verse and that ”daisies, being among the simpler flowers, characteristically employ a rough sort of octosyllabic doggerel, but more evolved species, especially those in the tropics, can produce sestinas, rondeaux, and villanelles of the highest order”? Besides, most of the jokes are too good for children. Like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles or ”The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster, ”The Brave Little Toaster” is a wonderful book for a certain sort of eccentric adult. You know who you are. Buy it for your children; read it yourself.

Yeah…

"…before any of the small appliances who may be listening to this tale should begin to think that they might do the same thing, let them be warned: ELECTRICITY IS VERY DANGEROUS. Never play with old batteries! Never put your plug in a strange socket! And if you are in doubt about the voltage of the current where you are living, ask a major appliance.”

Damn.  Rest in peace Mr. Disch.  I wish I’d known how good you were when you were alive…

”Once a mortal, soon to be in Heaven, I may be

your best chance to distinguish yourself

as someone specially Blessed and bound for Glory

without going to a lot of trouble or expense …

Start with a little Tom My God shrine beside the BBQ

and before you can say Glory Be the whole back yard

and all its gardening tools are tax-deductible!

If your tax returns are challenged, show this poem

to the judge and ask him how many believers

constitute a Faith …”

But I know now.  And if you and Charles aren’t together now in some better place, at least you lived to see a world where the two of you could be together in our memory.