HOW COMIC BOOKS SAVED MY LIFE

FLASHBACK: Brownsville, Brooklyn circa the late 70s

I grew up in a hard place at a hard. I grew up in one of the most violent ghettos in New York at a time when New York City was ranked the murder capitol of America. It was the kind of place where there were only two ways out:

College through an academic or sports scholarship...

Or prison.

Most people I grew up with didn't know there was a world outside of Brownsville.

Now when I say comic books saved my life, I don't mean that I'd be dead if I hadn't discovered comics (Although, who knows). What I'm saving is comic books expanded my mind. You know how they say marijuana is a gateway drug that will lead to harder more addictive drugs like cocaine and heroine. Well comic books were my gateway drug. From comic books I started reading mythology, spy novels, horror, sci-fi, then... everything. 

It also made me want to express my creativity. It did the same thing for my two brothers who also read comic books. They both became artist (one does paintings for a gallery in Manhattan). For me, it made me want to write. 

Comic books did one other thing. 

It led me to Gymnastics. 

When I went to high school, I had to take the public bus to Canarsie, which was basically a Jewish and Italian area. Getting lost in the halls of South Shore High School during my first week, I accidentally wandered into the gym during Gymnastics practice. I didn't even know what the name of this sport was at the time, but I was hooked. This was the closest thing to being a costumed superhero there was. I could be like Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil and a whole universe of flipping, twisting, kicking badasses!

I think at that moment I even said, "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life." However the gymnastics coach didn't see it that way. He wouldn't work with me. Not knowing better, I tried to go for flips on my own and ended up crashing and burning. One time the coach got so mad at me he shouted, "Why don't you just get on a motorcycle and crash into a brick wall." 

That summer I decided to branch out, I sought out every YMCA and sports facility in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan that had an open Gymnastics workout and started going to them. I still didn't have a coach, but I quickly realized there were other gym bums like me. I befriended these fellow lost souls and we began training together. I was obsessed.

When summer was over and I went back to the gym at high school, the coach was impressed with all the skills I had learned over the summer. He went from being my main detractor to being my number one supporter. He even held me up as an example to the other gymnasts of what you can accomplish when you work hard.

After high school, I realized I would never be good enough to make the Olympics (not even close). I started when I was fifteen years old and for much of my career I was self-taught. So I hung up my gym grips and enrolled at Brooklyn College. 

But within a few months, I got the itch again. I began training and before long I found myself at the International Gymnastics Camp in Bartonsville, Pennsylvania. There, the hand of fate struck. Bruno Klaus, the owner of the camp, was also the coach of the local Gymnastics team at East Stroudsburg University. He recruited me as a Parallel Bar specialists and I spent the rest of the summer training there.

This also happened to be the Summer of 1980 when then President Jimmy Carter boycotted the Olympics in Moscow and ordered that no America athlete attend the games. 

So guess where the Mens Olympic Gymnastics team ended up? You guessed it. My coach's camp. I went from being just a nothing bum club gymnast to training alongside Olympic gymnasts and their coaches, as well as high caliber coaches and gymnasts from all over the world. 

Also weened since childhood on a steady diet of Professional Wrestling and 42nd Street movie theater Kung-Fu flicks, I would choreograph fights with my fellow teammates that combined Kung-Fu, Pro Wrestling moves and acrobatics. 

After college, not wanting to sit behind a desk or get a real job, I moved to Hollywood to become a stuntman. 

Once again the hand of fate struck. I got a job coaching Gymnastics in a local gym. Five weeks later, after Richard Pryor's stunt double was injured in a stunt doing a flip off a tractor trailer truck as it crashed into a lumber yard, Warner Brothers was desperately looking for a Black stuntman who could flip (there weren't too many back then). Someone at the WB got the bright idea to call around to gyms. The next day I was on set. I did the gag and my stunt career began. They liked the stunt so much they came up with an acrobatic martial arts dream sequence that they brought me back for.

I never in a million years dreamed I would get paid (well paid) for the same thing my friends and I did after workout in college. I would go on to double Arsenio Hall, Martin Lawrence, David Chapelle, Chris Rock, Danny Glover and many more. 

Then, I actually became a superhero (or at least a super villain). I started doing stunts on "POWER RANGERS" playing a Putty - the villainous creatures in gray that would always attack the Power Rangers.

But then my creativity re-emerged (or maybe I just grew tired of landing on my head for a living). I began to try my hand at writing screenplays. After a lot of trial and error, I sold my script "BRIDGE OF DRAGONS" to Millennium (the people behind "THE EXPENDABLES"). My movie would star Dolph Lundgren and become an HBO World Premiere movie.

After that I wrote an episode of "Power Rangers" that the producers later expanded into a straight-to-video movie called "POWER RANGERS LOST GALAXY: RETURN OF THE MAGNA DEFENDER." 

So I guess you can say my life has come full circle. From creative to athlete back to creative.

Maybe the title of this post should be "HOW COMIC BOOKS GAVE ME A LIFE."

PUTTY PATROL from "POWER RANGERS"