Moments with John Paul Leon – Third
Art by John Paul Leon
We would hang out every once in a while. If we weren’t talking about comics or playing tabletop games, we were talking about the other things that interested us. I was a metalhead in those days, and JP was not. We would share our musical interests anyway. The only album I can recall discussing as seriously as if it were a comic book was Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust.
JP introduced us to action movies that we didn’t have access to, like Lethal Weapon. After playing a game, we’d watch something and talk about comics. His dad would give him money for us to order some food.
The great times were there. But I don’t want this to sound like this happened all the time. Hanging out with that side of the family was an uncommon event. And maybe that uncommon quality made such moments more timeless for us.
My brother, I, and other cousins were getting into paintball. We invited JP to these war games. JP got into it like any of us. There was that time my brother popped him in the forehead with a paintball after demanding him to surrender and JP declaring, “Surrender is not in my creed!”
We were foolish, playing in swampy water on the border of the Everglades after some long rains, with potential coral snakes and alligators lurking under the surface. A lot of our equipment was ruined after that skirmish. JP was my partner in that fight, and after he got shot, I spent 45 minutes hiding in the water to ambush my brother and his friend. That friend of my brother’s had a submachine gun that actually unloaded the paintballs in full auto fire, and it looked like a MAC-10. The fight ended with my being shot up with a burst of rounds.
The four of us went to a 7-11 drenched in swamp water, and a couple of construction laborers hanging out outside asked us what the hell we were doing to get so wet? We recounted the story about my getting out of the water and how I was zapped, and the guy told his non-English-speaking friends a much more colorful version of me getting out of the water like Rambo and how one of the other guys simply shot me in the head and told me, “Sit back down!” We laughed at those embellishments and at how easily someone could take someone else’s story and make it their own.
Another time, we got back to my house and talked about the bout we just had. Our side was killed so fast, I didn’t even get the chance to shoot my gun. So, I pressed the trigger almost as if to illustrate, and the thing went off. I was not surprised because these airguns were powered by CO2 cartridges that fired regardless if you had a chambered round or not. JP had sardonically said, “Thanks,” because some of the air hit him in the face. No one noticed that the gun in fact did have a round chambered that had flown past JP’s head point blank. Though it was just paintballs, they could cause serious eye injury, especially at that range. We looked up and saw the tremendous splat on my wall. My brother and JP were laughing to tears, and I was smiling, but I knew I was going to get into trouble if that thing didn’t come off. And it didn’t!
And I did get in trouble. It was what we called a reality check. Our reality had the real world reality mixed with all these other realities that interested us. Sometimes, it was hard to confront reality.
For example, we had not seen my stepdad since 1986. I didn’t feel good about it, but it was a new life. I couldn’t find doing it any other way. We hardly ever mentioned him, as if the adult world from before were another dimension that we had no real need to revisit. It wasn’t like we met JP on a regular basis anyway. The times to spend had to be capitalized on for optimal fun.
So, we’d see JP now and again. We’d always ask him about how Alex was doing. I remember one time going to see a movie, maybe Die Hard, with JP and maybe a friend of my brother’s, and JP had driven us there. But he had just started driving. When he was driving us out of the parking lot, he slammed on the breaks as a car cut in front of him. He protested that there was no damn stop sign, which was true. But I guess when driving enough parking lots, you just stop, sign or no sign, when you need to get out of a column of parking spaces and into an actual thoroughfare. Reality check.
I think it was in those days that JP started working for TSR, doing spot illustrations for Dungeon Magazine. He had come full-circle. Tim Truman had started with TSR, and we had some of his work in D&D adventure modules, as well as Grimjack and other comics.
I was speechless. How could a high school kid get illustration work with the most famous RPG company? It was a hell of a start. And it was a sign for greater things in his future. I knew it. His dad moved closer to our new neighborhood, but we didn’t see him anymore than what was usual. I guess that made things special, always special, because hanging out with JP was always an uncommon occasion.
One time, my brother and I picked him up from his new house, and we were just going to hang out, maybe have something to eat somewhere. He needed to make an errand for his dad, and I told him I’d take him. We went to a large house in a nearby neighborhood. He had to drop something off, but we had to use the backdoor because the guy did not answer the front. There was an intercom by the doorknob, and the three of us noticed a video camera lens pointed at us. A tall, heavily-built man opened the door. He was black but not African-American; he was Cuban. He was dressed all in white. We were led into a room that might have been a family room in a normal house, if this house were at all normal. In Spanish, he told us to wait there. There were all kinds of religious statues and paintings all over, and the three of us being Cuban, we were aware that this was a Santero’s house.
Santeria is the hybrid religion that stems from Catholicism and Nigerian roots. Many Cubans felt it was a superstitious belief maybe not unlike Voodoo from Haiti. And most of us held it in fear.
A small, Afro-Cuban man with a head of white hair entered the room and gave something to JP for him to give to his father. He excused himself for having us go through the backdoor, but he used to make good luck charms for cocaine cowboys during the 1980s (who required the charms because of their short lifespans), and that was what the video camera was for. The three of us were soon back in our car, but when we went somewhere to get something to eat, we were talking about it as if it were an adventure. We busted out the D&D terms and dreamt up a situation where we were plunging into the depths of a Santero’s house like a dungeon, and how the short brother was probably a high-level cleric and the larger brother was an 18 strength mid-level fighter.
Almost everything was a joke to us. When that first Batman movie was out, and Michael Keaton’s Batman is holding up the thug and hissing, “I’m Batman,” JP translated it into Spanish, “Soy el Hombre Murcielago!” The exchange rate between the two languages was eight syllables for three.
But times were changing. When I went from college to university, I got into a serious relationship and forgot about the rest of the world. JP was still around for the occasional war game with the splat guns. He was applying to schools then. He got into School of Visual Arts in New York. He told me about it before he was on his way. I don’t know if I saw him before he left. I don’t have a memory of it.
Months passed. When the school break was coming, I called to see if he were in town, and he was!
I came over to show him some new Wolverine stories by Barry Windsor-Smith in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents. JP’s hair was a little longer, looking stylish. He was showing me an art project he did in one of his classes. In acrylics, he painted WWII imagery in a wooden box he had constructed. The outside was all in black and white, but the inside was in muted warm colors, and it had the main image of a clock denoting a certain time — the time that the first atom bomb detonated. We talked a little bit about art school, but he was not talking as much about comics as before. It could be he didn’t think much about Barry Windsor-Smith. I don’t know. I thought that a part of him was turning away from comics. He might even have been mentioning the future realities of pursuing illustration instead of comics.
And that was the last time I saw him for years and years. I soon graduated from university, after the big breakup with the girl, and I began to pursue a disreputable lifestyle. My priorities had changed, and I was trying to catch up with all the things I had thought I was missing out on. Sometimes, I would think about JP and Alex, wondering what both were doing, assuming Alex was still in town and also assuming that JP would come back to Miami after school. I never called to find out. I had other types of friends. It was a self-proclaimed cool crowd that came from art fields, and they were all about living the lives of artists and nothing about making actual art.
I was still into comics, and I had it in my mind that I would still make it in that field, finishing this 8-page story or that one, and submitting these short things and then collecting my rejection notices inside the wall of my closet. I had time enough to write and draw my stories, but not much more than that. The weekends were devoted to having fun and to subsequently recuperating.
On one small road trip, we were two couples going to Marathon in the Florida Keys. We checked in and hung out. That night, we were picking up booze to make things really interesting. We were at a convenience store to do just that, but I had a sudden memory of going to the Keys with my stepdad and mom almost every Saturday when I was a kid, and sometimes they would buy me a comic book or Mad Magazine. I was looking at the comic book rack. It was during the Image Comics days when everyone drew the same, with a million pointless lines. Sickened by the herd mentality that had befallen comics, I was looking for something different. I was able to find a couple of comics on the rack that looked like none of the others. One was Batman Adventures, based on the animated series. The other was something new I had never heard of. I was flipping through it and felt refreshed to see not everybody was following the Image nonsense. This particular artist was simplifying things and coming up with fun poses and angles, and he had a strong sense of form. I flipped to the first page to see who it was, and I stood there reading the name over and over, taking a moment to truly let it sink in. John Paul Leon. It was the second issue of Static, and out here in this rural place on a trip with friends, I exclaimed, “Son of a bitch! He made it!”
Art by John Paul Leon (the cover of Static #2 that I found in Marathon)