My Best (Or at Least Strongest) Birthday Memories

It’s my birthday and I’m writing a lot of nostalgic content these days, so I decided I might as well reflect on birthdays past. As a kid, I had infamously epic birthday parties. Back then, I had a lot of movies and I had a lot of toys and those were the things kids loved, so it was easy to make friends. At a certain point in time, I started a tradition of going to the movies on my birthday every year.

That would become the yearly theme of the birthday parties and even after the parties stopped, it’s a tradition that has continued ever since. I always go to the movies on my birthday or close to it every single year. This will be the first time since I was twelve years old that I have not done it. Not that I would want to even if they were open, of course.

But instead of dwelling on the frightening present, let’s dwell on the past. I’ve scrounged up some of my strongest birthday memories and we’re going to go through some of the very best.

First Grade (age 7)

The further back you go, the foggier the memories get, obviously. But I do have a few very distinct things that stick out about my sixth birthday. We went to Ellsworth and I have only the vaguest memories of who was there. But you better believe I remember those McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. It was one of if not the very best lineups they’d ever had: a whole slew of Marvel superheroes, from the X-Men to the Hulk to the Fantastic Four. One of my friends, maybe Brent, I remember he was there because it was the only time we had ever hung out, got really mad that they got Mary Jane and wanted to trade her for my Spider-Man (on my birthday, no less) but I wouldn’t bite.

After the big McDonald’s feast, we went bowling, where just about everyone was terrible. We were seven years old and still, apparently, didn’t warrant the bumpers on the sides. Everyone crashed and burned except for Anthony Gilley, who bowled like a child prodigy. Like he was born to do it. I’d like to say he became a professional bowler because that would be a great ending to the story, but no, none of us quite achieved that. I was definitely the worst at it, but that doesn’t surprise me now and I don’t think it surprised me then.

Second Grade (Age 8)

I have a lot of memories about this birthday. My cousin Lindsey was born the same week, but this was the first time that her birthday party happened to fall on the same day as mine. I remember my party was pretty big, that one really had a decent turnout, and was Jurassic Park themed. We had dinosaur plates and even paper cut-out masks. Two kids showed up with parents handing my mom their ADHD meds and saying “Make sure he takes these, or he’ll be a nightmare.” I don’t think either of them did, but that wouldn’t be a problem until much later in the night. Eventually, the dinosaur party was thrown out the window when someone suggested another idea: what if we had a squirt gun war with the girls?

It only made perfect sense. Most of the guys in my class were at my party, most of the girls were at Lindsey’s. We were armed with super-soakers. They were armed with water balloons. Sure, it seemed like the girls were outnumbered, but if those balloons hit their mark they did quite a bit of damage. It got to the point where we actually started losing, until my mom looked at me and mouthed the words “Turn on the hose.” That was our secret weapon and it ended things pretty quick. We got word back that my cousin had been extremely upset because we had ruined her brand-new birthday dress. Considering she had never been particularly nice to me, at any point in her life, I’d like to say I don’t feel bad about that, but I do.

That night, a smaller war broke out over what movie to watch. We had celebrated dinosaurs all day, minus the water fight, so Jurassic Park was really the only logical choice. But I was in the mood to watch Street Fighter. Nobody else was, except for Chris, who was a big fan of Van Damme. Pete had never seen Jurassic Park before, despite being just as big a dinosaur nut as I was, and was both excited and terrified at the thought of seeing it for the first time. I distinctly remember him wanting everyone to warn him when the T-Rex was coming. I solved the problem by setting up Street Fighter upstairs and Jurassic Park downstairs and moving between the two simultaneously.

Hopped up on just the title, Arlo and Anthony decided to have their own living room street fight and bounced between my two couches, clawing the holy hell out of one another. That was my first sleepover birthday party and by the next morning, we hadn’t just experienced my birthday, we’d survived it.

Fourth Grade (Age 10)

So, I have a lot of memories of the third grade. I remember the entire year, pretty much, from hanging out with Fox for the first time and having Chris over ever weekend, getting in trouble for reading Dracula in class, but I don’t remember a single detail of my ninth birthday. My tenth birthday, on the other hand, I remember pretty well. That year, we went on the big hike to the Bangor Auditorium to see the circus. The circus was a huge deal. It came once a year and everybody either went or envied those that did. We’d always gather around the people who’d been there first and hear them describe… a circus. It’s always been the same thing, but we never failed to be in awe of those first descriptions.

Before we hit the circus that day, we stopped off at the park for a picnic lunch. My mom had made sandwiches for all of us and, being kids, we started horsing around and I wound up falling down a hill. It happened to be full of what I called “prickle bushes” and prick they did. As huge an event as the circus was for a ten year old, I have much more vivid memories of being bent over in the car, door open for all passers by to see, as my mom picked thorns out of my butt.

We also had a minor sequel to the Great Second Grade Squirt Gun War that evening, only this time we just fought amongst ourselves. I had gotten a lot of water-themed presents that year, including a heavy duty Super Soaker that looked more like a proton pack from Ghostbusters. And while I’m sure that was a blast, it’s mostly the thorns in my butt that I remember.

Fifth Grade (Age 11)

Believe it or not, I actually fell in with a quote/unquote bad crowd in fifth grade. I had never had a detention in my life before that year and never had one since, but that year I got around six or seven of them. Chad and Evan got me into a lot of trouble. I acted out, I made inappropriate jokes, they thought I was funny and I would do just about anything for a laugh and that’s the brief story of how that whole year got carried away from me. My birthday party was pretty small, because of that. Chad and Evan came to my birthday party for the first and only time, and the only actual staple friend of my childhood who was there was Chris. That year, the big treat was that my mom decided she would let me rent a new horror movie.

That felt huge, because it broke our rule that I would only be allowed to rent older horror movies as my mom imagined they were tame by current standards. The trouble was that the crop of October horror releases hadn’t hit video yet, so the only new horror movie we could find was Bats. It didn’t go over that well. But, I had one feverish childhood obsession by this point and after Bats was over, I suggested we watch Puppet Master 5. Unbelievably, it saved the sleepover. Everyone got so into it, rooting the Puppets on against the evil Totem. My friends, two of whom typically made fun of everything and everybody, were cheering at the TV. It transformed that birthday into a Puppet Master party, which obviously delighted me.

Sixth Grade (Age 12)

Sixth grade was a huge birthday for two major reasons. The first was that it kicked off the tradition of going to the movies every year on my birthday, which would become a consistent thing until, well, this year. The film of choice that year was The Mummy Returns. I had been a huge fan of the 1999 remake, as were all my friends, so we were stoked for the sequel. That was also following on the heels of a stretch in fifth grade where everyone got really into wrestling for awhile, so I remember some kids being extremely stoked just to see The Rock in a movie. Even though it was very clearly a big adventure romp, Pete really didn’t do well with horror, so he brought along a crucifix made out of pencils and rubber bands to protect himself.

The best part of that birthday, without a doubt, came after the movie. When we returned home from the theater and walked in the house, I went upstairs to my bedroom and was blown away. I was a huge reptile kid, I always have been. And not knowing that they’re an incredibly common pet, the Leopard Gecko was my favorite kind of lizard. My dad had come in while everyone was at the theater and set up the terrarium and had gotten everything ready to go. I walked into the house to find that I now had my own Leopard Gecko. I named him Lenny and had him all the way through middle school, high school and college. He was a wonderful little buddy for so much of my life.

Seventh Grade (Age 13)

Spider-Man was easily one of the most anticipated movies of my youth, to the point that I once tried to make my own Spidey flick with my friends when it seemed as if an actual film would never come out. When I realized that my 13th birthday would roughly coincide with the movie’s release, that didn’t just feel like an impending party. It felt like an actual monumental event. I’d waited years for this and it didn’t disappoint. It was also the very first Free Comic Book Day, so it was made even better by the fact that the theater handed out free copies of Ultimate Spider-Man #1, a retelling of the Spidey story that hooked me from the first moment and wound up becoming my favorite comic book run of all time.

The hype could not have been higher as my friends and I took up half a row to ourselves (the crappy Ellsworth theater, admittedly, had very small rows) and asked each other who our favorite Spider-Man villain was. My answer was Carnage at the time. I’ll never forget the chills as the movie started, just for the fact that it was the Spider-Man movie and it was finally here.

We came home to a birthday cake from my grandmother, a tradition my friends had come to expect and anticipate. This year had a surprising addition. We started to notice pretty quickly that the cake had some noisy side effects and everyone who ate it started to fart up a storm. It also happened to be the one birthday where people kept coming in and out, people I normally wouldn’t see, relatives, you name it, all came into my house and had a piece of the fart cake.

One of my presents that birthday included the Spider-Man Monopoly game and we played that through most of the night and into the morning. It was exhaustive. Friendships that were already more strained than I think I realized at the time had started to crack and finally broke. Such is the way of Monopoly.

Eighth Grade (Age 14)

My 14th birthday party was also my last real birthday party and I could tell that it was going to be, even at the time. Even if it was unspoken, everyone kind of felt like we were too old to be doing this, especially as it was a repeat of the previous year, going to see a blockbuster superhero movie and then having a sleepover afterward. The major difference between this and previous years was, basically, middle school. Popularity is a sliding scale in middle school and a pretty unpredictable one at that. I had friends from all walks of life and that had never really been a problem before, but had certainly become one by eighth grade. My friends still all liked me, but they didn’t all like each other that much, that was pretty clear.

That year’s movie was X2 and I could not have been more excited as the first X-Men had become one of my biggest preteen obsessions. I was over trying to unlock my own mutant powers, but I was still absolutely giddy about seeing my all-time favorite X-Man, Nightcrawler, finally make it to the screen.

The rest of that night, while we had fun, was a bit of a nightmare. I had to spend my own birthday party just trying to keep my friends from killing each other. A few friends dared one friend to pee on another friend’s back while he played video games and goddamn it, they actually did. That other friend simply went on to describe the party as “the night he learned to use a washing machine.”

There were so many of us this time that we slept in tents on the lawn, which should have been fun, but was not. Everyone kept being intent (ha) on terrorizing the people in the other tent, which kept us up virtually all night, either making noises outside or mooning or whatever. It was truly the best indicator that high school was only a few short months away.

For all its troubles, that party also saw me get an absolute dream of a present—maybe the dream—from my mom. It’s no secret that Puppet Master was my number one obsession, but it was hard to be a fan of that franchise back then. The toys weren’t sold in most stores and the movies, while I adored renting them, were never anything I could really own. They were out of print at the time, so I couldn’t just buy them. I was several years deep into my love of the series at this point and had only managed to score used copies of Puppet Master 5 and Curse of the Puppet Master in that time. And then, lo and behold, that birthday my mom presented me with the first four Puppet Master movies on VHS. I had what I considered at the time to be the whole set.

Most of my friends had grown out of it by that point or had never cared to begin with, but everyone wanted to watch Puppet Master, it was like a unifying thing for that party, finally. And I completely ruined it, because I had only seen Puppet Master 4 once on TV when I was younger and was desperate to revisit it. Everyone begged me to put in the original instead, but I didn’t listen because I wanted to watch 4, damn it. It was Street Fighter all over again. Puppet Master 4 didn’t go over great and the last birthday party ended on a pretty lukewarm note because of it.

Sophomore Year of College (Age 20)

Skipping ahead a good chunk of time, sophomore year of college was not easy, to say the least. It was my worst year of college academically and for a lot of other reasons as well. By the time I hit my birthday that year, I had been a few months out of the end of my relationship with my first serious girlfriend and had just had things crash and burn completely with a girl I had really, really strong feelings for. And the worst part about that was that it wasn’t even within my control, I didn’t screw that one up on my own, it was the result of a friend acting on their own self-interest and dressing it up as “for your own good.” So it was incredibly hard to get over at the time and I won’t lie, I felt pretty low. My birthday was the last thing I was looking forward to, monument that it might have been.

Still, my buddy Drew, always a friend, dragged me out of my dorm room and off to see a movie and really put in the effort to cheer me up in a way I’ll always appreciate. The movie was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and you’d think that would have lowered my mood even further, but honestly it was just a welcome distraction. It made me harken back to seeing X2 with all my childhood friends and I was just happy to see those characters on the screen. My frustrations with that film grew over time, sure, but I was just there to have fun with it in the moment because I hadn’t had any fun for so long.

What really makes that birthday stand out, though, is that it convinced me to try and get out of my funk. And only three days later, I went on a movie date with a friend named Shelley to see Star Trek. We were Facebook Official a couple of days after that, married in 2017 and have now been together over ten years.

Texas Frightmare (Age 30)

Yeah, it’s pretty recent but last year’s birthday is without a doubt one of the best I’ve ever had. It really took the edge off turning 30 by getting to meet so many friends, people I write with, people I talk to all the time but had never gotten to meet in person, at Texas Frightmare. Michele Eggen and I go all the way back to the early days of Wicked Horror together and Ryan Larson has become such a great friend, plus Amanda Rebholtz and Freddy Ruiz, so many people from the Ghastly Grinning crew. As an avid listener of the Shock Waves podcast from day one, it was also completely surreal to hang out with the hosts, Rebekah McKendry, Rob Galluzzo, Elric Kane and Ryan Turek. When I started going to Texas Frightmare two years ago, I knew it would become an annual event. I really can’t put into words what a great 30th birthday it turned out to be and how incredible the company was in particular.

The night leading up to my birthday was a whirlwind of unbelievable convention going experiences. We went to a one-man concert of G Tom Mac singing songs from his Lost Boys musical. We sat and hung out and passed around a bunch of ridiculous horror comics I had bought that day, Turek and I got nostalgic about the Pinhead comic series and we were just absolutely perplexed by whatever the Leprechaun comic was doing. Rob, Ryan, Ryan and Elric all got to watch me attempt and absolutely fail to take my first shot ever at the age of thirty. I’m very proud of that. Turek and I also talked about the weird world of fans who “ship” certain horror characters together and the uncomfortable pairings we’ve seen, like Michael Myers and Carrie or Jason and Samara from The Ring. That, I’m both shamed and honored to say, was a discussion I sparked that actually carried on into the next Shock Waves episode. My only regret from last year is that the legendary Lance Henriksen, who I had met before and is one of the kindest people I’ve ever encountered in my life, was also at the convention and happens to share the same birthday and it would have been amazing if our paths had crossed.

I did not go to Texas Frightmare for my birthday this year, obviously. Nobody is doing the thing that they wish they were doing and we have to continue to keep doing the things we’d rather not be doing if we have any hope on getting control over the situation we’re in. It feels like we’re right on the cusp of ignoring the problem and we really, really can’t afford to do that. I’m going to make the most of a birthday spent in quarantine because it’s a hell of a lot better than trying to spend it anywhere else, all things considered. These are really the times that make you appreciate not only what you have, but what you’ve had, which is maybe why I’ve been looking back so much. Because on birthdays like this, even a fart cake sounds pretty good.