EPISODE INTERLUDE: THE TERMINATOR AND I ARE ON BREAK!!

Sorry, folks, but due to extenuating circumstances — namely the many other plates we need to keep spinning these days — “The Terminator Was My Best Friend” will be on hiatus until further notice. Keep checking back in, though, as we’ll have more wacky episodes sooner than you can say “mimetic polyalloy.”

See you soon, and for now, here’s a great quote that really tells it like it is:

“By writing, you can use your own experience but detach it from yourself. You nail certain truths. You make up others. The incidents you invent clarify and explain as much as, sometimes more than, the ones that actually occurred.” — Irvine Welsh, Skag Boys

EPISODE SEVEN: THE TERMINATOR TAKES NOTICE OF MY NEW INTEREST IN GIRLS

“Mathew,” the Terminator said. “I notice you spend a substantial amount of time watching young girls playing with their hair.” 

He was right, but fortunately I was young myself at this point in my life. 

I’d say I was around eight or nine when I first admitted to myself that watching girls – being a voyeur, really – was, yes, a “substantial” part of my life. 

To say I was watching young girls playing with their hair to excess, though? I’d say that would have been an excessive statement on the part of the Terminator, had he gone that far … which I think he was possibly implying in his characteristically staid tone of voice. 

One would assume that his highly tuned CPU would render him incapable of hyperbole. All those pure, clean calculations being made at lightning speed. How could he possibly be anything but wholly accurate in his observations? 

But, there he was. Exaggerating. (More or less.) 

I didn’t mind, really. Not at that time, anyway.  The Terminator was my best friend and, I believe, I was his, too. And when you’re so close as all that, you accept one another’s faults. 

In the case of the Terminator: overstating. In the case of me: staring at girls. 

To this day, outer appearance is very important to me. I’ve never been much of a He-Man Macho Superguy, myself, even after pal-ing around with a 6’3 muscle-bound Terminator throughout much of my upbringing – but I can’t lie: I love girls’ hair. 

I love their skin. It’s so soft and even when I’m merely looking briefly I can see it: that pale, lacteal silkiness, that way their skin can shimmer as though lacquered in some ethereal coruscated essence. 

Their smell – ahhh. Again: milk or cream, fresh mom-done laundry … The cliché flower petals that literally smell of powder-pink. 

Their eyes. Big, doll-like always. Blue, if possible. Though, I’ve been known to go for green if necessary. I may be Jewish on both sides of my family all the way back to Bob Dylan, Karl Marx and Jesus Christ himself, but I do have an Aryan’s predilection for azure oculars. 

But the hair. 

Oh, the Terminator was maybe right to overstate my fixation, after all. Because, well, perhaps fixation was what it was. The long, lustrous onyx sheen. The gentle golden-straw blonde hanging by her glass-fragile shoulder in an ocean breeze, fishtailed; loping strands of errant bangs flowing by her clear-frame glasses. 

Hair falling past the girls’ filigree straps of their yellowish sundresses. 

Their sandaled feet. Their toes. The Terminator asking me if I want to go for a ride, awakening me from my fever dream of girls’ hair and bows and ribbons and, no I do not want to go on his motorcycle. I don’t even know how he got a new motorcycle. I don’t want to know. 

He of course doesn’t have a job. He’d been working nights piling boxes at a local Hallmark when he accidentally broke the store manager’s hand; a story I’d rather not go into here and won’t. 

Motorcycles are loud, obnoxious, annoying and extremely dangerous. The Terminator knows I feel this way, so I can’t figure out – even at age eight or nine – why he continues to choose them (to, indeed, pluck them out of the very trees) as his preferred mode of personal conveyance. 

“Mom’s asked you not to ride the motorcycle up and down our street,” I remind the Terminator, possibly being as precocious here as some had said about me in the past. 

The Terminator reasoned that because he never went out of first gear on our small, narrow strip of road tapering off to the main drag, it shouldn’t be such a big deal. (I’m paraphrasing, of course.) 

But we did at that time live in a very cloistered subdivision of townhomes, and the reverberating racket of the Terminator’s chopper – even in first gear – was too much to bear. And I didn’t even want to think of these things, anyway. 

I was eight or nine, as I’ve repeated, and all I wanted to do was to be lost again in the frangible bubble reverie of staring at the girl across the street, out my window under the Nintendo Power Magazine poster. The girl: seven? ten? (so hard to tell at that age; even now I still do struggle over whether a girl is sixteen or twenty-three or thirty-two).

She herself, too, lost in her own poppable bubble of reverie, lost in her eyes behind those clear-frame glasses of hers, lost in the world around her that is not around her while she is so lost, sitting in the green-green grass glistening after having been freshly washed by the noisily spritzing sprinklers, glistening like her slender pale legs semi-covered by that sunburst yellow sun dress of hers. 

I can see through my window that she is gazing off to nowhere under the tall, full dark-green eucalyptus trees whose leaves seem plastic and reach out to nearly cover the left side of her building. 

The dappled sunlight magical and dripping on her, but not all of her, and she’s twirling her fishtailed hair falling on her shoulder and I can almost see the light lavender color of her fingernails twirling and playing with her hair. 

The Terminator asks me if I don’t want a motorcycle ride, if I might prefer a tuna fish sandwich instead. 

I do; I’m hungry. But, I can’t keep my eyes off the girl through the window.

The Terminator has grown worried, though I know him well enough to know his stock-still Buster Keaton expression behind me has not actually changed. 

He asks me if I require assistance and I tell him no. After a brief pause, I explain, “I’m thinking. You go down and I’ll be there in a minute.” 

He leaves my bedroom and I hear him clomping downstairs to the kitchen where the clatter of dishes resonate throughout our small duplex, and I do stare at the angel-fairy girl playing with her hair. 

She is my first crush, and I’ll never know her name.  

EPISODE SIX: THE TERMINATOR IS THERE WHEN I FIRST MAKE THE TERRIBLE MISTAKE OF BECOMING A WRITER

It’s raining pretty hard right now on the other side of the window of this small West Village coffee shop.

The vanilla latte is of a perfect temperature – neither scalding nor tepid. The milky vanilla is well-balanced, tinged with the barely bitter blackness of espresso. The grinder purrs away merrily, but I can still hear the light jazz that has followed early Michael Jackson.

And then there’s the discussion between a man who resembles the Cat Daddy and a lanky, bearded be-capped barista involving how they both ended up as writers.

Cat Daddy’s a journalist, he makes it clear, and has with him a baby carriage in which a passed-out infant rests, tacitly drunk.

Bearded, be-capped barista is rapidly conjuring up the former’s coffee drink while never taking his eyes off said new friend.

The barista writes “epic fantasy,” it turns out. He finishes making the drink and the discussion, Cat Daddy steps away with filled paper cup in hand and the next customer approaches the budding Tolkien for a small cappuccino.

Believe it or not, the Terminator was with me when I first realized I too would take on the cursed blessing that is the writer’s life.

Burroughs reminds us that there are those such as his old compadre Kerouac who write … and then there are others – the beret-wearing, foppish phonies who haunt cafes such as this one who, well, don’t. (Burroughs had put it more in leagues of a bullfighter who fights bulls versus a bullshitter who makes passes with the flag whilst there’s no bull present.)

I’d, meanwhile, like to think of myself as a bullshitter who fights bulls with no flags at all. In case you were wondering.

The jazz in this West Village coffee shop is still playing – speaking of Kerouac and berets – and a customer who walks in is surprised. The place, apparently, traditionally plays nineties indie rock and the like.

There were the few hints of being a writer early on. Too early, perhaps, as the Terminator would sometimes remind me.

There was the time he wasn’t there when I got in trouble at my after-school day program, after which the counselor told me I’d have to write a full … PAGE before I could leave when my mom came to pick me up.

Well, she was right outside and it was already late and I was very hungry, so I whipped up something lickety-split (that full fucking page) and shoved it into the hairy hands of the flabbergasted counselor.

I still recall his glassy eyes bulging out in disbelief that a six-year-old could write with such celerity.

To me, it was nothing. I hadn’t given it a second thought. Story structure and character development have always come naturally. Thanks largely to my mom having raised me proper on The Twilight Zone and the Terminator having done his part by recounting full corpuses of the great authors before bedtime.

The Terminator may have thought it more conventional for a young boy to be passionate about balls as opposed to books (how conservative was his programming!), but he knew a few chapters from B. Traven’s immortal The Treasure of Sierra Madre would be just the ticket I needed to kick start my journey into slumber. (I was a rather wound-up kid, as you can imagine, and even a cybernetic soldier from the future required the occasional break from me.)

There was also the time when I was about to read a short story about an anthropomorphic pig in front of my Sixth Grade class.

The Terminator, of course, was not permitted inside the actual classroom by this point in my elementary school career. It may have been both pre-Columbine and pre-9/11, but the PTA had nevertheless had their way after that unfortunate incident with the girl who tripped over me on her way to her desk on that fateful Tuesday the Fourth of one particular April.

Funny, I haven’t thought of her in twenty years or more, though I do remember something about her recently having regained her eyesight (and she is still, yes, confined to a wheelchair even now).

Had the Terminator been in the classroom on the day of the anthropomorphic pig reading, he surely would have kept his firearms to himself, as Steven Thomas turned to a nearby classmate and smilingly said, “Oh, this is gonna be a good one!”

I don’t think there was any sarcasm in the statement.

But, the “Tale of the Pig” and the thunderstruck counselor are merely paltry pieces of loose ephemera in the scattered remnants of my mind.

Thee moment when I knew I would (at least try to) be a writer sprouted out of some rather shallow soil.

It happened when I at long last defeated Super Mario Land on the (at the time) new Super Nintendo.  

The Terminator was right there next to me, standing as ever statuesque and stalwart. If he’d had the capacity for feeling emotion, he would have been proud of my triumph over Super Mario Land.

As it stood, he could only feign any real interest, knowing that gaming up until now was my life (along with way too much TV).

The Terminator had been there when I shook and gyrated, cheering victoriously after making it to the thirtieth level of Dragon Warrior.

Of course, he was also there with me when I’d gone with my dad to all of his comic book and Magic: The Gathering mini-cons where I would have to embarrassingly stand there waiting with the Terminator stately, somber and seemingly proud of himself now, at least in comparison to my dad who would was less than the picture of good health or grooming.

Even when we weren’t at those silly mini-con’s, my dad would be there in the house playing video games in his boxer shorts and revealing his pale-white flab (he tended to go shirtless in the house).

Times like these, with the strong and, yes, proud (at least in my childish mind’s eye) Terminator on one side of the couch and my shirtless, sloppy bear of a father on the other fiercely engaged in ToeJam & Earl or Earthworm Jim, led me to start considering that maybe video games were not the way to go, after all.

Then there was that infernal day in which I beat Super Mario Land.

The Terminator was, as-ever, there beside me as I watched the plump, mustachioed Mario and his lanky, mustachioed brother Luigi together in their festive combination Christmas colors dancing stupidly and thanking me for having seen them to their end of their treacherous quest.

I stopped for a moment.

I was transfixed by what I saw on the screen – an abysmal blank void but for the cartoonish characters prancing around in front of balloon-lettering that read THANK YOU!

The Terminator turned to me, clearly discerning that something was amiss.

“Mathew,” he asked me, pausing for dramatic effect it seems in my memory, despite that notion making no particular sense (seeing as he was, of course, nothing more than an insensate robot).

“You appear to be in a state of tension or discomfort,” the Terminator continued.

I remained sitting there, mesmerized by the vapid THANK YOU! end screen of Super Mario Land.

I had just spent two months on this game. We’re talking early mornings before school. We’re talking nights. We’re talking weekends. The game had consumed my life, had become my life.

A Peggy Lee song I’d recently heard flashed through my mind and I turned at last to the Terminator, then declared more than asked, “Is that all there is?”

The Terminator’s facial recognition software and spontaneous full-body analytics must have registered in him the question whose answer would define the rest of my life, “Mathew,” the Terminator inquired, turning to me and craning his neck downward where I was sitting Indian Style beneath him in my green sweatpants on the blue shag carpet, still clutching the gray Super Nintendo controller.

“It’s summer,” the Terminator went on to say. “How else will you spend your time if not playing video games?”

The Terminator was right. What would I do if I was going to quit gaming cold turkey?

I would not be my dad.

I would no longer invest my time, energy, soul or mom’s money into such a vacant pastime whose only palpable consequence was a couple of dancing dingle-berries saying THANK YOU!

I was – what? – maybe twelve at the time.

So, aside from video games and a little light reading, the only other thing I had that I could do during those awkwardly husky junior high school years of mine was: watch television.

Lots and lots of television.

The Terminator had even rewired our cable box so that we received not only an unscrambled transmission of the Spice Channel (Mom either never knew this or just chose to say nothing about it), but also every other channel under the ozone-shrinking sun.

Understand, I watched a lot of television. Next to video games, it had been the most important thing in my life. My mom being a distant third. (Hey, TV spent way more time with me than she did; though I should note that this was due namely to our dire financial situation which kept her working at all hours.)

I loved TV. I think (or at least I did in those days of bottomless Cool Ranch Doritos and Barq’s Root beer) that the feeing was mutual.

Why wouldn’t TV love me? I was its most loyal supplicant.

So, I wouldn’t play video games anymore. I’d now watch a whole bunch more TV. Before, I may have been hooked. Now, I was cleaned and gutted, too.

I watched so much crappy TV that I’m almost one-hundred percent certain I saw the Terminator roll his eyes when his glasses were off. He may not have been programmed for that kind of display of aggressive disinterest, but – looking back on it now – one too many episodes of Under the Umbrella Tree and Charles in Charge would probably do that to anyone.

And then a few weeks after my video game apostasy, I did something-or-other to render myself horribly, horribly punished.

Mom said I was grounded from TV for an entire night!

Grounded? From TV? Why not say no more air or food, Mom? This on a night when Beverly Hills, 90210 was premiering a new episode! I was twelve! Dylan and Kelly and Brenda and Brandon were real people in my life, and I had to be apprised of every little thing going on in their maudlin world, damn it!

What would they say and do that night that I would now not know about? (Until a re-run at least a month later.)

“Mom!” I cried out like I had been branded on the butt. “What am I supposed to do all night?”

“Why don’t you write a story?” she suggested.

I looked to the Terminator who was washing dishes in the sink next to her. He turned his head to look at me and nodded laconically.

So that night I wrote.

And wrote.

And by night’s end, I’d written seventeen pages of a new sci-fi short story.

I labored over it for the next few nights. The story built up in my mind, on the computer and in its own universe I myself was devising.

School soon started back up again, and I began turning in chapters of the story in class. I was getting praised by classmates and teachers alike. This was not a hokey THANK YOU! end screen. This was true approbation. Based on something that I had actually created.

I quickly realized that I didn’t need to watch 90210 anymore. I was free!

I was liberated from its cathode ray shackles. Dylan McKay wasn’t some 16-year-old high school student. He was twenty-five. He was a twenty-five year-old actor, at that, with an uncannily prodigious forehead and prognathous chin.

He wasn’t real. None of them were.

The show wasn’t real. No more than the games I’d played all those wasted years. It had all been bullshit, just as Burroughs had foretold.

I kept writing, and I finished One Among Us – all three hundred and fifty pages of it – by the time I hit high school, still only thirteen years old.

My first novel. I was so proud.

I may have only received impersonal rejection form letters from the handful of publishers I sent it to (it was wholly unreadable, three hundred plus pages written by a thirteen-year-old or not), but I knew then I’d be a writer.

And even the Terminator squeezed my right shoulder with some true paternal pride upon completion of the tome.

I can still feel how much that actually hurt, even today. I’ll never forget it.

EPISODE FIVE: THE TERMINATOR BECOMES MY BEST FRIEND [ORIGINS AT LAST]

There’s something you need to understand first.

It’s not so much that I have no interest in Star Wars or Star Trek as a mature adult. It’s that I never cared about Star Wars or Star Trek.

I was also never into the films of Steven Spielberg.

I had little interest even as a child in E.T. aside from maybe the scene where Elliot pulls the blonde girl toward him for a wind-blown embrace. I used to watch that part over and over again in slow-mo, worrying a little that I’d eventually snap the alien-green tape inside the VHS.

But that never happened.

Part of this disinterest in such films might have been due to my total and complete fixation on another VHS tape. It was this masterwork of modern sci-fi that helped me to leap straight on over to the early works of Mr. James Cameron (and, later, Mr. Paul Verhoeven with his ultra-violent, ultra-nudist RoboCop and Total Recall).

I’m just going to lay it all down here – I was six years old when my dad gave me a copy of The Terminator for my birthday.

This may sound like a strange if not wholly inappropriate gift to bestow upon a six-year-old. But you don’t know my dad. (A subject we’ll blessedly move on from for purposes of keeping this particular vignette short; I received the gift, which is the important thing here.)

I brought it with me to sleep-overs. It was as integral a part of these nocturnal experiences as my trusty sleeping bag, pillow and occasional Wrestling Buddy  (I had them all).

The tape of The Terminator did cause some outrage – if not at first befuddlement – on the part of my friends’ parents; this, after they would pop their heads in to see what we were watching.

The fact that I grew up in Rick “Purpose Driven Life” Warren’s orange-flavored backyard didn’t help much. My mom may have gone to Woodstock, my dad may have given his young son a highly graphic movie as a birthday present, but the vast majority of the rest of the parents in Orange County slept in separate bedrooms and only saw each other on Sunday mornings at church.

When whichever unlikely host mother dared to check in on us in the living room, scattered across the carpet and glittered in Doritos dust, screening a film where Arnold Schwarzenegger unceremoniously dislodges his own eyeball or shoves his entire fist up into the sternum of a scrawny, blue-haired punk Bill Paxton, the look on her haggard yet patrician face was always one of equal parts teeming rage and healthy fear.  

This last statement, I must say, might have made even more sense if the petulant mothers knew the truth. I mean the real truth here.

The real truth being that the Terminator (not Arnold Schwarzenegger, mind you) was my best friend in those days.

I’ve never really opened up about it before. Who would ever believe me?

Sure, there’s been the occasional drunken outburst at parties or other adult-era get-togethers in recent years. But then anything goes and nothing’s believed (or hardly remembered).

It must have been my one hundred thirty-second viewing of the 1984 dystopian techno-thriller that wrought something very different in my viewing experience.

Bespectacled as always in his 1980s Gargoyles shades and enshrouded in biker black leather – flat top in perfect military fashion – the Terminator was about to throw open the door to the wrong Sarah Connor (so much for computers being more efficient in the future) … when, suddenly, he stopped.

The hopelessly overweight, curly-haired woman biting her lip said something new this time round, asking, “Can I help you, sir?”

I swear to you, she’d never said that before! Never! Ever!

I leaned in toward the television screen, brow furrowed. Was this something I’d missed over those past one hundred thirty-two viewings?

The Terminator said nothing … before actually turning to me. Impossibly breaking the Fourth Wall, he says, “Mathew Klickstein?”

Now, there happens to be another Matthew Klickstein in the world (though he spells his name with the traditional two “t’s” and is now in a fantasy metal band called Wizard’s Throne or some such thing). But I hadn’t known that those fifteen years ago.

I therefore knew the Terminator was talking to me. To this Mathew Klickstein (the one writing this; Hi, me.).

“Yes?” I answered, as more of a question, still in disbelief but young enough to allow for such mysticism to be possible (I slept with the light on at the age, being that those were the days when monsters were still very, very real).

The Terminator’s black gloves reached through the convex glass teat of the screen (no eldritch glowing light, as one would expect from similar fanciful occurrences in other films or TV shows including Arnie’s own Last Action Hero; he simply reached through from the spellbinding Unreal to the mundane very Real, as though the TV screen were merely an open window).

As though by reflex, mesmerized by the sight, I reached out to the large cybernetic hand before me and … we did: We touched.

His gloved fingers gripped mine, and out I plucked him from the tube as he had plucked out his own eyeball one hundred thirty-two times before.

The Terminator wasn’t really as heavy to lug out of the screen as one would imagine. I’m no physicist, but I imagine it’s rather like what happens when someone – even a heavy person (like a metal-bound robotic life form, for instance) – is immersed in water and becomes deceivingly weightless.

The room did jostle, however, when the Terminator planted his booted feet on the blue shag carpet of my floor.

“What the hell was that?” shouted my mom from downstairs in the living room beneath my bedroom.

“Sorry, Mom!” I hollered back down through the floor at her, knowing that that would be enough for her (an actual answer rarely having been necessitated by my mom).

I didn’t take my eyes off the Terminator standing there before me in front of the 13-in. television on my white dresser with the blue trimming. There I was, sitting on the rumpled red comforter of my twin-size bed.

My staring at him (it?) must have been unnerving, for the Terminator – expressionless as always – asked, “What?”

I twisted my lips in perfect McKayla Maroney fashion and replied, “I thought you’d be taller.” (I was a precocious kid, the kind who’d speak his mind with little fear of reprisal … even when it came to a Terminator, apparently; I must confess, little has changed over the years).

“I am approximately 1.80 meters in height,” the Terminator said.

“How tall is that in inches?”

“Approximately 74.02.”

“I’m a little over three feet tall,” I told him, remembering a recent check-up with a shiver running up my spine. “How tall is that in meters?”

He paused a moment before answering. I asked him why, and the Terminator told me he was analyzing the sixty-three Troll dolls on the white shelf with blue trimming next to my bed.

I asked him if he wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s with me and when he asked how we would get there, I said I could ride my bike and he could take my step-dad’s; Mike never used it, which was absurd since he had spent so much money on it.

I made sure to wear my helmet, but it seemed silly to waste time on messing with the straps to get Mike’s helmet on the Terminator’s head, so he road to Chuck E. Cheese’s with me without one. 

EPISODE FOUR: THE TERMINATOR AND I HAVE OUR OWN SPECIAL CHRISTMAS

I remember being asked why we always have such a lousy Christmas.

“Because we’re Jewish, Dad.”

On top of that, it turns out that The Terminator is secular, so there’s no real Christmas memories worth recounting here.

Happy holidays, everyone! 

EPISODE THREE (PART 2 of 2): THE TERMINATOR AND I GET IN TROUBLE FOR FLICKING OFF THE SECOND GRADERS

The Principal, meanwhile, was your prototypical bureaucratic type straight out of Central Casting. Skinner haircut, pastel tie and all. A bit short (even to me back then when I was five), and his diminutive stature was exaggerated whenever The Terminator would join me in the Principal’s Office, a place with which I was not entirely unfamiliar.

First thing off, the Principal requested that The Terminator remove his black Gargoyle glasses.

Once The Terminator complied, the Principal ventured that, “We’re not outside, after all,” though there was the faintest hint of a squeak in his sentence’s final syllable.

The Principal then turned to me and asked why I had chosen to vandalize the outer wall of the Kindergarten classroom. I was sitting on a small, yellow-plastic chair and was still somehow nearly eye-level with him behind his desk between us. He was sunken back into an imperious, burgundy chair.

Just as the Principal leaned forward, I told him in pure innocence that I didn’t know what that word meant.

“Which word?” he asked, just as innocently.

I was about to tell him when The Terminator – God, he knew me so well – submitted that the word was “vandalism” and then followed this admission with the direct definition from Webster’s:

“The spirit or conduct of the Vandals; ferocious cruelty; hostility to the arts and literature, or

willful destruction or defacement of their monuments.”

There was then a pregnant moment of silence in the room.

“Really?” the Principal asked. “Ferocious cruelty?”

Further silence ensued, though this may now have been because The Terminator had taken a small step forward. Toward the dowdy principal with his sumptuary hairstyle. The dowdy principal with his sumptuary hairstyle who just then swallowed and dropped his pencil, I now remember.

He had been clutching the pencil to near breakage in his right hand. Once dropped, the pencil had noisily rolled down the apparently slanted wood-panel desk, tearing through the otherwise silence of the cold room.

The pencil plunged off the edge of my side of the Principal’s desk and, with a lightning reflex born of the best programming money can buy, The Terminator snatched the pencil from thin air.

He then advanced closer still to the principal, all but banging his shapely, black-pant’d legs against the desk.

The Terminator held the orange No. 2 pencil – razor-sharp tip first – up to the conical nadir of the Principal’s cartoonishly pointy chin, as though offering up a gift of flowers.

The Principal was stock-still, tensing up like he had become a frozen Creamsicle. Which, in the harsh yellow light of the room, the Principal’s aforementioned 80s pastel raiment and, melting with sweat droplets trilling down his face and neck, he somewhat did physically resemble now.

The principal swallowed intensely for the second time.

My mom had been called by the secretary by this point, and we all awaited her imminent arrival with a silence that was this time more abortive than pregnant.

When Mom did arrive, she was dressed in her mint-green dental hygienist scrubs and smelled fairly of antiseptic, as always she always had right after work.

She immediately saw the not too rare tableau of the Principal, The Terminator and me, then gave a knowing Oh, what NOW? look to The Terminator whose expression went of course unchanged.

The Principal abruptly rose out of his seat saying, “Your son just graffitied the out Kindergarten classroom wall.” His final syllable squeaked even louder than last time, as he wiped his forehead of glistening perspiration tinctured with the room’s harsh amber light.

I should add here that this squeak was likely a result – as would often be the case throughout the duration of my early public school years among a variety of authority figures I’d end up running afoul of – of the Principal being even more intimidated by my mother than of my stalwart best friend, The Terminator.

Catching the abject fear in the Principal’s bloodshot brown eyes, my mom pursed her lips as she would to keep from laughing maniacally.  She turned to me, barely got out a terse, “Do you know what you did wrong?” and immediately went back to pursing her lips to again keep from bursting into a prolonged cackle.

I read between the lines of her sardonically cliché bagatelle and responded in kind, “Yes, Mom. I’m sah-rrrr-eeee. It will nevvvverrrr happpennnnn again.”

My mom feigned the look of the “concerned disciplinarian” – still pursing her lips to keep from laughing – and turned to the Principal who was eying The Terminator (he still hadn’t yet moved the pencil tip from the Principal’s chin, even after the Principal leapt up out of his chair when my mom arrived, courtesy the Principal’s shortness).

“It’s my fault,” my mom said, confessing to her faux pas back in New York City.

Graffiti wasn’t art in the Principal’s provincial opinion, though, and he noted, “Be that as it may, Mrs. Klickstein – “

“Ms. Siegel,” The Terminator corrected at the same time my mom said, “Helene.”

“Helene,” the principal continued, as though no interruption had taken place, “Mathew will have to clean the wall he defaced.”

This seemed fair to all of us, but when I asked with that same boyish innocence, “What about The Terminator? He did it, too …”, the Principal’s eyes glanced down to the razor-sharp pencil tip a mere millimeter from his upside-down pyramid of a jawline and decreed conclusively, “He can watch.”

Which at long last brings us to the Middle Finger Incident.

This time, it was me, another ragamuffin victim of my rather freeform upbringing courtesy my mom, and The Terminator.

Whenever I retell this story, I can never quite remember where I had first seen the Middle Finger. It must have been in a movie I saw. Perhaps The Naked Gun.

I still clearly remember where I was in my summer day camp when Back to the Future first taught me the word “bastard,” screamed at the top of his lungs by one Marty McFly.

It’s certainly possible that an older kid revealed the power of the Middle Finger to me, and he might have even goaded me into its employ. Although, that might be something from a movie or TV show itself.

Whatever the case may be, the Middle Finger was now a part of my ever-growing gesture repertoire. And I did know what it meant, despite what – yes, later when she would retell the story – Mom would say.

That aside, there we were: My best friend The Terminator, my classmate (was it the one with the highly unlikely name of Voul? Had I actually known someone with the name of Voul?) and I.

If Burroughs was correct about language being a virus, I was successfully in the process of infecting the young, spotless mind of Voul (let’s just go with it; I also grew up with a kid on my periphery named Ovidu).

I was showing Voul the Middle Finger itself when The Terminator tapped me on the shoulder.

I’d forgotten he was standing there, next to me. Which may sound unbelievable, considering I was here a tiny, four-and-a-half-year-old (or round it off to five) suburban Kindergartener with his own cybernetic killing machine adorning the finest in Harley Chic directly to his left.

But, being a four-etc./five-year-old suburban Kindergartener, I was easily distracted and forever lost in my own world (cyborgs or folks named Voul/Ovidu on the periphery, notwithstanding).

“Mathew,” The Terminator said after tapping me (lightly, I should add; he’d learned his lesson after an earlier unfortunate incident that resulted in his almost being as intimidated by my mom as those previously mentioned authority figures). “This gesture you are teaching Voul may not be appropriate for the ethos of the schoolyard.”

He went on in his assiduous way to say, “Considering the recent discussion with the Principal regarding the vandalism we perpetrated, this may not be the most strategic tactical maneuver we could take at this time.”

But the viral contagion had spread, Voul had been forever mutated and he was now anxious to whip it out at a prime time.

“Hey,” Voul blurted out impetuously, “the Second Graders are coming! Let’s flick them off! All of ‘em!”

Clearly, he hadn’t paid The Terminator’s admonishment any mind (though this may have been less to do with Voul’s obdurate behavior and more to do with his not understanding much of what The Terminator had actually said, thanks to my best friend’s abstruse terminology and heavy Austrian accent).

Either way, we three of us were off to the other side of the tree-trunk-colored/textured lunch tables where the Second Graders passed us by in two perfect marching band rows.

They each caught the gift of our infantile, toothless smiles and stumpy Middle Fingers as we giggled girlishly.

The Terminator tapped me on the shoulder (a bit harder than last time) to point out two of the stripy-polo-wearing Second Graders who were already running ahead of their group to point us out to the middle-aged bespectacled lady of a teacher in front of them, there with her curly white puffball of hair lining her egg-shaped head.

The result of this being another visit to the Principal’s Office.

In my memory of it, the Principal’s barbershop haircut had grayed slightly in the few weeks since the Charcoal Graffiti Incident. But, perhaps that wasn’t the case.

What had changed this round was the fact I was brought in to his highness’ office separately from my best friend The Terminator. There was also a notable absence of No. 2 pencils.

The Principal began speaking with me and inevitably ended up resorting to the question of whether or not I’d learned the indecorous gesture from The Terminator whom he assumed consorted with a rather “unruly” cadre of leather-clad vagabonds around town.

When the Principal said the name of my best friend, his eyes shot upward, to the effect that I turned around for a moment in my yellow-plastic chair and saw that the Buster Keaton face of The Terminator (sunglasses on inside this time) was peering through the plastic portal of the Principal’s Office door.

Seeing the Principal tensing up when I turned to face him once more, I told the man that he didn’t have to worry about my best friend who had actually told Voul and me not to flick off the Second Grade. And that I had learned the gesture from a movie.

The Principal let out a long sigh of relief followed by an even longer, contemplative Hmmmmmm that even as a child I read as rather fake, obligatory.

I never found out what happened to Voul, but he wasn’t in Kindergarten class the next day and that was the end of his chapter in my life.

Meanwhile, what happened after my short time in the Principal’s Office for this most current offense was that (and here comes the part that my mom loves to tell incorrectly) I ended up in Mom’s navy blue Chevrolet Rabbit convertible with the seats our dog had chewed up to perfection.

It was after school that same day.

“Matt,” she asked me, trying as always not to laugh while attempting to discipline me. “Do you know what that symbol you made means?”

I told her I did.

She asked me to show her exactly what I’d done, and I looked out the car window where The Terminator was waiting to give Mom and me a semblance of privacy.

I showed her what I’d done, and this is the part we’ll never agree on: I say I showed her the Middle Finger; she, on the other hand, is certain I gave her the wrong finger (likely the Index Finger).

Whichever it was, we both remember her – finally – erupting into a cacophony of laughter that lasted well through dinner that night.

As to which finger was actually presented, I suppose it might have been lodged somewhere there in the memory banks of The Terminator’s CPU; he was just outside of the car, after all.

But, frankly, I never thought to inquire as to whether or not he was spying on us. It just never seemed appropriate to ask.

EPISODE THREE (PART 1 of 2): THE TERMINATOR AND I GET IN TROUBLE FOR FLICKING OFF THE SECOND GRADERS

Then there was that time The Terminator and I got in all that trouble for flicking off the Whole Second Grade.

This was back when I was in Kindergarten. In all fairness, it wasn’t really our fault and I suppose we didn’t get in all that much trouble.

I better start with the Graffiti Incident first … (That wasn’t really our fault, either.)

What happened was: The Terminator and I went with my mom to New York City early one morning when I was maybe five or so. We would do this throughout much of my childhood, because Mom is originally from New York and that’s where my uncle and grandma lived up until a few years ago.

Mom would get homesick and miss eating quiches in Central Park. So she’d come into my room at four-in-the-morning and suddenly it would be, “Get your stuff! We’re gonna go see Grandma and Uncle Glenn!”

The Terminator never seemed to mind and regardless of the obligatory trouble we’d frequently have at the airport (this was previous to 9/11, so it wasn’t that bad even when The Terminator would forget to disarm himself), we’d usually make it through the metal detector with only minor issues. Then off we’d go to a magical long weekend in Manhattan and Upstate New York.

I have to add here that since my mom had a “friend” who owned a limo company, we’d get to take a black stretch – all sybaritic luxuries included – to the airport during these extemporaneous trips “Back East,” as Mom would always put it.

Because of the limo treatment, my memories of New York City as a youth are concomitant with scenes we’d watch on the shitty 1980s minibar TV of, for whatever reason, usually Bloodsport with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The Terminator, as always behind his characteristic opaque Gargoyle lenses, would seem to be holding aloof to the visage of Van Damme onscreen while we made our way to LAX. Mom would try to warm him up a bit with a Mimosa she’d whip up from the contents of the minibar, but each time The Terminator would politely decline.

New York City was to me more than steaming Sabrett hotdogs and screaming black kids running around in oversized basketball caps or stuffy old white dudes strapped into their stuffy old suits. New York City was more than the smell of urine-soaked streets, more than its claustrophobic glass skyscrapers embowered in an oily-greasy urban sprawl.

New York City was also its majestic art museums, and The Terminator – occasionally monitoring the rather suspicious passerbys and possibly even bump into one or two, rendering the man knocked almost in slow-mo through the air against the nearest wall – seemed to enjoy the museums as much as Mom and I.

And they were everywhere, those art museums. As was the art.

This was the peak of garish 80s decadence, and I have vivid memories of the likes of Basquiat’s white-painted tires standing atop one another in a modern-day representation of the Tower of Babel.

“Mathew,” The Terminator asked while we were taking in the tires streaked with veins of dried white goop, “I understand the mythology of the Tower of Babel, but I am unable to logically discern why these rubber tires painted with white paint have been exhibited in an art museum of this caliber.”

I was only five, remember, so it was difficult enough for me to come to terms with such an installment myself.

I just turned to The Terminator and told him that art was “in the eye of the beholder,” the title of a Twilight Zone episode I’d seen with my mother during the previous Thanksgiving’s TZ marathon.

Outside, we’d see more art. Or at least what Mom told me was art in accordance with her own unique delineation.

The Terminator had asked if the faded neon scrawls and occasionally brilliantly colored curlicues were in fact evidence of vandalism. But Mom said instead that, no, this was actually a very special kind of self-expression.

(Mom did typically lean toward the lofty and didactic, even when speaking to me as a child or to The Terminator usually next to me. The Terminator, with his expansive lexicon on file, always got what she was talking about; I often just nodded my head so that we could move on and go maybe get some cheese popcorn.)

Days later, I’m back home in Southern California.

I’m holding in my tiny five-year-old paw a gritty, chalky piece of black rock retrieved from god-knows-where. I’m writing I-don’t-know-what on the peach-colored, faux brick wall of my Kindergarten classroom outside, and the recess monitor (overweight old bitch with curly-white short hair) stops me in my tracks.

Now, it’s bad enough I have my own towering Terminator with his East German flattop trolling around with me wherever I went (the school got used to it, more or less, after that unfortunate incident with the Principal’s kneecap). But now I was defacing school property, and that was just totally out of the question for proper playground propriety.

I was five for chrissakes, and I was graffiti-ing the wall like a common hoodlum!

Worse still was that, being the Type A personality that I’ve always been, I wasn’t alone.

Along with The Terminator, whose black-smudged (gloveless on this particular day) hand was holding a piece of charcoal himself after having written what I recall as an unholy combination of Japanese lettering and binary, I’d gotten a classmate to come along with me in my “accidental” transgression inspired by Mom’s words of advice on aesthetics back in NYC.

I think his name was Matt, too (was it Matt G.? Or maybe Matt L.?) and the curly-white haired recess monitor stood there bespectacled and with a single rivulet of glittering sweat rolling down her temple as Matt G. or Matt L. – holding his own gritty piece of black rock that had been used to draw a dinosaur silhouette – turned to The Terminator who turned to me for what to do next.

I shook my head, letting him know his singular form of violence was not necessitated at this moment.

The recess monitor, trembling, wiped her forehead and cheek with the back of her velutinous arm and sighed with what even I as an innocent child knew was relief at having quite literally dodged a bullet.

The Terminator dropped his black rock and Matt G. or Matt L. ran away, still gripping his piece as though in a relay that would end with his passing the charcoal off to someone whitherward.

“You can wait here,” the dowdy recess monitor said to The Terminator. “And Matt G. (or was it Matt L.?), we’ll deal with later. Matt K.,” and then she turned to me, “you’re to come with me right … now.”

And I did. Right … then.

The sere old bitty snatched at my hand in a way that jolted my best friend The Terminator, and I again quickly shook my head.

The recess monitor, having realized what just took place, quickly lost the color in her already fairly pale face, before she just as quickly regained her slightly more roseate hue.

We were off to the Principal’s Office, The Terminator and me …

[FIND OUT WHAT GOES DOWN BETWEEN MY BEST FRIEND THE TERMINATOR AND THE PRINCIPAL IN NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE!]

EPISODE TWO: THE TERMINATOR MAKES SOME POPCORN FOR MY FRIEND KEVIN AND ME WHILE WE GUILTILY WATCH “REVENGE OF THE NERDS” FOR THE FIRST TIME

Then there was the time I saw my first tits and ass – but mainly tits – on TV. And The Terminator was right there beside me, as always.

I remember how very strange the tits appeared to be. So peculiar. So unreal. They just didn’t seem natural. Is that what tits really look like? I pondered in my six- or seven-year-old brain.

It was the notorious Panty Raid sequence from 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds, and there I was watching it all, reclining comfortably in a brownish La-Z-Boy.

The room is rather dark, the floor-to-ceiling canvas curtains beyond the television set are blocking off the light attempting to jailbreak its way through the glass door on the other side of the cream-colored barrier. We’re watching a very R-rated film in the family room of my friend Kevin-from-Karate’s quaint, one-story ranch-style house.

The fake-looking, almost plastic-seeming, oddly-colored tits that are far more triangular in shape than one would have originally expected are out for all to see onscreen, and Kevin-from-Karate is sitting back on the tangerine shag couch cattycorner to my leather recliner.

There The Terminator is standing guard off in the corner to our right, in his characteristic black leathers (jacket, pants), boots and cool-customer Gargoyles that are in fact reflecting the tits onscreen from off of his mirrored lenses.

This makes the tits look even weirder, but I’m not looking at The Terminator’s glasses for long before turning back to watch the show on the TV proper.

After some more nudity-infused shenanigans onscreen, I turn back to my best friend The Terminator and regard him standing there stock-still, almost at ease as a statue in perfect equanimity.

I can’t help but wonder what he must think about the obtrusive nakedness before us.

Kevin-from-Karate’s zoned-out. He’s a portly Pilipino kid with onyx waves of hair moussed into a perfect part down the middle of his large, olive-colored face. His stubby olive-colored legs jut out as very smooth tree trunks from long denim shorts, and his knees are wide apart as he sinks back further into his comfy couch.

Rather than gawking at the many jiggling boobs overwhelming the screen with the same off-orange color as the couch (as Kevin-from-Karate and I are), I now notice my cybernetic friend in black seems to be almost intentionally standing askance.

It’s as though The Terminator is fine with us watching near soft-core porn, but he’ll personally have nothing to do with the glowing box of carnal mischief himself.

Revenge of the Nerds proceeds onscreen, Kevin-from-Karate is an unmoved blob of olive-skinned boy on the orange-peel couch and The Terminator stands.

Is he disappointed in me? I wonder. Is this perhaps The Terminator’s first viewing of boobacious babes baring breasts, too?

But, no. I quickly remember that The Terminator’s CPU contains “detailed files” of the human anatomy that allows him to be a “more efficient killer,” according to the manual.

It’s at this moment, ironically, that The Terminator asks Kevin-from-Karate and I if we would care for some popcorn. We had lunch four-hours-and-thirty-two-minutes ago, he reminds us as the dutiful compatriot he is, and we must be feeling just about ready for a mid-movie snicker-snack.

(This last part he says in his prototypical military parlance, but for purposes of my parboiled memory, I’m hard-pressed to recall his exact words now.)

“Hey, man …” Kevin-from-Karate mumbles as inquiry out of the side of his saliva-dripped gape of a mouth, “Did your Terminator just ask if we want popcorn?”

Sure, it may have seemed a bit odd at the time to Kevin-from-Karate, but truth be told, The Terminator was not only my friend but best friend, after all, and – yes – he was always there to make us popcorn or cripple if not vanquish any oncoming foe who might dare approach.

I may have only been six or seven at this time, but I can tell you: The Terminator and I? We’d already gone through much together. And despite its probably seeming incongruous that such a mechanical killing machine – at 6’3”, with harsh Austrian accent, flattop hairdo, opaque frogman glasses and cold-as-metal glare was offering us piping-hot popcorn (that he himself would presumably be making, as there was none yet available to eat), it was in reality no more strange to me (or The Terminator) than those weird-ass breasts displayed for all onscreen.

Friends are friends, breasts are breasts and popcorn is popcorn.   

EPISODE ONE: THE TERMINATOR ISN’T EXACTLY ECSTATIC ABOUT MY NEW COMPUTER

I remember turning to The Terminator and noticing how confused he seemed when Mom gave me my first-ever computer.

I didn’t even know that his CPU was capable of permitting or even experiencing the sensation of confusion. But there he was, confused and staring at the desktop IBM assembled on my blue-trimmed, white shelf. There were the 60-some-odd Troll dolls with their trademark rainbow hair colors and variegated sizes on the three shelves above said new computer.

This must have been around 1990, and my mom had told me that if she was going to get me a computer, I’d have to make sure to never get “frustrated with it” or “bang on it angrily.” I’d had some trouble with that sort of thing in the past. I was also known around the neighborhood as a crude disassembler of various machines and toys – a remote control hovercraft Dad had gotten for me for a certain Christmahanukkah, a small radio I’d found in the cluttered one-car garage, the 7.62mm GE M134 Mini Gun The Terminator had come home with, blood-splattered and bedraggled one particularly memorable evening.

But this wasn’t a 7.62mm GE M134 Mini Gun. No, this was my first-ever computer, and I couldn’t help but wonder if The Terminator was feeling rivaled for my affection.

I was maybe nine-years-old here, but still I felt a sophisticated empathy toward the cybernetic organism who allowed me to reach out and childishly clasp his cold, uncannily hard “bony” fingers sheathed in black motorcycle gloves.

“It’s only a computer,” I told him as he proudly stood in my quaint bedroom with a four-way folded TMNT Mad Magazine parody poster sloppily Scotch Taped to the wall next to a poster of Orel Hershiser (despite my total disinterest in sports).

The Terminator said nothing in his black leather biker jacket, black jeans, scuffed combat boots and customary Gargoyles that obscured any semblance of expression in his eyes I could not see for the opaque lenses.

“Look,” I said, still holding his hand and gazing up to him towering over me. “I need a computer.”

He did not respond.

“It’s for school,” I reasoned. “All the other kids have one.”

“Mathew,” The Terminator said in his understated voice tinged by a harsh Austrian accent. “I do not understand why this inferior machine now resides in your domicile.”

I rolled my eyes, sighed and said, “I told you. All the other kids in class have one and they’ve all had one for a while.”

An impregnable silence subsumed us both.

I took a deep breath, adding, “It’s weird I didn’t get one until now.”

The truth was that all my buddies at school had a lot more money than I did, especially since mine was the only set of parents smart enough to divorce before drifting into a depressingly dysfunctional-family routine. My single mother – too headstrong to take the bountiful child support or any financial aid from my dad – might have struggled throughout my otherwise randy upbringing, but at least she didn’t live in a hateful relationship with my dad, sleeping in separate bedrooms in the same house, as was the case for the desperately religious parents of most of my classmates burdened by the rigorous strictures of fundamental Christianity.

Money was tight for us, though. There had been the time that, for her thirty-eighth birthday, The Terminator had screeched up to our condo’s narrow driveway in a flashy red sports car whose model I can’t recall, and Mom had told him she was sorry but couldn’t in good conscience accept the charming gift.

The Terminator had appeared somewhat confused then, too – now that I look back at it – regardless of his eyes being guarded at that point by lensed BluBlockers. His befuddlement meant little in light of his nevertheless needing to bring the car back to its rightful owner or, as it would turn out in this unfortunate situation, the owner’s next of kin.

“Mathew,” The Terminator told me, back in my bedroom and glaring through his Gargoyles at the infernal computer. “There is no need for additional computations to be processed besides those that can be executed by me.”

It was truly heartwarming that The Terminator was clearly envious of this silly new PC on display before us underneath my scads of Troll dolls smiling foolishly out to nowhere. There the computer sat satisfied, there with its 17-inch screen, wide ivory-colored QWERTY keyboard, dual external keyboard and three free games in their original colorful boxes next to it.

The Terminator’s palpable insecurity aside, the fact remained that I did require a computer, and I was a little worried that he might be less than trustworthy around the device that Mom had told me to be extra-careful with for fear of costly repairs.

I looked up to him, through the onyx barriers of his glasses, and mustered up as best I could, “It’s not going to replace you.”

In my memory, a moment passed. In reality, a longer period of silence flitted by before The Terminator craned his neck to the left and stared down at my hand still clutching his. My eyes all the while burning through his shielding glasses.

He turned his attention back to the computer and without looking at me, reported plainly, “This machine fills a void in the negative space of your shelf, and in so doing does satisfy numerous aesthetic qualities of this area of your bedroom.”

There was a somber standoff before my mom called me down to dinner downstairs.

Still allowing me to hold his hand,  I stood out of my rolling chair and The Terminator escorted me through the bedroom door he opened. Out we went into the blue-carpeted hallway that in turn led us to the right and down the stairs for some much-needed grub.