I heard the gun shots as I was ringing up a sale. It was close. Really close. I instinctively hit the floor and snuck a quick look from behind the various racks of football jerseys and jackets. My customer grabbed her bags off the glass counter top and fled. I heard people screaming and running all around. It was total chaos. The gentle piano melodies of “Someone Saved my Life Tonight” ironically continued to play on my tiny cassette player behind me. I saw police hauling ass down the aisle. It was a fleeting five minutes of violence on an otherwise quiet Saturday afternoon. Once peace was restored, I slowly stood up and surveyed the scene. The gunman had been apprehended and the cops restored order among the vendors and customers. It was a day like none other at the Rt. 1 Flea Market in New Brunswick, NJ, and yet, at the same time, it was like any other day.

This is how I spent my weekends as a young man in the early ‘90s. Buried inside a tiny flea market booth in Central Jersey, 20 minutes away from Rutgers University. From Friday to Sunday I worked here, selling sports merchandise and memorabilia. Not every day featured a gun fight a few booths away from me mind you, but it did happen. Gangs and drug dealers were a constant presence.

Police cars and ambulances were commonly seen parked outside the front entrance. Armed officers roamed the aisles like something I had only seen in movies about war torn, third world countries. Their presence took some getting used to. This certainly was not something I ever experienced at the local CVS in my quiet, suburban hometown of Fair Lawn. I may have still been in New Jersey but I was far away from home.

Alone in that booth, occasionally surrounded by mayhem, I often found myself thinking, what is a thin, pale, shy suburban kid like me doing in a place like this?

It wasn’t some random idea of mine to seek employment here, in case you were wondering. It was my boss, Gary. He owned the business. We worked together at the local video store in Fair Lawn in the late ‘80s, when I was still in high school. He was the manager and I was just a movie obsessed nerd who would spend most afternoons hanging out there, checking out the latest releases, scoring some free popcorn and even volunteering my services to help put the boxes of returned movies back on the shelf. Since I was there all the time anyway, Gary decided to just put me on the payroll. So when he decided to follow his entrepreneurial dreams to New Brunswick to open a sports merchandise business, he just took me with him.

Simple as that. After graduating high school, I had no clue what I wanted to do. I most certainly wasn’t excited about going to college after I’ve been in school for most of my life already. So I worked a series of odd jobs throughout my late teens, early twenties until I arrived at some form of clarity that eventually lead to furthering my education despite my initial hesitation to do so. But before my college career began, I spent a few years sorting myself out in this flea market, hawking Chicago Bulls baseball caps and New York Mets garbage pails.

This enormous market was a one hour drive south from my hometown down the Garden State Parkway . Once you pulled in to the sprawling parking lot along the bustling and crowded highway, one was greeted at the front entrance with a variety of outdoor vendors peddling everything from costume jewelry to vinyl records to vintage adult magazines and videos. Inside, the beaten and dirty white linoleum floors seemed particularly grim lit by a ceiling mounted with depressing flickering fluorescent lights. It was the kind of place where the misfit toys from Rudolph would go to die.

All of the food vendors were linked together at the front of the market, next to the entrance. Among them was my favorite pizza joint, which not only provided me with most of my meals but also employed my flea market crush- a stunning blonde girl, who only wore tightest jeans ever created by man. She spent much of the weekend walking from her pizza stand in the front of the market to the arcade in the back, where her very large and imposing boyfriend worked. She tortured me. She knew it. The struggle was real. She actually came to my booth once and asked about the price of a Lakers tank top. I can’t confirm what happened next but I’m pretty sure before I blacked out, I ripped an XL tank top off the hanger, threw it at her and ran away.

She never came back.

But I remained. A solitary figure among a wild variety of eclectic vendors, endlessly pushing their merchandise to a lifeless clientele. Buried inside a cocoon of coat racks that housed a variety of football jerseys and jackets for hours on end gave me time to really contemplate the next stage of my life.

What did I want to do? Who did I want to be? I was free to be anything, free from any pressure from my mellow parents to do whatever the hell I wanted. But free to do what, exactly? Like anyone at that age, it’s always the big question. High School is over. Now what?

For the most part, it was just me and my music. And my work. Folding Yankees T-shirts. Pricing NY Giants Starter jackets, arranging NJ Devils key chains and organizing various styles of hats from all the major sports teams, along with an odd assortment of posters of famous athletes mixed in with posters of the popular boy bands of the time. For some odd reason.

Days were long and mostly quiet but it was the perfect job for someone who enjoyed the solitude. It was mindless work but being alone gave me nothing but time to think and contemplate what my future might look like. Gary was hardly ever there. He mainly stopped by to drop off boxes of new merchandise but otherwise it was just me. I enjoyed having a job with no one looking over my shoulder, no one constantly telling me what to do or feeling the need to fill the silence with inane small talk. Even at a young age, I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of working with other people, so this job suited me just fine. Plus all the Dallas Cowboys merch I could handle at cost. Another perk.

The flea market itself was a circus. A kaleidoscope of cultures, music, merchandise and food. The retail equivalent of the Mos Eisley spaceport. If actual Jawas or androids were seen walking around, no one would have batted an eye.

For the first six months or so, I kept my head down, walked straight to my booth and tried to just stay out of the way. Despite the market’s more volatile and unpredictable moments, I did begin to settle down and settle in. Once I did, I became part of it all. One of them. No longer a terrified Northern Jersey boy but a more confident part of a rich cultural tapestry that before had been so alien to me.

Yet there were still moments when this growing confidence was severely tested in some dangerous ways. The aforementioned gun fight, as well as a constant presence of drugs, gangs and some comically bold thieves. One of which I came face to face with during one afternoon. And he didn’t come alone.

A group of four very serious looking men just calmly bypassed my wall of T-shirt racks and walked into my space. One of them looked me dead in the eye and said he was taking the $300 Raiders parka off the rack. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t argue. It felt like all the lights had gone out in the entire building save for a glaring spotlight that shone on me and my would-be assailant. He was kind enough to inform me that he had knife and I replied that he should take the item and have a nice day. Then I sat on a box of Miami Dolphins hats, shaking uncontrollably and trying to breath. This most certainly was not in the job description.

Luckily, most weekends were not like that. At least not for me. I’m sure most vendors, at one time or another, were threatened to hand over some merchandise. Seemed like a right of passage for working in a place like this.

And it’s not like we could complain to the owner of the market, who was rumored to be a drug dealing criminal himself. He likely knew most of the gangs there and would look the other way or even encourage this behavior.

Before I knew it, a few years had gone by. Gary and his business partner had also generously employed me at one of their other locations at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, NY, during the week, selling the exact same variety of sports merchandise. Thankfully, the atmosphere at the Nanuet Mall was decidedly less eventful. My days there were spent making new friends and developing new crushes. No threats to my life, which was certainly welcome.

After much thought, I decided enough was enough. My best friend had talked me into taking a few classes at the local community college and I relented and agreed. It was time to move on and progress in a completely different direction. I said goodbye to Gary and goodbye to the flea market. By the end, I felt like I had been trained and graduated from something a lot more meaningful and useful than school had ever been.

And when classes began at Bergen Community College in the fall of 1991, I did not walk the hallways in the shadow of my painfully awkward and timid high school self. Things were different. I was different. I was ready to confront the challenges that awaited me and not just hide away in my bedroom, burying my fears under a symphony of indie pop music.

While I began the job as a shy, introverted, quiet kid from a safe suburban town in North Jersey, two years later I emerged as someone else. Something in me changed. I was ready to move on more confident, understanding and more educated about a side of the world I had been shielded from my whole young life. A world that was diverse, complex, messy and dangerous. Something a lot more like life itself.

I was walking in the park across the street from my house with a friend of mine. Jeremy was someone I only knew for about a year but we quickly became close friends. Shortly after the original friend group I grew up with, and had known pretty much since birth, scattered, I found a few new friends that temporarily filled the void between grade school and middle school.

I can’t exactly remember the context of the conversation I was having with Jeremy on this day but the manner in which it ended will always take up permanent residence in my consciousness. He turned to me in the middle of the conversation and just bluntly said, ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself!’

I was 12.

Stop feeling sorry for myself? Is that what I do? Is that what people really thought about me? I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t prepared for this.

This must have been how Joseph McCarthy felt after Joe Welch asked him if he had any sense of decency during the McCarthy hearings. But instead of initiating a country wide anti-communism witch hunt, I was apparently occupying people’s time with self pity and melancholic monologues.

Not quite the same thing. But still.

It was a lot to process.

And just how Welch’s famous line all but ended McCarthyism, Jeremy’s rather harsh observation all but ended our friendship.

It was the first time in my life that someone provided some insight into how others may see me. It stuck with me for a long time. Still sticks with me, forty-four years later.

There are moments when I feel an urge to reach out to him on Facebook and see if he remembers that moment. Would it be odd to inform him that something he told me four decades ago still lingers with me? Would he be happy about it? Proud? Or simply confused why a man in his fifties, that he hasn’t spoken to since middle school, would still be seeking clarity and closure, like a desperate boyfriend stalking an old ex continuing to seek answers about their breakup?

Probably best to leave it.

After Jeremy told me how he really felt, we parted ways. He walked north, up the path leading out of the park to the other side of town and I retreated south, down the path back to my house as the sun made a hasty exit behind the clouds. The sounds of the commuter train in the distance, returning city workers back to their homes in the suburbs, accompanied me through my front door.

I withdrew to my room, crashed on the bed and stared at the peeling paint on my ceiling, wondering how many years it’s been since my Dad said he was going to repair the damage.

On the radio, the Men at Work song “Overkill” occupied the quiet space in my room as Colin Hay reminded me that “Ghosts appear and fade away…”

So now I wonder, what ghosts were haunting me then and what ghosts continue to haunt me today?

Ghosts appear and fade away. And return again sometimes.

Standing on the doorstep of puberty, I was still struggling with processing my fragile mind just as my body was about to take control of everything. It would be many years after that before I re-engaged with my busy and confusing internal dialogue. And even now, at this age, the volume and frequency of those same discussions persist.

Within a few weeks of this rather awkward moment, another school year would begin, as classrooms and hallways would be packed with even more people that wanted nothing to do with me.

I slowly started to realize that I was fucked either way. If I remained quiet and insular then I was “that loner kid.” And got ignored. If I decided to just be myself and open up to people, I was “weird and odd.” And got ignored.

Social rules and norms made absolutely no sense to me. There was no path to be completely myself while being accepted at the same time. But hey, I didn’t choose to be this way. I was still a kid. I was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on in my head.

Looking back on this younger stage of my life, it might have been communicated as self-pity to others, but in reality it was something that felt more like confusion. Like, why do I feel alone in a crowd of people, or completely disconnected with my family or with anyone? There’s a different plane of reality that exists between the physical world I experience vs the emotional one. And I can understand how the interpretation of those feelings may irritate some but it’s also impossible to act any other way.

When you’re always on the outside looking in, others just can’t relate and they don’t have the patience or interest to do so. Maybe they think it’s some sort of vague way to get attention, when in reality there are frustrating constraints on my ability to process the world around me.

Which kinda sucks.

But this is who I am. If people stick around, great. If not, I’m at peace with that too. I know exactly how to be alone and not feel lonely. It’s taken many years to figure that out. Maybe some of my readers can relate. When you are a dreamer and a misfit, you have to adapt and realize that the problem is not you.

Heading into the seventh grade, that’s what I had to do. Adapt. What was going to make me happy? Trying to be someone else or just be myself? I decided the latter. If being genuine to who I am meant a life of no friends and no girlfriends, so be it. I could live with that. After all, I had music, movies and books. That’s all I really needed. No one I knew at the time was able to provide the same kind of perspective and understanding that those things gave me, anyway. Like one of the great hair metal poets of the 80s, Whitesnake, reminded me, “Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone.”

I think I missed my calling to appear in a Whitesnake video. Oh well.

Despite all this, I was determined to find my people as I progressed through life. And luckily, as I got older, I did just that. However, decades later, those pesky voices inside continue to provide a daily struggle. I suppose they always will. This is just the system I was given. Nothing can change that. I can only change how I operate it.

Dreamer. Misfit. Loner. Weirdo. Outcast. I’ve heard it all.

But in the end, like Lewis says at the conclusion of the 80s classic, Revenge of the Nerds: “We have news for the beautiful people. There’s a lot more of us then there are of you.”

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, indeed. Good advice. Thanks, Jeremy.

I could not believe I found it.

Rummaging around my dark and freezing attic one afternoon, I dusted off a box of old writings and there it was. Appropriately hiding at the very bottom, buried under folders of short stories, poems, song lyrics and a half written novel, was one of the first things I ever wrote:

“Martian Max’s Adventure on Earth.”

I just sat on the floor of my attic for a moment, my legs accidentally touching the fiberglass insulation that surrounded me, and I held it. For years I thought this monumental achievement in my young life was among the many victims of my father’s Great Attic Purge of 2014. An event my father executed without fanfare or warning, following the passing of my mother, which effectively and literally trashed most of my childhood memories. He did this prior to selling my childhood home in New Jersey and moving to Florida. This event I will never let go, even if I live to 100.

Yet somehow, remarkably, this story survived. I must have subconsciously grabbed it when I left home, like the house was on fire and this book was the only thing I could save.

I put the box away and climbed back down the shaky staircase into the warmth of my living room.

I sat on my couch, cozying up to one of my three cats, and read it. Martian Max was a picture book, written by me in the sixth grade, featuring illustrations by my older sister. The brown cardboard cover, which used to be adorned with gold stickers spelling out the title, now displayed only shadows of where the stickers used to be.

Even though I wrote this epic tale when I was 11, I could still remember putting it together as an assignment for class. The drawings were done in colored pencil, the text written in black marker. I invented the name of a publishing house, which I included on the title page, along with my name and a dedication. To my parents, of course. And at the conclusion of the story, a brief ‘About the Author’ page. Very classy.

Now, even though memories of the making of this short story exist, I cannot quite remember what kind of grade I received but I’m pretty sure the teacher loved it and told me I should become a writer one day.

Perhaps she was on to something. Or maybe she just told everyone in class the same thing.

Coming in at a very efficient 6 pages, Martian Max tells the story of a donut shaped alien, who visits a new land and struggles to fit in amongst a society that only mocks and ridicules him. No matter how he behaved or what he did, no one would accept who he was. He tried to be scary, and they laughed. He tried be nice and they ignored him. Despite every effort to live up to other people’s expectations, nothing he did created a space for him to belong. He was an outsider, an outcast.

So, what was my childhood self trying to say with this story, anyway?

Remarkably, even at 11 years old I was already exploring themes of isolation and loneliness. Max, a misunderstood alien being, was looking for some form of connection and an understanding of where he belongs in this universe.

I feel like Max and I have a lot in common. It’s probably why this story was so easy to write. Even though I was born on this planet, I still sometimes feel like I’ve come from another place entirely. It’s a consistently odd space to occupy. It’s a long way from the sixth grade to middle age only to essentially feel the same way.

It’s kind of funny that even at this very young age, I was already writing my first “Dreamers and Misfits” post. I just had to wait for time to catch up with me, I guess.

This unnerving feeling I had as a kid began well before the sixth grade. By the time I arrived at this story, I already knew well enough what kind of challenges I faced. The mystery I had was trying to determine how to exist in this skin. It’s a mystery I have yet to solve.

So this is where we are, my fellow Dreamers and Misfits. If you’re any kind of creative person, you can relate to this misunderstood Martian. From the outside, most people probably don’t recognize the shyness, the social awkwardness or the way we’re crawling up the wall emotionally when trapped at a party we have no interest in attending. We can’t help who we are but we can learn how to navigate around the edges of society. Even pretend to blend in just enough that, from the outside, we appear to be doing everything right.

But it’s always there inside us no matter what words we choose to say or how we decide to dress.

In the end, you’ll be happy to hear that Martian Max does find acceptance. All he had to do was stop a thief from stealing an old woman’s purse. Once the criminal attempts to flee the scene, Max shoots him in the face with his ray gun. Problem solved. After this heroic act, the people finally accept him and after all that effort to belong, he simply peaced out and went back to Mars. Which is kind of perfect.

The story ends abruptly but satisfying, saying “when he left, he left happy.”