High School Memories – Drugbusters

Meet Bob, Ed (aka Lez), Eric, Ed... and Seniors

I had lunch seventh hour my freshman year.  We only had eight periods of school.  The lunch lines would close down halfway through, so woe if you were ever late.  We sat at long tables that folded up and big plastic chairs.  There was no assigned seating, of course, but somehow every one eventually found a place to sit and generally stayed there for the rest of the year.  I sat at the end of a lunch table by the salad line.  It was maybe two tables over from the hallway exit.  At the beginning of the year, I sat with two guys named Ed and one named Eric. 

We had photo IDs at our high school.  There was a big Polaroid camera in the office they used to take your picture and then crop it to fit in the ID.  This process wasn’t exactly instantaneous, so IDs were handed out over the first couple of weeks of school.  One of the Eds got his ID first and had to show it off to everyone, introducing himself as “Ed Leslie from Police Squad” and holding out his ID like a badge.  From that, I got the idea to draw him and the other guys from the lunch group in a comic strip.  I called it “Drugbusters”.  Ghostbusters had come out the spring before and everyone knew about “Just Say No” (we thought it was kind of lame; even those of us who didn’t actually take drugs). 

The sum total of the plot of Drugbusters is as follows.  The Drugbusters are made up of four freshmen who have dedicated their lives to ridding the school of the scourge of drugs.  They see four seniors smoking dope in the back of the cafeteria.  One by one, they attempt to arrest the seniors.  The seniors are much larger than our heroes; all you ever see are their legs and clenched fists.  After everyone has been beat up a few times, the Drugbusters get crafty.  They start using technology to help them in their quest, which ends up not being any more successful.  Every strip tends to end the same way: with a “POW!” and the Drugbuster laying feet up in the air. 

The comic ended up running through my entire freshman year.  The Drugbusters expanded to include my friends Dave and Tony and Ed’s friend Bill.  We also had Ralph the Wonder Mutt who reminded me a lot of my first dog Tramp (one of the dumbest dogs ever to grace the planet).  In the end, the Drugbusters did get the seniors in a showdown that would have made Victor Hugo cry with envy… assuming he could read English and had still been alive in 1985.  However, the victory is bittersweet and the ending caught everyone by surprise.

Unfortunately, by the end of the year, the Drugbusters on paper didn’t accurately reflect the friendships at the lunch table.  Ed Leslie was the first to leave.  I still saw him in my Spanish class, but he didn’t really want to be a part of the comic.  I “killed” his character off, but then brought him back at the end of the year in a long soap opera worthy plot line.  The other Ed also left our merry band of eaters.  He and Eric got into a fight and while I was able to negotiate a treaty of sorts, it was never the same.  Ed eventually sat with another crowd.  It was down to Eric and me, though Tony did come down and eat with us every so often.

Adventures in Filmmaking

I picked up my first movie camera for a buck and a half at a garage sale.  It was about the size of a small Kleenex box, and could shoot a four minute cartridge of silent movie film… outdoors in the daytime.  Despite these technical limitations, I was all set once again to make a movie.  This time, it would be a space adventure based on the comic exploits of Ray Blaster, Astronaut.

Ray Blaster started out as a comic strip in my seventh grade science class.  My lab partner – Brian Cichon – and I came up with this swashbuckling hero in the spirit of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.  Ray and his sidekick zoomed around the galaxy in the atomic rocket X-1 (like, what else do you name an atomic rocket?), looking for adventure.

Well, to be technical, he would have zoomed around the galaxy looking for adventure, but the comic turned out to be rather short-lived.  And when I say short-lived, I mean one page.  Ray barely got off the ground.

Ray Blaster’s cinematic debut – “Attack on Planet Zaberia” – didn’t have sound and the special effects were best left to the imagination.  Actually, they were imagination; I couldn’t afford anything else.  The film cartridges cost about seven bucks, almost a month’s worth of allowance.  We didn’t even have the luxury of a second take.

The plot of “Attack on Planet Zaberia” is as follows:  The intrepid crew of the X-1 (I believe I actually described the crew as “intrepid” on the intertitles) lands on the mysterious planet Zaberia.  At first they detect no life forms.  However, aliens appear and capture the crew.  One particularly intrepid crew member escapes.  Meanwhile, Ray has avoided capture.  He frees his crew and they all escape in the X-1 to fly off for another adventure.

We shot the movie in an afternoon at a local park.  The rocket X-1 was a duck blind, the Zabertrons were my brother and his little friends, the prison was the fence around the infield of a baseball diamond.  Tim Tokarz – my next door neighbor – played the escaping crew member.  He climbed up the fence and got stuck at the top, cutting up his leg in the process.  It was windy and the intertitles – written on regular typing paper – kept blowing around while I was trying to film them.  Otherwise, the shoot went pretty smoothly.  We finished up in a couple of hours.

We had to wait about six weeks to get the film back to watch it (developing costs were another month’s worth of allowance).  The world premiere was held in my basement, attended by the cast and half a dozen friends, and it was a great success.  We watched it twice.

Afterwards, the girl who lived across the street from me started talking about using a Ouija board and I managed to convince most of my neighbors that my basement was haunted.  But that’s another story.