 |
Steve Kissing
|
Meet Steve Kissing, self-proclaimed teenage dork. The understated athlete, ladies' man and exceptional kid grew up in Price Hill during the 1970s. He ran an average of five miles every day without fail for nearly three years. He became an altar boy for St. William's Parish and slowly ascended to become a National Catholic Youth Organization state representative. He searched for a happy medium when it came to girls: not too much of a prude, but not a slut either. He's your typical all-American boy.
Of course, those boys usually have a bump in the road along the path to perfection. That's where Kissing places his narrative focus in his first book, Running from the Devil.
At age 11, Kissing experienced his first hallucination in the midst of a social studies class.
"One moment I was trying to remember the various ways the Red Man used maize," he writes. "The next moment my brain felt as if it were tossed into one of those domed dice tumblers in the middle of a board game, some angry person pounding it over and over, dissatisfied with every number."
Post-hallucination, Kissing simply felt a bit dazed but nonetheless moved on. As the attacks came on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, he began theorizing as to what could have caused them. Perhaps it was the time he got shocked while exploring the inside of an alarm clock. Or maybe it was when he went without his thick glasses for two weeks, stumbling around blindly. Surely he was affected by staring into a light bulb for 15 minutes.
Eventually he trashed those possibilities, instead developing a hypothesis fit for The Exorcist: The devil was controlling his mind, taking him down one trippy experience at a time. The obsessive experiments he conducts as a result (an exorcism involving Wonder Bread and holy water, for one) are sardonically hilarious.
Kissing's childhood memoir comes in the form of a never-ending confession. He doesn't intend this, however, to be one of the Catholic type. Instead he writes openly and frankly, baring his soul in hopes of ascending the ladder to the playground-in-the-sky.
Kissing's success comes with his witty humor in the face of his all-too-serious hallucinations. He remains in a childlike point of view for most of the book, naively looking at his condition.
"I decided to do everything within my power to make Jesus a friend, a close one, like the kind you'd invite to a Friday night sleepover," he writes early on.
The author, whose day job is as a copywriter for Barefoot Advertising, recalls the story's original form: "It was a feature length story in Cincinnati Magazine in 2000. Based in part in reaction from the story, I decided to blow it up. I was able to give it greater depth and detail and bring in elements that I didn't have time to address originally."
In expanding Running from the Devil, Kissing found it enjoyably different from his typical journalistic writing.
"To have this story, I have a greater sense of control over the telling of it than I typically have in writing other pieces," he says.
Although his memoir has a strong tie to his Cincinnati heritage, the story and prominent themes go above and beyond that.
"I set out to write my story so that someone didn't have to be Catholic or from the West side to connect," he says. "It's a story about parenting and the influence of imagination. Because it's about those things, it transcends decades and geography."
Kissing's story is familiar to many. Of course, not everyone adamantly believes Satan has taken control of their minds. Substitute that for any variety of teen angst or quirks, and you can relate to Kissing's years growing up.
"I think we all, as children and young people, have these dorky elements to our character," he says. "With some young people it's more readily apparent, but we all had or have them. And it takes a few years to realize it's a better way to go through life."
Running from the Devil follows suit in the traditional traumatic teen fairytale -- teen has a good life, teen discovers a problem of sorts in his/her life, teen battles said problem until he/she finds out everything is OK. What elevates Running above the others is Kissing's in-the-moment honesty and inherent good nature.
Whether you pity him as he wrestles with the nonexistent devil or relate to his dorkiness, you'll be rooting for him.
STEVE KISSING reads and signs Running From the Devil at 2 p.m. Saturday at Barnes & Noble in Kenwood.
Printer-friendly version
