Dinosors

By: T. Rivera- Dundas

My first day of Kindergarten was a big deal. I was torn away from the expanses of jungle-gyms and three-foot-tall basketball hoops of preschool, away from a school converted from a modest house on a suburban block. My comfort bubble of woodchip backyards was eagerly taken from me and I was shipped miles away to a school that was actually meant to be a school with my Buzz Lightyear backpack and a few missing teeth. This school, a little red building with its own rock-wall and pool, introduced me to the Tyrannosaurus Rex- the dinosaur. That’s the one that’s been dead for sixty-five million years. It’s the one with the scrawny, two-fingered arms and the teeth meant for ripping and tearing, about the size of a bus piled on top of another bus.

The first day of Kindergarten meant getting to know all the other kids with their first day of Kindergarten which meant breaking some prepubescent ice which meant playing blocks with a kid whose name I learned to be Sam Angle. Sam initiated a chain of events that ultimately led to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, with its teeth that cut and its idle fingers. Sam had multiplying warts on his index finger and an attraction to reptilian creatures. He was more athletic at five years old than I would ever be, but spent most of recess hunting ants with me and eating them for sport. Together we were able to distinguish the spicy ants from the tasty ants just by looking at them.

Sam and I were easy best friends, and I tried to make myself like him in all aspects of my five-year-old life. He drew in green marker with all five fingers in action, so I drew in green marker using the blunt of my wrist. His N’s and R’s looked dangerously similar when writing the word “dinosor,” so I sculpted my N’s and R’s into the same indecipherable shape. Sam spent hours of class time drawing reptiles, snakes and lizards and frogs, so I trained myself to do the same.

Sam and I, as an inseparable unit, would sit together in our art class, and ponder new ways to depict Sam’s favorite subject: the king reptile-giants that lived millions of years ago. We sat around and drew dinosaurs together. We drew a countless amount of gnarled teeth, of tails and spines and wings and claws. The curve of the Brachiosaurus neck, the permanent scowl of the Velociraptor, and the terrifying proportion of the Tyrannosaurus filled lined pages and spilled out of the margins of book reports. We spent time perfecting renderings of what would happen if dinosaurs attacked Los Angeles or New York City, deciding that the second Jurassic Park movie depicted this scenario almost perfectly. We were in love, completely obsessed with scaly arms and merciless eyes, and elected the Tyrannosaurus as the leader of this dinosaurian revolution. It was a logical promotion; the T-Rex was the one on all the t-shirts and movie posters. It had the meanest eyes and could probably run the fastest. The T-Rex was the one that could eat people in a single bite if it were still around, and eating people was the sort of thing that the T-Rex would love doing. The T-Rex epitomized everything us tiny, pale boys could ever want to be; big and bad, with scary teeth and tails that would whip.

In my drawings, my Tyrannosaurus was about twice the size of the actual Tyrannosaurus. It would have spiked backs, like a hybrid between the actual dinosaur and the Stegosaurus. It had deadly claws and arms that could swipe, it had evil squinting slits for eyes, it had bloody fangs. My Tyrannosaurus was usually destroying downtown or battling aliens. My Tyrannosaurus only lived on the blue lines of paper at school, drawn with Sam, and it was always done in profile- representation of terror and power as I knew it at five years old. In its own proportion, without the constraints of logic or realistic thinking, my Tyrannosauruses were perfect.

Sam and I became Tyrannosaurus connoisseurs- while other kids were learning how to share or speak Spanish, we immersed ourselves in the Cretaceous era, a time when sharing and the Spanish language couldn’t save you from a full-scale T-Rex attack.

This lasted years.

The blocks and markers of Kindergarten became the addition and subtraction of first grade, which in turn became the cursive and history of the second grade. Sam and I barely matured, and the dinosaurs were the same as they were millions of years ago. By the second grade, Sam’s self-made nickname, Rex, was the only thing he was known as. Rex and I still drew together. We drew through the grades, through every sort of experience one is likely to have during the ages of five through seven. When I left the red school, and ultimately detached myself from Rex and his pet lizards, drawing the T-Rex helped me through that. It knew, with its bloody fangs and triumphant expression, sometimes even going so far as breathing fire, it understood what I was going through. I drew through my parents’ divorce, and I drew through all the adjustments that separation entailed. When I stopped being a cute blonde child and grew into an awkward adolescent, I drew through that as well.

It was easier to draw the Tyrannosaurus than to pay attention in class. It was easier to draw the Tyrannosaurus than deal with the random problems and troubles that sometimes affect small children or older ones. It was easy to draw some hulking creature representing might and force than it was to be me. It was a pretty easy thing to draw.

The Tyrannosaurus was the harbinger of a career in drawing fangs and claws. Out of the Tyrannosaurus General spewed ranks of demons and monsters and winged things. The Tyrannosaurus led the pack of the bizarre creatures and characters that came from my head and came from the Tyrannosaurus onto the page. When I stopped drawing the Tyrannosaurus, I was drawing some cycloptic beast or alien that just happened to be T-Rex shaped. The T-Rex was the beginning, an initiator of things on paper. The Tyrannosaurus Rex, the way it would topple skyscrapers over or do battle with Martians on other planets, was a reflection of its illustrator, this scared child. It was what I looked up to- my forty-footed, diabolical hero. It didn’t matter how many millions of years ago it had been dead. It was my “dinosor,” my connection with one Rex Angle. The Tyrannosaurus was ultimately my childhood, screaming and biting the heads off of lesser beasts.