THE LOST OASIS

by James Lincoln Warren

Today the United States is speckled with so-called convenience stores, the most famous of which is 7-11, but including Circle-K, Stop’n’Go, and of course, the fictional Kwik-E Mart of “The Simpsons” fame. A couple blocks away from my condo in L.A., there’s a convenience store called the K7 Market — I don’t think it’s a chain, though — and the friendly folks who run it are South Asians in line with the current cultural cliché.

When I was a kid growing up in San Antonio in the 60s, we had them then, but we didn’t call them convenience stores. We called them ice houses.

They were a little different from today’s convenient stores, but in all essentials, they were the same. Originally, they were places that not surprisingly sold ice, Texas summers being famous for their shimmering heat and ice not being anything like a luxury in the searing temperatures. (Many parts of the state didn’t get electricity until relatively late — the young Lyndon B. Johnson built his early political career on getting power to his constituents.) The ice houses had names like Lone Star, Mr. M’s, and yes, Stop’n’Go. They always had a cooler out front filled with bottles of soda pop. You’d reach into the cooler, grab your bottle, then go inside to pay for it. The beer was kept inside — Pearl, Lone Star, and Falstaff were all brewed locally, and after midnight and all day Sunday, beer was not for sale. No liquor or wine was ever for sale at an ice house back then.

But my favorite part of the ice house were the comic book and paperback racks. There were always at least three rotating wire racks filled with riches out of the Arabian Nights. Ace Doubles, Dell, Avon, Bantam, Fawcett, Signet, and other precious jewels. They were mostly mysteries and science fiction.

And it was there I fell in love. Mind you, I said love, not romance. My ten-year-old heart was not interested in romance. In fact, romance was kind of gross. But love, oh yes yes yes. Love for the Man of Bronze, and also Monk, Ham, Johnny, Renny, and Long Tom. I saw the Jim Bama cover for The Lost Oasis, and I would never be the same.

And there was the story itself. Not only did it have a lost city in the Rub’ al Khali, but the adventurers arrived there by submarine, through a long subterranean channel. (It was there that Monk, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, that is, found the runt pig Habeas Corpus, who featured in dozens of later Doc Savage stories, an animal I perceived as being a perfect pet, although I had no idea what habeas corpus meant — my mother told me it was a legal term, and since the purpose of the pig was to torment Ham, aka Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks the legal mouthpiece, that was all ye need to know.)

Clark Savage, Jr., Doc himself, had his headquarters on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building and his own elevator. He never killed the bad guys, having invented “mercy” bullets that simply drugged the victim into a stupor, which were fired from full auto machine gun pistols of his own design that roared like bull fiddles. He would also perform brain surgery on criminals he caught at a hospital in upstate New York, inducing permanent amnesia and reforming them into useful members of society. (It never occured to me that this was a criminal act itself. Doc was the hero, after all.) Although tall, muscular, handsome, rich, and ingenious, he was hopelessly awkward around attractive girls. When concentrating, he emitted a weird trilling sound. What a guy!

I didn’t realize until after I had devoured at least a dozen of Doc’s adventures that they were from the 1930s. I thought that Kenneth Robeson, the putative author, was a real person who was writing the books in the 60s. (The author’s actual name was Lester Dent; “Kenneth Robeson” was a house name, like Nancy Drew’s “Caroline Keene”.)

Although Doc Savage was a crime fighter, most of the adventures had strong elements of science fiction in them. The prose was abysmal. In retrospect, I can see that the cultural attitudes espoused in the stories had a strong whiff of fascism about them and were distinctly racist. I didn’t notice anything like that at the time, though — I suppose I was just too naïve even to detect it. All I knew was that I had graduated from the Hardy Boys to something with some real oomph.

And it was shortly thereafter that I started to write stories of my own. Oh, I had drawn my own comics for some time — my rip-off of Batman was Thunderbird (N.B., not the Thunderbird — in the 60s, it was not the Batman, either), who tootled around town in the Thundermobile with his teenage sidekick, Skylark, and my rip-off of Spider-Man was called the Tracker, whose arch-enemy I with startling originality christened Professor Squid. But I had never attempted anything without pictures before. Doc Savage changed all that. With Doc, the pictures were all inside my head.

How can any kid resist a guy in a torn shirt firing a machine gun, surrounded by giant bats?

Well, I couldn’t.

Nowadays, convenience stores don’t have wire racks filled with paperbacks. People don’t go to convenience stores looking for things to read, I guess. It’s sad.

The ice houses were considerably more than a place to grab a bottle of cold Big Red, as far as I was concerned. They were lost oases of culture in the Rub’ al Khali of imagination.