The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

SEEING PAST THE CORNERS

(An Introduction of Sorts)

Get a writer talking about himself and he’ll eventually come around to the question of genesis. How did he become a writer? When did he know that storytelling was the path for him, and why? As a reader I love those kind of questions. Give me a short story collection with biographical notes or story introductions, and chances are that I’ll read that stuff before I ever get near the fiction. I can’t help myself There’s just something inside me that needs to know… and right now.

So it’s only fair that I give you my answer to the genesis question up front. Not so much the how, when, or why I became a writer, because I’m still not exactly sure about the answers to those questions.

I can tell you the where, though.

I became a writer at the drive-in movies.

Let me tell you about it.

If you were born in the late fifties, like I was, drive-in movies were a big part of your growing-up experience. I visited my first drive-in before I could talk, figure around 1959 or so. Yeah. I couldn’t talk, but I could cry. And my brother, who was around ten at the time, wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who sat still easily. Between the two of us, our parents would have had their hands full at a walk-in theater.

But we were fine at the drive-in. In the comfort of our Chevy Bel-Aire, baby Norm could cry his head off and my parents wouldn’t have to suffer adult recriminations. And if my brother needed to turn his inner wildcat loose, there was always the playground — a gravel lot just below the screen complete with slides and monkey bars and carousel and a dozen other kids whacked out on snack-bar popcorn and sugary drinks (this was pre-diet drinks… also pre-Ritalin).

My parents both worked — Dad was a truck driver and Mom was a railroad clerk. They were usually on a budget. That was another reason we went to the drive-in. My dad had a connection that could get us in for free.

Said connection’s name was Jack Kennedy (really). I don’t remember Jack, outside the place he occupies in family stories. But from what I’ve heard, he was just the kind of neighbor you were apt to find on a fifties TV sitcom — a hale and hearty Irishman who worked several different part-time jobs to support a large family.

When the TV boom hit, Jack installed antennas on most rooftops in the neighborhood. He was also an electrician. Anyway, the part-time job that relates our story is Jack’s gig as the projectionist at our local drive-in theater. That’s how he ended up with a steady supply of free passes, some of which he gave to my dad. And that was great with my mom. She loved movies. Dad was a different story. He was on the impatient side, like my brother. Getting him to sit still through a double-feature was next to impossible. Sooner or later he’d decide he needed to take a stroll, or head to the snack bar for a cup of coffee, or have a cigarette.

Of course, Jack Kennedy counted on my dad getting itchy feet. I imagine Kennedy was bored out of his skull in that projection booth. He must have seen each movie at least a dozen times. And he probably heard the advertisements that played during intermission in his nightmares, because the same ads played at our drive-in week after week, year after year. To this day, everyone in my family can recite the Winchester Mystery House ad, which featured ghostly voices egging on Sarah Winchester to add more rooms to the legendary crazy-quilt mansion she built to appease the spirits of those killed by her husband’s rifles: “Keep building! Keep building!” the ghostly voices cried at the beginning of the ad, and somewhere in the middle a grizzled old-timer said, “Hey, Slim, gimmee one of them Winchester repeatin’ rifles,” and then came the final tag line: “The Winchester Mystery House… open every day, in San Jose!”

There I go. I’ve ended up about two steps removed from the thing I set out to talk about. But that’s the way this introduction is playing out, which is another way of saying that I’m bound to take more than a few detours on this particular road and I certainly won’t hold it against you, dear reader, if right about now you decide to flip ahead to the first story and get to the meat of the meal. If you continue on here, it’s going to be a mixed assortment of snack bar food — popcorn and corndogs and the occasional world-famous Flavo Shrimp Roll thrown in just because I feel like it.

Okay. That said, I feel a little better. You’ve been given fair warning. Beware digressions, detours, and heartburn, all ye who enter here

Back to Jack Kennedy. Obviously, he gave my dad free drive-in passes as much for his own benefit as ours. He knew my old man would end up in the projection booth as soon as he got restless. Together, they’d knock back a couple of beers and shoot the bull. Some nights they’d even fire up a little barbecue that Jack kept by the projection booth, toss on a couple of steaks, and proceed to ignore the movie to the best of their ability.

Sometimes Jack would miss a reel change and the car horns would start blaring. Sometimes the barbecue would get a little out of hand, as it did during a revival screening of Ben-Hur, when my dad and his buddy nearly set the projection booth on fire. The smoke kind of added something to the movie, though. For years, I thought that some wily Roman slave had torched the Coliseum during the big chariot race, put up a smoke screen that allowed Chuck Heston to cream Stephen Boyd.

Conflagrations aside, we all had a good time at the drive-in. Big brother climbing the monkey bars. Dad hanging out with Jack Kennedy. And me and Mom watching the movies.

We saw all kinds of stuff Big-budget epics. Westerns. Musicals. Comedies. And horror movies. I enjoyed most everything, but it was the horror movies that really took hold. That wasn’t much of a surprise, really. I’d always been the kind of kid who loved ghost stories more than anything. Some of my earliest memories are of summertime parties in the backyard where the neighborhood dads would spin spooky stories. The stories my dad told were some of the best. Tales of bloody footprints in abandoned houses, and Pennsylvania’s mysterious, glowing Green Man who stalked the countryside on moonless nights, and a dozen other weird and wonderful stories that filled my head and never quite managed to leave me… or my imagination.

Anyway, I spent a good part of my youth reading, watching (and eventually writing) about monsters. I learned about the unholy trinity (Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman) the way most kids my age learned about baseball players. Me, I didn’t care about baseball one little bit. No way I could tell you anyone’s batting average. But if you wanted to know a dozen different ways to kill a vampire, I was the kid you’d want to consult.

It made me feel more than a little freakish. Back in the sixties and early seventies, horror was definitely not cool. Not in the town where I grew up. Sports were cool. Cars were cool. Rock ‘n’ roll was cool. But monsters… uh-uh. Forget it. Monsters were okay for a couple of hours on the late, late show or at the movies, but any interest beyond that was seen as slightly weird. And if you were a kid like me, who dreaded being labeled “slightly weird” in the worst way, you learned to keep your mouth shut about monsters.

Of course, years later when I started going to horror writers’ conventions, I found out that there were a whole lot of kids just like me. We bought Famous Monsters of Filmland even though our parents had forbidden it, we filled our bookcases with Aurora monster models, we collected Castle Films silent 8mm versions of classic monster movies and magazines like Creepy and Eerie. And most of us were very careful to keep all of that stuff under wraps, especially around our parents. I mean, you could only take your mom and dad exchanging those “at first I thought he was going through a phase but now I’m getting worried” looks so many times.

But some of us were lucky. We found other kids who liked the same stuff we did. Kids who read Bradbury and Bloch and that weird guy Lovecraft, kids who marked the TV Guide weekly and set their alarm clocks to catch monster movies on the late, late show (this was pre-VCR, of course).

Me, I was one of the lucky ones. My best friends—Ron Ezell and Darryl Castro—were pretty indulgent of my fascination for all things horror. Ron, especially, went along with it, but he kind of marched to a different drummer anyway. He was the only kid I knew who actually talked his parents into letting him stay up until midnight on school nights so he could watch the Alfred Hitchcock Presents reruns the rest of us had to miss. The way Ron would relate some of those stories as we walked to school the next morning was better than the episodes themselves, and I always envied the fact that he never really gave a damn what other kids thought of his enthusiasm for horror movies and comic books.

Anyway, a lot of good stuff went into our creative boilers, and something was bound to come out. We made a few 8mm monster movies (including “Dracula vs. the Wolfman,” which featured a chubby vampire and a gray-haired lycanthrope [because the only wig we could get for our monster was octogenarian-gray]), and we drew our own comics, and we wrote a lot of short stories.

At least I did. My stories usually turned out to be pretty dull imitations of stories I’d read or watched. But I had fun writing them, and by trial and error (and by reading and watching) I began to learn the conventions of horror stories—how to grab a reader’s attention right away, how to foreshadow the coming of the monster, and how to set up a twist ending with clues planted early on. I’m not saying I was exactly accomplished at any of the above. My idea of a great opening was: “At midnight, the ghost hunters arrived at the Mansion of Blood. There were twelve men and five women. By sunrise the next morning, all but one would be dead!” But I was trying my best, and I paid attention to the things I read and watched, and I tried to make those things work in my own stories, and by doing that I couldn’t help but start to learn. The end result was kind of like osmosis, I think, and I began to develop an almost organic understanding of how horror stories worked.

When I sat down to write “those spooky stories” (as my mom called them), it was my goal to scare the living daylights out of whoever might read them. Not that I succeeded much. That wasn’t likely when you were writing epic stuff like “Castle of the Honda Monsters,” in which an elite squad of U. S. Marines traveled to Japan to battle a pack of Honda motorcycle-riding goblins who were terrorizing the countryside. Of course, the Marines won in the end—and here comes my big O. Henry twist—because our heroes were riding a superior American product: Harley-Davidsons! Finishing that story, I remember being incredibly proud of my brilliant twist ending. Leathernecks on hogs! Wotta concept! Now… well, all I’ll say now is that “Castle of the Honda Monsters” was the best motorcycle-riding goblin story I could possibly write… at the time.

Anyway, my buddies Ron and Darryl only went along so far with my enthusiasm for all things horror. They certainly weren’t as single-minded as I was, but pretty soon I met another kid who was on my wavelength. His name was Chris, and he’d seen every horror movie that I had and more. But that was no real surprise, because it turned out that Chris’ dad was the new manager of the drive-in… and (to get this introduction back on track at long last) Chris’ family actually lived there!

The set-up was like this—besides the big screen and the snack bar, there was a little house at one corner of the drive-in lot. The owners had built it for the manager and his family, and it was probably their sneaky way of turning a 40 hour a week job into a 24/7 job.

The house itself wasn’t anything fancy—in fact, saying it was “modest” would probably be an overstatement. But to my ten-year-old eye, my buddy Chris’ new home was just about the coolest thing I could possibly imagine. In the living room, there was a big sliding glass door that faced the drive-in screen, and mounted on a nearby wall was a speaker—the same kind customers hooked in their car windows so they could hear the movies. That meant Chris could lounge on his living room couch and watch anything that was playing at the drive-in. No muss, no fuss, no begging parents or an older brother to take him to the show. Talk about having it made!

Needless to say, Chris and I became the best of friends. I’d hang out at his house some nights and catch a movie (the first time I saw Planet of the Apes I was sitting on his couch), but most of the time I visited him during the day.

That was just as cool. There was something magical about being around the drive-in when no one else was there. It was weird, having the whole place to ourselves, and it kind of reminded me of those post-apocalyptic movies I loved — stuff like The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. On hot afternoons during summer vacation we’d hole up in the snack bar, pretending to fight off the vampire hordes that had sucked poor Vinnie dry. When we got tired of that, we’d read press books and promotional flyers for upcoming movies none of our friends knew about yet. I’ll tell you, we felt like bigtime cigar-puffin’ Hollywood insiders, doing that.

I noticed things at the drive-in during the day that I’d never noticed at night. Namely how big—and how empty—the screen looked when the projector wasn’t filling it up with a movie. It sure didn’t look like the sparkling white screens at the walk-in movie theaters I frequented. No, the drive-in screen was made up of dozens of garage-door-sized panels, and while some of them were clean and white, most of them were dappled with strange gray drive-in barnacles, as if the long-ago projected image of Moby Dick had left something behind.

And that’s not a bad image—the empty screen as some leviathan waiting for its moment, some Moby Dick trapped long after the projector was turned off and the film returned to the distributor. I could almost picture Gregory Peck pinned up there, doing the old come-hither with his dead Ahab arm. Step right up, kid, were waiting for you. There’s lots of room up here. But don’t forget to bring your stories.

See, even then, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I realized that was what I was built to do. Of course, I didn’t know just what I’d write. Maybe novels, maybe short stories or comic books or movies… and yes, I certainly had moments when I imagined my very own movies being projected on the drive-in screen. But that was a very big dream, and while I couldn’t really understand what it would take to make that dream a reality, I couldn’t quite help but be reminded of it every time I looked up at that empty screen. My future seemed to stretch out before me up there, a bigga bigga hunka daunting emptiness that only I could fill up, and every one of those barnacled panels seemed to hold a very special kind of challenge for me.

Ahab’s flapping arm, Gregory Peck’s voice: Bring it on, kid… and put it up here.

Somehow, I was determined to do just that. But I had no idea how to begin, and the very idea of trying scared me more than a little.

But there were other things around the drive-in that scared me, too.

There was the hunchback.

I can’t remember what the hunchback did at the drive-in. It runs in my mind that he might have managed the snack bar, or maybe he delivered the new movies when the program changed. Whatever he did, he was around the place a lot. Chris and I always knew when he was coming, too. The hunchback drove a muscle car, glass-packed muffler and all that, and you always heard his car a good five minutes before you ever saw him.

The hunchback couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Apart from the hump, he looked like any other member of the Woodstock generation. He had acne, stringy Neil Young hair that he was always brushing away from his black horn-rimmed glasses, and more than a few paisley-patterned shirts that must have been specially tailored to accommodate his twisted back.

I’m ashamed to say that the hunchback scared me at first. But once I got past the idea that he looked a little different, I realized that he was pretty much the same as the guys my older brother hung around with. For one thing, he loved to talk about his car. I can’t remember what kind of car it was — to tell you the truth, I know as much about cars as I do about baseball — but I do remember that the engine in the hunchback’s street machine really gleamed. I’d never seen anything like it, and I’d been around my share of gearheads (at the tender age of six I had a hot-rodding babysitter who liked to borrow my red crayons to touch up the stripes on his tires, but his car’s engine always looked like it was lightly basted in Pennzoil).

Every now and then the hunchback would stop and talk with Chris and me. Once he even gave me a bunch of old movie posters, including one for The Crimson Cult because he knew I liked Boris Karloff. But Chris always worried that we were getting in the guy’s hair. Maybe he was afraid that the hunchback would find out about our raids on the snack bar, where we’d sometimes wash buckets of day-old popcorn down with forbidden Cokes from the concession dispenser. Whatever his reason, Chris thought it was best that we steered clear of the hunchback most of the time. If we were anywhere close to the snack bar when he showed up, we’d jump on our bikes and head off to “shoot the humps.”

That was another favorite drive-in activity. We’d pedal as fast as we could and tear over the mounded rows that allowed drive-in patrons to park at an incline so they could get a good view of the screen. We’d launch ourselves from the crest of those mounds — getting airborne, coming down hard, pedaling again to take the next row and praying we wouldn’t wipe out… because that meant taking a gravel bath.

One day the hunchback came roaring up in his muscle car while we were shooting the humps. He leaned against the hood and watched us for awhile. We did our best to show off, pedaling like crazy to build up a good head up steam, pulling up on our butterfly handlebars as we launched ourselves, hitting the breaks and kicking up gravel with our fat “slick” back tires when we landed… and then topping it all off with the grand finale — letting our bikes slip out from under us while we held onto the handlebars as we came to a stop.

That last bit really notched on our own personal coolness meter, but the hunchback wasn’t impressed. “Looks like a lot of fun,” he said after watching us for awhile. “But how’d you boys like to try a real thrill ride?”

When you’re ten years old and you don’t want to look like a hopeless chicken, there was only one way to answer that question. We shouted out “sure thing” and the hunchback told us what he had in mind. By then there was no way we could back down even if we wanted to, and pretty soon we found ourselves lying on the hood of the hunchback’s car, painted flames beneath our chests warmed by a presently idle engine that had just recently been tearing up the highway on a hot summer day. The hunchback gave us one last chance, asking us if we were absolutely positively 100% sure we wanted to try his thrill ride, but there was no way we could chicken out now.

“Okay,” he said. “You boys better grab onto those windshield wipers, though. I’d hate to see one of you take a tumble and end up with a bad case of road rash.”

The hunchback climbed behind the wheel while I wondered what he was talking about. Road rash? I’d never heard the expression. He keyed the ignition, and the glass-pack muffler growled. I felt the big, spotless chrome and steel engine vibrating beneath me, and Chris and I exchanged what the hell are we doing? glances, and the hunchback floored it and the car’s rear wheels kicked up a spray of gravel and we were on our way.

There were maybe ten rows of parking humps between the snack bar and the screen. The hunchback hit the gas as he crested every one of them, trying to get airborne like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. Of course, the humps were too close together to pick up much speed in between, but even a little speed turned out to be more than enough.

See, it wasn’t the going up that was dangerous… it was the coming down. Every time the hunchback’s car landed, the front shocks screamed and Chris and I yelped, holding onto those windshield wipers for dear life.

I should have closed my eyes, but I didn’t. I looked to my right and saw a sea of gravel waiting to chew me up and spit me out. I looked to my left and saw Chris beside me, trapped somewhere between a laugh and a scream. I looked straight ahead and saw the bug-splattered windshield, remembering the joke my dad told every time an insect ended it all in a kamikaze smear: “Well, he won’t have the guts to do that again.”

I stared at the bugs, suddenly feeling that we shared a certain kinship. The hunchback eyed me from behind the steering wheel. He was laughing his head off, his stringy hair slashing his hornrimmed glasses as he bounced in the driver’s seat. His twisted spine prevented him from seeing more than a couple inches above the wheel under the best of circumstances, and I suddenly wondered if he could see over me at all when he wasn’t bouncing.

Finally we crested the last hump. Okay, I thought. It’s almost over now. This crazy maniac will stop his car, and we’ll get off, and then we can all have a good laugh and lie about how much fun this was —

But the hunchback didn’t stop his car. He kept going, following an access road that ran along the playground fence and looped around to the back of the lot.

The hunchback hit the gas and headed in that direction.

I stared through the windshield.

I saw the look in his eyes.

I knew exactly what he was going to do.

Jesus Christ! I thought. This crazy asshole’s going around again!

And he did just that, starting from the rear of the lot, hopping row after row as he headed for that big white Moby Dick screen. I held on for dear life, like a drowning Ishmael grabbing fistfuls of Queequeg’s coffin, the sharp back edges of the windshield wiper digging into my hands. But even if I managed to hold on, that didn’t mean the wiper itself would hold — after all, I knew kids who broke those off for fun, like automotive toothpicks.

I wasn’t going to so much as look at that gravel now. I was too scared of what it could do to me. Road rash. Now I knew exactly what that meant. I didn’t want a terminal case. I closed my eyes, but that only tuned in my senses to The Hunchback’s Wild Ride soundtrack — gravel rattling in the car’s wheel wells like machine-gun fire, the shock absorbers screaming, and the radio blaring sixties rock. I don’t know what the song was, but it should have been the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out.”

We shot another hump. My chin hit the hood. My eyes flashed open. The hunchback was still laughing, still having a great old time behind that bug-splattered windshield. Either he didn’t have a clue as to the level of our terror (I couldn’t believe he might actually think we were enjoying this), or something else was going on in his head —

And that, dear reader, is when the budding writer in my brain kicked in. Suddenly I saw the hunchback’s wild ride as a story… like something that Robert Bloch would invent for one of his collections. And Bloch’s stories almost always had a twist. That scared me — remember, I’d begun to understand how horror stories worked — and suddenly I was absolutely certain that I knew what the twist in this story was going to be.

After all, the driver was a hunchback. I’d known that all along — but you always had to know that all along for the twist to work. But it was the thing I didn’t know that really scared me — I had no idea how the hunchback had ended up being a hunchback. It wasn’t like I’d read the special origin issue of Teenage Hunchback comics. I knew nothing about the guy.

Of course, I knew none of the cold hard clinical facts about scoliosis of the spine, either. But right then, I didn’t need to. Such mundane knowledge wouldn’t have satisfied my imagination. Because by then that most dangerous of animals had put the whole puzzle together for me, and I imagined that the hunchback had once been a kid just like me, a kid with a nice straight back who’d taken a dare to hold onto a windshield wiper while he rode a bucking hunk of Detroit steel around a parking lot …

Suddenly I was certain that what was happening was locked up solid in the same kind of logic that I’d found in so many stories. Only this story wasn’t trapped between the covers of a book, and it wasn’t bordered by the four corners of the drive-in screen. No. It was happening down here on the ground, in the middle of a gravel lot speared with in-a-car speakers.

And it was happening to me.

As the muscle car charged toward the snack bar, I was quite certain that there was nothing I could do to defy the inevitable. After all, how could anyone escape the big twist? I’d never known any character in a story to manage that trick, and I didn’t figure I was going to do it now.

All I could do was smile grimly as life turned the page for me.

All I could do was watch as my imagination ran a grisly coming attractions trailer of a kid tumbling across a gravel lot at thirty miles per hour.

All I could do was listen as that Ahab voice whispered in my ear: “Understand now, kid? That’s why they called this story ‘Road Rash’!”

Well, here we are, arrived at the big cliffhanger moment. Only problem is, I can’t give you any kind of satisfying payoff.

Because it turned out the story of the hunchback’s wild ride wasn’t called “Road Rash” after all. There was no big twist ending to this particular episode of my existence, and certainly no twist to my spine. Which is another way of saying that nothing bad happened. The hunchback simply stopped his car when he got to the snack bar, and both Chris and I breathed not-so-silent sighs of relief.

The hunchback unlocked the snack bar. We helped ourselves to buckets of day-old popcorn—the hunchback even treated us to the concession-dispenser Cokes that were usually denied us—and then we sat around and talked about what a blast we’d just had. It took awhile for things to sink in, but soon enough I realized that everything was actually okay.

This wasn’t an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone. I was safe. I wasn’t going to open my eyes and find myself back on the hood of the hunchback’s street machine. And I wasn’t going to end up with my eyes bugging out of my head, either, the way that poor bastard in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” always did when he realized he hadn’t escaped the hangman’s noose after all. There were no twist endings here. No lightbulb-over-the-head moments of realization or just-desserts shocks brewing up to bite our young hero in the ass.

This wasn’t a story, after all.

This was just plain old everyday life.

And if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that plain old everyday life wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d put up on a movie screen. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d put in a short story, either. Real life just didn’t work that way. It wasn’t as slick. It couldn’t be. It was just the kind of stuff that happened, and you got through it as best you could even though it was sure enough more than a little weird, and then you got back to thinking about the stuff that you really needed to think about if you wanted to grow up to be a writer of spooky stories — the vampires, the werewolves, the Frankenstein’s monsters.

That’s what I thought back then, anyway. Now I know better.

As the sixties wound down, my family didn’t make as many trips to the drive-in. Jack Kennedy had moved away, and my dad wasn’t much on the “new” stuff that Hollywood was turning out—to tell the truth, the coming of movies like Easy Rider drew a line in the sand that the old man refused to cross. Besides that, my brother was now a college student, I was into double-digits age-wise, and the drive-in just wasn’t the “let’s pack up the kids for a night out” kind of destination it once had been.

Going out to dinner became the family activity of choice. Believe it or not, my brother and I had both learned to behave ourselves in public. On our own, that was something different. We each had our share of misadventures. But my brother was nine years older than me, and we didn’t exactly move in the same social circles. That didn’t mean that Larry wouldn’t take pity on me now and then. Sometimes he’d let his kid brother tag along with him… and sometimes that meant catching a movie at the drive-in.

My brother owned a ’67 Mustang. I’d usually sit up front when we visited the drive-in (with a buddy of mine, if my brother was feeling really generous), and Larry would sit in back with Marian (his girlfriend, and later his wife). We saw American biker movies and action movies, but we also developed an international palate—spaghetti westerns, Japanese monster movies, Hammer horror movies from England.

We saw lots of the latter. The Brits had revived the old Universal Studios monster franchises, but with a sexual technicolor twist. Picture Dracula and his buxom vampires. My brother would always say about the latter, “Now, don’t tell Mom or Dad about this part.” As far as our parents were concerned, Dracula meant Bela Lugosi. Dracula didn’t mean a bunch of chicks in lowcut gowns with British accents, dripping fangs, and startling cleavage.

My buddies and I kept our mouths shut. We knew when we had it good. (And here, gentle reader, I will spare you the usual authorial meditations on preteen boys and the relationship between sex and death that you usually find in introductions of this kind.)

Anyway, not every movie featured accents, fangs, and cleavage. Hammer hadn’t exactly cornered the horror market. But most of the American stuff was pretty low buck, and most of it was pretty awful. Sometimes it was two-or three-times awful, depending on whether we were catching a double-bill or an all-night-triple (lots of bad horror movies were released three-at-a-time in those days, as if quantity made up for the lack of quality). But hey, my friends and I never complained too much. At the very least we were out of the house, and chances were good that we’d be eating popcorn and drinking Cokes if we had any left-over allowance $$$$ to burn that week, so no night at the drive-in was a total loss.

One night my brother took Marian, me, and my friend Darryl to a horror double-bill. The first movie was a dud — in truth I can’t even remember what it was — but it was enough of a yawner to convince us that we were in for one of those at least we get popcorn and Coke kind of nights.

The second movie was something else indeed. It was called Night of the Living Dead, and I’d never seen a movie quite like it in my life. Watching NOTLD now, my writer’s eye can pick it apart and see how it works and why it still works after all these years. But then… well, I think part of the reason that it hit me — and everyone else in Larry’s Mustang — so hard was sheer surprise. We had no idea what to expect going in. No preconceived notions. We’d read no reviews, seen no previews. All we knew about the movie was the title, which we’d seen spelled out on the marquee with the same plastic letters that had spelled out the titles of a thousand other movies over the years.

In short, we had nothing to prepare us, and I can’t imagine that there was any way possible to sit through a impromptu viewing of NOTLD without batting an eye. This wasn’t the recycled terror we found in Hammer movies. After all, you killed the Hammer Dracula the same way you killed the Universal Dracula — ram a stake through that sucker’s heart and you were good to go. But the old familiar fix-its weren’t going to fly this time out. No way. Director George Romero’s movie featured something new—armies of flesh-eating zombies that could only be destroyed by serious head trauma. Mix that with some late sixties we’re knee-deep in Vietnam and the world is going to hell in a handbasket attitude and a hyper-realistic style rarely used in horror movies, toss in a black “everyman” hero (Duane Jones), and you had yourself a real mindslammer. My brother, who usually amused himself by grabbing me from behind whenever a cinematic “boo” moment arrived, was actually the first one to jump the night we saw NOTLD. During one of the film’s few quiet moments, a zombie unexpectedly reaches through a window and paws at Duane Jones, and the shock jolted Larry so hard that he actually jumped up and hit his head on the car roof.

Things got worse for old Duane as the movie progressed. You bet they did. Boarded up in an old Pennsylvanian farmhouse with a bunch of people who refused to listen to sense, he had no real chance of escape, and neither did I. I was sucked straight into his world, fending off an army of zombies who wanted Duane and his pals for dinner.

Yeah. I was trapped… until I began to consider what waited in the moonlit shadows outside the corners of the drive-in screen. See, the drive-in in my hometown had not one… not two… but three cemeteries as neighbors. Realizing that, a nasty little idea began to nibble at the corners of my imagination. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the dead folks in those cemeteries clawed their way out of their graves and came shuffling across the road to pay us a little visit.

I stared through the Mustang’s side window. A fence topped with barbed-wire bordered the drive-in, but I didn’t think it (or the retractable tire spikes at the exit) would slow down a determined army of the living dead. Across the road, the cemetery waited. This one was the oldest of the three, and it had the whole gothic atmosphere thing going—mausoleums with stained glass windows, marble funereal monuments, and granite statuary. My eyes studied silhouettes in the moonlight. A lot of cold black stone out there. None of it moved at all. Only the trees moved, branches swaying in the late night breeze.

Well, that made sense, I told myself. Even if the dead were to return to life, the folks in the old cemetery had been dead a long time. I figured most of their coffins didn’t hold much more than a pile of bones… or maybe a couple fistfuls of dust. Even if the occupants of those coffins managed the Lazarus trick, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and actually do anything.

So I wasn’t too worried about the dead in the old cemetery. No. But the new cemeteries—which included the one behind us—were something else indeed.

They didn’t look nearly as scary as the old gothic cemetery. There were no imposing granite monuments or statuary. The new cemeteries had plain little bronze placards planted in the grass. Really, they weren’t very frightening at all.

But when you’re talking living dead, I knew that what counted was under the ground, not above it… the same way I knew that there were lots of fresh graves in the cemetery behind us, and each one of them held a recently deceased corpse.

I always avoided fresh graves when walking home through the cemetery. They creeped me right out, almost as much as seeing the gravediggers at work. I’d seen that a few times while hanging around with my buddy Chris. We’d be riding our bikes around the drive-in lot, and we’d happen to look across the road and see a couple of guys working with a backhoe, digging holes for people who’d been sucking wind just a couple days before.

Up on the screen, the zombies got the crazy blonde girl. I sat there watching Duane Jones fight off the living dead, and I thought about that cemetery behind me, and I wondered what I’d do if the “fresh ones” in the new cemetery started coming out of the ground.

I didn’t like thinking about that. I’d known more than a few people who were buried in that cemetery. My own grandfather was buried up there. So was the alcoholic barber who’d nearly sliced off my ear. And there were other people. Neighbors I’d liked and disliked, old ladies whose windows I’d soaped on Halloween —

Imaginatively speaking, I knew that I was treading dangerous ground. I knew I should concentrate on the movie. Sure, it was scary, but it wasn’t as frightening as the things my imagination churned up. Those things couldn’t be contained between four corners on a drive-in screen. They had dimension, and strength, and a reality all their own —

I imagined what I’d do if the zombies came stumbling across the road. I was just a kid. I couldn’t drive (just like the crazy blonde girl in the movie)… but for some reason I was the one sitting behind the steering wheel, so I’d have to get out of the front seat and switch places with my brother. Who knew how long that would take. It didn’t seem like the zombies in the movie were very fast, but there were a lot of them, the same way there were a lot of people buried in the cemetery. And once they got hold of you—

I could almost see them coming.

The dead neighbors who didn’t like me…

That crazy barber, a rusty razor in his hand…

The husks of withered old ladies who’d dropped Halloween candy in my trick-or-treat bag, leering like Graham Ingels characters in some old E. C. comic…

“You soaped our windows, Norman! And now you’ll die!”

For years after that night, I had NOTLD dreams in which I’d wake up, open my bedroom drapes, and see the streets teaming with zombies. Sometimes I’d try to barricade myself in the house, boarding up the windows and the doors. Sometimes I’d escape on my bicycle, pedaling as fast as I could, and I’d head for a friend’s house… preferably one whose parents owned lots of guns.

But no matter what I did, I was never safe when those dreams ended.

They weren’t the kind of dreams that ended that way.

My buddy Chris moved away before I started sixth grade. By the time I entered junior high school, my brother had transferred to a college in Oregon. I looked around and figured out that I’d lost both my “in’s” at the drive-in. I still wanted to see a lot of the movies that played there, but they weren’t the kind of movies my parents were likely to take me to see. And, needless to say, I was a long way from having a driver’s license.

But necessity is the mother of invention and all that. The drive-in was only about a mile from my house. So was that new cemetery I’d worried about while watching NOTLD. Along with some of the other kids in my neighborhood, I began to put two and two together. Pretty soon we hatched a plan — we could sneak over to the cemetery at night, hunt up a spot where we could see the drive-in screen, and catch at least one movie before the eleven o’clock curfew most of our parents imposed.

It seemed like we could pull it off. It was summertime. The weather was California perfect. At night, our parents were happy to turn us loose so they could relax in peace after a hot day. Usually we’d play street football, tear around on our bikes and skateboards, or head over to someone’s house and watch television reruns if we got bored. We weren’t exactly missed if we didn’t show up for two or three hours.

I remember a lot of things about those summer nights. I remember the scent of anise, a hot licorice smell that drifted from plants we called “skunk cabbage.” I remember the buzz of mosquitoes and street lights, and the one-speaker backbeat of A. M. radio rock on KFRC and KYA out of San Francisco. I remember arguing about the real identity of the Zodiac Killer (who’d begun his murderous spree in my hometown), and whether Paul McCartney was really dead or not, and how many gunmen were on that grassy knoll in Dallas. And I remember our walks to the cemetery.

We’d start at the edge of our housing tract, where the street dead-ended. There was a marsh on the other side of the bent guardrail that marked the boundary of our neighborhood, and we had to be careful there… one slip and you’d end up with a swamped tennis shoe that would squeak all night. But if we were careful, and if there was a good moon, we could make it across the marsh easily. Usually we didn’t even need a flashlight.

At the other side of the marsh, we’d work our way through stands of cattails to the music of croaking bullfrogs, and when we left the cattails behind we’d find ourselves at the edge of the cemetery. There wasn’t even a fence around the place. No kind of boundary at all. Just a wall of cattails, and then a well-manicured lawn.

The cemetery sloped up a hill. A paved road wound through the place, but we never followed that. We’d cross the grass, picking our way around the grave markers—my own grandfather’s, the alcoholic barber’s, the neighbors we’d liked and disliked—and we’d climb to a little ridge that overlooked the road… and the drive-in screen.

There was a little shade tree with a canopy of low branches at the top of the hill. That’s where we’d get comfortable, lying flat on the cool grass where no one was likely to notice us. After the first movie started, one of us would sneak across the road and slip into the drive-in (there were a few holes in the fence, and I knew where they were courtesy of my friend Chris). Usually the last few parking rows were empty unless the place was really packed, and we’d turn up as many speakers as we could. This way we could hear the movie as well as see it, even from our vantage point across the road.

Sitting on that hill as one summer blended into the next, I was introduced to Count Yorga, the abominable Dr. Phibes, and Blacula. They left their marks on me, but they didn’t really scare me. Not the way the caretaker did.

All the kids in my neighborhood had heard stories about him. They said that the caretaker worked for the cemetery as kind of a night-watchman—he kept an eye out for vandals, or kids who might park in the cemetery to neck, or kids (like us) who might sneak up on the hill to watch drive-in movies for free. We’d all heard that he had a horribly scarred face, and that his face was the reason he worked nights at the cemetery—he was far too ugly to work a job where people might get a look at him in the daylight.

I’d heard that he was stone-cold crazy, too. That he did horrible things to the kids he caught. Chris’ older brother had told us stories about the caretaker dragging trespassers into the mortuary, where he’d lock them up in a pitch-black viewing room with only a corpse for company. And if part of the evening’s business was a cremation, I’d heard that the caretaker would force trespassers to watch his coworkers feed the dear departed to the crematorium oven’s flames.

Of course, I didn’t believe any of those stories. Not really. Though I didn’t know anything about “urban legends” at the time, I knew that the stories about the caretaker probably weren’t true. They couldn’t be, because they always involved “a friend of a friend,” and they never ended with the caretaker getting fired or arrested for the crazy things he did. But there was something about those stories that sent a chill up my spine, even so. They made me want to believe that they were true, even though I knew I shouldn’t. They were the kind of stories the human race had been telling since the first cavemen gathered around a fire, not much different from the stories my dad told about bloody footprints or the Green Man, or the stories my friends told about phantom hitchhikers or that ghostly haunter-of-bathroom-mirrors, Mary Worth.

So I didn’t really believe the stories about the caretaker, but that didn’t stop me from being afraid of him. I spent a good portion of my time at the cemetery looking over my shoulder, or listening for a quiet footfall on the well-manicured lawn.

But no one ever got close to us at the cemetery. Every once in awhile we’d hear a sound, or we’d see someone on the far side of the grounds walking around with a flashlight. And every now and then our eyes would follow the little road that wound through the grave-markers and we’d notice the mortuary door standing open in the middle of the night. Maybe someone would be standing there smoking a cigarette, and we’d glance at each other and we wouldn’t have to say a word, because we all knew that the only smart thing to do was run.

At moments like that, whatever was on the screen was instantly forgotten. Count Yorga, or Blacula, or Dr. Phibes… it didn’t matter. We’d run from the caretaker, hoping that we wouldn’t be locked up in a pitch-black room with a corpse for company, praying that we’d never find out what a dead body smelled like when it hit the crematorium flames. And when we reached the marsh, when we charged through the cattails and made it to the dead-end street beyond and the safety of its streetlight glow, we’d look back into the darkness and find that no one had followed us at all.

I’m sure there was no one to follow us.

I’m sure there never was a caretaker.

But that didn’t stop us from talking about him. When we were sure that we were safe, we’d sit there at the end of the street and tell all the caretaker stories one more time. It didn’t matter how many times I heard them. They always made me shiver.

I loved hearing those stories. I loved telling them, too.

And now I’ve told them to you.

I never really wrote about any of these things, until now.

I did write about the drive-in and the cemetery across the street. Much of the action in my first novel, Slippin’ into Darkness, took place there. But there weren’t any buxom vampires in that book. No George Romero zombies. No Frankenstein or Dracula, no Dr. Phibes or Count Yorga or Blacula. There weren’t any monsters at all.

Of course, there weren’t any hunchbacks with muscle cars, either. No dads nearly lighting the projection booth on fire with their friends. No kids eating buckets of day-old popcorn or drinking forbidden concession-dispenser Cokes. There was a cemetery caretaker, but he was a harmless old guy. He didn’t have a hideously scarred face, and he didn’t lock up anyone in a mortuary viewing room or crematorium.

None of those things happened in my first novel.

None of those characters appeared.

But in a way, they were all there. Every one of them. Because they were inside me. If they hadn’t been, I never would have written that book… or anything else.

I could go on, dear reader, but I think that’s where I’ll leave you. I feel myself straining to make a point, to make connections that aren’t really there. But this isn’t a game of connect the dots, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that real life rarely has the clarity of fiction. I learned that while riding a bucking muscle car when I was only ten years old.

I still visit the cemetery now and then. My dad’s buried there, close to that tree my friends and I used to sit under when we sneaked out to watch drive-in movies. The old man’s gone and I miss him more than I can every say, but I still remember his stories about bloody footprints and the Green Man, and I still tell them, the same way I tell my own stories.

The drive-in remains, too. It’s still right there, across the road from the cemetery. It’s been closed for many years, but no one has tom it down. These days the screen is in horrible shape. Several of the garage-door-sized panels are missing and it’s more gray than white—like the picked-over carcass of Moby Dick.

I still get a funny feeling looking up at that screen. Sometimes I can still see Gregory Peck pinned up there, beckoning with his dead Ahab arm… and I’m reminded of things I set out to do a long time ago, and things I’ve done, and things I still want to accomplish.

But I’m reminded of other things, too.

Things I saw outside the screen’s four corners.

Some of those things I saw clearly. Some of them I’m still trying to recognize.

I like to think that those are the things I write about.

I hope you’ll find some of them in these stories.

Norman Partridge

Lafayette, California

March 1, 2001