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As a child, I had more fears than there are plump, juicy raisins in Kellogg's Raisin Bran (is it just me or are there too damn many raisins in raisin bran now?). Oh, sure, I had all the usual ones - Mom, Pop and my cocker spaniel, Licky, might die horribly on Route 9, my older sisters' friends might see me in my pajamas, and, of course, most terrifying of all - that circumstances might force me to take a shit outside. In retrospect, age seven was probably too young to read the "Necronomicon," "The Dr. Mengele Story," "Coffee, Tea or Me?" or "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Fiends, ghoulish scientists, malignant clowns, insatiable stewardesses and metamorphic worms still people my poisoned dreams. Life magazine's photo essays of happy, hopping carrion birds - taller than I was - fighting for body gobbets on the battlefields of the Punjab didn't help, nor, despite the best of intentions, did "Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits."
But more than any other source, I owe Hollywood for the grisly, lurking horrors with which I play unceasing games of Whack-A-Mole in my weakened psyche. Movies bequeathed a bright new world of previously unimaginable depravity, akin to an advent calendar by Hieronymus Bosch, a Damien Hirst pet shop, or a Michael Savage interview of Ann Coulter (Pop goes the weasel!).
[* Footnote: For those of my readers who have not played the ancient game of Whack-A-Mole: W-A-M is a test of faith, nerves and reflexes wherein the initiate tries to hammer down small subterranean animals as soon as they pop up from their multitudinous holes. Early Gnostics believed that life itself was such a game, except that God and Satan held the hammers. Guess who played the moles?]
"Psycho" destroyed the simple, yet voluptuous assumption of an undisturbed shower, and then Glenn Close fatally ruined tub time (I content myself now with a quick warm-sponging, while keeping a sharp pachanga at hand for last minute guests.) The "Living Dead" movie franchise changed my heretofore neutral feelings - personally, I believe for the worse - toward corpses, walking corpses, dancing corpses, half-starved corpses, corpses that like Oscar Mayer wieners, rats, maggot-ridden meat, closets, basements, attics, dark hallways, sepulchers, nighttime and the very soil I walk on. To be honest, I no longer trust corpses of any kind, even those of family or close friends, and that seems a pity.
"Alien" added a regrettable dimension of anxiety to the common "gassy" stomach. Now when I reach for the Pepto Bismol, I can't help wondering if a toothy hardon with feet is going to pop out my stomach lining, then run, hide and grow to enormous proportions in the engine room.
And then there are all those Robin Williams movies like "Smoochy" and "Bicentennial Man."
These diseased, cinematic fondue sticks to the soft cheese of a young child's subconscious had one simple thing in common: utter, unhinged insanity. Motel clerks, dentists, women who make love on kitchen counters, bulldogs with human heads, seed pods, sink disposals, ventriloquist dummies, Republicans, Robin Williams and - need I say it? - corpses; anything can go maniacally and murderously insane, and when it does (it will) - it's going to come yoo-hooing for you-know-who. Olly olly oxenfree!
When my time came, I had plans to kill myself before they ate me alive. "So there! Fuck you, Super Corpse!" Like so many others - readers, critics, agents and publishers in particular - they'd made the fatal mistake of underestimating Henry E. Panky.
But none of this flesh-sucking, bathtub-popping hoi polloi even reached the upper varicose veins of the querulous Queen who truly ruled the raucous Bedlam of my dark nights. She reached out to me with palsied arms, rheumy eyes, discolored baby teeth, and wrinkled lips the consistency of elephant hide: "Come give auntie a kiss, sweet pea."
Nothing and nobody terrified me more than the elderly Bette Davis.
Fairy tale witches are not so frightening: they're property owners, easily identified by their accessories and rarely encountered. But in "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte," Ms. Davis injected unspeakable dread and senile malevolence into an entire demographic. Old ladies wandered all around me: shuffling to mailboxes, opening doors at Halloween, fluttering past dim windows within neglected houses. "Hush, Hush" featured a veritable coven of gorgons and crones with their bulging, dripping baggage: the barking and howling, heads bouncing down stairs, scary music, spooky lighting, blood-soaked dresses, creepy masks, severed limbs (whack!), creaking doors, nightmarish dream sequences, and that perennial award-winner in the Boundless Fear category: blurry faces glimpsed through windows. My tiny scrotum shriveled back up into the pelvic cavity, and given the option, I would happily have climbed in beside it.
It didn't matter one iota in the end, that Charlotte apparently hadn't whacked Bruce Dern's hand and head off with a meat cleaver after all. By then, it was far too late for the legal niceties. With her glittering, protuberant eyes and overly made-up face, her debutante party dresses and waist-length hair, her batty smile and little-girl fruitcake voice - tastefully spiced with visceral limb-lopping shots - Bette had irretrievably horrified one susceptible, but unusually large-headed child forever. The details - which witch did what to whom - were irrelevant! I had long since become a small catatonic worm, trapped in the rank, black humus of my imagination, waiting helplessly for the roto-tiller of perdition.
"Bedtime, Henry. Sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite!"
"Eek!"
Darting from light switch to light switch.
Frightened glances into closet and under bed.
The panting, starting-line stance, flicking the final switch and ...
in the dreadfully burgeoning blackness ...
the final feverish dash for safety.
Transfixed with terror, I hunched - sleepless, smothered and overheated - under the blankets, listening with every antennae of my cowardice for the scuffling of her footsteps. I really would have appreciated a brother, of any shape, age or personality type, to share the room with, but my parents had long since thrown in the reproductive towel. In the absence of a sibling, a 300 watt, motion-detecting nightlight would have been thoughtful. Every desperate gulp of cool, outside air exposed me to she-who-waited-patiently with dripping butcher's knife. When I cracked one eye open to scan the enveloping gloom, hideous heads floated and bobbed like balloons. Party time at the abattoir!
Ooogah, ooogah; dive, dive, dive!
My father - though a Goldwater supporter - wouldn't allow me a handgun, much less a flamethrower, and I doubted that the bullfight banderillas Uncle Pat had given me would stop Nana Bette when she came to call. And I recoiled at the idea of sticking them into her wrinkled, saggy body - think of the horrible shrieking! It would just piss her off without killing her! Then I considered a ball peen hammer, one of the few weapons easily obtainable by a first grader. Would that be effective - a ball peen versus a cleaver? No, the odds weren't attractive. I finally opted to go quietly, and pray for a definitive head stroke before she started on the thighs and drumsticks.
In a clinically interesting side effect, for many years after Bette played Iron Chef, I couldn't even contemplate a hamburger with ketchup, or spaghetti in meat sauce without stomach-squeezing revulsion. In an era when 97% of school cafeteria menus were retreads of those two sanguinary themes,* lunchtimes became bitterly fought battles with the peristaltic impulse. This doubtless helped turn me into the aberrant and ostracized loner cringing before you today.
[* Footnote: Monday: Burgers (kids applied their own ketchup); Tuesday: Salisbury Steak (reshaped, leftover burgers in tomato sauce); Wednesday: Spaghetti & Meatballs (leftover Salisbury Steak squished into balls, in leftover tomato sauce); Thursday: Beefaroni (meatballs returned to ground meat, plus yesterday's spaghetti and Tuesday's tomato sauce); Friday: Bubble & Squeak (don't ask: the horror is still too fresh).]
Gee, I'm not sure I ever mentioned to Dr. Friedman the marinara sauce phobia. He's been so distant and distracted lately. Maybe this would bring back the hand-rubbing excitement of our early sessions.
Any way you slice it, Ms. Davis' malevolent decrepitude and palsied virulence inflicted a grisly wound upon the tender bud of a blameless child's psyche; an innocent who forever lost his eager, prelapsarian delight in grandmas, cleaning and butchering meat animals, senior porn and canned macaroni products. If there is any justice in this crapulous universe, the horrific old bag is even now being pan-fried in hell like a catfish prepared in the famous blackened Cajun style. I'm sorry if that sounds a little harsh, but in my defense, the bug-eyed ogress also made "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Aiyeeee! My bowels still loosen helplessly at the memory.
By Henry E. Panky
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