Hopelessly Devoted To: George Nader

Published June 25, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

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Often cast as chiseled heroes and stoic police detectives, George Nader’s talents as an actor were never fully exploited. Granted, rising to fame after playing the bare-chested lead in the execrably notorious Robot Monster could have had something to do with the lack of diversity in his roles. That the majority of his Hollywood films were with B-Movie factory Universal Pictures also might have helped seal his fate. 

But what stands out the most about his life to me is how long lived (and seemingly happy) it was compared to many of his other queer contemporaries. His relationship with former actor Mark Miller lasted 55 years, ending only with Nader’s death, at the age of 80, in 2002. A sense of resiliency also seems at play in his personality. When an injury made working on camera difficult, Nader, creatively, turned to writing. His novel Chrome was one of the first widely distributed science fiction novels to deal with homosexual themes. 

Ultimately, even his performances have a celebratory impact to them. Akin to (fellow expat sex symbol & equally well-regarded performer) Carroll Baker, he was embraced in Europe in the ‘60s, appearing as a stalwart FBI Agent named Jerry Cotton in a number of fun espionage features. Even the most ardent numerologist couldn’t resist such titles in his resume as The Million Eyes of Sumuru & House of 1,000 Dolls, as well. Nicely, both of those features have been re-released, in the last decade or so, as special editions, granting him a much-deserved celluloid legacy and the privilege of being thought of as a cinematic cult figure of note.

#georgenader #pridemonth #pride2023 #lgbtqia #family

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Va-Va-Villainess: Monica Lewis

Published June 18, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

Sybil Meriden. If you guessed that might be the name of a cinematic troublemaker – then you’d be correct! As enacted by vivacious singer-actress Monica Lewis in the 1952 MGM musical Everything I Have is Yours, Sybil was definitely the type of woman that no self-aware wife would trust. Vixenish to the extreme, this slinky contender not only gladly eclipsed Marge Champion’s devoted Pamela professionally, but she decided she also wanted her husband, played by Marge’s real life spouse Grover, as well. Naturally, as in all feel good entertainment, her plans were vanquished by the final sequence. Lewis, herself, soon realized that Metro, to whom she was signed, wasn’t going to promote her adequately. Thus by 1953, much like Meriden, she took the proverbial A-Train, hightailing it back to the glamourous nightclubs of NYC.

Nicely, decades later, Lewis would regain her celluloid grounding by appearing in number of the disaster flicks being produced by the legendary Jennings Lang, her husband. The most popular of those appearances include Earthquake, where her resolute secretary is lowered from a destroyed building via her own pantyhose, and Airport ’79. In the latter, she essentially played herself, a successful jazz singer traveling with her famed accompanist, played by Good Times’ popular Jimmy Walker.

Remaining active until her death at the age of 93 in 2015, Lewis’ eclectic career is properly memorialized at https://truecompassdesigns.com/monica-lewis/.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Music to Make Horror Movies By: Vivien Leigh

Published June 11, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

Her brilliant, deluded Blanche Dubois set the gothic precursor for scores of questionably sane ladies in horror. Indeed, the strains of Vivien Leigh’s expert creation can be felt in everything from quieter projects like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death to the more bombastic strains of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Of course, as an extreme go-getter and all around connoisseur of women on the fringe, Leigh returned to this grim psychological territory with (the latter day) Tennessee Williams’ piece The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Here, her essaying of the title character concluded with the enacting of a love starved death wish, an even more extreme journey than the one the playwright eventually sent DuBois on. 

Unsurprisingly, as a woman of many talents, Leigh performed some of her most acclaimed work on the theatrical stages – even winning a Tony for her work in the 1963 musical Tovarich.

With footwork as skilled as her sense of dramatics, it’s no wonder the world mourned her tragic death at the age of 53 from tuberculosis.

Until the next time, SWEET love & pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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First Time I Ever Saw Your (True) Face

Published June 1, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

From the moment that Father Lou asked me, at one of our post-Sunday mass family get-togethers, to do some odd jobs around the parish, I knew exactly how I was going to spend the money I would earn. For weeks I’d been excitedly eyeing an 8-track player at the family run True Value hardware store near the expressway…and now, Dana Kimmell willing, it would be mine. Dana Kimmell, for all those who are unusually uninspired, is the heroine of Friday the 13th Part 3. I look to her as a savior of some sorts. If Chris, her resilient yet emotionally awkward heroine, could survive the strain of judgmental friendships & the onslaught of an unstoppable killer, then I can endure the realities of existing in such an unglamorous, excitement-less town as East Randolph, NY.

To Illustrate – our town has no stoplights or movie theaters. There is no work out facility or any name brand department store, as well. But in seeming deference to the farmers and factory workers that comprise the bulk of its population, there are two hardware stores. McNally’s Hardware in the heart of town has been the local favorite for decades – its friendly, rumpled owner always present there in a pair of faded gray bib overalls. He wanders among the never changing, dusky open-ended bins of nuts and bolts and practical tools, beaming whenever his assistance is requested. Famously always costumed in his downbeat attire of choice, he pays cash for everything – keeping a wad of green tucked inside the front pocket of his never altering outfit. My dad loves to tell the story of how a shiny brute of a salesperson almost turned McNally away from purchasing a new vehicle – until he noticed the indentation of cash and realized the unaccomplished gent in front of him was actually going to pay in full…and not with a check. The shinier True Value was a newer addition to our manure strewn burg – appealing to younger families and the truckers who veered off the highway for food and supplies. And while McNally would have never dreamed of carrying frivolous accessories, rows of comic and colorful lawn ornaments greeted you when entered the bright confines of this rivaled counterpart. And there, on a table towards the front, sat the greatly reduced item of my fascination. No surprise there. It is 1983 and the era of the cassette Walkman. Bins of sale priced 8-track tapes reside in hidden corners of any department store that you wander into. While most of my contemporaries would have properly scoffed at this totally uncool, completely uninvestigated bounty, to me it seems like a cornucopia of undiscovered music that I can commander on the cheap – if only I had the necessary equipment. I long to dive into the riches of the titles that I had already purchased for seeming pennies – Cher and Greg Allman’s Two the Hard Way, the critically reviled recorded culmination of this famous duo’s short and combustible cohabitation, Joan Armatrading’s Show Some Emotion and the film soundtrack recordings to Grease and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – a perfect stew of funky, pre-teen sonic bedevilment. And now the time was at hand.

We don’t have many muggy days in our miniature municipality. Surrounded by shaded hills and rolling meadows, we are in the heart of ski country-and a good hour or two away from the moist atmospheres brought on by Lake Erie. But as I set out to clean out Lou’s garage and straighten out the parish lawn, it is bursting with warm heat. I walk down Main Street, the primary boulevard, past the Children’s Home, the town’s modest gas station, the high school and McNally’s Hardware. The winding strip also contains the rectory and St. Patrick’s Church, buildings that reside shoulder to shoulder, at one of its’ furthest tips. I arrive sweaty and Lou forces water on me. Like any 14-year-old, I would much prefer a glass of soda…even something of the generic variety. But that seems out of the question at this venture, especially considering his visibly parental concern over my well-being. So, I settle for the H20 and try to ingratiate myself to its restorative effects. When he is finally convinced that he has helped me avoid the degenerative onslaught of heat stroke, Lou gives me a cursory description of what he would like done. He then excuses himself for a nap, telling me to come wake him when I am through. He will drive me home. He decisively informs me, mama lion style, that am not walking back in this heat!

Labor-wise, it seems like I am through with the bulk of the chores before a half hour has even passed. Worrying that Lou will think I have rushed through things or that I perhaps have skipped over some important detail of the proceedings, I linger, moistly, over some minor activities – washing the windows of the garage, collecting the garbage strewn about the parking lot – I want it to appear that I have thoroughly committed myself to the tasks at hand.

Finally, it feels as if I can dawdle no longer and I enter the rectory through the kitchen door, making my way through the dimly lit living room and up the stairs to the bedroom. As I advance up the steps, it dawns on me how unusual this scenario is and a slow bead of fright starts to drip slowly into my consciousness. I am entering the bedroom of a man who has swiftly become like an uncle to me, a revered agent of god. In our simple familial theology there is not much difference between our local clergy and the president of the united states and something feels off about this. Perhaps, this is merely reality bursting forth, the oddness of his chosen vocation finally seeping through the walls of my budding sub consciousness. That spring I was shepherded together with a bunch of other teens to listen to a group of nuns talk about their lives, in the ever-springing hope that some of us would examine ourselves and perhaps, one day, join them in their calling. This career day for the sacramental arts seemed to misfire for all of us attending, though. We itched uncomfortably in our seats, mentally begging to be released from the unrelentingly suggested assault of such a life denying profession. For days afterward, I feared that, as they suggested, some spirit of devotion would overcome me and I would be compelled to join them on their religious journeys. Therefore, thoroughly embracing the muse of counter-activeness, I fearfully found myself masturbating every spare second that I could, sure that such willfully enforced horniness would turn sour any benevolent urges to pursue priesthood that suddenly might consume me. The fear of such entrapment still lingered with me that day – along with a tiny distrust, a worry for the strange path that could lead anyone, including our family’s beloved Father Lou, toward such a strict and solitary vocation. How sexless they must be.

Still, I enter his bedroom, rosy hued with the dimming afternoon sun. He lays crumpled on his right side, breathing heavily. Sheets and blankets are swirled around his heavy form, moving up and down to the sluggish atomic force of his jagged breathing.

“Father Lou,” I called out, hesitantly.

He stirs…wakes. Slowly rising and facing me, like a vine less Dick Durock emerging from the Swamp Thing‘s cinematic quagmire, he remains laying on his side – his torso arched towards me while his legs are still curled into the depths of his queen size mattress. He breaths deeply for a moment and takes me in, frozen in the doorway, unable to step further into what now feels like dangerous territory. He laughs lightly as he genre-hops, stylistically. Pouting his lips out now, like a heavily made-up nightclub chanteuse, he stretches out his lower leg, a rotund Marlene Dietrich lounging his body across some imaginary piano top. “Have you come to ravage me in my bed?” he sings out, girlishly.

The room shifts and I feel my body leave itself. It’s as if mother Mary herself has smacked me in the face. If anything, I was expecting him to brusquely rush me from his quarters…even thought I may have misunderstood his instructions and that he would scold me for invading his privacy…but not this. Seeing my shock, he rolls onto his back and wraps the blankets that have fallen away tightly around him. He laughs, dismissively, and tells me to meet him down in the kitchen. I should grab some licorice from the jar and a can of root beer from the fridge. Minutes later, he emerges into the bright light of the pantry – a check for me in one hand and his keys dangling from the fingers of the other.

He chatters, brightly, as he drives. I know that I will walk back this way later this afternoon. I will not be able to stop myself from collecting my bounty – I have 8 tracks to listen to, after all. I try to think of all the fun I will have tucked away in my room, my new toy spinning out sounds that I have waited months to hear. It is easier to concentrate on that hopeful future than to focus on what has just happened. It was a joke I tell myself, ignoring the salacious intent…the truth of perversion I had seen glinting in his eyes. It will, I assure myself, never happen again…

Note: (My first horror movie buddy was a priest named Lou Hendricks. Several years ago, Hendricks was named by the Western New York Catholic diocese as one of their most unrepentant predators in the ’70s and ’80s. Thus, I grew up watching monster movies with a monster – a man who was like an uncle to our family. Over the next few months, I will be sharing some of my stories from that period of time.)

Unsung Heroines of Horror: Lucy Lee Flippin

Published May 19, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

For old school cinema buffs who revel in the stern antics of such character actresses as Fern Emmett and Margaret Hamilton, the divine Lucy Lee Flippin, nicely, offers up a contemporary answer to her predecessors’ judgmental, high-strung activities. Best known as Alonzo’s strait-laced schoolmarm sister in Little House on the Prairie, Flippin is highly recognizable to students of ‘70s and ‘80s television and film.

Her roles in such films as Summer School, Flashdance and Earth Girls Are Easy, often in administrative or secretarial roles, gained her widespread recognition. But much like Emmett, who played cameo bits in many of the Universal horror features, Flippin also appeared in such projects as zombie-comedy Surf II and the Chuck Norris slasher Hero and the Terror in blink & you’ll miss her performances.

Significantly, unlike Emmett and Hamilton who were stuck performing characters without an ounce of sexuality, Flippin got to indulge in earthier aspects with her characterizations. As the slightly vengeful Natasha Jones on The Munsters Today, she gave full essence to the lustful nature of the part, ending that experience as part of a May-December pairing the likes of which Miss Gulch never would have seen. Nancy, her arched eyed hotel worker on a popular episode of The Golden Girls, also rang with the heart of a manipulative grifter, a criminality that the citizens portrayed by her cinematic forebears never would have approached.

Even more impactively, Helen, the desperate character she essayed on the second season of (the original) Charmed would have caused Martha Steele, Babe in Arms’ show business folk disapproving miser, smartly played by Hamilton, much alarm. There Flippen essayed a woman willing to murder and conjure skin shredding demons, all for the hoped for pleasure of eternal youth.

Certainly, the distinctive actions of roles like that emphatically earn Flippin a place in the Unsung Horror Hall Of Fame.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Hopelessly Devoted to: Ethel Griffies

Published April 27, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

At the time of her death at the age of 97 in 1975, Ethel Griffies was deemed the oldest working actress alive. “When I was a girl,” she is stated as saying, “acting was considered a thoroughly disrespectful profession. We were thought of as vagabonds and rogues.” To wit, during her illustrious career, Griffies, perhaps best known to horror fans as the elderly ornithologist Mrs. Bundy in The Birds, definitely played her share of scrubby common folk.

But she was equally skilled at portraying the impervious and the disdainful. One of her archest celluloid adventures was in the pulpy 1933 Carole Lombard starrer White Woman. There as the regally cruel Mrs. Chisholm she causes much misery for Lombard’s put upon lounge performer. With a proud and dismissive energy, Griffies gives Chisholm enough attitude that Lombard’s character soon flees town in the arms of the grotesquely odd Horace Prin, essayed with gleeful mania by Charles Laughton. A harsher sentence for any fictional damsel is hard to imagine.


Nicely, Griffies’ credits also include such genre offerings as the classic Werewolf in London and 1940’s Stranger on the Third Floor with the always indescribable Peter Lorre, proving she maintained a career that is always worthy of rediscovery for interested cinephiles everywhere.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Shark Bait Retro Village: Haunted by her Past

Published April 18, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

If you’re going to decimate an evil, mirror dwelling sorceress, its best to do it in a hot red teddy! Just ask Susan Lucci! After a weekend of tortured nightmares and heated bodily possession, in the 1987 made for television fright fest Haunted By Her Past (AKA Secret Passions), that is exactly how daytime drama’s most famous diva eradicates the evil spirited temptress that has been torturing her character’s fragile psyche.

The character in question here is the usually mousy Karen Beckett. After taking a detour on her anniversary weekend with her devoted husband (John James) and her best friends (Marcia Strassman, Robin Thomas), Beckett winds up at a tiny inn that soon seems to tie into her violent (yet previous unknown) history. Beguiled into a closed off room at the establishment, she is captivated not only by its furnishings, but by the evil Megan (Finola Hughes), who resides in the wooden looking glass that dominates the space.

As often happens in the course of these potboilers, the more Karen falls under her spell, the stronger Megan grows. In one of the film’s most ludicrously fun moments, a poor manual laborer is sent flying to his death merely by the reflected menace of this century’s dead wraith.

This project also nicely glances back at film’s golden age by featuring the indomitable Madeleine Sherwood as the town historian. Best known as Sister Woman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the veteran actress provides subtle nuances to this traditional role. As the provider of much needed backstory, she is a revelation of economic fun.

Horror buffs will also be happy to spot Page Fletcher as the cad who causes Megan’s downfall in the movie’s flashback sequences. Fletcher, of course, was the titular character in the terror anthology series The Hitchhiker. Interestingly, his first film appearance in the slasher semi-classic Humungous closely echoes his role here. There, in the opening moments, his character violates a young woman, ultimately helping to creating the havoc raising beast that serves as the film’s unstoppable backwoods killer.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Always Something There to Remind Me

Published April 10, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

I am the B-movie loving, punk rock savior of Chicago theatre. Well, not really…but please let me try to (over-confidently) claim that title for at least a moment. This change in ruling status has been confirmed by a review in The Chicago Reader…well…almost…and overall, this has been a pretty glorious time.  

It all began months ago, when I forced my grizzled, unshaven roommate James to watch a backwoods revenge opus called Blood Games with me. A cigarette never far from his yellowed fingertips and a rocks glass, forever spilling over with Diet Coke and whiskey, he looked on at me, from his favored black leather recliner, with an almost tender, parental disbelief. Although his face was ringed with sort of kindness, he was definitely not sharing my enthusiasm for the cinematic retread of I Spit on Your Grave that was spooling out before us – a low budget opus about a traveling female baseball team who, after winning a birthday game against a group of chauvinistic small-town males, soon find themselves being physically assaulted and murdered off by the chagrined losers. Of course, Babe, played with committed athleticism by Laura Albert, and her fellow players, including the spunky Shelley Abblett, who stood out to me as the undefeated, kick ass Donna, triumphed by the final credits – obliterating all obstinate assholes and meek male passers-by. As always, struck by how an exploitation piece could have such obvious social constructs – so many women I knew did deal with harassment and subjugation on a daily basis and triumphantly made it through – I sat down and a wrote a show using the well-worn plot points of my favored exploitation gems mixed with all the feministic thought pieces that I had been compiling from riot grrl albums and periodicals for the past several years. I cast a series of fresh young actresses, many new to the city and some totally new to the acting scene itself – one or two marking the project as their first professional theatrical excursion – and we began a series of rehearsals in various living rooms across the city. 

Not only were these women acting out my words – a distinct and precious thrill – but they served as my built in movie buddies, as well. As part of the process, I shared a variety of revenge flicks with them – starting with that (previously mentioned) grimiest Mother of Invention- I Spit on Your Grave. Granted, I skipped over all the drawn out rape sequences, cutting straight to Camille Keaton’s beautiful revenge arc. The southern gothic The Beguiled (about a group of Southern school girls poisoning Clint Eastwood’s charming Northern philanderer also served well… although the rape of Mae Mercer’s Hallie, a plot point that I had forgotten about, caused an uncomfortable moment or two.  The fact that Farrah Fawcett actually stops her attack as well as turns the tables on her unshaven transgressor also made Extremities a necessary tool for the celluloid viewing pile…although by that point in time, we all had grown restless with the aggressive pyrotechnics on display and rounded things out by watching John Waters’ Female Trouble, a suggestion from one of the cast members, and a surprisingly appropriate offering considering (title character and perhaps Divine’s great moment) Dawn Davenport’s aggressive no holds barred criminal badassery. 

One night, during rehearsal, I even found a reason to throw in Barbi Benton’s Hospital Massacre AKA X-Ray. The show was written in a poetic idiom and there were 3 MacBethian witch style characters in X-Ray that I thought might help illustrate the rhythms that I was looking for in one of the dialogue selections of the show. But admittedly, by then my favored ladies seemed weary of my exploitation loving instructions, so I cooled it with my all too enthusiastic celluloid explorations. Thus our tight knit balance of personalities was restored and anything seemed possible once again.

We even beat the odds, structurally. The owner of Too Far West Cafe, the establishment where we were performing the show, decided he was going to put up a full length mirror in the performance space days before we were to begin rehearsing there. If his plans had gone through, the audience, in essence, would have been watching themselves watch the show. Thankfully, Daniel, the cute bespectacled barista who eventually became the show’s adorably muppet-like mascot, dropped the unwieldy piece of glass just before its installation and it shattered on the ground…allowing us to retain a certain sense of suspension of disbelief. 

We weren’t so lucky with the first reviewer, a long feared indie paper mainstay named Jack Helbig, who compared what I thought was Lydia Lunch style outrage to a badly written, overly hysterical after school special.  Hoping to mitigate the damage, I waited, squirming with anticipatory anxiety, for The Reader to come out today. As 5pm finally neared, I rushed from the office I work at on 640 N LaSalle to the paper’s headquarters on 11 E. Ohio, skirling through the broad, 4 sectioned contents with both hope and dread. I practically jumped with joy when I finished reading. While not without its criticisms, the author here actually got what we were aiming for and provided me with enough positive verbiage to market the rest of the run with some proper rave statements. 

Feeling the triumphant relief expressed in my opening paragraph here, I am proudly strutting across the bridge on LaSalle to Wacker Drive. I’m definitely taking the train home from the Lake station, downtown, off of the illustrious State Street. It is a bit out of the way but I want to be in the middle of a mass population glow, to be throwing out my joy among the thronging urban crowds. I want to fuel my already propulsive energy with the forceful stamp of my fellow city lovers, to feel as if we are all one big creative body, streaming together en mass. I believe I am finally on my way to achieving a consciousness filled with a swaggering essence of peace. I, stupidly, did not click on the self-confidence box when the goddesses of microbiology were creating my make-up at birth and I have stumbled every since, trying to ease my round sense of uneasy wondering into some square, stable peg. 

But just as these notions of security begin to take purchase in my essence, I glance into the swirling population storming around me …and I think I spot Lou sweeping past me in the crowd heading in the opposite direction and I gasp. All those motivational building blocks I have just carefully stacked up within me, crash down, shattering like James’ empty whisky glasses around me, cutting a quick and unexpected path to fear & turmoil in the face of this literal ghost.

Lou has been dead for over two years…and it’s been much longer than that since I’ve seen him, face to face. Granted, it has dawned on me, multiple times, as I’ve bludgeoned my way into my early 20s, that despite our familial friendliness, our relationship was far from a kosher one. I’m well aware what happened between us was abusive, but until now I have always sensed a love for him of some sort within me, as well. The mere suggestion of him has never frightened me before.

So, this reaction, this chilled to the bone- heroine in a gothic Henry James story response stuns me. I have no idea where it’s coming from. Could this possibly be the trauma that my therapist Gail has often talked about? She mentioned these feelings might sneak up on me when I was least expecting them. True to that form, I am standing here, stock still, contemplatively considering this — when I realize people are beginning to have to move around me, stalled in mid traffic as I am. So, I recover quickly, give a quick glance behind me and determine, decidedly, that the stranger I have just passed – as I have known all along – was not Lou. I shake it off and head home, eager to call my favorite cast members with the good news. We have a tag line for the show. “Searing…inescapable.” Two words, I suddenly realize, that describe not only our show, but the circumstances of my past, as well.

 

Note: (My first horror movie buddy was a priest named Lou Hendricks. Several years ago, Hendricks was named by the Western New York Catholic diocese as one of their most unrepentant predators in the ’70s and ’80s. Thus, I grew up watching monster movies with a monster – a man who was like an uncle to our family. Over the next few months, I will be sharing some of my stories from that period of time.)

Suddenly Last Summer

Published March 22, 2023 by biggayhorrorfan

My father is hanging from the ladder off the side of the house, a common sight. He tinkers constantly, blind hope filling in where carpentry skills fail, with our 200-year old residence, trying, hopelessly, to navigate the creaks and pains that come with its accelerated aging.

“Hi, Brian. How was rehearsal?” His fingertips hooked around a rotting rain gutter, this question is eagerly, almost hopefully, asked- even before the woman who is directing the small community production that I have joined as a time killer this summer has the chance to pull out of the driveway. 

“Fine,” I reply.

“Good.” Then before I have a chance to expound any further about the process, to snootily remark that I will be happy to be back among the future professionals at the famous theater school that I have been attending in the fall, he gallops as if atop a through-bred, to a newly reconfigured finish. “Before you go inside, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve rented a house in Alfred for the coming year and…I’ve filed for a temporary separation from your mother. I think it’s for the best.”

Almost working in accomplice with his forced ease, I take this news with breezy relief, as if this new juncture was a long foreseen conclusion. And it has been. My parents’ marriage has been teetering towards oblivion since the day I was conceived. This feels like the first smart move that my father has made towards that increasingly acidic partnership in a while.

“I think that’s a wise move, dad.” He almost blushes with relief. Then. as if the dissolution of an almost 20-year old marriage is everyday news, I quickly ask “Can I borrow the car?” 

“Sure, Brian, sure,” he happily sputters. “And thanks!”

Touched by his childlike alleviation, I expand a bit. “The commute has been rough on you and the kids. & a break will do you and mom good. Things have only gotten worse lately.”

Comrades now… equals, he solemnly nods his head in agreement with me. “I knew that you kids could feel that. I decided to do this for everyone. Not just your mom and me.”

I nod and he swings back to his patchwork repairing – a whistled tune soon escaping from his recently loosened lips.

Later, after I have returned from the store with my frozen pizzas and 2 liter bottles of pineapple soda, my mother approaches me, teary eyed. 

“Did your father talk to you?”

“Yes.”

“I – I just can’t believe it!” Tears begin to pour forth from eyes as her body hiccups with the intensity of her sobs. 

I am shocked. Her every waking moment has been colored with derision towards my father since my late teens. How could this not come as some sort of relief to her? I look on at her as she weeps… bewildered and judgmental, a photocopy of the whispered glances that I am sure she is consumed with worry that are soon to come – frowns from family members and the well wrapped parishioners of St. Patrick’s Church, scowls filled with disapproving inferences. She is a failure. She could not make it work. 

Thus, the summer unfolds in degrees. Lou and I watch Alice, Sweet Alice and Blood Sucking Freaks during late night get-togethers. He has been counseling both of my parents and the extremity of being twisted between two sides weighs on us both. Inducted, fully, into the creative activities of a big city life, I desperately clutch at any culture I can imbue myself with. My parents take turns accompanying me to events. The concerts I attend with my mom are a mixed bag of practices – Marie Osmond at Chautauqua Institute contrasted with a huge homecoming bash at JCC for hometown heroes 10,000 Maniacs. I excitedly procure Natalie Merchant’s autograph on a flyer before she skittles quickly, skirt flowingly away. Ever in competition, my mother decides that my father has fared better with me – shows with Judy Collins and Emmylou Harris (who I also get to meet) seem much more relevant to her. More disturbingly in her spreadsheet of wins to losses, while out with my father at the Little Valley County Fair, I am called up onto stage to perform with Louise Mandrell – an event that is captured by one of my mother’s co-workers on camera. This provides hard photographic proof that my paternal regiment is there for the significant artistic occurrences in my life – a fact that provokes wearying conversations – especially as my brother and sister disappear more completely into their new lives several townships away. 

So these movie nights provide relief – for both Lou and myself. Almost ineptly pornographic, I can’t quite decipher what Bloodsucking Freaks is, cinematically.  It’s the only film that I watch with Lou that makes me feel a bit awkward. With its brain milkshakes, head vice tortures and elements of WIP slavery, however ineptly rendered, it’s not exactly a film you watch with the equivalent of a family member. (Years later, I would have the same reaction when watching the opening moments of Leaving Las Vegas with my father’s second wife, Judy. “Why, he should be arrested,” she sputtered during Nicholas Cage’s first drunken diatribe as I, cringingly, held my breath until she, soon thereafter, joined my father in their bedroom, a whole thankful flight of sound proofed stairs away from the TV room, where I continued to watch.) Still, it feels like a film, much like The Toolbox Murders and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, that as a well-rounded horror aficionado that I should have in my viewer’s canon. Ever looking for connective tissue between my celluloid obsessions, I am also thrilled to find that the film features former soap opera actor Niles McMasters as the avenging, crime solving hero. While almost silly here, McMasters gives a much more well-rounded portrayal in Alice, Sweet Alice, a film that I adoringly play on repeat throughout the summer. Not only do I watch it first by myself, but I also share it with the older group of kids that I watch over at the local children’s home, my summer job. I excitedly purchased it – my first VHS tape – with my inaugural paycheck – picking it out from other desired offerings such as Sleepaway Camp and Empire of the Ants in the budget K-Mart movie bin – although the $10 price tag does not seem like much of a bargain to me, to be truthful. I had first read about the film in a scholastic style biography of Brooke Shields which described, in judgmentally lurid detail, her character’s violent murder at a first communion ceremony in the film. While the author’s intent was to seemingly make the readers avoid the movie – it had the opposite effect for me and I had been, dreamily, searching for it ever since. Slightly influenced by that writer’s assessment, I was not expecting the rich atmosphere, twisted dramatics and stylized violence that, markedly, colors the film. The exact opposite of the cheap horror outing that I was expecting, I adored it and wanted everyone to revel in its hysterical beauty along with me.

Lou was surprisingly silent about these offerings, though. Blood Sucking Freaks was understandably hard to, conversationally, qualify. Although, I, at least, expected him to comment on McMaster’s handsomeness. But I fully expected to discuss the wonders of Alice, Sweet Alice with him. I could, instinctively, hint at the things that the film was trying to say about power and those devoted to it. It seemed emblematic of the world around me. It seemed there, as in real life, no official could be trusted.

But perhaps it hit too close to home. “You watched this with, Lou?” my mother asks me, looking up from the magazine that she has been half- heartedly picking through, during one of my repeat watches. Now that my father and siblings are in absentia, she often spends her evening hours cuddled near me as I view my favorite programs. “Yeah.” Her eyes flicker with a questioning note. “What?” “This just feels a bit…anti-Catholic. I’d be offended, maybe, if I was a priest or a nun.”  For a moment, I also consider the character of Mr. Alphonso, the corpulent landlord in the film. This character defiantly accosts the film’s pre-teen lead at one point early in the plot’s gestation. I realize I have seen myself in all the awkward final girls that I have grown to love – from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to Laurie in Halloween to Chris in Friday the 13th, Part 3. I connect fully with their otherworldly apartness. Perhaps Lou saw himself in the well portioned vastly skinned Alphonso and he did not like what he saw. 

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I do not dwell on this thought for long, though. My mother’s birthday is fast approaching and I want to ease some of her sense of loss by throwing her a party. Lou agrees to offer up the rectory as the gathering place if I provide all the necessary drinks and food stuffs. I begin inviting folks and buy packs of cold cuts and bags of potato chips and pretzels from the Quality Market. Lou assesses what I have purchased and suggests I buy more. 

The night of the event I am in heaven, greeting the invitees as they arrive and playing DJ. I think my mother even realizes she is wrong about the events I’ve attended with my father being the more significant. I happily show off the Marie Osmond album (with its silky atmosphere and leggy pose) I’ve been playing to Marsha Hinman, one of the soft spoken elegant church ladies I’ve invited. My mother overhears me rhapsodically speaking about Osmond’s act with her and beams. We’ve needed this. Just the week before, I spent the weekend with my father. My brother who had been attending a movie with a friend got in a small car accident and was taken to the hospital. When I call my mother to let her know from the payphone in the visitor’s lobby, she has a fevered breakdown on me. She screams, inconsolably, blaming me somehow for her physical and emotional distance from her other son during this minor tragedy. Unable to reason with her, I finally hang up the phone. After he is fitted with one or two stitches on his forehead, I convince my brother to call her – and though no apologies leak forth when she asks to speak to me again, I can tell just hearing his voice and his assurances that he would have called her immediately himself if he had been able to, has calmed her. 

Tonight, all has been forgiven, though. And it even seems, that days away from my return to college, all is as it once was. She clasps my waist and happily squeezes me moments before Lou gooses my backside proudly. “You did a good job,” he tells me, a paternal note of proudness leaking into his voice. But I can see. due to the winking brightness behind his bifocals, that he longs to go further, to stroke my buttocks softly, as well.

But reveling, for once, in the deterrent of my mother’s closeness, I quickly remove myself from his over grasping attempts at affection and begin the clean-up that gatherings such as this always justify.

Note: (My first horror movie buddy was a priest named Lou Hendricks. Several years ago, Hendricks was named by the Western New York Catholic diocese as one of their most unrepentant predators in the ’70s and ’80s. Thus, I grew up watching monster movies with a monster – a man who was like an uncle to our family. Over the next few months, I will be sharing some of my stories from that period of time.)