The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

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