The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

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