It’s taken me a few weeks to really become acclamated to the warmth of the sun that is summer. I’m not particuarly fond of it, or it’s sister, spring, but live in it I do. It usually means intense heat, pollen and dust aggravating my sinuses, working ten hour doubles, and worrying about the upcoming Fall semester. It’s interesting to denote, however, that it never used to be that way, that somewhere along the way I lost track of summertime funtime, and became jaded to the inherent fun a lot of my cohorts see in it.
Driving to work Sunday morning, it was already warm; my uniform Target consists of nothing but a plain red shirt, khaki pants, and a name tag that displays my name. Over the near two-years I’ve been employed there, I’ve tried to break up this visual monotony; recently I added upon my lapel the Ghostbusters logo. But this was the furthest from my mind as I crossed Fir and began to make my way towards Jasmine, where on my right was the Flash Foods store, already buzzing with business this early. And to my left was the Cinema 7, the only theater in a town and the only bastion of entertainment that we have left. As I sat at the red light, I quickly scanned through the lineup: Shrek 4, Robin Hood, Date Night, and Letters to Juliet sounded appealing. But then my eyes fell upon the words “Eclipse–On Sale”. It had crept up on me that the next film in the Twilight Saga was already upon me…and I had not even seen New Moon yet. I’d declined the offer to go see it during Winter break because I had no interest to revisit that part of my life (not to mention the offer came from an individual I had issues with and was not looking forward to being the butt of jokes), but I knew that I was going to see Eclipse, for the very large fact that we would be seeing the Quileute werewolves in all their hair. It is a rich bias, but I have always had an inclination towards werewolves insamuch as movie monsters go.
But only because I understood the subtle tragedies of feeling as though I were different on the inside than out that I was ever able to truly appreciate that feeling of being other.
When I was growing up, I looked forward to summer vacation; not for going outside, due to the fact that I was consistently sick as a child, but because my mother allowed myself and my younger brother to stay up late at night. This meant that on weekdays, I could be up for hours in the evening looking through the channels for something to watch. I don’t know what it was, it may have been getting the Monsters series of the Real Ghostbusters toyline that did it, or maybe it had to do with seeing the box art for the re-released Universal Monsters on VHS, but I was always on the lookout for the original movies. I became pretty good at sitting in front of my grandfather’s television at the old Previews channel and watching those boxes go up the screen. Occasionally my eyes would drift to something like “Weird Science” or “The Breakfast Club” and around 2:00 p.m. I’d switch over to Fox for Disney Afternoon. But I never gave up the hope of looking for those old horror movies, but it wasn’t until we moved around the corner to our house did I see my first classic scary movie. I can’t tell you what channel I eventually found it on…but I do remember it being a Friday night in October, my brother and mother were asleep and with the volume down low I switched over to a film I’d heard about on the news and read about in school…1981’s An American Werewolf in London.
A decade on, An American Werewolf in London still tends to send shivers down my spine due to that transformation sequence; I didn’t see the original Wolf Man (with Lon Chaney, Jr.) until high school, so this was my childhood exposure to seeing a realistic enough portrayal of a man transforming into a wolf. In hindsight, the sequence might look a little dated since we’ve expanded past Jim Henson style animatronics, but man….staying up at 2 a.m. and watching that at the age of 8, I held my breath as I saw David Naughton’s bones crack, break, and shift into his feral form as he screamed in agony, with Sam Cooke’s version of “Blue Moon” (along with the Marcels and Bobby Vinton’s) being used in this sequence that it, along with “Mr. Sandman” still rank as one of the unlikeliest creepy songs.
I didn’t really have a lot of close friends until around middle school; in hindsight that is probably my own doing as I didn’t know how to relate to anybody in any of the classes I had. I would mostly sit out of recess and read near the swings while everyone else played and this went the same way until around the end of 5th grade, when I began forging the group that have remained, for the most part, in my life for almost twenty years. We’re not as close now as we were five years ago, but even though we’ve splintered somewhat, there are still indelible trademarks that have remained the same. We were all geeks and misfits in a way, though I’d never say we were ever Goths or “Spooky Kids”. We were just a bunch of kids who did their own thing different from everyone else and in a way, that mindset has still remained the same even when we’re older. For instance, if not for Darby Nickless, I probably wouldn’t say I do a lot of things or go a lot of places without his push. But even so, even he was one to deride some of my habits back then. Even though I was technically the oldest, I was still enamored by childish hobbies, and among my group, I was probably the only one who truly enjoyed watching Big Wolf on Campus.
From a memory standpoint, no episode stands out, except that I liked the show enough to watch all 65 episodes. Maybe if they ever come out with a big DVD box set of the show will I ever remember why I liked it; the production values were low, even by Canadian standards, and the stories (from what i can recall) were even lower, but had a low-brow Three Stooges kind of feel to them. But that didn’t really matter in the long run. Even though I continued to watch the show, I found myself moving on into high school, and the shocking idea that maybe it was vastly uncool to still keep talking about Ghostbusters and He-Man and comic books. I’d stopped playing with toys around ’98, and had lost nearly all of my original Ghostbusters items (save Ray, whom I had kept in a spare shoebox that I discovered again at my grandfather’s years later) in a mass purge. I’d changed, but what hadn’t was that I was old enough now to start looking at garage sales and used bookstores for the VHS tapes I’d liked looking at so much as a kid. I didn’t worry about a curfew much anymore; whenever the original 1931 Frankenstein was on at 11, I’d be up and watching the Gothic nightmare of someone misunderstood.
A lot of people will speak fondly of their high school experiences: the parties they went to, the games they lost or won, the friends they made, all they women they fucked. I can’t speak for myself in that regard; I kept to myself primarily, eating lunch by myself if Darby was unavailable, or Devin Hughes was somewhere else; I’d find a spot behind the cafeteria, a lonely pair of stairs in front of the loading zone of the cafeteria where I could stretch out and read. I was even more isolated from my main group by Junior year and it was still settling in that I had had failed spectacularly in really making memories in high school. By that time, I had begun moving into a darker mindset, and began to ask questions that I hadn’t really thought of before, and began to denote myself as an Outsider, even when I didn’t have to be. It just seemed all the more comfortable for where I was heading; if I was going to be a monster with my messed up thoughts, why drag someone else down to the windmill to burn with me?
It was Valentine’s Day of ’04, bitterly cold around that time that a lot of students tended to wear scarves to class. I forget how low it was, but I know that when the temperature drops low enough for anyone to simulate smoking, it’s definitely a chilly day. The cafeteria was packed, and even if I had wanted to eat inside, I didn’t feel like sitting next to or across from someone I didn’t have anything in common with. And that was pretty much E V E R Y B O D Y. Heading outside to my secret spot, I ducked really quick so that none of the teaching staff would see me; I could get in trouble for not eating in the designated area. Not serious trouble, but enough to be sent to Brenda Peterson, principle of our high school, instead of Rodeffer, the dean.
Once I knew the coast was clear, I grinned to myself. I had intended to eat my piping hot Red Baron pepperoni pizza and fries, and get down to reading a book I’d brought from home. I no longer remember what book it was, but I’m willing to suspect it was an issue of Fangoria, becauase of what happens next.
I saw her from a distance and recognized her immediatley. She was in my next class, and we didn’t really talk, but I had to admit that I had a faraway schoolboy crush on her. She was also sitting in my spot eating her lunch. The submissive part of me wanted to just turn around and leave her there; I’d never been very good at confrontation and, logically, she was there and where would she go if I made her move? But then logical thought was flawed; I was there first, had been since last August. I was owed that place dammit.
I have an unusual way of walking: I rarely make noise. She did not hear me as I crept up on her. I could see that she was engrossed in a book, which I surmised to be for our class. “Hey.” 300 years of the English language comes down to one syllable. She looked up at me, and her blue eyes became wide with the momentary startle I had given her.
I’d often thought about what it would be like to have a girlfriend. The first real crush I had was a girl named Erika, who was a Beatles fan. Perhaps that is indicative of girls I’ve liked; they were all fans of the Beatles. With this girl in front of me, I forced myself to make conversation: shop talk about our class, school, until she noticed the magazine tucked in my arm. “What’s that?” she asked. I told her; she grinned. I did not realize she liked the old horror classics, and was too a fan of horror movies. I asked her what her favorite was. “The Howling” she answered.
We stayed friends until June, when she moved to California. I haven’t heard from her since. We never got to be boyfriend/girlfriend, and part of me wonders if I was even mentally mature enough for one. But I’ll retain the memory of her bringing her laptop one day in March and we watched The Howling at what had become “our” secret spot.
Things changed, people change, but the spot hasn’t…and neither has The Howling
In the Spring of this year, I was with Darby when it was decided we should go see The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro. I was no longer living at home at this time, staying in a dorm at Jacksonville, so we hightailed it to Regency Square Mall’s AMC 24. I’d never felt like Jacksonville was my city; I’ve met some great people going to school there, and some have even become friends I want to keep for a long time. But there are others who sour the experience in such an epic way that I looked for any opportunity in my free time to get off campus and not stay around in the dorm watching my other roommate and his fuckbuddy be annoying. I did not like being reminded of how many times I’d failed in moving past the Friend Zone with some of the girls I’ve met at the school. In fairness, I did not have a “get up and go” attitude either; I just saw that “No” blazing red right above their heads before I even said anything to them.
I’d struck up a long-distance friendship with a girl who did not live in Jacksonville, but shared a lot of the same interests I did. It marked one of the rare times that I did not feel like a mutant as I talked to her. I would not meet her until about a month and a half after watching The Wolfman, but back then, our texts were like conversations as we conversed throughout the day. I was really digging her.
Sitting in that darkened theater, we talked until the credits began rolling. The Universal logo rolled before morphing into a moon. There weren’t a lot of people in there with us, and I didn’t care. The plot was slow in building up to the action that everyone wanted to see, but it paid off handsomely. The love story between Talbot and Gwen Conliffe (played by the stunning Emily Blunt) wasn’t as realistically portrayed as it could have been. But the growth of their romance was interesting because here was someone that nobody quite understood trying to overcome his own shortcomings…and being bitten by a werewolf proved to be a vastly large shortcoming. It was a bloody good time. At the end I could hardly wait to tell my friend all about it, so she could see it, and perhaps slyly suggest her to come up to see it with me. That never happend, remaining a consistent fantasy.
We eventually met and things didn’t click as much I was hoping they would. I spent a little while back and forth, wondering what it was that I had done so wrong. I didn’t want to approach the idea that sometimes people just don’t click, but I eventually had to. No matter how much one person matches so well with another, it’s a scary thought that being matched together doesn’t necessarily mean things line up perfectly. And maybe it was all for the best; maybe again I still wasn’t ready for a relationship, and I asked myself when the day would come that I would be able to breathe and not feel frightened at the fact that I’m still vastly immature inside after all.
I don’t think I’ll ever truly stop asking myself questions of who I am and where I’m going. I’ll never be fully satisfied with the person that I am until I have probably found vindication for everything that I’ve done and gone through. I also ask myself why is it that out of all the movies I’ve loved since I was a kid, that it has to be films about people turning monsters that I identify the most with, that tend to have a larger impact on my life than even Ghostbusters has. I don’t think of that as a bad thing; in an ever fluctuating timeline, werewolf movies have remained consistent for me. I don’t think I’ll be able to go into a Blockbuster without my eye immediatley gravitating towards the horror section and my thumbs running down the spines looking for a title that has to deal with lycanthropy.
It makes me wonder that when my wedding day comes, if the cake will have an image of Lon Chaney imprinted on it (providing whoever my spouse will be, is cool with such a thing) or that as I’m getting ready to go to the church I’ll flip through channels and see Werewolf in a Women’s Prison on somewhere.
At least I know I’ll always have something to look forward to in this crazy mad world.
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