This is an odd little film, aside from the fact that there was no real giant Gila monster in the film, rather a regular size one filmed climbing over hot rods from the producer's kid's Matchbox set. Well, OK. There ARE no giant Gila monsters, I get that now. But as I kid, I didn't know. This isn't a film where the explanation of atomic radiation=big monsters (see THEM, TARANTULA, BEGINNING OF THE END, THE PREYING MANTIS, and three billion others), its just there. One lone Gila monster, so I assumed that there maybe could be such a thing. Hey, the film came out the year I was born, so I might've been eleven when I first saw it. Yea, you guessed it. 1970. Screaming Yellow Theater. Svengoolie. But that is not the oddity of this film. The man character is named Chase, and he's into hot rods and plays a guitar. Saves everyone at the end by filling his ride with nitroglycerin and peeling rubber, jumping clear in the last minute. Chase had a kind of look going, maybe Bobby Rydell or one of those surf rockers that would come a few years years after the film (maybe Rydell did, too, I don't know). Again, that's not my point. What is your point?, you ask. OK. Its the scene you likely watched already, the one where he sings "The Mushroom Song." I always thought that the song was called "Laugh, Children, Laugh," because I knew I'd never really be seeing a soundtrack for the film. And since its not the 1960s, its not called "The Doobie Song," or "The Bennies Song." For no real reason, as if it was from a film on Earth-14 that was string theory-spliced into this film, Chase brings his guitar to see two elderly women (i.e,. in their *gasp* 30s) and a crippled girl with leg braces. No explanation is given for any of this, if the girl had polio, whatever. She seems to be showing off new braces as she walks towards Chase and then topples over, brave little tyke. Unhappy because she could not walk all the way to Chase--who really, if you think about it, could have at least taken a few steps toward her, she wails until Chase kneels before her to strum his guitar and sing about the mushroom. Then he leaves, the women and the girl happy as all hell, and he drives off to go to a sock hop in a hillbilly bar and madness ensues when the giant Gila monster shows up. But to this day I have never, I mean NEVER, seen a monster movie that has ten minutes of What The Hell? jabbed into the middle of it. By finding it on YouTube, I feel strangely vindicated. By the way, go check out Helockman's blog, he's been posting about horror hosts, too. And he probably doesn't ramble on, as I tend to do.
The original Svengoolie was Jerry G. Bishop, a rock 'n roll dj on WFLD, our "Federation of Labor" station. SCREAMING YELLOW THEATER was broadcast on Channel 32, which is now Fox but back then you pretty much had to stick the antennae out the window to get a clear signal. I honestly never knew the show to be broadcast in color, as I watched in on a b&W TV in my room. Somehow I got to watch CREATURE FEATURES downstairs, but I think my parents were annoyed by Link Wray and the Ray Men playing over a woman's screams every three or four minutes. That, and the stupid jokes. One night, I saw HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM with Vincent Price for the first time, and the woman whose eyes get poked out by the binoculars with the spikes in them freaked...me...out.
Last year about this time, I was recalling our Saturday night fright time. Friday might have been The Midnight Special, but Saturday at 10:30 PM was Creature Features, and now that I have high speed and can figure out how to find files on YouTube, I'm sending along the intro, which always scared the crap out of me as a kid, between the panning shots of Bela behind the tree, that creepy Renfield crawling across the floor dressed like F. Scott Fitzgerald and the music which I later learned to be Henry Mancini's EXPERIMENT IN TERROR. Like TELSTAR and even HARLEM NOCTURNE (which I've never mentioned before), I have to admit that there are more than a few Where Did That Come From instrumentals out there. Enjoy the music and the good old Universal Monsters, the best kind of monster pals anyone could ever hope for.
I posted this over at STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED for my monthly entry, for October its always posting stories, poems, or essays. I wrote the following piece for OCTOBER DREAMS, edited by Rich Chizmar and Bob Morrish. I hadn't been asked for a story, but rather to contribute one of the many "My Favorite Hallowe'en Memory..." pieces, so I gave people both. A few people who commented to me earlier brought up the sense of smell and writing, and I mentioned back that I actually have been awoken from dreams because of a specific smell in the dream itself, not like awakening to smoke or anything like that. Vivid dreams involving all five sense, a perfect example being my dream/memory of the exploding clown I wrote about the last day of August...
CYANIDE AND PIXIE STIX
It wasn’t that long ago I lived in Chicago, taking the elevated train into and back from the Loop each weekday. You live in a routine, you get to recognize sights and smells on an almost subliminal basis; anyone from out of town need only assume the subway entrances smell of sweat and sewage even during the harshest months, but there are sweeter smells from factories and warehouses that share the same blocks with tenement apartments.
At Ashland Avenue, the train stops just across the river from the Holsum bread factory, and when the doors slide open on a summer morning, it’s like a blowsy woman wearing just the right amount of perfume sashayed down the aisle. Further west where the blue line bisects the Eisenhower, the Pan Candy factory makes it’s presence known. Southwest, where the streets hump the train yards near Marquette Park, there’s the Nabisco cookie factory and the old joint where they still make Tootsie Rolls. It’s this last place where I’m reminded of the smell of death.
Walking from the train to my home, the smell from the confectionery smokestacks is intoxicatingly sweet, and I think of Pixie Stix, a brand name candy from my youth, long paper tubes of powdered sugar in pastel colors offerings of lime and cherry. In the early eighties, when I would be walking the same route home after college, immersed in espionage novels or wondering if I had it in me to write stories instead of poetry, Jack Malvides became the man who murdered Halloween.
At least, that was his nickname to the television audiences; every since “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy was arrested, catch-name killers were big in Chicago. Jack Malvides killed his seven year-old son in a heinous way, poked a hole in his boy’s Halloween stash and slipped some cyanide in. Difficult? No way, as the still unknown deviate who killed seven people with tainted Tylenol capsules, or the investigating cops and coroners, could attest to.
The cyanide was powder, just like the Pixie Stix. I think the candy company also made little candy buttons you could peel off of butcher paper. Malvides banked on an insurance scam against the makers of the product but that plan went bust mostly because he acted too shifty, or shiftless, depending on who was making the comparisons between grieving father and that of cunning murderer. So the police eventually wore him down, but the boy was still dead, along with the stigma of the one day a kid can get free goodies from neighborly strangers (or strange neighbors) and yet die choking on lime green vomit.
I hadn’t even been thinking about writing horror fiction at that time, if anything I was being deluded by the grand scale confusion Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsythe created in each new conspiracy. I would not write “A Field Near Grayslake” or “Rapid Transit” until the following spring. A part of me believes the death of Bobby Malvides allowed me to slowly desensitize my prose, which I did all that winter, culminating with my poem about spring for my senior year workshop, about a dog romping through a field with part of a woman’s skull in his jaws.
And as I said, there is an intensity to certain smells just as there is deja vu to a recurring image. I can smell copper in my sleep, to wake from some dream of an imagined fiend, with blood in my nostrils and my jaw numb from clenching. Twenty years later and everybody is desensitized by life itself. Every other day there’s some kid shooting up a school or random bombings by some idiot with an agenda.
I can still visualize what Pixie Stix felt like , the paper tearing away, the bitter powder on my tongue. Most times, it is the scents from the Tootsie Roll factory that provides the catalyst. But as the years pass, I find it increasingly hard to recall a Halloween afternoon filled with children not under adult supervision or in single groups of one or two, dumping piles of candy together one a living room floor and dividing the spoils.
Within minutes of my posting around 3:00 this morning about that beating and the PCM, Rich Chwedyk--yes, THAT Rich Chwedyk--emailed me about how he thought the place was being demolished, and Scott pretty much said the deed was done already, maybe a year back. I guess I always expected that place to be there, though photos of the new place do seem to show a less crowded setting. So this might be the reason those two homeless folk I mentioned gave the Mission as their address, right now its certainly closer than where they were sitting the night of the beating. I hate talking crap about people on the streets, and being the son of a city copper leaves me with the option of being biased in both the bad way and the good way. (As I type this, people on the news are berating the cops because it took them three days to find a white SUV with a dead boy in it, even though the kid's father, who also killed his mother- and brother-in-law, was in custody and the fucker certainly could have pointed at a map to the corner of Jackson & Kolin.) That's why I post a photo of Maurice the Flag Man, who has been giving his flags away for whatever you want to give him for as long as I've been to the Loop, I first saw him around 1985. I posted about him a year or so back, in detail, and last month I wrote about Rockabilly Dave. The (sometimes not-so) simple truth is that you can't give most of the people on the street food because they won't take it, and even those who seem in good shape to work (as Dave often does, through day labor) are out there day after day, certainly not trying to get work. Kids successful enough to live in high rises or have enough dough to stay at the dorms for Columbia College or the Art Institute walk the same intersections as those who stay in the shadows of the old George Diamond's Steakhouse building. (Watch, that building's gone too, I'll bet. What I get for taking train that goes underground for four miles). I, myself, have been cursed because I honestly had no money I could part with this past June before my unemployment kicked in. Same person might have acted differently if it was 3AM and not 3PM, I cannot say. Are there cities on any other civilized planets in the universe that are so thoroughly screwed up as Chicago?
Funny how so many of you picked up the man/monster aspect of the poem and my thoughts behind it. And, yes, Capcom, the Pacific Garden Mission is known outside of Chicago, but the place is not what it used to be even a decade ago. Part of it is that so much of the south Loop is being renovated, the Roosevelt Hotel, once an SRO, is now condos. Around the corner is the Wabash Tap, near Buddy Guy's Legends blues club. About two months back, a guy and his girlfriend were celebrating her 25th birthday and had just left the tavern, which, back in 1998 likely would have been the twin to the 666 Lounge, a black man and woman ask them for a light, they presumably answer the wrong way (this being the wonderful city of equality, right?), and they proceed to get beaten nearly to death. The man, all 210 pounds of him, kicked the girl in the head at least ten times. If someone called me a cripple (if that man was even called a name), I highly doubt that I'd rail off physically on that person. I still recall the photos of the girl in the paper, she survived and is fine now. But here it is three in the morning and the two fuckheads give the cops an address of the Pacific Garden Mission. So why weren't they there and in bed? Sure, they offer religion there but the cops should have given some blue religion to that bastard who thought it just fine to kick a girl half his weight and size in the face. He's in jail on ag-assault, awaiting trial. If I was at the corner of Wabash and Roosevelt that early morning in the false dawn, there'd have been a stained chalk mark in the shape of an @$$hole after the cops finished their job and carted him off to the morgue. You gotta know who to love in this city. And you gotta know who is taking up a bed in a shelter that should be going to a much better individual. Carl Watson, a writer from Uptown, wrote it best in BENEATH THE EMPIRE OF THE BIRDS. The best religion in the world consists of two words: be careful.
