Fingers Like Nosferatu

This poem was posted here in 2007, just about a year before Harry died. It was in the form of an email, not one of our usual wacky postcards. I always think of it on Hallowe'en, though. I think I'm supposed to.

Fingers Like Nosferatu


Body by Baron Victor Von F
Luck by Loki
Going forward day and night.
American Dreamer
Algerian Detective
Holed up on Desolation Row.
In the Heartbreak Hotel.
Where less brave spirits have checked out long ago.
His voice sounds there still.
Disturbing the dust, and any who would dare listen.


We are patterns, persisting. Yes, indeed, HE Fassl.

More of Harry Fassl

More Harry Fassl stuff here. First, a photo Mark took of Diana and I in front of the residence, and remember, 1111 was a part of my cursed life in 1985, I did not meet Harry & Diana until 1992. We were in the basement, and there was the last postcard I sent Harry, still on his desk. Diana let me have it. I'd email Harry crazy stuff, pulling formulas off Wikipedia about Faraday cages and whatnot, then cut & pasting only a random part of the equation. Craziness. All us old guys have left. You might question the ball of clay. Harry had taken up sculpting, and Diana offered Mark and I a lump, and I accepted. The saddest thing, on the desk was a photo from my 40th birthday, my sis threw it as a surprise. A black and white photo of me & Harry cropped, ready to get slapped on a postcard with some funny saying. Maybe it would have been about Faraday cages. Son of a bitch.

Axman's Carnival

I wish I still had my photo of Harry standing in front of Axman Surplus in Minneapolis. His copy is still on the bulletin board in his basement. Well, Diana's basement. What a messed up place, they had huge barrels of dental equipment, Israeli gas masks, bolts and washers...and torpedoes. I'm not lying. The only thing I purchased was from a box of disemboweled Teddy Ruxpins. I lucked out, you can even hold this like a gun.

Harry and I were staying at the Midway Motel on Hammerline Boulevard, and I know how my subconscious works, so when I awoke the next morning, Harry told me I said the words "Axeman's Carnival" in my sleep. I had no reason to disbelieve him. And so I wrote a novella with the same name that I have never sent anywhere at all. I wrote this in 1994. The room at the Midway was funny in that every time we turned on the television, Mr. Rogers was on. Go figure.

Resting On The Certainties

Years ago, too many to count, Harry Fassl illustrated a story of mine in a magazine out of California. This was how we met and our friendship started, after one of the editors told Harry to get in touch with me, because we lived so close together. Back in the days before the ubernet. I'm keeping this somewhat vague for a reason. The other editor hung himself a few days back, outside of Victorville, California, the ass-end of San Berdoo County. Now the guy was nice enough, the last time I ran into him was at the World Horror Convention in Denver, the spring of 2000. We kept coming up with new tag lines for the film THE SIXTH SENSE. I see leprechauns. I see Van Halen, and, yea, we both knew that was off. Things got bad for him after that, a divorce, pill addiction after a back injury. Dead broke and, to some, not likable anymore. And so he headed further west into the black. Not like Harry, not in the least. Harry was cracking jokes at Goldy's, the best hamburger joint ever, the last time I saw him and Diana. In times past. Suicide is too simple, I now believe. I'ds much rather someone need to piece together what brought about my end, like sad Fletcher Hanks found frozen to that park bench in 1977. I know I have a Creator, but I sometimes wonder if I'll just show up again as a frog in the Amazon jungle, or a happy dolphin in the Pacific. I found a wonderful quote by Michael Faraday, the guy who is considered one of the great experimentalists to date. Here goes: "Speculations? I have none. I am resting on the certainties." We all die. Just in different ways. But we all die.

One Year Gone

I always want to apologize to Harry. Present tense, even though today is the anniversary of his death. Present tense, he is still around. I see him every day. Whether it's his own artwork, as seen above, for a story I have in SCREAM FACTORY. Sean Doolittle owns the original. Last week, Holly Day emailed me about unearthing a copy of VICIOUS CIRCLE, which had work by her and, unknown as I was to her at the time, myself. I emailed back on who Sean was, of the books she could find of his at Borders now, but back in 1992, when VC was a project for, I believe, business school, Sean ran into Harry and me at Minn-Con and thought we were enormously famous. Harry and I joked about that later, and when I last saw Harry and mentioned Sean's crime novels, he took a drag from his cigarette and, in exaggerated Harry fashion, vociferated that he "knew that young kid would make something of himself one day." I can still smile about Harry and the way he could deliver lines.

I see him every day through his loves, and when I talk with Diana on the phone (which is not nearly enough, but as with Facebook and Twitter, I'm just not a phone kind of guy). Hans Bellmer. Harry absolutely loved his work. He was fascinated with the work involving dolls, and so I have two images, the other being similar to something Harry himself might construct. Wires and painted wood and odd little window frames, boxes in his back room labeled DOLL PARTS and CHINA CATS, though I think the latter was Diana's stuff. You never knew from Harry's inventory.

I want to apologize to Harry (and Diana, as well), for not visiting nearly as much since I moved to Burbank. As I'd gotten older, I felt guilty about sleeping over, and my ride to Oak Park was doubled in time because it was no longer a straight ride down Pulaski to the Blue Line. Yet we still emailed and exchanged postcards, but I should have visited more. The mid-90s seem so, so long ago, the days of watching HORROR OF PARTY BEACH and TARANTULA, laughing and enjoying them just the same. And so it is I think not just of him, but of all the good times I had...we had, and it seems as if I can just reach far enough, I can pull those years back and relive them again.

I even see Harry in the moon. Yea, you got me. I think it's the whole harvest moon thing. So at 2 AM all week, as I wait for my border collie Mitch to take his piss, I stare up at that crazy half moon. And now I'll stare at my reflection in the window for awhile.

The John Agar Hypno-Cube

Yep. Made it myself. Actually made two of them, one for Jeff Osier as a apartment housewarming gift after he got engaged to Cathy Van Patten. Just like Pepsi & Coke or Oreos & Hydrox, there was John Agar & Richard Denning, when it came to the monster movies of the 50s. Denning was in the first Creature film, Agar the second. Earlier tonight, I was telling Capcom about two failed attempts (and maybe rightfully so, as they were circa 1980), STEAMROCK JOHNNY and NOWHERE MEN, which both had roots in the Industrial Age. The second was wholly my baby, and basically it was about six scientists who averted a disaster in 1883 by folding into timespace so that no one ever knew they existed. And what does this have to do with John? And, sure thing, I can call him John. I'd have to call Denning Mr. Mayor as he became Mayor of Honolulu and even married Evelyn Ankers, Lon Chaney Jr's gal in THE WOLF MAN. But I digress. All over the place.

I knew John Agar. We spoke on the phone and when his arthritis became bad, his wife Virginia wrote me letters that he dictated until she died. I plain out confronted him in 1996, telling him in a letter that I wanted to ghostwrite his autobiography. He married Shirley Temple. He was in SANDS OF IWO JIMA (and ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, to which I say...SO?) His family owned the Agar cured ham business up on the north side. John told me flat out that his life wasn't important enough to write about. He suggested I simply write my own book. I told him that it would be his words that were more important. And I held to that. He never budged. And then he died. And I wrote an article on his film career for SCARY MONSTERS. Back in the day, Harry Fassl and I would do the Denning-Agar war of words, but Harry would always concede that even though John did some pretty wacky movies, in fact, some were remakes of Richard Denning films, an example being THE SEVENTH PLANET, there was nothing wrong with a nice giant spider movie. I miss John Agar, and I'll be bringing one of his films up during this month of monsters. Also, I will continue Universal Monsters Monday in two nights, it seemed best to do things right in October.

A Month Ago, A Ghost

Just came back from the Twilight Tales readings, and it's one day short of a full moon. Harry's ghost wasn't on this trip, though a large amount of drunk Cubs fans were on the train for part of the way. Still eerie like last time, I was the sole passenger from Washtenaw on to Cicero. Empty lot, but instead of a clear sky, there were odd little black clouds like smoke signals. I love the sound of street traffic as I walk through an empty lot, I wonder if people who drive get a similar feeling, maybe from being on the open road. It's about a half-mile walk and for some reason, the city has been infested with mosquitoes in the last week or so. Nasty ones. I used to never get bit because of the Zostrix I put on my elbows and neck. The bastards adapted! Well, anyhow, I'm enjoying tonight, listening to Dizzy Gillespie as I type this, and right at Lawler, before the church parking lot, there's an building with a basement apartment. Often the kitchen blinds are open, not tonight. But I've seen different families at different times of day, all from that odd angle of being maybe five feet above them. Last month, it was that girl putting the key in the lock, today, in front of the same house, it was two kids playing with a soccer ball. Plus, more mosquitoes. Yet, I will take getting bitten and wearing short sleeve shirts over walking home in winter anytime.

Ah, but what's with the green guy, you say? It's J'onn J'onzz, the Manhunter from Mars. Harry loved this guy, his stories ran alongside Batman's in Detective Comics for most of the 1950s. A guy stranded on Earth via a teleportation beam, from Mars, he does what any guy would do, takes on the identity of John Jones and becomes a detective in Denver. Well, last year, during the Final Crisis even that killed Batman (for now), Martian Manhunter (as he was called during the 60s on up) was killed, as well. I sent Harry a comic called Requiem which was a sort of recap of MM's life on Earth, and he was around for more than 60 years, fer cry-eye. Kinda ironic, kinda sucky I did that. When I was at Harry and Diana's house in December, the comic was on his doodle shelf. I am certain some image from that book would have ended up on a postcard in the future. In the early 90s, a much-overlooked three-issue book by Gerard Jones was published. AMERICAN SECRETS was a cool 1950s story, with lizards from space, contestants on quiz shows being brainwashed or their heads explode, and thinly veiled characters like Elvis, the Beaver, and some girl who I can't recall, not Shirley Temple, but someone from the movies. And they went to Las Vegas, too! Martian Manhunter has some great lines in the books, once, when he sees both Oreos and Hydrox (remember those?) on the shelves, he asks the owner of the shop "Why are there two of everything?". Plus the page I scanned above. Just like we joked about Ed and his turbines and Billy getting on the plane, every now and then we'd answer each others phone calls with the question "Is it warm there in the magazines?"

Guitar Man & Hound Dog

This guy usually has a few friends hanging around him, but guitar man sometimes sits with his dog alone, winter and summer. When I took these photos last week, I realized I hadn't seen them since maybe 2006. Of all the "people like me"--as I like to call them--that I've photographed over the years, the only one I'm missing is Tab man. Its a huge kid in shorts, plays a Walkman and sings out loud, but the truly strange thing is that he always has a plastic bag from Jewel/Osco holding two big liter bottles of Tab. Last seen in the vicinty of 55th Street. I'm on the case. (In all seriousness, these guys have been around forever. As Harry Fassl once told me: We are patterns, persisting.)

Time Won't Let Me (HELLOVON)

Bob, maybe you're right about a walking hallucination. After all, the night was clear, the moon full, yet later it was cloudy. Was I walking through another life and then back into my own? My pain allows me to hallucinate for minutes on end, more often than not I'm thinking it's just me only it's the Earth-14 me and then I'll come back around in a while. As I type this, I'm trying to upload a video. If it works, you'll hear Harry saying the words Hello, Von to Yvonne Navarro sometime in the mid-90s, before I even had a computer of my own.

Rich, the Lithuanian Museum used to be Von Solbrig Hospital, which my father often said that it should be condemned, the 8th District cops getting more than a few calls to go there for well-being checks. I tried to find a photo of the hospital itself on Google but, oddly, found only the new sign for the museum, which moved there in 1986, and a photo of Robert Blake from some Spanish guys TV blog. Go figure.
Well, here goes. My walking hallucination. Because they sure as hell aint dreams.

Archer & Leavitt

After I posted last night, I let my dog out and saw that the clear sky had become more misty than cloudy, adding to my belief that I had dreamt my ride home, that there was no reason to be completely mortified at a stranger who I had, in fact, helped. Another odd moment, I had forgotten to write before, as I cut down Lawler towards the church parking lot, a car dropped this teenage girl off in front of a two-story apartment--far as I'm concerned, they are only flats in the old neighborhoods--and it was just so...quiet. The car drove off, I could hear her keys in the lock, even as I was walking and watching the "tree shadow" walking on the other side of 87th Street. Moments that you know are going to be gone forever even as you witness them happening. I recognized the girl, I'm the lone pedestrian of the neighborhood after all, but hearing her keys as I watched Harry's doppelganger, both senses having such clarity, the kind of detail that makes me hate dreaming because I wake up most mornings like I'm digging myself out of a grave.

Diana, Harry's girl, wrote and mentioned Harry having a phrase, "We are patterns, persisting." If I never ever ever got that before last night, I do now. And now, here are the last of my recent Archer Avenue photos. Earlier tonight, Balzekas officially closed its doors to selling new cars. The place opened in 1933, I can't even imagine what Archer Avenue led to back then, back towards where Chinatown is now, there was the Levee District, the whorehouses, the blind pigs. And for some, Archer was always an artery to get close to Comiskey Park, now US Cellular Field. Archer onto Pershing (39th) and east a few blocks.

These last few are random, all within a block of each other. I thought of just putting them on my Flickr account, but it got me to post about Balzekas and, more importantly, Harry and Diana.

Full Moon Red Line & Harry

I'm still creeped out as I type this, but in an eerie, calm kinda way. I went up north to hear Not From Michigan Mike read at Twilight Tales tonight and got a lead on some other job involving printing, so that's cool. Then I bought a bag of fries at the McDonalds on Lincoln and Fullerton, thinking the girl in front of me had a Godzilla foot. Turns out her sneakers were the same color as the tiles. Then the older guy who takes my order has a look of sheer and utter terror on his face. Maybe it was because I was wearing a Cleveland Indians shirt I bought at Unique Thrift for $2.00 and is now my favorite shirt.

OK. This is still so weird. I'm admiring the full, yellow moon rising above DePaul University, eating my fries, looking at a girl with long black hair waiting with her bike on the northbound platform, me thinking, man, I am twice her age. I'm on the train then, reading BUTTON, BUTTON, a collection of short stories by Richard Matheson. I hear a guy behind me calling the CTA about how late the 87th bus goes to Cicero. I turn to tell him, because of course, I'm going the same route. But the guy looks just like Harry Fassl. Without the voice. Skull, head, smile. I knew the guy wanted to talk, even when we got on the bus eight miles to the south. I looked at him, thinking, Jesus, he has shoes like Harry, and Harry wore big shoes. As we walked past the Dominicks to points west, he finally turned to thank me again. I really think he was wondering why I was all gibbledy-gibbledy. I told him no problem, standing there under this full yellow moon in a deserted parking lot, thinking of all the times during the summer where I might have seen Harry & Diana...The Red Lion, their house at 1111 Scoville, having burgers at Goldy's before watching crappy movies about giant spiders. This guy of course walked faster than me, being tall and all, and I followed his path, and where I cut through the church parking lot to get home about a half-mile from the bus stop, I could see him several blocks ahead, like a giant tree moving in the shadows between the streetlights. And you know what? Harry would have loved hearing how creeped out I was.

Deconstructing March 14th 2009

Yes, that's me inside of a grill of, if I recall correctly, a Pontiac. I think. Harry took the photo, it was my idea, though. It's on the back cover of PAIN GRIN, so we're talking maybe 1993. The tossing of the ashes was postponed until summer, but I planned to go and so I did. Took the train to the Loyola station, walked to Pratt then to the lake. Well, almost. I stopped just before the beach, because I was thinking how it was Harry and Diana's beach, and I wanted to wait until summer when more of us could be with Diana. Goofy, I know, but I felt like it would be trespassing. I'm crazy that way. I brought several graphic novels to read as I knew both rides would be awhile, plus the fact that there was going to be several hundred stupid twenty-five year olds staggering down Madison and Dearborn. So I'm reading WE 3, and don't ask me to explain it. It's brilliant, it won an Eisner award, written by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Yea, yea, that Grant Morrison, the one that killed Batman and had Batwoman with the ball gag. But this book, its...three astronauts, a dog, a cat, and a rabbit. Its poetry, all the bad and the sad in my world is going away in waves. The train ride would be maybe 45 minutes. And then the strangest thing happened. A young white kid in a brown parka started walking down the aisle. And he wasn't parking his bike. That's right: HIS DICK WAS OUT. He didn't have a raincoat on, he wasn't drunk or high. Security finally got him off the train, but as he passed me I said, quite severely, look, I am trying to read a book about three astronauts who happen to be a dog, a cat, and a bird and your dick really shouldn't be anywhere near me. The train car was maybe half full, so I had plenty of time to make my stand. When we hit the Loop and the drunken idiots boarded, I almost missed the parka guy, because he wasn't slurring every word (actually, he was quiet the whole time, oh, and he wasn't asking for money, a rare thing). I talked to Diana awhile ago, Saturday is a late day at the Art Institute, she first reprimanded me for not going onto the sand, then we both laughed that Harry would have loved the story involving me, the astronauts, and Mr. Peanut.

Buddy Love

It was neat that Jerry Lewis won an award at the Oscars. Granted he's not Mitchum, he's not even Jack Lemmon, but there are a few films I have enjoyed, including the one with DeNiro as Rupert Pupkin, THE KING OF COMEDY. There's a film almost everyone doesn't know, ARTISTS AND MODELS, with Martin & Lewis in a flophouse, Dean-o doing line work for an ad magazine, Jerry reading Batgirl comics. Turns out that Batgirl lives upstairs, Jerry sees her in the outfit the artist sketches from, thinks Batgirl is real, hilarity ensues. And then there's THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. Read the story I've posted here, whenever you get the chance, you'll see why my post is called Buddy Love. And, just for fun, I cam across this photo in an article on freeze frame shots. All I could really think of was crazy Jerry doing one last fatal stunt as he falls on his gafloygil.

This is also one of those stories that brings back memories of times past, as you can see by the dedication at the end of the story. Kurt and Amy are in Colorado now, Andrew is in San Francisco, and Harry, well...he's right here, man. Telling me to post this, shut it down, get some rest.





BULLETS CAN’T STOP IT
by Wayne Allen Sallee


Believe you me, what happened at the drive-in that night was something else. I wish I could retell the story with sound effects that would fit our terror, though that might actually make it something more humorous, like in Invasion of the Saucer-Men. Now that was like a cartoon, with a harp being played while Frank Gorshin’s character was being knocked flat by his buddy. Yeah, just visualize in your head the things we came up against in that one hour. If you saw the movie, even once, well then you could get a pretty good picture. And—get this segue here—to start this particular picture off right, I’ll run down the cast of characters: There was myself, Aubrey Maddox, and I guess I’m the skinniest of the bunch, and my best buddy Johnny Coronette, and a neighbor girl of his, Gloria Talbot. Johnny knew even more about old 1950’s monster movies than I did, and that surprised me when I first met him because he certainly had a decent physique and probably should have been hitting the big screen at the Colony or Marquette with a different girl every weekend instead of hanging around with the likes of me.
Gloria was younger than the two of us, and Johnny had brought her along to get a scare out of her. See, the drive-in was one of those virtual reality thrill machines where your favorite movie scenes get programmed through head goggles and isometric gloves. Johnny could rattle off every movie Richard Denning ever acted in from Creature From The Black Lagoon to Black Scorpion, and my first adult dream (if you could call it that) was about stealing Cynthia Patrick away from John Agar because he was too afraid to fight The Mole People, with a background song called “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” from the Beatles’ HELP! album. I’ve often wondered how many people dream with background music. Gloria was born between the assassinations of the two Kennedys, so she was going to be in for a treat, as Johnny said along the way. I mean, Gloria’s formative years were spent at the Jerry Lewis Cinamerica watching Charlton Heston movies against her will and/or better judgement.
We all had ideas of what movies we wanted to morph together once we got to the drive-in in Manteno, though it was mostly Johnny talking nonstop as the Camaro sputtered along the Tri-State, the windshield wipers slapping back and forth across our vision. First big rainstorm of the summer hits on Friday night. Par for the course in Chicago. But the weather wasn’t going to stop us from getting to the Bullets Can’t Stop It Drive-In in rural Manteno, an hour south of the city.
And aside from the weather providing proper atmosphere, like being spooked by Henry Mancini’s theme for Creature Features back in the seventies, strains of a piano over Dwight Frye in all his grinning madness, we had been saving our money for the better part of a month to hit the drive-in. The price was based on similar so-called thrill rides at the Disney complex in Japan and the virtual reality games along Navy Pier. Fifty dollars for thirty minutes, fright (okay, excitement) guaranteed. The drive-in idea had coincidentally been developed by one of the Japanese cybers, Jay Osigu, and was backed by the Wimberger Corporation.
The Van Nuys-based Wimbergers had first tried out their Virtreal Graphicsä in Arizona and Missouri, for the cowboy and gangster buffs. Kansas City has the highest mob concentration outside of New York City, and the St. Valentine’s Massacre Theater propelled the corporation into the big time, making them “the goods,” as Johnny Coronette put it when he first read about the drive-in’s impending opening.
Manteno, Illinois, is forty miles southeast of Chicago, and is best known for being the onetime site of the state mental institution. A common line as we were growing up was, "You see that guy? He looks like he just came from Manteno.” Things like that. Now the town held the Mavros printing plant, several farms, a Fatty Pig BBQ, and the Bullets Can’t Stop It Drive-In.
Our destination was actually a theater, but each individual parlor, or sensor cage, was made to be perceived as a drive-in good ol’ Hicksburg, U.S.A. on a summer night, except you weren’t in cars, you just had the biggest freaking screen imaginable, one that would make Grant Williams look like anything but The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Johnny was a wealth of ideas for morphing combinations of films together. He thought of putting Elvis instead of Landon in I Was A Teen-Age Werewolf. We both had Gloria snuffling laughter with our snarls and sneers. “Ah’m a wolf, ya gotta believe me ‘n lock me up, man,” and “Ah got sompin on mah lip, oh, is’ jus’ muscle tissue, mah boy, mah boy.” Then I mentioned how it was too bad we couldn’t get other films besides monster titles into the computer, an example being Oceans Eleven and Attack of The Crab Monsters. In that one, the crabs took over the voices of their victims, and wouldn’t it be great to see cheesy-looking crabs talking with the voices of Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford? Johnny thought of mixing Seven Brides For Seven Brothers with Dracula’s Daughters. Man, we had Gloria in tears, Johnny just grinning away like the night was ours.
Which was the whole part of the drive-in.

The parlors were immersive, that is, set up with the goggles and gloves, everything attaching the patron to the computer simulate. It was set up for volume business, so there could be up to five people in each room, or film, at each interval.
Move them in and out, fast as possible. Clear the program and let the next group have their fun. But the drive-in was nearly empty that night, probably because of the rain. (I’d hate to think it was due to Barry Manilow’s one-night set at the World Music Theater in Tinley Park.) Also, the Famous Monsters convention was coming up for Labor Day and most people with our cinematic sensibilities could easily have been saving up for that.
But I’d like to think it was the rain, because of what happened later. It was exactly the type of plot device you’d see in a B-movie from the fifties. Due to the inclement weather, we passed right by a foreboding clue as to what was to come later, Devery Truax’s old beater GTO, parked in Fatty Pig’s lot, the faded tan of the car against the lime green brick of the restaurant like some hideous color scheme for a bed and breakfast overlooking the Cal-Sag Channel.
I only realized it later, that the car had been there, when I was putting all this together. Devery Truax’s car with the faded RAT FINK bumper sticker and the glow-in-the-dark Frankenstein on the dashboard. Truax was a punk from the word go, looked about as tough and talked with the same kind of mock intimidation as John Ashley in High School Caesar.
He also had it bad for Gloria Talbot. Hell, who wouldn’t? Shoulder-length auburn hair, thin comet trails for eyebrows that waggled with amusement, and eyes that were the color of charcoal smoldering inside emerald green glass. A gal like this hanging around two four-eyed goons like me and Johnny, who knew?
Truax had also brought two others with him that night: Del Teach, this gangly computer geek who looked like his parents had been involved with atomic projects and hadn’t properly protected themselves, and Clement Wing. The latter fellow was this borderline autistic from down the block I lived on.
Wing’s father had been a Chicago cop same as mine, and there were many summers when our dads were working third shift and slept in the afternoons, I had to take Clem somewhere and keep him occupied on days when his father really needed to sleep. More often than not, I’d take Clem to play pinball games or go to the Ford City Cinema on Wednesdays, when you could get in for a dollar matinee by showing a Pepsi-Cola bottle cap. Clem was thin with hair the color of dirt. He had five o’clock shadow by the time he was fifteen. Forget my lame joke about Del Teach; the real mystery was Clement Wing.
The doctors never did pin down exactly what was wrong with him; eventually he was diagnosed autistic at the age of five. If he had been born ten years later, there might have been a better medical understanding of his situation, but he, like myself and Johnny Coronette, were products of the waning months of the 1950’s.
I knew I was constructing an armchair diagnosis, at best. Clem was able to talk lucidly, though he chose to remain silent most of the time. But he could certainly be eloquent. Earlier that summer, I was watching The Killer Shrews on Channel Eleven’s MOONLIGHT MADNESS when my hound dog, Rusty Wells, born the week Elvis Presley died, looked at me the way dogs do when they know it is time. I carried her onto the back porch as she shuddered her last and sat through the morning to keep the crows away from her still form.
Clement saw me the following week and said how maybe Rusty was peeing on her way to heaven, burning the grass so I’d be able to find my way that much easier when my time comes. Autistic? Hell, then I’m a sadomasochist. Or something. You see my point at the absurdity of how Clement Wing was perceived in this world.
His parents were content with the doctor’s diagnosis, the way a ghetto family will deny on the ten o’clock news the fact that their eleven-year-old son shot dead an honors student on the next block over, that their boy was not involved in some gang initiation.
In its own way, the “world” Clem lived in made it easier for him to get by. Before Johnny Coronette got some meat on his bones and buffed out a little, we’d both been antagonized by Devery Truax and his goon squad.
They would go after Clement Wing, as well, but he would stand up to them.
Actually, I always thought it was because he didn’t know how to be afraid.

We pulled up near Druktenis Road, close to the south end of the lot, spooky woods beyond the Camaro’s headlights. The drive-in off to the right, pastel blue and pink neon, the only thing missing was a soda shoppe. Johnny was still going two-forty on the possibilities to be had. I said how next they ought to morph television shows of the past, have a big immersive cage and call it “Tonight’s Episode.” Or combine TV and film, make a show staring David Janssen as The Amazing Colossal Fugitive. Gloria laughed at that one because her mom watched the black and white reruns on a cable station out of New York.
Johnny, not one to be upped, said that they could do similar morphing with the recent remake with Harrison Ford. Turn Sam Gerard, Kimble’s nemesis, into the rampaging behemoth. You could see (and hear) it now: Tommy Lee Jones towering over Harrison Ford, bellowing, “Richard, do you want to get stomped?”
More gales of laughter.
Fade out to the next scene, the interior of the drive-in. POV, mine.
We paid our money to one of the tellers. The place was nearly deserted, although a crowd of balding, gray-bearded guys were lined up by the Hondo Suite, where all the Japanese monster movies could be morphed. I’d bet every one of them would fight whichever monster to successfully win the love of Emi and Yumi Ito, those six-inch princesses from Infant Island, The Alilenas. One of the men even looked like an old Raymond Burr, in an odd sort of way.
It was while we were cracking wise about the Gajira guys that Devery Truax must have come in, because we certainly would have suspected something was up, particularly if we saw the two lackeys, unwitting or witless, that he had in tow.
We talked some trash as we stood in line for our turn in the Bug-Eyed Monster Room, waiting for the usher to explain the programming to us. There were poster headings on each wall, like banners, and Gloria read them out as Johnny and I took turns guessing which movies the blurbs belonged to.
A Savage Giant on a Blood-Red Rampage. The Biggest Thing Since Creation. Mightiest Double Bill In The Universe.
Spewed From Intergalactic Space…
Flying Saucers Attack…
Clawing Up From The Depths Of The Earth…
Johnny won, of course, by guessing that The Two Most Hellish Horror Hits That Ever Turned Blood To Ice were The Screaming Skull and Terror From The Year 5000.
Like we were betting real money.
Then the usher came by and handed us our equipment and explained the program. We would each have thirty minutes in the same room and be outfitted with goggles which fit snugly over our heads (and, thankfully, glasses). The programming board itself fit over our forearms like compact shields. The small boxes were made by a German company, Fassl GMBH, and weighed no more than a Sony Walkman. A long rubber connected the Virtreal OpsTM to the gloves we wore.
The gloves looked more like black matinee gloves or those Isotoner gloves you always get at Christmastime from some obscure relative. They were lined with veins and bladders, and compressed air was pumped through during the action. The gloves also recorded galvanic responses, that is, our heartbeats and pulse rates.
The computer wire-frames covered certain parameters, commonly referred to as “flock of seagulls,” random sensors and velcro diodes that would interface the sensory feedback. The program display was comparable to a list of selections on an ATM machine. Films to choose from for morphing purposes were listed alphabetically, by subject, and by actor/actress. For example:
ATOMIC MONSTER APE AGAR, JOHN
There were also optional settings for effects like The Tingler and music (à la the Del-Aires surf music from The Horror Of Party Beach). Plus, you could choose backgrounds and/or stages that included the Downington Diner from The Blob, Belton High School from I Was A Teen-Age Frankenstein, or even the Tivoli Theater from Village of The Giants.
We each made our selections, the lights went down.
And all hell broke loose.

This part I found out from Johnny afterward, while I was in my hospital bed:
Devery Truax had bribed a now-unemployed usher to let him and his two companions inside our sensor cage. The week before, Del Teach had stolen a Virtreal Ops board from the drive-in, (he had also stolen the money he had used to pay to get into the drive-in, but that’s a different story). He spent a week screwing around with it, turning it into something, well, something evil.
And poor Clement Wing was the unwitting vessel. Evidently, Devery had something on the kid, what amounted to blackmail. Maybe he was threatened with having his parents told that he was looking in Gloria’s bedroom window or something. The rigged board and attachments were hooked up to my autistic neighbor and the switches turned on.
Once activated, it overrode our individual programs.
The simplicity of what Devery Truax and Del Teach had done was this: they had plugged Clement Wing effectively into a computer that was “fright guaranteed.”
Clement Wing who had never showed fear in all the years I’ve known him.
Through all the mental battles we fought.
Through all the films we had seen.

This is how it spilled out. And I mean that quite literally. Everything, every single freaking Bug-Eyed Monster (and then some) imaginable spilled into our immersive, collective subconscious, sluicing into our mental receptors as if we were standing in Smallville U.S.A. under a liquid sky.
At the time that Clement’s device overrode the main-frame of the room – and it only happened in our particular suite – Johnny had already set himself up as the hero in The Day The World Ended, saving Lori Nelson and Richard Denning from telepathic, cannibalistic, four-armed mutant buglike creatures, but Gloria and myself were still deciding. (I had been giving serious thought to “fulfilling” my childhood dream of actually winning Cynthia Patrick away from John Agar without ever having to sing that insipid Beatles tune.)
But what I saw (not then knowing we all shared the same “screen”, as it turned out). Was the three of us in the same film, just the way Del Teach had programmed it. We were in an empty parking lot, drive-in speakers and jacks in even rows around us. The large screen in front of us was blank because it was still daylight, and there were the muted hums of cars on an interstate behind us, making a ribbon across a horizon the color of torn plums.
The floor of the sensor cage had been transformed into the gravel of an actual drive-in, with rows cleared by the travel of the patrons’ cars. There was the detritus of said patrons around me. Our positions were exactly as they had been during “real time,” moments before; Gloria was standing between the two of us. I could see that she and Johnny were wearing the goggles and gloves, so I assume I was, as well. No special costumes, considering the fact that we had all materialized into a common arena as if we were characters in one of those mutant comics, and had been inexplicably transported to an antimatter universe to fight The Thing That Shouldn’t Exist or something like that.
A desolate wind blew as a red sun slowly set above the treetops beyond the screen. An Oh! Henry Mega-Size wrapper twisted around my ankle, then skittered away. I could smell Gloria Talbot’s Taboo perfume and buttered popcorn.
I glanced over to the woods above the hill, the frontage road to the expressway, assumedly, and did a double take. I could’ve sworn I was looking at the silhouette of Alec Rebar, The Incredible Melting Man, shambling down the incline with dangling arms and bell-bottom hospital-issued whites. The image made me think of a live-action Saturday show from my youth, H. R. Puf-N-Stuf. Don’t ask me why – I even thought that back in 1978 when the movie was on a double bill with Saturday Night Fever. I still thought I was the only one seeing this until I heard Johnny through my headset, asking where the hell was Richard Denning?
Suddenly, as if with the setting sun, everything went to black and white; the sky, the trees, the big screen. Even the pink and blue neon. Shadows were now everywhere, draping across the lot, elongating the speakers, the ones dangling now resembling bloated spiders.
It happened all at once. If I had smoked some marijuana as I had been viewing Altered States, I might have started to take it all in stride. It wasn’t just bugs. (Our specific room was going to be bugs. Only bugs, the creepy-crawly kind. Or, at worst, bug-eyed creepies like the bloated-headed thingies in Invasion of The Saucer-Men.) Not behemoths, not sea serpents, certainly not blobs and flying brains.
But that’s not exactly what we got. The three of us alone, against the hordes of fifties films. Where the hell was Nestor Paiva when you needed him?
There was a playground in front of the drive-in screen, and this was where the giant, hairy tarantula began its slow, ominous crawl, coming into sight over the teeter-totter and then the twirly-bird. I was watching that when I felt things scurrying over my feet. It wasn’t candy wrappers this time, it was those mousy killer shrews, gnawing at my ankles. I jumped away, oddly thinking of my dog Rusty and feeling like momentarily weeping.
From out of the screen itself, giant grasshoppers from The Beginning Of The End began climbing downward to ground level. I started looking for my friends. Johnny was a few feet away, dodging a familiar gelatinous hunk of goop. Nope. Sadly, Steve McQueen was nowhere around with a fire extinguisher from the concession stand.
And Gloria was jumping up and down because the earth around her was being sucked in. I immediately thought of those damn mole people. She screamed then and I saw a transparent floating brain, from the planet Arous, natch. It was hovering there, deciding when to make a move, I suppose. Maybe it was waiting for its cue.
I even saw shooting stars and flying saucers in that monochrome sky of Midwestern stars. Would we have to wait for the computer to run its program through, or for security to be called? I couldn’t even tell if our thirty minutes were anywhere near being expended.
Oh, and there were sounds, don’t get me wrong. Not just of the three of us struggling, with Gloria not screaming, to hear benefit, let me set the record straight. We heard, well, I did, the chitinous, whirring sounds of what I could only guess to be the giant ants of Them, just beyond the horizon (or even in the sewers). And I heard an unseen voice saying, “You think I’m the freak, well, let me tell you. I’m not the freak, you’re the freaks. I’m not growing, you’re shrinking!” The male voice started laughing, but then stopped abruptly as if startled.
And I saw why, just as everything became a brilliant Technicolor. Just as everything started dawning on me.

The cars on the Interstate, silence through all this, had stalled, the occupants looking out their windows. Pointing at the horizon. The bugs and monsters moving away, not just from us, but just away.
The drive-in screen was being shredded from behind, beyond our field of vision. I looked at Johnny and Gloria, and they stared back at me helplessly. Frankly, none of us knew what the hell to expect next.
There was a blur of blue and shiny black coming into view as the screen tumbled and the dust from the gravel cleared. Oh, Jesus, I thought.
The newest “monster” was Buddy Love, the latter half of the Jekyll/Hyde-like creature created by Jerry Lewis’ character – damned if I could recall his name – in The Nutty Professor. But…why? All these other films were familiar to me, I had seen them with…Clement Wing. I had also seen The Nutty Professor, Three On A Couch, the list of Pepsi matinee movies went on.
And I understood. I concentrated and recalled standing in front of the sensor cage. Had I imagined hearing Devery Truax, Del Teach and Clement Wing? Had this whole program been jury-rigged?
This scene was Clement’s consciousness finally taking over. Suave and cool Buddy Love, replete in his slicked-back hair and blue lounge jacket with the black lapels. The swagger and the way with the ladies he would never have in his life.
Poor Clem. Devery, that motherless…
I concentrated harder, figured will power might work. Clem had always been close with me. I shut my eyes, my last image being Johnny and Gloria, thoroughly confounded at this hundred-foot Jerry Lewis thing.
All I saw was the gray behind my eyelids, and I blocked out all sound, whispering to Clement to please stop this. I made myself envision Buddy Love’s transformation in reverse, turning him into a celluloid parody of Clement Wing, with uneven buck teeth and mussed hair the color of dirt. I felt light-headed.
Gloria finally let out a gasp.

She had her hand to her mouth as she saw me there in the hospital bed. Johnny was there beside her. I was found unconscious in the sensor cage after the computer shut down, they tell me, and now I’m at Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet.
Then the doctor tells me it is time for me to rest and he gives me a shot of blissful Demerol. Like I said, fright guaranteed. Clement Wing was not afraid until he saw himself the way everyone else saw him, as a nutty professor. He wasn’t scared by ants, grasshoppers, brains with spinal cords attached, or giant sea serpents. He was – for a time – an automaton, and bullets couldn’t stop it.
Truax and Teach are out on bail, poor Clem’s in psychiatric counseling.
My parents told me I’d been contacted by an independent film company regarding possible film rights after our ordeal made the wire services.
I suppose it is something to bring up with Johnny and Gloria, but frankly I don’t think I’m up for any kind of a sequel.


This story is for Kurt and Amy in L.A. and Jeff, Andrew, Harry and Diana in Chicago. Here’s to late night viewing.

Six Degrees of I'm Not Certain

I will always manipulate the universe with scissors and tape. And so it was that I saved a photo of Jeff Osier from my infamous 4th of July party in 1996--infamous in that it stands as the coldest day of record, July 3rd barely hit 45 degrees--and made him hover over the two Superdawgs, which Rich has named in his comment on my previous post. Then Harry got an idea and a few years after the 4th of July AND the Amazing Colossal Superdawg photo, Harry mailed me (yes, via the USPS) what he called "Awooga," and so, when I scanned it into my computer, I kept the name intact. Now, I must tell you all that Jeff Osier is the number one believer in Superdawg's, he took his wife Cathy Van Patten there right after she moved here from Virginia, and I think they still have SD sweatshirts. I found the photo in a copy of Tribune magazine and thought, you know, I could cut around the edges of the building a slide in the photo of Jeff on the pool ladder. This is how my mind works nearly 90% of the time. What kind of goofy thing can I do next? Well, I think I'm done with Superdawg, but I thought it might be best to get these three images all in a row, for the sake of future generations.

The Memorial, Part Three: The Crazy Puppet Takes Us Home

Capcom wanted to know if Harry's site was still up, and I've told a few of you our plan is to get The Book of Harry (well, that's not really the title) out by this time next, well, this year. (Hmnn, I'm in a time loop). So I've posted a few things that Harry has left behind in the books I, too, will leave behind. Here, too, are the last of the photos from Harry's basement. I keep looking at that empty chair. I have a new printer/scanner/hoobajoo so when I get it set up and have the time, I'll scan other pieces he has done, for my story "Shots Downed, Officer Fired" in VICIOUS CIRCLE#2 and "When The Dead Men Walked Down Division Street" from THE SCREAM FACTORY's Night Of The Living Dead issue, and one more off the top of my head, from BIZARRE BAZAAR, "The Givers of Pain & Rapture." I think of that empty chair, but its more fitting that the puppet on strings is what I saw as I left Harry's world most likely the last time. And now it is 2009.

The Memorial: Part Two

Here is Harry's Lab. I'm just going to let the photos tell the story, except for #2. Harry had done kind of a Castle Revolving thing with the basement, and in one corner, he had cleared an area into a miniature dojo. The wall caught my eye, as that large splotch reminded me of the silhouette of a cartoon character, maybe Felix the Cat. The other photos face the same direction, and I've mentioned the bulletin board and, possibly, the bookshelf with the skull. The highlight for any visitor to the basement to see, though, were Harry's Chthonian sculptures. Scattered on those shelves are small props for any number of b&w HEF photos, but those sculptures are a wonder to behold.