August 7, 2006
“BACK UP IN YOUR ASS WITH THE RESURRECTION” —GETO BOYS
Zombies Part II
I probably got stoned second-hand for the first time watching a movie with Dad.
This had to have been before the age of six, in Wichita, when my sister Leticia and I were shuttled between him and a mother soon to disappear forever. I distinctly remember once sitting in his lap while thrashing at wisps of smoke in the air, just like Dad’s cat Ho Chi Minh swatting flies. Dad and someone else – my step-mom, maybe? – laughed at my antics. “He’s trying to catch the smoke, ha ha ha ha!” Drowsy, sluggish, easily amused pot talk, to be sure.
The concept of a babysitter was something from TV, because Leticia and I went along for every ride, to dates, drive-ins, and all the drunken fall-out. (For example, the vague recollection, flavored by cotton candy and colored by lime-green troll hair, of my aunt making out in a carnival parking lot with the man who would soon break her heart.) Some of these times must have been pretty good, because the memories warm me even now with thoughts of popcorn and clown colors and ice-cream-truck soundtracks, scraps of memories of drive-in playground swing-sets and monkey bars at dusk.
Drive-in movies were a special treat, even if the early ’70s fare of meta-violent, über-exploitative, and downright lurid features usually scared the holy hell out of me. I don’t remember Leticia freaking out in public just yet – that would happen when Dad brought us along for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and again when Grandma and Irma took us to see The Exorcist – so she must not have been old enough to react. One vampire flick in particular left me with brilliant images of blood, bodies, and gore-caked fangs to reel around in my head for years. Much later, Leticia and I visited Dad on a summer visit to Fort Hood, and we went to see The Town That Feared Sundown at the drive-in as a family outing. With threateningly sexy Euro-vampires and mercilessly psychotic Texas serial killers, we bonded in the dark over nachos and brutal, aggressively ugly Technicolor images splattered across a glorious billboard-like screen in the stars, bloody murder gurgling all the while like a distorted 911 call from a field of cheap, cackling speakers.
Dad saw the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and I saw the Dawn of the Dead. And so my heritage from Dad living through the ’60s was more Manson than Woodstock, more Helter Skelter and “Gimme Shelter.” I believed in zombies long before I could imagine the Pentagon levitating. Black-and-white newsreels of riots mix in the mind with snapshots of dad’s Afro and the remembered chaos of fleeing a movie house amid my sister’s wailing, photo prints of me as a baby in a T-shirt Dad brought back from war: “VISIT VIETNAM: Fascinating, fun capitol of the world…”
Family, history, zombie.
When Leticia and I moved to Texas to live with Grandma, Mexican drive-in movies balanced out our cultural enrichment, as we feasted on enchiladas and watched triple features with a typical line-up: a ranchera flick with dudes in unbelievably expansive sombreros singing on horseback, then a raunchy sexploitation comedy with fat breasts and bean farts, and finally a border-crossing piece of social realism set to Tex-Mex tracks. Halloween at the drive-in had kids trick-or-treating from car to car, with a full slate of South of the Border horror: supernatural thrillers with Catholic motifs, jilted howling mothers drowning their children, narco-Satánico death cults sacrificing bloody extremities, and villains buried alive in karmic coffin spasms.
These memories stand out as wonderful times, better definitely than when Grandma and Irma took us to see Saturday Night Fever at the Rialto in Harlingen. This was where I’d see Scarface and Beastmaster in junior high, when I’d travel by myself via Greyhound for cheap balcony seats at the triple feature. But somehow, Travolta’s sweat-hog sexuality stuck in my pre-pubescent brain as a filmy, tacky spectacle out of a wet dream gone horribly wrong.
As the years went by, I’d get my horror fix on Saturday afternoons from Boo!, the TV B-movie feature that would get replaced by Kung-Fu Theater and Texas pro-wrestling by junior high. Back in the days of Boo!, even the grainy intro credits would get my pulse going: a child-sized, blanket-covered figure claws through the woods in the rain at sunset to find a shotgun shack with baby doll-heads littering the windows, and when the door agonizingly creaks open thunder resounds with hideous cackles, cries, and pipe-organ flourish. Awesome! Sometimes, Leticia would start screaming at just that intro!
One of these afternoons, while recording music onto cassette tapes from the radio on my ghetto blaster, I must have heard a radio spot for Night of the Living Dead. The cheap studio screams and gags made my flesh crawl with imagined thrills. “SEE PEOPLE EATEN ALIVE BY ZOMBIES BACK FROM THE DEAD!” I was not yet a teenager then, but I wanted to sneak out of the house and hang with the creatures of the night.
And when I finally was a teenager, Tio Dino visited from Peoria one Thanksgiving that we observed in Santa Rosa with Tio Ruperto and Tia Concha. Cousin Dave, my mentor in the mysteries of teen delights, rented Dawn of the Dead, which we took in after Tio Ruperto choked out a pointed, pained Thanksgiving prayer.
That early eve, I walked out with Tio Dino, Grandma, and Leticia to a desolate dirt road on a windy, dark and cold day in the Valley. On the way home, I vividly imagined families across the land fending off turkey-dinner zombies and the world slowly turning over to the walking dead.
"Zombies, man, they creep me out ..." —Dennis Hopper in LAND OF THE DEAD
Posted by Benjamin at August 7, 2006 09:25 AM
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