April in October

I long for the monsters of my childhood. The ones on TV in rubber costumes and pie plate flying saucers in low low budget flicks you were supposed to take a date to who would grab you during the scary parts so you could put your arm around her. I don’t remember ever doing that, but it is part of those mythical teenager fifties and early sixties, but I was too young for that. Dating protocol was no longer so clear in the early seventies. I grew up watching horror movies on TV in shows with a host in costume and terrible comedy bits, like The Dungeon out of Miami, hosted by M.T. Graves on Saturday afternoons or Creature Feature late at night, and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKiY1IIXrII 

Then I was lured by the Aurora monster models in ads in Boys Life and Famous Monsters of Filmland. The classic Hollywood monsters of Karloff, Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr. were colorfully illustrated for the plastic models which came in pieces you put together with airplane glue that got on your fingers and on the surface of the plastic pieces and making a mess until finally coming together more or less as instructed, with Frankenstein’s monster standing in front of a tombstone, arms extended, an object much less satisfactory than the illustration on the box I wish I kept.

https://www.classic-monsters.com/aurora-monster-models/

Billy and I were really into all this and my sister promised to take us to a monster movie sometime. I was maybe ten or eleven and Billy a year younger. When the time came around we could go Billy got sick so it was just me and Betty and we saw The Pit and The Pendulum with the gloriously creepy Vincent Price playing a wealthy grieving widower in a family estate somehow that was involved in the Spanish Inquisition and there were had instruments of torture in the cellar. There is a plot to drive the Price character insane by convincing him he had buried his late wife alive and now she’s haunting him. The doctor argues that she was dead, but the only thing to do is to go downstairs to the family crypt in the middle of the night and break through the brick wall of her tomb. The lid is removed from her casket and the characters react and what they see then flashes on the screen for a thrilling second and blast of soundtrack trumpets — the image of death and decay and dead skin peeled from a screaming skull and the desperate skeletal hands of the woman trying to escape her tomb. This shock shot affected me the way it was supposed to and I told my sister I wanted to leave, so we left and went to McDonalds, and McDonalds hamburgers always brought that night back to memory. I didn’t sleep much for a while thinking about death and decay and Mom and Dad and Betty and everyone ending up like that person in the tomb. My sister tried to comfort me by saying it wasn’t real and it was like a Halloween mask or monster model, but that isn’t the point, which is that beneath the everyday screen of life is the fact of death and rot, even for Mom and Dad, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBr0clMssEE

In late October I think of April. April was the name of a girl I knew in high school. The Pit and The Pendulum was showing in our school auditorium Halloween night and I went, older, wiser, cooler, and maybe ready to see how the movie ends. As luck would have it the girl I had a painful crush on also went alone and we sat together. April was a Junior and I was a Senior but we were in the same Creative Writing class and became friends. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. I also tried to play guitar and mostly ruined Bob Dylan and Neil Young, but April really knew how to play and she had a lovely voice and was a cute brunette so I fell in love. She was sitting next to me in the auditorium. She said she’d taken Mescaline. We giggled through the movie and maybe she grabbed my arm once during a scary part and it was fun but didn’t lead to holding hands, petting, or beyond. Next semester we were still friends but she was dating a college boy. A couple of years later ran into her at an alternative church. She couldn’t remember my name.

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched The Pit and The Pendulum since. It doesn’t scare me but it fascinates me as a thing that used to scare me.

Mom and Dad are in their graves and my late wife is in hers and eventually my ashes will accompany hers.

A few Octobers ago I googled April and learned that she too has been in a grave for a while and that she died of breast cancer, like my wife, and too young.

I can’t say I have accepted death and that it doesn’t worry me but I’ve lost my childish fears and old horror movies don’t scare me anymore, and Halloween candy doesn’t appeal to me anymore, but death still brings sadness, and this October April is one of the names I remembered for Dia de Los Muertos.