I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (22 page)

He’s in prison now, Roberto’s dad, for fraud. Just the other year, I learned that Ricky’s dad was a Noriega coke lieutenant. He lessened his sentence by becoming a federal informant. He and his family were in the witness protection program. My own father found out but never mentioned it. His suspicions were confirmed after a sleepover, when he called Ricky’s dad and told him, “I have your son here—how do you want to do this?” One gravid pause later, Ricky’s dad said, “… What is it that you want?” “To … get rid of … your son …?” Dad said, suddenly wide-eyed and cognizant. Asked later why he didn’t say anything—“God
damn
it, Dad, I could’ve been blown up with their Chevy Venture!”—he responded: “Shit, everyone was getting
well back then, myself included. Who do you think built this place?”

When the New Year ticked over, the male guests at Ricky’s new house fired rounds skyward. I jumped into the pool, too, drank cups of fountain Coke and ruined my rented tuxedo.

Russellhaus was herself purchased out of bankruptcy from an associate several degrees removed from Ricky’s dad, an “international coffee importer.” Strange shit was certainly abrew in there. For instance, there were
waaaaaay
too many phone jacks. Phone jacks where there should be no phone jacks—in the attic, under the carpet, deep inside closets. Add to that the several false walls, and rooms with non-Euclidian geometries. The angles in my bedroom did not add up. It was painted a jaunty teal, but still it felt like some Lovecraftian gateway chamber. Not least because a bricked-over door to nowhere stood at one end, occasionally seeping this oxidized ooze. I would not be surprised to find that, in its blueprint design, Russellhaus was less an architecture than the diagram of a psychic event.

All of us but Mom were absolutely
certain
that something was hidden in there with us. Treasure, or maybe worse. Periodically, a hive of bees would appear in the living room chimney; the next morning, they’d be littering the floor in their death throes. Violent midnight thundershowers often caused the electricity to cut out; when the lights came back up, there’d be a dozen blue crabs slowly suffocating in the shallow end of our pool, their pincers up like dukes. After Hurricane Andrew, when that pool was drained of detritus and storm-surged bay water, a dorsal fin, then a caudal fin, and finally a shark’s lifeless snout dawned at the bottom like the worst realization.

We were broken into and (ostensibly) ransacked three times. Only once was anything taken.

Karen and Lauren: “Of course that dump was haunted.” Karen: “The worst juju was in your closet.” Lauren: “Oh, fuck,
yeah—your closet.” Dad: “When we were cleaning out the house before selling it, I went up into the crawl space above your closet. Eerie shit, man. I was not comfortable. All the wood up there—it was like brand-new. Blond, firm wood. Remember, that was underwater during Andrew.”

The thing about a haunted house is it’s narcissism’s friendly confines. A place where time passes slowly, if at all. Where you grow more and more obsessed with your own sordid past or problems. The past
itself
becomes the specter darkening your present.

There, you screw inward instead of growing outward. You’re caught in an endless repetition of neurosis-driven thought and action. There, you have setting as psychological pathetic fallacy. A palpable disease you drink in, unconsciously.

Strangest of all at Russellhaus was an outdoor bust of Bacchus. Not the cherubic Bacchus you usually see—we’re talking aged Bacchus, leathery in the face, his grape-leaf wreath come undone. Bacchus through the wringer. His eyes looked skyward, and his chin was tucked into his neck. His hair was matted, and his thick lower lip hung ajar, grouper-like. He looked indescribably pained, or else about to barf.

His bust was affixed to a back wall, on top of a hollow, coffin-shaped plinth. Our meter reader thought he was the Devil. Another guy refused to clean our pool because he feared we were LaVeyan Satanists. To combat this, young Karen X’ed out Bacchus’s eyes and scrawled “
I LOVE THE LORD
” across his base.

The only thing that for sure ghosted around that place was Dad. Russellhaus’s animating spirit. He was there when we woke up, there when we got back from school, there when we went to the kitchen to fix a midnight snack. (Though by then he was usually passed out in the recliner with the lights off, the TV on,
and the shadows of muted snow flurrying across his face.) From the day after he lost his job to the day I went off to UF—a closed loop of character who was not exactly
pleased
with his new plane of existence, but who was resigned to existing intransitively now.

Although, unlike most ghosts, he did not want anyone to uncover the crime that had created him. Jesus, no. He does not want a proper burial for his bones.

What it was I felt was the fist of my heart in my chest. I felt this every night, unless I happened to be spectacularly drunk. The feeling gripped me at least forty-five minutes after I’d fallen asleep but never more than sixty. It jolted me awake with the full understanding that some
thing
was in the room with me.

The feeling often coincided with noiselessness: the thermostat shut off, or the traffic vanished, and I was roused by the scream of the silence. Sometimes I’d come to but wouldn’t move. I’d think, I’ll be okay, so long as I don’t budge. Sometimes I threw the cover two feet above me, where it briefly caught air, me-shaped, like skin jumped out of. I’d be down the hall by the time it came to rest.

Usually, though, I sat up and just stared at what I took to be a person. He smeared the air around him, made it go viscid like preignition shimmer, so it was hard to tell. I wished he’d have the decency to announce his coming, maybe groan a little outside my locked bedroom door. At least then I could’ve girded myself. That was the worst part—not knowing how long he’d been in there with me, with nothing between us.

This particular time, I was in a hotel room in Pittsburgh. I stared and stared at a sort of mirage with a face. My heart
clenched, but the rest of me shook at an awful frequency. The only thing I can think to liken it to is the wobbly singe you feel when you make bad contact with a baseball bat. The man or his ghost evanesced eventually. But I did not get back to sleep, and I lurched through the next day, my first at the program.

I was eight the last time I slept soundly, and for this I thank one man: Tom Savini.

Tom Savini is a sixty-seven-year-old special-effects artist, a sometime director, and an actor on the up-and-up. Distinct geeks revere him for his effects work in horror films from the 1970s and ’80s, stuff like
Dawn of the Dead
and
Friday the 13th.
But it’s not like he was the best effects guy back then. Back then, Rick Baker was winning the first of his seven special-effects Oscars. Tom Savini was never so much as nominated.

What he was, though, was the pioneer of hyperrealistic blood and guts, what the film historians call “splatter.” “The Sultan of Splatter,” they christened him. “The Godfather of Gore.” He was the first and best at making bodies reveal themselves onscreen. His work also happened to be the literal embodiment of the shift in horror movies from fright to terror, from beatable alien monsters (
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
) to the abominations within (practically every serious horror film since
Night of the Living Dead
).
Film Comment
wrote of him, “It can be argued that Savini, through his effects work, offers us a distinctly modern view of an alienated human existence. The assaulted bodies he creates are all flesh, and no spirit.” His death scenes are glorious, and his creatures dense and unctuous. His stuff cuts deep.

When I caught my first glimpse of it, eight-year-old me inched as near as possible to the screen, the better to gawk at the fonts of blood and stomachs pulled agape. I laughed; I was enlivened
by it. How’d they manage to do this, I wondered, make it seem so real? I couldn’t look away from the man’s handiwork then—and I still can’t. Neither can a lot of maladjusted dudes come of age: Quentin Tarantino recently put Savini in
Django Unchained.
He was just featured in Robert Rodriguez’s
Machete Kills.
J. J. Abrams loves him, as do Matt Groening, Oliver Stone, and Stephen King, whose head Savini has exploded on camera. Darren Aronofsky wants him for his upcoming Noah’s Ark project. He’s been on
Letterman
five times. Less famous devotees have hand carved or tattooed countless homages to his creations: Jason, Lizzie, Fluffy, Bub, Dr. Tongue, Helicopter Zombie—the whole silicone gang poured directly from the dark matter of childhood subconsciousness. His engagements at horror conventions are rumored to earn him as much as ten thousand dollars a pop.

During one of my interrupted nights the other summer, with nothing else to do but futz around online, I discovered that Savini has an academy. An atelier, more like. Tom Savini’s Special Make-Up Effects Program, in Monessen, Pennsylvania. It’s the first of its kind, a sixteen-month curriculum in which students learn sculpture, makeup, molding, and casting from guys (and it’s all guys) who’re either done with Hollywood or taking a break from it. The instructors have each worked with Savini, apprenticed under him, or been inspired into the craft by the man. I signed up for the summer session and flew to Pittsburgh. The idea, I suppose, was to learn how to reverse engineer the things that haunted me.

Monessen was a corpse of a place. Steel supports jutted at fractured angles from abandoned buildings downtown. Ribby grills were pulled across spiderwebbed shop windows displaying dusty nothing. I counted a dozen houses of worship, about ten
more than I did pedestrians. The Savini School was the only thing astir. It’s a four-story bloodred brick building backed up against a Catholic church. It used to be a nunnery. Across the street was the decommissioned steel mill where they shot part of
Robocop,
the scene where a bad guy gets melted by toxic waste.

Inside was a narrow honeycomb of workshops, makeup stations, sculpture banks, and coves of power tools. Some rooms were done up to look like reanimation laboratories; others, torture chambers. Along the walls were old murder implements, monsters under glass, the severed heads of celebrities. Altogether, the place was like some imaginarium of the id.

My first class was Beginning Animatronics. The assignment: vampire fangs. My dozen classmates in the chalky workshop were the same energetic young people you can find in community colleges across the country, just more heavily tatted with pop hieroglyphs and attired almost exclusively in the grays, blacks, and blues of floater bloat.

Our teacher was a serene hulk of a man in a too-small baseball cap, a Savini alum and, prior to computers, the best tooth-and-claw guy in Hollywood. He had shown us how to create casts of our mouths; now we were working to roll our fangs out of clay before painting them with acrylic and buffing them to a sheen. I tried to use a wood-handled dentist’s hook to detail my tooth, but I succeeded only in shaping it into a scale-model Uluru.

Most of the students here had enrolled with a high school diploma and no background in art. For them, an eighty-thousand-dollar degree from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh or some digital-animation lab was out of the question. I took my stumpy cuspid and followed them into a studio where the more competent were using rotary tools to file the efficacy of their effects to an edge.

At the station next to mine was a dude with muscles in a
beater. He was especially capable. I asked what brought him to the program. “Heard about it from an ad in the back of
Fangoria
magazine,” he said.

This, I’d discover, was how many first heard about the school. If forced to sketch a brief ethnographic portrait, I’d say this institution attracts mostly white males who dislike any reliance other than self-, who hate crowds, waiting, and the feeling of being a small piece of something greater, and who would refuse the steep and perpetuating cost of modern convenience if they could. Oh, and who still read print media. Simpatico, to say the least.

My neighbor’s own teeth were brown and furrowed and pushed this way and that, like old, crowded headstones. His name was Andrew. He fought mixed martial arts on the side. “I didn’t know there was a home for what I always wanted to do,” he said, polishing his fang into a pearlescent scimitar.

There hadn’t been one for Tom Savini, the only boy who shined shoes around ’60s Pittsburgh for makeup money. Coming-of-age, for him, had been about fashioning disguises and inventing monsters. He spent his days sculpting in the garage and curing wounds in the kitchen. By his late adolescence, Savini knew effects were what he most wanted to create. He practiced on himself.

Savini joined the army rather than wait to get drafted, because enlisted men got to pick their jobs. He served as a combat photographer in Vietnam. After the war, he moved to North Carolina and started acting in a repertory theater. He was still playing around with makeups, still using them to scare the holy shit out of people. (In Vietnam, he had been all, “Mama-san, take … a … look … at …
THIS
!”) In fact, that’s what earned him his early notoriety: the verisimilitude of his wounds. “There’s something about seeing the real thing that sets me apart from, let’s say, some other makeup artists who have never experienced
that,” he said in a post-Vietnam interview. “When I’m creating an effect, if it doesn’t look good to me—real—doesn’t give me that feeling I used to get when I’d see the real stuff, then it’s just not real enough for me.”

In North Carolina, he received a telegram from George Romero, whose
Night of the Living Dead
Savini had been set to do effects for when he got called overseas. The telegram read: “Start thinking of new ways to kill people, we’ve got a new gig—George.” That new gig—the zombie magnum opus
Dawn of the Dead
—Roger Ebert would call “one of the best horror films ever made.”

Dawn of the Dead
didn’t aim to scare audiences, not explicitly. The film is a biting satire of consumer culture as told through scene after scene of hashed gore. In place of
Night
’s black-and-white slow burn,
Dawn
has Technicolor brain splurk, and human skin rent by zippy teeth like the thin offal prophylactic that it is. Romero would go on to say that “if it wasn’t for Tom, we wouldn’t have been able to do ninety percent of what we did.”