I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (23 page)

What they did was beget the germ of our current zombiepocalypse. The film’s critical and commercial success ensured that decayed but insatiable automatons would become
the
monsters for a postindustrial, postrational America. And it was Tom Savini who created them, with his bare hands.

In Savini’s studio, Andrew explained to me that three-quarters of the students who come to Savini’s school come as fanboys. They account for most of the washouts, too. “They think it’s play, then they come and see it’s real-ass work,” Andrew said. “That this takes art and manual labor and makes a dirty baby.”

Off my other shoulder, a bovine young man in a sleeveless red tank top leaned over a buffing wheel. He was watching his fang intently, right up close, curly blond hair a-dangle.

“The problem is that the fans can sometimes see Savini as
almost like a living comic book character,” Andrew continued. “Fans think he’s going to ride off with them on zombie-killing adventures. When he doesn’t, they get resentful.”

With one false twitch of my wrist, the rotary tool wore my tooth to a nub and ruined hours of work. “What I want to know,” I said, thrusting the butt of my tooth at Andrew as if it was his cigarette I’d been holding, “is, like, can you really master fears here?”

He laughed. “Bro, you know where most of us go on to work? It isn’t Hollywood. They’ve outsourced
that
to computer nerds. For us, now, it’s dental labs, the haunted house industry, sex toys. Prosthetics for vets. They’ve got four or five of us making RealDolls.”

The high whine to my right stopped. There was an affectless “Ooch. Please help.” I turned and saw the buffer had shimmied up the bovine guy’s forelock and blown a fuse.

Andrew slipped his finished fang over his left canine. In his best Count von Count voice, he went, “One! Tooth! Ah ha ha!”

In subsequent classes, they showed us how castor oil keeps a demon from chapping. How syringes and condoms and squeeze balls combine for the most realistic panting apparatus for your yeti. How, if you want to sell a wicked bite, you have to paint red liquid latex on a flat surface, dry it with a hair blower, powder it, then do X and Y and Z until it bunches into a web-like structure that will stretch and tear like tissue.

Most of the time, though, our instructors stressed the many variations of one theme: this ain’t about just flesh and blood.

The Savini School’s core curriculum centers on anatomy and abnormal psychology, art history and technique. The thinking is that first, an apprentice has to know his own self. His bone
structure, his theory of mind, his being a really shitty craftsman. He has to know what is human before he can put it through its about-face. Which is what we were really apprentice to: the convincing transformation. Man to wolf, young actor to old, mossy bones brought back to life—we were working toward the effect that looked so believable it might just step out of the frame with a life of its own.

This was also, I realized, what it was about Tom Savini’s movies that filled me with such delicious anxiety when I was younger.

Though later it would become more of a nuisance, the nighttime was something I dreaded very much as a kid. As soon as I saw the sun start dropping down the sky like a dynamite plunger, I raced to screw shut the bedroom windows, turn the dead bolt on my closet door, and remove all mirrored surfaces. Chance—or anything else—was not getting invited in. I double-checked all drapery and crannies before I laid me down.

Then, when it was just me and my brain in the dark, I’d begin to consider the creeping horror that lurked everywhere under everything. The great disparity between what I beheld and what was potentially visible. The monsters were real, I knew, and they were coming. Sure as a clock ticks.

“Night terror” has no verb form, but I can assure you it’s a transitive activity, something that involves kicking holes into the drywall or alligator-death-rolling off the top bunk. (I demanded bunk beds for myself, because only a fool would sleep that near to what lies beneath.) Many mornings I came to on the tile, pedaling against nonexistent sheets, hearing the magnetic resonance of thirty TVs on but muted, and tasting a sharpness like green pennies. My dad’s voice would reach me through thickness. No words, but I could make out the amplitude and the frequency, a short-long-short-short that I’d heard enough to know was “For
Christ’s
sake, son.”

So, so often did I hit my head on the nightstand or the floor on my way down. Consciousness then felt like knee-walking on gravel. And burned into my mind’s eye were the afterimages of horrible dreams. They came in many flavors, but vanilla was zombies pouring in, and there’s me, a decent caliber deep-throated, waiting till the last possible moment to pull the trigger.

I took enough of these night-terror-induced gainers (and resultant CAT scans) that the Florida Department of Children and Families felt it necessary to have a sit-down with my father. He was the one who’d bring me to the hospital; he was the one who’d find me.

My father took it upon himself to wake me each morning. Gently, usually. But every now and again he’d kick open the door, and if I wasn’t concussed on the ground, he’d clutch at his chest and scream, “Heart attack! Embolism, right this minute!” I’d ratchet upright, hyperventilating. Then he’d ask, casually, “Did you say good morning to the adversary?”

My old man had lost both his brothers at tragic ages in separate, horrific accidents. Then he’d served in Vietnam. He thought it was important that I greet Death as part of my morning routine.

Our sculpture teacher carried himself with the quiet easiness born of manual competence, but his reedy voice splintered when he yelled at a student—“Donald, Jesus, that looks tremendously unsound!”—as Donnie took practice cuts with a baseball bat he’d sawed off and glued a sledgehammer head to.

“Did you hear about the guy they claimed was on bath salts when he ate his dog?” Donnie wanted to know, pivoting, following through. “I think he was a carrier! I think it’s about to go down!” Donnie, unable to modulate his pitch or volume,
talked as though he was impersonating a poststroke Edward G. Robinson.

The sculpture room was narrow, with stools pulled up to a ledge that ran around its perimeter. On the wall above each was a fiendish head sculpted and painted by a student. I picked a stool near Donnie; the head canted down at me was a mean ape in a Brodie helmet. Today I would start work on a self-portrait formed out of umber Chavant.

Unfortunately, I had joined the school a couple of weeks into the summer semester and missed the lesson about what makes a face. So, rather than make one of those, I spent the morning forcing crests of clay around a hydrocephalic head. Donnie glanced my way with increasing regularity, and concern, until he scraped back his stool, stepped over, and pointed out where my replica came to a point. “See this?” he asked. Then he slapped his palm onto the crown of my actual head, drawing out one long
Booooop!
I looked at him, and he looked at me, and still he
Booooop!
ed like a quiz-show buzzer. We were maintaining eye contact when he did likewise to my clay dome. I added my own plaintive
Booooop!
Finally Donnie unhanded me, and then the little me, and I saw he’d made him better.

After that, Donnie let on and on about the time he’d spent in psychiatric care, all while thumbing a better-than-faithful bust of Robin Williams. His own face, acne-knurled, was curtained behind black hair. This made his hands appear to be working of their own accord. They scrambled around the ledge, one of them crumbling a brick of clay while the other pinched Robin’s earlobe tenderly. Their capacity for both power and dexterity had me thinking of sea creatures evolved to eat soft things hidden in shells.

Donnie got close and told me he wanted to make toys, figurines. “An indie like me would get the Stephen King licenses, see?

“It started when I met Tom Savini at my mall in South
Pennsyltucky.” He stopped sculpting to pick up his hammer bat. “Now, where I’m from, by now, I should’ve been killed three times over. But here I am standing before you today.” He hinted at some kind of boonie meth predicament, choked up on the hammer bat. “Because I’m from a lower-middle-class family, see, I believe meeting him was an act of God.”

When I checked the clock, the six hours of class had flown by. It was pretty remarkable. The inside of my own head had fallen eerily still while I shaped its doppelganger. Laying hands on clay—who knew?

But things about my analog were off. Cheeks sagged. Lids drooped. Skin flaked. It didn’t seem at rest, but rather ill at ease, its grimace curling inward. Frankly, it looked like a poorly embalmed face halfway awake in the grave. So much work remained to be done.

In my hotel room that evening, after having taken my fright, I nodded off in the small hours. I dreamed of something I’ve been dreaming of since:

My dad’s in a cramped bathysphere, dropping gently into perpetual night. Deeper and deeper he goes, the pressure mounting, the warm side of the spectrum squeezed out until all that’s left is blue-black water and the white of his craft’s spotlight. Through the one porthole he sees nightmare creatures, wraiths with shiny lures built in. Leaks are springing, the hull crumpling, but he’s plugging holes and digging in his heels, pushing back. I don’t know that there’s a bottom, but whatever he’s on his way to, he won’t reach it alive. He’s holding out for as long as he can, even though—
in spite of the fact that
—he knows his vessel will be crushed like a beer can between invisible hands.

At the start of my penultimate day, we few students placed our sculpted heads on the chest-high workbench in the animatronics shop. It was almost time to plant servos, animate them. My hours and hours (and hours and hours and
hours
) of careful handling had yielded an inhuman likeness, this rictus-faced gremlin that belonged floating in a jar. I’d had it with the thing.

To ward off classmates who might try to help, I’d taken to raising my notebook and flipping through it as if searching for the protective spell. Still, a classmate named David started speaking at me and would not stop. “I can talk to people, is what this made me realize,” he said as I nodded hollowly. He was putting the finishing touches on his rendition of Two-Face. “This is me,” he said, pointing to the human side of the monster.

David had muttonchops and a pushy chin. He was a veteran of the 82nd Airborne, but he was unacquainted with Ryan. How he got into this was he would scare his squadmates by faking razorblade suicide. “I made those bitches be
lieve
that shit,” he said.

The sclerotic, tendony half of his sculpture was intricate, the focal point being a lidless eyeball mapped with veins. David crosshatched the clay flesh with a dog brush and rubbed baby powder into the corrugations. “This is the thing that keeps you up at night,” he said. “And it’s never going to go away.”

The power tools in the shop screeched to life. David said that when his face was operational, “the eye will wink, the head will turn forty-five degrees to obscure the fucked-up side, and the smile will peel back.” It took hundreds of hours for him to achieve this.

As he worked, I noticed that his hands had the same expression as his face. They held out his nature like an offering, and they added themselves to what they touched. “There’s never been a time when I haven’t been trying—avidly trying—to figure. Out. How. That. Worked,” he said. “I watched horror
movies still by still to see how they accomplished the effect. You got scared? Break down why.” I looked at my own small and soft hands and thought of benthic mollusks.

“Isn’t that what gets us in trouble in horror movies to begin with?” I asked. “Isn’t presumption what gets us overrun by dead things when the end comes?”

“You talking about the Shit?” he asked. “The
Shit
shit? Because when that Shit goes down, I’m going to be, fucking …” David made an AOK sign, and then he took off his shirt to point to a tattoo over his heart, his name formatted into a UPC bar code. “I’ve got my bugout bag ready. How about you?”

Even after all my friends got girlfriends and grew out of the habit, I would stay in weekends and watch horror movies. Zombie flicks mostly, D-grade, and these with my father. We’d sit staring out of our faces and judge the characters’ awareness, discuss what we’d do differently. Foremost: we’d
never
open the door to our boarded-up farmhouse/​fortress/​keep. Not a goddamned crack. All that work at becoming impregnable, undone.

Though not quite on the level of bugout bags, my dad and I
did
have a pseudoserious Z-Day Plan. (It just also happened to be his Impending Race War Plan, his Aftermath of a Mondo Hurricane Plan, his North Korean Invasion Plan, et cetera.) First, we’d grab his service weapon from the crawl space, along with the hundreds of rounds of surplus Chinese ammunition he kept therein. Then we’d take stock of the canned goods in the pantry, supplementing these when necessary with fish caught from the bay down the street. Onto our flat rooftop would go plastic buckets, for the constant South Florida rain. Onto our many windows would go plywood from storm seasons past. Our doors we’d reinforce; behind them, we’d make nary a peep. Hell, we couldn’t
wait
! The dead would punish the living for us, and we’d be left alone at
the center of creation. There, within the structure we’d built to keep out what terrorized us, we’d defend ourselves unto death.

What’s interesting is my sisters had them, too. The night terrors. I know because some nights, when we were young, I’d jog awake, and from the bedroom next to mine would come the sound of two feet slapping tile, concurrently—a sister having gone from supine to athletic crouch—and then a pause for bearings, and then the Bronx applause of those same feet booking it down our tile hallway.

And of course we
knew
our old man had them. Were we to hear some bump in the night and then go to get him to investigate, we’d often find him wandering in a fugue, opening closet doors with one hand, stabbing into the void with a fillet knife in the other.