I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (24 page)

Again, my dad is like a secular Puritan vis-à-vis his devotion to vigilance. A man who is troubled by nothing so much as peace of mind. Who believes above all in Death’s acquisitiveness, and that the surest sign his cold hand has caged your heart is if you
feel no danger.
Does that make sense? Who believes that safety is found in the very dread of ever feeling safe enough to rest your eyes.

Parentally, he practiced admonitory judo. A black belt, that guy. He would intercept the force of your amenability and joie de vivre, and he’d flip and twist it until you, too, were immobilized by fear. Going for a walk in the woods, eldest daughter?
The horned deer are in rut, extra stampy, plus there’s rapists.
You would like to earn a few more dollars working the graveyard shift at the all-night pizzeria, son of mine?
You’ll get shot in the face with the quickness.
In all his ponds were alligators, and only psychos rang his bell. The first thing he made my mother do
on their honeymoon cruise? Crawl the route to the lifeboats, blindfolded.

Any attempts we made at psychic intervention were met with a shrug and the phrase “I’d be scared of nothing if I was alone.” The implication here was that we, his family, had summoned all these demons simply by existing. We were objects to be loved, meaning we were objects to be protected. His empathic wall had expanded to accommodate us, but all that meant was he had more to lose. As long as either he or we were alive, the best to be hoped for was a kind of padded equanimity.

Thus, when any one of us knocked on his bedroom door and tried that old chestnut “I’m a little scared,” the response from inside was always “You damn well should be!”

I met Tom Savini in a conference room full of filing cabinets and blank diplomas. He was about five-foot-eight, knottily muscled, and dark like stained wood. His partially unbuttoned linen shirt, midthigh blue shorts, bushy beard, and grayly threaded ponytail had him looking not like a dad but like a man who could beat up a dad; a lion tamer, maybe.

He spoke to me for four hours about horror and his place in its history, and it was pure romance. We ordered in—minestrone—and talked shop re: how he managed to dredge fear from me, and people like me, and shape it into golems, and breathe life into them. We lamented computer graphics, the tools become our masters. We agreed that when watching all these modern blockbusting CGI fests, we felt as though we were the only ones left who still preferred the squish and crunch of a real, live monster up there on the screen.

Eventually, though, we got down to existential tacks.

“People think I’m this goremonger,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s the writers who write the stuff into the script. The
last thing I’m trying to do is desensitize people. Me, I cry when I see someone being indiscriminately, unnecessarily good.” With age, his sharp Mediterranean features have spiked downward, as if from the steady drip of something erosive.

“I’m done with effects, for the most part. I give what work there is to the students. Now it’s about becoming someone else.” He put his hands to his temples, tinkling them with his middle and ring fingers.

Across the table, I beckoned strangely with both hands, an unconvincing coax. How could he abandon horror? Horror, I pleaded, is about the perception of the truth of our condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? “It means to know that you’re fucking food for worms!” I clawed at the space between us. “Your work, zombies, all of it—it’s the ruthless chaos of existence made flesh.”

He parachuted his thick eyebrows. “It took me sixty-five years and a few amateurish, embarrassingly bad movies to get here, but now I understand that it’s about us.
Us
as in the audience,
us
as in you and me. Fears and projections. All that.
The monster
 …”—here he grimaced and held out a palsied, pointing finger—“
is
YOUUUUU!”

Taken aback, I fumbled through my notebook. To give myself time, I asked which of his effects was his favorite.

He spidered a hand inside his beard and said picking a favorite was like choosing among his kids, but that he was partial to one from a movie called
Maniac.
He called it “the closest I’ve ever come to the feeling of having committed cold-blooded murder.”

What he did was make a cast of his head and shoulders, and from that a thin latex mask of himself with a plaster lining on the inside. He filled the cast with apple cores, corn chips, ten bloodfilled condoms, and calf brains from a slaughterhouse. This he placed on a urethane-foam-and-chickenwire chest. Then, with
the film rolling and him dressed up as the Maniac, he emptied both barrels of a shotgun into his material counterpart.

It was at this moment that I had an idea. “Mr. Savini?” I asked. “Tom? Could you shoot me in the head? Like a zombie in
Dawn
? Doesn’t have to be a blowout. Just a nice pop shot. A blurty little coup de grâce.”

He said in a soft voice that skipped along in dactyls: “Okay. That’s called a
squib.
A squib is simply a
det
onator. I’d place the
det
onator in a
tube
that’s filled with
gun
powder. And that would be placed
in
side a prophylactic which’s filled with
blood,
so when the blast goes off the concussion
blows
the prophylactic
and
the blood from be
neath
you.”

But then he shook his head. “I’m not licensed for that anymore.”

He watched my enthusiasm deflate. Then he said, “It still amazes me, the zombie thing. I never would have guessed they’d strike this chord.”

Tom Savini walked me out, wished me well, and got into a blue BMW with the vanity plate “
SHAZAMM
.” And that night, locked into a hotel room with my clay self gaping on the nightstand, I considered why horror in general and zombies in particular should be striking this chord.

We—or at least I—love horror and zombies and gore because it’s all apocalyptic, necessarily so. I mean this in the original sense of the word,
of the nature of a revelation or disclosure.
This stuff effects a revelation, but it’s not the revelation I used to think it was. It’s not that when we feel in our bones how contingent we are, we become afraid. That watching a horror flick is a reality check, an affirmation that my sight still clearly registers the universe.

What resonates, I think, is the suggestion that I’m haunted by a force majeure. The idea that there’s this entity—be it collective like zombies or individual like Jason or even insubstantial
like a damn ghost—and this entity is relentlessly after me. Besieging. It resonates because it’s homologous with this other gut feeling. And that’s that whatever it is that’s out there—it’s going to get in. No matter what. It’s going to get
me,
in the end. Relieve me of my life.

Contemplating this, I fell through to a sound sleep.

“Totally fine to drive,” I was telling Dad. “Just gonna run in and grab me and Mom some more, you know, aperitifs.”

From the kitchen, he went, “Oh
no,
Kent, you can’t leave your car idling in the CVS parking lot for even a
second.
You do that? And someone comes and steals it? And they kill a pedestrian? Then that shit’s on
you,
my man, in the eyes of the law. Everything you worked for, gone like
that.
”

I redlined, said, “That’s goddamned absurd. Who does that happen to?
Who
?”

“I’m a lawyer. It’s my job.”

“
Were
a lawyer.”

“Let me drive you to the CVS.”

“It’s down the fucking hill.”

“C’mon, man.”

“You talk a big game with all this personal responsibility hoo-ha, but you’re, like,
the
childproofer. You’re a human outlet cover.”

“Whoa, hey”—he came around the load-bearing wall drying his hands on a dishrag—“who’s the guy who managed to fall out of his
stroller,
okay, and nearly get himself killed?”

According to Mom, how it transpired was: He and Papa are
blotto, and I’m in an umbrella stroller, unsecured. Also, I’m a toddler, and so have about as much control over my bulk as does a sack of meal. Some quick acceleration/deceleration on Dad’s part—he’s using the stroller as a prop in the tortuous retelling of a DUI near miss—starts me pitching forward. Slowly, slowly, I topple, slicing my neck open on the jagged nub of a
STOP
sign broken off at the root.

He and Papa turn, yelp “
Shit!
” into each other’s face. Vents of hot blood arc in time with my heartbeat. Later, in their fond remembrances, they’ll tell me that this, foremost, made them really have to pee.

And yet Dad’s litmus test for granting a sick day was barf. Barf had to be present if I was to be absent. And he’d inspect it, too. He could tell when I’d watered down tomato paste and spangled it with Cheerios.

“Three-fourths of life,” he’d say, crouching, picking up and popping a few soggy Os, “is showing up, and showing up on time.”

The last fourth? “Never, ever volunteering.”

Thus did he not volunteer to drive me to the ER when a water beetle lodged itself deep in my ear canal while I was swimming in our pool late one afternoon.

“Calm it down,” he said. I barked and spasmed on a wicker chair in the sun. The bug was inching angrily. Dad stood, Sherlockian, with his magnifying glass to my ear. “It’s just wax.”

He jabbed at it with a Q-tip. I yowled and made a move for his larynx.

He said, “Okay, have it your way. Pinch your nose and blow. It’ll shoot right out.”

Following the loss of consciousness, and once I’d pulled myself back onto the chair, a string of blood began to leak out of my ear and run down my neck. He handed me a turkey baster and said, “Flood it out.”

After that, he blew cigarette smoke into the opening, saying, “Like in Westerns.”

Of course, if you asked
him,
he’d say that the real tragedy here was a father’s having to care for a son whose one true skill lay in improvising injury out of any situation, scat-like. To which there’s more than a little truth.

I emerged from the womb cross-eyed to the point of functional blindness. Only post-(expensive)-op was I able to see straight. Sort of. Not long after, I toddled off and filled my diaper with handfuls of what I believed was sand but turned out to be ant pile. Karen and Lauren considered me a fun plaything; they liked to drag me about by my arms, till the day they dislocated both of my shoulders. The one home video we submitted to
America’s Funniest
involved the two of them convincing Dad that they’d taught me how to walk down the stairs. I’ve needed to close my left eye in bright sunlight ever since Lauren thought it was a good idea to tie a length of rope between our bicycles before racing downhill. I shattered my ankle within five minutes of attempting soccer. I forwent the chocolate bunny and instead ate a toxic box of egg-dye pellets one Easter. I broke and swallowed a sprinkling of teeth on
Christmas Eve.
(The bright side, I thought, was I might have occasioned a dalliance between the Tooth Fairy and Santa.) I got a hernia in the
sixth grade.
When the attractive female doctor had me go pantsless on the diagnostic table, I knew then from mortification. Dad looked on; I plucked at my baseball jersey while shaving tears with blinks; the doctor poked around my bald, prawnish sex, explaining that my guts had breached my nutsack.

I think the guy might still be paying off the Mercy Hospital CAT scan I ruined by way of vom, gasping concussedly as I did so, “Now! [
blegh
] You! [
blegh
] Believe! [
blegh
] Me!”

So, when he said while buckling his seatbelt: “I’m telling you, a bug is natural, biodegradable”—I didn’t fault him.

“Its bodily fluids are full of nutrients and shit.” He looked at me, tapped the key near but not in the ignition slit. Pity, fear, and anger were eddying around his face.

“Probably do you some good,” he said.

Then he delivered this lead-footed soliloquy on the way to the hospital: “Look. A guy’s courageous who, when he knows what his kid’s up against, the kind of shit that’s in store, he still lets life bear down on his child. Because that child, as soon as you have him, your heart belongs to him. It isn’t holed up inside you anymore. It’s him. Your biggest vulnerability’s up there at the plate getting beaned, so to speak, in the game of life—and it hurts like hell. You want to pinch-hit.”

Though I’d always hoped that the sum total of pain I sponged up—or one spectacular instance of it—would put me through. Would find the right frequency. Say I get a fastball thrown down my throat, and then when I whistle through splintered teeth, “What’re you looking at, asshole?”—open sesame. The secret passageway into Dad’s respect, unsealed at last.

Anyway. I let him captain the beer run.

We all crowded against the right-side windows as our tour bus crept on the Amish. There were three of them—brothers by the color and cut of their hair—and they sat in descending order on the driving bench of a horse-drawn cart. As they rolled on, some rusty contraption plucked cornstalks out of the ground and fanned them on the cart’s bed.

“Do
not
take pictures, y’all!” begged our driver and guide, Gail. “They’re huge on the Second Commandment, which means no graven images, which means no pictures. Please. Every time. No pictures.” We were a baker’s dozen, a couple of families and some seniors, and we’d only just begun this three-hour, handicapped-accessible tour of Amish farmsteads.

“These boys don’t need a license to drive that baby,” Gail informed us in his southerly lisp. “Y’all know the buggies, but here’s one for you: eight percent of the Old Order Amish here are millionaires.” He explained that nowadays, most supplement farm income by selling furniture and handicrafts to tourists. Some even operate small-scale workshops that fill orders for retailers like KMart. They keep overhead low and won’t expand past what’s prudent. “And more people come to see them now than go on out to Ellis Island. Ten million a year. Who’d’ve
thought?” Gail checked us in the rearview. “The Amish, rivaling the Statue of Liberty.”