“It’s only dangerous if you don’t teach them to be careful,” he said. He’d leered and waggled his eyebrows, nibbling at her ear. “Besides, I want to get you up on it one night real soon, wearing nothing but butter. I’ve seen those babes on The Man Show and, sweetheart, I know you’re going to bounce beautifully.”
“Can’t imagine what the neighbors’ll say to that,” she’d protested with a prissy smirk. “Isn’t there something in the rules about nude butter jumping on a trampoline under the moonlight?”
He chuckled. “If there isn’t, the uptights around here will create an amendment. You can bet your shiny, sweet-creamery butt on that.”
Nicely, she neglected to remind him that she was one of those uptights. She seldom let her hair down—or her guard. He doubted he’d get her jumping on the trampoline.
Now Peter noticed Diane through the kitchen window, probably washing vegetables in the sink. Roses in the filmy lace curtains framed her face. They appeared to be growing from a garden of her dark hair, making her angelic as she smiled.
This wasn’t the only face he caught peeping from a window. Out of a second story porthole across the alley, just above where branches from a tall willow bent in semi-permanent pieta, a neighbor stared down into the Beta’s back yard, trying to see without being seen. Peter sensed more than perceived folks in the houses to the left and right, leaning against their respective sides of the fence, peeking between redwood boards at the kids going up and down. It was creepy, like in the movies: a suggestion of lurking body heat, psychic waves of malignant intent. Just right there…so close that if he punched the fence he’d hear ’em squawk.
He waited for one of these people to say something, to lob their expected protest. He planted his feet apart and put his hands on his hips, grinning forcefully, positively daring them to say even as much as a single solitary word about it.
At eleven, Ellis was the older of the two children. He bounded up and somersaulted as neatly as any practiced gymnast. Three years younger, Melody was less daring but still agile as she soared. She stretched her legs out until they were practically perpendicular from her torso, then reached out quickly to touch her toes. Both kids shrieked their delight. Peter guessed, if they were to bother, they might glimpse the neighbors pressed against the fence. Well, of course, they’d be able to see them, bouncing up UP UP. High as the second stories, able to spy into the windows of these California alfalfa sprout Stepford types, if that was their intention. Able to see the splash in a pristinely blue pool or the muted pastel color of a paper parasol in a drink while someone grabbed the last rays of the sun. Would these people smile and wave, or would they scowl—not in a way to create frown lines Botox mightn’t burn away.
Against the rules, Mr. Beta!
(Oh yeah? he thought defensively. Damn it, this is America. A man ought to be able to have toys for his kids. It’s why families buy houses with back yards, isn’t it? So their children can play safely without having to go out in the streets where the pederasts and the drug merchants wait.)
Diane appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. “Time to come in and be fed. The sitter will be here in about an hour. Your father and I are going to get dressed. We’re having dinner with Mr. Friedhof.”
Reluctant and grumbling, Ellis and Melody slowed their bouncing, then rolled off into the grass.
“Looks like we’ve got two Olympic hopefuls here,” Peter said as they marched past to file into the kitchen, stray dandelion wisps on their clothes. They both walked as if there were spring tension coils in their feet.
“Don’t forget to thank your father,” Diane reminded them. “It’s his birthday, but he still brought you two a big present.”
“Yeah, it’s great, Dad,” Ellis recited, spinning around to grace Peter with a toothy smile. The boy’s face was pink, shiny with perspiration.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Melody effused, not using as many teeth because she was missing the front two uppers. “Happy birthday.”
“Right…happy birthday!” Ellis echoed.
Peter nodded, feeling almost a strain from ear to ear. “You’re welcome.”
“Don’t forget to put your plates and silverware in the dishwasher once you’ve finished,” their mother said, trotting in behind them. She tilted her head back, a single curl falling across her forehead. It was the only curl she had, the rest of her hair straight as a fistful of pencils. She whispered. “I wonder how many have already called The Neighborhood Association. Shit’s going to hit the fan. You know we’ll end up having to get rid of it.”
Peter shrugged and followed his family inside. He felt eyes on his back from others living in their nice, virtually look-alike homes. Same architectural style, same color brick, precisely identical roof shingles. All with picket-topped redwood fencing, six feet high—not an inch more or less. You signed an agreement when you moved in, a sort of loyalty oath to adopt the rigid conformity of the neighborhood’s code of standards.
The fact they owned the trampoline now wasn’t the problem.
It could be hidden behind the fence where nobody had to suffer the sight of it. It was kids jumping up and down on it, able to see—and what’s more, BE SEEN—above their allotted space in the community. Up and down. Appearing. Disappearing. A nuisance.
Even Diane couldn’t abide a nuisance. Not if it couldn’t be shut up where it was completely out of sight. Such as in a room upstairs.
The Beta’s background had been thoroughly investigated. She was thirty-five and a bank executive, he was nearing forty (would actually turn forty at 11:36 P.M. this evening) and a high school teacher. Two kids, a boy and girl. No police records for either parents or offspring. Sanitized. Vanilla. Middle. Jaw-popping yawns.
Just because this was California, not far from La-La-Los Angeles, didn’t mean that every community was full of liberal nutjobs. If it hadn’t been that they needed a place to live fast after Mazuma Bank transferred Diane from a Dallas branch, and her father had found them the house in the La Cállese community and gifted them with the down payment, they might have been living somewhere less bloody conservative.
(Californians had elected Ronald Reagan as governor—and Arnold. Right-wingism wasn’t to be prized from their cold, dead fingers.)
The couple climbed the stairs over beige carpet, white walls gleaming all the way up. Diane went into the white-tiled bathroom to shower as Peter approached the bedroom to change clothes. He paused to glance towards his hobby room, glad he was lucky enough to have a (more-or-less) understanding wife and a separate place to keep his penchant away from Ellis and Melody. He couldn’t help stopping, unlocking the door, looking in at the bookshelves lined with albums of collectible photos. At the gleaming posters and stills, carefully framed and matted upon the walls, dark curtains up so the sunlight wouldn’t fade them. Well, okay…and admittedly so they couldn’t be seen by any passing spy. What would these anal retentives around here think? Oh, my!
He’d never been much of a reader, growing antsy whenever too many words were thrown at him. He’d always been good with dates and facts, how he ended up becoming a history teacher. But printed matter beyond the cold case had always represented a mental morass to him, concepts waiting to drag him down in their quicksand.
Movies were a whole other animal. And they had to be scary because those were what held the most primitive thrills. Peter liked it when his skin crawled and his stomach did a slow roll-over, much slower than his son somersaulting in the air.
What could he say? Sanitized. Vanilla. Medium. Man with wife, two kids boy-and-girl, plodding daily through a dull job in statistics, driving a tan S.U.V. (hers) and a white, gas-efficient Toyota (his), paying a heavy mortgage in a constipated neighborhood with a name that translated out to be the Spanish word for Hush, where they had a numbered code forbidding a basketball hoop over the garage or a sprinkler head in the shape of a gargoyle.
He needed some craziness somewhere, adrenalin rushing from images of sex and death. The sati
sfying recreational shiver that kept a man from going on a rampage of his own.
««—»»
His interest in horror films had begun as a child. He’d been born in 1965. Three years too late to have seen Paris’s Grand Guignol before it closed forever in 1962, the theater where body parts were de rigueur and fake blood flowed like an unparted Red Sea. How cool this must have been.
Peter’s parents had been young, Nixon-supporting Republicans living in LBJ territory in Texas. They were also movie-goers, taking their toddler. The first fright movie they ever took him to was Astro-Zombies. Instead of being scary, it had left the young couple with the giggles. As for Peter, he’d mostly slept through it.
The next was Rosemary’s Baby. They weren’t crazy about the reference to Jack Kennedy and thought the sexual situations were too strong. But they knew their baby couldn’t possibly understand them. Anyway, he’d slept during most of that one, too.
Then, on the high recommendation of friends, they went to see Night of the Living Dead. They soon realized they’d made a horrible mistake and promptly left the theater, but not before Petey had seen way too much. He hadn’t slept through a nanosecond of it—and also didn’t sleep for about a week after.
They didn’t go to any fright films after that, not for a few years. They were outraged at the sheer depravity, the lack of common human decency. What was the world coming to?
He didn’t get to see another until Frenzy came out in 1972. His folks were sure this one must be safe. After all, it was by Alfred Hitchcock, that portly yet pleasant fellow who’d done a popular t.v. show they’d both grown up on. At his absolute grisliest, Mr. Hitchock had made PSYCHO. Yet it was an honored classic. Frenzy would be intellectual. Above all, it would be stylish.
Peter was seven-years-old by then and no longer fell asleep in theaters. He’d found the film dull, the foppish killer reminding him of a clown. Many children were frightened of clowns but not Peter. If this was supposed to be scary, why wasn’t it working for him? In the back of his mind, he expected to see sights which would remind him of the fresh meat counter at the grocery store. He expected a shuddering, surprising coldness, as when his mother took him to the clinic and the doctor stuck a thermometer up his clenched behind. He looked around. Everyone seemed to be enjoying it. So what was the matter with him?
About a month or so later, Peter slept over at Curtis Halprin’s house.
“Hey, let’s sneak into a movie. Want to?” asked his friend once it got very late. After Mr. and Mrs. Halprin had retired to bed.
They slipped out of the house, ran down two blocks to an odd jumble of older buildings which offered boutiques, eateries and entertainment to a nearby college campus. Sandwiched between a book store and a head shop was a theater some thirty years old.
“Midnight flicks,” Curtis whispered, giggling as if he’d said some encrypted form of **fuck**.
“Come here often?” Peter asked him.
“Once or twice.”
Curtis led his friend down an alley.
“How do we get in?” Peter wanted to know.
“Just wait. Some hippie always opens up.”
Curtis knocked. Sure enough, a teenager with long hair and wearing a threadbare tee-shirt that read FABULOUS FURRY FREAKBROTHERS on the front, his breath reeking of pot smoke and Bali Hai, let them in. Turned out the door was an exit from the old theater, set into the same outside wall as the screen.
The teenager grinned at them, both foolishly and knowingly.
Curtis asked, “What’s showing?”
The kid’s smile revealed popcorn kernels between his teeth. “Last House on the Left. S’pose to be based on the Bergman film, Virgin Spring. Ya know, an art film! A major gross-out’s what I heard. So ya better duck down if an usher shows up. They’ll toss ya out for sure.”
The boys began their adventure with tittering, pinching each other, pig-snorting and farting. They ended up wide-eyed, educated a mite beyond their tender years. Both had fallen respectfully silent: Curtis because he was very nauseous and thought he’d certainly throw up every bit of food he’d ever eaten in his short life—and Peter because he was in awe.
Pete knew what he viewed must be taboo, yet it left him exhilarated. As if a tide of voracious army ants had suddenly swarmed over him, eating off his skin before he could even flinch, and then leaving burned nerves exposed to freezing air. He couldn’t move his feet, even when his bladder demanded to be emptied. He just picked up an empty soda cup and, as unobtrusively as possible (everybody’s eyes riveted to the bloodbath on the screen anyway), peed into it without looking away more than one or two seconds at best from the savage intensity that utterly amazed him. He felt nasty, weeing into a cup right out in public. The fizzing splash seemed as noisy as the movie’s shrieks. But it wasn’t as if he could march up the aisle and through the lobby to the restroom. Some employee would grab him and torture him for the Betas’ phone number. His father would arrive to take him home in disgrace, to where his little bedroom would become a prison cell for a couple months.
Peter wanted to turn away from the sights upon the screen. He did, really! But it was also the god’s honest truth that if Curtis were to try and make him turn away, Peter would’ve snarled and bitten him. Just like a dog protecting its dinner.
He heard someone retching and guessed it was his companion. It turned out to be a girl—didn’t that figure?—a few aisles back from the very front. The sounds of her ratchety spewing covered up the noises of his whizz. If anybody noticed something unpleasant aside from the movie, it would be her they’d suspect…not Pete.
“Honey, it’s okay,” her boyfriend told her as he rubbed her back in tense circles. “It isn’t real.”
It’s okay. It isn’t real.
A few stalked out but most remained. Because it wasn’t real, just a staged exercise in the primitive. Point-blank shotgun blasts to faces, knifings, mutilations, electrocution. Full-frontal evil and then a revenge so total, so relentless, it was as if from the Old Testament, steeped in ancient blood where retribution became elevated to the rank of sacred ritual.
Peter set the cup of urine under his seat. He still crouched there at the end of the movie. He’d been made aware of terrible mysteries until he was shaken. He’d never be the same, childhood irrevocably at an end. The film made a man of him.
Curtis poked his shoulder as the screen faded to black.
“We got to split,” Curtis urged. “They’ll be coming in any second to clean up. We better get out that exit door fast.”
Peter stumbled but managed to get his feet moving. Someone behind them accidentally kicked over the pee cup and a yellow stream trickled down the tilted floor. He danced a little to avoid it touching his sneakers.
The cool air outside felt almost like a slap in the face. It was just too damned dark to suit him. After coming out of something like this, you needed light. But what could he expect? It was, after all, about two in the morning.
His friend shook his head. “Man, what was that?”
“Amazing,” was Peter’s reverent reply.
“Hey, that one scene, did you see? I think she was biting his dick off,” Curtis said. “Think it’s really possible to have that happen?”
Peter gasped. “And what they told her to do. Piss your pants. Or they’d cut her friend. If killers told me to piss my pants or they’d cut you, I wonder if I could. Guess I’d have to. Anyway…”
They trudged back in the dark which seemed twice as Stygian as it had on the way to the theater. There were maniacs behind every pecan tree. The boys jumped and clung to each other at crickets moving in the bushes. Eventually they crept into the Halprin house. They stayed downstairs since, if the steps were to creak as they went up, they’d both surely die of heart attacks. Neither could sleep but whispered all night, every light blazing.
“Remember the song?”
“‘And the road leads to nowhere…’”
“‘And the castle stays the same…’”
When dawn arrived, Peter looked at himself in the Halprin’s bathroom mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, circled round with shadows. Oh, but they looked wise. He pinched and prodded the flesh on his face and chest, positive it wasn’t tender anymore. Almost as if he’d undergone himself the violent rigors of Last House on the Left and managed to emerge alive.
He was a hero. Because he was a survivor.
««—»»
Peter and Curtis devised plans for other sleep-overs at the latter’s house. It was easy to sneak out of the Halprins’. Both Mr. and Mrs. Halprin took prescription sleeping medications which rendered them quite dead to the world by eleven o’clock. On the other hand, the Betas went out too often on weekend nights to be host parents.
In the next couple years the boys got to see midnight showings such as Horror Express, The Other, The Gore Gore Girls, The Exorcist, It’s Alive, Psychomania, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Don’t Look Now. Curtis almost invariably became sick to his stomach, even at movies Peter dozed at. Some were what the Betas would’ve considered to be chic or at least respectable creepies. Others were proof that liberals were ruining the moral fiber of the world. A few were too silly to shiver over. A couple were a complete waste of good wholesome unsupervised nightmare time in the dark. One or two contained moments where Peter was briefly stupefied, but which surely didn’t merit the sickly haunted eyes of the teenagers who’d unwisely dropped L.S.D. before visiting the theater.
As a matter of fact, for the most part Peter was let down. He’d been hoping to capture that fabulous sense of prickle and damnation he’d undergone with Last House on the Left. Would no other film ever match this historic sense of frisson? Would he never feel again—upon leaving the theater—that he’d only just gotten through it by the skin of his teeth, crawling out from under the bloody ruin of viscera as the only one to take a stand and remain unconsumed by the film’s nominal threat, be it zombies, demons or vampires?
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