The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

by Norman Partridge

  For Mom and Max …

  with a whole lotta love

  SEEING PAST THE CORNERS

  RED RIGHT HAND

  COYOTES

  DO NOT HASTEN TO BID ME ADIEU

  THE MAN WITH THE BARBED WIRE FISTS

  THE PACK

  BLOOD MONEY

  LAST KISS

  BLACKBIRDS

  WRONG TURN

  SPYDER

  MINUTES

  WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH

  THE HOLLOW MAN

  RETURN OF THE SHROUD

  TOMBSTONE MOON

  THE MOJAVE TWO-STEP

  CARNE MUERTA

  BUCKET OF BLOOD

  UNDEAD ORIGAMI

  HARVEST

  THE BARS ON SATAN’S JAILHOUSE

  SEEING PAST THE CORNERS

  (An Introduction of Sorts)

  Get a writer talking about himself and he’ll eventually come around to the question of genesis. How did he become a writer? When did he know that storytelling was the path for him, and why? As a reader I love those kind of questions. Give me a short story collection with biographical notes or story introductions, and chances are that I’ll read that stuff before I ever get near the fiction. I can’t help myself There’s just something inside me that needs to know… and right now.

  So it’s only fair that I give you my answer to the genesis question up front. Not so much the how, when, or why I became a writer, because I’m still not exactly sure about the answers to those questions.

  I can tell you the where, though.

  I became a writer at the drive-in movies.

  Let me tell you about it.

  If you were born in the late fifties, like I was, drive-in movies were a big part of your growing-up experience. I visited my first drive-in before I could talk, figure around 1959 or so. Yeah. I couldn’t talk, but I could cry. And my brother, who was around ten at the time, wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who sat still easily. Between the two of us, our parents would have had their hands full at a walk-in theater.

  But we were fine at the drive-in. In the comfort of our Chevy Bel-Aire, baby Norm could cry his head off and my parents wouldn’t have to suffer adult recriminations. And if my brother needed to turn his inner wildcat loose, there was always the playground — a gravel lot just below the screen complete with slides and monkey bars and carousel and a dozen other kids whacked out on snack-bar popcorn and sugary drinks (this was pre-diet drinks… also pre-Ritalin).

  My parents both worked — Dad was a truck driver and Mom was a railroad clerk. They were usually on a budget. That was another reason we went to the drive-in. My dad had a connection that could get us in for free.

  Said connection’s name was Jack Kennedy (really). I don’t remember Jack, outside the place he occupies in family stories. But from what I’ve heard, he was just the kind of neighbor you were apt to find on a fifties TV sitcom — a hale and hearty Irishman who worked several different part-time jobs to support a large family.

  When the TV boom hit, Jack installed antennas on most rooftops in the neighborhood. He was also an electrician. Anyway, the part-time job that relates our story is Jack’s gig as the projectionist at our local drive-in theater. That’s how he ended up with a steady supply of free passes, some of which he gave to my dad. And that was great with my mom. She loved movies. Dad was a different story. He was on the impatient side, like my brother. Getting him to sit still through a double-feature was next to impossible. Sooner or later he’d decide he needed to take a stroll, or head to the snack bar for a cup of coffee, or have a cigarette.

  Of course, Jack Kennedy counted on my dad getting itchy feet. I imagine Kennedy was bored out of his skull in that projection booth. He must have seen each movie at least a dozen times. And he probably heard the advertisements that played during intermission in his nightmares, because the same ads played at our drive-in week after week, year after year. To this day, everyone in my family can recite the Winchester Mystery House ad, which featured ghostly voices egging on Sarah Winchester to add more rooms to the legendary crazy-quilt mansion she built to appease the spirits of those killed by her husband’s rifles: “Keep building! Keep building!” the ghostly voices cried at the beginning of the ad, and somewhere in the middle a grizzled old-timer said, “Hey, Slim, gimmee one of them Winchester repeatin’ rifles,” and then came the final tag line: “The Winchester Mystery House… open every day, in San Jose!”

  There I go. I’ve ended up about two steps removed from the thing I set out to talk about. But that’s the way this introduction is playing out, which is another way of saying that I’m bound to take more than a few detours on this particular road and I certainly won’t hold it against you, dear reader, if right about now you decide to flip ahead to the first story and get to the meat of the meal. If you continue on here, it’s going to be a mixed assortment of snack bar food — popcorn and corndogs and the occasional world-famous Flavo Shrimp Roll thrown in just because I feel like it.

  Okay. That said, I feel a little better. You’ve been given fair warning. Beware digressions, detours, and heartburn, all ye who enter here

  Back to Jack Kennedy. Obviously, he gave my dad free drive-in passes as much for his own benefit as ours. He knew my old man would end up in the projection booth as soon as he got restless. Together, they’d knock back a couple of beers and shoot the bull. Some nights they’d even fire up a little barbecue that Jack kept by the projection booth, toss on a couple of steaks, and proceed to ignore the movie to the best of their ability.

  Sometimes Jack would miss a reel change and the car horns would start blaring. Sometimes the barbecue would get a little out of hand, as it did during a revival screening of Ben-Hur, when my dad and his buddy nearly set the projection booth on fire. The smoke kind of added something to the movie, though. For years, I thought that some wily Roman slave had torched the Coliseum during the big chariot race, put up a smoke screen that allowed Chuck Heston to cream Stephen Boyd.

  Conflagrations aside, we all had a good time at the drive-in. Big brother climbing the monkey bars. Dad hanging out with Jack Kennedy. And me and Mom watching the movies.

  We saw all kinds of stuff Big-budget epics. Westerns. Musicals. Comedies. And horror movies. I enjoyed most everything, but it was the horror movies that really took hold. That wasn’t much of a surprise, really. I’d always been the kind of kid who loved ghost stories more than anything. Some of my earliest memories are of summertime parties in the backyard where the neighborhood dads would spin spooky stories. The stories my dad told were some of the best. Tales of bloody footprints in abandoned houses, and Pennsylvania’s mysterious, glowing Green Man who stalked the countryside on moonless nights, and a dozen other weird and wonderful stories that filled my head and never quite managed to leave me… or my imagination.

  Anyway, I spent a good part of my youth reading, watching (and eventually writing) about monsters. I learned about the unholy trinity (Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman) the way most kids my age learned about baseball players. Me, I didn’t care about baseball one little bit. No way I could tell you anyone’s batting average. But if you wanted to know a dozen different ways to kill a vampire, I was the kid you’d want to consult.

  It made me feel more than a little freakish. Back in the sixties and early seventies, horror was definitely not cool. Not in the town where I grew up. Sports were cool. Cars were cool. Rock ‘n’ roll was cool. But monsters… uh-uh. Forget it. Monsters were okay for a couple of hours on the late, late show or at the movies, but any interest beyond that was seen as slightly weird. And if you were a kid like me, who dreaded being labeled “slightly weird” in the worst way, you learned to keep your mou
th shut about monsters.

  Of course, years later when I started going to horror writers’ conventions, I found out that there were a whole lot of kids just like me. We bought Famous Monsters of Filmland even though our parents had forbidden it, we filled our bookcases with Aurora monster models, we collected Castle Films silent 8mm versions of classic monster movies and magazines like Creepy and Eerie. And most of us were very careful to keep all of that stuff under wraps, especially around our parents. I mean, you could only take your mom and dad exchanging those “at first I thought he was going through a phase but now I’m getting worried” looks so many times.

  But some of us were lucky. We found other kids who liked the same stuff we did. Kids who read Bradbury and Bloch and that weird guy Lovecraft, kids who marked the TV Guide weekly and set their alarm clocks to catch monster movies on the late, late show (this was pre-VCR, of course).

  Me, I was one of the lucky ones. My best friends—Ron Ezell and Darryl Castro—were pretty indulgent of my fascination for all things horror. Ron, especially, went along with it, but he kind of marched to a different drummer anyway. He was the only kid I knew who actually talked his parents into letting him stay up until midnight on school nights so he could watch the Alfred Hitchcock Presents reruns the rest of us had to miss. The way Ron would relate some of those stories as we walked to school the next morning was better than the episodes themselves, and I always envied the fact that he never really gave a damn what other kids thought of his enthusiasm for horror movies and comic books.

  Anyway, a lot of good stuff went into our creative boilers, and something was bound to come out. We made a few 8mm monster movies (including “Dracula vs. the Wolfman,” which featured a chubby vampire and a gray-haired lycanthrope [because the only wig we could get for our monster was octogenarian-gray]), and we drew our own comics, and we wrote a lot of short stories.

  At least I did. My stories usually turned out to be pretty dull imitations of stories I’d read or watched. But I had fun writing them, and by trial and error (and by reading and watching) I began to learn the conventions of horror stories—how to grab a reader’s attention right away, how to foreshadow the coming of the monster, and how to set up a twist ending with clues planted early on. I’m not saying I was exactly accomplished at any of the above. My idea of a great opening was: “At midnight, the ghost hunters arrived at the Mansion of Blood. There were twelve men and five women. By sunrise the next morning, all but one would be dead!” But I was trying my best, and I paid attention to the things I read and watched, and I tried to make those things work in my own stories, and by doing that I couldn’t help but start to learn. The end result was kind of like osmosis, I think, and I began to develop an almost organic understanding of how horror stories worked.

  When I sat down to write “those spooky stories” (as my mom called them), it was my goal to scare the living daylights out of whoever might read them. Not that I succeeded much. That wasn’t likely when you were writing epic stuff like “Castle of the Honda Monsters,” in which an elite squad of U. S. Marines traveled to Japan to battle a pack of Honda motorcycle-riding goblins who were terrorizing the countryside. Of course, the Marines won in the end—and here comes my big O. Henry twist—because our heroes were riding a superior American product: Harley-Davidsons! Finishing that story, I remember being incredibly proud of my brilliant twist ending. Leathernecks on hogs! Wotta concept! Now… well, all I’ll say now is that “Castle of the Honda Monsters” was the best motorcycle-riding goblin story I could possibly write… at the time.

  Anyway, my buddies Ron and Darryl only went along so far with my enthusiasm for all things horror. They certainly weren’t as single-minded as I was, but pretty soon I met another kid who was on my wavelength. His name was Chris, and he’d seen every horror movie that I had and more. But that was no real surprise, because it turned out that Chris’ dad was the new manager of the drive-in… and (to get this introduction back on track at long last) Chris’ family actually lived there!

  The set-up was like this—besides the big screen and the snack bar, there was a little house at one corner of the drive-in lot. The owners had built it for the manager and his family, and it was probably their sneaky way of turning a 40 hour a week job into a 24/7 job.

  The house itself wasn’t anything fancy—in fact, saying it was “modest” would probably be an overstatement. But to my ten-year-old eye, my buddy Chris’ new home was just about the coolest thing I could possibly imagine. In the living room, there was a big sliding glass door that faced the drive-in screen, and mounted on a nearby wall was a speaker—the same kind customers hooked in their car windows so they could hear the movies. That meant Chris could lounge on his living room couch and watch anything that was playing at the drive-in. No muss, no fuss, no begging parents or an older brother to take him to the show. Talk about having it made!

  Needless to say, Chris and I became the best of friends. I’d hang out at his house some nights and catch a movie (the first time I saw Planet of the Apes I was sitting on his couch), but most of the time I visited him during the day.

  That was just as cool. There was something magical about being around the drive-in when no one else was there. It was weird, having the whole place to ourselves, and it kind of reminded me of those post-apocalyptic movies I loved — stuff like The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. On hot afternoons during summer vacation we’d hole up in the snack bar, pretending to fight off the vampire hordes that had sucked poor Vinnie dry. When we got tired of that, we’d read press books and promotional flyers for upcoming movies none of our friends knew about yet. I’ll tell you, we felt like bigtime cigar-puffin’ Hollywood insiders, doing that.

  I noticed things at the drive-in during the day that I’d never noticed at night. Namely how big—and how empty—the screen looked when the projector wasn’t filling it up with a movie. It sure didn’t look like the sparkling white screens at the walk-in movie theaters I frequented. No, the drive-in screen was made up of dozens of garage-door-sized panels, and while some of them were clean and white, most of them were dappled with strange gray drive-in barnacles, as if the long-ago projected image of Moby Dick had left something behind.

  And that’s not a bad image—the empty screen as some leviathan waiting for its moment, some Moby Dick trapped long after the projector was turned off and the film returned to the distributor. I could almost picture Gregory Peck pinned up there, doing the old come-hither with his dead Ahab arm. Step right up, kid, were waiting for you. There’s lots of room up here. But don’t forget to bring your stories.

  See, even then, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I realized that was what I was built to do. Of course, I didn’t know just what I’d write. Maybe novels, maybe short stories or comic books or movies… and yes, I certainly had moments when I imagined my very own movies being projected on the drive-in screen. But that was a very big dream, and while I couldn’t really understand what it would take to make that dream a reality, I couldn’t quite help but be reminded of it every time I looked up at that empty screen. My future seemed to stretch out before me up there, a bigga bigga hunka daunting emptiness that only I could fill up, and every one of those barnacled panels seemed to hold a very special kind of challenge for me.

  Ahab’s flapping arm, Gregory Peck’s voice: Bring it on, kid… and put it up here.

  Somehow, I was determined to do just that. But I had no idea how to begin, and the very idea of trying scared me more than a little.

  But there were other things around the drive-in that scared me, too.

  There was the hunchback.

  I can’t remember what the hunchback did at the drive-in. It runs in my mind that he might have managed the snack bar, or maybe he delivered the new movies when the program changed. Whatever he did, he was around the place a lot. Chris and I always knew when he was coming, too. The hunchback drove a muscle car, glass-packed muffler and all that, and you always heard his car a good five minutes before you ever saw him
.

  The hunchback couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Apart from the hump, he looked like any other member of the Woodstock generation. He had acne, stringy Neil Young hair that he was always brushing away from his black horn-rimmed glasses, and more than a few paisley-patterned shirts that must have been specially tailored to accommodate his twisted back.

  I’m ashamed to say that the hunchback scared me at first. But once I got past the idea that he looked a little different, I realized that he was pretty much the same as the guys my older brother hung around with. For one thing, he loved to talk about his car. I can’t remember what kind of car it was — to tell you the truth, I know as much about cars as I do about baseball — but I do remember that the engine in the hunchback’s street machine really gleamed. I’d never seen anything like it, and I’d been around my share of gearheads (at the tender age of six I had a hot-rodding babysitter who liked to borrow my red crayons to touch up the stripes on his tires, but his car’s engine always looked like it was lightly basted in Pennzoil).

  Every now and then the hunchback would stop and talk with Chris and me. Once he even gave me a bunch of old movie posters, including one for The Crimson Cult because he knew I liked Boris Karloff. But Chris always worried that we were getting in the guy’s hair. Maybe he was afraid that the hunchback would find out about our raids on the snack bar, where we’d sometimes wash buckets of day-old popcorn down with forbidden Cokes from the concession dispenser. Whatever his reason, Chris thought it was best that we steered clear of the hunchback most of the time. If we were anywhere close to the snack bar when he showed up, we’d jump on our bikes and head off to “shoot the humps.”

  That was another favorite drive-in activity. We’d pedal as fast as we could and tear over the mounded rows that allowed drive-in patrons to park at an incline so they could get a good view of the screen. We’d launch ourselves from the crest of those mounds — getting airborne, coming down hard, pedaling again to take the next row and praying we wouldn’t wipe out… because that meant taking a gravel bath.