My Life In The Dark

"Monsters & Madmen, All come alive. When the dead start walking there's no place to hide " Oingo Boingo from "When the Lights Go Out"

As the nurse was getting the water just right for my weekly sponging she was in an unusually chatty mood. She was yammering on about life, love, and other nonsense. I was trying my best to avoid eye contact as it makes the bath time awkward. To know me is to know my disgust of communal bathing, but even with the bile creeping up my esophagus at the mere thought, her babbling was really getting to me. She even started peppering me with questions. It was worse than being on the Ellen Degeneres show with Melissa Ethridge, I wouldn't have much to say in that mix, just be watching and choking back my gag reflex. One of her questions did get me thinking though.

My adoration for cinema started at a young age. My Super Mom used to pack my brother, sister and I into our 1968 white Vista Cruiser station wagon, acquired via trade for, get this, a 1966 Mustang, the worst trade in history until it was topped by the Minnesota Vikings trading 12 draft picks to the Dumbass, I meant Dallas Cowboys for the perennial bust, Herschel Walker. Both trades, in hindsight, break my heart. But I digress. Super Mom would load us into the wagon, affectionately called Moby Dick, and take us to the drive in theater. I was a wee small fry at the time and don't remember the flicks, but I do remember wearing my Scooby Doo pajamas to the drive in and playing on the swings. Yeah, they had swings.

My earliest celluloid memory is of a day my ever so brilliant sperm donor decided to take me to a movie because actually spending time with me at home would require too much effort, as I was actually fairly well behaved in public, not so much on the home front. So, Father Knows Nothing takes me to the local mom and pop, yeah there we still theaters with marquees and names like The Savoy and the Onyx. The cinematic masterpiece that I witnessed that day, at a very young, impressionable age, probably has a lot to do with my near psychosis. He took me, for my first cinematic memory, to see the Turkish prison epic, Midnight Express.

Watching men give head to other men, a woman plastering her pouty titties to a slab of prisoner barrier glass, and watching a man bite off and spit out rather graphically, another mans tongue could explain some of my night terrors. How, after witnessing this, the favorite movie of my childhood ended up being E.T., I have no idea, but Spielberg played an earlier role in my neurosis.

The night before taking my brother and I on our first pre-dawn fishing trip, the Dr. Mengele of Movies, showed us Jaws on the precursor to HBO, ONTV. You can only imagine the effect that Jaws has on a nine year old in a boat the size of a Ritz cracker bobbing around the Pacific before the sun rises. I still hate fishing. It's amazing that I like movies at all with that guy filling my brain with fear and terror while still wearing Under-Roo's.

What was the first movie you remember seeing? Any horrible experiences with cinema?

Dixie Cup of Love: Steven Spielberg for terrorizing me.