My Uncle Larry came to stay with us for a while in Hollywood. I was happy because I would finally have a straight-shooting male role model that I could look up to. I didn’t even mind giving up my bed (with its cool Superman bedspread) to him while I took a spot on the floor nearby.
I’ve been in and out of health food stores for almost twenty years and seen so many people come and go they’d probably fill Key Arena. I could look around this arena and easily not remember more than half of them.
Of the ones I do remember, there was Kitty, and Squanch, and a self-described ’30 something virgin’ named Elderberry (who we called Eldercherry). There was a guy whose name I don’t remember but who answered the phone “Hello sir or ma’am, thank you for calling Perelandra.”
I really liked those early shifts at Perelandra Natural Foods; especially the ones in the summer when the Yanks had a home afternoon game. I’d get up early, still dark out; and wait on the Avenue J platform for the D train, making its way from a deserted Coney Island (it being only 5am). Depending on the time of year I could easily see the Big Dipper from the northeast side platform. Whatever the time of year I’d look up and try to identify stars and the occasional planet.
Mary had been with me everywhere. The ups, the downs, the countless moves to different cities and states. I couldn’t shake her. My sibling barnacle knew all my moves and how to push all my buttons. She was my rival, always nearby, a sentient shadow. And one day when we were coming back from Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors I just, well, snapped. A moment later when I realized where I was, all I saw was my little sister (not even one whole year younger than me – clinging stubbornly close even in age) lying there on Gower Street with a scoop of vanilla rolling slowly to the gutter. It lost its glint as it picked up debris and quickly started to melt.
“Oh crap, Alan’s at the door, gimme a minute here hang on,” I said as I rushed away from our front door and its fisheye peep hole. I knew we had to air the room out, our building’s owner Alan was at the door, and I was already in trouble with the friggin’ guy. I stubbed out my joint and hurriedly opened my bedroom window.
“Wait, hold on, Eddie, you know you can’t be here.” I said.
“What do you want me to do, jump out? Looks like I’m already screwed anyway, what else am I gonna do?” Eddie replied. He was always a nervous and paranoid guy; now he was also drunk and high and his personal nemesis had arrived at our door – excuse me, my door. Eddie didn’t belong here at 164 Prospect Park West.
My first introduction to the world of heroes and villains (and their differences) happened when I was about ten years old. Before the era of California and all those movies. Well…. there was one movie that helped me kind of crystallize everything. It was a movie I didn’t even like very much until I thought about how the characters were kind of like the people I had been watching every Saturday night in the Spring and Summer, when the weather was warm and muggy.
I take the subway late at night, everything on and working, at this hour it’s just for me. Get on at Atlantic Avenue, get off at 33rd and Lex, climb out of the underground, lights are on but the shutters are down. I’m smiling, I can’t get rid of this smile. No people, I love it, there are no people. I’m attracted to these places that are empty. It’s all mine!
It’s 1am Wednesday morning; I grab a Voice (it’s free, everything that matters at 1am is free), slowly read it while walking. I look at things I don’t get a chance to look at during the day, when there are so many people hurrying me along, caught up like a two by four in a sudden torrent. Now I can take my time and look, a livery cab passes me, then a yellow, and then another yellow.
Anybody who makes a list like this has to ask themselves one question (no, not ‘Do you feel lucky punk?’). The question is this:
“What really scares me?”
The opportunity to analyze this question, given to me by hundreds of terror-filled sleepless nights, has yielded this insight:
(Along with realizing an apparent insomnia) I fear the things that go on in a room that I can’t see. In other words, I don’t really care if something’s happening in my room; I never feared the boogie man or needed to look under the bed. Really, I didn’t. But what’s going on in my sister’s room? My parent’s room? What was that weird sound from down the hall I just heard?
Is it coming to get me when it’s “finished with them?”
This fear is my criterion, and by its very definition, it eliminates any SciFi movie, like, for example, the otherwise outstanding “Aliens.” Because it has to be able to happen to YOU, alone and in an unfamiliar house, just out of sight, out of reach. This, of course, eliminates spaceships and such.
So here we go, five movies in no particular order that you may have already seen on various lists. But to me, they all have to have the same theme: they have to be movies that because of unseen activity stoke the fires of your worst imaginings and leave you cringing.
For the top five list and the remainder of this post please go to my sister’s site at:
“Welcome to Hollyweird.” I heard it first as an 11 year old (fresh faced and fresh-lunged) from my Mom when my sis and I arrived from Oklahoma. My first impressions were: a lot of buildings, hills and palm trees. I felt there was “more civilization” than what I was used to in Tulsa. But things seemed a little dirtier too, but you had to look carefully, like the cleaning didn’t get all the way into the crevasses. The weather was really nice all the time; I noticed that as well, while throwing our Nerf football around in our apartment’s parking lot.
The actor Victor Kilian was bludgeoned to death at the Lido Apartments in Hollywood in 1979, a few weeks before I moved in. Around that time and in that area, though I certainly wasn’t aware of it, there was apparently a lot of dying going on. A few miles west of my place, and just a couple of years before, Sal Mineo had been stabbed to death. At the time of Victor’s death, a guy named Lionel Williams was on trial for the Mineo killing, he would shortly thereafter be convicted.