(Missed Part 1? Read it now.) So with the “Exploding Head Movie” incident (as it became known in our house) behind us, my family became over-observant of what I was watching. Which mean the same thing it means to any obsesssed 10 year old: I had to get better at hiding what I was getting my hands on.
Sure my aunt still took to the movies, but we had to be a LOT more careful of how we did it. My parents began to ask for the movie stubs for the movies we saw. So we were buying tickets to see “Airplane” every week. But in all honestly, I was seeing “Halloween,” “Motel Hell,” and “Rosemary’s Killer” (AKA “The Prowler”). This went on for the following year or so. I was loving life. And I was the hit of recess in school as I would tell all of my friends about all of the scary, bloody movies I was seeing, going into great detail of how the killers dispatched their victims. Always met with “Ooohs” and “Ahhhs.”
Well as we have seen (or all experienced), all good things must come to an end. One of 
the “Noon Aids” (the older women who monitor our recesses) overheard my conversation about how Michael Myers held the guy up and stabbed him so hard that it stuck him to the door. That very afternoon I was called to the principal’s office and there was the principal, the Noon Aid, and BOTH of my parents. None looking happy at all. The principal told me to sit down and tell everyone what I was talking about at recess. And with my quick thinking I went into a very detailed explanation of how cool it would be to be Han Solo and fly in the Millenuim Falcon. Nobody was entertained.
What followed was a lecture from the principal about how unhealthy it was that I was allowed to watch such terrible movies, and that my parents were doing me no favors by letting it happen. To sum up what has already turned into a longer story than it ever needed to be: my dad is an old school Italian. Swear in Italian, wear a wife beater while making sauce (not gravy), drink red wine with dinner Old School Italian. And he was a cop. So he’d be damned if this hoity toity woman was going to tell him how to raise his kid right. Let’s just say the meeting got loud. I was sent out of the room to await my demise. About five minutes, and many “Who the hell do you think you are?”s later, the door opened and my parents gave me the look, and we all left together.
On the silent car ride home, I began to wonder how big of a beating I was gonna get for this one. (Remember -old school in the 70s- we ALL got beatings. And we deserved every single one.) Then I started to wonder how much trouble my Aunt was going to get in for this. I mean, she was the one taking me. When we got home I went to my room and waited. Listening to my parents yell about all of it. It got loud, then it got Italian. Damn, I was dead. My door opened and my dad came in.
He stood in front of me and proceeded to tell me, in the barely restrained calm voice that all angry parents use of their kids to scare them into listening, that I am never to talk about movies in school again… I waited for the next consequence, or at least to what was happening to my aunt for being my enabler. And nothing. He walked out of my room and that was it. This had to be a trick. They were going to wait till I was asleep and then unleash the fury. But the fury never came. In fact it was this “Noon Aid Incident” (we have had a lot of “Incidents” in my house when I was younger if you couldn’t tell), that changed the way my Horror Movie Life would be lived forever more.
My mom would go to bingo with her friends every Wednesday night, thus leaving my dad to take care of me. I used to like Wednesday nights as it was the one night of the week it was just me and my dad, usually spent visiting my grandma and having peanut butter graham crackers and chocolate milk. But the Wednesday night following the “Incident,” my dad had different plans for us. We hopped into the car and went a different way than usual. I knew this way, but there was no way we could be going THERE. When my dad pulled into the movie theater parking lot, I thought we were pulling a u-turn. Nope, my dad parked the car, looked at me and said “Ready?”
I stared at him in disbelief. Inside I was bouncing all over, but I managed a relaxed “Sure” and opened the door. We walked in and my dad bought us 2 tickets to “Madman.” A movie that I was hoping my aunt was going to take me to before all of the shit went down. He bought me popcorn and led me into the theater and we took our seats. The lights went down and my father leans over to me and says, “If you tell your mother, we are both dead, got it?” He smiled, leaned back and watched the legend of Madman Marz with me. And all the axe swinging, rope hanging, hood decapitations that came with it.
On the drive home he asked why I liked these kind of movies so much. And with the answer I still give to this day, I told him because it is fun to be scared, but know that you are still safe. I mean it is all fake anyway. I went on to explain how Lon Chaney used wire and string to distort his face to like a monster in his movies. He just smiled as (he would later in life tell me) he felt better knowing I was going to be “ok.”
Tags: Madman
You know, the only thing that flips me up here – is “sauce (NOT gravy).” I’ve been fighting my whole life the opposite battle. Getting people to believe it’s gravy. Not sauce.