Monster Movies

"Frankenstein, y'ever see Frankenstein?"

Of course I had, and all of his other favorites too: Dracula, The Mummy, Universal's entire stockpile of spooks. As he lovingly poured over every still frame of his book, the coffee table translation of the James Whale classic, his eyes glossed over. I was nestled tight over his shoulder - it was a narrow booth, a downtown parking lot's - watching him turn the pages with his one good arm. What had happened to the other, the one that stopped at the elbow? Close as we became over the brief period we worked together, I never asked. Was that, I started to ask myself after endless conversations about monster after monster, what was responsible for the love of Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney? Did he honestly see himself as one of their on-screen incarnations, a physical anomaly, an outcast from society, a tortured soul? And if so, what was I to him: the scientist who recognized his innate goodness? The sympathetic blind man to whom the physical meant nothing? The understanding but helpless cop who bore witness to his torments?

The day he was fired - I can't recall the reason but I'm certain it was trivial - he cried. Teary, he deftly packed up his movie books with his good arm, secured them against his ribs to free his hand, and bade me goodbye. The next day, though I desperately needed the small salary, I quit in sympathy.

We met again some fifteen years later, a public place; he was completely obscured from me, snuggled against a girl I knew. She introduced him as her new boyfriend. I extended my hand. Nothing. "Geez, you sure you want to be with a guy like this?", I cracked. "He won't even shake my hand." The combination of her tense smile and his full turn to me let me know how big a faux pas I had committed. I had not only embarrassed the three of us, I had destroyed the possibility of being able to express how glad I was to see him again after all these years. He nodded sullenly, and I retreated to my seat. Did he recognize me but was now ashamed to know me, or did he simply not recognize me at all? It couldn't be the latter. It was Me! - Me, the scientist who understood him, the blind man who bonded with him, the cop who cared.

But times had changed - it was the politically correct '90s now - and scientists, blind men and cops, even girlfriends it appeared, were all around him these days.

"They don't make monster movies like they used to." That's what people started to say after Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy were replaced by chainsaw-wielding mental patients in hockey masks, hungry for teenaged blood.

For me though, that expression has a different meaning