Nights at the Strand

The Strand Theater, Scottdale, PA

As the lights dim and the tattered curtains

rustle and part with a creak-crank

of unseen wheels and pulleys, as a boy's eyes

widen to a dark screen grown suddenly bright

and huge – not the tiny ovoid TV

but vast, enormous, spanning the width

of his field of vision from Row Three,

the row, as Marilyn tells him

with a fifth-grader's knowing accent

the monsters are in perfect focus.

He cleans his glasses furiously

as the sound track crackles, and a globe

topped with the RKO tower emanates

a zig-zag of Marconi waves, and, lo,

he commences his movie-watching Saturdays

with King Kong, who, on that screen,

amid those shrieks and screams of the crowd

on-screen and in the audience, strides tall

on his island, taller yet as he scales

the uncountable floors of the Empire State.

He had seen cartoon dinosaurs, but those

who try to wrest the Fay Wray-morsel from Kong

are as real as they get, the first taste

of a primal world of eat-and-be-eaten,

smite-or-be-smitten, the first "beware"

of the fate of him who falls for Beauty.

An old poet now, on a far coast, he can, if asked,

recite all the names of the movies he saw there

like a litany, week by week, in double-feature pairs,

as dear to him as the saint days to a medieval monk.

A basement full of surgical failures in The Black Sleep –

first view of an exposed brain a special thrill.

They do that to crazy people in Torrance, he’s told,

skull-top raised up like an egg-cup, brains

poked and stirred around for no more reason

than Let’s see what happens if we do this.

The mute sad butler played by Lugosi was a pathetic sight;

the man who had been Dracula reduced to a doorman.

Rathbone and Carradine, Tamirov and Johnson

the mad doctor and his henchmen and victims.

This double-billed with The Creeping Unknown,

whose alien-microbed astronaut, gaunt and wandering

assimilates all life in its path: men, cacti and lions,

until it oozes octopoid onto the scaffolding

around Westminster Abbey. Fast work

for stalwart scientist Quatermass who rigs

the metalwork with a million volts

from a nearby power plant.

After The Blob he turned inward to his chemistry set

and devised, with his friends, The Boron Monster, a bubbling mess

of boric acid, carbonates, and a medley of insect parts

that festered for two days in a Florence flask, then

made a nocturnal exeunt into the floor drain. For weeks

the four boys of the Kingview Science Club swore they heard it

in house pipes and gurgling drains; one went so far

as to say it raised its white pseudopods when he looked

into the late-night toilet bowl.

                                                    The dreaded Cyclops

from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad seemed as he woke

to stand in silhouette against the bare hill behind his house.

When the garish colors of Curse of Frankenstein

reveled in blood and bosoms, he set up shop

in Caruso’s garage in Keiffertown. Live Monster Show,

the hand-drawn poster said in drip-red lettering

and the children came from all around.

Clothesline and sheet for curtain, old 78

of The Sheik of Araby a Gothic foxtrot,

his fellow fourth-graders no longer chemists

but grease-paint actors: monster and villagers,

doctor and hunchback. Naturally he is the Doctor,

his hands the ones that raise Jell-O brains and send blood

rivulets down the aisles among the screaming girls.

A raincoat, sleeves inverted, can pass for a Dracula cape.

He sends for a mail order course in hypnotism.

They learn the art of mummy-wrapping, green chalk
and Noxema rubbed on torn sheets for coloring,
black powder and kerosene for fires,

dry ice for malevolent Jekyll-Hyde elixirs.

But there’s no keeping up with the Strand and its

accelerating horrors. The bugs have invaded:

ant and tarantula, mantis and locust grown

to the size of locomotives, the dark side

of the atom whose giant-flower mutations

they are taught about on schooldays. They would

all glow in the dark and in perfect health

when Our Friend the Atom was done with them.

After Them! and Tarantula, Beginning of the End,

The Giant Claw, and The Deadly Mantis,

the worst was The Black Scorpion, so horrible,

in fact, that as he watched it open a train

like a sardine can, extract the passengers, then sting

them with its terrible venom before the slow

ascent to the drooling jaws and mandibles, someone

on the balcony vomited a visual melange

of popcorn and orange soda on his brother's shoulders.

Then came Godzilla, a whole new order

of urban destruction and radium-breath:

boys who had never seen a city looked on

as powerlines and factories, gas terminals and seaports,

glass and steel towers, department stores and palaces

were stamped to splinters and rubble

beneath the wayward reptilian scourge

that had nothing to do with eating: Godzilla was hell-rage,

a force that might wipe clean the earth once and forever

of the human infestation.

                                               Godzilla made manifest, too,

in the form of a fat bully on Mulberry Street

who waited to knock the school and library books

from his hands into the nearest snowdrift.

He filled a squirt gun with ammonia and onion juice,

a minor armament since he was studying nuclear fission

and knew a dozen withering curses in Latin.

When the saucers of The Mysterians began airlifting women

to help repopulate a dying world, he was jealous,

dreamt of a gravity beam abduction from his own bed.

Forbidden Planet taught him to embrace the alien:

if left on Altair Four he'd happily join Morbius

in solitary study of the long extinct Krell geniuses;

if taxed enough with unjust bullying, he'd join

the crew of Nemo’s Nautilus: they’d all be sorry

when he sank half the Atlantic fleet or turned

the submarine to starship and beat the Russians to Mars.

He had never been two towns away,

     but he knew the names of the outer planets’ moons.

Small boy in torn shoes and baggy hand-me-downs

sewn from his father's old shirts,

goggle-eyed with wrong glasses, arms full

of comics and all the books he could carry,

he was The Strand's acolyte, its screen and stage

the doorway to a higher reality. No matter

how far he has gone, what written or done,

he is still there, in that seat in Row Three

as the ships land, the invasion commences,

the tentacle comes slowly into focus

at the edge of vision, the branches part

to those two great orbs of The Beast.

He was the one who ran away

     to join the Monsters

          to explore the stars,

haunted, to become the Haunter.

--October 2010 – March 2011

Scottdale, PA