I have a five-year-old grandson. And the child somehow, through his mother, has gotten into a form of violence—the violence of the tai chi. It seems his mother has put him in a tai chi class. When he comes home from the class, he has on the white outfit with the white belt. He puts his hands together like coming in peace, two palms meeting. He bows. And then he kicks and punches the air, making this sound—haah! His opponent is invisible, so I assume tai chi means “to beat up an invisible person.” I don’t know who the person is that he’s fighting—I never bothered to ask. Kick—haah! Punch—haah! You’re looking at this child—haah, haah, haah—with no reality in sight. Just fighting someone invisible. Then, all of a sudden, it’s haah, haah, haah—all over me. He knows that in our home, the home of the grandparents, he is not to hit any furniture or glass or anything, even wood. Nothing. Pillows? No, you don’t hit the pillows.
My five-year-old grandson is absolutely delirious about Godzilla. He’s always saying to me: “I have a new Godzilla, Grandpoppy! Do you want to watch it with me?”
I’m not a fan of Godzilla. It isn’t that I don’t like Godzilla, but for me, there is a genuine disconnect, at age seventy-three, to a large green lizard. My heroes, when it came to scaring me to death, were Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney. Lon Chaney had facial hair and wore a Brooks Brothers suit that was too small and a shirt where the cuffs were too long. He had an overbite. Horrible overbite. I also remember the eeriness of Dracula standing on the lawn of Lord So-and-So in front of an old castle.
And then there was King Kong. Not Mighty Joe Young, because they played “Beautiful Dreamer,” and that was the end of that. You can’t get scared when you hear “Beautiful Dreamer.” It’s like singing cowboys. Nor do I want my monsters to be calmed by soothing music. Frankenstein lost me when he started smoking cigars and listening to violins. I want to make it clear that I didn’t enjoy him when he killed the little girl, but he was scary, and to this day, as of this writing, I am still frightened while laughing at the same time when seeing Frankenstein. I did not know that a human being was capable of being scared, frightened, and still able to laugh, not in hysteria, but laugh at comedy. When Lou Costello sat on Frankenstein’s lap, not knowing it was Frankenstein, I have never had such an epiphany. Nowhere have I seen anything that equaled that.
The first time I heard about King Kong, the movie, it was playing in the Booker movie house. We didn’t have money in our home for me to go to a first-run showing, so I wound up going to the ten-cent edited-down version. Actually, King Kong was made in 1933, four years before I was born, in 1937. But at the time it came to the Booker, everybody was talking about it like it was the first time it ever was shown. We just didn’t know any better.
I think for me the scene that almost had me up and running out of the theater—which people used to do in those days, they’d run out of the theater, and some people didn’t use the aisles—was when he tore down that elevated train. That was the one that almost got me up from my seat and all the way out of the theater. Now, when I think back, I remember that you could, as you got older, eventually tell that the quote-unquote “pygmies” in the King Kong movie were actually white short people with black makeup all over and black legs. After that, it wasn’t so frightening because those white short people with black makeup drew my attention away from the scariness.
Before you caught on about the pygmies, it was, in fact, a scary movie, and you went home with that movie in your head and you couldn’t sleep. I would even hear grown people talking about a sleepless night because of King Kong. Or a sleepless night because of Frankenstein, a sleepless night because of Wolf Man. So those were my scare heroes.
I don’t even know how word came to the projects, but at some point I heard about a movie called Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. And we, at the age of nine or ten or eleven, began arguing over who was the strongest, Frankenstein or Wolf Man. There were guys, boys that I was playing with—for example, Fat Albert, Rudy, and the gang—who said that Frank and Wolf Man were going to have this fight. This was before Ali and Frazier, so Frankenstein versus Wolf Man was all we had. And word was that this fight was definitely going to happen.
Everybody was rooting for Frank because Frank was bigger. But there was one guy who thought that Wolf Man, with his sharp teeth, could win because Frank’s equilibrium wasn’t that great. The guy kept saying that Wolf Man could move, he could feint, he could jump around, he was a wolf, he could go in and come out before Frank could close his hands around him. Still, everybody agreed that if Frank ever got his hands on Wolf Man, being a monster that couldn’t feel pain, it wouldn’t make any difference what Wolf Man bit off—Frank would continue.
Then, of course, when they showed the movie, there was the wonderful ending of the two of them just fighting and then collapsing, and I think they both fell into something. They fell into an ice thing and they froze to death. Well, they were both dead anyway, but they froze so that the sequel comes and they thaw them out. Or it could have been a flood that killed them. Whatever. Those things are just a part of one’s memories. Like a song that you couldn’t get five people to buy today: “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”
Since the grandchildren can watch this Godzilla thing stomp Japanese people to death, I decided to play Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man for the grandchildren. This was after I put on an Abbott and Costello and they were bombing badly. The granddaughter and the grandson saw nothing funny in them. When they saw the monsters, it just did not register. So I played Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I think they had an attitude like: And you say this is supposed to be scary? Knowing that I had an audience that was just trying to be nice to their grandfather, I turned it off and released them. They were very quick to leave.
By the same token, Godzilla is just not doing it for me. I also understand that Godzilla is female because this is what I’m told by my grandson. My wife and my daughter, the mother of the five-year-old, have also declared that Godzilla is female, but they also say this about God, so I’m not too sure.
