I used to sit on a stool at the counter of the soda fountain in my dad’s drugstore and talk to Louise, the counter waitress, while she made milk shakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. I especially liked to be there on Saturday mornings when the organ-grinder came in with his monkey. The monkey and I would dunk doughnuts together in the organ-grinder’s coffee. The regular customers would always stop and say something to me, and tell my dad how much I looked like him, only handsomer.
One Saturday morning when I was about six, while I was waiting for the organ-grinder and his monkey to come in, I started talking to Louise about scary movies. I had seen Frankenstein the night before and I told Louise it was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, even scarier than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms that my dad had taken me to see at the Oriental Theater when I was five. I had had dreams about the beast ripping up Coney Island and dropping big blobs of blood all over the streets ever since, but the part where the Frankenstein monster kills the little girl while she’s picking flowers was worse than that.
“The scariest for me,” Louise told me, “is Dracula. There’ll never be another one like that.”
I hadn’t seen Dracula and I asked her what it was about. Louise put on a new pot of coffee, then she turned and rested her arms on the counter in front of me.
“Sex, honey,” she said. “Dracula was a vampire who went around attacking women. Oh, he might have attacked a man now and then, but he mainly went after the girls. Scared me to death when I saw it. I can’t watch it now. I remember his eyes.”
Then Louise went to take care of a customer. I stared at myself in the mirror behind the counter and thought about the little girl picking flowers with the monster.