II.

Movies as a Form of Reincarnation:

Boris Karloff Remembers Being Chinese on More Than One Occasion

1.

I was not born in Dulwich or Brighton, but in Camberwell, south London. Because I was illuminated from the outset, I did not find it necessary to become an animal, a water buffalo, a rat or a snake, in order to understand what Buddha was preaching. I did not even need to know such an immense figure might truly have existed, walking the bereft earth in a faraway place. This wasn’t my job, which was easier than knowing. I didn’t need to know, I only needed to pretend, become what you saw. Among pretenders, I was one of the best. So good in fact I have been confused with many of the shadows pinned against your city walls, embracing, as Walt Whitman did, the legions of castoffs, the hordes of those fate has tossed into the kegs. But Whitman could not make them walk the streets of your city as easily as I can. This is why I am still among you, a kind of peril whose color you might think you know, but are no longer so quick and willing to say.

2.

Time dissolves into drops suspended from a jagged black branch, my life. I will begin in the middle, working simultaneously toward both my demise and my birth, since they are the same moment. However, be duly forewarned about the use of such magic, as it can be tainted by those who try to bend it toward the cold caverns of the imagination, places where the light has been drained out of the jar, and only unidentifiable bones remain, like warning signals. Remember, only a movie actor can say these things without retribution, being as the body is not, as the audience has been fooled into thinking, a vehicle of the physical.

3.

A master thespian is never a vehicle, which, at best, is a wearisome form of servitude, something easily obtained and discarded. Rather, he or she is a librarian of the occult, a noble figure who accumulates a vast repertoire of irreplaceable motions and sounds. Because you thought I was given the key to that library, becoming in that regard its keeper, I was able to become a triumphant blur, an unmistakable hum in the night. These are the corridors where I wandered, a shrouded, lightning-haunted landscape at the edge of sight, a ruined world that memory, that deceiver, cannot shake loose. I tug at you when nothing and no one is there. I become what you see when you want to laugh or shudder or both, a clumsy oaf whose body, like a laboratory frog, twitches in time to the swaying violins and mournful trumpets, the knowing oboes.

4.

The story is simple because it is not a story, but a chain of events in which you are a link. One afternoon, in neither the distant future nor the nearby past, I happen to find myself confronted by a series of largely unspeakable circumstances, all of which were indelibly marked by the entrances and exits of my shadow. Thus, I am forced to quit my position at the White and Wong Detective Agency, and seek my fortune elsewhere.

5.

An itinerant detective and occasional time traveller, as all my kind are known to be, I learned various trades, all of which served me to become more and more distant from the one you thought was me. Among my accomplishments, I can list being handsomely rewarded for my sojourn in Black Castle, where I fed the alligators lolling in the manufactured mud. This was not all I pulled off in those years I strolled down Sunset Boulevard. During one particularly horrible Los Angeles summer, I was plucky enough to take up residence at Voodoo Island, where I became a gardener, and raised carnivorous plants. Soon, however, I grew tired of fancy hotels, their bright lobbies and thick carpets. I wanted to penetrate the maze of corridors intersecting the elevators, their ornate brass cages. It was time for me to escape, to find refuge in a different form than the ones I had so far been assigned. There were other bodies to be had, to have.

6.

Moments later, I departed the small fetching hamlet where I was said to have been born, thrust into this world, I daresay, like a miser’s moonlit fist, embarking upon what I was sure was my journey toward eternal redemption. How long was it before time began once again to accelerate, its forehead beating the air, I do not know. All I remember now is that at the first sign of dawn, and the ritual nailing of the dove to a yellow cloud, I beat a tactical but hasty retreat into the forest the gods had so handily dropped beside a lake, not far from the Dew Drop Inn, where two men and a horse had gathered to discuss the recent hijacking of the president’s substitute body. It was this body, rather than his own, that they wanted to install in a museum, sure that it would attract the curious and the morbid, the tearful and those seeking further proof of the miraculous. I, however, was not satisfied with being esconced in a museum. My body, I proclaimed to the sky, was not to be fitted so easily into a display case.

7.

Although the future had not yet vomited anywhere near where I had stopped to survey my own increasingly meager options, it wasn’t long before I learned that my own body was to endure a plight similiar to that of the president’s doppelganger, his hired dummy. Thus, after a fortnight of munching on acorns in a tangled black mass of thorns and branches, cold sunlight finally saw fit to stir me from my humble stupor. It was in this potentially embarrassing situation, muddy and covered with manufactured cow manure, that I discovered what I hoped was not my final fate: I had become a half-wit servant. Even worse, some unthinking, uncaring parent, who I would never know, much less have the chance to throttle, had forever cursed me with the name of Voltan. Even the villagers were quick to point out that it sounded like a dented car whenever I stumbled into a room and began mumbling before them, the bowl of my large empty hat waiting to be filled with whatever curses fell that day from the ceiling or sky.

8.

I tried to tell them that my real name was Mr. Wong, that for many years I had been gainfully employed as a detective, and that both my peers and my enemies believed me to be blessed with a third eye, an inner oculus. I was, I repeatedly told them, famous for my ability to pass as someone else. Had they not heard of the bandit Fang, who alone among thieves was a principled man doomed to die and be reborn as the frightening, though short-lived “Invisible Menace”? So many adventures, none of which seemed to have ever been transcribed in the official records, much less remembered by the occupants of this isolated village. Had they not seen me before, many times in fact? Why don’t they know who I am? They think of me as an idiot, a fool, some disheveled thing rather than one of them. And when they tilt toward me, act as if attention is all they possess, my life story is but an interlude, a moment in which to slap the table and howl. It is time to mimic my every gesture, to repeat my every halting word. I have become the shadow they shadow, that is their daily delight.

9.

How could they not know that I had once been a shadow that pulled the gestures of others back, until they became mine. In such a manner, I had passed time as an ex-con and a spiritualist, a spy and a surgeon. In each life I lived, the mask I wore was my own face. It resembled your dreams of how such a face should look when peering through a torn curtain, a fogged-over windshield, a martini glass filled with blood. It was a face you knew because you knew the outcome. This was how I was able to become Chinese so often, more times than anyone else who set out from a town or village, toward the paved driveways and marble bathrooms of Pacific Palisades.

10.

My dream was simple; to be ensconced in fur, to loll like a seal, to dream with my eyes open. Today, sitting at my desk, writing this memoir, at last I am able to ask: Was this not how Fu Manchu and Frankenstein were born? Didn’t you, dear reader, dear viewer, not already dream of them before they were ever known to cast their shadows across humanity’s noble visage? Did you not predict that they would stalk the earth, wreak havoc, cause untold misery, be caught and finally destroyed, their mortal bodies plunged at last into the spiritual fires?

11.

Isn’t it true that you did not need to see my face to know it was me swathed in dusty bandages? that it was me rising from the Horus-headed coffin locked in a secret chamber deep inside the pyramid? Didn’t you already know that only I could possess the formula necessary to transmit my body, its blur, across and through time? Isn’t it me that you’ve been waiting for all along, as if I am a messiah, a lover, and an enemy all rolled into one hideous corpse? And if, for the next few hours, you sit before the flickering screen, waiting for my face to finally be uncovered, so that at last you can see my jutting jaw and sallow cheeks, my high, unforgettable forehead and large ears, all the while reveling in my thick-tongued speech bordering on a hideous lisp, it is so you can get up and walk away, open the refrigerator or look in the mirror, glad that you have been right all along.

12.

Finally, you think, such perfection doesn’t belong to me, but to you. It is why I have been placed before you, both as a warning and as something to remember. A talisman you slip back in your pocket, a coin whose face has been eroded by years of unthinking caresses, something spent in a moment dedicated to frivolity. Am I each of these or none? Or am I what vanishes behind your eyes without ever going away?

Genghis Chan: Private Eye XXIX

(Fourteen Ink Drawings)

Mirror film stain
Gown tiger glass
Canopy powder bell
Mulberry blister festival
Boat portrait box
Vermillion chestnut cloud
Milk shadow moon
Breeze identical face
Ink ladder jar
Orchid chimney tongue
Parachute sword wave
Groom motel coffee
Anvil clock hair
Condom audience dog

Genghis Chan: Private Eye XXX

shoo war
torn talk

 

ping towel
pong toy

 

salted sap
yellow credit

 

hubba doggo
bubba patootie

 

wig maw
mustard tongue

Peter Lorre Reminisces About Being a Sidekick

Iron cloud, bronzed sunset, stolen dream.
I wasn’t always a feverish lepidopterist
chasing whistling chariots in a stadium.
My wax lacked coherence, my human hairs glistened.
Perhaps you would like to come in off the ledge
and share a mug of hot cocoa laced with absinthe.
Or is that the kind of little naughtiness you prefer to shun?
Have you noticed that there’s a lot of snow
clinging to my last Fabergé egg?
Take off your tie, throw away your shoes.
Have you seen my collection of portholes?
some pried from the very finest luxury liners
to have foundered on these rocky shores.
It’s not that I am given to issuing a high-resolution
lightly thawed whoop or two
whenever my oversized eyelids
belly fat knuckles start twittering,
and the crease in my gabardines start gabbing
to the pleats gathered at the corner, waiting
for the light to change its spots,
but I just love yodeling
“O sweet spotless tyrannosaurus,
why hast thou huffiness handcuffed me
to the Hunting Lodge of Unrepentant Nations
and their sprawling kin? Am I not
allowed a few extra paces
before I am commanded
to run into the woods?”
Such timely intermissions prove
how newly minted and hot I became,
while sitting on a painted horse,
surrounded by dancing dandelions.

Did I forget to mention the adventures of Smoky Muskrat,
Maison Spittle, and Cheap Varmint Night and his Band,
The Sheep Bladder Brigade? Or am I being too allegorical,
too much a one night pill flipper in a copycat’s storm?
Will I ever be regarded as truly satisfying?
Can I become one who exudes
a heroic magnetic profile?
become one whose blessed visage pulls the dust
off your brow of well-endowed verbs?
Will you remember me as something more
than an imported bandana
when I am draped in bad blood squirted from a can
made of recycled helmets retired ogres pitched in a ditch?
Hey, are you glugging to the ghosts of Salvation Coliseum?
This isn’t a resurrection factory, you simian of slime.
What are you doing? walking your toast
down to the coroner’s barn? Quit hawking
your perforated hanky, there is always more of this
where this came from. Remember, the last time
you had your brain amputated, you were required
to sacrifice your definitions of meandering reincarnations
in favor of a satchel of bologna pizzas.
Or were you just another hungry artist
quick to lick the trumpet of integrity?
Hard to dream about the outside when it stops
raining long enough to forget you once had
a memorable name. This is where I get off
the bus, Buster. Or is it Bruiser or Boozer,
Flappy or Winsome with an Axe?
On the other side of the lake lives a two-headed dragon.
Pink smoke rises from the nostrils of the one known
as Ying, while blue tears fall from the one known as Yank.
It is rumored that they used to be Siamese twins
but got tired of eating from the same hollywood bowl.

As a dishwasher, I became familiar with their plight,
and tried to comfort them, but with little consequence.
You encounter all sorts of shadows in this game preserve.
Some have been suspended in the trees for eons,
their souls locked inside the recyclable peanut
butter jars insulating the wizard’s hexagonal library.
That’s how I plan to get promoted to Senior Gatekeeper.
A small wagon floated downstream, guided by nymphs.
Huge fragrant bouquets descended from the rafters,
quickly covering the stage, but, by then,
the headline star had fled into the closet
the management rented out for such occasions.
Time to hoist your mortal spoils out of bed, Bunky.
I wasn’t trying to become you when the mountain
tugged itself together, collapsing outside the doghouse
where I pass my afternoons, dreaming of the day
my portrait will finally hang in the dog museum.
You pass more than afternoons, you blasphemous pustule
on the noble edifices that have been studiously erected
by a fleet of robots, sleek and newly released,
like a certain frog’s vivacious belch, from
the recently upgraded prison recreation facility
just down the road from the gas station where I saw you
licking grease off the monkey they keep
tucked behind the cash register.
I wasn’t always this gentle. In fact,
I wasn’t always an Austro-Hungarian umpire, either.
Twice I’ve been from somewhere
outside your sovereignty. Once I was even Japanese,
but that was before the war brought us home,
to the blue picket fence draped with ribbons and razors.
Quit smooching the mirror, goggle-eyes.You got a face
that could pass as a kangaroo’s pouch.
Not that I don’t muster up some small careful affection

for that doomed race of puddle hoppers,
but we all jump into oblivion, don’t we?
Maybe you ought to get into another line of work.
Maybe you ought to fold your name somewhere else,
sign on someone else’s dotted line
since you were never issued one in the first place.
I am sure I can find you an envelope big enough.
What about the barrel of forks you hid in the alley?
Say, what are you doing here anyway?
Who said you could stop by and smear lemon grass
meringue over your cloudy lapels? You think
you got something big to say? Something momentous?
Or is it what you had to memorize
in order to escape the men with lightning in their eyes?

Boris Karloff in The Mummy Meets Dr. Fu Manchu

Emerging from the woods, the audience stumbles upon an isolated scene: In the late afternoon’s arcade of artificial gloom, a dainty, dotted hand deftly smooths the lower slope of a massive forehead. Zoom to close-up: Thick oblong plane’s corrugated surface, its vertical grooves sprouting with stiff thistle or hard clumps of new hair. Moving suddenly into focus is a multi-leveled chorus of angular limbs festooned with pin-pricked skulls of uncategorizable animals. A paleontological nightmare thinks the perverse paleontologist, her imported platinum tongue stud momentarily glistening between her lover’s neatly pointed teeth. Color-coded keys shift and finally settle at bottom of lint-lined pocket. Sharks churn and chug, excited by the array of scents swiftly filtering through their olfactory detectors. Defined by the lingering traces of a mischievous grin, one that suggests satisfaction of a nonverbal order, a heavily jacketed though unpimpled boy points out the newly severed head of the evening moon, which, elsewhere, is floating directly above the Bank of Shanghai’s misaligned ideograms and misplaced radicals.

 

Soon, every member of this roped-off section of time and space will meld into the unnumbered ranks of invisible spectators condemned to wander across the inclines of a barnacle-encrusted city. Gladys tugs at her store-bought underwear. Is the name of its color forget-me-not?

 

For a month of free parking, you must answer the following question:Whose gloved digits parted the black petals of the actress’s accordion before the votive candles slid out of view?

 

She hears but cannot determine the origin of a voice which whispers, you are guilty of secreting liquids of a private nature into the public basement.

A nameless place in the universe or a dead phase in a mechanized elephant’s recently restored memory bank, no one knows.

 

In the lower balcony, Jiminy Jimmy tries not to muffle the bundle of fidgeting taking up space beside him. He dreams of the day he can leave his insect self behind, a papery husk gathering human dust in the shallow valley of a velvet cushion. Outside, beneath the curtains of the evening sky, the mournful cries of a disgruntled tyrant are quickly punctuated with the boiled dust of his headless ancestors. Rows of soldered bells and newly unfolded buses are waiting to absorb the growing stream of visitors. On the screen, hordes of infected termites eat through the edges of the unfurling role-call. A large gathering of beady eyes begins investigating the remains of this tiniest of essays.

 

Night’s panorama of stars is no longer a coming attraction.

 

Hans Violin enters the tunnel and emerges as Hank Harmonica, bit player and familiar television talk show guest. Meanwhile, after waking up in another section of the numbered quadrant, Gus “The Big” Viola discovers he has been reduced to a small-boned, foreign-born dry cleaner.Time briefly accelerates its production of contaminated images. Realizing that, while he will always remain foreign to those who seek the indelible signature of his services, he has unwittingly let himself succumb to a flurry of mispronunciations. In doing so, he has become an even smaller, small-boned servicer of others. However, now no longer either a dry or clean specimen, Gus decides he must lessen the flow of his daily sobbing. Otherwise, he is incapable of eliminating his love of operatic presentation, even though fate is about to cast him as a person without merit, a clod or a heel, a snippet of abject flotsam inhabiting a zone fit for exhaust fumes and unapologetic vandals.What he doesn’t yet know, but which the audience suspects, is that his tears, however few may fall, will slowly stop evaporating.

Bones and cars accumulate at the bottom of the lake.

 

Without knowing exactly why—he is in this regard still optimistic about the future—Gus begins wishing he was wearing a red leather poncho and sitting at a shiny black piano. Somewhere in the back of the spacious, aromatic auditorium, a young woman clutches a tattered plastic rose to the tattooed Turkish dagger above her quickly beating heart. She feels the beads of sweat tightening around Gus’s long, slender neck. He has become a swan pedaling around a small lake surrounded by tanks. It is winter and the war is in its sixty-fifth year. The large, antiquated camera swivels haphazardly toward the next set of sprockets. A speck becomes a many-legged shadow hovering above a roofless manger, where a one-eyed mother comforts her two-headed infant. The audience gasps; it is the only acceptable response a civilized person can make under the circumstances.

 

As we are unable to escape the law of averages, there is, of course, one exception. You see, I have entered your line of sight, a tall, almost shapeless profile with long arms, hands, and fingers stiffly extended, as if, of their own accord, they are searching for some malleable form to embrace and squeeze.

 

I am swathed in thick, wide bandages, which makes it difficult to offer a newly minted hanky to Gus, the tear-stained dry cleaner, who ignores the puddle slowly forming by his feet. I am standing in his store or, as the blue lettered sign on the window states, his very reliable and friendly establishment.Was I drawn here because he too is foreign? an impediment to speech? Did he exude a magnetic field I could not veer away from? Was this collision planned by large unseen forces known to move in mysterious ways?

 

My sole purpose is to inquire how I might go about finding someone who can aid me. The goal was stated at the outset by my pharaoh father, before the first effects of his second reincarnation set in: I am to find my original identity, the one from which I and my sperm bank embarked, many eons ago. Not the one Gus sees before him, wrapped in dusty bandages, but the one inhabiting the one whose face is covered with strips of cloth soaked in the Nile.

 

The sky darkens to the color of a bruise and the last of the renegade stars are quickly nailed into place.

 

It is a silly thing, to ask someone how you might go about finding out who you are. Presumably you already know. But, in my case, I am of two minds and at least two bodies. One is only visible to me. The other is the one I inhabit but cannot catch sight of.

 

My dilemma is familiar. I can’t recognize my reflection, as I can only nod to the shadows the director has painted on the wall behind me.These painted blobs move in tandem to my hesitations.We could begin to dance, but that would only prove a distraction to those whose attention I have gathered like wool on a spring day.

 

Oh ferry man, perhaps I too was meant to guide puppets across the River Styx.

 

Certainly, my mission, if you can still call it that, remains largely unknown to me, the dry cleaner, and the audience. The small glances cannot be strung together. Rather, we manage to form the extendable legs of a polished aluminum tripod, on top of which someone has installed a motorized camera. All the seats are taken; and there is nowhere else to move. Time to hunker down and look forward. Darkness, it seems, is approaching, a swift car galloping majestically across the diamond red tundra. As advertised in the brochure, the temperature is starting to plummet. In the short time you have left, you must persuade the couple in front of you to remove their hats and wigs.

After My Chronology by Peter Lorre

The splattered flag of an idiot scavenger; this was how
I sailed beyond the perfect faces of the coming storm.
Many times, almost as many as in your shabby arenas,
their walls of baritone shadows, their stream of flailing ants.
I was rolled beneath a couch. Stuffed in a trunk. Drooled
down a box (complete with fishing tackle,
their silvery tangle and heap of pink wigglers).
Flopped into a crumpled cup. A semi-anonymous heap.
Shorn of all but secondary features, some of which
were legendary, petals of manufactured smoke
erasing butterflies shivering in the branches of my material
remains.
Did you try and insert me in a pile of juggled lumps?
Was I part of a column of figures? Or was I
a figural column surrendering sky’s black roof ?
Who traces the umbilicus of these outbursts of frenzy
back to its mouth, my carriage of sagging carbon
cries out? Who embraces these hummingbird sparks of lateral
agitation?
A monogrammed hanky steeped in sepulchral vapors?
Pathetic this monaural chivalry.

 

Once I even crawled around a lake resting in
the crevice of a porcelain saucer, before being
swatted into diaphanous mulch, leaving only
an inky signature on the lard inflated plains.
What is chronology, but detachable hands
sifting for condensation collectivized in an earlier era?
Could I not have arrived before you opened your eyes,
found your axial culmination seated in the upper registers
of a Babylonian balcony or Sumerian wing chair,
optically registering disturbances flooding through
the illuminated window? Or were you always there,
always perfectly poised, stored among the glass roses
you will be requested to accompany to the heated antechamber?
Always waiting for the mirror to begin reciting the contents of its
solid lake?

I Was a Poet in the House of Frankenstein

Do you remember me as a spy
in a mythical European kingdom?
How about when I am a French Canadian trapper?
a role I play a number of times.
I kidnap Henrietta Barge. It isn’t the last time
I will commit such a dastardly act.
I belong to a band of marauders
presided over by the evil Mangua,
played by Wallace Beery.
I am the villain Ahmed Khan
and a villainous halfbreed
who abducts the heroine in a canoe.
The ruler of a fictitious Menang Island,
I order the wholesale massacre of the white settlers.
I live in Old Baghdad and make tents.
I become a maharajah and, once again,
I am a French Canadian trapper.
A Mexican halfbreed, a mate
on a rum smuggling ship,
an evil governor:
I am each of them and more.
During World War I, I am a scissors grinder in Vienna.
Both earlier and later, depending on the way
you tell time, I am a scurvy-looking
crew member of the pirate Jean Lafitte.
I continue being a Barbary pirate.
I am a deserving victim in a murder mystery.
My name is Blackie Blanchette: I rob railroads.
This is my card: Snipe Collins, fiendish crook.
I live among lion worshippers.
Usually, I am one of the main villains.
I disinter, smuggle, conspire,
I behead, betray, swallow,
I shoot, throttle, gasp.
I am the ship’s purser.
I live in swashbuckling New Orleans;
my name is Fleming.
The Vanishing Rider,
Vultures of the Sea.
In Burning the Wind,
I am a wicked ranch foreman
who carries off the heroine.
Hoot Gibson is the good guy.
I am Maurice Kent,
stewing in a cabin in the “northwoods.”
Small furry animals are part of the plot.
I once played a man named “Boris.”
I am a henchman, call me Cecil.
In the Charlie Chan murder mystery
Behind That Curtain,
my name is “Karlov.”
The first time I spoke on screen,
I was a Hindu servant.
The director of the film was Lionel Barrymore.
Instead of being the villain,
as everyone thought,
I am the heroine’s father.
I am a prison guard.
My boss is a sadistic overseer.
I star in Sea Bat.
Charles Bickford
manages to escape
Devil’s Island.
I play a villainous sheik
with a phony French accent
in a film about a young American
who escapes from an Indian prison.
I am a “trusty” who kills a “stool pigeon.”
I become a revolutionary
in the kingdom of El Dorania.
I sell dope, the stronger the better.
I am a crooked gambler
who tries to cheat a barber.
I am a crook’s cultured accomplice.
Will Rogers is a razorblade king from Oklahoma,
I am a sheik.
I work as a butler.
I am an unscrupulous newspaper
editor’s evil assistant.
A clubfoot man
who loves to dance,
I teach my son, Fedor,
who, of course, becomes famous
making me happy, scared, and jealous.
A madman kills me during the performance of a ballet.
I am a gangster, a beer baron.
I work as Lionel Barrymore’s orderly.
I try to hide on a yacht, but I am caught.
I am on the dirigible Los Angeles,
exploring the South Pole.
Many members of the team,
myself included, perish.
I am on the lam,
I hide, shiver, moan, and grunt.
I play the part of a prison warden,
and then I am lying on a table in a castle,
waiting to be born.
My name is Frankenstein,
and I am deathly afraid of fire.
I manage to become a waiter.

I work as an autopsy surgeon,
and I am malevolent.
I play myself, eating in a well-known restaurant.
My name is Nikko; I am a charlatan.
I pretend to be a faith healer.
I direct a narcotics ring.
In ancient Egypt,
I am a prince
who breaks into the tomb
where the princess I love
has been buried.
A brutish dumb
but homicidal butler.
I own a nightclub,
and wear no makeup.
I steal the mask of Genghis Khan
from the British Museum
in an attempt to start a “holy war.”
I am Dr. Fu Manchu,
both Chinese and sinister.
A torturer of the innocent.
I am both
a half-mad recluse
and a master criminal.
After I am buried alive,
I return to claim
a priceless jewel
which someone has stolen from me.
Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and I
appear in a cartoon.
I am the evil host.
Bela Lugosi is the sinister stranger.
The movie is House of Doom
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer,
who, because of the Nazis,
was forced to flee Germany.
I am an insane religious fanatic,
trying to incite my people
to destroy a British patrol
which has gotten lost in Mesopotamia.
As the anti-Semitic Baron Ledrantz,
I try to destroy the House of Rothschild.
I am able to transfer
all my thoughts and feelings
into someone else.
I am “Dr. Maniac, the brainsnatcher.”
In Charlie Chan at the Opera,
I am Gravelle, a former baritone
possessed by homicidal tendencies.
After Charlie Chan cures me of my insanity,
I resume my career in the opera.
While engaged, with my partner
Bela Lugosi, in astronomical research
in Africa, I am contaminated
by a radioactive meteorite.
Anyone I touch dies.
I try to kill Lugosi
because he wants to stop me
from killing Frank Lawton,
who is having an affair with my wife.
In the story of the man
who is brought back to life
after he is electrocuted,
I am wrongly accused of murder
and put to death.
I return, a strange, remote, possessed,
and obsessed being,
completely animated
by one idea: revenge.
My name is Mallory;
I invented a burglar alarm,
which was stolen from me
by Ranger. Twenty years
have passed and I am
about to go blind.
But, before I do,
I invent an invisible ray system
which enables me to silence
my foolproof burglar alarm.
In 1937, in the northern oilfields of China,
I am the Chinese bandit Fang,
a good guy who dies because of his beliefs.
In 1938, in San Francisco,
I am Mr. Wong,
an unassuming but meticulous
specialist in crime investigation.
Because I help
a wounded, escaped prisoner,
I am sentenced to Devil’s Island for treason.
My name is Doctor Gaudet.
Edwards, a collector of jewels and antiques,
gains illegal possession of the gem,
“Eyes of the Moon,” which was seized
from the Nanking Museum during a riot.
When he is murdered
during a game of charades,
I decide to track down the murderer.
My name is Mr. Wong.
In Mr. Wong in Chinatown,
my name is Detective James Lee Wong.
Princess Lin Haw, played
by Lotus Long, is murdered
by a dart from a bamboo tube
hidden inside a sleeve, a weapon
well known to the Chinese
and those familiar with their ways.
The story centers around
a “mechanical” heart
that restores life to the dead,
but changes the whole
character of the revived man.
Baron Wolf von Frankenstein
returns to the castle
where he discovers I am in a coma,
tended to by a crazy shepherd.
I am the grim clubfoot executioner, Mord.
Captain Street’s best friend,
Detective O’Grady, is murdered
and I am called in to solve the case.
This is the fourth time I am Mr. Wong,
but the sixth time I am Chinese.
I have not yet added up the times
I am less than human, a halfwit,
a necrophiliac, or a ghoul.
I am an absentminded
professor of English literature,
who is run down in the street.
In order to save me,
part of a dead gangster’s brain
is transplanted into my skull.
I dress as an ape, and obtain
the liquid needed for the serum.
I am the German ace-spy, Strendler.
I invent a machine which can communicate with the dead.
I steal the body of a woman from a newly dug grave.
I am a Greek general in the Balkan War
visiting the island where my wife was buried fifteen years ago.
I escape from prison.
I am the head of an insane asylum known as Bedlam,
and I have a mistress who will turn against me.
I am a crazed clothes designer.
My name is Gruesome, and Dick Tracy
will throw me in the clink.
My name is Guyasuta, Chief of the Senecas.
I am Tishomingo, a friendly, educated Choctaw.
I am Mr. Hyde.
I am the ferocious
head of a band of dope smugglers
on the island of Ischia.
I work as the local rajah’s military chief.
I am Baron Victor von Frankenstein, the last of my family.
I am a novelist investigating a gruesome murder,
two decades old, which,
in another personality, I committed.
I am a doctor during the early days of anaesthesia.
I am a wicked wizard living in a slimy green castle.
My archenemy, another sorcerer, is Vincent Price.
During the prologue, he reads
Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
I am a necrophiliac baron
intent on preserving my dead wife.
Jack Nicholson tries to rescue her,
but ends up with her turning to dust in his arms.
My co-stars are Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.
I am Amos Hinchley, Price’s senile father-in-law.
I am an East European vampire who carries
someone’s head in a sack.
One day, I tear out the throat of my four-year-old grandson.
I walk on Bikini Beach.
I have the voice of a rat.
I am a blind sculptor.
I cannot see the ghost in the invisible bikini.
I am bearded, I limp.
I start out ordinary, kind,
but end up a hideous monster.
My job is to reenact the role of a mad scientist.
I am Professor Marsh, witchcraft expert.
I am Byron Orlok, an aging actor
who became famous for his horror roles.
I want to retire.
A young married man
with an obsession for guns
decides to kill me.
He sees me once,
through a telescopic lens,
and then in two places.
I am on the screen of a drive-in movie,
where he has come with his rifle,
to kill more innocent bystanders,
and I am walking toward him,
an aged but determined man with a cane.

Film Adaptations of Five of America’s Most Beloved Poems

It burns and winds. For as long as I can remember, my Sunday task has been to polish the antique wooden perambulator until it gleams like an aluminum bread box. Do you mind being the landlady’s favorite pet? No, Little Igor, raunchy ruminator and muralist to mid-sized manufacturers, these are not the horoscope dials you should be consulting. Look at the fuzzy ones over there, on the pink control panel mounted beneath the custom aquarium populated with poisonous snakes, addled alligators, and small but hearty fish. Have you ever seen such a diverse array of live entertainment clouding the waters before?

 

On misty days the sun hangs pale blue over a black diamond sea. Academic painters of every persuasion rise from their imported beach chairs and press their ointment-covered noses against the unnecessarily spotted glass, unaware that cross-eyed snakes are staring back at them. Intrepid mountaineers follow the whistle of the marmot up to the highest crags, and over playgrounds and puddles alike rises the cry of a wounded sea otter, fondling the most delectable portion of his imported fish dinner. Meanwhile, a caravan of carrion has been dragged across the sand.

 

It turns and whines. All motels are penetrated by two sounds—a scream and a complaint. Today, as long ago, these are the two sacred messengers of the Western Nile Plumbers’ Union and their far-flung subsidiary units.Trying to overcome the image of being nothing more than a bunch of loud-talking, gum-chewing cronies, the union leaders decided to dispense with opening ceremonies and closing sermons. Later, concerned with the rank-and-file’s growing resentment of enforced civic duty, some of the leaders voted to reenact well-known gaffes at previous company picnics, while others elected to learn the intricacies of miniature collie and poodle grooming as an alternative to hosting the Sunday car wash.Their favorite costumes included a red satin tuxedo, a cowboy moustache, and nicotine-stained talons. Last month, the duly elected Vice-Secretary issued the following decree: No velvet cones with tassels are allowed to cross the threshold.

 

High above the Wabash River, its riverbanks lined with quaint cobblestone streets and newly renovated factories, complete with working fire hydrants and helmeted dwarfs scattered discreetly among the hordes of wayward children, a foreign possibly alien power has managed to thrust the city’s entire workforce into a state of suspended animation.The mayor fears the immense stone bridge that was to become a major tourist attraction in the tri-county area will remain unfinished. The pianist is trying to imitate the sound of an oncoming train. No one dreams that the images are stolen from a semi-retired sorcerer while he is dreaming of a miniaturized sorcerer who is assassinated and buried in a jelly jar by a quartet of indignant barbers. A hexagonal shield gleams in the ruby-colored gloom descending from the sky. Great ospreys nest in the crowns of the unfinished arches. Four goats wander across the ice. The head goat,William of Upper Broadway, keeps reminding Thutmoss of the likelihood that strange plants are migrating rapidly across the ocean floor.

 

A man pleads with the creature locked inside an imported hair dryer to reconsider the wording of their oath. The less said about the source of this rumor, the better. After taking refuge in a deserted gas station containing seven slim coffins, one for each gambling centipede, the high-brow hero—he has a forehead the size of Rhode Island—decides to return from hell to find out why his latest girl-friend didn’t follow him to the very ends of the earth. Meanwhile, in a drugstore in Angela, Ohio, an attractive young woman by the name of Akron decides to buy two lottery tickets, one for each side of the coin.

Peter Lorre Records His Favorite Walt Whitman Poem for Posterity

I am an indigestable vapor rising from the dictionary
you sweep under your embroidered pillow

 

My only offer: A kidnapped dog in exchange for your thirst
Call me Zanzibar Sam, Bulging Pharaoh, Narcoleptic Swill

 

Custom labyrinths made to order, purveyor of mid-sized jungles
a gravedigger counting shoes in a candlelit saloon

 

A miracle erupted from a reunion of mouse and sow, horse and
hubby
Son became bagged contraband penetrating ring of nibbled pyres

 

Me criminal puss no longer muzzled and mugged by snoring
camera
Me signaled pasty or patsy, but donned smooth glacial twitches

 

Mere slip in a sequined slapper, lolling whimper of purring grape,
not just smoothed flotsam bulk and hankering moss

 

Inside me dwells a nude drummer toy, all pomade and fancy,
while the outer me, the bun you tufted, was heavy-lipped

 

reflection of uncanny twittering amidst gnawed leaves

Peter Lorre Speaks to the Spirit of Edgar Allan Poe During a Séance

Back then which is anywhere in back of now
I was pretending to be a practicing mendicant

 

a mower of smaller children, a moratorium in a tuxedo
while you were acting like a hopeless sponge

 

a photograph of a convict whose mind
isn’t quite made up, but it is

 

Later, I draped the last of my outer garments
over my jockey shorts, and left town in a cab

 

I told the man whose shiny head
reminded me of a bottle of wine

 

Deliver me to the suburban rodeos of
Piccadilly or Paradise

 

a harbor of idle tugboats
an island of glass huts

 

wherever smoke hasn’t started
charting its progress across a shorn sky

 

Thus, the journal of our journey
and the urinal of our yearning

 

began with the opening of faucets;
tear ducts; syrupy vittles;

Arctic ice storms; bowler hats
above long thick sleeves;

 

white-haired gymnasts and their smelly pets
The detectives came later

 

examples of their tarnished industriousness
tucked beneath their pressed pink tongues

 

Did you know that I was never called upon
by those who would have known

 

what I meant
when I said

 

I was a star
in an early

 

stage of deterioration
a page upon which

 

someone has drawn
the seven shapes of my name

 

their skeletal facades
pressing against deserted streets

 

The rest of me—the part you know
as it is also you—

 

is sitting inside a bus station
watching television,

waiting for further instructions on how
I might dig myself out of the roles

 

blind biographers have stuck me in