In My Head

 Recently, I wrote about the relative permissiveness of my parents when it came to the entertainments I enjoyed during my formative years. That seminal experience of huddling at the foot of my parents' bed watching King Kong for the very first time is one that shaped, or perhaps bent, me for a lifetime. Coupled with a subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland, my youth was solidly forged in the movies of the thirties and forties. The ones about vampires, mummies, werewolves and anything with Boris Karloff in it. To say that my life was forever changed by all those images of horror would not be an overstatement. 

But those images would have to compete with the ones I conjured up in my own head on all those summer nights when I stayed up late in our mountain cabin, reading the works of Edgar Allen Poe. The faint jingling of the bells on the jester's costume of the fool who would be walled up in the cellar in The Cask of Amontillado. The dead eye of the old man who would be murdered, dismembered and stuffed beneath the floorboards in The Tell Tale Heart. The rapping, tapping at my chamber door of The Raven. At an age when so many of my peers were filling their heads with Little League and swim team, I was holed up in the loft of that cabin, imagining myself having to make the choice between The Pit and the Pendulum. All of these stories and poems filled my head on top of the foundation laid by the novels Frankenstein and Dracula. And HG Wells' War of the Worlds. 

I was reading classic literature. I was filing my brain with murder and mayhem via the works of some of the most revered writers of all time. What parent wouldn't want their child to be steeped in the classics? Is it any wonder that by the time I was a teenager that I was already steeped in those things that would forever warp my sensibilities? 

No one ever asked. It was part of me. A great dark shadow inside me that was further enhanced by nightly visits to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, hosted by the late great E.G. Marshall. It was Mister Marshall that gave me the gift of the word "macabre," for which I am eternally grateful. In the early seventies, there was no "goth" lifestyle to adopt. I was just another kid wandering around in my T-shirts and jeans, with a head full of horror. 

And I liked it.