The signboard outside the Variety Store
announced a new DVD shipment - $1/each.
Even after WalMart appeared on the way
to the airport on its own new blacktop
Apple Blossom Road, the Variety Store
persists beside the parking lot it shares
with the new blonde wood Starbucks.
I whipped the car around in the Lakeside
Drive-in parking lot and we went in -
past the outside folding tables piled with
lime green and lurid pink flexible plastic
beach pails, imitation Crocs and wrench
sets attached as thoroughly as tied
quilts to cardboard. Indoors in
perpetual gloom were the dimestore
reek from childhood, glassware with
flagrantly unconcealed seams, and
familiar looking 1000 piece puzzles.
A twenty something man with black hair
and Spanish accent leaned behind
the counter where the weeble bottomed
white lady used to sit. I'd never seen
DVD's in such narrow packages. We
sorted through at least 40 copies
of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
which we've seen, blocks of 20 to 40
copies of each movie you've never
heard of. Carnival of Souls begins "as
three young women in Kansas drag
race on a wooden bridge... only one
of the women... emerges from the murky
depths... goes onto Salt Lake City
to become a church organist... haunted by
visions of spirits." In Werewolf
of Washington, Dean Stockwell "gives
an unforgettable performance
as the haunted reporter in this
surprisingly lighthearted horror film
that can be enjoyed by anyone."
In The Ape Man, Bela Lugosi plays "a
gland specialist scientist who transforms
himself into a semi-simian state when
an experiment goes wrong." According
to the liner notes, "his only hope is to
find the anecdote..." Another sad film
from Bela's declining years, The Devil
Bat, shows how "Dr. Carruthers (Lugosi)
uses his genius to enlarge bats and then
train them to attack wearers of a certain
perfume he has discovered... in this well-acted
tale of terror from director Jean Yarbrough."
I remember babysitting at thirteen, never,
ever turning to horror films, which left me
with Roller Derby, rough-looking women
racing raggedly around a rickety looking
track while pulling one another's hair,
hauling back and solidly punching each other
smack in the face, pulling each other
to the floor and skating over the downed.
One night I looked up to see a man
looking in at me from the window
of the door to the garage. My father
who was visiting the family behind us,
leapt the fence, but the man had gone.
The police nabbed him two blocks away,
an albino, they said, on the loose.