Also see Deeky's review of Dracula Vs. Frankenstein
By Lupe Bensonhurst
In the summer of 1983, I was seven years old. My older sister and I spent a few weeks that summer at Grandma’s house while Mom alternately taught high school English to and was assaulted by her juvenile delinquent students during summer school. It was several years before Sis or I knew about Mom being shoved underneath her teaching desk or having to call the Sheriff to escort her to her car in the afternoon, though, and we spent those short weeks in June and July of 1983 enjoying the freedom that summertime brings – all the more free because we were out of direct parental control.
In no way did Grandma count as a parent.
We did the normal summer things kids in Oklahoma do. We spent a week or two collecting lightning bugs in jars, decorating mud pies with juniper berries and intact cicada shells, and turning the concrete slab that covered Grandma’s cistern into a theatre stage. (By this time, we both could recite Romeo’s and Juliet’s balcony speeches, and Sis could do some stuff from Julius Caesar, too.) For lunch we’d have grilled cheese sandwiches, made of toast and U.S. Government commodity cheese. After sitting a spell in front of the swamp cooler and chugging down jelly-jar glasses of Nestlé instant iced tea, which Grandma shook up by the gallon in plastic milk jugs, we raced back out into the heat to play. Grandma would start hollering us back in around sundown, and we’d come in from the night air and the threat of snakes, wash our bare feet, and then squabble over who got to spend the night on the side of the bed nearest the fan. I almost always won. We’d say our prayers together, and then talk ourselves to sleep. It was a routine we knew by heart, having spent at least two weeks of almost every summer of our lives at Grandma’s, in the company of chiggers, Grandma’s blue-haired acquaintances at the Mounds Southern Baptist Church, and Hee-Haw on TV.
One day, a pickup truck and camper trailer pulled into Grandma’s driveway. A scruffy, dirty man crawled out of the truck and heaved himself onto the sagging front porch. When Grandma emerged from the house, it took only a moment for her to start clucking and grinning as the stained and smelly stranger resolved himself into lines that fit the shape of my Uncle David. He was Grandma’s baby. He hugged her around her scrawny neck, and if she minded at all the smells of unwashed male and mechanic’s oil that Sis and I picked up from our shy distance, she didn’t say one word.
In short order, Uncle David had deposited himself in the kitchen, where he rifled the bread and ice boxes before commencing to make the strangest sandwich I have ever lain eyes on, then or since. Between three slices of Rainbo bread, he layered Oscar Mayer bologna, commodity cheese, Tabasco peppers, Sure-Fine salad dressing, and green onions pulled just that morning from Grandma’s weedy garden. What happened next is the subject of some family speculation, but the way I remember it is this: Uncle David pulled out a butter knife and began slathering peanut butter on the sandwich. With a wink at my whitened face and dropped jaw, he told me in all seriousness that the little curly tips left when the knife broke contact with the surface of the peanut butter were rats’ tails, which were all that was left after the peanut butter machines smashed up the hungry rats along with the peanuts. Then he took a huge bite of the sandwich.
I swore off peanut butter for years.
In addition to introducing us to the white trash version of a Dagwood, Uncle David had brought with him a castle in disguise, in the form of the camper trailer attached to his pickup. It was one of those contraptions shaped almost like the Great State of Oklahoma, itself – with a small sleeping or storage space hovering over the cab of the pickup while the bulk of the trailer sat on the bed of the truck. The trailer had it all: full screen door, toilet and shower stall, dinette set, windows complete with curtains, cabinets and a sink. My sister and I thought we had never seen the like, though Mom later said it should have been old hat to us, as we’d traveled back from California a few years before in a similar, though sleeker and certainly fresher, model commonly known as a Silver Bullet.
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Sometime shortly after he arrived, Uncle David ceded tenancy of the camper trailer to us kids. He wasn’t around much anyway. Which is to say, he slept an awful lot, and we never really knew why. He wasn’t sick or old, and we couldn’t puzzle out anything more than that he sure stayed up late in the night – reading paperback novels, smoking, and sprawling on the living room floor watching the sort of late night TV that made me scared to get out of bed at night to pee.
One morning while Uncle David slept the sunlight hours away, Sis and I scampered out to the camper trailer and crept inside. We carried with us an old cassette player, a microphone, and a deck of cards. The camper reeked of stale cigarette smoke, mildew, and mechanic’s grease. Even worse, there were five or six mud daubers who’d staked a claim. I made my sister deal with those while I waited outside, dancing from foot to foot and squealing “Oh! Oh! Ohhhh!” from time to time in a helpful manner. When she informed me that the coast was clear, I went inside and joined her at the dinette. We opened the windows to the summer air, and Sis told me we were going to tape a radio show.
Now, I can’t speak to the quality of the programming. The tunes of the Oak Ridge Boys and the Statler Brothers, as sung by young girls age seven and ten, would appeal to a very limited audience. But we were earnest. Oh, boy! Were we ever earnest. We spent all day long and into the night singing every song we could remember (Sis was just learning to harmonize), deejaying them, and writing our own commercials (“Grandma’s Famous Bologna & Mustard Sandwiches – made with only the finest ingredients!”). Sis was a fair but grueling taskmaster. We taped the show. We ran it back. We played it. We learned how to use the microphone. We taped the show again. We ran it back. We played it. We ran it back. We fixed it. We taped some more. And on and on.
Sometime in the faint and early shadows of evening, we wandered back to the house, sweaty from the lack of air conditioning in the closed metal box we’d spent the day in. We noticed Uncle David wandering toward the back yard with a towel and a bar of soap.
Sis: Hey! Where are you going, Uncle David?
Me: Yeah. Where are you going, Uncle David?
Uncle David: Well, seein’ as how your Granny’s bathtub ain’t got no shower, I was going to take one out back.
Sis & Me: Her name is Grandma. Granny’s an ol’ mule.
Uncle David, laughing: Right. Well, I best get cleaned up now.
Me: Okay.
And I followed him. He slipped through the garage to the back yard, and there amongst the hollyhocks, right near the dilapidated wash house, he hooked up a garden hose. Giving me an odd look, he pulled off his tee shirt, turned on the water hose, and began lathering up with the Lava soap. I watched, fascinated. Here was a grown man taking a shower in broad daylight with a garden hose and a bar of soap. It never occurred to me that he would want privacy, that he might want to strip off the cut-off jeans instead of soaking and soaping them. I just watched while he lathered himself – hair, face, beard, armpits, chest, cut-offs, legs, and feet (which were firmly ensconced in flip-flop sandals). He chuckled the whole time, then rinsed off, squirted me once with the hose, grabbed his towel from the stalk of a sturdy hollyhock, and squelched back inside.
When he was dried and dressed, he joined us kids and Grandma for dinner. He told Grandma that I had watched him shower (“And she no more knew than anything that I wasn’t going to take off all my clothes!”), and she laughed in a scandalized sort of way and told me I should be ashamed of myself. I felt my face flush from their teasing and got quieter, prompting Grandma to pull out a stock line about me: “She leaves her talk in the living room at dinnertime.”
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Later that night, after I had cried and whined and secured my cherished place in front of the box fan that cooled our bedroom, I woke to the sounds of the Late Night Movie. My sister was gone. The glowing lights from the TV flickered against the living room and bedroom walls, and I shifted anxiously in bed, trying to fall back asleep, though I knew from the pressure in my abdomen that sleep could be disastrous. Finally, I threw back the thin sheet and crept past the living room to the bathroom. Finished there, I hastened back to the bedroom, but paused for a moment in the doorway between the living room and bedroom, caught by what I saw on the screen.
I must have made a noise. Uncle David raised his head from where he laid sprawled on the floor. His ashtray was nearby, and the area around him was littered with snack food and soda debris. My sister sat in Grandma’s easy chair, her eyes glued to the television. Uncle David beckoned me to sit close to him, but I stopped just behind him and sat on the sofa instead, hugging my knees tightly for protection.
One small and one larger monster on the TV screen were battling it out. I could tell they were monsters mostly from the scary music in the background. A closer shot revealed that the smaller monster wore a black cape lined with red satin. Dracula! The height, breadth of shoulders, and lumpish face of the other monster didn’t register with me. I asked Uncle David. “Frankenstein” was the reply, and I took his answer for truth, although I didn’t see any of the trademark green skin or bolts in the neck. I watched as the battle played out, as Dracula hastened back to a decrepit church trying to beat the sunrise. Oh, I knew the story, you bet! My fascination turned to horror as he failed, decaying into more and more of a nightmare before my very eyes…until he was gone. Only a creepy-looking ring with a blood red stone remained of him.
How Uncle David got me tucked back into bed next to my sister, I have no idea.
Text © 2006 - 2008 by Lupe Matilde Bensonhurst.
All other material © 2006 - 2008 by El Topo Entertainment