One was the coolest white guy in town. To me he was perfection. He wore white clothing that matched his hair (which was cut into bangs and were bleached platinum blond), smoked white cigarettes, drove a white Stingray, and had the perfect girlfriend. Most of the guys on screen couldn’t match his charisma. Not all the guys were Mr. Perfect, though. Most were just regular folks in looks and behavior. Others were thugs or thug wannabes. The girls, many with the still popular beehive do’s, didn’t make the same type of an impression unless one of the more beautiful ones graced the place. If that happened, and you could tear yourself away from watching her long enough to look around, you’d likely catch the eyes of any guy there stealing a glance at her as often as possible. God I loved going to the movies.
My grandmother gave me a lot of grief about my smart mouth. Usually this was an opportunity to take a dig at a friend of whom she disapproved, and some of it must have been the audacity I exhibited in calling her on some of her shit. She didn’t like to be called. I guess she could have stopped my weekly cinematic excursions if she’d chosen, but the truth was that they were as much a part of her routine as mine.
When Fridays rolled around and I headed home after school I was usually pretty tired. Because of increased homework demands, and especially my inefficient response to those demands (often influenced by television programming), my school night bedtime was around 11:30 PM (an incredibly late hour I was informed few years later during a sixth grade visit to the principal’s office), so I really wanted to relax at the completion of the school week. I might go out and play army with a friend, but the play was subdued, and often I just watched The Early Show and waited around until dinner. That was followed by the national news, and later, after Route 66, I watched The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock. I usually made it through the local news at 11, and sometimes through the first 15 or so minutes of The Late Show before I crashed.
Saturday was my grandmother’s day to sleep-in, so I tried to get up as quietly as possible to watch Action Theatre at 7:30 AM. I really liked the Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen serial which bookended whatever movie played. Since there was no alarm clock that day, my actual waking times varied widely. Sometimes I made the entire show, but sometimes I missed an hour or a portion of an hour. On a few days I might miss the thing entirely (I always blamed granny for that), and on equally rare days I got up early enough to see the test pattern before sign-on. Anyway, after the movie I watched cartoons and waited for breakfast.
A lot of times my next door neighbors’ grandson, who stayed with them on Saturdays, would come over to hang out. In truth, he was the person who got me started going to the movies in the first place, so I owe him a lot. The movie started at 1 PM, so after lunch he and I, or another friend and I (if no one was around I went alone), walked uptown to see whatever flick was showing. Admission was 25 cents, so my grandmother gave me 50 cents for the movie and popcorn (she sometimes even paid admission for one of my friends). Now I don’t really care for popcorn, so that extra quarter fed into another great diversion—comics.
My love of comic books began when I discovered their existence. What’s not to like? Even before I could read I bought them just to look at the pictures. I started out enjoying war comics, especially Sgt. Rock, and what I called scary comics, like Batman or Superman. The way the movies worked into the comics was simple: I went to the movies, did not buy popcorn, then after the movie went to search the comic rack at Tallent’s Drug Store across the street from The Hollywood for two new titles. With the exception of Classics Illustrated comics, which were 15 cents each, all other comics cost 12 cents each, and a penny in tax for two, so I purchased two each week. The end of the day was well on the way by the time I got home, so I spent the night reading and/or watching TV until I went to bed.
Like most spoiled baby boomers, I had a lot of toys, and like many boys of that time I had a lot of toy guns. I had a hard plastic, red, spring loaded .45 that fired little suction tipped darts and served me through several years of campaigns. I also had a shoulder holster and a snub nosed .38 that fired plastic bullets when the shell was powered by a cap. Mom got me a machinegun that, when wound up, would make rat-tat-tat sounds at each trigger pull. I had a lot of the usual stuff, cars, Lincoln logs, Tinker Toys, science toys, and lots of plastic soldiers, including Civil War armies with two cannons each, and other things, too.
Until the late spring of 1963, I received most of my toys as Christmas or birthday presents, with a few wild cards thrown in along the way, but a large package filled with toys from mom and dad appeared one day and changed all that and brought a new obsessions. One was a plastic model of Frankenstein walking over a grave. I was in awe. I didn’t even know those things existed. The others were large, green, plastic soldiers with more realistic detail than I was accustomed to. There were other things in the box as well, but who cared after those two?
And so it was that every six or eight weeks the packages came. Frankenstein was followed by Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The big soldiers also continued, but now included Japanese, German, and Russian troops. I also received my first WWII combat aircraft models in those shipments.
If all these things weren’t enough diversion from school work and activities, there was the stumbling block of girls in the classroom. Christ almighty, how could I be expected to do a goddamned thing when surrounded by girls all the time? I couldn’t keep my eyes off em. I thought about them all the time. For instance, during Math time I might be in the midst of a sex fantasy about a classmate or teacher (we had quite a number of good looking teachers), or might be mentally sodomizing some beauty during Geography. I walked around with a boner for goodly portions of each school day. So, as I said before, my grades plummeted that first year with granny.
So, what do the toys and other diversions, as I call them, have to do with my musical history? Nothing in the narrow sense, but in the larger picture they were all part of the same pop cultural exposure which led to the development of a personal critical aesthetic I would use to evaluate all experience from then to now.
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