Chilling in the Star City with a café mocha — courtesy of a super-cool writer pal. Thinking up some future stories. (Thank you, m’Dear.) No, I cannot close a Starbucks lid correctly — it’s why I’m always spilling coffee on myself.
Everyone is so extraordinarily nice in this town. People actually slow their cars to a stop to allow you to cross the street — even when they have the right of way! They even make eye contact, and smile and nod when they do it! Such a thing would be virtually unheard of in New York, which is basically Thunderdome when compared with Roanoke.
How can such vast numbers of people in this city be so polite? This city might be the eighth wonder of the world.
I need to learn to be a little more pleasant and sociable to match the spirit of humanity here. I can think of it as getting into “Roanoke-mode.”
“Willard” (1971) and its sequel, “Ben” (1972), were another pair of 1970’s movies that got plenty of airtime on 1980’s television. I read both books when I was a kid too.
First I picked up Stephen Gilbert’s Ratman’s Notebooks at a yard sale, because that’s how you found cool horror books during summer vacations when you were too young to drive. (Sometimes adults had few compunctions about what they sold to minors too. I bought a vampire book in gradeschool that was full of nude photos, for some reason, and that led to what I’m sure was an interesting conversation between my parents and the neighbor-proprietor down the street.)
Anyway, I absolutely loved Ratman’s Notebooks (despite its lamentable absence of nude photos) and I finished it in a day or two. The novelization of the “Ben” film by Gilbert A. Ralston was somewhat less impressive, but I still enjoyed it.
If you’re a comics fan, like I am, then it might occur you that “Willard” and his army of trained rats seem to inspire a villain in Batman’s rogue’s gallery — Ratcatcher. Ratcatcher has been a minor league villain since he debuted in DC Comics in 1988, but he’s a pretty neat bad guy when placed in the hands of the right writer.
I feel certain that anyone will recognize Ernest Borgnine in the first trailer below– his face and voice are impossible to confuse with those of another man. If the disaffected, spooky, eponymous Willard looks familiar to you, that’s none other than a young Bruce Davison. He’s a good actor who’s been in a lot of films, but I think a plurality of my friends will know him as Senator Kelly from the first two “X-Men” movies (2000, 2003).
You’ll note the presence of flamethrowers in the trailer for “Ben.” Flamethrowers were a staple of 70’s and 80’s horror films; it was just part of the zeitgeist. They were handy for heroes fighting any nigh-unstoppable nonhuman baddie — think of “The Swarm” (1978), “The Thing” (1982), “C.H.U.D.” (1984), “Aliens” (1986), and “The Blob” (1988), for example. Hell, 1980’s “The Exterminator” featured a vigilante using a flamethrower to kill criminals. It was a weird time.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it … And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable…what then?
I’m honored to share here that The Piker Press will feature four more of my poems in the coming months. “November, Blue Ridge Mountains, 1992” will appear on November 18. “As Silver as the Stars You Tried To Rival” will be published on December 16. “Lilac, Wine, Pomegranate, Black” will appear on January 13, and “Lie To Me, But Brightly” will be featured on February 10.
As always, I am grateful to Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice through The Piker Press!
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 