On a blissful Saturday afternoon late in the summer of 'sixty one, while entranced by the cathode-ray transmissions of the one-eyed sailor with the smoked-ham biceps, bladder jaw and segmented chin, my mother padded into our living room in a frayed chemise, her feet bare and gray with ash, stood in front of the screen of our bulky black & white, and announced we were going to watch a 'spooky movie'.
          To my considerable annoyance, she turned the dial to WNEW's channel five. And, as Popeye pummeled Bluto into coo-coo bird stupidity, the carnival gaiety of trilling pipe-whistles abruptly gave way to the foreboding thrum of jungle drums. A 'kooky' New Yorker-style graphic of turtle-necked beatniks hobnobbing in an espresso bar with disk-lipped cannibals displaced Popeye's pinwheel of spinach-fueled punches. Clouds of cigarette smoke coalesced in cross-fade into the legend, Drive-in Jungle Jive on Five.
          A peevish scowl crinkled my brow. I'm missing Popeye for this?
          Now, I had never seen a 'spooky movie'. Or at least not in its entirety. I didn't avoid them. I simply wasn't aware of their existence. I was only seven. The closest I had ever come was the oddity of watching Sean Connery wrestle a yard gnome in Darby O'Gill and the Little People. A year would pass before the creature's face from the drive-in quickie I Was A Teenage Frankenstein––re-colored in putrid greens, bilious yellows and, of course, abattoir reds––would etch itself on my retinas in jolting close-up. And before Mr. Bennie, our neighborhood druggist, in a moment worthy of the younger Lon Chaney's lycanthropic-transformations, would exchange a pair of quarters for my first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. I was a long ways off from becoming the monster-obsessed geek I am today.
          My fondness for Mad magazine; the jigglesome curves of Little Annie Fanny; Rocky & Bullwinkle; Three Stooges shorts; The Loves of Dobie Gillis' Maynard G. Krebs; Slinky coils; pink gobs of Silly Putty; Etch-a-Sketch screens; Pez dispensers; chocolate Devil Dogs; Kool-Aid; McDonald's 15 cent cheeseburgers; and the wayward offspring of tv's Ernie Kovacs––Sandy Becker, Chuck McCann and Soupy Sales––over-rode all other concerns in my nascent life. And my love for the Fleischer Brothers' Popeye cartoons transcended even these. So my mother's intrusion was a breach bordering on the unforgivable.
          Nonetheless, as she joined me on the sofa, I retracted my sulky lip, nestled into a burrow of her pungent underarm, and resigned myself to watching the gloomy procession of ghouls lumbering across our tv screen. My mother, a psychiatric nurse, bore no qualms about inflicting needless trauma on my delicate and impressionable psyche, so she unilaterally decided––Popeye be damned!––I would watch my very first 'spooky movie' in all its wretched cinematic glory on that blissful Saturday afternoon. Truthfully, until that day on the sofa, my only real encounter with a 'spooky movie' happened after a game of mock domesticity in the dirt lot behind the building my family occupied in the late nineteen fifties.
          The building was in a neighborhood just on the outskirts of Yale. It was populated by a community of blacks and Latinos who never really benefited from the monies pumped into New Haven's urban revitalization programs. As I remember it, it was a place noisy with the constant sounds of doo-woppers in harmonized caterwaul; transistor radios crackling with seriously fonky rhythm and blues; and the mambo of spit-curled Puerto Ricans. Lacquered coifs wrapped in neon-colored doo-rags was the order of the day.
          Despite whatever booty Santa stashed in our toy-box Christmas Eve, for me and my friends dirt was still our plaything of choice. It was always filled with surprises: colored glass; animal skulls; Cracker Jack toys; bugs; doll parts; weathered centerfolds of mold-stained white women––the top layer of whole, long-forgotten civilizations. It was versatile, too. You could do anything with dirt from build a house to eat it. If God could make people out of dirt, it was good enough for us.
          On the day of my initial brush with spooky films, a pre-pubescent love triangle of Kevin, Sharon and I had just finished a pee-soaked round of our special ‘slum-edition’ of house, in which all of the necessary structures and comestibles were made from dirt. I entered my family's quarters on the second floor, my legs dusty and streaked with urine, and turned on the Motorola. It was tuned, by chance, to the last tragic moments of King Kong. I gaped at the screen in paralyzed awe; reeling in a vertiginous warp of such mind-bending proportions, I would not have a comparable experience until a blotter of brown-dot surged through my system eleven years later.
          A squadron of droning biplanes swarmed the gigantic ape hugging the Empire State.  Fusillades of machine-gun bullets fired into his heart. The dying colossus stared at the blood pooled in his palm.  He gently laid down the woman grasped in his paw on a ledge of the skyscraper. He swooned. Staggered. Fell.  Simultaneously, with a reverberating thud, my eighty-year old babysitter stumbled and died on the upper floor.
          Beyond this synchronistic collision between Willis O'Brien's stop-motion mountain gorilla, and a cowled Mr. Death, I had never seen a 'spooky movie' in my life. The movie on that blissful Saturday afternoon was a black and white production from the early 1940s. Charlie Chan's right-hand man, Birmingham Brown, was in it. Birmingham was played by Mantan Moreland but in this movie his name was Jeff. Mantan made a lot of money jeffin' in Hollywood. Mantan was famous for his adroit comic timing; bug-eyed double takes; slow burns and the phrase “Feets do yo' stuff!”
          Long before Michael Jackson 'moonwalked' through “Billy Jean,” Mantan, a vaudeville veteran of the 1920s, encapsulated the existential plight of the disinherited by mastering the metaphorical social allusion of running at frantic speeds while going absolutely nowhere at all. So it was no mistake he found himself in a production of Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center in the late nineteen fifties.