#anyway i just had this image of Dracula getting real fucking mad to the point he needs to say how much powerful and feared he is

[the-crow-binary]

Dracula: I AM VLAD DRACULA TEPES. THE IMPALER, THE DEMON KING ! THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS ! MASTER OF CASTLEVANIA ! IN MY ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF REIGN I HAVE SLAIN MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS AND VANQUISHED ARMIES WITH JUST THE SNAP OF MY FINGERS ! ONE LOOK AT ME WILL SEND THE MOST FEARSOME WARRIORS CRYING IN THE ARMS OF THEIR MOTHER ! I AM FEARED BY THE NIGHT AND THE DAY ALIKE. EVERYONE TREMBLES AT THE MERE MENTION OF MY NAME. I WILL NOT BE DISRESPECTED LIKE THIS-

Julius, placing his last Uno card on the table: I won.

Dracula: *Flips the table over*

[365days365movies]

January 6, 2021: Last Action Hero (Part 2)

SPOILERS! And check out Part 1 beforehand! Anyway, let’s go! Got a lot to cover, TRUST me.

So, this movie is incredibly cluttered. Anyway, Slater makes his way to the Fart Bomb, and Practice (makes perfect) is a dirty cop working for Vivaldi. Danny and Slater get chained to a pipe, and I’m still surprised we haven’t even slightly revisited the time Danny got taken hostage about, what, an hour ago? Whiskers the Cat Cop arrives and shoots Salieri, and I weep for the part of my sanity that just died typing that sentence.

I want you to know, I mad that GIF. I had to type “furball problem.” I’m losing it, you guys...and I think I’m enjoying it.

Together, Slater and Danny steal the body of Leo the Fart (HUP, there goes a little more sanity), everybody at the funeral has a gun (including one old woman with a straight-up grenade launcher), and so, SO much property is abused and damaged. In other words, it’s a pretty fun action sequence. Leo drops into a conveniently placed tar pit alongside Jack Slater, and Danny briefly becomes a domestic terrorist by shooting a gun in a public area, WOW, the ‘90s was a different time!

So, it’s at this point that I start getting annoyed by Danny always being meta. I realize that I've been praising it for this, but...yeah, no, it’s starting to get annoying now. Especially considering that we’ve got an hour left in the movie. But, on the bright side, it’s also at this point that Benedict becomes my favorite character. This gorgeous motherfucker kills Vivaldi (whose plan was completely nonsensical, by the way), and then turns to the screen. Charles Dance effortlessly channels the spirit of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Duke of Gloucester, as says this to the audience:

If that little turd, Daniel Madigan, can move through parallel worlds, I can move through parallel worlds. In and out! In, steal whatever I want, and out again! Impossible to catch!

I can add colors to the chameleon, change shapes with Proteus for advantages, AND SET THE MURDEROUS MACHIAVEL TO...Anyway...  

Charles Dance is giving his absolute best energies to this role. And this might be a silly movie, but godDAMN is Benedict a great villain for it. It’s immediately followed by the surreal image of a monster truck crashing through the wall of this mansion, and the fight leads to Benedict, Professor Toru Tanaka, Danny, and Jack Slater falling through a portal created by the ticket, and ending up in the real world.

We put Jack’s action-movie world in contrast with the real world, first with little things, and then with a legitimately vicious-looking car accident. Like, wow, it’s a VERY realistic-looking accident. I’d show a GIF of it, but...wow, it’s extremely affecting. Toru dies, and there’s, uh...there’s blood. Man. It’s rough, honestly.

Speaking of affecting, Jack is beginning to understand the true nature of his reality. And Schwarenegger does an OK job pulling that pain off...but like everybody in this movie, his emotions are way calmer than mine would be if I were in his shoes. But there is one character I can identify with: Nick, the theater owner. When he finds out that the ticket works, he starts to talk about the movies he could now visit, the people he could meet. OK, most of them are beautiful female starlets, but still! I get it! Do you know how much I would love to meet Stan Lee? SERIOUSLY? It’d be amazing.

I can also identify with Danny’s mother, who is rightfully PISSED. Seriously, this kid just got assaulted by a robber, brought to the police, and went directly TO THE MOVIE THEATER. GROUND THIS CHILD. GROUND HIM SO GODDAMN HARD.

And then, Benedict experiences the darkest part of the real world, and Dance again shows his talent. He begins by showing surprise and mild horror at the depravity of an early 1990s New York City (a little more dramatically bad than it was in real life at this point, but still), then sees a man assaulted (and possibly killed) for his shoes. He remarks at this in horror...then realizes that the police don’t come as quickly as they do in his film universe. He experiments by killing a man in cold blood, in public, and no one stops him. 

Upon realizing his potential freedom in this world...he makes a plan. He uses the ticket, and brings back...the Ripper. ANY OTHER MOVIE VILLAIN? Dracula? Freddy Kreuger? Jason? Like...nobody? That is...such a missed opportunity, goddamn.  Anyway, their plan is to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger. As in the REAL Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually appears upon his real-life wife at the time Maria goddamn Shriver! Which...yeah, that’s cool, but...the amount of celebrity cameos in this scene is, frankly, INSANE. 

Here’s a list: Little Richard, Jim Belushi, Damon Wayans, Chevy Chase, JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME, MC Hammer. And that’s not counting Tina Turner (the mayor earlier), Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Joan Plowright, and...well, I’ll save the best for last.

I haven’t even mentioned the development of Slater’s as a three-dimensional character in multiple different ways; the Ripper showing up at the movie premiere alongside the movie actor, Tom Noonan; the Ripper KILLING NOONAN’S REAL WORLD AGENT...

This movie is insane. So much to cover, and yet it’s SUCH A LONG GODDAMN MOVIE. This movie is 2 hours and 11 minutes long! SERIOUSLY! I am tired, I gots to go to BEEEEED. Let’s get this climax over with, shall we? Arnold Schwarzenegger meets Jack Slater in some REALLY seamless effect work (this movie has actually aged SO well, damn), the Ripper kidnaps Danny and brings him to the roof of the theater, in a bid to reenact their old battle. Some meta dialogue takes place from the Ripper, and he THROWS DANNY OFF THE ROOF. Noonan’s also actually pretty good at playing this unhinged, Joker-esque maniac, by the way.

Jack kills the Ripper (again), and Danny’s saved from falling by Jack, just in time for Benedict to show up and make my day once more. He expounds the true potential of the ticket and film villains (frustrating me even more), while also chewing the scenery splendidly. He points out that any movie villain would love the real world, noting that in this world, the bad guys win. He shoots Jack Slater, and as he’s about to win, Slater shoots him in the eye, resulting in this shot.

Nice. 

But he drops the ticket, which lands near a theater showing the classic Ingmar Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, a movie which is on my list for Drama December. Or maybe Experimental June, I haven’t decided yet. Anyway, the ticket activates in front of that theater and...that’s Ian fucking McKellen.

THAT IS IAN. FUCKING. MCKELLEN. PLAYING INGMAR BERGMAN’S DEATH. WHAT. HOLY SHIT. And that happens just as Slater is literally about to die in the ambulance, and Danny summons his domestic terrorist impulses again, whipping out a gun and hijacking the ambulance to get Jack back to the theater. Meanwhile, Ian McKellen just KILLS a dude on the street, because this movie is secretly AMAZING. DeathKellen follows the ambulance to Nick’s movie theater as Jack is dying. Leading to one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen.

McKellen fucking TAKES this movie as an omnipotent death, and is essentially Death ex Machina. My God. This movie is the silliest, craziest, wackiest, most nonsensical, crazy movie that I’ve seen...and goddamn does it have some amazingly great moments. To the extent that I only just realized that the fucking cartoon cat is voiced by DANNY FUCKING DEVITO. WHAT. THE FUCK.

And all of this is also running over the almost completely ignored fact that Danny is still greatly saddened about the death of his father. And this film completely passes that fact over. Like I said, there’s so much extra folderol in the film, and it really did have the chance to be this emotional, existential epic. But sadly...it’s kind of all over the place.

Anyway, Jack’s back in the movie, where his wounds heal, and he now has a new understanding of his own fictional existence. He officially becomes the meta. And also ruins the Jack Slater franchise forever. Yeah, uh...the franchise has literally become self aware. And that’s not gonna be a good thing for the movie.

And that’s Last Action Hero! Epilogue coming in a few hours, so stay tuned for that. And I gotta tell you...I have some words to say about this movie. Some great, and some...stay tuned.

[wolfofansbach]

amateurish analysis of the Wolf Man (1941) cause I’m bored

The Wolf Man (1941), is one of my favorite movies of all time and, I’m convinced, one of the greatest horror movies (potentially also one of the greatest psych thrillers, too, and if I may be so bold, maybe even one of the best of the golden age of cinema, period) ever made. Most people are probably at least vaguely familiar with the image of Lon Chaney Jr. in his classic wolf man get up, stalking a foggy forest. Unfortunately, the actual plot of the film, its characters and themes, have failed for the most part to seep into the popular consciousness. Most people could tell you the basic tales of Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula, but probably not that of Larry Talbot. The wolf man is more famous for his part in the later, cheesier, and somewhat shallower ‘Monster rally’ flicks like Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man or House of Dracula (don’t get me wrong; I love those movies), than for his debut film. This is a damn shame, because iMO the Wolf Man is probably the best of the early Universal horror pictures, and a much smarter film than you might expect of an old black-and-white monster flick. Largely when read through the lens of a psychological tragedy instead of a simple monster story.

(More under the cut, and warning: long as fuck. If you read to the end you win a prize: my congratulations for wasting twenty minutes of your life on me. A lot of what I say here has been said elsewhere and better by others. I’ve just had werewolves on the mind lately and wanted to put some of my thoughts to paper. Or screen.)

First a brief overview of the story:

After years abroad in America, the tragic death of his his brother in a hunting accident brings Lawrence “Larry” Talbot, estranged son of stiff-necked patrician Sir John Talbot, home at last to the little Welsh village of Llanwelly.

While settling back in, Larry finds himself smitten by a local shopkeep’s daughter, Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers, one of my first screen crushes). Despite the fact that she’s engaged to be married, he manages to wring a not-date out of her. Of course, she does insist that her friend Jenny tag along, and the three visit a Roma camp just outside town.

While Jenny visits with the palm-reader Bela (Bela Lugosi, towards the end of his A-lister years), Larry and Gwen go for a moonlit stroll.

Bela sees a pentagram in Jenny’s hand and tells her to run. Moments later, Larry and Gwen hear a howl. Then a scream. Larry rushes towards the sound, to find Jenny being mauled by a massive wolf. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the girl, and before he can beat the animal to death with his new cane (topped with a silver wolf’s head, and purchased earlier from Gwen’s shop), it bites him, too.

The next morning, Larry is questioned by his father and the authorities, who tell him there was no dead wolf at the scene. Only the corpse of Bela, the fortune teller. He insists in vain that he killed a wolf, and tries to show them his wound, only to find it’s healed up.

Dun dun dun!

Gwen receives the calumny of the town for being out and about ‘unescorted’ with a man other than her fiancé. Larry on the other hand, is suspected in the deaths of both Bela and Jenny, and his mental state begins to unravel.

It all comes to a head a few days later when Larry speaks with Maleva, Bela’s sage old mother. She tells him that he was bitten by Bela, a werewolf, and now will become a werewolf himself. A shaken Larry shares his fears with Gwen, who is less than convinced. But Larry rushes home that night and transforms into a wolf-monster which then kills the town’s grave digger.

Now things really start to unravel. Larry awakens in his bedroom, covered in mud, with wolf tracks leading from the window. With the discovery of the grave-digger’s body, the men of Llanwelly become convinced there’s a wolf at large, and organize to hunt it down. Larry, now fully convinced he is a werewolf, tries in vain to convince his father and the town’s notables of such. He is dismissed and increasingly suspected of madness. Before Sir John goes out to join the hunt, Larry convinces him to take the silver cane with him.

The night of the hunt, Larry visits Gwen to tell her that he’s going away. But then he sees a pentagram in her hand--a sign that indicates to a werewolf his next victim. He runs home and begs his father to restrain him. Sir John obliges, hoping to show his son this madness is all in his head.

Of course, the restraints do not hold him, and soon the wolf man is stalking the woods again. Gwen rushes out to find Larry. Dodging the hunters, the wolf man Larry finds Gwen and attacks her. But before he can kill her, Sir John appears and manages to beat the monster to death with the silver cane.

Sir John and Gwen watch in horror as the wolf man transforms back into Lawrence Talbot.

Roll credits.

Summary over

What’s most interesting about the Wolf Man to me, is that it was not conceived as a monster movie. Not exactly, anyway. In Curt Siodmak’s original screenplay, Larry is bitten by a wolf and becomes convinced that he has become a werewolf himself. But we never see Larry in the shape of a wolf, and whether or not he has really become a monster or simply gone mad is left ambiguous. At the last moment, Universal decided they wanted a straightforward monster movie, and changes were made accordingly.

However, despite these alterations, it is still quite easy to read the film as a story of insanity and superstition, rather than one about monsters, and I wonder if this was not Siodmak’s intention, studio mandated rewrites notwithstanding. Even within the film’s own universe, more characters doubt the existence of werewolves than accept it. Unlike many monster (or ghost, or demon, etc.) movies, the supernatural skeptics are not portrayed as bullheaded or unreasonable, and there is no grand scene at the end where they realize their naturalistic errors.

Sir John for one has little patience for his son’s lycanthropic nonsense. He explains the legend of the werewolf as a primitive explanation for the duality of man, his capacity for both good and evil. When asked if he believes in werewolves, the town physician, Doctor Lloyd, tells Larry only that “a man lost in the mazes of his own mind may imagine that he’s anything”.

It is easy to watch the film and imagine that just maybe, Larry is lost in the mazes of his own mind, and there is never any monster at all, except the one he imagines himself to be (and thus “becomes” in spirit). When Bela in his wolf form bites Larry, we don’t see a monstrous hybrid, only an ordinary wolf (played by a German shepherd), which Larry beats to death with his cane. The film is told from Larry’s point of view, and before he is convinced of the existence of werewolves, we see nothing obviously supernatural. Only an ordinary wolf.

Only after Larry comes to believe in werewolves do we see an outwardly supernatural monster in the form of Larry’s own two-legged wolf man. Perhaps it’s Larry’s paranoia in the aftermath of the wolf attack that leads him to become a beast. But only in his head.

We never get any confirmation from the other characters that Larry is indeed a literal werewolf. When he kills his first victim, Richardson the gravedigger, you must watch Richardson’s face. He first spots the wolf man crouching under a tree, just before it lunges at him, but his expression isn’t “holy fuck what the hell is that thing?” it’s more “what’s that guy doing?”. Only when it springs for his throat does Richardson panic. It’s easy to imagine in the place of the monster, a maddened but very human Larry Talbot, probably barefoot and wild-eyed. Enough to unnerve Richardson and make him take a second look, but not enough to cause immediate and mortal terror, as we might expect if he was actually face to face with a supernatural monster.

Later, when the wolf man attacks Gwen, and Sir John rushes to her rescue, his face is again less that of a man who’s just been confronted by an honest to God werewolf, and more that of someone who’s just stumbled upon a man assaulting a young woman in the forest. Once he kills the wolf man and it slowly transforms back into Larry Talbot, there is certainly shock in Sir John’s face. But rather then the shock of witnessing a magic transfiguration, might this not be the shock of a man who’s realized what his own son is capable of?

Gwen, upon witnessing the same reversion to Larry’s human form, exclaims “Larry!” But Evelyn Ankers delivers the line in such a way that I hear less “werewolves are real?” and more “I can’t believe Larry Talbot just tried to strangle me.”

So if we grant that Larry has not actually become a wolf, and is instead fallen prey to superstition and his own psyche, whence comes the transformation? Why does he believe he is a werewolf? Why does he kill people?

Lon Chaney Jr. was great at playing sympathetic (and sometimes pathetic) characters that you just can’t help but feel for. His performance makes it hard not to like Larry, who seems every bit the put-upon everyman.

But long before he is ever bitten by the beast, there are indications that Larry Talbot has got a darker side.

Towards the beginning of the film, as mentioned earlier, he becomes smitten by Gwen Conliffe. But the manner in which this happens is quite disturbing. He is tinkering with his father’s telescope, and using it to scout out the town. That’s when he spots Gwen through her bedroom window. Rather than avert his eyes, he focuses the lens and watches for a bit, before going down to the shop to say hello.

The “wolf” man, indeed.

When he goes down to the shop to flirt, she’s not particularly interested. Much less so when he alludes to the earrings she keeps on her bureau in her room, spotted through the telescope. But Larry is pushy, and won’t take no for an answer. He insists on a date (”I’ll pick you up at eight”). She says no. He shows up at eight anyways. She caves.

I’m willing to chalk up some of the screenplay’s depiction of such unsettling behavior to shifting social mores and old-style sexism, but even in the 1940s watching a girl through her bedroom window was beyond the pale. So I think at least some of this was intentional on Siodmak’s part.

So it would seem the bite of the werewolf did not make Larry into a predator--he already had that side to him. In fact, when he first visits Gwen’s shop, in the face of his bold advances, she sardonically offers to sell him a cane topped with a wooden dog’s head (”how about a little dog? That would suit you!”). Larry says that won’t do, and the narrative agrees. Because next she suggests a cane capped with a silver wolf. That suits him, agree not only Gwen and the script, but also Larry himself, because he buys it.

Dogs are a byword for lechery and boorishness, but wolves are a byword for much worse: rapacity, savagery, bloodlust, unbridled lust.

What’s the significance of Larry choosing a wolf over a dog? Is there any? Am I overthinking this? Yeah, probably. You tell me.

So Larry goes with Gwen and Jenny to the Roma camp. He’s insistently flirting with Gwen when they hear the howl and the scream that alert them to Jenny’s peril. Larry rushes in to rescue Jenny, and though she’s already dead, he manages to kill the wolf with his cane.

Despite the selflessness of his act (sidenote: abandoning the “it’s all in Larry’s head” interpretation for a moment, it’s been pointed out how ironic it is that Larry, who has been a bit of a creep up until now, does this one good deed and in doing so damns himself to become a monster), it is ultimately his persistence in pursuing Gwen that leads to his being bitten by the beast.

Is it the case that, once convinced he has been bitten by a werewolf and is therefore doomed to become one himself, Larry’s subconscious finds an excuse to vent the violent psychosexual impulses that have been lurking there all the while? After all, he’s a monster now. He can’t help it.

What triggers Larry’s first transformation? A few days after he’s bitten, he goes back to the Roma camp, ostensibly to blow off some steam at the fair. While there, he runs into Gwen again, who happens to be with her fiancé Frank Andrews. He and Andrews have a ‘friendly’ competition at the shooting gallery, but when Larry is presented with a target in the shape of a cardboard cut-out wolf, he freaks and bolts. This (and the subsequent werewolf-centric conversation he has with Bela’s mother, Maleva) are the immediate cause of his first outing as ‘the wolf man’, but it seems pertinent that it follows right on the heels of another tense interaction with Gwen and with the man that’s going to marry her.

Once he becomes the wolf man, his first victim is Richardson the grave digger. Richardson is a man. But Richardson’s death seems almost accidental. Larry runs across him and kills him out of principle. Gwen on the other hand, is built up by the narrative as his “perfect victim”. Larry is horrified when he sees the apparition of a pentagram in her palm, believing himself destined to kill her. Later, during the climax, he transforms and specifically hunts her in his wolf form.

In short, both the wolf man and Larry want Gwen.

So is the wolf man a manifestation of Larry Talbot’s (possibly thanatophilic) lust? His savage sexual hunger given free rein in the shape of the “wolf man”?

It’s certainly an interesting, if eDgY, interpretation, to see Larry Talbot not as a doomed everyman, but rather as a sexually driven serial killer. Or at least, I think so.

(Worth noting that the other werewolf in the film, Bela, also transforms after a one-on-one encounter with a young woman, Jenny. And her first question of the fortune teller is “can you tell me when I’m going to be married?”)

Usually I’m not a fan of lazy “it’s all in X character’s head!” interpretations. They often come across as uninspired and pointless. But in this case I believe the film itself bears it out (or can be plausibly watched that way).

As mentioned above, Sir John makes several speeches on the duality of man. The same duality we are shown with such clarity in Larry himself. Sir John is played wonderfully by Claude Rains (probably best known as Casablanca’s Capt. Renault, but also starring in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Lawrence of Arabia) and like I mentioned above, is never made a figure of fun or contempt for his disbelief in the supernatural, unlike so many similar skeptics in monster movies. At most, his skepticism is portrayed as tragic, in that he doesn’t believe until it’s too late. At least, it can be argued (as I’ve been doing here) he was right in that there were never any literal monsters.

It seems superfluous to have Sir John make so many erudite statements on the monstrosity and capacity for savagery that exists in man, if we are not to at least contemplate the possibility that this is enough to explain the events of the film, without recourse to the supernatural.

So what is Sir John’s role in his son’s transformation, literal or otherwise? First, it’s important to note that Larry’s presumably deceased mother is never so much as mentioned. I’m sure there’s something Freudian at work here, but I’m too lazy to work it out.

The main point is that it means Sir John is alone in dealing with his son. At the beginning of the film, Sir John, glad at Larry’s return from America, tells him (regarding the traditionally austere relationship between aristocratic fathers and sons) “between us there shall be no more such reserve”. Through the remainder of the film, he again and again counsels his son that there are no werewolves at all. He’s all rationality and cool-headedness. When he speaks with Maleva, the old sage who has been Larry’s go-to in all things werewolf, he angrily denounces her as “the old gypsy woman who’s been filling his head with this werewolf nonsense”.

But of course, all this is no to avail. Towards the end of the movie, when Larry (almost hopefully) wonders if the people of Llanwelly will storm Talbot Castle and lynch him, Sir John falls back on the certainties of aristocratic privilege to reassure his son (”You’re a Talbot! This is Talbot Castle! You think those people can come in here and drag you out?”) Regardless of whether or not Larry literally sprouts fur and fangs, Sir John’s reason and deconstruction of superstition is powerless to control the monster in his son. In the end, all he can do is crudely bludgeon it to death. Tragic, really.

A commentary on the impotence of psychiatric analysis? Probably not. Still interesting to think about.

Now on to Maleva. Maria Ouspenskaya plays the crude old crone stereotype, but I think there’s a bit more to the character. She’s the mother of Bela, the Roma fortune teller who ostensibly bites Larry. She is perhaps the only staunch believer in werewolfism in the film save Larry himself, once he becomes one (or believes he has become one, if you’re staying with me). When Larry visits her just before his first transformation, she gives him the low-down on werewolf lore (”whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives, becomes a werewolf himself”). She also gives him a necklace marked with a pentagram (”the sign of the wolf”) and promises him it can break the evil spell.

He immediately gives it away to Gwen, hoping that it might protect her from himself, so we don’t get to see if it would have stopped the transformation. But when Gwen is attacked by the wolf man at the film’s climax, the charm does exactly jack-shit, so it seems unlikely. So Maleva, who believes in werewolves and even has magic charms meant to ward them off, is as powerless as the rational Sir John or Doctor Lloyd to contain the monster in Larry Talbot. The film itself never explains why the charm fails, but under the interpretation that Larry’s condition is mental rather than supernatural, of course a magic charm fails to keep him from killing.

Why does Maleva believe in werewolves? The film would immediately suggest it is because she comes from a culture that (in the movie at least) believes in them. But there’s another factor: she’s the mother of the other werewolf in the movie.

If we assume werewolves are just a manifestation of human lust, murderous or sexual or both, then it’s no wonder Maleva believes in werewolves: her son had the same monster in him as Larry Talbot. Explains her belief in the creature, and also why her charm doesn’t work. I suppose it might be easier to believe your loved one’s condition is a magic creature rather than simply a very sick human being.

So Maleva becomes as tragic a character as Sir John, both of whose explanations for the murderousness of their sons cannot do anything to actually restrain that murderousness.

(I haven’t and won’t even go into the implications of Larry killing Bela the werewolf with the phallic symbol that is a cane, and later being beaten to death by his father with the same, because it’s too on the nose and also it would probably fill another ten paragraphs)

Anyways, watch the Wolf Man. It’s a great movie. Whether you want to play psych 101 and overanalyze it like I’ve just done or just enjoy a straight up monster movie. The performances are great, the atmosphere is spooky, the score is fantastic. It’s a classic. Check it out.

And remember:

Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.

[resmarted]

we are eight years old when we have our first lovers’ quarrel. for being second graders, we are very darla and alfalfa, sitting together in the sandbox during our recess period because it is considered something for little kids and we are supposed to be too old for it now. we aren’t. it’s the only place we can seem to be alone, and that’s where all the trouble starts. my friends are sick of me trading them out for a girl, and i’m never sure if their jealousy is over you or me, mainly because we are all nerds and it’s weird if anyone even talks to us let alone a girl. we talk about all kinds of stuff though. you tell me what you dreamt of the night before and i dig piles of sand for you to sculpt things out of, and then we discuss what we had for lunch earlier. we don’t eat lunch together, that’s just too much. i sit with my friends and you with yours and we both hang out by the monkey bars with all our other friends at first, but slowly migrate to the sandbox and that’s when the ooh’s and ahh’s and kissy noises start. we think nothing of it at first, but the tension builds over time. one day i can be heard from across the blacktop screaming, no you’re mean! i slam a rock down when i say it in a frustrated angst and sand blows up into your eyes. you start to cry but i drop to my knees like no no, i’m so sorry, stop. i didn’t mean to, i’m so sorry! hold still and look at me and try not to blink. you do begrudgingly and suddenly i am blowing softly into them and asking if it’s helping. it’s too late though and the teacher on yard duty has been alerted, and before we know it both of our parents have been called in and i’m being suspended and have to see a therapist about my anger issues. i keep saying i didn’t hit her, it wasn’t even on purpose, but it doesn’t matter because it was an act of aggression and now i’m a problem child. you’re too scared to say anything because your parents are there and we are all in the principal’s office and the room is swelling up with pressure, everyone’s eyes are on you. i can’t even remember what we fought about, but i think it had to do with how my friends wanted to hang out that day and i figured just this once i could throw them a bone. i’ve barely seen them since our love blossomed from being randomly paired as fingerpainting buddies. ever since we’ve been inseparable and i was just trying to be fair, you know? my parents tell me to leave you alone and yours forbid you to talk to me. the teachers all know now to keep an eye on us and everyone’s watching us now, for real. we stop talking or acknowledging each other, but we deal with it in fucked up ways, like when your friends convinced you act like you were grossed out by me or when mine would suggest i still wasn’t over you and i would respond by acting like you were just another science experiment. we both bottle our feelings up until seventh grade when we are caught holding hands and kissing at a birthday party, which causes a whole new ruckus when you’ve barely recovered from the first one years earlier. by high school you have become a really surly goth girl, nothing like you were with the abercrombie crowd you were once so loyal to. in all the unlikely scenarios to happen, i became somewhat of a jock once i learned to take my aggression out with a baseball bat and eventually football. one day during junior year i get into a fight with my cheerleader girlfriend, someone whose name you once wrote next to friends 4eva on your trapperkeeper in white-out, was supposed to be my ride that day. i hadn’t taken the school bus in years and almost decided to just walk home, but then i saw you get on. something came over me and i jumped in as soon as they were about to shut the doors. you were looking out your window in a daze, music blasting into your ears, and i walk directly to the back to slide in beside you. you don’t even notice me until the bus starts moving and the first thing you do is shoot me a very angry browed stare. i start to say something but you pull your earphones off and just go, what? i try to say how’s it going and you say no i mean what are you doing here? i say there were no other seats, but there are plenty of seats. this bus doesn’t even go anywhere near my house and we both know it. you say something really vicious like the angry little chihuahua you’ve become, something like, i didn’t know your nose could detach this far from kelly’s asshole, and i can only laugh and say that’s a good one. i’m not as smart or as witty as you, i’m actually terrified of you on most days. i ask if your parents still hate me and you scoff like, why do you even care? i care. i have always cared. i’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you as far as they’re concerned, and you laugh like yeah that makes three of us. i follow you out to your stop and you look at me like i’m a crazy person before calmly walking ahead. and maybe i am a crazy person, this is a crazy person thing to do, i live nowhere near you and was banned from your life years ago. but here i am chasing after you like it’s another game of tag, except i’m following you home, uninvited and unperplexed. i just want to know why you hate me, or that’s what i say anyway. i want to know everything about you and to find a sandbox for us to dig in together and just erase all the bad parts of our impalpable history. i want to see what’s under your black nylons and what your tiny hand with the chipped black nails would look like in my beast paw. you turn around and say that you don’t hate me, in this way like i’m supposed to know. you grasp at your forehead in this frustrated way like you’re trying to explain where babies come from to a child, and these little wisps of bangs fly out from under a black beanie in the process. look i know your dad doesn’t like me and i’m not the wholesome image of the strapping young man that he expects to be in your life but, and you stop me. what? since when do you want to be in my life? ever since you let kelly give you a blowie at the spring formal you two have been inseparable. i look at you like i’m surprised you even know anything about me, and i am. look, i know kelly was your friend, and you let out a loud scream-grunt into the air. the fucked up part is that i only started talking to kelly in hopes it would get me closer to you, that maybe she would bring you up in conversation and give me hints about your life and who you are. all she did was complain and soon the friendship crumbled and after losing all hope i settled for a vapid drama queen that was just someone to kill time with. i can see your black lace bra through your white blouse, and you’ve got this black sweater and these black boots and i want to know why you’ve drained yourself of color but can’t stop staring at the way your mouth moves and how hard your stare is when you rant at me. i don’t even know what you’re saying anymore and the whole world stops when i lean in to kiss you and you grab onto my face, clawing like the little black cat that you are, and kissing me back with a force i have never felt before. you pull back and smack the shit out of me, my face beating red when you go there, is that what you wanted? we’re in a quiet suburb and everyone is inside watch tv when i drop to my knees in the middle of the street and say yes, and a million more, it’s worth every slap to me. you sneak me into your backyard and the garden your mother grew protects us from being seen when i taste you until midnight and your fingernails clench into the soil. you wear your same goth clothes the next day to school but with my letterman jacket and everyone oohs and ahhs. someone makes a shitty comment about how i’m trading a barbie like kelly for dracula’s daughter and i nearly go postal, grabbing him by the collar and slamming him against the nearest locker. i ask him to repeat what he said and he gives me that shit eating grin that i hate so i grab him by the throat. it isn’t until i hear your little voice speak up beside me like, please don’t. and so i don’t. i let him go and walk away, grabbing your hand with proudest posture. we eat lunch together alone and everyone around us gossips about it the same way they’ve done time and time again. i don’t give any fucks. you give a few fucks, but your shyness is slowly replaced with a flirtatious kind of vibrancy. we make out on the steps outside the library, my grabby hands and your thighs, god those thighs. you have been my forbidden lover since the beginning of time now and all i want to do is to feel and squeeze and touch and grab and god don’t go yet, i haven’t even felt up your boobs, your blouse still has all the buttons done. you start going to my games and i go to concerts with you for bands with names like fragile monsters and fully loaded impostors, and we manage to keep it from your parents for an entire year. when they find out, they’re too tired to even be mad about it at this point. in a surprising twist they see you as someone who is adult enough to make her own decisions and there must be something drawing us back together again and again like this. i actually end up becoming friends with your dad, the most sensational part of all. he’s glad that i got you to open up more to color again and i don’t tell him that i actually love when you dress like the craft and that is basically a form of lingerie at this point, because i don’t want to give the guy a heart attack. same goes for when he asks about the scratch mark on my face, i play it off as something that happened at practice but really i just don’t want to be like actually i was eating your daughter’s pussy so good that in a euphoric spasm it made her involuntarily claw half my face off and i fucking loved it. i fucking love you.