Frankenstein Takes a Driver's Test

When I was living in Downingtown I tried desperately to get a nickname, attempting to get people to call me “Spider”. I kept trying, but everyone kept ignoring me. The closest I got was Mantis or Daddy Longlegs, which I didn’t like. Kids used those as derogatory references to my gangly arms and legs. No cognomen ever stuck, which in Downingtown was probably a good thing since most sobriquets I heard were derisive. Nobody wants to get stuck with the epithet Quasimodo. Some may consider the one I finally earned just as bad. “Frank” became my nickname, short for Frankenstein.

“They’re both monsters, aren’t they?”

No, actually neither is a monster. Quasimodo was a deformed human being. The hunchback really represents the near standard of a human, flawed but with kindly and protective tendencies, especially in comparison to the handsome, but shallow Captain Phoebus, who is more the real monster.

Frankenstein was the scientist who created the monster. I was the slightly hunched-backed boy who created horror stories. I don’t know how much my classmates knew about my writing in Tenth Grade. We did write those short stories in English and I got teacher recognition for mine. Besides “Rescue” there was another, “Purgatory Story”. But these weren’t Horror stories per se.

“Rescue” concerned a young man stranded on the side of a cliff. “Purgatory Story” was about a group of teenagers who became lost in a cave. Both stories had twist endings, which weren’t happy ones, but they weren’t horror. They were more adventure-suspense tales.

Still I was sort of a 1950s style “Goth”. I was known for what I read and talked about. When called upon to do a book review I always selected what I thought were Horror books. I mean, who knew “Buried Alive” by Arnold Bennett (pictured left) wouldn’t read like something by Poe? It was difficult enough plowing through Bennett’s 1908 writing style to then discover nothing that horrific ever happens. This was the opening of the novel, Chapter one: The Puce-Dressing Gown.

The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic-- that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history--had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington.

If that doesn’t pull you right into the novel, what does? And puce, really? What guy talks about puce? When I was 15 I didn’t know what puce was. Closest thing I thought of was puke, which pretty much summed up my opinion of “Buried Alive”.

I was a voracious reader who read during lunch and study halls. What I read was generally in the horror or science fiction genres, books or collections of stories by Richard Matheson, Ramsey Campbell, Frederic Brown and Ray Bradbury, and of course, Edgar Allan Poe.

One weekend while visiting with Stuart Meisel he said, “I want to show you something.”

He went upstairs and came back with a paperback book. He handed it to me. The book was a bit worn with a creased cover and tattered edges. The title was The Lurking Fear and Other Stories.

“This is the scariest stuff I ever read,” he said.

The book was by someone I had never heard of before, H. P. Lovecraft. He insisted I borrowed the book to read.

During the next week I lay down on our living room floor one bright afternoon. No one was home. The sun was shining through the front windows and I lay in these blocks of light it made around me and read. I became so engrossed in the stories that when a passing shadow broke the light I screamed. I couldn’t even read the book at night.

I added Lovecraft to what I carried about school in my hip pocket.

To tell the truth, up until I started writing my autobiography I believed I didn’t get my nickname, “Frank”, until Twelfth Grade after I did a showcase reading of my short stories at school. I was looking for a picture in my 1957 copy of The Torch, the school yearbook, when I read the inscriptions on the back page. These were autographs I got from some of my classmates at the end of Tenth Grade. All but one was addressed to Frank, Frankie or Frank-in-stine (sic).  One inscription also reminded me of something else.

“Frank-in-stine, to a real witty classmate. Always remember our trip to Audubon. Jeanette.”

Jeanette Richards (pictured left) was one of the most desired girls in my class. I doubt she would have ever gone on a date with me since she had her pick of every guy in school, but she did become a friend and part of what I might call my gang. In fact, most of those who signed that page would be in that clique. Homer, Wyatt, Jon and Phil were among the signers.

Mr. Brown of Biology had sponsored the trip to  Audubon and the Meadowbrook Bird Sanctuary. Nothing  bonds a group like traveling twenty miles in a cramped van and spending a day traipsing through woodland together seeking out Hairy Woodpeckers and White-Breasted Nuthatches. The group began accepting me as an equal part of the class on that expedition.

Beating the bushes for Black-Capped Chickadees didn’t get me my nickname. Toting around those genre books and talking about writing my own horror stories accomplished that.

When school ended in June of ’57, I got a job picking strawberries at Ridge Farm. The field was located along Route 23 about a mile walk from my home. I had ambled down the Bucktown Hill early one morning and inquired at the barn if they were hiring help. I started the same day.

There were no Daddy Longlegs in the strawberry bushes. There weren’t any insects so I guess the farmer sprayed his fields. It was grueling work. There was no shade whatsoever. You went up and down the field towing a little cart of baskets. You duck-walked the rows all day plucking the ripe berries. When you filled all the baskets on your cart you pulled it to the back room of the barn.

The farmer’s wife oversaw this operation. She would tally your baskets each time you came in. You got fifteen cents per full basket. (I forget the size of the baskets, they weren’t real big, perhaps a quart.) After counting your yield, she inspected the front and back of your hands for any stains. If you got juice on your skin it meant you damaged some of the product. If she found any such incriminating evidence, she deducted five cents a basket for that load. If it happened enough time, she fired you. I got into the habit of not clipping my fingernails short on this job. The best way to pick was to grasp the stem above the berry and clip it off with your thumb and index nails. This procedure slowed your production, but was the only way to avoid staining your hands.

What can I say, it’s a living. I hear people saying Americans won’t do this kind of labor anymore. I’m not sure I believe that. Why not, it’s honest labor? I'd do it, except at my age I would probably expire from heat struck halfway down a row.

My mother gave me a surprise sixteenth birthday party in late June. Like the last one in Fifth Grade, she invited some kids I wouldn’t have and missed inviting some who I would. I don’t remember a great deal about this party. I recall we played a morbid game in the dark. Mother passed about various items and told us these were parts of a dissected man. We had to guess what the part was. The person who got the most right won a prize. There was macaroni for veins or some such thing. Grapes represented eyes. I dread to think what body parts would be represented in this day and age.

The only gift I still remember was from Ronald Tipton. He gave me a record album of Gospel songs by Mahalia Jackson. He said, “I know you like her.” I don’t know where he got that idea. I liked Gospel music okay, but not her style of singing. But still, it shows he paid attention to my interests and put some thought in what he gave. I do still have that album, although I transferred the tracks to iTunes.

Ronald was brought to the party by his date. Her name was Patty Daller. She left the party with another boy, Charlie Crouse, leaving Ronald without a ride home. I don’t know why this other boy was even invited. He was from Downingtown and I didn’t even know him. Maybe he crashed the party.

There were a number of other parties over the next year I enjoyed more than my own birthday bash. Richard Wilson and Joan Boder threw most of these. They were just get-togethers at each other’s homes. It was dancing and food. The attendees were friends of Richard’s usually, almost everybody younger than I because Richard was two grades behind me. Girls wanted to dance with me at these parties because they considered me a good dancer. We all knew each other as friends. I wasn’t dating anyone attending.

Although we seldom played games, there was one we did. It was at a party at Richard’s. There was a cookout in the late afternoon, and as the sky grew dark everyone drifted onto and around the porch. The adults kind of hung on the edge in groups, drinking beer, smoking and talking. As the evening wore on their talking grew louder and was interspersed with loud guffaws. We teenagers meanwhile began dancing in the center to music Richard played on his record player. Eventually the night turned a little chill and the adults moved inside the house.

We kids, probably warmed by our jumping about to the rock beats, took over the porch completely. Eventually less and less of us were dancing. Instead we were sitting down where we could or stood leaning on the railing. Suddenly the music stopped and Richard picked up the record player and stepped down on to the ground.

“Hey, you wanna play a game,” he said.

He was waving a large flashlight about and he used it to lead us out to the garage. The cars were outside and when our little parade marched inside we saw he had set a group of chairs in a circle. He placed the record player down on a workbench next to a wall outlet and plugged it in.   It was very dark in the garage. The only illumination came from the flashlight Richard held. He proceeded to explain the game. As he did he shown the light in our faces and then the circle of chairs, and then he handed the torch to his brother. Tommy didn’t participate in the game; he manned the record player. It was musical chairs with a twist. The boys sat down on the chairs and the girls circled around them while the music played. During this time the flashlight was snapped off and it was pitch black inside the building. When Tommy suddenly stopped the music the girls had to jump on a boy’s lap.

I did not enjoy the game. As soon as the first girl jumped on my lap I got an erection that would not go away. I could not make out any faces in that dark, but I sure could feel each girl’s bottom pressing across my thighs. Some of them would sit still until the music restarted. Some of them twitched or bounced around impatiently. I could feel the heat of them as well as the weight.

I spent the whole game trying to avoid having the girl feel my condition when she jumped on my lap. Most of the time I failed in my attempts, especially if she was one of the bouncers. Some girls kind of leaped on to me and some sort of climbed up, grabbing me where ever they could to aid their mount. I wanted to help them, but was fearful of touching them. I didn’t know exactly what my hands might grab in the dark.

Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I was inclined to fold them over my lap, but what if a girl felt my hands beneath her bottom when she jumped aboard? What would she think I was up to? I gritted my teeth and kept my hands pinned close to my chest. Fighting to keep hands off even though in my opinion most of the girls were landing right in the worst possible spot. I felt embarrassed for the girl as well as myself believing each and every one was discovering my condition. All I heard around me were giggles, laughs and occasional shouts. Everyone else appeared to be having a good time. I was too naïve to understand what I wished to avoid was the real object of the game.

I had turned sixteen. The day after my birthday I was at Motor Vehicles applying for my Learner’s Permit. Even though I would be taking driver’s Education at school next semester, it was required in Eleventh Grade, I wasn’t going to wait around another six months to get my license. I got a lot of practice in during the spring on the back roads in all kinds of vehicles. I was an experienced driver, although no one knew how I became so. I took my driver’s test during the first week of July.

And I failed.

I had no difficulty with the written exam, which was the part I was most concerned with. You were given about a dozen random questions that were taken from anywhere in the Driver’s Manual. It seemed like a lot of material to have to memorize, but the questions were fairly basic. I aced that part.

I was sent outside behind the building and then ushered to a test car. I got in the car for the road test next to this big State Trooper. He was very intimidating. He spoke in that clipped military style. “You will start your car and drive to that stop sign. Once there, you will turn right.”

I remembered to check my seat position and adjust my mirrors. Cars did not have seat belts yet. I drove toward the stop sign and I put my arm out the window to indicate I was stopping. I stopped. I pointed over the roof that I was going to turn right. Some cars had a new devise called turn signals, but even if you did have such a devise, you were required to use hand signals in the test.

I breezed through the parallel parking and the weaving through cones.

“Go halfway up this hill, stop and turn off the engine,” he ordered.

Ah, yes, what some people thought was the hardest part of the test. People were afraid they would stall the car trying to start up again from a dead stop on a hill. It was a matter of not popping the clutch between releasing the brake and giving the car enough gas to overcome gravity and inertia. Yes, we took the test on a stick shift. Automatic transmissions were also a rarity in those years. There was very little on these cars either automatic or power driven. We were probably lucky we had some kind of windshield wipers. In fact, the intermittent wiper system didn’t even go on to automobiles until the 1969 Mercury installed the first.

I restarted the car and pulled up the hill without a hitch, a pause, a jerk or a gear grind. I had conquered the hard part.

“I want you to do a three-point turn and take us back,” ordered the Trooper.

This was the last step in the test. All I had to do was execute a three-point turn and I was done. I turned forward into the first point. I backed up and my rear bumper just barely scraped the embankment behind the shoulder.

“Is that it?” I asked weakly.

“That’s it,” he said, noting on the clipboard that I had failed.

I had failed my driver’s test. I was mortified. I would have to come back another time and go through all this tension again.

Back to the Beginnings: A Throwback Thursday Piece

To tell the truth, these last three years have been very…how shall I put it…distracting, hectic, off-putting; just the aggravations of life interfering with living that very life. It has been especially interrupting of my writing. Most of my life I wrote every day, maybe a lot or maybe a little, but every day, until 2012 and since then my output has shrunk to almost nil. I didn't think this possible. I thought writing was an incurable disease. It seemed to be a curse as much as a gift. I could NOT not write. But now I wonder if I can.

Maybe looking back to the beginning of the itch will refresh the rash.

I was twelve, just. It was the summer of 1953 and I had recently finished the sixth grade. I was sitting

on the floor of my bedroom playing with some toy soldiers, making up the plot of their latest skirmish with a tribe of plastic Indians. (It was 1953, after all, no one had replaced the misnamed term Indians with the misnamed term Native Americans yet. Quite possibly, in my twelve-year-old mind I might have referred to them as a tribe of plastic savage Redskins.)  My father came down the hall and began to ridicule me, a not completely unusual occurrence.

"You're too old to be playing with dolls," he said at some point. I never thought of the little toy people most we boys played with as dolls.

"I'm not playing," I said. "I'm writing."

He gave me a hopeless look and left me alone.

"I'm writing" was something that simply popped into my mind and out of my mouth, but it wasn't completely a lie. I had a vivid imagination and my little games were always elaborate plotted plays. Still, having said it, I figured I better write something.

Writing wasn't really foreign to me or far-fetched. I had gained some success and notoriety as a writer in grade school, though I didn't think of myself in that term, "writer", yet. I wrote my first short story as a third grade assignment and was highly praised by the teacher, Miss Ezrah, for my effort. In fourth grade I performed a puppet show, which I also wrote, in an assembly and it was a success. Finally, in the sixth grade my friend, Stuart Meisel, and I ( we two pictured left) had created, written, published and sold a weekly newspaper we called "The Daily Star". (Yeah, I know, "daily" and "weekly"are not the same thing.)

At any rate, I picked up a lined pad left over from school and began to write my first novel; that's what I called it - a novel.

The novel was titled, "It".

Some of you may be familiar with a bestselling novel titled, "It".

This wasn't that one. Stephen King wrote that one. Stephen King has a habit of stealing my titles. My wife and I wrote a book in the 1960s called, "Danse Macabre". Stephen King wrote a book in the
1980s called, "Danse Macabre". He's had better success with his titles than I had with mine.

King's "It" was about a group of kids (sometimes adults just to confuse the issue), who join together against an evil clown that becomes a monster. My novel was about a group of grownups (never children), who join together against an evil monster that was never a clown. He could have been a clown, but I didn't have a little clown top person. All the characters in my novel were based on my toy men, so the group was a tall cowboy, a shorter cowboy, a tin soldier and a one-armed cowboy, because one of my toy cowboys was broken.

The basic plot went like this. An explorer named Tom Reiser is found dead beneath a tree with his unfinished diary in his hands. Thus we are introduced to the tale by Reiser's diary entries. (This was the devise used often in the 19th century and I coped the form from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (which is quite different from the Universal film version as I found out when I read the Classics Illustrated Comic book version) and Bram Stoker's, "Dracula" (which I am not sure was ever a Classics Illustrated Comic.)

By the way, as a caution, you can't always trust Illustrated Classics Comics as a shortcut to your high school book reports. Sometimes the comic book doesn't follow the classic exactly as I discovered when I used this trick in eighth grade. My assigned book report was "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". Somewhere through the first chapter I decided there must be an easier way and, aha! Classics

Illustrated. Don't think I always avoided Victor Hugo. I did read "Les Miserables", the unabridged edition, all 1,463 pages of it.

I do own a copy of the Classics Illustrated "Les Miserables". It is hanging on the wall of our Rec Room, which is an out of date name for a place where families and friends are supposed to get together and play games and stuff.

I have a Les Miserables Coffee Cup, too, which I bought when the play was popular on Broadway. I can't drink coffee anymore because of a medication I take, so I use the cup to take my medications, a cruel irony. Not being able to drink coffee is indeed les miserables.

Want to guess my favorite Broadway show?

But I digress, let us get back to It, the subject at hand; that is, my first novel at age twelve entitled "It".

We had poor dead Tom Reiser's diary and authorities trying to figure out how he became poor dead Tom. The clue was in his last entry and the mention of a mad scientist and monster (a bit of stealing from "Frankenstein" here) hiding out on a mysterious island (I also took some ideas from Robert Lewis Stevenson's "Treasure Island") surround by quicksand (a bit stolen from many episodes of "Ramar of the Jungle").

Eventually the authorities call on a group of sleuths (a mix of specialists in the mode of "Doc Savage"). They fly by helicopter to Quicksand Island, where the mad scientist lives in a castle, guarded by his monster. Here they join forces with a one-legged giant hermit, who lives in a cave upon the island, to destroy they creature and blow up the castle.

I don't have any original copies of this manuscript. I had first wrote a short version on a lined pad, but then expanded it into chapters, but I wrote these on onionskin paper and this long ago faded away and was lost.

I followed up "It" with a comic novel based on my first years in junior high school.  It had no monsters per se and was pretty autobiographic, just slightly exaggerated for comic effect.

As to "It", I rewrote the original idea over and over again as I grew up until in retained little of the story I outlined above. It eventually became a story of a teenager spending the summer on an island caring for his aged uncle. It is a tale of greed and the boy comes to a bad end.

The title also went through changes from "It" to "Quicksand Island" to "It, The Horror of Quicksand Island" to "Dream of Horror" to just plain, "Dream".

I groupd it with two other novellas I wrote in a collection called, "Smoke Dream Road".

There we have a Throwback Thursday look at how I decided to be a writer way back in 1953.

 Me and Peppy, 1953

Horrors! I'm a Horror Writer. (Not Horrible -- Horror, Horror!)

The grouping on the left was sold on eBay a few years back for $1,800, meaning each issue was $100. That is a pretty good markup for magazines that had a newsstand price of $.75 when originally published in the 1970s. It was listed as "The Stephen King Collection", because it contained some of Stephen King's earlier stories. Mr. King had exactly twice as many stories within these volumes as yours truly. I wonder if it would have added value as the "Stephen King and Larry Eugene Meredith Collection"?

Probably not.

I seem to be garnering fame on the coattails of more famous authors, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Robert Block, Nero Wolfe and Clark Ashton Smith. My name has more recently been popping up on its own. For instance the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, where I am an entry along with 70,966 other writers of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. Plus my short story "Conjured" ("Startling Mystery Stories", March 1971) was mentioned in a book examining the horror comics and pulps of the 1960s and 1970s, World of Eerie Publications (2010, Feral House) by Mike Howlett.


I got a complete two-page synopsis review of my short story, "The Last letter of Norman Underwood" in Brien J. Frost's, Essential Guide to

Werewolf Literature (2004, University of Wisconsin Press). It is nice to be elevated to the level of "Literature".

This variation on the werewolf tale of mine originally appeared in "Magazine of Horror" in January 1969, nearly 11 years after I had written it at age 16 and it was the first horror story I sold, unless one considers my anti-Vietnam War "Poem to the Boys on the Flat" a horror story as well, which was published in "Psychedelphia Period" in 1968. "The Last letter of Norman Underwood" was also published in a Spanish anthology in 1968, La Chica de Marte y Otros Relatos (The Mars Girl and Other Stories, Gemini, 1968) with the title "La ultimo carta de Norman underwood".

A story I sold to "Magazine of Horror" in 1969 (published January 1970), "The Writings of Elwin Adams", also showed up in an European anthology a few years after publication in the United States. In this case the book was published in France, 13 Histoires  D'Objets Malefique (Marabout, 1975, Andre Gerard - Editor).

Now as a matter of fact, horror stories make up a small portion of all my writing, both published or unpublished. Even among my fiction they are less than a quarter. So how did I get branded as a horror writer?

Well, duh, for bringing it up so much myself, like in the first half of this essay. Honestly as a teenager it was all I aspired to. Yes, my highest ambition was to be a hack pulp writer, which I suppose I accomplished. It is easy to step over a bar set low enough, but the real challenge in life is to set a bar you have to reach up for and pull yourself over.

I didn't write strictly terror tales then either, but most were and the others tended to be about juvenile delinquents or guys with hot rods. But still, how did this innocent, Christian lad get hooked on this darker fiction in the first place?

Partly it was a story we read in our fourth grade class at East Ward Elementary School. It was Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". That is the first story I can remember really gripping and intriguing me. It drove me to the library looking for more Poe, but I failed in my effort for I was restricted to the Children's Room and Poe was considered too adult, too upsetting for a nine-year-old.

Somewhere about that same time I saw a dramatized version of Poe's "The Gold Bug" on TV and this

whet my appetite even more, although "The Gold Bug" isn't a horror story per se. I did manage to get a paperback of some of Poe's stories and when I got a bit older I badgered my family for more. My grandmother found me a ten volume set, The Richmond Edition, The Woks of Edgar Allen Poe, published in 1904. Volume six was missing. I still have them, so they are now 110 years old. It appears volume eight has also went missing. Volume Ten's cover has really faded and that was a favored volume. It contained all of Poe's verse, which turned me on to poetry.

My friend, Stuart Meisel gave me a paperback that he assured would scare me. It was The Lurking Fear, a collection of short stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and it did scare me, but it also inspired me.

But I think there was more to my choice of content then just Poe and Lovecraft, plus the Universal monster movies recycling through our local theater at the time. I think much had to do with the monsters lurking in my own life, the bullying and abuse I faced most days at school, the fear of my father and the times of loneliness. I suffered from nightmares nightly.

Creating supernatural menace put me in charge of the demons and allowed me a world I controlled. Perhaps the demons within, those desiring vengeance on my tormentors, had an outlet not in some violence against anyone real, but in a bizarre world where vampire and werewolves and other outer-worldly creatures recked havoc on fictitious surrogates for my enemies.

Either become a writer or a serial killer; I think I made the right choice.