My Thoughts on Being A Monster Kid .

                         

                  Here I am as The Voodoo Child at a 1974 Halloween Party.     

Here I am, almost sixty years old and I'm referring to myself as a  Monster Kid. Now for those of you out there who have no idea what a Monster Kid is, well, an explanation is in order. A Monster Kid is someone who grew up in the late fifties to the late sixties, when Monster Movie Magazines, Monster toys, Monster model kits, wallets and notebook covers emblazoned with a Universal monster on them, Super 8 condensed versions of your favorite monster movies,and other such goodies were plentiful. Someone once referred to these years as the Golden Age of  Movie Monster Merchandise. We Monster Kids had it all.

You know, my poor Dad would be rolling over in his grave if he could hear me calling myself a Monster Kid. He never really understood horror and science-fiction films or for that matter, why anyone would want to watch them. All through my childhood and teenage years, he called them " goofy movies". Which of course, made me love those kinds of movies all the more. I truly believe if he had said nothing and had not constantly hooted down and jeered at my monster hobby, my interest  might have ran it's course and I would have moved on to something else. But his disapproval  made my attachment to the strange, fantastic films that inspired both awe and wonder in me even stronger.

My monster hobby even help pull me through some tough times in my personal life. My parents, and I have to blunt about this, were two people who should have never gotten married in the first place. The reason they stayed together was a rather stupid one: for my brother and I. It's not a good thing having a family unit when the husband and the wife are always fighting. Oh, they'd get along for brief periods, but they argued more times than not. Add drinking(on both their parts) and domestic violence(my Dad was an abusive man) and you had a situation where divorce was the only sensible solution. My Dad once said in an attempt to me feel guilty, " I stayed with your Mother for you and your brother." My reply was ," You didn't do us any favors."

My monster hobby actually helped me through some of the unpleasant periods in my young life . One time, my parents were spending the day arguing back and forth about some such shit. It seemingly went on for hours. At one point, I went out to get the mail and much to my surprise there was the first issue of Monster World in the mailbox that I'd ordered from an ad I found in the back pages of Famous Monsters Magazine. Immediately I went into the rec room and began devouring the contents of the magazine. Although my parents had stopped their petty bickering,the tension in our house was so palpable, if anyone had dropped by to visit on that day they would have felt it immediately.

But there I was, happily reading my monster magazine when my brother Mike came to me and asked," With all of this going on, how can you sit there reading ?"  I replied something along the lines of," I just want to read my magazine." In other words, this was my escape from my parents drama. At the age of fourteen I didn't possess the proper tools to cope with my Mom and Dads inability to pull their disintegrating marriage together. Since there was no one else in my family to turn to(my Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents weren't worth the powder to blow them to hell) and no support groups existed back then, I was left on my own; refuge into the world of  monsters, robots and the supernatural was my way of dealing with the situation. But, I'm damn sure there are other Monster Kids out there with similar stories, so I'm not trying to elicit sympathy from anyone. I'm simply telling you where I've been.

But, getting that off my chest , I have to admit that through the fifty some years of being a Monster Kid, I've had a lot of fun, whether going to monster movie conventions and meeting like minded individuals like myself or seeing the latest horror or science-fiction film at a movie theatre (when  theatres showed real 35mm film prints and not DVDs), or acquiring a piece of movie memorabilia for my collection. And while I've known people besides my Dad who don't get my enthusiastic appreciation of the horror/science fiction genre, well, that's their problem and not mine. I'm a Monster Kid and proud of it. End of story.