Norman Partridge: The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

For Mom and Max …

with a whole lotta love

SEEING PAST THE CORNERS

RED RIGHT HAND

COYOTES

DO NOT HASTEN TO BID ME ADIEU

THE MAN WITH THE BARBED WIRE FISTS

THE PACK

BLOOD MONEY

LAST KISS

BLACKBIRDS

WRONG TURN

SPYDER

MINUTES

WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH

THE HOLLOW MAN

RETURN OF THE SHROUD

TOMBSTONE MOON

THE MOJAVE TWO-STEP

CARNE MUERTA

BUCKET OF BLOOD

UNDEAD ORIGAMI

HARVEST

THE BARS ON SATAN’S JAILHOUSE

SEEING PAST THE CORNERS

(An Introduction of Sorts)

Get a writer talking about himself and he’ll eventually come around to the question of genesis. How did he become a writer? When did he know that storytelling was the path for him, and why? As a reader I love those kind of questions. Give me a short story collection with biographical notes or story introductions, and chances are that I’ll read that stuff before I ever get near the fiction. I can’t help myself There’s just something inside me that needs to know… and right now.

So it’s only fair that I give you my answer to the genesis question up front. Not so much the how, when, or why I became a writer, because I’m still not exactly sure about the answers to those questions.

I can tell you the where, though.

I became a writer at the drive-in movies.

Let me tell you about it.

If you were born in the late fifties, like I was, drive-in movies were a big part of your growing-up experience. I visited my first drive-in before I could talk, figure around 1959 or so. Yeah. I couldn’t talk, but I could cry. And my brother, who was around ten at the time, wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who sat still easily. Between the two of us, our parents would have had their hands full at a walk-in theater.

But we were fine at the drive-in. In the comfort of our Chevy Bel-Aire, baby Norm could cry his head off and my parents wouldn’t have to suffer adult recriminations. And if my brother needed to turn his inner wildcat loose, there was always the playground — a gravel lot just below the screen complete with slides and monkey bars and carousel and a dozen other kids whacked out on snack-bar popcorn and sugary drinks (this was pre-diet drinks… also pre-Ritalin).

My parents both worked — Dad was a truck driver and Mom was a railroad clerk. They were usually on a budget. That was another reason we went to the drive-in. My dad had a connection that could get us in for free.

Said connection’s name was Jack Kennedy (really). I don’t remember Jack, outside the place he occupies in family stories. But from what I’ve heard, he was just the kind of neighbor you were apt to find on a fifties TV sitcom — a hale and hearty Irishman who worked several different part-time jobs to support a large family.

When the TV boom hit, Jack installed antennas on most rooftops in the neighborhood. He was also an electrician. Anyway, the part-time job that relates our story is Jack’s gig as the projectionist at our local drive-in theater. That’s how he ended up with a steady supply of free passes, some of which he gave to my dad. And that was great with my mom. She loved movies. Dad was a different story. He was on the impatient side, like my brother. Getting him to sit still through a double-feature was next to impossible. Sooner or later he’d decide he needed to take a stroll, or head to the snack bar for a cup of coffee, or have a cigarette.

Of course, Jack Kennedy counted on my dad getting itchy feet. I imagine Kennedy was bored out of his skull in that projection booth. He must have seen each movie at least a dozen times. And he probably heard the advertisements that played during intermission in his nightmares, because the same ads played at our drive-in week after week, year after year. To this day, everyone in my family can recite the Winchester Mystery House ad, which featured ghostly voices egging on Sarah Winchester to add more rooms to the legendary crazy-quilt mansion she built to appease the spirits of those killed by her husband’s rifles: “Keep building! Keep building!” the ghostly voices cried at the beginning of the ad, and somewhere in the middle a grizzled old-timer said, “Hey, Slim, gimmee one of them Winchester repeatin’ rifles,” and then came the final tag line: “The Winchester Mystery House… open every day, in San Jose!”

There I go. I’ve ended up about two steps removed from the thing I set out to talk about. But that’s the way this introduction is playing out, which is another way of saying that I’m bound to take more than a few detours on this particular road and I certainly won’t hold it against you, dear reader, if right about now you decide to flip ahead to the first story and get to the meat of the meal. If you continue on here, it’s going to be a mixed assortment of snack bar food — popcorn and corndogs and the occasional world-famous Flavo Shrimp Roll thrown in just because I feel like it.

Okay. That said, I feel a little better. You’ve been given fair warning. Beware digressions, detours, and heartburn, all ye who enter here

Back to Jack Kennedy. Obviously, he gave my dad free drive-in passes as much for his own benefit as ours. He knew my old man would end up in the projection booth as soon as he got restless. Together, they’d knock back a couple of beers and shoot the bull. Some nights they’d even fire up a little barbecue that Jack kept by the projection booth, toss on a couple of steaks, and proceed to ignore the movie to the best of their ability.

Sometimes Jack would miss a reel change and the car horns would start blaring. Sometimes the barbecue would get a little out of hand, as it did during a revival screening of Ben-Hur, when my dad and his buddy nearly set the projection booth on fire. The smoke kind of added something to the movie, though. For years, I thought that some wily Roman slave had torched the Coliseum during the big chariot race, put up a smoke screen that allowed Chuck Heston to cream Stephen Boyd.

Conflagrations aside, we all had a good time at the drive-in. Big brother climbing the monkey bars. Dad hanging out with Jack Kennedy. And me and Mom watching the movies.

We saw all kinds of stuff Big-budget epics. Westerns. Musicals. Comedies. And horror movies. I enjoyed most everything, but it was the horror movies that really took hold. That wasn’t much of a surprise, really. I’d always been the kind of kid who loved ghost stories more than anything. Some of my earliest memories are of summertime parties in the backyard where the neighborhood dads would spin spooky stories. The stories my dad told were some of the best. Tales of bloody footprints in abandoned houses, and Pennsylvania’s mysterious, glowing Green Man who stalked the countryside on moonless nights, and a dozen other weird and wonderful stories that filled my head and never quite managed to leave me… or my imagination.

Anyway, I spent a good part of my youth reading, watching (and eventually writing) about monsters. I learned about the unholy trinity (Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman) the way most kids my age learned about baseball players. Me, I didn’t care about baseball one little bit. No way I could tell you anyone’s batting average. But if you wanted to know a dozen different ways to kill a vampire, I was the kid you’d want to consult.

It made me feel more than a little freakish. Back in the sixties and early seventies, horror was definitely not cool. Not in the town where I grew up. Sports were cool. Cars were cool. Rock ‘n’ roll was cool. But monsters… uh-uh. Forget it. Monsters were okay for a couple of hours on the late, late show or at the movies, but any interest beyond that was seen as slightly weird. And if you were a kid like me, who dreaded being labeled “slightly weird” in the worst way, you learned to keep your mouth shut about monsters.