WEDNESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2011
Incubus, the book and movie, and Scotch
I’m going to write a lot about my early life. A lot of crazy things happened to me between the ages of five and twenty-eight, and people laugh when I describe them. I get some horrified looks, too. Not bad horrified – more like Oh my God, I can’t believe you just told me that. You wanna tell me some more I’m not going anywhere. One of these days I’ll recount how I lost my virginity. It was a very dark day (night actually), full of shame and completely unsafe behaviour, but it’s an awesome and horrendous story.
But onto this one. A story of my youth, with the mandatory horror element.
I was seventeen. A brash and privileged seventeen, and I had the lead in a school musical. I was single and horny, and not all that choosy about whom I wanted.
So I picked a girl who had been mooning over me for a few years. I’d never really given her a second look, but over that past year she’d lost weight, coloured her hair, and began looking like a grown-up. Also, when she’d lost weight, she’d kept it on her chest. Sorry, but that’s an important factor for teenage boys. One night at a school dance, between rehearsals, I got her alone long enough, kissed her a bit, and the next day in school some of my friends were giving me odd looks and saying So you’re together? With her? O-kay…
Over the next week and a half we dated, kissed a little by my locker. I could already see that things were probably not going to last – whenever she stopped talking she would stick her tongue out of her mouth at me and roll her eyes. She may have thought that was cute; I’ll never know. I didn’t know her all that well. One of my closest friends had already told me that “She’s not worth a bag of milk.” I didn’t know what that meant but I figured it couldn’t be good.
My parents were divorced and my mother went on a lot of business trips, so I had her house to myself a lot of weekends. She had a cozy living room with a tiny love-seat and a beautiful wood-stove that threw off almost tangible warmth. That living room became a passion pit for a second-rate teenage Romeo, and I’m sure my mother knew and didn’t really know how to stop it.
I invited her over to watch a movie on a Friday night. I don’t remember the movie, because we were all over each other less than a quarter of a way through. She was really digging all my cheap moves: the ear-nuzzling, the biting on the nape of the neck, the just-hard-enough tugging of her hair for that element of non-threatening danger.
She’d begun moaning and I was ready to do something joyfully irresponsible when the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said impatiently after I’d disentangled my tongue from hers and staggered to the phone.
“Mac, we rented Incubus!” yelled my best friend down the phone. “We got a bottle of Scotch and we’re coming over!”
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A word about Incubus. It was first a book by American writer Ray Russel, written in 1976. It was pure, sensational, but quite well-written, pulp: A small town full of attractive women. A mysterious supernatural creature has been killing them. How? Well, it has a high sex drive, and an endowment that would make an elephant jealous. It doesn’t kill them intentionally, if you know what I mean. The murders are described in graphic detail. The business end of this thing’s member is described as akin to a ‘drooling grapefruit.’
The hero is a handsome anthropologist, and he’s assisted by the local doctor, who has to pour the hero a glass of Scotch whenever they begin pontificating on the nature of man and sex. When the monster isn’t killing, the two protagonists are usually drinking their faces off.
This was intoxicating stuff for teenage boys: to think that a regular, respected writer would make up stuff so primal. To make up a monster that was the very essence of young male sexuality. That book was passed around among us like a joint at a party.
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So when one of them told me over the phone they’d they’d found the movie version (1982, with John Cassavetes in the role of the doctor), and that they were bouncing around the city looking for a house and a VCR, I felt honour-bound to say yes. Think of those skeins of friendship, honour, and sexual mythos involved in that short phone call, and you might understand, as disrespectful as I was to this poor girl.
So my three friends arrived with booze and a movie. They were big loud guys, not really used to spending much time with girls. They went to my mother’s kitchen and fetched the big milk-glasses – the kind made for growing teenagers. They filled the milk glasses with Scotch, shoved the movie into the VCR with an almost sexual intent, and got down to some very serious teen binge-drinking.
I don’t remember much of the movie, other than it seemed awful and contained none of the salacious elements that made the book such a hit. The girl watched my friends drink pint after pint of Scotch. They made very rude in-jokes, and gradually the room began to smell like a peat-swamp. The girl and I sat side-by-side, all passion gone. Occasionally they toasted one another and drank whole glasses in one go.
The movie ended and they made her drive them home. I was told they were very civil to her when they were in her car, other than making the air flammable.
Not surprisingly, we broke up soon after.
