A Story of Weak Men and Their Prey

Note: this entry originally was written and published on February 25, 2015, at a time when I was trying to strengthen myself a little while knowing I was shouting this into the void without any readers. I have battled my personal beliefs in sharing this story publicly for many years. I have suffered panic attacks, crippling flashbacks, and a paralyzing fear of any sort of vocal conflict. Even as I write this, every time I see that face or hear that name, my flesh feels like it's burning, and my heart races as if he's still in the room with me. When I google him, I feel like I'm walking to his front door expecting to be attacked. And when I google him and see that he remained broken and continues to break other people, I feel guilty for having survived it. I feel guilty for not having prevented it from happening to my family, for happening to other families. Most of all, I feel guilty for taking the mantra of my childhood superhero idols to heart and not removing this man from the face of the earth, even at the cost of my own life and future, just to spare the pain he caused my family and has gone on to cause for many others. I have made almost no edits to the following story, but I feel the need to add this link for some additional perspective.

https://www.rapsheets.org/florida/palmetto-jail/SAVOIE_ROGER/10344759

This includes criminal reports below as well as his most recent criminal report that I could find from almost two years ago, and the details of it make me sick to my stomach.  "Great bodily harm/disability/disfigurement." They make me feel as though I failed a group of strangers out there in the world by not speaking out about it at the very least. The way my life has gone since then almost makes me feel like that was what I was meant to do, and I failed in it because I tried to put it behind me. My family was the first family he broke, and the ample police records show that he has only escalated his behavior and still walks the streets to do it again after serving no real sentence. The justice system has failed all of his victims, but there is more. If you look at the release dates, you'll notice that he was released a little over a month after each arrest. All three times. I know in my heart why that is, too. Even after "great bodily harm/disability/disfigurement," I know... KNOW... that the victim dropped the charges, probably the same woman every time. Because my mother did. Every time. I might have, too, when he almost killed me when I was seventeen, but I was a minor then. He served time for that. It wasn't enough.

Without getting repetitive, I'm just going to move into the actual story while I'm still able. I can't keep going over this without shaking, but I need to go over it at least one more time. It never gets easier to tell.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     This is a story of domestic violence. If such stories make you uneasy, then I suggest that you do not read it because it will be graphic. It is not my wish that any harm come to any living person as a result of my story, and it is not my wish to urge anyone to action on my behalf or the behalf of others. I tell this story only because it is a story that should be told and remembered. Perhaps it will seem at times that I am still emotional over this subject. I am, but I am still not of the mindset that anyone has the right to take vengeance upon anyone else. This story did not change my lifelong ideal of being a peaceful person, but it certainly tests it to its limit.

     Some time ago, shortly after my mother's death, I thought about a significant moment in my late childhood (and my brother's early childhood) that had lasting effects on my family. Overcome with grief, I still managed to convince myself that I was being the better person by keeping this to myself because the Internet is such a hotbed of raw emotion as it is. However, after discovering I had gotten over a tiny fraction of the grief of my mother's passing and the sorry state of my personal life, I came to realize that keeping this story to myself doesn't mean that I have gotten over it. At one point, I tried to convince myself that this story simply never happened. Repression is never a healthy way to deal with memories. My brother still thinks repression works, and he's a hot mess. I tried to convince myself that this story no longer had power over me, but I was lying to myself. I tried to convince myself that simple human nature was responsible for my entire body shaking and my skin burning whenever I even felt a hint of a verbal or physical conflict coming, but the "everyone is born with PTSD" argument fell flat because I never suffered emotionally or physically as I have before the story I am about to tell.

     In the many years I have had access to the Internet, I have used it to look for a number of people. Why I never looked for this man until five months ago, a month before the first anniversary of my mother's passing, is a mystery to me. He came up in conversation a few times (never as a positive segue), but there never was any curiosity as to his whereabouts that made me think to look for him. Had I done so, then my mother might have known some peace of mind in the last months of her life... or she might have suffered even more for knowing it. I can't know which effect it would have had on her to know, but I know for a fact what effect this man had on her in the latter half of her lifetime. In a personal journal entry for that date, I said that he was dead to me, but he never truly could be dead to me because of the impact he had on my life. I had spent the entire evening trying to kill him off in the story of my mind, playing emotional games with myself and peering into "What If..." Marvel universes, pretending to be Uatu The Watcher as I narrated a handful of scenarios, just like the comics, to peer into alternate worlds where my family's life had been better-- or worse-- for having done things differently. At the time, it helped me to cope. I was still fractured from losing my mother. I tried to frame every imaginary notion of changing the past to remind myself that it was the past and that there were no guarantees that I could have fixed things no matter what I did. And, in the back of my mind, it was a silent prayer that we were the only family that he had broken, a prayer that had gone unanswered whether or not the truth existed in public record... which it did.

     Before I go on, I need to put a face to the name. I turn your attention to the focus of this story, Roger Conrad Savoie. From personal experience and comparison to his public criminal record, I can say with every ounce of certainty that this man has served no purpose in his life other than to make people suffer. He is a user, a drunk, and a man of both short temper and short intellect. He is also a very strong man and skilled in martial arts, skills he uses against women and children, not men his own size and strength. He is also skilled at making those same women and children feel sorry for him, only to forgive him until he does it to them again... and again... and again. Don't just take my story as the gospel truth because his criminal record tells the same story of battered women and children.

http://openpasts.com/PublicRecord/ROGER-SAVOIE/0026311389158

http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Roger_Savoie_14035581/

http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Roger_Savoie_15392565/

     When I was twelve years old, my mother and stepfather separated for good. My biological father was an alcoholic, and my parents divorced less than two years after I was born. My mother married my stepfather shortly thereafter because, as she put it, every child needs a father. In hindsight, I found this to be only a half-truth because my mother showed herself over the years to be a woman that could not live without a man in her life. My stepfather was a sociopath and a hard drug user, and the only positive memory I have of the man is that he fathered my only sibling, a brother eight years my junior. They were married for twelve years, and nothing he did prompted her to leave him until she began to develop some confidence in herself. Despite their marriage, she had been a single mother most of her life because he was either at work, in rehab, or disappearing for several days to shoot up the paycheck that was supposed to be buying food for his children. Not only was Christmas a dicey time of year with the threat of him disappearing for a week with all of the money intended for buying Christmas presents, but he also wiped out my savings account (granted there was not much there) and cashed in a number of family gifts and even the tickets for a trip to Disney World one year... just to disappear for a drug binge. My mother attempted suicide toward the end of their relationship, and he barely showed any emotion. It taught her just how much she had been raising her two children alone up to this point, and the decision eventually came that we did not want him in our lives anymore.

     There is more to the story of my stepfather, but this story isn't about him. He still deserves a good deal of storytelling from me for the abuses he handed down in the time he was a part of my life, but he changed his ways. He atoned for his sins. He still atones for them and has been clean for years as far as I know. He has no contact with me; I wasn't his child. I never was, and maybe that had some bearing on things. But my stepfather still tries to reason with my brother that my stepfather was a piece of garbage and that my mother deserved none of the resentment my brother's limited memories put on her. I would blame my stepfather for putting us in the situation that brought about what happened next if not for believing that it was some sort of destiny. We moved from Texas to Florida in 1987 for a new job that my stepfather couldn't keep due to his drug use, so my mother had the added hardship of being separated from a close-knit family that had helped her through many of the difficulties in their relationship. My mother was a proud woman, and being a single mother with only the benefit of a single parent's income was not an easy adjustment to make. She despised welfare, but we had no choice but to live off some of its benefits in the few years we lived in Florida without my stepfather's added income. My mother did not want to move us back to Texas with her family if she did not have to do so, but the choices she made brought that inevitability to us even more quickly.

     My mother dated a few men after she separated from my stepfather, but she put a great deal of focus on raising her children. This was perhaps the most attention she paid to raising her children in her life, and it came after a suicide attempt and a brief feeling of self-worth and confidence, the confidence that pushed her to separate from my stepfather. She did the best she could with what she had. She was a lonely woman with a difficult family history, and she did her best to try to instill some values and a better outlook on life in the two children she had. On top of that, her career was in-home childcare. She didn't just have her two sons. At any given time, there were a dozen children coming in and out of our home. Other parents trusted her and her sons with their children, and, as far as they knew, we were stable. For a time, we were because the toxic situation with my stepfather was gone. We were happy. But this didn't last two years. The income wasn't enough, and my mother started getting bounced checks because she was the kind of person to treat her business customers as friends too often, even when she had two children of her own to feed, and her customer base was already small to begin with. She became involved briefly with a pizza deliveryman that reminded her of my birth father, but she developed a relationship with his best friend shortly thereafter. This is where my story truly begins.

    Roger Conrad Savoie was 20 years old. My mother was 34. Despite the age difference, whatever she saw in him was strong enough to impact her life in such a way that she lost sight of the past two years of her life. She slipped back into the feeling of needing a significant other in her life after succeeding at doing it alone. This was not the sort of man she expected. I must point out here that this story is a combination of my own personal experience as well as secondhand information my mother was too willing to share with me throughout my life about how she felt about all of it. None of the words I use to describe here are any words of my own opinion. They are the words she used to describe herself in her feelings of guilt after the fact. The relationship she developed with Roger was when she was at her most selfish and immature, and it was at this point in her life when she began to doubt which relationship was more important to her: her relationship with Roger or her relationship with her children. One might say that a good mother would not make that kind of decision, but I'm not making that argument. Yes, my mother claimed she had a weak will when it came to many things, but there are also people in this world that sense that and feed upon it. Roger is one of those people.

     I only know of the first couple of weeks of the relationship what I saw firsthand. My mother did in-home childcare, and it was a rare occasion that the house was not full of children. I spent much of my time in my bedroom behind a locked door or playing at friends' houses, and I wasn't paying much attention to what was going on. She only had a few other children staying with us at this point, and none of them stayed more than a few hours in the mornings and afternoons. At night, when all the children were gone and her own children were in bed, Roger was appearing more and more often until he had completely moved in. He made every effort to befriend my brother and me, and he shared enough of our interests to hit it off with us. It seemed like my brother and I had someone in our lives for the first time that we could think of as a father figure, but what did we know? We were just dumb kids that didn't know any better, but we would learn. One night, shortly after Roger had moved in, I got up after midnight to use the bathroom. My mother's bedroom door was open slightly, and I could hear whispering. I sat in the bathroom and listened, and my heart started to race. I'd never felt that kind of fear in my life. What sounded at first like a simple argument soon lost all sense whatsoever as it became clear to me that Roger was drunk and that my mother was pleading with him in a whisper not to wake the children. I heard him ask her what pain was. Then I heard the slap, followed by my mother trying to muffle her cries. Then I heard him ask her why she made him do it to her. Shortly after, everything was quiet again. Even my mother's crying eventually stopped. I went back to bed shaking, and I don't know how I got back to sleep, if I did. I carried this eavesdropping memory with me without mentioning to my mother that I had heard what happened, but it didn't matter because Roger didn't care to keep it a secret for long.

     The story becomes sadly typical of domestic abuse after that. He apologized for his behavior, broke down and cried, and swore he'd never do it again. My mother believed him until he did it again, and it started out as one of those "only when he drinks" excuses until it became clear that he didn't need alcohol to fuel his rage. My brother was four years old, and he and I spent a lot of time in my bedroom playing with toys and making funny radio interview shows with my handheld tape recorder while my mother spent time in the living room with Roger and his friends and family. As long as they were with other people, things were fine. When everyone else went home one night after an evening of partying and drinking, the cycle started all over again, and I remember feeling that fear again. I remember her coming to my door and telling us to stay in the room as we heard him shouting in the living room. Then I heard him slam her against the wall. No matter how scared I was, I couldn't stand in my bedroom and listen to this. I had to be brave and try to put a stop to this. I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, shouting at him to stop, but I was trying to reason with an animal. I could see it in his eyes. I remember that look in his eyes just as if he were standing right in front of me right now, and I can feel the back of my neck burning. Even the mugshots don't look as realistic as that moment frozen in my mind. I might as well have been staring down a wild bull as I told him to stop and think about what he was doing. I was a child trying to reason with an animal. All the while, as my brother stood behind me crying and Roger looked ready to charge down the hallway at me, my mother stood between us, crying and concussed, begging him not to hurt her children and begging me not to try to stop him. I couldn't abide that, and I called the police. He was taken to jail, but my mother didn't press charges.

     Of course, that it not the end of it. Far from it. Roger came crawling back to my mother, begging for her forgiveness, and she eventually gave in. My brother and I forgave him as well, and things went smoothly for a few months. It wasn't our first substance abuse rodeo; we'd had three failed tours of rehab with my stepfather, and Roger made an effort to stop drinking altogether and to change his ways. The damage had been done, however, because my mother slowly fell behind in her bills and rent because she started paying for his mistakes. Although I was not privy to the full details of the situation, I can put two and two together and add up why the last couple of childcare customers she had didn't show up anymore. It became painfully clear to her that we could not remain in Florida for much longer. This inevitable upheaval and Roger's personal responsibility for my mother's financial strain did not help the relationship as time wore down. My mother tried to delay it as much as she could, but Roger couldn't hold down a job to contribute anything to the family. He cost more money than he made. A few days before the move, Roger disappeared the night before we were to leave. He didn't call, and no one knew where he was. We finished packing the truck ourselves, already dealing with the difficult choice of having to leave some of our belongings behind because the single truck we could afford was not large enough to hold all of it. Beds, a living room couch, and several other things were left behind, and I sadly left behind a few boxes of toys and collectibles by accident due to the stress and the urgency of the situation. When Roger finally showed up late that night, he acted as if he had done nothing wrong. He said that he had been spending a little time with some of his friends before we were to leave because he was leaving his life to be with us, and he didn't think my mother should have made a big deal out of it. He had been drinking and didn't bother to call my mother and let him know where he was, and he hadn't been there as he promised he would to help his new family pack. It was a big deal, and my mother finally told him that she was through with him. She didn't want him moving with us to Texas. Roger lost it.

     What led to what happened next is a little hazy in my mind, but a previous argument at a family gathering prompted me to call Roger's parents at home instead of calling the police. When I reached his father on the line, it took far too much convincing to get that asshole to take a moment out of his life to come over and help. I should have just called the police again because I would learn that his father was an abusive sack of shit, too. What a surprise. But I am starting to digress on the emotional side. I pleaded with Roger's father for help as Roger held my mother in a headlock in the backyard and threatened to break her back. When it was all over, my mother went back on what she said, believing that she couldn't make the trip back to Texas without Roger's help.

     Things only got worse when we reached Texas because my mother's family was quick to get involved. The hint of a raised voice would bring them running from next door, so any argument that could have led to Roger being abusive with my mother turned into a different argument about the rest of my mother's family not knowing how to mind their own business. Secretly, I was grateful for every interruption. Roger and my mother argued less with each other because they had her family's dysfunction in common. All it did was to stave off the inevitable a little longer. At one point, Roger moved out because my grandfather, a controlling and abusive man in his own right, didn't want Roger on his property anymore and had even fired a gun at him to make the point. Roger managed to hold down a job and got himself an apartment, sober for a time, and my mother visited him often or snuck him into our house. Things started to smooth over a little again, but, as always, it was short-lived.

     The summer before my junior year in high school was among the happiest times in my life. Family was getting along, and I was feeling a great deal of confidence in myself. I certainly felt like I was turning around for the better. My mother was about to start a new job, and marching band practice was about to start for me at the beginning of August. I felt more spirit to participate at that moment in my life than I ever had before, and I wanted to be a part of things. Despite my own doubts about my performance, the band teachers had decided to promote me to a more advanced band class, and I wanted to take their faith in me seriously. My mother's new job was to be an in-home care shift for a mentally and physically disabled boy who went to my high school. I'm not sure what he suffered from, but he was severely impaired and needed around-the-clock care. He had to be fed and clothed, he wore a diaper, and he was carted around in a custom-made wheelchair everywhere he went. The night before band practice, my mother was getting ready to spend her first night at the boy's house taking care of him. The best way to describe what happened next is to follow Roger's laughably moronic logic and say that my mother was "too excited" about her new job. He hadn't been drinking that night, but it didn't take him long to twist my mother's excitement over her new job into her claiming that she was better than him. It got worse when he took issue with my mother changing the diapers of a seventeen-year-old physically disabled boy, and he even accused her of getting off on seeing the boy naked. Everyone laughed at him even making such an absurd statement, and the laughter only made it worse.

     For these few years living together in Texas, we had lived in a cramped two-story loft. It was not large enough for four people, but it was what we had. This crowded space allowed for little room to maneuver, and it offered no place for anyone to seek shelter when fists began to fly. I was seventeen years old now, and this night was a night when I was preparing for a turning point in my own life. The entire family had a bright and positive prospect ahead of us, and Roger just had to go and fuck it up all over again. My mother didn't take Roger's unnecessary anger seriously, and why should she? Nothing he said made any sense, and it turned into the most ridiculous argument with him being jealous of my mother spending any amount of time with another person that she would have to see naked, even a disabled child. It didn't matter. All that mattered to Roger was that my mother was starting a new job where she would have to look at and touch another man's dick. Then he shoved my mother hard. This was the first incident in over a year. My entire body felt frozen, and I could see my brother on the top bunk on the other side of the room. My brother was crying, and this was going downhill fast. I shouted at him, and my mother immediately stood between us, blocking us from each other and telling me not to get involved. All the while, Roger shouted at me and at her, and then I saw it firsthand for the very first time. Barely two feet from my face, I saw Roger swing his fist around and hit my mother in the side of the head. Without even a split second to think, I balled up my right fist, swung it around my mother's shoulder and connected with the left side of his face. In even less of a split-second, Roger's left fist swung around my mother's left shoulder and hit me in my left eye. The left side of my face went numb, and I went blind in my left eye.           


     Barely a few seconds passed in this moment, but I felt like minutes passed as I tried to understand why I had lost sight completely in my left eye. As my mother struggled to keep us away from each other, Roger pushed both of us against the wall and wrapped one hand around my throat. It was like trying to pull an iron bar loose, and I couldn't breathe. He was so unimaginably stronger than I was, and there was nothing in his eyes but rage. He was going to kill me. In that moment, as I looked down at his hand, I could see finally why I was blind in my left eye as I saw blood rushing down my face and stomach and all over his hand as he choked me. I couldn't push or kick him away because my mother stood between us the entire time trying to pull him off me. Everything started to go dark. What vision I had in my right eye was blurring, and the only sound I could hear was my own tongue gurgling in the back of my throat. I don't know how long we struggled there, but it seemed like barely a minute before the police rushed into the house and dragged Roger outside, handcuffing him and taking him to jail. All I really remember after that was feeling embarrassed that I was sitting in my underwear as an EMT bandaged my left eyebrow. To this day, I have an itchy and irritable scar that my eyebrow barely conceals. The state pressed charges against him for assaulting a minor, but he didn't serve much time. This information supposedly is out there as well, but I have yet to find a site that doesn't want me to pay money to see the records. Roger wrote her letters from jail, and he was seeking anger management and counseling for what he had done. Still, the damage had been done, and the relationship seemed to end when Roger went back to Florida shortly after his release.

     Believe it or not, this was not the most difficult part of the story to tell. The difficult part comes later, when he was released from jail. I had lost my place in marching band because I missed practice for the first week after the incident, and my mother was forced to turn down her new job completely. To save family face, my brother and I agreed to a story that my eye had been hurt playing baseball. My self-esteem was at its lowest, and my mother was unhappy. She made it clear that she couldn't let go of Roger, but she couldn't let him hurt her children and get away with it either. Things, however, began to return to somewhat normal as I reached my high school graduation the following year. My mother got a new job, and I was about to graduate high school. The hardest part of the story to tell is the part where, even after all of this, that I convinced myself that it was okay to let Roger back into my life. I don't remember the exact date, but it couldn't have been more than a year later. My mother received a phone call from a motel room, and she had a panicked look on her face. As some grand gesture of change and devotion that all of us bought lock, stock and barrel, Roger had hitchhiked and walked 1700 miles from Florida to Texas to try to win my mother back, and the experience almost killed him. Despite everything that had happened, even I couldn't look at someone in such a horrible physical state without feeling some pity. Even I couldn't stand to see a vicious animal suffer, and Roger looked like he had been starving in the desert for a week. His body was emaciated, he had lost much of his muscle mass, and he could barely walk because his feet were swollen to almost twice their normal size and covered with bloody blisters. He should have been in a hospital. Any one of a dozen people who saw him before we did should have taken him to a hospital. 

     This weak shell of a man seemed sincere enough that he was a changed man, but there was no way he was simply coming home with us. My grandfather had threatened to shoot him if he ever laid eyes on him again (and almost did), so things took a different turn. My mother snuck him into the house, and he managed to remain there as she nursed him back to health. His presence there remained a secret for several months. There was no arguing, and he truly did seem a changed man. Slowly, as one family member after another discovered the secret, the only person that didn't know about Roger hiding there was my grandfather. My mother looked at her relationship with Roger differently after that and took some of her power back. At the very least, seeing her oldest son bleeding from the eye woke her up. There would be verbal arguing again after that, but she would not take the physical abuse from him anymore. Roger seemed more than willing to accept his place in the relationship as not being the man of the house in any shape or form. There needed to be peace between us, and there was... for a while.

     When my grandfather finally found out that Roger was there, the reveal came from a heated argument with my aunt. My grandfather did, indeed, try to shoot him, and Roger moved out of town where he got a new job and an apartment, neither of which he kept. My grandfather finally washed his hands of it and didn't care what happened anymore. My mother still tried to hold a relationship with Roger, but things quickly started going back to the way they were. My mother began working long hours, and she seemed to be trying to escape problems at home more than she was trying to earn money. I was going to college and still living at home, but I was seldom there except to sleep. As my brother grew older, I began to discover that the time I spent away at college and the time my mother spent at work meant that my brother was at home alone with Roger. They got along well enough, but that's just that feeling you get in an abusive relationship during those small moments when the abuse isn't there. With my mother out of the picture, the relationship between Roger, my brother and me took a different turn.

     As I said earlier, Roger was much younger than my mother. He was only 8 years older than I was, the same age difference between my brother and me. I was fed up with Roger once and for all, and I took advantage of the fact that he was enough of a changed man that he never laid a hand on my brother or me after the night he hit me. He did, however, make moves toward us that made me think he was going to hit us, and he started picking on my brother just to make me angry. He even attempted suicide one night as a way to get back at my mother for neglecting him and working such long hours, and my brother and I were the only ones home with him at the time. I'm not proud of the fact that I didn't reason with him very strongly not to down an entire bottle of aspirin, but I had given up trying to reason with him long ago. I called 911 immediately after he smirked at me and said, "Down the hatch, motherfucker," and I still remember how calm I was when it happened. At that moment, I really felt that I didn't care if he lived or died, but I still wasn't going to be the instrument. I just stood there and watched, telling him he shouldn't do it in a matter-of-fact tone, and then I picked up the phone. He spent a few days in the hospital after getting his stomach pumped. All it did was delay the inevitable end to their relationship a few extra weeks.

     On my part, I am more than willing to admit that I simply let my emotions run wild. I was done with it, and I was going to fight him. I wasn't putting up with his shit anymore. He wasn't welcome in my life or my brother's anymore, my mother's feelings be damned. I remember lunging at him more than once, but the only time I remember doing it in detail was the day that he was angry at me for some reason and my brother stood in between us yelling at him. Roger threatened to slap my brother, and I told Roger that he'd better not dare lay a finger on my brother because his argument was with me. Roger smirked at me and lashed out with his hand, lightly patting my brother on the cheek, obviously doing it to piss me off, and I lost my mind. I jumped on Roger, tackling him to the floor and rolling around with him for a few moments. I don't remember anything after that, let alone how it was broken up. There were no fists used, and after that night when I was seventeen, Roger never laid a finger on me again. I merely tackled him to the ground and tried to pin him to the floor to keep him away from my brother. When my mother came home, she didn't know whom to believe, but the sad truth was that there was no sense of maturity between the three of us at all. My mother had spent 14 years (yes, that is the math of the full length of the relationship) with an abusive man-child, and our behavior seemed to get more and more ridiculously immature as time went on. The age difference shined light on the stark reality of it all because Roger was almost the same age I am as of this writing when he left. Additionally, when he left, I was almost the same age as he was when he met my mother. As far as I remembered, Roger finally left of his own accord because it was clear that my brother and I wanted no part of him in our lives anymore, but my mother argued with me until her dying day that she was the one that told him to leave. I still don't know if I believe it because she never truly got over him, and she never missed an opportunity to bring up the good times we had with him as an excuse to overlook the bad.

     My mother suffered from debilitating bone deterioration until she passed away, and she suffered a number of mental lapses and disorders that I wouldn't rule out were long-term effects from Roger's physical abuse, potentially from several instances of head trauma. Of course, none of that can be proven now, so all any of us could do was to try to move on with our lives. I've been sitting here writing this story-- living it-- for too long to try to tell anyone to take it as a lesson. It was just a story I had to find the strength to tell instead of trying to convince myself that it didn't have any power over me anymore. It will always have power over me because it was a large chunk of my life and memory, and it took over the entirety of my late childhood and early adulthood. The way it finally ended was just one day fading into the next and everyone slowly moving on from one dysfunction to the next. It wasn't long after Roger was gone that my grandfather's health began to fail, and my mother's health began to fail shortly after that. My mother's health was the only thing I thought of after that, so nothing else mattered anymore. I had to push these memories aside because they weren't important anymore, but I had to start taking stock in my life when my mother passed away unexpectedly. I had to go back and look at these moments and to find out what sort of impact they might have had. I had to find out if Roger was still alive somewhere. I had to know if he had changed his life for the better or not. He hadn't. He just moved on to other families and started the cycle all over again. I read the police reports. It almost felt like I had written them myself. Please forgive my vulgarity, but I am too tired to find a polite way to put it. For this, I have to quote Eddie Murphy as my mother did to describe her situation.

      "Once you make a woman come real hard... no matter how bad you fuck up, no matter what you do wrong, no matter what you say, no matter what you do... as long as you say I'm sorry, she will listen to your story, and that's the truth."

     After knowing Roger, that was the one Eddie Murphy joke I couldn't laugh at anymore because Roger had proven Eddie right. My mother said it herself. Roger has made it this far in life because he has easy targets: struggling and impoverished mothers willing to put the livelihood of their children aside and accept terrible physical abuse in exchange for how hard he could make them come. My mother admitted it. I can't state often enough that these were her words and her references and not what I personally believe about her, but she still made excuses for Roger for the rest of her life. He is an alcoholic asshole, and he never was a man not to take care of his body or to take advantage of the things he could do with it. The only thing he ever really did with his power was to hold someone down and feed off them like the parasite he is.

     I don't have anything nice left to say, and I don't want this to devolve any further into a vulgar repetition of attacks on his manhood and maturity because all it would do is to undermine my own. I'm not here to create anger or to reinvigorate pain. I'm telling this story now because I see the story for what it is: a story that had an impact on my life and clearly has had the same impact on others. I have tossed and turned in bed on a sleepless night feeling responsible for another mother and child he could be hurting right now, arguing with myself over whether or not the world would have been a better place if I had made sure he stayed in jail longer or taken out his kneecaps with a baseball bat. My experiences with Roger have tested my stance against violence. I have tried to be the better person in my life, holding on to the hope that Roger truly would change his ways and wake up to the reality of his miserable life, and I have learned that violence, anger and hate only strengthen each other. Even though my mother is dead and buried while my brother and I have to live with the memory of the suffering we endured, it doesn't put me in a place where I believe that a man is beyond redemption. But I no longer believe Roger is a man. I believe he is an animal. When I first published this piece, this section originally was more sympathetic to his pain because he, too, was a victim of terrible abuse as a child at the hands of an abusive father and mother. It came to light that he was severely premature at birth, and I have no doubt that he suffers from psychotic mental illness on top of his drinking and drug use. Despite that, he has failed at creating any positive impact in anyone's lives. I make no excuses for his behavior, even though I saw firsthand that he was broken and had the capacity to suffer. He knows right from wrong, and he continues to do wrong. Consistently. I still argue with myself to forgive because it's in my nature, but forgiving what was done to me is much easier than seeing the pattern continue from person to person. I don't forgive Roger Conrad Savoie for what he did and continues to do. And I'll never forget, either.

     If you see this man on the street, avoid him. Don't give him the time of day. Don't let him into your home. Don't let him into your place of work. And whatever you do, ladies, don't let him into your bed or your mind, and to the children out there looking for a father figure, do not let this man into your heart. He's very good at it. If he is your friend, your employee, your father or your lover, then you should cast him out. I already know that some of you can't because you still have that little collection of what you think are "good times." As I said, those good times are just the brief feeling of relief when the abuse isn't there. The abuse is always going to come back. You're just getting a small break from it. He only brings suffering, and he deserves to walk through the world alone, receiving no aid, no love and no sympathy from anyone else.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The last paragraph of that entry used to be a long speech about how none of us has a right to judge. It came from a personal mantra that there is always another way. It came from a fear within me just how easy it is to become someone like Roger by losing sight of what is important, how easy telling this story could encourage someone else's rage. It came from a hope, several years ago, that maybe, just maybe, even the worthless sack of shit that Roger is could turn his life around, that he could find some way to be deserving of that chance, that he wasn't ever entirely in control of what he was. I wish the justice system would keep him caged forever like the animal he is, but I've also never wished death upon another living creature of any kind. It isn't who I am, and it's still not who I am almost four years after my mother's death, a passing that might not have happened at all or been delayed had she never met him, never suffered his severe physical abuse when she was already physically ill, never found herself in her ultimate position in life. Every possibility is just "What If...?"

Roger should be kissing my feet right now that I never was that person, that I never had the real desire to live out a Dexter-style fantasy with him. He should be kissing the feet of everyone he's ever known in his life for having the common human decency to think he still has a right to live. After "great bodily harm/disability/disfigurement," I don't believe, and never will believe, that he has the right to live among other human beings. He belongs in a zoo with the Harvey Weinsteins and the Bill Cosbys and the Donald Trumps and the Devin Faracis and the Harry Knowleses of the world, like an episode of The Twilight Zone, each one with a plaque of their criminal records and the names and photos of all of their victims, particularly photos of those victims just after they were abused. That's the only true purpose any of them serve, the only right they have to life after what they have done: a lesson to the rest of us what devastation and corruption that power and abuse bring to the world.

If Harvey Be My Destiny

     Fear can have a different effect on all of us. The best thing it does is to bring out a little courage in a few of us. All of mine takes place in the final paragraph, so you can either stay along for the entire ride down Memory Lane or you can jump right to the end for all of the flowery and emotional language. And there is flowery language. A lot of it. You know I don’t use it in my writing or friendly conversation like this, so you’ve been warned of a first here tonight. As Hurricane Harvey looms in the distance and I sit in my home alone—as I have been for some time now, save for a few pets, while other family members and neighbors are attempting to remain safe from the weather in their own homes—I’m doing the only thing that I can think to do to calm my nerves: writing. Saving this every few sentences and having to pick up after one brief power outage already, I face only the unknown as I discover the confirmation that I’ve been coming down with a cold this week. The timing couldn’t be better as I feel feverish and shaky from a combination of frayed nerves over my fears of high winds; a stomach with intense acid reflux at best, an ulcer at worst; and the overall malaise that a cold brings. But I have plenty of cold medicine, bottled water, and boarded windows. Meanwhile, I have two once-feral cats in here with me very unhappy about their situation. They want to go back outside regardless of the weather. Hurricane or no hurricane, this is a cage to them, and I know just how they feel. Glass windows barricaded, all we can do is wait it out. There’s no possible way to get everything of value off the floor in case flood waters reach inside, and we have to hope that the new roof installed after Hurricane Ike will allow us to remain safely upstairs and dry if it comes to it.

     Up to this point, I’ve been through three hurricanes in my lifetime in two states—Texas and Florida—as well as two floods and numerous tropical storms. I have not allowed time to exaggerate the details of any of those stories. I was lucky. The house I am in now stood through most of those. My first hurricane was Alicia. I was very young at the time and don’t feel like looking up exact dates, but it is one of my earliest memories from about the age of three. I remember my family sleeping behind a couch in the middle of the living room for two days, away from windows and without electricity for several days that followed. Our home was sturdy, so I don’t recall anything more than the sound of thunder through it all. I remember the disingenuous bravery of my parents. They were scared, too. You couldn’t see the ground outside when it was over. Leaves and sticks and debris seemed to be arranged carefully to cover any possible view of the grass or soil beneath it. My family had to detour around a specific road a few blocks away because I cried and screamed if I even thought there was a hint that our car might drive down it. A tornado had mangled the telephone poles that lined this road, and it took several months for their repair. The poles leaned and hung over the road even after the lines were repaired, and it was one of the most frightening images of my childhood memory. Within a month after the hurricane, my mother began to lose patience with me over my frightened behavior, but I did not budge. I was not traveling down that road with anyone.

     Coastal Florida was my home during my second major storm, Tropical Storm Marcos. I was about twelve. This storm did not reach hurricane strength, but a trip to the beach the day before it made landfall was a sobering experience of the power of nature. I was hit by a strong crashing wave on shore and very well could have been swept under, but, thankfully, the wave deposited me right back on land after churning me around in a giant washing machine. I laughed. Part of me wanted to do it again because of the adrenaline, and I can understand the feeling of surfers who face that risk for the thrill. But it wasn’t too bright within an hour of hindsight. In 1994 and 2000, back in Texas, I faced the two major floods of my life. The house I am in now, fortunately, was elevated enough to prevent water from getting inside in 1994, but you couldn’t leave the front porch without being up to your waist in flood water. The flood of 2000 was not as intense and receded more rapidly.

     Katrina doesn’t really belong on this list but feel the need to mention her. My brother’s wife was pregnant with my nephew at the time, and my brother was going through army training in South Carolina. Weather or no weather, time marches on, and his training camp was having a meet and greet weekend visitation that my sister-in-law insisted upon attending. A few days after Katrina had passed, we left for South Carolina, forced to take a number of heavily damaged side roads farther north to leave the state and work our way around Louisiana to South Carolina. Once we took the first detour, everything was black except for the headlights, and the tank was on fumes before we finally hit an area with electricity and an open gas station. We were truly afraid we were going to be stranded on the side of the road somewhere because even a full tank of gas couldn’t make the trip from one side of Katrina to the other. When Rita came along a short time later, my family evacuated. It proved to be unnecessary, but Katrina had everyone on edge. The hurricane was nowhere near as miserable as the time I had to spend confined with a few family members I didn’t want to give the time of day.

     Trees fell left and right when Ike hit, but we stayed. One large oak tree hit my childhood home, slid off the side of the roof, and hit the house next to it. I lost most of my VHS collection to the damage, store-bought and broadcast recordings that can’t be replaced in most cases, but I could have lost much more. That night, I saw one of the spookiest images I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw an orb of light floating in the yard and seemingly unaffected by the heavy rain and wind. It looked like a family member stupidly braving 110mph winds out in the front yard with a flashlight. I was quickly cured of this thought when I saw the light pass through the chain link fence and continue hovering across the yard for at least a minute before it vanished. I became that family member stupidly braving the winds to check on my brother’s dog when the storm began to die down a bit. Like a scene from Poltergeist, I had to fight my way past a tree the wind bent over my brother’s front door. It felt like its branches were trying to reach around me and to pull me off the ground, but I managed to get past it. The electricity went out during Ike barely an hour after landfall, and, for my family, it did not return for two weeks to the day. Fourteen days of sweltering humidity, a hand crank radio, a pocket fan, plenty of batteries, and a lot of reading by candlelight. I was still fortunate. For many, it was much worse. My only friends at the time were online acquaintances. Some were mad when I disappeared and couldn’t get in touch with them. They were justifiably scared that I might have died, but I was cut off from civilization.

     Remembering the difficult parts never comes easy. The saddest image of my life from a hurricane is one that I never really wanted to share, but I feel I should. Just outside of the house, barely a few feet from my door, a possum was wedged in a y-shaped tree branch. It had drowned during the night from the heavy wind and rain, and it looked like it was still alive and sleeping, suspended in the air like a baby in a harness swing. The entire branch had to be cut down with an extended tree saw to dislodge it, and I buried the possum as I would have a loyal pet. It broke my heart to think that I was so close to this poor creature and unable to rescue it from the weather. It’s burned in my mind how this possum must have climbed the tree for shelter and fallen or been blown down onto this branch in just the right position to be trapped helplessly overnight.

     Uncertainty rules the night. The storm is picking up audible strength outside as I type this paragraph, stronger with every temporary lull. It’s the strike of 9PM Central, a time I usually enjoy a great deal on Friday nights. There is no enjoyment tonight. Harvey is making landfall, and several cities closer to the coast are feeling it already. I’m tired and weak enough to try to sleep through it, but I doubt that will happen even though my bed is in the safest spot in the house. I continue to write as I wait for the inevitable power outage. I’ve managed to appease much the anger that inspired me to sit and write this in the first place. There were several things I wanted to say under the heading of “nothing else to lose” and “don’t leave things unresolved or unspoken.” As I said, aside from a few pets, I am alone here. Most of the loved ones I had during past storms are dead and gone. I have not spoken to a few of the online acquaintances I had during Ike for some time, and even a few of them have passed away since then or drifted apart. At first, I felt as though much of what I wanted to say at the outset was simply cursing and lashing out with my emotions, and I could just as well scream it into the storm like Lieutenant Dan. But this first stage of Harvey has given me plenty of time to think about it.

     My flaws, my response to the world around me, and my hopes for something good to come of all the bad happening in the world. Maybe none of it matters that much to convey even in the face of potential disaster. I have to settle, as many of us do, for doing as much as I can to preserve a small area of space around me. Easy access to people and events around the world through the Internet brings with it feelings of helplessness to some and apathy to others, lets others into your life to worry about you and vice-versa. The helplessness comes from wanting to preserve things beyond that small area of space, and the apathy, for some, comes as either a coping mechanism or, sadly, just an inability to care about things over which you have no control. Despite everything I have seen and endured in my life, I still believe in the essential truth that the apathy of the latter only comes from a very small percentage of humanity, even if that small percentage receives the most attention.

     

     Please take care of yourselves and each other. Oh, and if you’re looking for poetic wording here or hidden messages in the first letter of every paragraph, then I’ll just confirm for you right now that it says exactly what you think it says. I don’t care if it’s hackneyed. It’s from the heart, and it can be my epitaph. Fuck you, Donald Trump. Fuck you, with your “good luck to everyone” on your way to another weekend vacation on our tax dollars while many of us face death and devastation that you, no doubt, will use to your political advantage. Fuck you, Donald Trump, for pardoning that piece of shit Arpaio. Fuck you for your nonexistent wall and your “very good people” marching for a white power America. Fuck your transgender military ban and your administration’s attacks on women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and the poor. Fuck Steve Bannon, Breitbart, Alex Jones, Fox News, and all of your other Fake News supporters that have exploited your complete lack of fitness as a world leader to their mentally deranged advantage. Fuck everything else you stand for. And if—and this is a big “if” that probably doesn’t apply because I have known and respected a lot of people for many years, but I’m covering my bases—you have a problem with what I’ve said here, think I’m just being hysterical, think I’m tainting a nice little story about my past experiences with bad weather, or are disappointed in me for buying into all of the “fake news” to prove I wasn’t as intelligent as you thought I was, then fuck you, too. I love you, and I’d still give you the shirt off my back on the street if it came to it, but fuck you. There’s a storm coming. I don’t give a shit about your political disagreements. I’m going to care more about picking up the pieces of my home than any pieces this writing leaves of my reputation. That, if nothing else, is the one thing I couldn’t go without saying with my mortality—and with the inevitable, perhaps countless, and likely preventable deaths that will come of Harvey, citizenship status be damned—bearing down on the state of Texas, its surrounding states, and the people of Mexico. I wanted to say it a long time ago, and I thank Harvey for at least giving me the courage to be open about it. Once the lights go out, at least I won’t have to listen to it for a little while. Or forever, come what may. None of my feelings on that are going to change the slightest when the storm clears, and the power has held out long enough for me to be absolutely sure I mean it. I always argue with myself about making judgments about people I’ve never truly known, but not tonight. I’ve seen enough. I’ve read enough. I’ve heard enough bigoted support of you from the mouths of my own family members. This is on your plate. All of it. I hope 11 million more illegals swim over the border overnight. I hope the news to come is loaded with stories of transgender military personnel rescuing people heroically from the storm. And since none of that really matters to you anyway, I hope you never sink another valid hole at golf, either, you greedy, petty, attention-whoring orange troglodyte.

No matter who you are out there tonight, please try to stay safe.

#Filmistines Live Tweet Saturday, July 16, 2016 - Lemonade Joe

Filmistine

  Noun

1.          Ironic portmanteau of “film” and “Philistine” describing a member of a motley crew of people arguing, riffing, laughing and indoctrinating each other with their diverse tastes in movies. Devolves into bitter love/hate disputes when the subjects of Blade Runner and 1950s Danish cinema come up, yet somehow it perseveres.

     And so, apparently, we come to the birth of a new tag, the #Filmistines, a grassroots movie live tweet appreciation gathering running around 11PM EST on Saturday nights as a sort of prelude to the TCM Underground. I’ve gone with the flow of a number of back room VHS viewings, chat room movie nights, and live tweets in the last twenty plus years, and I had the honor of coming up with a name for the group that everyone seemed to like (it’s always nice to know that my complete lack of talent can fall back on making one new word out of two different words… I should put in an application to The Pokemon Company). Over the past month or so, the #Filmistines have waded into shallow waters with movies like Blade Runner, The ‘Burbs, the French New Wave classic Bob Le Flambeur, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Some of us love them, some of us hate them, we kid around, we riff, we bum each other out when we don’t all fall under the same opinion of a classic, but we keep at it because that’s what movie lovers do. And we are making every attempt to dive deeper. It’s not an original concept, but if you can find someone with whom you can laugh and argue at the same time and keep coming back every week, I think that’s coming pretty close to what you’d call friendship. But I’m not here to give a motivational speech about getting along. I’m here to talk about me.

     Coming hot on the heels of my #MondayActionMovie and #CinemOn The Road takeover night on July 18 (see previous blog post for full details), I’ve called dibs on the #Filmistines Saturday night of July 16 to feature something special to me. I became a fan of Czechoslovakian film—and foreign film in general—as a very young child through, believe it or not, preschool animation. I had the distinct pleasure of the fledgling Nickelodeon channel and premium cable in the early 1980s, and early cable needed filler. Channels like HBO and shows like Nickelodeon’s Pinwheel had the opportunity to pad out their time with cartoons from all over the world including Russia, Sweden, Hungary, Australia, and Finland. That diversity, coupled with horror host broadcasts of Kung Fu and Japanese monster movies, would foster an admiration and appreciation for the diverse cultural styles of film that remains with me today. It was through those local network horror hosts that I would be introduced to the legend and the master that was Karel Zeman, a man some call both the Czechozlovakian Ray Harryhausen and Walt Disney. His animation style was a major influence of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, but his work still doesn't seem to get the exposure and appreciation it deserves around the world. I would not have seen any of his work at all if not for some dubbed VHS releases of 1961's Baron Munchhausen and Saturday afternoon TV broadcasts of the dinosaur epic Journey to the Beginning of Time. If I thought I could wrangle enough people in the #Filmistines to buy some imported BluRays of those films from Zeman's own museum website (which I haven't dared to purchase myself yet for lack of money and fear that the BR player I have just might be one of the models that won't play the questionably region-coded discs), I'd go for it in a heartbeat, but for now, I'm testing the waters of Czech film appreciation with a more accessible title that did get a domestic US DVD release, 1964's Lemonade Joe.

     

     By 1964, that aforementioned cultural diversity had made its way around the world several times over already, been driven out of some countries by war and social upheaval and managed to make its way back again. In the West, the American Western genre specifically was suffering, but it was gaining ground in Europe and even Japan with Akira Kurosawa’s Western-influenced samurai films and the success of Italian “Spaghetti” Westerns from directors such as Sergio Leone. The formula stayed mostly consistent, but with every border crossing into a different culture, even the most well known archetypes and tropes take on new interpretations and controversies. Things took an interesting turn in Czechoslovakia, where the American Western had been a popular genre among the Czechoslovakian people as early as 1918 until American Westerns were banned under both Nazi and Stalinist rule for nearly twenty years. Although Westerns would not begin to reappear in the country until the 1960s, just in time for that new life Kurosawa and Leone breathed into the genre themselves, the influence of the American Western survived through the work of satirist Jiří Brdečka in the 1940s with Lemonade Joe. Lemonade Joe grew out from serials to radio to the stage and, eventually, to film in the 1964 musical comedy Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera, poking fun at the concepts of the American Western, commercialism, and aspects of top governing powers of the time, both Capitalism and Communism alike.

 

Recommended reading: International Westerns: Re-Locating the American Frontier

     July 16, 2016, at 11PM EST, join me as I subject the #Filmistines to Lemonade Joe. Falling a bit short of its 50^th anniversary but just in time for the 10^th anniversary of its DVD release to English audiences in 2006, Lemonade Joe can be found on Amazon Prime if a physical copy of the original DVD eludes you before show time. I’m delighted at the opportunity to revisit it and give it a little more exposure. A little song, a little dance, a little lemonade down your pants.

#MondayActionMovie X #Cinemon X #GHWP - Live Tweet All-Out Attack (Monday, July 18, 2016)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Original planned date was June 13, 2016, but I'll be out of town for a family funeral. 

I’ve got myself a full plate three days out of the week again with live movie tweeting, and I’ve landed a three-hour slot for July 18 that promises to be a whopper. First, for my fill-in #MondayActionMovie, I’ve chosen a belated Memorial Day tribute of my own with the 1956 Robert Aldritch WWII action drama Attack! I would link the trailer here, BUT trust me when I say that, if you haven't seen it, then you're better off not watching it. It's one of those trailers that feels like it tells too much of the story, and it even features a poorly-delivered alternate take of one of the best scenes of the entire film. Watch the trailer after the movie or not at all. Just my two cents.

“I'm not a war movie buff. I saw a number of Vietnam War era movies as a young child because I had premium cable during the Nam nostalgia boom of the early 80s, but outside of seeing a few classic Cirio Santiago movies as a kid, I wasn't really into war movies. I wouldn't have given this movie a chance at all if not for the Phil Hendrie Show on talk radio. One reason I became a fan of his show was how similarly we share tastes in classic movies, and this was a film he mentioned fondly and often, even taking time out during one show to explain why he loved the movie and why he quoted it so much. Phil's recommendation still stuck in the back of my head for a few more years before I finally got my hands on it. Attack! immediately became one of my favorite movies of all time with a cast of some of my favorites from Richard Jaeckel to Buddy Ebsen to Lee Marvin, and it's Jack Palance and Eddie Albert at their best. It's a dark and powerful tale of political nepotism putting soldiers' lives at risk and putting integrity, morality, and mental stability to the test on the battlefield.”

The above review quote was copied and pasted from my Letterboxd page (SonOfKaras). I don’t even remember writing it. I almost sat on Microsoft Word writing an entirely new review that would have said the same thing almost verbatim, so I’m glad I checked Letterboxd first and saved my addled brain some time. It's worth repeating that I owe Phil Hendrie everything for that one. I’m one of Phil's “no life, VCR-petting geek” talk radio listeners. He didn't mean it as a compliment when he said it, but I take it as one. Every once in a while I'll dig into my old Backstage Pass collection just for shows like an hour he did in December 1999 about made-for-TV movies like Deliberate Stranger; Mother May I Sleep with Danger?; Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; and Sweet Hostage. A few months earlier, he devoted an hour to the films of George C. Scott (with the aid of young film buff R.C. Collins) shortly after the actor’s passing, and I can't count how many times he printed off a filmography list from IMDB and ran through it with hilarious commentary. I'll never forget how hard I laughed when Phil's intern Bud Dickman insisted that all of the titles of John Wayne and the Little Rascals were gay porn. Phil inspired me to seek out several of those films (I don't mean gay porn, not that there's anything wrong with that), but there are many that I still need to see. Some of the quotes Phil snuck into the dialogue of his show the most came from classics like Halloween, The Exorcist, Dracula, and, of course, Attack! 

Some people listen to music on a portable music player when they're on the go. I listen to music, too, but I also mix in a heavy dose of Phil for some of the best laughs I ever got when I was driving home from college in my early twenties between 1998 and 2003. I still have a shelf of cassette tapes of almost every show he did from Summer 2001 up until 9-11 and even into parts of Spring 2002, recorded myself right off the local radio, and I'll pop one of those tapes into the car tape deck every so often depending on the mood I'm in. Since his was considered a comedy show, my local station was one of those afraid he was going to keep doing comedy following 9-11. He didn't, but it took them more than a week to figure that out and put him back on the air where he belonged. His straight talk and his understanding of history were just as important to me in those times as his Comedy Gold, and I consider him a mentor and part of the family. If you're reading this, Phil, and I know you're not, I love you, brother.

As I say in every review I’ve ever written on a war movie, I just don’t do war movies. Even the fiercest recommendations like Phil's usually take me a few years to pursue. Nonetheless, when I do get around to watching a war movie, I really sink my teeth into it. Two of the maybe five war movies total I have seen in my life are among my top favorite movies, and I only saw one of those for the first time—Das Boot—three days ago (June 4). I’ve hoped for years that Turner Classic Movies might add Attack! to its schedule at some point, and I’ve been saddened to see that it’s available on Blu-Ray in France but was released only on DVD several years ago in the US (and I think is out of print). For the love of Pete, it’s Robert freaking Whatever Happened to Sweet Charlotte on The Longest Yard with The Dirty Dozen Aldritch! Well, y’know what? It’s on YouTube. If TCM ain’t gonna host it, then I will.

(Edit: I'll already have hosted a few #CineMon shows by the time this altered schedule takes place, but for the sake of continuity, I'm postponing this particular Route 66 episode until July 18 as well.)

After Attack!, I’ll be starting a new bi-monthly gig as host of #CineMon. I’ve filled in a few times here and there, but I’m in for the long haul now for at least the summer, grasping the reins every other Monday from the previous co-host to take us out of the water and onto the open highway. I’ve been in the mood for some classic television lately, but live tweeting Japanese superheroes (Spider-Man on Tuesdays and Spectreman on Fridays) has all of my #GHWP hosting slots filled for the foreseeable future. The offer of the #Cinemon slot was perfect timing, so now I’m using it to plug in something that’s been itching in back of my head for a little while: an old favorite called Route 66. As the heat of the summer rises, I'll mix in a little more of The Hitchhiker along the way. Or I may do a little of both in one night.

I’m a Nickelodeon baby, as a couple of my previous blog posts have stated very clearly. Nick and I grew up together. We lost touch around the age of twenty, but I was right there at the ripe young age of seven on July 1, 1985, when Nick at Nite was born. It was an amazing feeling staying up late one summer night watching Lassie, Dennis The Menace, Turkey Television, The Donna Reed Show, My Three Sons, National Geographic Explorer, and, of course, Nick at Nite’s flagship drama series, Route 66. A few years later, even though a couple of cherished favorites like Route 66 were gone, I was still with the channel every night for Susie; Mister Ed; Car 54,Where Are You?; Bewitched; The Monkees; Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection; Make Room for Daddy; The Dick Van Dyke Show; Laugh-In; Saturday Night Live; The Patty Duke Show; Looney Tunes; Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp; Green Acres; Dobie Gillis; SCTV; The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Alfred Hitchcock Presents; On The Television; Fernwood 2Night; Hi Honey, I’m Home!; Mork & Mindy; F Troop; Casey Kasem’s annual New Year’s rerun countdowns; a marathon of Sid and Marty Krofft shows; and another all-time favorite drama, Dragnet. I heated up Nick at Nite on a spoon and shot it directly into my arm for well over a decade. There was no other channel worth watching after 8PM any night. Old reruns were king. And they still are thanks to current channels like MeTV and H&I.

Having watched The Incredible Hulk while still in diapers (my grandmother has photos to prove it), Route 66 was my second taste of a dramatic anthology, and this one didn’t have any flashy colors or mutating superheroes. If you were seven years old in 1985 and had the attention span to sit up around 10PM or later at night to watch a show like Route 66 or Dragnet, then you’re already a friend of mine. Although Route 66 was shot in black and white, it was a beautiful travelogue of scenery of 1960s America and a who’s who of amazing actors such as George Kennedy, Beatrice Straight, Walter Matthau, Darren McGavin, Julie Newmar, Leslie Nielsen, Lois Nettleton, Lee Marvin, and even Rin Tin Tin. I had no clue who Jack Kerouac was at age seven, but I already felt familiar with him when I pursued literature in my college years thanks to Route 66. It was a weekly series depicting the frustrations of youth to find a place in the world, always finding out that you never were far from home no matter how far you traveled (or ran) away from it.

I’ll be starting my #CineMon run with a real Route 66 gem and perhaps the most famous of the series: Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Tail, guest-starring the legendary Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney, Jr., AS THEMSELVES! As an added bonus, the episode available on YouTube is an original 1962 broadcast complete with original station breaks and commercials! I never caught this episode on Nick at Nite as a child. There's no doubt I would have worshiped it if I had. The first time I saw it was on MeTV on Halloween night 2014, a year to the day after my mother died, and it was a blessed hour lifting the fog. Horror movies and old TV reruns were something my mother and I shared very passionately, and this was the best of both worlds.

So cinch up your danglies, maggots, and join me Monday, July 18, for #MondayActionMovie with  Attack! at 8PM EST. Then, stick around at 10PM EST for #CineMon and Route 66 – Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Tail.

GHWP Superhero Summer Tuesdays - Spider-Man in Japan

             Venturing farther into the reaches of unknown space, Gaping Head Wound Playhouse comes to rest on Planet Spider. Tuesday nights after #TrashTue this summer, coincidentally falling in line with their June Bugs marathon, #GHWP is happy to present the adventures of Spider-Man. Peter Parker? No. Miles Morales? Guess again. Parallel universe Gwen Stacy? I’ll give you one more chance. The clone Ben Reilly? Now you’re just being silly. It’s none other than Takuya Yamashiro, Toei’s very own Spider-Man in Japan.

             Marvel Comics helped change the landscape of Toei’s superhero universe forever in 1978 when an overseas partnership threw some major new ideas on the drawing board. While American audiences were watching Nicholas Hammond web-swing around the city as Peter Parker, audiences in Japan were treated to Shinji Todo (best known and loved in GHWP circles for playing Metalder's nemesis God Neros) as motorcycle racer Takuya Yamashiro, fighting the forces of evil with a different arsenal of skills and gadgets. Not unlike Peter Parker, Takuya has the tragic death of a loved one on his shoulders that urges him forward against his enemies, but Toei’s Spider-Man is an instrument of vengeance rather than one of power and responsibility. The Iron Cross Army, led by Professor Monster, murders Takuya’s father and comes close to killing Takuya himself, but Takuya soon discovers that there is more than one alien hiding on Earth. The Iron Cross Army’s previous conquest was Planet Spider, and its sole survivor, Garia, followed Professor Monster to Earth to seek revenge.

Overpowered in his final battle against Professor Monster, Garia was trapped in a cavern of poisonous spiders, but Professor Monster did not count on Garia’s ability to endure his imprisonment. It couldn't have had something to do with Garia coming from a planet called Spider, could it? Nah. Silently, patiently waiting for 400 years, Garia finally sees his opportunity and his successor, injecting the wounded Tayuka with a serum of Garia's blood called “Spider Extract.” Takuya Yamashiro’s very DNA is altered, making him both a brother of Planet Spider and of Earth. Takuya Yamashiro is Spider-Man, and he has access to Garia’s entire cache of Spiderian weaponry including the signature Spider-Man uniform known as the “Spider Protector,” the flying Spider-car GP7, and the massive space battleship Marveller that, with a simple command, transforms into the sword-wielding giant robot Leopardon. The Iron Cross Army, big or small, doesn’t stand a chance.

 

Shotaro Ishinomori’s previous formula, successful from 1971-1978 with series such as Kamen Rider and Himitsu Sentai GoRanger, kept its superhero tales mostly at a human-sized level. Mecha, or giant robots, were considered a separate sub-genre of television science fiction, finding their own success in series such as Jonny Sokko and His Flying Robot and Super Robot Red Baron. Ishinomori’s superheroes were more espionage-based action stories, adding costumes and stunts to stories that were more dramatic and closely related to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or the James Bond franchise with a science fiction twist. Toei’s Spider-Man, however, was the first to blend both of those ideas together, partnering Spidey with a giant transforming robot. Branching away from Ishinomori’s formula once and for all, Toei’s sentai series would come to be known as the Super Sentai series, and every team of Rangers, beginning in 1979 with the Marvel-inspired Battle Fever J, would incorporate a giant transforming robot. Fortunately, Ishinomori’s style and influence remained intact for the Kamen Rider franchise and several other one-shot Toei sentai series, but Super Sentai became forevermore a mixture of costumed heroes and giant robots that progressively relied more on gimmicks and merchandising than plot. 

Change, Leopardon! (Leopardon now available at your local retailer. All parts sold separately and some assembly required and you don't really love this show and have terrible parents if you don't get up right now and BUY ONE!)

Ultimately, this isn’t another sad tale of the West tainting eastern culture because it was Toei’s decision—with some disagreement from Marvel at first—to include mecha in the story, and it seemed as though this was to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Perhaps Toei didn’t think the plain, average, every day American Spider-Man was capable of pulling off 41 episodes of human-sized action drama on his own without the help of a giant robot. Ironically, the giant monster and robot battles barely took up two minutes of each episode, consisting more often than not of repetitive stock footage of the robot Leopardon himself almost never coming into the same frame with his opponent, so, in the end, the success of the series truly did hinge on Spider-Man following roughly the same human-focused superhero formula as the Riders and Rangers that came before him.

With sooooooo much more posing. Move over, Madonna. Voguing didn't start with you.

Under the #GHWP hashtag on Twitter, episodes of Spider-Man will be live tweeting every Tuesday night around 10PM EST following #TrashTue beginning June 7. Streaming availability comes courtesy of Kissasian.com and their beautiful catalog of tokusatsu and Asian drama.

I did mention a lot of posing, right?

 And in case you've been off the radar, #GHWP's flagship series Spectreman is back on Friday nights at 10PM EST following #Kolchak. The hand-talking misadventures of Dr. Gori and Karas are even more fun the second time around.

#GHWP Live Tweet Fridays - Metalder and the Road to Year One

     After a few months of "succumbing to my own gaping head wounds" (i.e.: suffering through the winter holidays for another year after the loss of so many loved ones in recent past), I'm trying to pick this back up again.

     A little part of me always wanted to be a TV horror host. When Mystery Science Theater 3000 came along in my early teens, I watched the horror host dynamic altered right before my eyes. Not only was there hosting going on, but there was live and humorous commentary to boot. I love watching television and movies and talking about them. It's perhaps the only time I feel comfortable and confident with myself in a public or even a pseudo-public setting like Twitter. If I had the opportunity to do it in costume and make up, all the better. Twitter and #GHWP gave me the virtual opportunity to make that dream come true and to give me some learning experiences along the way, and I set aside the costume and make up for a make-believe gorilla suit and chest plate. It started as a lonely little riffing venture on my part with a few random movies I simply wanted to see and didn't want to watch alone, and it took a little while to settle on a hashtag. But it wasn't really the hashtag that did it: it was the material I knew best and the great people I met that decided to stick around for the ride with their own observations and humor.

     #GHWP owes everything to the people of #DriveInMob and their viewing of Space Giants for inspiring the five-year-old kid in me to revisit Spectreman, and they are one part of a big group of funny and kind riffing folks deserving of my thanks including #TrashTue, #BMovieManiacs, #MondayActionMovie, #WarBonds, #Riffotronic and #BNoirDetour. I jumped into this headfirst and just started throwing ideas at these once-random strangers, and they were good enough to play along. Spectreman became sort of the mascot of #GHWP, and the whole thing might have faded away in the early stages if not for Spectreman's instant success. At peak, I think a few Spectreman episodes had around 20 people attending a couple of nights. For me, even 3 people would have been a success, and that's usually the number I have on a Tuesday night. If no one shows at all, sure, I get a little bummed out (I know my time slots aren't the best), but I love doing it anyway. I'm adding more depth to the experience of watching something.

     When Spectreman ended (a little disappointingly with its final episode), it was a hard struggle to find something to take its place. I could name in a snap any number of shows I would have chosen to take its place, but there was the problem of availability in online streaming. I tried my hand at just about everything I could find, and despite how well some of it went over with the audience, all of it was sorely limited to a small number of episodes. Smash hits like Kikaider and Robot Detective K only filled the time slot for a couple of weeks with just the first few episodes available, and the English language Ultraman series didn't get the attention I expected. I kept sifting through material on YouTube to the point that all I was trying to do was keep #GHWP going for one more week. I'd run out of ideas and couldn't find anything to fit the mood for extended periods of time. I needed a new series that could run for a while and keep drawing a crowd, and I stumbled upon Choujinki Metalder. I thought little of it because I'd never seen any of the series before, and if the first episode or two didn't go over then no big deal. Metalder, however, became the perfect spiritual successor to Spectreman, and it became an instant favorite series of mine as well.

When Ryusei Tsurugi's emotions hit their peak, he transforms into Superhuman Machine Metalder.

     The instant hook was the assortment of villains, the action, and the fact that Metalder's nemesis God Neros threw his entire army at Metalder in the first episode. Metalder broke away from some conventions and even set aside the standard kick-explode-the-monster-of-the-week a few times to deliver something that was more a modern day feudal samurai drama mixed with a little bit of Pinocchio, and I came to find out that more than a few of the enemies in the story were based on real Japanese folklore. Good villains are what make a good superhero story, and the God Neros Empire really knows how to party with their gladiatorial death matches, arm wrestling competitions, fancy dress dancing balls, disco parties and women's slavery. Okay, well... they had me ready to sign up until that last one. Don't tell me you weren't at least a little intrigued up to that point, too... and, um... maybe a couple of you still are anyway... um...

     Metalder managed to keep going strong for more than half the series until a few viewing setbacks came along, and I was afraid it was going away for good. The upside is that I can keep going through alternative means. The downside is that I'm going to have to skip about a half dozen episodes with poorly scripted subtitles. I spent an entire weekend re-editing the subtitles for those episodes, but there is no way to implement them into the viewing at this point. Maybe someday down the line I can go back and fill in those gaps. The remaining Metalder episodes last exactly long enough to shift right into the first anniversary of #GHWP the week of May 12, 2016. When that day comes, we're going to get nuts with a few oddities I had to pass up for a while, and I have a few special plans to revisit the things that helped get Gaping Head Wound Playhouse off the ground including, of course, Spectreman. Fans have clamored for his return, and the void left by the absence of Dr. Gori and Karas has been palpable. Even better, there is now opportunity to feature their return to the screen as alien invaders in another more recent movie.

     I want to thank everyone for riffing along with me and for reading my little collections of nonsense here. It's been both therapeutic and something that induces the need for therapy depending on the week... but somehow I have managed to keep this going for almost 52 weeks straight at almost two nights a week. I just enjoy sharing my own joys, so I hope you'll stick around to celebrate this little milestone.

     #GHWP presents Choujinki Metalder courtesy of KissAsian.com from April 1-29, 2016, with the final 9 episodes as well as the theatrical movie. #GHWP nestles snugly in between the fine riffing programming of Friday Love which begins at 8PM EST with #TGIRiff and finishes out with #Bmoviemaniacs at 11PM EST. If you don't dig what I host on a Friday night, one or more of those folks more than likely have something to strike your fancy.