Suburban Derelict (eBook)
244 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9794-1 (ISBN)
About the author, From the Southside of Chicago to the mean streets of New York City, with many stops in-between, Suburban Derelict is a salute to growing up. Author/artist Carolyn Parello hopscotches across her life events, including a mad stint in advertising, a dizzying spell as an airline executive, an exhausting run, chasing around NBA players, a rebellious tour of duty as an oil painter, to finally landing on the distant shores of Buzzards Bay to record all the shenanigans in this Auto*Bull*ography! www.Carolynparello.com
"e;An Unexpected Laugh is always the Best One!"e;Suburban Derelict, an Auto*Bull*ography, is a wave of fun and mischief in every chapter. As a salute to growing up, Carolyn Parello, hopscotches from the suburbs of Chicago to the urban jungle of New York City, to the tranquility of New England. These coming-of-age tales are written in a charismatic and refreshing voice, and in her words, "e;How the story should have been told!"e; Parello's characters are flawed, messy and downright weird but somehow more lovable because of it. Each chronicle is colorful, exaggerated and brutally honest, and at the end of each journey she leaves us with a brilliant life lesson. While this is an irreverent comedy and a work of contemporary fiction, it is also a keen observation of human idiosyncrasies, described in captivating flair. This hilarious journey is warm hearted, down to earth it's Erma Bombeck on crack!
3
You Axed for It! &
Cannabis Christmas!
Two tall tales, and a poem all together
Rising slowly from the silvery mist, a 3,000-year-old mummy emerges from the earth. In a trance he shuffles forward, unsteady, unraveling, with lifeless eyes in search of revenge. A black shadow passes over me as the music’s eerie tempo quickens. The mummy is getting closer and closer. My heart is racing, and I am paralyzed, shivering in fear.
Horror and Humor
My dearly departed cousin Romeo was a fragile, eccentric 14-year-old boy obsessed with three things in his short time on earth: monsters, dinosaurs, and Scotch masking tape. That’s right, you heard it right—masking tape!
Romeo’s steady diet of classic horror films turned me into a monster addict at a young age, silver bullets, wooden stakes, garlic wreaths and all. My lifelong passion for this campy genre was due to his undying devotion to fiends, beasts, and zombies. It was highly contagious. We spent our days watching monster flicks starring the royalty of American horror films—Lon Chaney Jr., Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi. They had our full attention. Every Saturday evening in the 1970s revolved around the television program Creature Feature Double Feature. Starting at 7 pm, Chicago’s WFLD had us trembling in our shoes while glued to the couch cushions. Our zany Chicagoland fright host was none other than the goofball known as the Son of Svengoolie. His signature look was as a ghoul wearing skull makeup. His tall black top hat and tuxedo jacket suggested he was a mortician. We admired his corny, zany one-liners, mixing horror with hilarity between commercial breaks. The gags and wry comments were often more entertaining than the scheduled celluloid being shown.
“Wasn’t Dracula just fang-tastic in that last scene?” The double-bill of budget horror films was good, wholesome fun. We especially loved the B-movies’ shoddy special effects, topped off with lousy acting. The absurd plot lines were a baffling combination of gruesome acts and slapstick comedy, which had us constantly rolling our eyes. Romeo and I couldn’t wrap our heads around the nitwits descending into a dark basement with a broken flashlight to check out a noise.
Creature Features’ silly parodies and kitschy banter had us hooked. We constantly tried to shock each other by inventing Svengoolie punchlines to insert into our daily conversations:
“Why, isn’t that so a-gore-able!”
“You are my best fiend.”
“I wish I was dead. Oy.”
The Invisible Man
My cousin Romeo was one of those people born wearing an invisible cloak. Other than his immediate family, only two other people actually saw him and knew he was alive. Otherwise, Romeo tended to blend nicely into the background, which is ironic, considering that nobody noticed a 14-year-old with the kind of humped back usually found on a 90-year-old. I thought he resembled the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which made him cool to me. To look at Romeo was to look at a shrimp, a petite weakling who was highly immature for his age and had no friends whatsoever. Romeo was what you might call “quirky” if you were being polite. It was whispered he was touched, peculiar, perhaps a bit mad. He had an odd way about him and a brain pattern to match. The truth is, he was a chronically ill, sickly kid. I was seven years his junior and too young to understand his fragility; I simply thought he was strange. With all that said, he was my older cousin, and I looked up to him. Romeo was my best friend.
Wrap It Up Like a Mummy
Besides the monster obsession, Romeo was fixated on dinosaurs. His small bedroom was jammed wall to wall with a full range of giant, colorful plastic dinosaurs spanning many prehistoric periods. He loved that they had terrorized the earth and wished he was big enough to do the same. His favorite was the stegosaurus. If you are not up on your dinosaurs, the stegosaurus is one of the badasses. He’s a four-legged, armored gent with knife-sharp plates along his back and spikes on his tail. The stegosaurus was an herbivore, and the hardware protected him from an attack while eating plants. While this is extraneous information, it is unfortunately stuck in my brain with the rest of my irrelevant collection of zany facts. Nothing is more thrilling than nonsensical information rolling around in the old skull.
Then there was the Scotch masking tape, initially purchased to repair a broken dinosaur tail. Romeo was what you would call an “avid taper.” He loved masking tape and taped everything and anything that he deemed “needed a protected surface.” He bound wiffleball bats, broken Frankenstein models, bike frames, and all his father’s tools, which might have been a mistake once his father got home. He once stated that if masking tape doesn’t solve your problem, you simply need more masking tape.
His most memorable tape job commenced during a scorching summer when local radio station WMAQ ran a contest. This Chicago station was known for its creative and fun-loving promotions. The Chicagoland area was buzzing with the new clever telephone challenge. Here’s how it worked: if, by chance, your number was randomly picked out of the massive phone book by the radio station, then dialed, and you picked it up and immediately said, “WMAQ’s gonna make me rich,” you would win $50.00, a handsome payout in those days. You could also win while driving your car; if you were lucky enough to find one of their “WMAQ’s gonna make me rich” bumper stickers at the grocery store and stuck it on your car, and they spotted you, you won the cash as well.
Romeo and I scoured the grocery stores daily, looking for bumper stickers, but there were none to be found; they were in hot demand. As an entrepreneur and creative thinker, he grabbed a giant roll of masking tape and, on the inside back window of his mother’s new Impala, clumsily spelled out in chunky, uneven tape, “WMAQ is going to make me rich.” As you might have guessed, this was a terrible idea. When my aunt sold the car nine years later, the faded yellow outline of the tape’s sticky residue remained permanently baked on the glass from the sun beating down on it. No amount of solvent could totally remove the adhesive and barely legible letters.
At the end of the summer, the contest ended, and we were not winners. However, Romeo insisted we continue to answer the phone with the jingle, just in case. Every time I called his house, he sang out in a loud, cheery voice, “WMAQ’s gonna make me rich!”
I would pretend to be from the radio station and say, “Congratulations! You, sir, are a winner!”
He would shout into the air, “I won, I won!” Then, there would be a pause. “Wait, is that you? Rats! You’re a real fink, you know that? A real rat fink!” Those were the moments in his bizarre personality that made me
love him.
The Boogeyman
On Saturdays, Romeo was paid to babysit me and my siblings, the Brothers Grimmm, who were small little boys then. He arrived early for duty so my parents could go out on date night. After scanning TV Guide, we would prepare for Double Feature Creature Feature. We loved the promotional taglines for the upcoming show: “It’s Goosebump Week on Channel 32! Tonight, it takes two to tango and destroy Tokyo! Godzilla vs. Mothra!” Romeo brought a stylish Godzilla model from home to add to the mood and atmosphere, placing it on the television like a trophy. We carefully painted his scales in glow-in-the-dark goop so they would radiate during the movie.
Together, we plotted and planned on how to scare the obnoxious little boys. The plan primarily consisted of lurking behind doors and around corners as the movie played. In the pitch dark, the television threw off splits of grainy light to add to the atmosphere. As the sound effects of creaking doors, echoing footsteps, and threatening music played, Romeo slipped out of the room and hid in the bathroom. He would lay on the cold ceramic basin of the bathtub for hours if needed. Eventually, one of the Brothers Grimmm would go to the toilet, a guaranteed necessity after all the illegal pop they’d been served. Once their pants were down and they were in mid-stream, Romeo would jump out from his hiding spot and yell, “BOO!!! AHH-HA! I’m gonna get you!” There was an ear-shattering scream and then pee flying all over the walls. Crying would ensue, and our juvenile babysitter would hold his sides, rolling on the floor in fits of laughter. It was a monster movie within a monster movie, if you will!
Frankenstein and Dracula
Once Bela Lugosi appeared on the screen, there was utter silence. In a trance, we were mesmerized as Dracula’s scorching stare penetrated us through the television screen, trying to hypnotize us, bending us to his will. None of us moved a muscle as we sat there with our mouths open. We attempted to outdo each other during the commercial breaks by shouting campy comments before the Son of Svengoolie could:
“Oh, that was hex-cellent!”
“That’s bloody awful!”
“Werewolf, you be going? I hope not out into those dark woods all
by yourself!?”
And, of course, our favorite to scream out at the top of our lungs after someone was hacked to death: “YOU AXED FOR IT!”
I Walked with...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 5.6.2025 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| ISBN-13 | 979-8-3509-9794-1 / 9798350997941 |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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