Gothy is as Gothy Does
I have become the ipso facto Keeper of the Past. Like many from a family diaspora, I tend to hunt down and find things from the past; in point of fact, my specific past. I started out around the age of ten falling in love with the past. I read Victorian gothic novels, ancient Greek, Roman, and Hindu books dealing with their pantheons, collected herbs and simples (and labelled them in Sanskrit so that The Chaos would not know or be able to read what was in all the many, many dozens of tiny bottles), and became obsessed with honestly how creepy most of the parts of ‘being German’ that had been handed down to me actually were when viewed in the light of day. Part of this latter attitude was the legacy of WWII, because German-Americans did not want to talk about being German in that period so close to it all, and every other whitebread cultural group always used “the Germans” as their boogie men. (Don’t believe me? Research all the WWI movies, books, and TV shows in the late 50s/early 60s that were obsessed with Nazis being The Ultimate Bad before the Russians took that designation over in the Cold War.) Add to that the only movies in the afternoons on television being old black and white Film Noir movies and The Scariest Cartoons in the World (Merrie Melodies and all those other weird short films where inanimate objects come to life).
As I grew up next to an old cemetery on a huge hill that went back to the Revolutionary War, that was where I spent most of my time. Luckily or not, I also grew up during the period when horror and the macabre were very popular in the 1960s, so I had a compleat diet of Hammer Horror and B-movies, The Addams Family (loved) and The Munsters (not so much because the humour was extremely heavy-handed and ‘the pretty girl being treated like a monster’ made little sense to me) on television, giant Movie Monster shortbread cookies, the local Horror Theatre TV host living down the street (Sammy Terry), and no end of really hideous Beach movies that featured Peter Lorre, Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, and others. My uncle Freddie exposed me to Rat Fink and the monster car-cartoon creations that drove strange vehicles and seemed like nightmares. Because I exhibited artistic talent very early, my Mom arranged semi-private lessons with a local artist when I was nine (sadly, I don’t remember the artist’s name, but her creepy collection of peculiar stuff to draw and paint, the dark, weird house she lived in on New Jersey street just south of 22nd Street, and the other paying art students were a little freaky and made a huge impression upon me. ‘Art’ at the time still suffered from the Beatnik phase).
The Rolling Stones (NOT the Beatles, believe it or not, since they were too poppy for me and I only really loved their period between “Revolver” and “The White Album”, despite my getting into rhythm and blues and rock when the British Invasion started) turned me into an Anglophile. You cannot image how thrilled I was at age eleven to receive a Blue Willow teapot and ACTUAL BRITISH LOOSE-LEAF TEA for Christmas one year. (Yeah, I was an odd kid.) Prior to that, ‘tea’ was that miserable Lipton’s red tea that parents only gave you with dry toast when you were ill, or the sickly-sweet iced tea that was powdered-in-a-jar that the adults drank all summer.
By the time I reached school and was shown German Expressionist films, I was inured to the horror and in fact welcomed it as normal for me, despite the fact my sister Teresa was all about Pink! Pink! Pink! and nothing like me. (The six years between us made a huge difference~! She used to tell her friends I was ‘exotic’.) I preferred black clothing from the time I was a toddler (and have the photos to prove it) and it was only the tsunami of Pop, Peter Max, and Yellow Submarine in the later 1960s that gave me my wildly colourful obsession, although always framed in and surrounded by black, black, black, black, black (No. 1). Yeah, I came by being a Goth Kid naturally and I have never outgrown it.
This is also why my house is called The Museum by first my nieces and later by my friends. Over time I became very clever at finding precisely what I wanted at garage and yard sales, antique malls, EBay, and sometimes even discarded on the street. In my own, past-obsessed way, I have collected Blue Willow dishes and Friendship pattern silverware (both what Grandma Sherrill used and served food before us every single weekend and holiday), old kitchen utensils from the late 50s/early 60s (like what my Mom had before she discarded it all for Newer! Better! More Plasticker!), Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass themed items (the first movie that imprinted upon me at age three was the 1933 version that featured Cary Grant as the Gryphon. I am still obsessed with All thing Gryphon and it’s “my” animal in every way), Lewis Carroll (ditto the previous, but he also made me into a photographer), any anything else I can shove into my sweet little 1920 Art & Craft bungalow. My only complaints are that everything was scaled small in that period (closets, outside toilets before the tiny bathroom editions, kitchens) and I wish my house was over to the East about six streets so that I lived on a curvy Irvington street instead of the grid pattern where the old guy across the street appears to live on his front porch, glares at me all the time (as if my living here was an affront to him personally), and has taught his grandson to shout horrible things at anyone he sees in the neighbourhood. Try enjoying sitting on my porch with that going on!
Add to this my having learned to turn my nightmares into humour to remove the sting. My first major nightmare at age three or four involved burned up/charred people and a black iron horse head like the ones you see on old-fashioned lawn ornaments meant to mimic old horse-tethering posts, so for many years I was terrified of them. Of course, the neighbor up the hill from the house my Dad built had one in his yard. Eventually I figured out if I brought one into my apartment as an adult, the creep-factor died away. Friends started giving me blackened figures and creatures once they saw I had a ‘collection’. The same thing worked with ‘the Vegetable People’, the animated horrors in those Merrie Melodies and other old cartoons that both scared and thrilled me. Ditto with the many implements of dental torture, Victorian asthmatic breathing apparatuses, medical implements, x-rays, etcetera, that have filled my sickly life with living nightmares. Better to live WITH them than to be afraid of them. (Such is the life of a person with little or no immune system all their days. I have had perhaps only about a month’s worth of healthy days my entire life. Every other one is full of medicines, procedures, doctors, pain, grief, and just trying to pull through to the next hopefully better day.)
I used to fear what my sister and my nieces and nephew would think of all this. Colour me shocked and surprised when they expressed eager interest and they appeared to find it all not only cool, but began arguing with my sister on how they might divvy it all up once I was gone. Which is not as macabre as it sounds, since I am the oldest one among us and my health’s never been great; I’m okay with it. I can’t express how happy that made me, because that is one of the best levels of acceptance a person could want.
As I grew up next to an old cemetery on a huge hill that went back to the Revolutionary War, that was where I spent most of my time. Luckily or not, I also grew up during the period when horror and the macabre were very popular in the 1960s, so I had a compleat diet of Hammer Horror and B-movies, The Addams Family (loved) and The Munsters (not so much because the humour was extremely heavy-handed and ‘the pretty girl being treated like a monster’ made little sense to me) on television, giant Movie Monster shortbread cookies, the local Horror Theatre TV host living down the street (Sammy Terry), and no end of really hideous Beach movies that featured Peter Lorre, Christopher Lee, Boris Karloff, and others. My uncle Freddie exposed me to Rat Fink and the monster car-cartoon creations that drove strange vehicles and seemed like nightmares. Because I exhibited artistic talent very early, my Mom arranged semi-private lessons with a local artist when I was nine (sadly, I don’t remember the artist’s name, but her creepy collection of peculiar stuff to draw and paint, the dark, weird house she lived in on New Jersey street just south of 22nd Street, and the other paying art students were a little freaky and made a huge impression upon me. ‘Art’ at the time still suffered from the Beatnik phase).
The Rolling Stones (NOT the Beatles, believe it or not, since they were too poppy for me and I only really loved their period between “Revolver” and “The White Album”, despite my getting into rhythm and blues and rock when the British Invasion started) turned me into an Anglophile. You cannot image how thrilled I was at age eleven to receive a Blue Willow teapot and ACTUAL BRITISH LOOSE-LEAF TEA for Christmas one year. (Yeah, I was an odd kid.) Prior to that, ‘tea’ was that miserable Lipton’s red tea that parents only gave you with dry toast when you were ill, or the sickly-sweet iced tea that was powdered-in-a-jar that the adults drank all summer.
By the time I reached school and was shown German Expressionist films, I was inured to the horror and in fact welcomed it as normal for me, despite the fact my sister Teresa was all about Pink! Pink! Pink! and nothing like me. (The six years between us made a huge difference~! She used to tell her friends I was ‘exotic’.) I preferred black clothing from the time I was a toddler (and have the photos to prove it) and it was only the tsunami of Pop, Peter Max, and Yellow Submarine in the later 1960s that gave me my wildly colourful obsession, although always framed in and surrounded by black, black, black, black, black (No. 1). Yeah, I came by being a Goth Kid naturally and I have never outgrown it.
This is also why my house is called The Museum by first my nieces and later by my friends. Over time I became very clever at finding precisely what I wanted at garage and yard sales, antique malls, EBay, and sometimes even discarded on the street. In my own, past-obsessed way, I have collected Blue Willow dishes and Friendship pattern silverware (both what Grandma Sherrill used and served food before us every single weekend and holiday), old kitchen utensils from the late 50s/early 60s (like what my Mom had before she discarded it all for Newer! Better! More Plasticker!), Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass themed items (the first movie that imprinted upon me at age three was the 1933 version that featured Cary Grant as the Gryphon. I am still obsessed with All thing Gryphon and it’s “my” animal in every way), Lewis Carroll (ditto the previous, but he also made me into a photographer), any anything else I can shove into my sweet little 1920 Art & Craft bungalow. My only complaints are that everything was scaled small in that period (closets, outside toilets before the tiny bathroom editions, kitchens) and I wish my house was over to the East about six streets so that I lived on a curvy Irvington street instead of the grid pattern where the old guy across the street appears to live on his front porch, glares at me all the time (as if my living here was an affront to him personally), and has taught his grandson to shout horrible things at anyone he sees in the neighbourhood. Try enjoying sitting on my porch with that going on!
Add to this my having learned to turn my nightmares into humour to remove the sting. My first major nightmare at age three or four involved burned up/charred people and a black iron horse head like the ones you see on old-fashioned lawn ornaments meant to mimic old horse-tethering posts, so for many years I was terrified of them. Of course, the neighbor up the hill from the house my Dad built had one in his yard. Eventually I figured out if I brought one into my apartment as an adult, the creep-factor died away. Friends started giving me blackened figures and creatures once they saw I had a ‘collection’. The same thing worked with ‘the Vegetable People’, the animated horrors in those Merrie Melodies and other old cartoons that both scared and thrilled me. Ditto with the many implements of dental torture, Victorian asthmatic breathing apparatuses, medical implements, x-rays, etcetera, that have filled my sickly life with living nightmares. Better to live WITH them than to be afraid of them. (Such is the life of a person with little or no immune system all their days. I have had perhaps only about a month’s worth of healthy days my entire life. Every other one is full of medicines, procedures, doctors, pain, grief, and just trying to pull through to the next hopefully better day.)
I used to fear what my sister and my nieces and nephew would think of all this. Colour me shocked and surprised when they expressed eager interest and they appeared to find it all not only cool, but began arguing with my sister on how they might divvy it all up once I was gone. Which is not as macabre as it sounds, since I am the oldest one among us and my health’s never been great; I’m okay with it. I can’t express how happy that made me, because that is one of the best levels of acceptance a person could want.