Free Danse Macabre by Stephen King Page B

are Americans with club feet, Americans without noses, amputee Americans, blind Americans ( I've always wondered if the blind of America felt discriminated against by that McDonald's jingle that goes, "Keep your eyes on your fries . . ."). Beside such cataclysmic physical fuck-ups of God, man, and nature, a few pimples look about as serious as a hangnail. But I should also point out that in America, cataclysmic physical fuckups are (so far, at least) the exception rather than the rule. Walk down any ordinary street in America and count the serious physical defects you see. If you can walk three miles and come up with more than half a dozen, you're beating the average by a good country mile. Look for people under forty whose teeth have rotted right down to the gum line, children with the bloated bellies of oncoming starvation, folks with smallpox scars, and you will look in vain. You'll not find folks in the A & P with running sores on their faces or untreated ulcers on their arms and legs; if you set up a Head Inspection Station at the corner of Broad and Main, you could check a hundred heads and come up with only four or five really lively colonies of head lice. Incidence of these and other ailments rise in. white rural areas and in the inner cities, but in the towns and suburbs of America, most people are looking good. The proliferation of self-help courses, the growing cult of personal development "I'm going to be more assertive, if that's all right with you," as Erma Bombeck says), and the increasingly widespread hobby of navel-contemplation are all signs that, for the time being, great numbers of Americans have taken care of the nitty-gritty realities of life as it is for most of the world-the survival trip.
    I can't imagine anyone with a severe nutritional deficiency caring much about I'm OK—You're OK , or anyone trying to scratch out a subsistence-level existence for himself, his wife, and his eight kids giving much of a toot about Werner Erhard's est course or Rolfing. Such things are for rich folks. Recently Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album . For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book: the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaiithe seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples. When the horizons of human experience shrink to HO scale, perspective changes. For the war babies, secure (except for The Bomb) in a world of six-month checkups, penicillin, and eternal orthodontics, the pimple became the primary physical deformity with which you were seen on the street or in the halls of your school; most of the other deformities had been taken care of. And say, having mentioned orthodontics, I'll add that many kids who had to wear braces during dose years of heavy, almost suffocating peer pressure saw them as a kind of deformity-every now and then you would hear the cry of "Hey, metalmouth!" in the halls. But most people saw them only as a form of treatment, no more remarkable than a girl with her arm in a sling or a football player wearing an Ace bandage on his knee.
    But for the pimple there was no cure.
    And here comes I Was a Teenage Frankenstein . In this film, Whit Bissell assembles the creature, played by Gary Conway, from the bodies of dead hot-rodders. The leftover pieces are fed to the alligators under the house—of course we have an idea early on that Bissell himself will end up being munched by the gators, and we are not disappointed. Bissell is a total fiend in this movie, reaching

    existential heights of villainy: "He's crying, even the tear ducts work! . . . Answer me, you have a civil tongue in your head. I know, I sewed it there." * But it is *Quoted in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film , by Carlos Clarens (New York: Capricorn Books, 1967). the unfortunate Conway who catches the eye and mainsprings the film. Like the villainy of Bissell, the physical deformity of Conway is so awful it