An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 4)

An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 4)

originally written on September 18, 1995

Slightly revised on August 20, 2021

Backing up a little - my next door neighbor (and also the nicest person I know) Randy Blemmel showed me some magazines which would prove to become favorites.  They were published by Warren Magazines and each one dealt with the macabre and the bizarre. Eerie and Creepy were black and white graphic pulp magazines that took the horror genre into realms that DC books never dared to go. Vampirella was similar although it was a serial title and focused on one main character, an out-of-this-world sexy female vampire named Vampirella. 

The best Warren magazine, in my opinion now and especially then was Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was primarilly filled with still photos from classic (and not-so-classic) horror films of the time. Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and Christopher Lee were the big boys here and the gorier the photograph the better I liked it. Perhaps this is strange but I was only like 10 years old and had a lot of curiosity to waste on these trivial things. (In 1995, when I originally wrote this, there were still monster magazines being published but nothing as good as Forest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland...there could never be because modern horror, influenced by slasher films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street have little more to offer than blood and gore. That's not so much the case now, in 2021 as they have turned into a cliche)

The eternal vampire has been replaced by the psychotic knife weilding serial killer. Back then, in the late 60s and early 70s we were afraid of the monsters/villains for what they were (vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, on and on), not simply what they did (and could do) to their victims, though that was definately a part of it as well. Dracula was my childhood favorite because the idea of a living corpse feeding off of human blood seemed almost believable. (2021 update: I now see a lot of reasons to be afraid of such a creature not the least of which being summed up in the old saying "Who wants to live forever?" which is a flip-sided question of it's own)

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I started out writing about my mother and I've wound up with comics, magazines and Dracula. I guess that's because my mother and I were never really close (that can be said of my dad and me as well, I'm afraid). In these formidable comic book collecting years my mom and dad seemed to have been trying to recapture the lost romance of the years, I assume, before my brother and I were born. They'd begun visiting, every Saturday night, a country music "dance hall" (let's call it what it was, a honky tonk bar located a few miles out of town that obviously needed an outlet for adults at the time, worried about the war, having diffiulty bringing themselves to the point where they could see through the black and white). This place was called the BJ Corrall. Named after the owners Betty and Joe Sargent (I think that was thier last name, pretty sure about the first). It was apparently the "place to be" in Prague on the weekends. At least they had a live band, though I was not old enough to ever find out, I can only imagine it as a lame country and western cover group trying to churn out Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings you get the idea. 

Actually I feel kind of foolish suggesting any reason for why they went there. What did I know? And what do I know now? I just knew that they fought a lot still and I can speak for my brother and myself that we were too young to have to listen to that stuff so often. There were periods when they would argue days at a time although I never saw my dad lift a fist to hit her and I honestly don't think he had ever done that. I think he pushed himself to a line where he refused to cross with her and later with me when I was the one on the other end of his nightly arguing. It seemed as if he actually enjoyed fighting with me as I reached and crossed the line of puberty. Especially after my mom got tired of being on the recieving end of his rage and left us to fend for ourselves and take care of him on our own. It was a little too much, though. My brother and I had to figure out what was going on in front of us and it wasn't pretty. He was having a nervous breakdown but we had no idea, I don't think I even knew what a nervous breakdown was at that time or at least that I would recognize one as such. But he would go on about how his nerves "were shot". He was in agony, you could tell he was ashamed to be crying in front of you, he'd beg me to go after her, once he even hit the wall hard enough to put his fist through it. But never did he threaten us, that wasn't something he would have done. 

After he realized she wasn't coming back and that he'd given me a hundred dollar bill to drive to Oklahoma City and do this supposed magic spell he must have thought I had in bringing him back and in retrospect you're damn right I feel guilty for taking that money and not saying a thing to mom about coming home when I went there. I admit it, I didn't want her to come home. I didn't want her to face him again and argue like it was a part time job piled up on top of the full time job she left behind. Dad was desperate when he did that and I recognize it as such. I sometimes wonder if he ever "wised up" and realized that I'd stopped having anything to do with her...that wasn't my fault either, what I inherited were the arguments. Virulent and hateful we would stand at the end of the hall and hurl abuse towards each other. It's a blessing that I don't remember all the things that were said on my side as well as his. He made a lot of threats and so did I, it must have been comical to an educated outsider that we didn't just have at it and wrestle it all out, get it out of our systems physically but he was my dad and I'd never lay a hand on him as long as either of us lived and I kind of knew he would be the same. To be perfectly honest I think we did take each other down once but again, I've mentally blocked it if I did. 

It's strange, looking back (in 2021) but it's almost as if I subliminally learned to enjoy an argument now and then from him but trust me, that's not a place I need to be or ever want to be. My wife has taught me what a fool I am to want to argue about anything or everything. Lately I've been about keeping the Cynic at bay and this morning I feel pretty damned good even though I hated reliving this sad portion of my history, it's over, it's in the past, my father passed away in 1999 and the only thing I can think of is how happy I am that he never had to witness the World Trade Center attack. He had a soft heart and so much tragedy at one time would surely have put him over the edge. I don't know if I'll ever see him again, but I know there's a huge part of him in me, both the good and the bad. And what with all the hate we taught each other I think that IF we somehow wound up together on the other side of my life we would forgive each other as we have been forgiven on this side by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Then we can see each other as He sees us. Made perfect by His sacrifice.