I Married a Monster from..., Part One

I Married a Monster from Hollywood Heights, Part One



Mom and Dad and the kids share a common groove in their fabulous home, they all turn into werewolves and refuse to do anything but accept it and go on about things as if they were as normal and adjusted as you and me, except they hide it better, and they haven’t cleaned their swimming pool in three years—the water is brownish green and referred to as the swamp—but they jump in and splash around and play volleyball all year long, and maybe that’s where they caught lycanthropy.
Dad hears voices, shrill, domineering, comedic voices, such as, “Who’s his own worst protagonist? Who? You are, aren’t you? That’s right. Come on. You know who you are, Pops.” To that, he answers, “Who, me?” Perhaps not the wisest of moves for a man trying to hide, among other things, blood-stained claws and fangs.
Early morning suits them just fine for a carnivorous makeover. Mom, already hairy, referred to as ‘Momster’ wherever she’s not, growls, “Damn. He’s home. I can smell him.” Amazingly, just beyond mom’s sexy waxy head, slightly out of focus through her cataract eyes, dad writhes in his werewolf agonies with steam rising from his pillow, and that bobbing Adam’s apple!
“Who’s the floozy this time?” she yowls. “Is some of her in this house? You had better have an alibi that sticks! AAAARRRGGGH!”
“I do,” dad says, suddenly docile. “I was dead last night.”
“That never stopped you before!”
“Okay. Give me a break this morning. I had an argument with our neighbor Hal. I ran over his newspaper.”
“So what?”
“While he was reading it.”
“I take it all back, Harold. I do love you.” People that don't know mom don't know that she never tells the truth. She’s always waiting for some sap to take her seriously. “Honest.”
“Yeeeeeoooooooowlllll!” And dad, who glugs a bit of the creature between bedtimes, goes spiraling out of his favorite window under the sting of mom’s size eight boot.
Despite mom’s unique blend of support and encouragement, and her interminable concern for familial order, dad takes the full-moon freak out like a tortured prophet. Look at him, banished, toiling in his makeshift lab in the backyard shed. Watch him work on a cure for life. At his scratchy and smeared chalkboard, within the second phase shift of an inverted cosmic verity, he stumbles upon the unholiest of conundrums: Why do good things happen to bad people? Beset by ‘something’ not explainable by math, he mauls a dog, then rips back to his matrimonial bed and starts on another groundbreaker, My Theory of Everything Else, working late at night surrounded by books, papers, mom, and anachronistic gizmos, behaving like an overzealous chimp staying in for some good vibrations. He leaps. A ceiling fan blade catches his skull. O! how mom and the kids die laughing, literally. Then dear father’s slide rule opens down his windpipe as he’s celebrating a breakthrough with a bouncy rendition of ‘Life Is Just a Bowl of Harries’! Mom takes him leisurely to the vet, via the scenic route, on her scooter, gets lost, and stops at a bar for something to take the edge off. Finally, at the vet. “I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t treat werewolves.” Yes, the little receptionist will soon be slaughtered. Dad might eventually pass the bat, but mom will never forgive a slight.
Mom takes her werewolf curse in stride, so calmly, like a satisfied sadist, always smiling and nodding to beat the band to death. She just kills and maims and then kills again and then gets all tawny and aloof when her perfect world falls to pieces in her mind. She likes her meat cooked, and so she hunts beachside with an astrolabe, walking and counting grains of sand. So long as her kitchen is clean and organized and her hair is not frizzy, she feels that nothing can stop her from making her husband appear foolish.
“I love to watch my husband suffer.”
In the twins’ bedroom, we hear little Darrin’s sibilance: “Jenny, Uncle Maynard says it’s not the richest guy in the cemetery that wins; it’s the one with the biggest belly. Ss-ss-ss-ss-ssss.”
Amazed with wild wonder, Jenny, who, during her formative years, thanks to her mother, thought her father’s name was ‘get off me!’, slams her book (she reads in the dark) and replies, “Uh, I don’t get it,” and hears Darrin’s teeth elongating and his white skin furring up in the dark. It sounds like a distant bowl of Rice Crispies in milk, spilling onto the hardwood floor. Being twins of a very hairy plumber, these darlings come under the werewolf horrors whenever a toilet flushes.
And there goes mom’s paw for the toilet handle! And there go the children’s thick satin pajamas into puffs of confetti! Blood feast blitzkrieg! When will this absent-minded father, now stalking a neighborhood skunk without his glasses, ever invest in durable nighttime apparel for his little changelings?