.
This
is a Halloween Horror entry. In about
the year 1963 or so, four of us in Seventh Grade and one in Ninth Grade formed The
Sadist Club. It was meant to
be as diabolically weird as possible. We
were committed to the eerie. We had a
secret meeting place (crawling up a tree and over an old roof, through a chink
in a small boarded-up window into the second floor of an unused farm building,
my father’s “Double Decker” building).
We had a collection of skulls and skeletons of various animals, usually
woodchucks, turtles, mice, etc.
.
We
had a secret oath (“Poe’s Honor,” as in Edgar Allan Poe, poet of the macabre
and our main saint). Our sacraments were
watching the Friday Fright Night horror movie double feature on TV at 11:30pm,
with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and the rest of the Classics
of Horror. We tried to be ghastly.
.
We
were: Scott F., Bob D., Greg D., Ron D.
(the Ninth Grader), and me.
.
How
do 13-year-olds get so weird? Well, our Seventh
Grade Reading class teacher retired two weeks into the term, and we got a great
substitute teacher for the remainder of the year: Mr. Johnston.
Incredible luck on our part, for he created his own strange curriculum.
.
Mr.
Johnston was a romantic eccentric who would never have lasted as a teacher in
mid-20th century America. He
told us that this gig was just a temporary stepping stone until he could move
to Ireland and marry his Irish fiancée, his sweetheart. He played records for us of The Clancy
Brothers with Tommy Makem, Irish folk music at full tilt! Before he played such songs of theirs as “The
Rising of the Moon,” he would explain the historical tradition behind the
revolutionary lyrics. Wow! I am getting goose pimples and my hairs are
standing on end just thinking about it now!
Powerful stuff.
.
He
also played record selections such as the Berlioz Symphony
Fantastique, the March to the Gallows theme, where the hero is
ascending the scaffold of the guillotine.
He prepped us for it so that we would hear the part where the severed
head rolls. Are you getting the
picture? This teacher was ultra-weird
and a tremendous gift to us.
.
Mr.
Johnston told us about the Marquis de Sade, although I still don’t see how that
fit into a Seventh Grade Reading curriculum!
We never read de Sade, but we were told stories about him. No sexual themes were mentioned to our young
ears, but we were told mainly that the word “sadism,” as a term partially meaning
cruelty, was named after the Marquis.
Tales of torture fit into our monster movie mindsets, so we derived the
name of The Sadist Club from this. We
were aspiring heretics.
.
As
it was Reading class, we read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t remember much of the other readings
in that year of class, but I’ll never forget Poe. As we went through the stories, Mr. Johnston
would explain the gory background and the historical context. We found that our high school library had
over a dozen neglected copies of a very ancient, small, hard-bound edition of
Poe’s Poems, most probably from a literature class so long
ago that the teacher and many of the students were long gone to their
graves. Bob D. presented to me copy
number 13, inscribed, “From the Members of the Club.” It was definitely not
legitimately checked out, and I still have it in my Stateside book
collection.
.
I
think that The Sadist Club faded out as we started to be interested in
girlfriends and Rock n Roll. But it was
a sick and glorious chapter of our youth.
Essential education. I still
thrill when contemplating the Horror Classics.
.
-Zenwind.
.
