The Dark Tower

Then it’s a new week, the week his folks are gone, and a new movie, and the first time he sees it it scares the living breathing shit out of him. This movie is called The Lost Continent, and it stars Mr. Cesar Romero, and when Jake sees it again (at the advanced age of ten) he will wonder how he could ever have been afraid of such a stupid movie as that one. Because it’s about explorers who get lost in the jungle, see, and there are dinosaurs in the jungle, and at four years of age he didn’t realize the dinosaurs were nothing but fucking CARTOONS, no different from Tweety and Sylvester and Popeye the Sailor Man, uck-uckuck, can ya say Wimpy, can you give me Olive Oyl. The first dinosaur he sees is a triceratops that comes blundering out of the jungle, and the girl explorer (Bodacious ta-tas, his father would undoubtedly have said, it’s what his father always says about what Jake’s mother calls A Certain Type Of Girl) screams her lungs out, and Jake would scream too if he could but his chest is locked down with terror, o here is Discordia incarnate! In the monster’s eyes he sees the utter nothing that means the end of everything, for pleading won’t work with such a monster and screaming won’t work with such a monster, it’s too dumb, all screaming does is attract the monster’s attention, and does, it turns toward the Daisy Mae with the bodacious ta-tas and then it charges the Daisy Mae with the bodacious ta-tas, and in the kitchen (the mighty kitchen) he hears the Tokens, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, they are singing about the jungle, the peaceful jungle, and here in front of the little boy’s huge horrified eyes is a jungle which is anything but peaceful, and it’s not a lion but a lumbering thing that looks sort of like a rhinoceros only bigger, and it has a kind of bone collar around its neck, and later Jake will find out you call this kind of monster a triceratops, but for now it is nameless, which makes it even worse, nameless is worse. “Wimeweh,” sing the Tokens, “Weee-ummm-a-weh,” and of course Cesar Romero shoots the monster just before it can tear the girl with the bodacious ta-tas limb from limb, which is good at the time, but that night the monster comes back, the triceratops comes back, it’s in his closet, because even at four he understands that sometimes his closet isn’t his closet, that its door can open on different places where there are worse things waiting.