MONDO

 

Mondo’s house was a half-hour drive away. I’d brave the Oklahoma summer heat and make my way through Tulsa’s crumbling downtown and across the Arkansas River. On my first trip there, I tagged along with a trio of small-time criminals and county jail losers, Okies with bad teeth and oil-burning pill habits. That’s where Mondo came in.

He rented a small room in a weathered rental house he shared with a handful of housemates, none of whom I ever met. Mondo’s quarters were stripped down to a shocking sparsity. His possessions consisted of a dirty mattress, two or three chairs, a sturdy metal gun cabinet that held the wares he peddled, and a swollen, bulbous television, a monstrous thing of pre-flat screen manufacture. The TV seemed to eat up an entire wall. He’d attached a DVD player and a VHS deck to it.

Mondo was a nurse by trade, with sticky fingers and access to loosely-monitored drug lockers. He sold various substances – some of them illegal, some of them prescription, all of them illicit — but his drug of choice was one which I suppose qualifies as a timeless classic of the genre. Mondo liked gasoline, huffed hard enough that his ragged brain produced thrilling hallucinations. He would describe these trips in a bombed-out honk of a voice, bereft of a true speech impediment but impeded and slurred by the battering he’d given his grey matter over the years. When I met him, the deeply whacked-out stare he fixed me with was one part formless void and one part vacant hunger. His eyes had the lively, mindless glint one might see reflected in the eyes of a deep-sea scavenger – something that takes its rotting delight in lightless depths.

Mondo had two requirements if you wanted to buy anything from him. The first was that you listen to his stories, which would drone on and on in an endless, affectless stream. The second requirement gave him his nickname, derived from his greatest love (other than gasoline). He loved so-called “mondo films,” a genre of dirt-cheap exploitation documentaries and pseudo-documentaries most popular between 1960 and 1990, many of which featured real (or “real,” I suppose) mutilations, accidents, deaths, and surgeries. Mondo’s personal collection was all VHS-format and contained some rare and esoteric items, although I’m sure that torrents have made many of his mail-order and horror-con treasures easily available. His collection spanned a range of years, from the irredeemable Africa Addio to the latter-day, “much faker” (in his estimation) Faces of Death films of the late 1980s. He held the latter group of films in disdain, seeing them as “knockoff shit” compared to the original masterpiece (Faces of Death, 1978, directed by Conan LeClair, an ostentatious pseudonym that I’ve always rather enjoyed).

The summer heat and odorous humidity would roll in off of the Arkansas River, through the streets and green, overgrown parks, and settle over the city like a wet shroud. It was oppressive, and air conditioning was surprisingly hard to come by – or was among the folks I knew, at any rate. I remember that Mondo’s house was miserably hot, and sweat would roll freely down my neck and off of my flanks as I suffered through one or another of his treasures on the distended old TV in his room. There was a pervasive smell in that house. In the years between those greasy summer days at Mondo’s and now, I believe I’ve ascertained what that smell was. At the very least, I know what it represented.

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol opened its doors in Paris in 1897. For more than half a century, up until its closing in 1962, the Grand-Guignol specialized in horror performances that employed flamboyant, realistic, and grisly special effects, most of them accomplished with secreted offal. Private boxes were available at the Guignol, and it was not uncommon for guests of the theater wealthy enough to afford these boxes to engage in acts of erotic indulgence (viz. fuckin’) while they watched the screaming actors lose bowel-buckets of horse intestines, or thrust steel dirks through carefully concealed blood bags, or “gouge out” a palmed pig eyeball. I’ve come to believe that the smell I noticed in Mondo’s house was pheromonal, an exuded hormone-cloud borne of human arousal at the spectacle of human suffering. It was the smell of the avid and aroused delectation of human frailty.

The taxonomy of horror – like any classification system – is a human construct, and not as neatly ordered or separated into distinct categories as critical shorthand might suggest. Mondo cinema, splatter films, grindhouse horror, all are categories that have characteristics in common with body horror (as does the over-the-top gore style that has come to be known – in honor of the extinct theater – as “grand guignol”). Splatter films and fiction that focuses on the mutilation of the human body have often been seen as low-brow, almost pornographic. In fact, the portmanteau “gorno” is sometimes applied to modern variations on this theme. But is bloody horror really as simple as the prurient – the obscene? Or is it, ultimately, a meditation on the fragility of life, the ever-present threat of total annihilation that all living things endure, but which it is the uniquely terrible lot of thinking animals to both endure AND contemplate?

I watched a number of films at Mondo’s; Basket Case, Re-Animator, Blood Sucking Freaks, and, of course, the infamous Cannibal Holocaust. They made me queasy at first, and some of them still do (I would worry about anyone who could watch some of them with too calm an eye). But beneath the gore and the viscera, behind the veils of veiny flesh and bulging eyes, I think that this kind of horror offers us something of value; namely, a difficult meditation on the violability, mutability, and impermanence of the flesh. 

In so contemplating, we are offered an opportunity to feel solidarity with our fellow life-forms and an appreciation of the true value of life and health. By inviting us to contemplate the red secret we all hold inviolate within the bony tabernacle of our ribs – to ponder, rather than run from, the carnal mysteries of deformity — body horror puts us in better touch with our species, our self, and our place in the cosmos.

It just might not be a place we care for very much – at least, not when our number is up, at any rate.