Don't Go There!
A great as-yet-used film title. After all, there's a little horror-suspense in all our lives, right?
"Don't Go There!"
How is it you can Google 'til you gag, thumb Leonard Maltin's vast library 'til you're in ICU for paper cuts, comb the shelves at Blockbuster 'til your as blue in the face as their logo, and not come up with a single suspense yarn that bears this title?
Is there a person on earth whose body hasn't broken out in goose bumps at its very utterance?
The last time I heard it was at an impromptu family reunion, prompted by the deterioration of my beloved grandmother. Chitchat inevitably turned to her low-class upbringing, a sorry, Dicksensian affair, and the various characters that made up The Flats, the colorful slum (is there any other kind?) just outside of Ottawa, Canada, where she grew up. There, God assembled a cast worthy of Warner Bros' stock company: diminutive drunks, shell-shocked veterans, flat-nosed bullies and women in the mold of Marjorie Main. Among them was my grandmother's mother-in-law, a big, quiet woman with character actor George Tobias' face, who, legend has it, engineered her way into a men-only tavern one Halloween by cloaking her form in baggy overalls, tightly donning a face mask, and nodding authoritatively any time anybody asked her if she wanted another shot.
"I heard another one about her," I offered, still chuckling over the mask story. "Something about her falling down a flight of stairs...?"
Sudden silence, the kind of silence that said - you guessed it! - Don't Go There!
And indeed, that was the next phrase spoken. "What do you mean?," I countered. My body was suddenly both die-hard defensive and completely unprotect able; I was standing on that rarely visited middle ground, the slim, slippery one situated between tectonic plate 'I have to ask' and tectonic plate 'Oh God, why did I ask?'
The scene recounted me took place in an old-world flophouse, the kind of place people ended up once they went from "colorful" to badly faded. There had been an argument - in the great tradition of drunks going at it, no doubt it was loud, ugly and completely inconsequential. Somebody likely pushed somebody, but nobody ever ended up with any proof. All that's known is that my great grandmother, a resident, was found at the base of the central stairs, and that a doctor, in a private fit of conscience, intimated to her son that the bruises on her body did not suggest, as everyone else in the establishment maintained, that her name just happened to come up on the schedule that day to take the ho-hum, swill-inspired swan dive du jour.
My grandfather, I'm told, dismissed the doctor outright, thus becoming the first member of my known family to resonate from the impact of that great, yet-to-be-used film title:
Don't Go There!
