"A Casio. $10. Stylish" 

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Well, he always sure looked like "one outrageous dude". More like an accountant. Or an autistic wünder-kid who could belt out screenplay after screenplay on a veritable "conveyor belt" that began to get "awfully rickety" toward the end of the run.

God, there was nothing so glorious as "The American Cheeseburger", so long as they were good cheeseburgers sputtering on the grill and handed to we grunts on wax paper on a warm summer's night, hanging out by the tables like a pride of lions.

His films were an ever-reliable standby for Saturday night "home video" entertainment, though a lot of his "teen movies" tugged with a dull ache at your tonsils like a sentimental teenage girl's dilemma as she held her books to her chest and pouted with bee-stung lips. . . . . and we tended to leave that to "The Kotex n' tissue" crowd, like the kind of girls who threw themselves into dull fits of sadness by watching an old man feed the geese at a pond.

We wanted "the high octane gas", not "wuss movies".

One thing that disturbed me about life in adolescence was "how unmagically little it was like a movie", particularly "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" when I thought I was going to grow up to become the cleverest kid in class but only saw my schemes get shortchanged and backfire in horrific ways. There was a large difference between "commonsense" and "movie-sense" and I didn't figure that out until I tried to skateboard over the gorge 42 times and nearly ended up an emotional-invalid.

And "Heathers" sucked. . . . .

(My brother and I carrying
our collection of video tapes)

(Those are not his desecrated remains. . . . .)