Salon.com > Sarah Beach

Curse of the hippie parents

Wed, 22 Aug 2001 19:18:00 +0000

One summer when I was 10 or 11, a boy I'll call Jackson befriended my brother and came over to our house frequently to play in our pond. After a few hours of splashing around, naked as usual, we went up to the house to dry off and have something to eat. Jackson plopped down on my mom's platform rocker, grabbed his penis and started to masturbate.

"Hey!" I yelled, and threw a pillow at him. "Don't do that right in front of everybody!"

"My mom says, 'If it feels good, do it,'" he said, whacking away.

If it feels good, do it: a rallying cry of the '60s and the root of a lot of really awful parenting. Jackson may have been admirably comfortable with his body, but like many children of hippie parents, he was in the dark about some very basic social rules, such as the one that says don't jack off in public.

“House on Haunted Hill”

Thu, 11 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

I would rather feed Jesse Helms a rancid peanut butter sandwich, and then have him slowly lick my face off, than sit through "House on Haunted Hill" again.

"House on Haunted Hill," a remake of a 1958 William Castle movie, stars Geoffrey Rush and some other people, all of whom must have asked the Godfather for a favor years ago and had to pay him back by being in this film. I can't forgive Rush. What the hell was he thinking? He was terrific as the piano-playing weirdo in "Shine." As a career choice, this was a pantload of stupidity.

It would be pointless to critique the plot, which revolves around an eccentric millionaire who offers six strangers $1 million each if they can make it through the night in a scary house that used to be an insane asylum. Instead, here are some things I learned from "House on Haunted Hill." For the full effect, print this out, put it through a shredder and read the resulting bits of paper while repeatedly trying to close a door on your head.

If you are a sociopathic serial-killing psychiatrist and you want to torture your inmates by cutting them open without anaesthetic, you will have no trouble finding a bunch of attractive, equally psychotic scrub nurses to hand you a rusty scalpel and film the proceedings.

Blood brothers

Fri, 30 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Cary Stayner has confessed to killing four women in Yosemite and may have committed many more murders, including that of his uncle.

Cary's brother, Steven Stayner, was abducted at the age of 7 by a stranger, Ken Parnell. Cary and Steven were very different -- they didn't even really grow up together. I doubt they knew each other very well.

This is what happened to Steven: In 1972, he was walking in his Merced, Calif., neighborhood when a car rolled up, and Parnell abducted him. Parnell lied to Steven, telling him that the Stayners couldn't afford to keep him anymore and had given Steven to him. He told Steven that his new name was Dennis Parnell. He took Steven to a remote trailer home up a long dirt road in the middle of the woods in Mendocino County. Parnell beat Steven, manipulated him, brainwashed him and raped him over 3,000 times, by Parnell's own reckoning. Eventually he told Steven that the Stayners had died. Steven gave up hope, and the two of them lived alone out there in the woods.