Dean Lombardo
"For years my dreams were filled with creepy-crawly things meaning to do me harm in ways previously unimagined."
Origins of Vespa:
Ahh ... the summer of 1979.
I was eleven then, and a huge monster-movie fan. Over a friend's house one day I noticed a Newsweek cover featuring the face of a terrified woman framed by the title: "Hollywood's Scary Summer." I started flipping through the lead story, looking at the pictures and then reading about several horror films that were to premiere that summer. One was called The Prophecy, and it was about some kind of angry half-bear-half-pig mutation bent on dismembering human beings. The article also featured Dawn of the Dead, and I think I remember a photo of a young man with an axe in his skull. And, of course, there was this other movie being promoted that summer, a movie with far-less-overt, far-more-enigmatic photographs serving as its publicity. There was a picture of an egg, a leaking, glowing egg. The movie was called Alien. Strange ... what could this monster be? My curiosity was piqued, I had to see it. But it was rated R and my mother said No.
A week later another friend's father was telling me a bit about Alien, telling me how shockingly good it was. "Hey Dad," I said to my father later. "Ray took Steven to Alien. Will you take me?"
My parents divorced when I was five. I usually got to spend a few hours with my father on the weekends. But for the movie Alien, I couldn't wait. Dad picked me up on a weeknight, and together we staved off mother's arguments about me seeing an R-rated film and went to the movies and sat in the middle of pretty packed Avon Theater in Stamford, CT. The film started slowly, too slowly, and the crowd--which I seem to remember consisting of a lot of hippies (we're still in the Seventies, dude, remember?)--was starting to get impatient. When the monster finally struck, there was loud applause. Confused but easily led, I clapped my hands as well. My Dad, Mr. Conservative, and never one to join in a demonstration by a crowd of hippies, asked me why I was clapping.
"Because something finally happened," I answered sheepishly.
What had happened was this gelatinous crab-like creature, after hatching from a giant egg, had sprung through the air and fastened itself to the face of one of the movie characters. And when the other characters tried to get it off, the creature wouldn't budge. The disgusting thing was squeezing the unconscious guy's skull and, gulp, its tail tightened around the man's throat, and there was no way for me to help and no way for me to turn the channel. I'd met my monster movie match!
Things got worse, and my Dad sensing my unease said in his old-fashioned way, "Now, Dean, it's only a moving picture." His words helped ... for a while ... and everything appeared to be well again with our characters. The creature had detached itself from the poor man's face and crawled off to die, and our characters were getting ready to fly back to Earth safe and sound.
But unbeknownst to our seven characters, the face-hugging crab-monster had deposited something down the man's throat before letting him go: an egg. And now something was sneakily growing inside the man. During a scene at dinner, the crab-monster's toothy reptilian offspring burst through the man's chest, splashing blood over the other character's faces and stunning the audience on the other side of the big screen into silent paralysis.
And little did I know when I left the theater that night, something was growing inside of me as well. Something disturbing. At first, it took the form of many sleepless nights, where I couldn't get the movie Alien and all its horror out of my head. For years my dreams were filled with creepy-crawly things meaning to do me harm in ways previously unimagined.
With Alien's frightening images still vivid more than 20 years after my traumatic night in the theater, I didn't need to rush to see the movie again on cable or VHS. But in the late nineties, I purchased a copy of Alan Dean Foster's novelization and read it, studying how something so frightening could be put to words. In one passage, Foster compared what the alien creature had done to its first victim to what certain types of wasps do to spiders. Wasps? Really? Wasps just stung things, I thought. Could wasps really implant spiders with eggs that would later hatch and eat the spider from the inside out? I researched this, watching documentaries and reading everything I could get my hands on. It was true. Wasps were parasites, sort of like tapeworms and those squirmy things that appeared in your feces when you were a kid. Only wasps weren't satisfied with staying inside of you and living there until a trip to the toilet or doctor rid you of them. Wasp babies were killers. They lived inside of their victims and ate ... and ate until you were dead. And to make sure you couldn't get help from others of your kind, they'd dig a hole in the ground or a mud cast and entomb you until the eggs could hatch and devour you.
And this, my friends ... if you're still with me ... is how Vespa was born. For you, I want it to be something creepy and fun to help you take your mind off whatever boredom or burden plagues you. For me, it represents a form of catharsis, my way of ridding myself of that terrible and tenacious thing that's been growing inside of me since the summer of 1979.
Dean Lombardo
