Horror Show by Greg Kihn

gambles.”
    Roberta stopped doing her eyes again and turned to face Janice. The smoke from her cigarette curled seductively around her head, looking suddenly like a crown of thorns.
    â€œWill you calm down? God, it’s like you’re my mother or something. If anything happens, anything , I’ll grab a cab back home in a flash,” Roberta explained evenly.
    â€œWell—” Janice stubbed out her cigarette and exhaled sharply in her best Bette Davis impersonation.
    â€œCome on, Jan. It’s okay. Buzzy Haller is a very nice man. He’s taking me to a party where there will be lots of other people. What could possibly happen?” Roberta finished off her sentence with a sobering look, designed to assuage her friend’s fears.
    â€œA lot,” Janice replied, unconvinced.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œHe could get fresh with you, lure you into one of the bedrooms, get you drunk, and slip you his pepperoni.”
    â€œHis what ?” They burst into a torrent of giggles.
    Tad Kingston had no talent, at least that’s what everybody said behind his back. To his face they were more diplomatic. “Lots of potential,” the agents would say, or, “the right looks.” Never, “He’s a great actor.” And it was the truth. Thadeus Willinger, AKA Tad Kingston, couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, but he did not aspire to be a great actor. What Tad Kingston wanted was to be a movie star.
    In Hollywood, that was a much more realistic goal.
    Tad did have the looks. He’d toyed with being a rock ’n’ roll singer, but his inability to carry a tune turned off the record companies. So, Tad embarked on a career as a matinee idol. He found an agent who liked his face, had some pictures printed, and waited by the phone. It never rang.
    He ran into Landis Woodley at a party, and the brash filmmaker took him under his wing. He wound up with the lead teenager part in Hot Rod Monster, Blood Ghouls of Malibu , and Attack of the Haunted Saucer .
    The kids loved him. Overlooking his massive shortcomings as an actor, they focused on his hair. He had what Landis Woodley referred to as “star quality hair.”
    It was blond, longish for its day, swept back, and greasy. It flared with intricate patterns back from his forehead. His pompadour cascaded in front like a frozen waterfall, then swept back severely on the sides and ended up in a classic “DA.” He spent hours working it with a comb. If he’d spent as much time learning his lines, he might have gotten more work.
    His credits with Woodley probably helped him lose more jobs than gain them around Hollywood.
    Tad was wolfing down a ham sandwich his mother had made him when the phone rang.
    The telephone in the hallway of his mother’s house was black and heavy. It sat on a tiny table next to the most uncomfortable chair his mother owned. That was by design, of course. Tad knew her reasoning: that he would spend less time talking on the telephone, and thereby reduce the amount of her monthly phone bill. Coupled with the postage-stamp-size table, it was as severe an environment as she could muster for conversation.
    None of it mattered to Tad. He didn’t give two shits for comfort, and he talked as long as he liked, whenever he liked, regardless.
    She kept the ringer at its loudest setting and it reverberated off the flowered wallpaper with eardrum-rattling intensity.
    Tad picked up the weighty receiver. “Hello? Tad Kingston speaking.”
    Landis Woodley sounded pissed off. “Hey, Kingston, I heard you’re not bringing Lana Wills to the party tonight, and I thought I’d call you and find out for myself.”
    â€œMr. Woodley—I …”
    â€œI know you wouldn’t screw me like that, would you? I went out of my way to line this up for you. Lana Wills is hot now.”
    Tad stammered. He decided to be forthright and just tell the truth, an ill-advised