Snuff

  Watch World Whore Three and you’ll see how certain folks say the death scene is just another cum shot.

  The stopwatch girl steps down to the basement floor and stands there. She rips the pink skin off her hands, then a blue layer of skin – rubber gloves, pulled inside out – and throws them on the floor, where they spread, flat and dead as a sex surrogate. The girl’s bare hands slide up to cover her whole face. Her hand skin old with wrinkles and pickled from stewing inside those gloves. Her shoulders rise, her curved backbone straightens as she breathes in one big inhale of the piss smell, the baby oil and sweat of here. The breath holds inside her, her elbows crushed on top of her boobs, her elbows touching together. The breath sighs out in broken mouthfuls, jerking her whole body.

  Watching her, my balls are scrubbed red. My shorts, soaked wet from the sink. I’m homeless. An orphan. Broke and unemployed.

  The Dan Banyan guy, he’s looking. Not straight at the girl, but turning his ear to where she’s crying, really crying now, her breath muffled behind her fingers, her face burrowing into her open hands. The 137 guy says, “Is Cassie dead?”

  Cold and broke, orphaned and rubbed raw, I peel my feet the left, right, left, right sticky steps over to stand next to the girl. In just only my wet underpants, I put an arm around her shoulders, the knots of her sweater shaking. I wrap my other arm around her until she’s wearing me. Until the stopwatch girl stops shaking. My chin hooked over her shoulder, holding her head tight against my chest, I look down to see the writing on my arm.

  Petting her hair with one hand, I tell her, “My name’s not really number 72…”

  I don’t know.

  Dead flakes of her head, sticking to my hand, showering to the floor. The stopwatch girl coming apart. I sniff my fingers and say I like the smell of her shampoo. I say at least she knows her real birth mom. The cold feel of her stopwatch pushed into my bellybutton. Holding her until she’s just breathing regular, I ask what’s her name.

  And the girl pulls back a little. The silver crucifix hanging around my neck, it’s stuck to her cheek, and hangs there, pressed into her skin. She pulls back, and the gold chain of the crucifix loops between us, connecting her and me. Another breath and the crucifix peels off, falls back to my chest, leaving a red shape of it dented into her face.

  Her stopwatch has stamped a round clock shape around my bellybutton.

  The girl says, still in my arms, she says, “This is how much my mother hated me…” She says, “I tell people my name is Sheila because my real mother gave me the ugliest name she could imagine.”

  The name on her birth certificate, from when Cassie Wright gave her away.

  With the gun finger of one hand, the girl flicks the tears off each cheek, fast as windshield wipers, and she says, “The bitch named me Zelda Zonk.” She smiles and says, “How’s that for hatred?”

  Holding her, it’s not so important how I have nothing outside of this moment, outside of this place. How I have no idea of my real name or who I am. How, right here, her sweater against my skin, this moment feels like enough.

  And the Dan Banyan guy says, “Did you say ‘Zelda Zonk’?” Across the basement, smiling, looking at us with his ear, guy 137 says, “Did she really name you Zelda Zonk?” And, shaking his head, he starts to laugh.

  And I say my real name is Darin, Darin Johnson, holding Zelda until her cheek comes back to rest against the cross on my chest. Her stopwatch clock tick-tick-ticking against the skin of my gut.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  30

  Mr. 137

  The head of casting for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected Roy Fitzgerald three times. The actor stumbled when asked to walk around her office, stumbled so often she worried he’d break her glass coffee table. Fitzgerald, a former navy sailor turned Teamster, who now worked delivering frozen carrots, showed too much gum line when he smiled. Worst of all, he giggled. Fitzgerald spoke with the squeal of a teenage girl, and every time he tripped and stumbled over his own feet he’d giggle.

  Nobody would cast the big sissy until his agent, Henry Willson, taught him to press his lips to his teeth as he smiled. Willson exposed Fitzgerald to an actor suffering from strep throat. Once Fitzgerald was infected and his throat fully inflamed, the agent ordered him to scream and shout until his vocal cords were scarred. After that, the actor’s voice was lower, a deep, gravelly growl. A man’s voice. And his name was changed to Rock Hudson.

  I love that Cassie Wright knew that bit of Hollywood history. The fact that we both knew so much of the same trivia – about Tallulah drinking crushed eggshells and Lucy stretching her face back – that made me fall in love with her. Most marriages are based on a lot less.

  Cassie knew about Marilyn Monroe cutting one high heel shorter than the other so her ass would truly roll as she walked. Cassie knew that Marilyn’s lifetime of pneumonia and bronchitis was most likely caused by her habit of burying herself in a bathtub of crushed ice before any appearance in film or public. Lying naked, drugged to escape the pain, buried in ice for hours, gave Monroe the solid stand-up tits and ass she wanted for the day’s work.

  Wouldn’t you know it?

  Cassie knew Marilyn’s secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That’s who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  31

  Sheila

  Ms. Wright knew.

  All along, the woman knew who I was. Who she really was. She played along, knowing she would die. Cassie Wright would willingly fuck six hundred pud-pullers to make me rich.

  True fact. Another last thing today comes down to is reality.

  What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?

  That bitch.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  32

  Mr. 600

  On the TVs, they’re playing the first movie Cassie ever appeared in. Shot on video, maybe one step better than some security camera at the corner quick-stop grocery. On the TVs is her and me, young as Sheila and the kid 72. Cassie’s eyes are rolled up to show only white, her arms flopping loose at her sides, her head rolling around on her neck so far the pull opens her mouth, drool sliding out the corner of her lips.

  Slack as a blow-up sex-doll version of herself.

  If you want to know, that first film I did with Cassie Wright, I slipped her a diet soda mixed with beta-ketamine and Demerol. With the camera set up on a tripod next to the mattress, I fucked her everywhere my dick would fit.

  Because I loved her so much.

  That first movie was called Frisky Business. After she got famous, the distributor recut it and released the movie as Lay Misty for Me. Recut as World Whore One.

  If you got to know, Cassie never planned to make that first movie.

  That movie’s playing to the empty basement.

  The kid’s in the John, scrubbing any poison off his gonads, scrubbing the way the teddy-bear dude scrubbed his forehead.

  Sheila comes down the stairs, blubbering. Dragging her sleeves of her sweater across her eyes, smearing snot and whatnot sideways to her ears, her top teeth meeting her bottom teeth on edge, and her jaw bunched with muscle at the corners. She’s saying, “Fucker…” Sheila wings the clipboard across the room, where it hits the wall to explode in paper names and numbers. A fluttering cloud of fifty- and twenty-dollar bills that Sheila took as bribe money.

  The kid comes out the bathroom door saying, �
�Don’t cry.” Saying, “It’s what Miss Wright wanted…”

  Just graduated from Missoula High School, Cassie had this big plan to go to drama school. She planned to live at home and study to be an actor or a movie star – either way, so long as she was in show business. Either way, she didn’t want to marry me. How she told me was her grades were too good. Cassie said maybe if she was stupid and desperate, really clutching at straws and emotionally needy, utterly destroyed, she’d accept my proposal – so I figured there was still hope.

  Trouble was, her folks had poisoned her against me with all this self-esteem crap.

  The Friday night Cassie told me, I said I understood.

  I said I wanted her to live the full, rich life’s dream she cherished. And I asked, did she want a diet soda?

  The closest thing that comes to how today felt is when you wipe back to front. You’re on the toilet. You’re not thinking, and you smear shit on the back of your hanging-down wrinkled ball skin. The more you try to wipe it clean, the skin stretches, and the mess keeps getting bigger. The thin layer of shit spreads into the hair and down your thighs. That’s how a day like this, how it felt.

  Later, Cassie told me the drugs, the beta-ketamine and Demerol, stopped her heart. Her brain cooled, and she rose up out of her body, hovering near the ceiling, looking down, her and the video camera watching my ass clench and relax, clench and relax, as I fucked her until her heart started back to pump. Fucked her to death, then back to life. Humping her dead body around that mattress, I ended the old life she had, wanting to act, and gave her a new life.

  Sex reincarnated that good, pure girl, but as something else.

  Cassie hovering, watching the action same as I’m doing now.

  Behind Sheila, the teddy-bear dude comes down the stairs into the basement. Both his hands clutching the rail at one side.

  Sheila yanks the stopwatch, snapping the cord around her neck, and pitches the watch against the concrete wall. Another little explosion.

  Another step down, and Sheila says, “The pig took the pill himself.”

  The kid crosses to his brown paper bag, pulls out tennis shoes, jeans, a T–shirt. A belt. Stepping into his socks, he says, “Who?”

  Sheila folds her arms. Looking up at a TV, at me humping Cassie Wright’s limp body, she says, “My father.”

  The teddy-bear dude says, “Who?”

  Branch Bacardi.

  Me. Dead and hovering, the way Cassie floated up after her heart stopped.

  Six hundred dudes. One gal. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.

  Didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie. That’s a lie.

  If you imagined I was alive, that’s another. I took the pill.

  Buttoning his shirt, the kid says, “Is Mr. Bacardi dead?”

  And Sheila says it’s hard to tell. She says, “With his tan, and all the bronzer he has on, he looks healthier and more alive than any of us.”

  My daughter.

  On the TVs, I’m popping my load deep inside Cassie’s dead snatch, pumping her back to life. A decent money shot wasted, worthless for nothing except making some kid. Sheila. Stupid, stupid me.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  33

  Mr. 72

  We’re afterward now. We’re standing in the alley, after the paramedics asked Sheila was there any next-of-kin? Any family to be notified?

  This is after Sheila shook her head no. White flakes drifting off her hair, small as ashes from a fire, and she told them, “Nobody. The pig had no one.”

  Mr. Bacardi had nobody.

  It’s after we left the Dan Banyan guy in the basement, him getting dressed but wearing his shirt inside out. Feeling the buttons, he said, “For our reality show, how about calling it The Blonde Leading the Blind?” He pulled his pants on backward, then rightward. Then, fishing a phone out of his pants pocket, Dan Banyan punched speed-dial, and when somebody answered he says not to send the escort. Everything’s over. The old, flabby guy they were sending, he’s not needed.

  The job is done.

  After the Dan Banyan guy calls someone else to say yes, yes, yes to some emergency hair transplants. After he calls a restaurant to reserve a table for him and Miss Wright, for tonight.

  Just Sheila and me stand, alone in the alley, the sun is setting on the other side of the building. Those sunset colors, red and yellow as a fire burning, on the other side of everywhere. Sheila’s fingers flick the money back and forth between her hands, her mouth counting, “…fifty, seventy, a hundred twenty, a hundred seventy…” The money coming to $560 in her right hand. Then the same in her left.

  Don’t worry, I tell her. She can still hate her mom.

  And Sheila counts the bills again, saying, “Thanks.” She wipes her eyes with a twenty-dollar bill. She blows her nose on a fifty and says, “You smell meat cooking?”

  I ask, is she going to poison me?

  “Don’t you know?” Sheila says, “The damaged love the damaged.”

  Cyanide and sugar. Poison and antidote. Like maybe we balance each other out.

  I don’t know. But this moment, standing with her in the alley, outside the stage door, the number ‘72’ still going down my arm, waiting to do what’s next, this moment feels like enough.

  The ambulance guys still inside, chest-massaging the dead body of Mr. Bacardi. Sticking him with big needles full of some cure. His eyes squeezed shut from the huge smile his dead mouth is doing.

  And Sheila says, “Wait.” Half the money in each hand, she stops counting. She looks at the closed metal door we just came out. The door shut behind us. After the lock clicked, after everything’s done. Sheila leans, twisting her head sideways until her ear presses to the door. She puts her nose to the lock and sniffs – her nostrils reaching for the keyhole and sniffing, hard. One hand, clenched full of money, reaches to tug the handle. Tugs harder. Her other hand, fisted around the other money, she knocks on the metal door. Knocks louder. Tugs harder. Sheila shoves both hands at me, saying, “Hold this crap a minute.”

  A little, little smell of meat smoke. Barbecue.

  The red outline of my cross, the one pressed off my chest, fading on her cheek.

  It’s after she pushes all the cash into my hands Sheila starts really screaming, slapping and kicking the door, then tugging the handle with both hands.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  34

  Mr. 137

  On the film set, the emergency paramedics pound on the shaved chest of Branch Bacardi, the latex of their gloves sticking, then peeling off with a tearing sound, their latex palms stained brown with bronzer, revealing Bacardi’s dead blue skin. Their hands punching and pumping Bacardi’s chest, his red, dark-red nipple blood spots their gloves. The razor cut, his shaved-off nipple no longer leaking blood.

  With the cameraman leaning close, the paramedics sweating, the sides of their shirts, from sleeve to belt, their white uniforms soaked dark gray with sweat, Cassie Wright says, “Are you getting this?” The production stills-photographer shooting coverage, flash after flash from every angle, washing everything in bursts of strobe that leave us blind. Blinking. Breathing the hot air, heavy with sweat and perfume and sperm.

  At the same time, Cassie squats over Bacardi’s hips, sitting on the stubble of his shaved pubic hair. With both hands planted on her knees, she pushes down to raise herself. Half standing, she slams her hips down again, but not too fast, not so fast you can’t see Bacardi’s stiff blue erection disappearing inside her.

  Even dead, that’s a big dick.

  The Goldilocks of dildos. Battery-powered or manually operated. Dead as the pink rubber version under my bed. As any holy relic in a cathedral. Stiff as the shrink-wrapped rows for sale in adult toy stores. Now a collectors’ item. An antique.

  Cassie Wright lifts her hips and slams them down, the flash of blue, lifeless dick appearing and disappearing, and she says, “Upstage me…you prick piece of shit.” Both of t
hem drenched in sweat. She pounds her pussy down, snarling, “You stole my biggest scene, you rat bastard.” Her eyes washing tears down both cheeks, the runoff of eyeliner and mascara tracing the spidery wrinkles from her eyes to her chin, her face shattered by the network of branching black cracks.

  One paramedic squeezes clear jelly from a tube, smears the jelly onto a little catcher’s mitt. A small white mitt. Then the paramedic rubs the mitt against another little mitt, smearing the clear jelly between them. Wires dangle from both little mitts, trailing to a box where a red light glows.

  The paramedic smearing jelly, he says, “Clear!”

  The other paramedic leans back, away, not touching Bacardi.

  The catcher’s mitts, really cardiac paddles. A heart defibrillator. A billion volts of electricity, ready to shock Bacardi back to life.

  The paramedic holding the cardiac paddles, he shouts, “Clear, lady!” into Cassie’s broken, weeping face.

  And Cassie stands until the fat blue erection is their only link. That dick their only connection. Until the fat head of it pops free of her dripping labia. The stiff blue dick still reaching out, stretching straight up to touch her as she pulls away.

  The paramedic slams both cardiac paddles on Bacardi’s sagging, sweating chest, and Bacardi’s spine arcs from the current pumped into him. The muscles of his arms and legs swell, defined, etched and cut, his skin hard and tight. In that jolt, Bacardi looking young again, trim and tan, smooth and smiling. His teeth shining, white. His eyes shocked wide open. The photographer’s flash and the spark of paramedic lightning turning Bacardi into a buff Frankenstein’s monster.

  And in that flash, Cassie Wright looks down at Branch Bacardi restored to his prime, young the way they’d both been young. His perfect comeback.