by Michael Gira
He threaded his way through the maze of stalled and fuming cars like mercury pulled through a crack, a hypnotized vulture drawn unconsciously forward by the scent of decay.
The beautiful teenaged girl’s face inside the scratched glass booth had been machine-gunned with marble-sized pimples, as if the public face she presented were a mask she wore to protect her true artificially perfect good looks from the corrosive effects of close scrutiny. Each mound was a fury of impacted poison — a hundred inflamed knuckles scattered like primed red land mines across the battlefield of her face. Her hair was a blazing display of colors unfurling in a chromatic fan that blended from silver to gold to sun-bleached California blonde, unfolding like the wings of a futuristic bird, synthetic wires of precious metal and superconducting fiber blown up from beneath by the air-conditioning vent in the floor that pumped cool air out from the theater to her booth. A mist of diamonds rose up from her as she sat like a frozen version of herself, thawing, pocked and white, looking him over. He placed his hands on the ledge and pressed them slightly inside the portal in the glass, stealing the cold air sensation with the tips of his fingers, like ten larvae advancing on an organic host. He looked exactly like what he was — a young man whose body was undergoing an extended torture at the hands of its addiction to methamphetamine-sulfate, who hadn’t slept in five days and whose bones were like worms beneath his skin. His head was an explosion of static electricity and fine white hair. His face had taken on the color of the milk he drank daily by the quart to cloak the ulcer which grew like an embryo in the shriveled sack of his stomach. A single pimple clung to his cheek like a lonely red envoy sent up from the red homeland of his shirt to scout the white of his face. It sat huge and pregnant with the relentless paranoia manufactured by his addiction — interpreted by his body in the form of toxins, now aching to spring loose from the confines of their worried pouch. He felt it tingle as if in telepathic empathy with the littered stigmata that peppered her skin like ripening cherries. Waves of love expanded gurgling in his bowels. He chewed his lip like meat. His eyes were all pupil, made even blacker by the thin halo of bleached ivory around them.
The girl spoke to the double reflection of their faces merging in the glass: “Push the buttons! Push the buttons!” Her voice was a tormented fly, roasting on the flame-engorged head of a match, leaking out from the little silver speaker in the window in crisp syllables of agony. She nodded down to the sides of the booth where two black buttons were placed as if in a pinball machine. He pushed them. White rose petals drifted down from the ceiling like snow in a glass ball. Two crudely constructed metal robot arms bending on pulleys and levers hovered inside the booth, responding to the pressure or lateral movements of his thumbs on the buttons. Each pincer at the ends of the arms held a long gleaming surgical needle. The arms danced about her face, jabbing at the compressed kernels that infested her skin, releasing them from their bondage. Pinstripe jets of black oil shot out from her face in a depressurized spray of volcanic effusion as the girl thrashed in epileptic ecstasy. A hand extended out from the blurred tornado of her hair and flesh, a finger pointing towards the theater. “See the Manager!” Her voice followed him like a haunting gnat and burrowed in his ear, whispering with desire.
He glided like a narcoleptic ice skater over the buffed aquamarine tilework that sloped down the entranceway into the black maw of the theater. The images in the tile spelled out in Byzantine stylizations the advantages of decadent life in the lost city of Atlantis. He peered down like Zeus in a frightwig, his head floating behind his body on a string. The manager met him in a hurricane of air conditioning at the glass sliding doors. They parted soundlessly. He stood just inside the frigid aperture gesturing the young man in like an impresario, twitching, a rat-man in an usher’s suit spraying blue sparks of electricity out the sides of his mouth.
“Come in, come in, come in. We’ll lose the cool...” he hissed like a necrophiliac mortician wheeling a fresh cadaver into his refrigerated lair.
As the young man entered, for an instant he was shivering on his front side and sweating profusely out his back. The doors sucked closed behind him, hermetically sealed. Now the cold infused him completely. He stood shaking like a shaved cat. His shirt dried up and stiffened into a red cracking scab. He could feel the whiskers growing out of his face.
The place was as dim as a church. Roller coasters of tarnished brass and swelling seas of encrusted red velvet spread out in perversions of opulence before him. Gold thread traced rococo patterns in the purple felt walls. The theater’s logo — a cupid with a clutch of arrows in one hand and a severed head in the other — was sewn in embossed pink at regular intervals across the walls and carpets. Vicious, greasy teenagers prowled the lobby, pumped up on cheap violence, gore, and clinically depicted scenes of sexual denigration and mutilation. They loitered, coiled like springs anticipating release. They’d later spill out into the primordial chaos of the streets in an orgy of drive-bys, carjackings, murders and rapes, unleashed on the world like a marauding legion of rampaging demons escaped from a sewage hole leading up from hell, squirting hot hormonal juice out their pores, laboring and defiling the polluted night, Los Angeles laying there with its legs spread wide with tinsel tangled in its hair, bleeding from its gash like a freshly gang-raped transvestite weeping on the piss-soaked concrete floor of the L.A. County Jail.
“That will be 12 dollars please,” said the manager, his voice a moist rattle of phlegm tapping in a tin throat. Peppermint fumes escaped glittering from his lips, adorning the real stench of cheap brandy and bile that enveloped his head in its own planetary atmosphere. The young man orbited at a distance, a trembling stick figure with eight-ball eyes. He noticed a growth on the manager’s eyelid. It extended out a full inch, then drooped like a shriveled worm. It bobbed as he spoke, as if mocking his words. “12 dollars please!” scolded the manager, as if teaching a newly paralyzed patient how to use his fingers. He seemed used to this, ready to call out a hidden goon.
The young man simultaneously pointed outside and pulled a fistful of hundreds from his pants pocket as if seeking to buy the maelstrom of filth and heat out there beyond the doors of the theater with this immediate cash down payment. His stomach was a dissolving capsule, brewing with muriatic acid. In his mind was a microchip-sized seed that looked like a fish scale, containing the information that fed his lust for the teenaged girl, now just released from her booth and circling like a zombie in the foyer, drawn out by a thread of the young man’s lingering scent, her hands held before her like lobster claws.
She was naked. Her newly purified skin threw out aurorae of light. Her hair lifted up as if fluffed by a cool wind from beneath, despite the impossible heat rising from the molten concrete and the waves of choking smut tumbling in from the endless parade of radiant metal. As she circled aimlessly like a sleepwalker, it dawned on him: she was totally blind, helpless. He could feel her thoughts reaching out to him like an elastic tether, chewing at his heart, but his body was a slab of butter carved into a soft approximation of his shape, melting, leaden and numb. He noticed a couple of particularly vile and predatory teens looking her over covetously, as if an oversized chicklet had wandered in from the street and was now ambling on the tiles, waiting to be fried. They shared a cigarette, nursing it wetly like a swollen clitoris. Anyone coming on the scene would have thought she was performing a little degrading show just for them. They wandered out the glass doors into the heat. She lifted up her nose like a deer, sniffing the air for danger. Each one took an arm and they led her off, lifting her slightly so that her feet dangled like a ballerina. The young man watched as they carried her off to the slaughter, swallowed by the smog as they disappeared.
“I said 12 dollars! Now please!” repeated the manager, like a father about to inflict an especially gruesome perversion on a sleeping child. Then, to the air around him, “Wilfredo! Wilfredo! Come here now!”
The young man held out two handfuls of hundreds as if he’d just been eviscer
ated and was holding out his steaming intestines in wonder. Bills gathered at his feet like leaves in someone’s backyard. Various young thugs hovered.
“Ooooooh, I seeee! You want the roooom! Yes. Wilfredo! Wilfredo!” Eyeing the money, the manager drooled shamelessly, like an obsessive masturbator spying afresh jar of vaseline. His shoulders hunched in around his ears. The fingers of both hands clutched at his chin as if he were holding it in position on his face. The growth on his eyelid stood at attention like a stone-faced soldier.
Wilfredo was the goon. He appeared from inside a closet door that was seamlessly concealed in the purple velvet wall. Inside the closet, a collapsing black and white television held together with duct tape spit out in Spanish the carnal description of the wrestling match, depicted flicking in the screen. A distorted face seen in close-up convulsions of pain was invaded at the mouth by a beefy hand that pulled the face apart like a hooked trout. The announcer sounded like his balls were being nailed to a plank with pins, barking out lurid descriptions of his misery through a toy megaphone. The goon lumbered forward, brooding, a monster of epic proportions. His bald head was the size of a basketball and was tattooed with a spider web. At the center of the web was a childlike jailhouse depiction of a throbbing membrane. He emerged like a genie from the puny confines of his closet, annoyed at being pulled from the bloody revelry of his match by this child’s doll made of pipe cleaners and white cat hair with black ceramic discs for eyes and a rag soaked in blood for a shirt. The young man guessed he was about to be strangled and flung out into the street like a fingerful of snot, where his soul would bake dry in the sun.
Badly amplified sounds of hacking and moaning seeped through the double doors that led down into the theater, followed by scattered hoots of derision and parodied screams of terror. The goon stood inspecting the young man opaquely, like something squeezed from his skin. His hands were two writhing pigs stuck to the ends of his arms. His arms were the size of the young man’s legs.
“He wants the room Wilfredo... He’s a student or something, right?”
The manager looked at the young man, waiting for him to lie. Everyone had disappeared from the lobby, drawn to the horrors depicted on the screen like a crowd of infants slurping sugar milk from a huge communal tit.
“I -I -I -I -I -I..... NO! NO! NO! NO!... I -I -I -I....”, was the extent of the young man’s reply.
He had a childhood stutter which returned whenever the of speed lasted more than 3 days. His teeth were beginning to pull loose from his gums. When he sucked them, foul-smelling blood was drawn into his mouth, coating his tongue with bitter red paste. His breath smelled like pus. When he spoke now, he exhaled a swarm of rank flatulence. “NO! NO! NO! NO!”, he reiterated, a tendon in his neck tensing like a snake traveling beneath his skin.
“Very good! He talks! How impressive!” the manager cut him off, as if congratulating a trained monkey for an elaborately humiliating trick. “A hundred dollars a week, two hundred dollars security and damages. A hundred dollars each for me and Wilfredo here for our finders’ fee. I don’t care what you do in there, just don’t get me involved.”
The young man got the impression the previous tenant had gotten him involved, and that this had led in turn to the goon clothing his little pigs in suits of blood.
He followed the manager deeper into the building. Luxurious waves of crimson unrolled before them like a tongue. Money trailed from his pockets like seeds scattered in a field. The goon retrieved it, a peasant Frankenstein, stooping.
Lubricated, rhythmic fucking-sounds bled from beneath the theater doors. “Oh Baby! Oh Baby! Do it!” someone demanded of the screen. “I yam! I yam!” came the mock-reply, followed by a horrible liquid squishing, as if a hundred greased orifices were farting at once.
*
They entered an invisible door that parted inside a flaking mural depicting lewd scenes in a pastoral bacchanalia — Brueghel as seen through the eyes of a 1930’s Hollywood pornographer. When the door shut behind them, the heat was instantly suffocating, like being inside the lungs of a corpse, perfumed with the sharp tang of rotting air. The darkness was total, as if color and light had been vacuumed away down a tube. The manager flicked on his flashlight, a lipstick-sized cylinder protruding from a ten pound cluster of keys. They worked their way up the stairs like intestinal worms inside the body of a giant mammal. The manager led the way, an animated silhouette cut from tarpaper holding out a weakly glowing crystal ball for guidance. The goon followed the young man, wheezing thickly and prodding him in the back with a finger like a calcified sausage. Although the young man knew they were climbing stairs, it didn’t really feel as if they were ascending. The way the dark contained them inside itself, they could have been walking on a treadmill, the building tilting and swaying to convey the illusion of progress. The heat felt like air that had been sealed in a vestibule buried in the substructure of an ancient pyramid, permeated with fungal spores breeding in the decaying cement. He stumbled forward, following the manager’s gaseous nebula, the stench trailing behind the little man luminous, diffusing like the tail of a comet rising in slow motion into black space, the young man’s arms outstretched, reaching for the light like a child dragged forward by the diaphanous robes of its demented ghost-mother.
The manager’s keys jangled like a guard’s keys in a jail corridor and a door cranked, grinding metal. A painful artificial light cut flashing at the dark. In bursts of light, the young man saw the stairway leading back down, getting darker as it descended, growing what appeared to be intestines from its walls, like the viscous fruit of a tunneled abattoir. The moist crimson vines were caked with a fine layer of powdered dust in which grew whole civilizations of dust mites. These tubes uncoiled back down into the dark like spiraling strands of time sucked into the inevitable gravity of a black hole — seen in instants of hard shadows seared in blue-white.
The manager ushered the young man into the room. It was a cube intersected midway by the ceiling bending downward and transforming into a wall rising from the floor like the interior curve of an eggshell — the ceiling/wall was the reverse of the dome he’d seen from the street. A window was cut into the wall like an exploratory square cut into the resilient meat of a cadaver, revealing the wall to be extremely thick and solid, as if molded by hand out of flesh-clay. It was heavily textured with stucco and painted glossy pink, the color of the lubricated interior of a vagina, sealed in a glaze of nicotine resin. The paint itself had been rolled over curling hairs, roaches, torn edges of ripped-down old posters, thumbtacks, nails, little chunks of matter like food picked from someone’s teeth, and hundreds of scrawled telephone numbers, the inked digits dissolving into the dimpled pigment of the paint like fading tattoos.
The window admitted no light — it was stained amber with nicotine on the inside and dusted with a coat of black grit on the outside. The light was provided by an overhead fluorescent fixture, chaotically sputtering like a randomized strobe, suspended low from the ceiling on two long rusted chains. Dust adhered like fur to the chains, crusted with nicotine resin. A graveyard of dried raisin-sized flies, supine and fragile, formed a gothic landscape on top of the fixture, a gauze blanket of dust evoking a creeping fog. Long strands of fibrous dust, marbled with strings of nicotine nectar, trailed down from the light fixture like the tassled fingers of underwater flora, swaying in response to the slightest movement in the room. The scene cracked from black to light with the spitting fluorescent tubes. The strobing effect gave the room a sense of sickening motion, of spinning downward, like the nauseous disorientations of a kneeling drunk. The heat in the room was even more fungal and oppressive than in the stairway, as if it culminated here in a final concentration of malignancy, where it would some day soon burst forth through shattered concrete out into the barren sun and smog in a climax of erupting putrefaction, vomiting out into the choking sprawl of Los Angeles.
The manager stood in the door. The goon bent his neck beside him. The young man paced out the size o
f the room, counting the steps, already a prisoner. The manager swept out his hand like a tour guide at the Grand Canyon unfurling the majestic view for an expedition of tourists. His hand was too large for his body, like a fake monster hand, the nails painted black and shiny.
“It’s all yours! I don’t care if you live here, so long as I don’t know about it. The sink’s there in the corner. No hot water. There’s no toilet so you’ll have to use the one in the lobby. I’ll take the cash now please. Well?”
“I’ll take - take it,” said the young man, like an anesthetized patient choosing from a tray full of scalpels. He handed the manager a fistful of hundreds without counting.
“It feels great to be home,” he thought, squatting in the corner in a jailyard crouch, his arms thrust straight out over his knees, his hands dangling loose like limp petals. He watched the light flaring like the last frames of a movie spinning loose from its reel as the manager and the goon descended back down the stairs. Their feet knocked like hooves as they howled with laughter, counting the money out loud like two bluebeards tallying heads.