Black Leather Required

by David J. Schow

  All nine men paused to chuckle or ignite smokes when the whole enclosed atrium of jungle seemed to vibrate, which froze them all, cat-alert. McCullough looked up and found himself at ground zero of a widening shadow, just like Wile E. Coyote, eyes whitely visible in the abrupt darkness caused by the Rex landing dead bang on his head. A tri-taloned foot the size of a Datsun mashed him the same way Boyo had danced on the twirly-bird. Nobody had foreseen a ton-plus of death roosting above them. Bushwacked by a monster with barely a quart of brains. But hell, nobody had ever expected it to be such a virulent purple and yellow, either, and by the time the team could gawp at such wonderment and maybe wheel a LAWS rocket around to bear, McCullough had been gnashed in two. They all heard his ribs implode like cracking knuckles. Franco gut-shot it; dammed-up digestive gases sometimes made the beasts explode, and this one did, drenching everyone. Boyo did not intend to block any of the debris, but part of McCullough came whirling and hit with enough force to tear the flame-throwing rig from his back. It was the half with the head, and when Boyo sat up and opened his eyes, there was that head in his lap, staring right back, the fluids that had made his buddy function now soaking his fatigues.

  Out of the trees, thought Masterson, out of the goddamned trees.

  JOURNAL OF MATTHEW KOPERNICK

  DATE (?)

  No conqueror in history has ever had the luxury of the perspective we experience every time we snuff out another antediluvian life. The lesson of the story is that butterflies count. Worthless bugs can change history. Hindsight is what determines a battle to be victory of massacre. Change the future? Fuck. We've been doing THAT all our lives. But now the difference is that we are assured that the changes we are wrecking (SP?) will be broad, sweeping, altering literally everything that is to come. Not that we'll live to see any of it. But we know) and for warriors, the knowledge is enough to sustain us.

  One thing more: We are men, nothing less, but not gods or super beings. Should anyone ever dig up this journal and prove intelligent enough to fathom this language, that's the single fact we all want made diamond-clear: We sortied into our past and changed the building blocks all around, but we were men. Even with a purpose as heightened as we decided ours was, we could still die, and McCullough died like a soldier.

  Sarge handed the journal back to Kopernick. "You think this is important for somebody to know?"

  "Somebody should say something, that's all." Kopernick had taken to speaking in hoarse whispers, like a man whose life was on the wane in a movie.

  "Fine. Sign it, seal it in one of the vacuum canisters, and maybe a billion years from now something with tentacles and eyes on stalks will dig it up and go bananas trying to decipher the meaning of the word fuck."

  That elicited a phantom smile. "Yeah. Someday, maybe." Kopernick had been the one who timed the bomb to vaporize the time-travel lab thirty seconds after their departure. He'd always wanted to bash together an oil drum nuke, and since no one had chased them, Masterson assumed that puppy had detonated fearsomely, slamming the door behind them in a blast of hard radiation. The techs staffing the lab had not died as honorably as McCullough had. They had groveled and pleaded and, in microcosm, demonstrated all the traits Omega Team had come to despise in a world of wimpy politicos, do-nothing administrations, bread-buttering lawyers, mass child killers, greedy governments and the low common denominator of the undisciplined and unprincipled. Since the cancer was too entrenched, Omega Team opted to destroy the corpus and start anew with a fresh body.

  Arenas, Franco and Mendoza began calling themselves the Terrible Trio, once Kopernick told them that the Greek root words dienos and sauros translated directly as "dire saurians," not "terrible lizards." The lizards were nothing in the terrible department, not compared to them. They were armed, sentient men, and Greek was now a language that would never exist.

  What hey, victory.

  The story went that the tiniest death, the soundless pulverization of a butterfly's fragile body in the past, could grow, in the future, to a thunderstroke, a palpable floodtide of sound that touched all, and changed all it touched. The payoff for death on a massive scale was therefore seductive to Masterson. Although the mission he proposed was a guaranteed one-way op, each member of Omega Team had volunteered. Each volunteer realized that each of their actions, even the tiniest, like Mendoza's smoldering cigarette butt, would yield results too large to be contained by any history book, ever. That power, savored briefly but equally guaranteed, was enough to recruit them. A story of people who never were, a fiction printed on dead trees in cheap black, could change the face of a world they scorned.

  Stories could be rewritten. Authors die, tastes evolve, and all of a sudden some latter-day Mongol monarch decides recorded history should begin with him and razes entire cultures to ash and legend.

  Technology has always existed to simplify ancient procedures. Just look at torture.

  Franco, crazy fuck, decided he wanted to taste spitted dinosaur meat. Masterson said it would make him sick. Franco told him that it tasted like rattlesnake, only juicier. Then he died, vomiting blood and little foamy hunks of his own guts.

  Dinosaurs: 2. Omega Team: 13,000+.

  With two men gone, some cockiness waned. Fright and hostility took their turns. Kopernick shelled in and rarely spoke to anyone. Boyo's eyes stayed under the spell of McCullough's dead gaze. Satch got pissed and shot a tracer round into his face. Boyo died trying to slap out the fire in his head. Masterson returned the anger by blasting Satch out of his combat boots. The giant roaches dug up the military graves and ate the remains. Arenas and Mendoza, the surviving two thirds of the Terrible Trio, died together when they went searching for Bull, who had gone into the forest to take a dump and never come out. The Dire Duo took a lot of irritated prehistoric life-forms along when they checked out. When Kopernick went insane, Masterson disarmed him and confiscated his yet-unburied journal. When Kopernick managed to cut his own carotid, Sarge added a final entry and sealed the book up forever. He did not sign his name. What would be the point?

  All I'd like to do now is stop, and hope our fight really meant something, and go home. But of course I am home already. It's impossible to go back because all of time lies ahead. Like time, I can only march forward.

  Like history, I can only spend my remaining hours waiting for that knife in the back.

  As he was putting down the cannister along with Kopernick's corpse, something flitted past Masterson's sweating face. It was a huge, glass-me insect, much like a butterfly, its cobweb wing-work splotched with ideograms of color. It circled his head and lit on the grimed handle of the folding spade.

  Masterson laughed, gently now, and let it live.

  Author's Note:

  This story is presented with gratitude (and a slight grimace) for Ray Bradbury, for obvious reasons.

  Graveyard

  Layover.

  You snooze;

  You stay.

  Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage

  That upon which you are about to feast your eyes is one of two scripts written for a proposed legit stage revival of the Grand Guignol Theatre, circa 1990. (My companion piece, an adaptation of the Robert Bloch short story, "Final Performance," can be found in the collection Look Out He's Got A Knife.) Since this was one of two such productions being mustered concurrently, there was always a sense of fast competition to get our show on the boards first. "Our side" included, as contributors, magical bad boy Penn Jillette, Israel Horovitz, Phil Hartman, Charles Busch, and Wes Craven; as performers, Ann Magnuson, Bud Cort, Lea Thompson, John Fleck, Christian LeBlanc and Dan Butler among many others; as producers, Randy Bennett and Craig Strong, working on behalf of Douglas Cramer for the Aaron Spelling Company. Randy and Craig had just done Cynthia Hiemel's A Girl's Guide to Chaos before devoting nearly three years of development to this project.

  It was pitched as "a Broadway revue produced in the lavish, blood-dripping style of the Grand Guignol. . .part Alfred Hitchcock, part Joe Orton and pa
rt Freddy Krueger," and participants not only encouraged, but assured that "the more horrible and grotesque the piece, the better"

  The Grand Guignol project was pronounced dead in March, 1992. Rather than see this piece sink into the abyss of unrealized projects, I've included it here for whatever cheap thrills it's worth.

  Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage

  A one-act drama for Four Men, Three Players

  Characters:

  Hugo, a bum.

  Clad like his brothers in a derelict's array of grimy castoffs, open-toed shoes, scarves and scrounged junk. He WALKS as though partially lame. MUMBLES to himself. Exactly the sort you'd avoid giving money to on any city street.

  Alf, another bum.

  Alf COOKS. He wears a battered FEDORA. Unshaven and filthy.

  Howie, another bum.

  One of Alf's gourmet pals. Just as weird, gross and dirty as the rest.

  Joeboy, another bum.

  Speaks with a slight cornpone accent. Wears fingerless gloves. Always picking his nose.

  NB: Wardrobe should be creative and diverse with bum attire so we will differentiate among the bums by sight, not by name references.

  Also:

  Three Zombies

  Decayed living dead corpses who rise from their graves to dismember and gobble up the bums. They are decomposed, skeletal, tottering, shuffling, clad in cerements, clodded in dirt and oozing slime. Brittle, flaking cannibal ghouls. Again, Makeup should go all-out to differentiate the Zombies. The Zombies do not SPEAK.

  Setting

  A CEMETERY, inclined from back to front of the stage. We do not immediately REALIZE this is a graveyard, due to lighting and misdirection. It might be possible to have the necessary TOMBSTONES and grave markers RISE from the set prior to their revelation, in order to misdirect the audience. The CEMETERY is backlit faintly so we may perceive a crooked PICKET FENCE and a LINE of denuded TREES. In the center of the set is a practical PIT which will be revealed as an OPEN GRAVE. Players must be able to REACH into the pit to FETCH things, and Hugo must be able to FALL HEADFIRST into the pit and VANISH. Various HEADSTONES and CROSSES for the graveyard. Alight layer of FOG drifts DOWN throughout–this fog can help us DODGE certain effects as the bums are ripped apart at the climax.

  Basically: We are having a picnic in a Universal Pictures Monster Movie cemetery.

  ON CLOSED CURTAIN

  As the audience waits for the next act. HUGO wanders down the aisle toward the stage, MUMBLING to himself like a dirty old man. He ASKS an audience member for spare change and is rebuffed. He is thoroughly gross. ASKS another audience member, and so on, until he MOUNTS the stage in front of the curtain.

  HUGO

  You've seen me. Oh yes, I got my eye out. Popped it out, heh-heh. I seen you people. You're'a bunchajerks. You don't understand humor. Folks don't realize. You ask for money to eat. We all need to eat. Don't ask for change, mind you, we ask for spare change. Well, we already know there ain't no change that's spare. Smart alecks. You go, "Got any spare change?" And you dumb shits go, "I dunno–ask me when I'm DEAD," ha-ha, very goddamn funny, says me.

  CURTAIN RISES I SPOTLIGHT HUGO

  As he SHUFFLES OSR. From STAGE LEFT a derelict, JOEBOY, ENTERS holding a LANTERN. Center stage, two more BUMS are seated around a cooking fire in what looks like a ROASTING PIT, with a SPIT across the hole. LIGHT gradually up on the fire as JOEBOY ASCENDS to join up with the other two, ALF and HOWIE.

  ALF

  (seeing Joeboy and hoisting his tin can)

  A toast!

  HOWIE

  A toast!

  Howie HANDS Joeboy another tin can and they all CHANT, off-key.

  ALL

  "Three cheers for the brotherhood of Bums,

  We wander the land without no Mums

  Nor dads nor loving bitches named Rose

  All we got to our names is our bumly bro's."

  CLINK of cups over the fire. Joeboy SITS. Alf reaches to tear off a chunk of spitted meat, which SIZZLES and STEAMS.

  ALF

  (singsong)

  You have another hunk of toffee, and I'll have another chunk of thigh. . .

  HOWIE

  (brandishing meat)

  It's tough. You didn't baste it enough. It cooked out dry.

  JOEBOY

  Listen here to the Galloping Gourmet.

  Howie PELTS Joeboy with food. Joeboy picks it up and EATS it.

  HOWIE

  It'd still be better with sauce.

  JOEBOY

  Wotta you think this is? Macdonald's?

  ALF

  I can do sauce. I can make anything outta nothing.

  JOEBOY

  (clamping his crotch)

  I'll give some sauce. Joeboy's secret sauce!

  (makes FART noise)

  Alf tears loose a chunk of meat and BASHES it flat. Hocks and SPITS in it. Removes a bandana from under his Fedora and WRINGS it juicily out into a tin can. In with the meat. He SHAKES the can like a bartender. Offers it to Howie.

  ALF

  Presto. Sauce. Dip for the dip.

  Howie DUNKS a chunk of meat and tries it. Not bad.

  HOWIE

  Not too shabby. Wish we had us some vegetables.

  JOEBOY

  They're already growin'. (to All) In his underwear.

  ALF

  What underwear? Do I look like some kinda wimp to you?

  (to Howie)

  Here. Eat some grass.

  Alf TEARS UP a hank of browned grass, clinging turf.

  HOWIE

  That's dead.

  Double-take. The beaux all look at each other and LAUGH. Joeboy brandishes his meat at Howie.

  JOEBOY

  Damned well better be dead. You know how it feels when stuff starts movin around inside-a you? Ain't fully diseased, yet?

  ALF

  That's "deceased," you illiterate.

  JOEBOY

  (to Howie)

  I'll have that grass, if you ain't gonna eat it. . .

  Joeboy GRABS the weeds away from Alf.

  HOWIE

  (indicating MEAT)

  This ain't deceased. Just dead.

  Alf STOKES the fire. LIGHTS BRIGHTER. BACKLIGHTING UP. The light permits us to perceive the faint outlines of GRAVE MARKERS and CROSSES. The picket fence BG jumps into relief. [Or: This is cue to RAISE tombstones from beneath the set, so we may now begin to perceive them.]

  Alf DIGS around within the cooking pit and fishes up a drippy handful of what looks like cauliflower.

  ALF

  Who's for sweetbreads?

  HOWIE

  I thought them was maggots.

  ALF

  Just flick off the maggots, simple Simon.

  JOEBOY

  Always said you ain't never gonna get enough brains, Howie–better dig in.

  Howie WOLFS a mess of disgusting BRAINS and licks his fingers.

  HOWIE

  (mouth full)

  You just don't know how to live clean, that's all.

  Hugo WANDERS BACK IN from Stage Right. Now holding a CANDLE or LANTERN. . .by which we may see the CEMETERY appointments even more clearly.

  ALF

  (squinting)

  Hey. Looks like Hugo.

  JOEBOY

  (mouth full)

  Yo, Hugo! You're just in time for pudding! (to Howie) You want an olive to go with that? I sucked out the pimento.

  Joeboy extends what is probably an EYEBALL to Howie.

  HOWIE

  Weren't no olive. . .

  JOEBOY

  Weren't no pimento, either!

  (he HOOTS)

  HOWIE

  You just lay offa my brain curds. They're mine.

  As Hugo JOINS the group.

  HUGO

  Now who in hell are you bums at tonight?

  Alf HOISTS a previously unseen tombstone, obviously from the grave around which they dine. READS the inscription.

  ALF

  Umm. . ."Thor Pang
born." Died last Thursday. You know them laws say now he's gotta eat the dirt in four days or less. . .

  HUGO

  "Fewer." Not "less."

  JOEBOY

  It don't matter none to ole Thor. He was a pretty good man.

  HOWIE

  Lean. He was lean, too.

  (BURPS)

  ALF

  (reading)

  "Hard worker. . .loving husband.. .good provider. . .cherished father. . ." And not halfway bad entree.