“You’re a presenter, you know,” he reminded me.
“I’m sure I’ll be okay, Terry, thanks.”
I could see he was still worried. The raw stinging within my pants suddenly inflamed me, and I could feel sweat breaking out all over my body.
“I really need to go up to my room, okay? Thanks.”
I rushed away, stalking off on bowed legs as wide as a rodeo cowboy’s. I felt like I’d fucked a porcupine.
As soon as I got back to my room, I closed the curtains and stripped out of my clothes. I rushed into the bathroom and stood before the mirror to stare at the raging fire that was consuming my genitalia. The rough, sandpapered skin had puffed up, a purple-red lined in orange, its fever broadcasting a sickly corona of heat. I could see it pulsing, like the animated titles for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” They did not look like they belonged on my body…or on anyone else’s, for that matter. They breathed, they pulsed, they seemed independent. And they squirmed as if filled with angry worms. The root of my groin from which they dangled was an angry crimson, with fingers of color that reached up toward my otherwise sun-deprived pale white belly.
I poked at my penis, and it seemed to rear up to bite me. I pulled my hand away and it settled back down. Bad dog!
I ran the tub again, filled it with suds, and settled in. This time, it didn’t sting, it just pulsated in the hot bath, a heartbeat of hurt that I hoped I could melt away. My pulse, which pounded most fiercely in my privates, had settled into a rhythm, throbbing like a hip-hop anthem, and before long it rocked me to sleep.
I woke again to the ringing of the hotel phone, sitting in a lifeless pool of tepid water, the remains of the burst bubble bath forming a crust around the rim of the tub. I reached for the squalling telephone over the toilet, but it was a long reach, and I slipped on the slick porcelain of the tub, landing shiny-wet-ass-up on the floor like a baby learning to crawl. I scrambled on my hands and feet to grab the receiver, only to have my hand shoot out in front of me, causing me to slam my head against the toilet. When I picked up the line, I was out of breath.
It was Terry, of course. “I hope you’re hungry!” he trilled, expecting excitement at the prospect of rubber convention chicken. “Dinner’s in ten!”
“I’ll be down in a few,” I told him, looking at the bruise forming over my right eye. I hung up and got to my feet to get closer to the mirror. It was swelling; my eye was forced into a squint.
That was soon overridden by a sudden tugging at my crotch, and all attention immediately returned to my sexual organs. The water seemed to have subsided the swelling and redness a bit, but the pain still lingered; it shouted out to me, as my penis expanded and contracted like a rattlesnake coiling for attack.
What the fuck?
I called Terry back and asked him if he could get me some antiseptic cream from the little hotel shop in the lobby. He said he’d see what they had.
I dried off, taking special, gentle care around my nether parts, jumping into my robe just as there was a knock at the door. I opened it a crack to see a grinning Terry holding up a little bag. I grabbed it from him and slammed the door, unable to hear his muffled protest.
“I’ll be down in a few minutes!” I shouted to the closed door.
Then I went back into the bathroom and slathered my dick with three times the recommended dosage of Neosporin. It seemed to resist, jerking and spasming in my hand like a ferret trying to bite. I wrapped it in a clean washcloth and tucked it into a new pair of briefs before stepping into my elegant evening wear: a black high-collared shirt, a black jacket, black jeans, and black Converse Chuck Taylors. The sensation down below started to subside; maybe things were starting to heal. My swelling forehead started playing bass with the rhythm section down below.
I wanted to get this fucking dinner over with so I could tend to the boys in the band and let me enjoy tonight’s midnight show. So I buttoned my jacket, ran the hair dryer through my disappearing locks, and headed out of the suite.
—
Terry was waiting like a sentry in the banquet room, and came running up to me when I entered. The United Nations of servers was already making the rounds, the phrase “beef, chicken, or pasta” ringing through the room like a mantra. I was seated at the head of the table closest to the stage, ringed by the convention elite, and bookended by Mathilda Michaelson and the Alligator Man. She was chowing down voraciously, presumably on the flesh of the young and stupid. I couldn’t tell the beef from the chicken from the pasta, so I just ate what they put down in front of me. A band was playing themes from Halloween, Friday the 13th, and other genre classics, and Mathilda leaned across me for the salt and pepper and butter constantly, so that my face was repeatedly—and unwillingly—thrust into her overflowing titty bowls.
I felt I’d never get another erection.
Of course, as the Green Goddess would say, the night was young…even if she wasn’t.
I scanned the room for Marion; there wasn’t a trace of her there. Did such a woman even exist? The last twenty-four hours seemed like a really long and shitty genre movie itself. I didn’t want to watch this movie, nor make it, and I especially did not want to be its star. But the proof of her existence kept throbbing in my pants.
Conversation at the table was awkward at best. Mathilda kept trying to rub up against me and whisper not-so-sweet nothings in my ear as I tried to keep a congenial grin frozen in place, nodding without hearing, grunting “uh-huh” when I felt I had to, and trying to keep my attention off of my inflamed and pulsing organs. Alligator Man kept clearing his sinuses, occasionally sputtering some Chinese epithet to the table with a knowing, condescending frown. Then he would spit into his napkin, look at it, fold it up, and put it in the space between his plate and mine. I could not keep from glancing at it, as if it might come alive.
Mathilda tapped me on the shoulder and leaned in to my ear. “I can’t wait to see your movie tonight.”
My smile muscles were weakening. “Thanks,” I said, trying to stay oblivious.
“Maybe we can party in my room after,” she said. “They gave me a suite.”
She squeezed my ravaged goods and I couldn’t keep from letting out a scream.
She yanked her hand back like it was on fire, but her grin only grew wider.
“Well, you’re a big boy, aren’t you?”
She was delighted, but I was in agony. “Sorry, but that hurt!” I told her, feeling about fifteen years old.
“But,” she whispered, her warm, moist, septuagenarian breath fetid in my ear, “it hurt good, didn’t it?”
I couldn’t answer, the pain was so intense. And besides, dessert was being served.
It seemed like this fucking night would never end. The awards began, and there seemed to be one for every guest. I was presenting an award for Scream Queen of Tomorrow, one of the interchangeable blondes that kept popping up around the tables during the course of the event. Her acceptance speech was—you guessed it—a scream, which ripped through the room, hideously distorted when she leaned into the mike without warning anyone she was going to do it. The PA speakers ripped with her shriek, and the crowd came to their feet and roared their approval.
I felt like screaming, myself.
At long last, the dinner was over, and the buses and vans were loaded for the trip to the Keystone Art Cinema, where I would step back into better times.
—
The Keystone was nice, actually, and the house was full by eleven-thirty, with a line running around the corner of latecomers hoping for no-shows. I could not help but be impressed. As Terry led me through the throngs of fans, my teeth chattering in the Midwest tundra, I scanned their faces for Marion Crane, but didn’t see her outside. My wounded privates pulsed like an external heart, but I still hoped I would see her. Desire bloomed despite my ravaged equipment.
Once inside, it took a few minutes to shake the chill, but the crowd around me was cheery and excited, and their enthusiasm was contagious. Every one of them
recognized me, smiled at me, shook my hand, treated me like a Hitchcock; a Spielberg; a J. J. Abrams; a Christopher Nolan. My bank account might be cobwebbed, but I had made Taxed, and Taxed was the whole raison d’être for this overflowing crowd.
At the concession stand, I was loaded up with complimentary popcorn and Raisinets and Cherry Coke, and as I was led inside the theater, the gathered crowd actually cheered. A chant began: “Eat me, eat me, eat me…” all in the jungle growl of the Pardue family of cannibals from the movie. The emotion I felt was overwhelming, the first time I’d ever experienced anything like this. Tears fought their way out of the corners of my eyes, and, embarrassed, I wiped them away as soon as they appeared, but they just kept running.
At the stroke of midnight, the lights went out and the curtains opened—yes, they actually had curtains, and they actually opened!—to a deafening roar. A scratched and faded red-band trailer showed the blood and the guts and the toothless, pitiless grins of the backwoods family; the naked, nubile college girls taken down to the smokehouse; Eddie the Chain bound for glory; it even hinted at the ending of the delivery of the flesh-eating baby without giving it completely away. Each grainy, sanguinary image drew hoots and hollers almost sexual in intuitive, feral amplitude. It ended with “written and directed by Jack Tarrington,” which got them to their feet.
A spotlight snapped on and found Freddie Mazur on the stage, incongruously outfitted in a Hugo Boss suit and tie, beaming almost hungrily.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted, “Jack Tarrington!” As if it meant something.
And tonight, it did.
I strode up from my roped-off seat in the back row to the stage, past rows of cheering, adoring horror fans. This was unheard of, magical, and I wanted it forever stored in my brain. It almost made up for the blight of my life in the last quarter-century.
I climbed onto the stage, and when the spotlight found me, the cheers grew even louder. I stood in the heat of their adoration, fighting back tears and losing the battle. Freddie raised his hand to quiet the crowd, but I shook my head no, and they laughed and cheered even louder, though I’d have thought that impossible.
The fire that raged in my groin burned brighter, flaring its intensity, but it was overwhelmed by this ovation.
Freddie handed me the microphone and left the stage to me, and I stood there, alone, adored, benighted, and feeling naked as the proverbial jaybird. The roars of approval caressed me like a lover, and I basked in the waves of appreciation, taking the time as the audience returned to their seats to ease the tears away.
I looked out over the overcrowded auditorium at the sea of eager, loving faces all looking up at me. I stood there, solitary at the center of the stage, microphone in hand, basking, when suddenly…the fellows downstairs started to move.
I felt my privates swelling and moving, like the uncoiling of a rattlesnake. The skin down there felt hot, sensitive, vulnerable, but it did not keep my equipment from expanding with every heartbeat. It was weird, but it was also erotic, erotic in a way I’ve never experienced before. But still, here I was standing on a stage before an SRO crowd at midnight, hoping they don’t notice that my privates were choreographing a ballet of their own, out of sync with the rest of my body. They had a mind of their own, and they were feeling rebellious.
I quickly sat down on the edge of the stage—Look at me, how casual I am, I’m one of you!—but it was only to disguise the will of my naughty, naughty bits.
“Thank you,” I said, and they roared all over again. Several of them boomeranged “thank you” right back at me.
I searched their faces, but still could not find Marion among them.
But Mathilda was in the middle of the front row, her face eager, the rouged nipples completely revealed to me from the stage. I could swear she was drooling.
But where is Marion?
Who is Marion?
And what the fuck did she do to me?
But even worse…I wanted more.
“Taxed,” I said to the crowd, “was always meant to be a family film. About a really fucked-up family.”
That line always worked, and it got them roaring again.
“I hope you enjoy it. Hell, I haven’t seen it in ages; I hope I enjoy it!” Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
“It’s great to be spending the night with all of you tonight. We’ll have a nice intimate chat after the movie, just you and me.”
I climbed off the stage, the spotlight went dark, the curtains parted, and lo and behold, the not-too-badly-battered thirty-five-millimeter print of Taxed unspooled to its voracious devotees.
I settled into my VIP seat at the back of the cavernous cinema tabernacle and let it wash over me. I had seen the damned thing over and over across the years, but not in at least a decade. All I had been able to see were the flaws, everything I second-guessed myself on, all the stuff that could—and should—have been done better.
But now, through the filter of twenty-five years, you know, it really didn’t look so bad to me. The frame compositions were actually pretty artful, the choice of lenses inspired, thoughtful. The lighting was atmospheric; the camera movement seemed meaningful, not just movement for its own sake. The performances were grounded, real, and the sense of dread generated was genuine, organic, even chilling. When a movie is made with this kind of low budget, with actors you don’t recognize, you’re not sure how far the film is going to go, how mad the mind of the filmmaker. And this, being my maiden voyage, made outside of the system, had no boundaries. It went for the jugular.
The film was much more a product of intuition than knowledge, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well my intuition as a young man had served the film.
Looking back on it now, it looked like I actually kind of knew what I was doing. And maybe I did. Maybe I knew and forgot it once I stepped into filmmaking as a profession, once I saw it as a career, a competitive endeavor, a route to fame and fortune, to fortune and glory. From this perspective, Taxed was fresh, aggressive, bold, even imaginative. It had a sense of itself, in ways that my work had not ever since. It took me all these years to realize that I had not even thought of charting new cinematic ground since I started all those fucking meetings with studios and financiers and the press and movie stars and real estate agents and car dealers.
I may have had only one good movie in me, but Taxed, at least on its own terms, was that movie.
It was a bombastic revelation; I had gone from artist (well, I’ll refrain from giving it a capital A) to hack in a few lousy months. I’d sought a career, not a voice. But this awakening did not depress me. If anything, it was the reverse: It allowed me to see with fresh eyes the ambition and the creative reach of my youth. It made me happy, even though I would never occupy that creative space again. Twenty-five years of chasing the golden ring, of seeking awards and box office and kudos had robbed me of character, of spirit, of self-respect.
As the audience laid out before me screamed and laughed and cowered and worshipped at the feet of my film, I felt young again, felt the pull of excitement, of the need to express something potent and subterranean and primal, as I had here. The screen was splattered with viscera, but it was also awash in dreams. Nightmares, perhaps, curdled dreams, but dreams nonetheless.
And then a curtain of rot and degradation fell, and the theater filled with that horrible, dank, rotten stench. The room reeked of stink, and I could barely breathe without choking.
A door that had opened to wisdom slammed shut in the face of such a repellent aroma. And the raw, tender, weeping flesh of my manhood was somehow activated by it, jerking spasmodically—though absent of physical arousal—as if to escape not only that hideous smell, but the body that it was attached to as well.
I could feel thin, delicate skin stretching, surely tearing, at the juncture between my legs. My eyes, first moist from the loss of my youthful artistic id evacuated onto the screen before a sold-out audience, now filled with tears of piercing pain. My pubic flesh itched and wept and stretche
d. My privates felt like a squirming can of vipers, squiggly and poisonous and eager to disperse. Sitting in the citadel of darkness, I dared grab on to my pubes, gripping them, trying to quiet them and salve the fiery pain being ignited, but they fought against me, jerking and throbbing and pulling and tearing at the roots.
Meanwhile, I choked on the foul, fetid air, but nobody else seemed cognizant of it. They were screaming and laughing and cheering as entrails were strewn and viscera flew. This crowd wanted blood, and I had given it to them in spades.
The cinema seemed to shrink as the atmosphere grew closer, and my face was running with hot perspiration. Why was everyone else oblivious to this? Why weren’t they fighting their way out of the theater?
They were loving my movie, as my body, cleansed of creativity for years, seemed to want to disassemble itself.
The running time of Taxed was the longest eighty-eight minutes of my life. My cock and balls were expanding and contracting, twisting and stretching, seeking some kind of freedom I did not understand. My nose and mouth filled with wretched, acrid air I could not breathe. I choked on its stink but was unable to vomit it away.
And then the credits ran on the screen, in animated, dribbling red blood, and the crowd all stood up and cheered, turning around to face me and give me their devotion. I became oblivious to everything but their love and admiration, and stood to take a modest bow, which inflamed their roar of approval threefold. At least.
Freddie was on the stage again, his face a rictus of eager joy, an overwhelming, bloodthirsty hunger that had merely been enraged and engaged by the pitter-patter-splatter of Taxed. It was as if the crowd was howling at the moon and I was the man in the moon awakened by their midnight wailing.
But my body was in revolt.
Freddie led the thunderous applause, which grew in waves, and the crowd started stamping their feet in a jungle-drum tempo. He called me down to the stage, and I stood before them in the spotlight at the center of the stage as they hooted and hollered and screamed out my name.
Dark Screams, Volume 5 Page 5