by Brian Hodge
JOS
Jesus Christ! Do I have to?
ATT
Yes, you have to. You know that.
PAUSE
JOS
Her…her hands were tied underneath her. I put a handkerchief over her eyes so later when you found it you thought it was around her neck. It was to cover her eyes. You know what happened. I stabbed her three, four times, maybe five…
ATT
You strangled her.
JOS
No! The stuff you found around her neck, I told you. She was stabbed two times right over her heart. Right in the throat and neck.
ATT
Did you have sexual relations?
JOS
She kept saying don't do it, don't do it. She didn't want it. She was ready to do anything else. She said, you lied, don't do it! She wouldn't stop screaming, trying to scream with a gag in her mouth. She kept yelling, you're going to do it to me, you're going to do it to me! I was playing with her breasts, she was louder and louder, the knife was just on the corner of the table…
ATT
Are you getting ready to do it to her?
JOS
It was so dark in there, so dark. There was a window open. I tied her up, put a gag in her mouth, closed the window, put the shade down. It made it dark, completely dark in there, and I didn't see her anymore. I was playing with her. She was lying right on top of the bed. She kept yelling and trying to yell and I stabbed her. Once I did it once, I couldn't stop. Her eyes were covered. I held her breast. I reached over, got the knife…and I stabbed her in the throat. She kept…saying something. I grabbed the knife in my left hand and held the tip on her breast and I went down, two times, hard. She moved…blood all over the place…
FIRST MAN
Was there blood on you?
JOSEPH shakes his head, no. He can't speak.
FIRST MAN (Cont'd)
You jumped back?
JOS
I don't know…after I hit her two times, nothing happened.
ATT
Then you hit her again and again…
JOS
Jesus!
ATTERLEY pushes back his chair, stands.
ATT
It's almost over.
PAUSE. JOSEPH is weeping now.
JOS
I kept hitting her and hitting her with that damned knife…she kept bleeding from the throat…I hit her and hit her and hit her…hard, all the time…why did I do that? She did something to me, that's what I'm trying to tell you.
ATT
She refused you.
JOS
What I'm trying to tell you…it was just like my…
ATT
She refused you and you…
JOS
I grabbed her by the throat, she made me feel so low, as if I was asking for something I shouldn't have, that I wanted something dirty. I wanted to kill her that night! Asking her to make love was asking a dead log to move. It was always, “do it quick, do it fast, get it over with!” She treated me lower than an animal…I loved her so much…I was burning up. How many nights I would lie next to her, so hot, so wanting to be loved and to love her…just the night before…my own wife…the same way! And she, right through the gag she was saying, “don't do it, don't do it! “ She was lying there, I could see everything…and still she talked. The thing I was doing, there was nothing wrong with it…it wasn't the loudness to me, it was just the way she said it…don't do it, it's not nice, don't do it…it's not this… it's not that…don't! Don't!
LONG PAUSE
First ATTERLEY and then JOSEPH return to their seats.
PAUSE
JOS
I told Hildegard, I said I was going fishing. That was my excuse for getting out of the house. I had a fishing net, it was weighted down with three lead pipes…
Lights slowly fade to BLACK.
Author's Introduction to DRIVE-IN MOVIE
Once upon a time I think I wanted to be either the next Edward Albee or Harold Pinter or maybe both. DRIVE-IN MOVIE's the result of that confusion.
It opened at the New York Theatre Ensemble on October 13, 1972 with two really fine character actors, Luanne Rohrbacher and Dan Jacobs, as Evelyn and Gerald. I directed. Lucille Talayco and Ozzie Daljord produced. It ran on a triple-bill for two weekends, Friday and Saturday nights. We got pretty good reviews.
But shortly thereafter Ozzie, who was the energy, light and heart of NYTE, was killed in a motorcycle accident. I don't think Lucille had the will to go on struggling to survive in that business without him and I understood.
Black box theatres in those days came and went. But I liked these people enormously, and they liked me. No matter what the weather, hauling my butt from the Upper West Side all the way down to the Bowery for rehearsals had never been a chore to me, always a pleasure.
Sometimes I miss those days. We were young and full of piss and vinegar.
But I can't say I miss thinking I was Albee.
DRIVE-IN MOVIE
A play in one act by Jack Ketchum
CHARACTERS:
EVELYN and GERALD, both in their mid fifties.
SETTING:
A rocker for EVELYN, a spindle-backed chair for GERALD. Otherwise, a bare stage.
TIME:
Evening.
NOTE:
The characters face the audience, not one another. Occasionally turning.
EVELYN
I wish it were summer. We could go to a drive-in movie. We've done that, haven't we?
(beat)
I could buy an egg roll during intermission. And you could have hot dogs and Coke. We could eat during the previews. We could take punks for the mosquitoes and light them early.
(beat)
There's nothing here to eat.
(beat)
The very first time I ever went to a drive-in movie I fell in love. I remember it. I was very young. BEACH PARTY BINGO was the feature. Another film was first. It was during BEACH PARTY BINGO that I fell in love. I had seen the other one.
(beat)
You don't believe me, do you?
(beat)
I did. He put his hands on my breasts. It was the first time. So of course I pushed him off. Not now I said.
(beat)
I was very firm.
GERALD
(he sneezes)
(beat)
Not that again.
(beat)
Nothing so terrible for a guy as chronic sneezing. Wears you out. I started sneezing when I was seventeen. Time I got over it, I was twenty-one.
(beat)
I was in the hospital with a kidney disorder. I was recovering nicely. Started sneezing. And they had to give me shock treatments.
(beat)
You could hear me outside on the lawn.
EVELYN
I was wearing a satin blouse which buttoned down the back. It was a floral print, iridescent blue and green.
GERALD
Called it the electric aversion treatment. That's what it was.
EVELYN
The buttons kept popping.
GERALD
Electric aversion.
EVELYN
By intermission the buttons had popped halfway down my back. I didn't know. I was very angry. I scolded him.
(beat)
I know that was foolish of me. I'm sure it wasn't his fault entirely. But I was very angry.
(beat)
We got out of the car and I could feel the wind on my back.
(beat)
So I scolded him. Nasty boy, I said.
GERALD
Terrible treatment. But nothing so terrible as chronic sneezing. Leaves you weak.
(beat)
I've said all this, haven't I?
(beat)
Still, I once read about a fellow in Britain who had chronic hiccoughs. Now that must have been pretty bad. Hicked more than one-hundred-sixty-million times for over eight years.
(beat)
I don't know. So
unds bad to me.
EVELYN
At the refreshment stand he bought me popcorn, pizza and ice cream. And naturally an egg roll. To make up to me.
GERALD
The man lost weight!
EVELYN
But when we got back to the car he touched my breasts again. Very lightly.
(beat)
Well this time I let him. I had a bra on. I didn't mind.
GERALD
Seems the only thing that could relieve him was a prayer to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes.
EVELYN
And I was not about to take it off.
PAUSE
GERALD
You listening to me?
(beat)
They could hear this fellow hiccough for over a mile. He might have been shouting. On a clear day, that is. No fog around.
(beat)
I don't think you've heard a word of it.
EVELYN
I'm boring you, aren't I. I'm really sorry.
(beat)
But he was so sweet. I can't tell you. We lit punks against the mosquitoes. I never liked the smell, but I could put up with it. He asked me why I wouldn't slip down my bra a bit.
(beat)
I asked him if he would respect me.
GERALD
In a case reported in 1888, a fifteen-year-old girl was said to have yawned continuously for five weeks. She had kidney troubles too, as I recall.
(he sneezes)
I think it's coming on again.
EVELYN
Of course, he said he would. He would respect me. I expected that. I laughed. He was sweet.
(beat)
Finally he gave in. Gave up. He became…quiet. We were content, then, to simply hold one another.
(beat)
The night had turned chilly. The heaters weren't helping much. There was no need for the punks at all.
(beat)
He asked me if I could love him. I said I could. He asked if I would take something from him. Just to keep in my hands. And so I did.
PAUSE
GERALD
(he sneezes)
I'm afraid it's the chronic sneeze again.
EVELYN
We fell asleep that way.
GERALD
I tell you, you couldn't stop me then. I was in a state!
EVELYN
He called me once or twice afterwards, but I was always busy with something.
GERALD
Had all I could do to sit quiet.
EVELYN
Something would always come up.
GERALD
They measured my sneeze at over one-hundred-and-two miles per hour.
(beat)
You hear me?
(beat)
I said they measured the velocity of liquids expelled from my mouth and nose at more than one-hundred-and-two, over and over again. The doctors did.
(beat)
I was in their care, you see.
(beat)
(he sneezes)
(beat)
(he sneezes again)
BLACKOUT
Author's Introduction to OLIVIA: A MONOLOGUE
Sometime in the mid-nineties I decided it would be fun to try my hand at directing again, which I hadn't done since the seventies. My friend the character actor Theo Levine was fond of the one-man-play concept and I directed two of them for him, the second of which was called SEREAL – a series of monologues he'd written and I'd edited and arranged from the first-person point of view of real-life serial killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Son of Sam, Ramirez, the Unabomber – a whole nasty bunch of ‘em. We found ourselves a home at Hank Foley's The Real Theatre over on 6th Avenue and 38th Street and started rehearsing.
Somewhere along the way we decided it would be a neat idea to enlist an actress who would do no speaking, just movement. A kind of silent Greek chorus who would occasionally dip into the action to get strangled, stabbed or whatever.
Then at some other point along the way I started feeling we were missing something.
The victim's point of view.
It wasn't there. Mime-stabbings just weren't…cutting it.
For a while I'd been sitting on a news clipping that Christopher Golden had sent me, saying he thought it had the makings of a Ketchum story. A piece about a strong young woman who was traveling to colleges all across the country, talking about what had happened to her and her lover one day on a hiking trip along the Appalachian Trial. A cautionary tale, a plea for tolerance.
Her story made me angry and touched me deeply.
I dug it out and very closely based on that, wrote the only piece in the play that wasn't Theo's, and we gave it to our actress, Mimi Dykes – who was thrilled to be doing a real character for a change – as a single monologue which would end a play in which she'd been so noticeably silent throughout.
The last word would be the victim's.
I remember that writing it was like taking direct dictation from the woman herself. The voice came that fast.
Writing it was exhilarating.
On opening night, Mimi broke our hearts. As she did every night in every performance thereafter.
Mimi produced a hush.
I thought the piece so strong that I decided to use Olivia's basic story again as the opening murder scene in THE LOST.
The monologue itself had never been published, though. So when Monica O'Rourke asked me for a short piece for the 2005 World Horror Convention Magazine I gladly handed it over. The following year it was published again as a limited-edition broadside from Lavandier Books, and finally in my 2007 collection CLOSING TIME AND OTHER STORIES.
It's good to see her take yet a new stage again.
OLIVIA: A MONOLOGUE
By Jack Ketchum
Olivia and I met at State University, organizing Women's Week. She sort of scared me at first. She was still living with her boyfriend, yet here she is looking at me in this certain way. I'd known I was gay since the eleventh grade and by then I thought I was smart enough not to get involved with some curious straight woman with a boyfriend. Sure I was. Because when she put her hand on my leg in the cafeteria I let it stay there. And when she kissed me that night I kissed her back. She had a way of looking at you like she was looking straight down into your soul and god, she was beautiful. Her mother was Puerto Rican, her father Iranian-American. To a Manhattan Jewish girl like me she was I guess you'd say exotic. When she broke up with her boyfriend it was like I finally had permission to fall in love with her. And I did. I did love her.
We used to go camping. It was one of those things we liked to do. She called me an amateur because I always wanted to build a fire while she had this little butane camp stove. So there I am with my hot dog on a stick and cans of beans and sauerkraut sitting in the embers while she's next to me making scampi.
Anyhow we were in Pennsylvania that day, on the Appalachian Trail and there was nobody at the campground but us. I get up in the morning and walk over to the public restroom and we thought we were alone out there so I was naked and I get halfway down the trail and there's this guy coming out of the woods and he's weird looking. Pale, knit cap in the middle of summer, sweatpants, ratty T-shirt. Got a cigarette? he asks me. And he's laughing. Because how would I have a cigarette. I'm naked! And I said jeez my god! I'm sorry and I'm so embarrassed I could die. So I run back to the tent, to Olivia and tell her we've got to get dressed, there's a man out here.
We decided to move to another campground. We pack our gear and start walking and just beyond the first bend in the trail there's this guy again and he says see you later and I said, see you later, not meaning anything, just something you say and then in a while we stop to check the map and there he is coming along behind us a little ways downtrail and this time he catches us laughing, kissing. So there I am embarrassed twice in one day and now he's got this rifle against his hip though it's not hunting season and he says, you lost? We're fine, Olivia told him. Okay, see you later he says and this
time I don't say anything, I just watch him walk away and disappear.
I figured we'd lost him. There were lots of campsites around and we didn't see him after that so we found a spot and settled in. Had dinner, went to bed. And we were making love. Inside the tent. And I remember Olivia's hands on me, I can remember the feel of them to this day. And that was when my arm just exploded.
I took five shots. Arm-neck-neck-face-head. If my mouth hadn't been closed my molars wouldn't have shattered the bullet to my face and I'd be dead. They told me if I'd been turned a centimeter to the left the third shot would have gone directly through my jugular. Olivia took two, in the back and in the head. I pulled her behind a tree and I'm thinking I've got to go get help or we'll both bleed to death and she's saying no, don't go, please don't, like she wants us to die together, die in one another's arms and then she's trying to put her shoes on like she'll go too, we'll both get out of there together but she couldn't, she couldn't stand up, she kept falling.
I watched her die.
Right before she died she went blind. She couldn't see. She told me to take her wallet out of her shirt pocket, said you'll need money and in the tiniest little voice she said, go. But I couldn't go. I loved her. I knew what was happening. I just watched her.