Still

by Charlee Jacob

  He called Staub’s.

  “Hi, Dunk.”

  “Pete! Vhat bad you ahp do?”

  “I was planning to come by and spend an hour an two. See what new goodies the store has in.”

  “Ad dis dime ahn a Duezday? Great! I ahm showink duh original Texas Chainzaw Mazzacre ahn duh shtore dube ad noon. Vanna come vatch?”

  “You bet! I’ll bring lunch for both of us!”

  ««—»»

  It only made sense to bring barbecue, recalling the gas station from the movie that sold its questionable meats. And a six pack of icy cold Voodoo Beer. Pete found he was excited, not having seen this movie since 1974. He’d seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, and the remake of the first one done a couple years back.

  Dunk waited for him to arrive.

  “You’re shtill vearing doz gloves I gave you?”

  How many times had Peter already used this lie? “Yeah, I burned my hands a couple days ago. They cover up the blisters.”

  They set up their feast behind the counter and Dunk slipped the tape into the machine. They piled paper plates high with meat, potato salad, and beans. Each popped the tab on a frosty brew and then saluted the film to the East, North, West, and South (widdershins as opposed to deocile, the witches way), taking a swig at every compass point.

  “Man, I sure remember the first—and last—time I saw this,” Peter said, sighing wistfully with nostalgia…and grief for Curtis.

  “I remember my inaugural dime, alzo,” Dunk agreed, eyes twinkling. “My virzt horror vilm in America.”

  Peter grinned, taking a forkful of brisket.

  There was the FBI warning and then the movie started.

  With flashes in the dark. A camera taking photographic moments of very greasy corpses. Not subliminal but stark. They imprint immediately upon the section of the brain that sends warning messages out to the rest of the body that something’s wrong, beware. Nothing too overt. A nightmare’s optical bytes.

  Information imparted: grave robbing. Desecration.

  Solar flare corona in red on black.

  Pan on a dead armadillo on the highway.

  A van going down that highway.

  Guy in a wheelchair.

  Peter remembered this character was Franklin. He and Curtis sure had made fun of poor Franklin.

  The van visits a small town where the grave robbings have occurred, ostensibly so Sally and Franklin (who are traveling with friends Kirk, Pam and Jerry) can make sure that their grandfather’s resting place hasn’t been violated. The cemetery is crowded with locals checking out the same thing.

  There’s a shot of some old drunk who says, “I see things.”

  Dunk chuckled. “Vhat? Dead people?”

  Peter burst out laughing, spewing Voodoo foam and barbecue sauce.

  On the television’s screen they saw the abattoir, the hitchhiker with the wine birthmark on one side of his face, surely a mark of Cain. Conversation about head cheese, nothing thrown away in a food chain zen, the methods they used to use to kill the cows at the slaughterhouse, from sledgehammers against skulls over and over to a new device that just bolt-shoots their brains in a merciful single hole-punch.

  Peter mused on the nature of the slasher film at this period in time. What happened when insanity transcended even natural levels of madness? Did it become supernatural? Was that why he revered this film as something better than many of those that followed, because it ceased to be merely slasher to metamorphose into the mythically American?

  (And this freak with the birthmark? Was he to be considered maladaptive—or merely deviant?)

  More photographs are taken by this hitcher who’d just shown his hosts a glimpse into his idiot-abyss by cutting himself. The photo is the peel-away kind. He tries to sell it to Franklin who refuses. So the hitcher burns the pic. Then he pulls a razor and slashes Franklin’s arm. Naturally, the van stops and puts this freak out on the road again.

  “Dey put him awt. ‘Bout dime,” Dunk commented.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Peter asked.

  “Naw. I vouldn’t haff picked him awp do begin vit.”

  “Good point.”

  Pam reads outloud from an astrology book, “There are moments when we cannot believe that what is happening is really true. Pinch yourself and you may find out that it is.”

  They end up at a gas station, meeting a guy there who makes barbecue. The barbecue cook says his pump’s out of gas. Franklin is shown right after this with some of this meat hanging out of his mouth, looking too much like some guy’s roasted dick.

  They go to Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s house. Pam and Kirk go looking for gas—or for a place to screw, it’s never totally clear. Kirk goes into some house they find while Pam sits on the steps. The audience hears pig squeals.

  Soo-ee! Soo-ee! Soo-ee!

  Don’t go in there, little piggie. It’s Sui…Sui…Sui…

  —cide—

  First shot of Leatherface, who cuts up Kirk.

  The barbecue was beginning to make Pete feel queasy. He clutched his stomach. Shredded brisket, too much like what was depicted on his body. And ham, the other white meat.

  (I’m meat; we’re all just meat.)

  Pam goes looking for Kirk and stumbles into a room filled with bones. A reaper’s candy store.

  There’s this big chicken in a tiny cage.

  Obligatory vomit. The use of this was really only starting in film. Although he recalled puking in a scene from Last House on the Left.

  Peter wiped his mouth, very uncomfortable. Why?

  Here comes Leatherface again, through that shiny metal door. As if he’s emerging from another dimension, some Lovecraftian icon with a chainsaw in place of tentacles. As if the door itself was one humongous, sideways guillotine blade.

  Poor Pam on a meathook.

  Now the chainsaw does its metal howl for the first time.

  Dunkel’s eyes were shining. A couple customers had come into the store and were watching, too.

  Jerry goes to look for Pam and Kirk. He arrives at the house, hears weirdly muffled cries, finds two big chest freezers—one with Pam inside, still alive and twitching. Leatherface attacks as a ratchet juggernaut.

  Then…

  Peter frowned, a roar in his ears. A night and full moon on the screen, clouds in ghosts fleeing across the scarred face of it. Sally and Franklin stranded at the van, going to look for Jerry. Leatherface appearing, doing Thanksgiving turkey work on Franklin as Sally does a bonkers bosa nova. Leatherface chases her through labyrinthine brush, a minotaur with a chainsaw.

  Sally discovers the same house Pam, Jerry and Kirk met their Steak Thanatos fates in. She hurries to it, screaming for help. She runs upstairs, finds a wizened grandpa, gross-out granny—and a stuffed little dog, too. Somewhere Dorothy wails in OZ, in bad need of a hero and Thorazine. Sally jumps out the second story window and runs, making it to the gas station where the cook seems to want to assist her. She sees that barbecue glistening, red, and you can just see the wheels going ‘round in her head: vegetarianism seems nice. Just before the cook stuffs her in a bag…

  Peter put his head down, right between his legs. Close to sniff if not actually kiss his ass goodbye.

  “You ahkay?” Dunk asked him.

  Pete didn’t remember any of this, not past the part when Leatherface cut up Jerry. No dark night’s arrival, no full moon with scudding specters. There was about fifteen minutes of the movie he’d forgotten.

  Now, this shouldn’t have been a big deal. He hadn’t seen this in over thirty years, not since he was nine-years-old.

  Couldn’t he be expected to forget some? Not as if he had some miraculous photographic memory or anything, right?

  So why did he feel cold?

  “‘Scuse me,” he managed to murmur. He got up and headed for the restroom in the back of the store.

  “Vant me do shtahp id?”

  “No no.
You’re watching. Customers are watching. I’ll be back when I can be. Don’t worry.”

  Peter locked himself in, took off the little cotton gloves and set them on the sink, then shivered on the toilet.

  “Man, what’s the matter with me? It isn’t like the film is even as bloody as I remember. Mostly it’s running and noise. I’ve seen a lot harsher since then. It’s just that at the time, it was really a seminal moment. It was the cathexis of Sturm Und Drang.”

  That’s when Pete started to throw up that barbecue, trashcan between his legs as he sat on the john, leaning forward, pants in wrinkles around his gruesomely decorated ankles, images on his legs in vicious glide.

  Was he never going to be able to bear to watch another horror movie? (Because he’d become one?)

  Were the ghosts getting revenge for his doing the kinky with Nika?

  See, he was a shrine to those without justice or recourse. Their special saint: all that God had been willing to give these lost—a pitiful gesture from an overworked Almighty, long since given over to apathy.

  And he’d treated them-on-him like a sex toy. He wouldn’t blame Nika.

  Eventually he felt some better. He wiped, flushed, washed his hands and splashed his face. Then went back out.

  “I vas vorried!” Dunk admitted. “Duh Mazzacre, id is ahver.”

  Then he stared at Peter’s hands.

  Pete had forgotten to put the gloves back on.

  There was a very unpleasant spell of silence. Dunk not knowing how to ask what that weirdness was and Peter not knowing how to answer.

  Pete glanced around. The store was empty.

  “Lock the door a moment,” he told his friend.

  Dunk raised his dyed black eyebrows but did it, setting Staub’s keys on the counter, next to the video for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  Pete took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, then took it off, too.

  “You remember the still you gave me for my birthday?”

  He explained, through Rosaluna and her baby, the photo of Elizabeth Short at school, and Detective McFadden’s scrapbook.

  Dunk just stood there for several minutes, his jaw dropped, revealing several gold teeth at the back of his mouth. He walked several circles around Peter.

  “Dis vrom lickink?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Dat shkin, id is your own Carnival awf Zouls. You look like you been punked by duh devil.”

  Dunk touched his skin, tried to rub it off. He held his fingers up to the light, disconcerted to see nothing residual. “Does id go—everyvhere?”

  “To places you wouldn’t believe. Everywhere but my head and neck. Even the soles of my feet.”

  Pete shut his eyes, sick again. He felt a clammy hand on his bare shoulder.

  “You could make a laht awf money,” Dunk told him softly. “I know guys in enderdainment, underground.”

  Pete opened his eyes again. Saw Dunkel Friedhof’s greedy smile.

  Peter exploded. “You mean a goddam freak show?”

  He dressed, grabbed the keys off the counter, and opened the store’s front door again. He left.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 21

  “None returns from there to tell their conditions,

  to tell their state, to reassure us, until we

  attain the place where they have gone.”

  —Ancient Egyptian Funerary Text

  The Harpist’s Song

  Nika stopped by her place after work and picked up what she wanted to change into. She’d looked around the front of Peter’s house, figuring out after about ten minutes where the Betas hid an extra key. Then she let herself in, slipped out of her work clothes and into that overused cliché of ‘something more comfortable’, resolving to wait however long it took for Pete to return.

  She considered lots of things, trying to convince herself she wasn’t absolutely the lowest bug on the planet.

  Roman circuses. The most flagrant displays of barbarity. Men fighting to the death. Criminals torn to pieces by lions, tigers, wolves. Maidens raped by other beasts. All to the roar of delighted crowds who couldn’t get enough.

  The Renaissance. High art. The Rape Of Europa, The Rape Of Leda (Leda And The Swan), The Rape Of The Sabine Women. And popular hellish torments by Sandro Botticelli, Mathias Grunewald, Hieronymus Bosch. The picnic outtings of low and genteel alike who gathered to ogle those burned as witches at the stake—or to see other condemned disemboweled and quartered. Brothels always did a booming business after executions.

  The Age Of Reason. The Illustrated Marquis de Sade. The prints of Justine and Juliette were somewhat cartoonish, created by anonymous journeymen engravers. Very French Rococo. Chic because they were outrageous in mediums of cruel bacchanalia.

  Mental hospitals used to sell admission tickets so people could, for a mere penny, watch patients rant and drool. And they could tease these unfortunates as much as they liked.

  The Industrial Age. The Victorians with their London Gazette providing lurid descriptions of Jack The Ripper’s crimes. Every nick in the cranny. There were posters up across the city, covered in savage drawings of women being butchered to advertise this or that provocative play or cheap novel.

  The medical book written by Dr. von Krafft-Ebing, concerning in intimately scorching detail the sexual perversons of psychopaths. Originally published only in Latin. This was how medical texts were always printed then, assuming the lay public couldn’t possibly be interested. And if they might be—these were prurient subjects only for properly educated minds. Yet translations of Psychopathia Sexualis were offered on the sly to the swoony titillation of many so-called decently disinterested citizens.

  Modern Day. Salvadore Dali. H.R. Giger. Clive Barker. Caniglia. The most brilliant sparkles in the night, sketched and painted with brush and razor.

  Sit your kids down in front of the television, cut me open, show how the bullet zipped through my insides, how the blowfly danced on my tongue, how my life was begun to be terminated for your pleasure.

  In horror stories and movies, it was usually the most beautiful who suffered, were carried off, stabbed, bitten, clawed, lovely grist (or gris-gris) for a creature’s lust. Except beauty was ever in the eye of the beholder. Anyone could be desirable to someone. None of us were safe. One of the most popular series on current t.v. concerned a special unit of a police department that investigated nothing but sex crimes.

  The same old circus. It was never bread the Romans used. It was raw meat. Same as now.

  Was it natural for people to be attracted to this?

  Pushing the envelope until the previously forbidden was old hat (old mattress, old genitals kneaded roughly to produce any sensation at all). Slashing open was a bloody metaphor for penetration, excess sanguinity a representation of all the fucky juices bodies could squelch up when rubbed together. Violence equated with passion too monumental to be suppressed; frenzy had its carnal way with the object of its most secret desire.

  Until there were no more secrets. Everything was ripped out into the open and sated into a sublime—if possibly damned—exhaustion.

  Nika had no reason whatever to beat herself up just because Peter’s living snuff film-skin was erotic for her.

  She hadn’t imagined its heat. Her medical instruments measured it. The transfer of its itch, sting, and static were tangible…registered on her personal instruments.

  The portion of the brain it touched (caressed) was the most primeval. Sex became an act of survival as well as self-nihilism. At its most extreme core, you became everything and nothing.

  Pushing the envelope.

  Food chain.

  Fuck chain.

  Dildo and knothole.

  Generative organ/degenerative pisspot for devils and deities. No more decisions to make, no more toil, only a giving up of yourself to an irresistible power.

  Swept away.

  Or becoming that force. Darkest nature incarnate, no longer denied anything. Cock-hammer or sword, all
-devouring cunt. Id squeezing the world small in its sphincter of gravity. Love and hate the kiss with teeth.

  Possession was 9/10s of the law.

  Never let me go, never let you go.

  To kill is to obtain, to fuck is to release.

  In one or another exercise, the orgasms went on forever like a comet. Many tried to ride it, to straddle it, own it and shriek the distance. Some were impaled or shredded on the glasslike ice of the tail. Others fell to plunge screaming into a pulsating red darkness where the pain never stopped.

  The maladaptive might be a third class paraphiliac, first class asshole, nonconsenting partners, variety of weapons up to and including himself. Power, anger, sadistic: the three categories of rape. The maladaptive might also experience motivation to kill, also in categories (legal terms) from:

  First degree: Malice aforethought, deliberate and premeditated son-of-a-bitchism.

  Second degree: Generally without these aforementioned factors. Depraved indifference, for example.

  Manslaughter: 1) Voluntary…in hot blood, provoked to the heat of bloody passion; just not as responsible as if you’d planned to get so turned on.

  2) Involuntary…oops, ran over you with my tractor six times while looped on corn likker and lost on Highway 101.

  There are people who sweat, groan, and cum when they kill.

  The deviant may only like to watch, never even considering themselves an accessory to the act. The blasphemy isn’t theirs.

  There are people who masturbate until the heat and ache move them to shed tears.

  Nika thought of Peter’s body. She touched herself through the silk fabric of her robe, feeling the slide of the material like the interaction of a soft, living thing. She squeezed her breasts and pinched her nipples purple, pulled on the ring through the one. The contact/force made her bite her tongue to keep from crying out. She savored the salt and rust in the saliva flooding her mouth. She wet her right forefinger between her lips, then slid it between her thighs, across the clitoral bud. It tensed, swelled, moistened. She mused on Pete’s cock—swollen with horrors—impaling her.