“Teddy, why didn’t you take out the garbage?”
“Huh?” He was confused by her displaced question, her banal motherliness.
“Oh, never mind.” She poked her cane at Angie with simple curiosity. “Put on your drawers.”
“Mother, it wasn’t my fault, she killed–” He quickly shut his mouth–Mother couldn’t know about Peg. She hated Peg.
“She’s dead, huh?”
“Mother, I didn’t mean to kill her.” That was a lie.
“You were watching her again,” Mother beamed.
“No Mother. I never ever watched her. I promise I didn’t.”
“You did. She tells me.”
“No Mother.” That bitch, she had told. He wished he could kill her again; she suffered too little.
“I told you not to do the nasty. And now I catch you doin’ it on your sister. What can I do with such a disrespectful boy?
Her rhetoric frightened him. What if she took away the television? What if she made him take those pills again—what had she called them? Saltpeter? He could fix that though. He was good at hiding them under his tongue and then throwing them out his window.
Although Teddy was taller than Mother, she overwhelmed him with her presence. She stepped over Angie and raised her cane to his head; she was varicose in her elegance.
“Bad boys have to be punished. That’s how we keep a family together.”
Sharply, and with surprising force, she bludgeoned his head repeatedly until he collapsed, limp and denigrated on the carpet.
When Teddy awoke, he winced at the tugging pain at his eyelids—they wouldn’t open no matter how hard he strained. Atop his naked groin he felt the cold security of Peg, and beneath him the gritty soil. Damn Mother and her sewing. He touched his eyelids and knew he would find the tiny knotted stitches binding his vision.
“Teddy,” she called from above. “You’ve been a bad boy. You won’t be looking at Angie anymore though, I’ve seen to that. Just like your father you are. I had to teach him a lesson too.”
He heard an earthy scrape from above and pleaded for forgiveness. “Mother please, I didn’t mean to look. I’m sorry. Please, Mother–”
A scoop of dirt landed on his face, covering his nose and mouth; his arms were squeezed too tightly into the grave to protest.
“Got to keep the family together.”
Mother continued to fill in the grave as Teddy struggled to free himself; he wanted to spit but his mouthful of dirt prohibited any such action. Above, Mother babbled about discipline and Teddy’s punishment led to suffocation as his eyes seeped tears of blood.
March 15, 1988
Night Terrors Magazine
1007 Union Street
Schenectady, NY 12308
Brian Warner
3450 Banks Rd. #207
Margate, FL 33063
Hey Brian,
Thank you for “All in the Family.” I like the idea, but I prefer something a little more involved. However, you write very well and very convincingly, and I’m anxious to see another submission from you. But, Brian, I would first urge you to acquaint yourself with the unique type of fiction we publish by purchasing a subscription to NT. I can send you the next four issues for only $12 for your first year and $16 each year afterwards. I hope you’ll take advantage of this savings—more than 35% off the cover price—and join our bloody little gang. If you’re serious about selling your work to NT—payment is two and a half cents per word—then getting to know the mag is your key to a quick sale.
Till then,
John Glazer
Editor
March 28, 1988
Brian Warner
3450 Banks Rd. #207
Margate, FL 33063
John Glazer, Editor
Night Terrors Magazine
1007 Union Street
Schenectady, NY 12308
Dear John Glazer,
Thank you very much for your encouraging response. Enclosed is a check for four issues of NT. I am eager to receive my first copies. In the meantime, I am sending you three new poems I wrote, “Piece de Resistance,” “Stained Glass” and “Hotel Hallucinogen.” I hope that you’ll find them more to your taste.
Thank you for considering these submissions, and I’m looking forward to receiving my subscription to Night Terrors Magazine.
Sincerely,
Brian Warner
PIECE BE RESISTANCE
When the fork eats the spoon,
and the knife stabs
the face reflected in the plate,
dinner is over.
STAINED GLASS
In the wooden silence
genuflecting fornicators
seek penance and
false-toothed idealists
throw grubsteaks on the offering plate.
light a candle for the sinners
light a fire
Self-pronounced prophet, parable-speaking Protestant
preaches his diatonic dogma,
disemboweling indiscreetly.
supplicate
congregate
the world looks better through stained glass
light a candle for the sinners
set the world on fire
Falsities
Falsities
Falsified factualities;
All sitting like eager sponges,
soaking up the tertiary realities of life.
HOTEL HALLUCINOGEN
Lying in bed contemplating
tomorrow, simply meditating,
I stare into a single empty
spot, and I notice a penetrating
of two eyes looking up and
down and at various odd angles
secretly inspecting me; and I
feel my stare tugged away
from the blank screen in
front of my eyes and directed
at the eight empty beer cans
forming an unintentional pyramid.
And I close my lids to think–
How many hours have passed
since I constructed such an
immaculate edifice of tin?
Or did I create it all?
Was it the watchers?
I open my eyes and return my stare to the pyramid.
But the pyramid has now
become a flaming pyre, and
the face within is my own.
What is this prophecy that
comes to me like a delivery boy,
cold and uncaring of its message,
asking only for recognition?
But I will not fall prey
to this revelation of irrelevance
I will not recognize this perversion
of thought.
I will not.
I hurl my pillow at the
infernal grave, as if to save my
eyes from horrific understanding,
and I hear the hollow clang
of seven empty beer cans,
not eight–
Was it fate that left
one to stand?
Why does this solitary tin soldier
stand in defiance to my
pillow talk of annihilation?
Then, for some odd, idiotic,
most definitely enigmatic reason
the can begins to erupt in a barrage of
whimpering cries.
Does he lament because his
friends and family are gone
or that he has no one
with which to spawn?
They were gone…
But no, that’s not the reason.
It is a baby’s cry of his mother’s
treason.
The screaming fear of abandonment.
And this wailing, screaming, whining
causes the dead cans to rise
and I can’t believe my eyes,
that this concession of
beverage containers is chanting
in a cacophony of shallow rebellion
to my Doctrine
of Annihilation
that was discussed in my
Summit of the Pillow (which is now
lost among the stamping feet of the
aluminum-alloy anarchists).
I am afraid, afraid of these
cans, these nihilistic rebels.
As the one approaches–the baby cryer,
I suppose my fear now
escalates, constructing a wall
around my bed, trying to shut
everything out
but without a doubt
the cryer casually climbs what
I thought was a Great Wall
not unlike the one in Berlin.
He begins to speak.
His words flow cryptically from
the hole in his head
like funeral music: deep, resonant,
and sorrowful.
He says to me: “You must
surrender to your dreams it’s just.
We sit all day planning for your attendance
and upon arrival you
very impolitely
ignore us.”
In awe, I nod involuntarily
and he closes my eyes.
No.
He gives me a pair of aphrodisiac sunglasses,
and I fall asleep in the shade.
Asleep in a field of hyacinth and jade.
When I crawl out of my sleep
I get up,
my hair a tangled mess of golden locks.
I enter the kitchen,
and go to the icebox.
I pull out a single can of beer,
and as I begin to drink
I hear
The weeping of an abandoned infant.
June 5, 1988
Brian Warner
3450 Banks Rd. #207
Margate, FL 33063
John Glazer, Editor
Night Terrors Magazine
1007 Union Street
Schenectady, NY 12308
Dear John Glazer,
I received my first copy of Night Terrors in the mail two weeks ago, and have now read the entire issue. I enjoyed it, particularly the story by Clive Barker. I haven’t heard from you, and wonder whether you received the poems that were included with my subscription request. I am more eager now than before to be published in Night Terrors Magazine. I feel that it is the perfect place for my work. Please respond soon and let me know if you received my last submission, or if you’d like me to send it again.
Sincerely,
Brian Warner
* * *
July 8, 1988
Night Terrors Magazine
1007 Union Street
Schenectady, NY 12308
Brian Warner
3450 Banks Rd. #207
Margate, FL 33063
Hey Brian,
Nice to hear from you. Thanks for the nice words about NT; yes, I read your poems, and enjoyed them, but did not think they were right for NT. I’m sorry; I must’ve forgotten to respond to them. But please submit again soon; I’m really enjoying your work.
Till then,
John Glazer
Editor
i wasn’t born with enough middle fingers
C’MON BABIES GREASE YOUR LIPS PUT ON YOUR HATS AND SWING YOUR HIPS DON’T FORGET TO BRING YOUR WHIPS WE’RE GOIN’ TO THE FREAKER’S BALL.
–Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “Freaker’s Ball”
WHEN you have friends, you form a band. When you’re lonely, you write. So that’s how I spent my first months in Fort Lauderdale. As my father worked at Levitz Furniture, supposedly a big opportunity for him, I sat alone at home and brought my most twisted fantasies to life in poems, stories and novellas. I sent them everywhere from Penthouse to The Horror Show to The American Atheist. Every morning I rushed to the door as soon as I heard the mailman. But all he carried in his bag was disappointment: either nothing or a rejection letter. Only one story, “Moon on the Water,” about an alcoholic writer with a cat named Jimi Hendrix and a well that swallows everyone he loves, was ever published—in a small journal called The Writer’s Block.
Disappointment followed me like a ball and chain that first year in Florida. The more work I did, the less it paid off. I was leading a pathetic life: living with my parents and attending Broward Community College, where I studied journalism and theater because it was all that interested me. For extra money, I became the night manager of a local Spec’s, a record chain where I soon found an opportunity to revert to the type of behavior that had gotten me into trouble in Christian school.
There were two cute girls who worked at the store. The one that liked me, of course, was heavily medicated and obsessed with killing herself. The one I liked was Eden, named after the garden of earthly delights, but she refused to share any of those earthly delights with me. In a callow attempt to be cool, I made a deal with them: They could smoke pot in the back of the store if they agreed to steal cassettes for me. Since there was a security guard who searched our bags whenever we left the premises, I bought the girls sixteen-ounce soft-drink cups from Sbarro’s and instructed them to fill the containers with as many cassettes by the Cramps, the Cure, Skinny Puppy and so on as would fit. The week Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking came out, I had Eden steal it and then unsuccessfully tried to coax her into coming with me to their concert at Woody’s on the Beach.
My first article in my college newspaper, The Observer, was a review of that show, headlined “Jane’s Addiction Returns to Shock Crowd at Woody’s.” Little did I know that there was a word in that headline that would go on to be used several thousand times to describe my music, and it wasn’t “woody.” Even more unforseeable was the fact that many years later I would be in a Los Angeles hotel room trying to keep Jane’s Addiction’s guitarist, Dave Navarro, from giving me a blow job as we sniffed drugs together. (If memory serves me correctly, Dave ended up hanging out in the room of my bassist, Twiggy Ramirez, who had ordered two expensive prostitutes and was busy fucking them to the beat of ZZ Top’s Eliminator.)
What I regretted most when I was fired from the record store for general job-shirking (they didn’t catch me stealing) was that I would never get to go out with Eden. Once again, however, time and fame were on my side, and a year and a half later I ran into her after a Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids concert. She didn’t even know I was in the band until she saw me on stage, and then all of a sudden she wanted to go out with me. So you can believe that I fucked her—and didn’t call her afterwards.
After getting fired, I delved into rock criticism, working for a local freebie entertainment guide called Tonight Today. The newsprint magazine was run by a creepy, burned-out hippie named Richard Kent, who never paid me a cent. He was completely bald except for a patch of gray hair he kept in a ponytail and he wore thick black glasses. He constantly walked around the office with his neck bobbing back and forth, as if he were a fat parrot in search of something to say. Whenever I asked him a question about an article or a deadline, he’d stare blankly at me for minutes. I never knew what he was thinking, but I always hoped it wasn’t about molesting me.
I soon conned my way into a glossy start-up magazine, 25th Parallel, by telling the owners, two lovers named Paul and Richard, that I had a degree in journalism and had written for numerous national publications. They bought my lies and hired me as a senior editor. I always tried to picture Paul and Richard having sex, but it was an impossible image to conjure. Paul, a small, chubby Italian from New York, looked like a fun-house mirror version of Richard, who was gaunt and tall with terrible acne and monstrous teeth that looked like they were part of a Halloween costume. One of the things that creeped me out most about them was a picture Paul kept over his desk of Slash passed out naked in a bathtub. I always wondered about the circumstances under which the photo had been taken.
Paul and Richard were a hopeless pair. They would sit around the office depressed, destitute and in tears. The only reason the magazine came out month after month was because they made
money selling the records they received for free in the mail. Like most people who don’t pay for their music, they didn’t appreciate it. I wrote nonstop for the entertainment section, but the piece that I was happiest with wasn’t about rock. It was about a subject that combined my aspirations in journalism and horror writing.
25TH PARALLEL, APRIL, 1990 WE ALWAYS HURT THE ONES WE LOVE
(A TRIP INTO THE WORLD OF B AND D)
by Brian Warner
The cloying scent of stale sex and leather instantly accosts my senses as I stumble into Mistress Barbara’s dungeon. After being blindfolded and escorted here by her personal slave, I spend a few moments adjusting my vision to the dim lighting in this living-room-gone-torture chamber; carelessly, I stuff the adhesive eye patches in my shirt pocket. Once I finally focus, the carnal coexistence of this Fort Lauderdale apartment becomes quite apparent.
The short, corpulent woman who calls herself Mistress Barbara is, in fact, a B and D (that’s bondage and discipline for those of you who thought that the missionary position was still the standard) specialist and her house of ill repute is closer than you might think.
“Whatever someone’s fantasy is, I fulfill it,” she asserts, gesturing to a roomful of painful, though prurient, blue movie props and other pornographic paraphernalia. “In commercial sessions I use instruments of torture on people. I do [genital] torture, body piercing and bondage—I tie them in positions that are extremely uncomfortable and I leave them there for long periods of time. If it’s a good session and they’ve been a responsive slave, I will allow them to masturbate afterwards.”
On the wall opposite the door is a row of full-length mirrors and to either side of them are her work tools. I follow her to the rack on the right where she points out two jockey helmets, riding gear, electric shock equipment used for dog training, several flea collars, a pair of spurs and metal cuffs designed for shackling legs, wrists and thumbs.
“I don’t always apply them to wrists, ankles and thumbs, however,” she laughs.
Continuing down the wall are a plethora of clamps and accompanying weights that are used for stretching the more tender parts of the body. Below that she identifies a set of familiar-looking utensils as “escargot tongs.”
“These are wonderful for [genital] torture,” she beams, picking up the tongs fondly and snapping them in the air like some metallic lobster. “And besides, when somebody eats those snails again, they always think of me.” (Reader warning: 25th Parallel recommends that you do not try this at home, or at Joe’s Stone Crab for that matter.)
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