The throbbing techno drives you to the edge of insanity. It makes you angry. At life, for inflicting all this craziness from birth onward. At your parents for solidifying the madness. At Kevin for being weak, for leaving you to struggle alone. You are furious at yourself and your misguided hands-off philosophy that gave your brother carte blanche, immersing him in unconditional love, extending extreme unction for his soul to pass into other worlds. You destroyed the power of conditions that led to self-responsibility. The degree to which you rein yourself in is the same extreme of permission he enjoys.
Your senses cringe in terror. You argue with your optic nerve, willing it to clear your vision. When it does, shapes become apparent. Bodies dot the walls like giant cockroaches. One nearby drags on a cigarette, the yellow glow of fire casting hellish illumination onto harshly-angled features. Not a friendly face, but the eyes look too distant for this to be an enemy.
You inch forward, now feeling with your feet for dips in the floor level that seem to be everywhere. The mallet-sound changes, like a hammer passed from one hand to the other of an ambidextrous person. The beat is the same. It punches through your nervous system, producing more fury that you battle, and throbbing at your genitals. Most of these patrons must be high on ecstasy. This music would stimulate them in a different way, or so you have read about E.
Finally you stumble upon the bar, close by the dance floor. A girl—or a good imitation—leans over, her Nazi cap low over kohl-lined eyes, minimal breasts bare, tiny pierced nipples erect and staring at you. She does not ask you what you want. You have an impression of deep disinterest. Didi shouts his order and gestures for you to do the same. You lean in and her face shows distaste as she eyes the coat you clutch to your body, her look implying you are not brave enough to be here. Above the pounding, you scream “Jack, straight up!” Without a nod, she turns her back on you, and fades into the darkness. You glance to the right to watch the dozen or so dancers.
Young. Slim. Naked. Sweat dripping down sinewy bodies that have never known fat. These Danse Macabre figures writhe and jump to the beating noise, eyes rolled up so the whites glow in flashing black light strobe, tongues lolling, corpse-like puppets yanked on strings. One penis, erect, suddenly shoots into the air like a fountain. Two dancers fall to their knees to lap up the discharge.
The light allows you to see patrons next to you at the bar, others across the dance floor, stripped of clothing, waiting, watching, fondling themselves and one another. All are skeletal, ribs jutting, hip-bones prominent, many bald, skulls so large compared to the child-like bodies, enormous fetuses. They resemble drawings of aliens, photos you have viewed of victims in interment camps. Watching them makes you hot, and you feel like a pedophile. Or a necrophile. You wonder when it became sexy to look as if you’re starving to death.
The harsh tapping on your shoulder goes almost unfelt—the rhythm is the same as the music, the same as the fingers around you groping, the same as your heartbeat forced to synchronize to all of this. But you do notice, eventually, and turn to find your drink. Behind it, one hand still on the glass, the other fondling a ringed nipple, the capped bartender releases your shot to hold out an open palm in much the same way as the door person, the coat check. You have the impression of beggars, starving, willing to take anything from anyone, but of course they will not take less than they demand. The image is titillating in its obscenity. You offer bills that are snatched away even before reaching the palm.
You want to ask Didi questions, about this place, about the preponderance of the thin, the beautiful who may live fast and die young for all you know, but the music prohibits verbalization. You only know this place is called Ecstasy, a 24-7 club that is more than a club, that is a lifestyle Didi assured you, frequented by transvestites, transsexuals, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, straight couples and singles, fetishists, hardcore SM players, everyone with the need to be ecstatic, in Didi’s words.
Kevin, you know, loved to get high. Most of his life he gravitated towards anything that would obliterate his pain. You watched your brother transit sexual preferences, chemical intoxicants, liquid libations, extreme physical ritualistic practices, various cults, and endless trendy diets to reduce the bulk he is prone to, all designed to take him out of the mud of this physical realm he loathes and lift him to spirit. You stood by helplessly for the thirty years you have known Kevin, unable to even aid yourself, let alone him. Each of his ventures was the answer, the salve to soothe the wound of living in a terribly imperfect world. Each would bring him the love and acceptance he longs for. Each was abandoned, or incorporated into Kevin’s perpetual morphing. You understand him, only too well. He acts out the inner turmoil you silently endure daily, turmoil that has driven you to three quiet suicide attempts, that causes you to sleep more hours each day than you are awake, that leaves you alienated and too depressed to make contact, or even to exhibit symptoms of your despair. Only the bulimia you battle in secret is evidence of your pain, and that goes unnoticed in a twisted world that values minimalism in everything to the point of praising your rejection of nourishment.
Kevin has tried it all, and you have watched like a voyeur, living vicariously through his efforts. Someone getting the thrills without the risks. You encouraged him, perhaps to placate the demon within you that demands extremes. When Kevin told you about his plans for the operation, and how if he were female instead of male, if he had been you instead of himself, life would be different, fulfilling, accepting, that night you had the first of what would become a recurring nightmare.
Stuck at the bottom of a dark empty well, you look through a soulless mirror that liquefies. This noir river begins to flow into you, your nose, mouth, ears, anus, vagina, even your pores. Little animals with barbed bodies scratch this tender penetrated flesh, stimulating you almost beyond endurance. You are poised in midair, air black as night, body throbbing with desires that will not allow release. And only when the black fire of passion forces a scream of exquisite agony from your lips do you wake in your lonely bed, covered with sweat and tears, thighs slick with juices. And no amount of stimulation releases your volatile frustration.
Eventually, when you had dreamed this enough, and cried miserable tears until your ducts emptied, it dawned on you what had been happening all along. And now, like the religion that both of you turned away from when it failed you, you have come with no answers to save Kevin from himself. But in the process of trying, perhaps you will be rescued as well.
Didi nudges you and you follow, away from the safety of the bar, around the outer corners of the room. You pass between people, and hands reach out to touch you, finding fabric instead of flesh. You smile, happy to have thwarted their expectations. But then one hand discovers your secret and worms beneath the fabric, inside your blouse, down under your bra, the body pressed hard against your own, following, in step, bony fingers tweaking your nipple in time to the pounding beat, forcing your head back, your mouth open, the black river flowing once again—
“This is it, what we came for,” Didi says. The hand is gone, leaving your nipple burning, your body freezing.
Didi opens a door and enters. You step into a cathedral of ice, with lighted grottos on each side of you. As you walk down the aisle, you pass these “rooms.” On the left a man is suspended by his wrists and ankles. Four naked attendants shave his head, strip the hairs from his torso with wax, pluck out his eyebrows, and the hairs around his anus … To the right, a bald woman’s bare body is cut with a scalpel, little cuts, deep enough to bleed, not enough for permanent injury, her flesh a canvas of tiny crosses, out of her mouth deep erotic pleas for forgiveness … A genderless being is having finger- and toenails clipped very very short, eyelashes singed, dead skin cut from the feet … You bend to peer inside a small door to find three pale and slender bodies prone on blond-wood shelves, sweat pouring off them as an attendant splashes water onto steaming rocks … Another grotto, a woman with her finger down her throat, vomiting, peeing, shitting, bleeding from
her vagina, all at the same time …
You have seen each of these worlds in one way or another, and they do not shock you. All your life you have known that to rid the body of everything leads to purification, to spirit. Every major religion reinforces this value. The culture in which you reside prays for the destruction of the flesh.
At the end of this corridor of pain and humiliation is a white door with a white Gothic arch above folding inward. Didi opens the door and you realize that somewhere along the way she has discarded the rest of her clothes. You move up the three steps to this altar of rejuvenation.
The inner sanctum glows with twinkling lights, bright as stars. All here is colorless, odorless, pure and uncorrupted: walls, floor, hospital gurney, sheets atop it. A frail woman lies still as death, attended by skinny hairless beings dressed only in white latex gloves and milky rubber shoes.
Didi puts a finger to lips, and you stare into her liquid eyes, realizing that they remind you of the black liquid fire. Her body is lean, angular, the dead refusing to die. Your vagina spasms.
This side show is interesting, but you remind yourself of the purpose of this quest. The pounding techno is a fraction dimmer here, enough to allow thought. Kevin is not here. You turn to leave.
“Fran?”
The voice catches you in a net of fragility. You glance back at the gurney, and the languid corpse-like form lifts its skull. Unnaturally bright eyes—familiar—peer into yours from deep in their sockets, as if beckoning.
“Kevin?”
“I’m Fran now,” he tells you, and your body jolts with this confirmation. “I need you for the reinventing.”
It is Kevin, or what is left of him. Instantly you move beside the gurney as if it is a coffin. He has no hair, no eyebrows, lashes, no finger- or toenails. His body is covered with pale stitches, like a rag doll repaired too many times.
“What’s … happening to you?” you ask.
“Ecstasy,” he says, his voice more feminine than masculine, the tone otherworldly.
“Drugs—”
“No. True ecstasy.”
You stare at his body, breasts plumped like white plums, his penis gone, replaced by … by … nothing! This is disturbing, but what leaves you unable to speak is his once thick-fleshed frame, now lighter than air, an exoskeleton.
“I’m thinner than you are,” he whispers with a smile so grotesque you shudder.
You can only shake your head, confused, horrified, resigned in your failure.
Suddenly, as if they are meant to distract, you notice the apparatus—clear tubes removing blood, suctioning fat from the body, washing out the intestine’s contents. You watch as one of the attendants pulls skin together over Kevin’s stomach where fat cells have been suctioned out, cuts the flab, stretches the skin taut, sutures …
“My stomach is stapled now, so I don’t need to eat,” Kevin whispers, eyes gleaming.
“What? … why? …” But you can no longer form sentences.
“To be you,” he says, the words so simple. The message clear as a crystal bell. This is your nightmare, your legacy. What you have created in your own distorted image. What you cannot show the world but what Kevin displays on your behalf. You gave him permission to reflect your darkness. Now that you see yourself with clarity, you cannot bear the sight.
He stares at the ceiling as if seeing God, as if he is ascending, and your eyes fill with tears.
Didi gently pulls the coat from your ravaged body, your clothes, then fingers find you through all your barren openings, filling them with black fire.
At long last, the heavy basket slips from your grip. Finally, you descend.
Pop Star in the Ugly Bar
Bentley Little
* * *
“Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” was first published in Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories From the Edge, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Nancy Holder, ROC, 2005.
† † †
I originally wrote this story in 1992 for an anthology titled Shock Rock, edited by the Hot Blood team of Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. They like the story and accepted it, but a month or so later, I received word that Pocket Books’ lawyers were not so thrilled. I was never sure whether they thought the story was obscene and thus open to prosecution, or whether they were afraid that Madonna, who had just come out with her Sex book, might be in the mood to sue. Either way, they banned the story. Three years on, after several rejections in the interim, Poppy Z. Brite accepted it for her anthology Razor Kiss. Unfortunately, she soon got word from the lawyers that they could not allow her publisher to include my story, and I received notice that once again the piece was banned.
Finally, a full decade later, “Pop Star in the Ugly Bar” appeared in the anthology Outsiders, thanks to editors Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick, and the brave people at ROC. No one sued, the world didn’t end, and now it can be reprinted here for your reading pleasure.
* * *
She walks in, the pop star. Arrives with her retinue, wearing a black leather outfit that shows part of one tit and is supposed to be revealing but just doesn’t cut it here in the bar. I can tell she’s slumming, looking for action. The second she walks through the door she’s acting as if she owns the place, and she tries to appear nonplussed when she finally figures out no one’s paying attention to her. She’s wearing a wig, pretending she wants to travel incognito, but now that no one notices her, she stands in her most recognizable pose, desperately willing people to recognize who she is.
Nobody does.
I do, but I don’t say anything, just watch. I’ve seen her videos, read about her in Playboy and Rolling Stone and TV Guide, read how she’s outrageous and into kinky sex, how she likes to pick up young black hitchhikers and have her way with them, and I see her now, this pampered bitch, and I have to laugh. Wild and outrageous? I’ll show you wild. I’ll show you outrageous.
Welcome to the Ugly Bar.
She said in an interview that she likes to be spanked, something pretentious about there being a fine line between pleasure and pain and that for her the two sometimes overlapped. Old news. Shocking maybe for grandpa in Kansas but babytalk here in the bar. I look at her smoothly unblemished carefully moisturized skin and I know it’s never experienced true funpain. I think of Desdemona, the time I carefully flayed her left buttock and rubbed vinegar and lemon juice on it while Deke pissed in her mouth, and I can’t see the pop star going for that.
Well, I can, but I can’t see her liking it.
Control freak. That’s what we have here, folks. Walks on the wild side carefully modulated, well-planned. Little fantasy trips with safe, padded boundaries, escape routes if things get too real, if the monster gets too hairy.
Pleasure and pain
Are almost the same
To me
Isn’t that a line from one of her songs? One of her videos? I look at her, at her Hollywood costume. Almost the same? I suddenly want to make her prove it. No matter that it’s an act, that she’s just entertaining people, trying to titillate them. The fact that she’s here in the Ugly Bar means that it’s no longer just an act, that she’s starting to believe her own press, that she really thinks she’s daring and provocative and out there.
I glance around the bar, catch the nods, catch the looks, and I know they all want to be in on it.
I walk up to her, ask if I can buy her a drink. Her eyes take in my mask, my codpiece, and I see, for a second, fear. She’s afraid. Not of me, specifically, but of losing control. She might say in her interviews that she likes big men, hung men, that she’s looking for a man who has enough between his legs to really satisfy her, but I can tell that now that she’s seen one, she’s scared. She doesn’t like it at all.
I push aside her bodyguards, and two of the Others come out of the shadows and drag them quietly off, taking them away. She says with all of the confidence she can muster, all of the confidence her money and power have bought, that, yes, she’d like a drink. The bartender pours it, holds it between his legs
, stirs it with his cock, lets a couple drops of bloody jizz fall visibly into it and hands it to me.
I grin, give it to her. “Here, bottoms up.”
She grimaces, puts it down an arm’s-length on the bar, pulls back. “God.”
The other patrons laugh derisively, and I think she realizes for the first time that she’s just an amateur here.
She looks around for her bodyguards, notices that they are gone, and I see the fear on her face again, but she pretends she’s not afraid, and she walks away from me, to the other end of the bar. She walks now with the grace and confidence of a dancer, the athlete she has to be in order to perform her stage show, but when I am through with her she will not walk that way. She will be hobbled and crippled, cleaned out with the razorcock perhaps, or violated to hemorrhage by the first three feet of Mr. Pole, and she will never be able to dance again. Each step she takes will be filled with pain and will remind her of her former pretenses and her forced knowledge of reality.
What if I cut her off at the kneecaps, cauterize the wounds with lighter fluid and fire, use the leftover blood to lubricate her bottom two holes?
Could she handle living on stumps?
She looks at me from the safety of the other side of the bar, faces me. “How big are you?” she asks, feigning boldness.
“Cock or arm?” I say.
She blinks.
“Two feet cock, four arm. More reach with the arm, too. I can maneuver around in there, feel out the womb, stroke those babygrowing sides with my fingers. Ain’t nothing like it, babe.”
She looks sick, looks like she wants to say something, looks like she wants to bolt, but her bodyguards are gone, she’s a long way from the door, and she’s been left here and hanging and knows she’d better make the best of it.
A crowd is gathering. The Mother and Zeke and Mr. Pole and the Roothog. Ginjer and Liz. There’s an animal smell in the air. Lust. Sexual lust. The lust of victors for more victims.
Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror Page 27