“It’s the nature of the tape,” Jack smiles. “More specifically, the nature of any moment you can rewind or fast forward with your finger.”
“Uh huh.”
“There’s a trick though. You ever try to rewind a VHS tape without hitting the button?”
“And how would I do that?” Stansberries asks.
“Just close your eyes, fool.”
With that, Stansberries shoves him to start walking.
“What did they see on the tape?” Rick asks, walking with them.
“What did who see?” Jack asks.
“Your old partner, Mike ‘Johnson’ Johnson. ‘Little Mike?’ Come on.”
“Wow. Really? You, too, huh?” Jack looks back to the smoking car and the men still trying to crack it open. “You should go talk to them. You two have a lot in common.”
“Me, too, what?”
The officer doesn’t wait for an answer and reaches for Jack’s arm to keep him moving.
“Forget it. You’ll have plenty of time to-”
“He thought a dog molested her or something,” the old fireman interrupts.
Jack brushes gravel from his hair, trying to appear calm, as he tries to remember who he is today, and if Larry is questioned under a hot lamp, can he remember if Jack was a paramedic who turned to porn or porn director who turned to paramedicine. Ultimately, he decides it won’t matter.
“That’s not really what I said,” Jack says, as Rick steps up between him and the officer.
“Listen, we have to get these people to the hospital,” Rick says. “We’ll have to figure this out later.”
“Damn straight he needs a hospital!” the old fireman says, and Rick shoves him aside.
“That baby doesn’t have time for this shit. Neither do I.”
The stocky cop gauges the climate of the eyes around them.
“Go,” Sergeant Stansberries says. “We’ll finish this later.”
Jack runs to the ambulance and climbs into the back, closing the door behind him. Rick climbs into the driver’s seat and starts their warbling, forever-busted siren. The crowd turns to look at the source of the horrible noise as Rick tears off down the road. No one seems surprised by the sound anymore.
Ambulance. Hours later. Jack is resting on the gurney in the back. Rick is driving.
“Just take me home if you don’t want to hear what’s really going on.”
“I am taking you home,” Rick says. “Dude, I’ve known you a long time, and that’s the only reason I kept you out of jail today. But as far as the job goes, we’re through. Once I drop you off, I don’t ever want to see you again.” He looks around the cab. “Where’s the cameras?”
“I’ve never mounted a camera in here, but I did put a fake phone booth in the back of the ambulance once. Of course, back then it was half a phone booth, lightweight so it could quickly get stuck to any wall, with bubblegum if need be. And back then my name was Larry.”
“Right.”
“The booth was leftover from my film-making days, and along the inside read ‘In case of plot problems, break glass. Which, of course, meant ‘drop a dime.’”
“Stop.”
“Basically, back in the days before cellular phones, when a character needed information to move a story along and they couldn’t afford or improvise or ‘afro-engineer’ an essential sequence, as Glen would call it, Larry would have his actors just slap the phone booth up on a wall, or hold it up with one hand if they had to, and they’d make an imaginary phone call. In their best Children of a Lesser God, one-sided phone call, the actor would announce to the viewer with some ridiculously obvious exposition just what the fuck was going on.”
“Like you being this ‘Larry’?”
“‘What do you mean I only have ten minutes to get to the dock and fuck the baroness before the bomb goes off?!’ You see, quite perversely, Larry still used the fake phone booth in his more respectable gigs, not while being a paramedic, ‘cause that might have been first, but at least during his ‘artier’ films. See, instead, the makeshift phone-booth conversations would leave it all up to the audience’s imagination, like every piece of shit at Cannes.”
“Where?”
“‘What? Yes. No. No. I will.’ Click. You get it? You might think this makes all fake-phone-booth, back-of-ambulance expositions utterly fruitless, but at least they remind Larry of better days, better work.”
“This movie sucks,” Rick says.
“Okay, if a rapist is faking dog attacks, too…” Jack winds back up. “…then how fast can you give someone a dog-bite tattoo…”
Rick interrupts him. “I saw what you did back there. To Little Mike.”
Jack says nothing.
“I didn’t know he was your partner,” Rick says.
“Long time ago. He was annoying as hell. Even worse than he is now. Was...”
“Don’t you mean ‘annoying as Heck’?” Jack misses the joke. “And another thing,” Rick goes on, shaking his head. “If you ever turn up on the side of the road, sniffing asses at a car wreck again, looking for signs of Milkbones or mystery molesters, I will fuck you up then call the cops.”
“...all you would have to do to fake it is leave a couple dog hairs,” Jack is saying. “…put a dog’s favorite chew toy in someone’s shorts so that he’ll dig for it. That’s enough.”
“You sound like an asshole,” Rick sighs. “You know what you’re doing? You’re the oldest story there is. You’re inventing crimes and characters to stop it. You’re like the firebug standing with the crowd to watch them put out the fire. Or watch you do it. Only there’s no fire. Or something.”
“Good analogy. Can you run that by me one more time, numb nuts?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Okay, listen to this, you know how a dog always sticks its nose between a girl’s legs the first time it smells her...”
The sound from the siren crackles and cuts out, then comes back on louder and more erratic. A car that was easing into traffic from a side-street suddenly lurches forward and takes out a mailbox. Rick reaches to turn off the siren, but the button isn’t working any more. The sound grows even louder. Rick yells over it.
“You realize that the only one who thinks about shit like this is someone who does
shit like this, right?”
The siren emits an almost human shriek, then coughs. Jack isn’t hearing Rick anymore or vice versa.
“…well, once I was hiding a squeeze toy behind my back, and my friend’s Rottweiler just
about bit off my nuts trying to get at it... wait. Turn right here.”
“Where are we going?”
“I know a shortcut.”
Rick turns hard onto an onramp, almost taking them up on two wheels again.
“You know what, Jack? At first I thought you just raped her and covered it up. Now I think it’s got to be worse somehow.”
“…but if we can X-ray this dog, we’ll find the answer to the… whoa. Turn left here.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. You know, you describe this theory about this man and his dog and his balls because it’s the nastiest thing you can think of. It’s the limits of your imagination because we’ve seen too much horrible shit. And you know what’s so fucked about that? You’re like the Holocaust survivor telling a story that you’ve heard before, that I’ve heard before, and you don’t think I’m paying attention, so you start searching your little brains for the nastiest thing you can think of. But you’re not very good at this game, dude. That’s the problem with our job, man. Out here we have seen and heard and smelled it all. So quit trying so hard with ghost stories, it doesn’t work on us, remember?”
“What do you mean ‘lack of imagination?’ Have you thought of something worse? Tell me about it. But turn right here...”
Rick takes a harder right turn. The siren is almost deafening now. Rick can only hear random words that Jack mutters.
“...’cause dogs are man’s best friend... not woman’s... turn l
eft... dogs... actually smarter than dolphins... also known to rape… turn right there where they used to be selling that snowmobile...”
“Jack, I saw a reality show the other day, and the girls couldn’t wait to get their rape stories out. This one chick was telling her story and you could tell, even though she had really been raped, that she was making it more dramatic and more interesting for the television, and suddenly I didn’t care anymore.”
“That makes you a horrible person.”
“No, we’re talking about you.”
The siren stops, and the silence is almost painful. Jack sits up, the sheet sliding off his face. They say nothing for a mile. Then:
“Do you believe me that there’s a rapist, Rick?”
“No.” Pause. “I don’t know.” He punches the dashboard in frustration.
“Stop!” Jack yells. “Right here!”
Rick slams on the brakes, and the ambulance slides and rocks on its tires. They’re at the entrance of the amusement park. Rick looks around confused.
“Why?”
“I want to check the scene of the crime.”
“Fine. Get out. And realize this is the last time I’ll be seeing you. I’m not risking my job because of your delusions. This is where you get off, know what I’m saying?”
Jack steps out of the ambulance.
“I’m going, I promise. But you didn’t answer me. Do you believe there’s a rapist out there?”
Rick stares straight ahead. Jack walks away backwards, reluctant to leave without getting an answer. The park is still open but thinning out, and Jack aims for the boy at the gate who’s handing out samples of elephant ears on toothpicks. The boy is frozen at the sight of the ambulance, scouring the horizon for an accident. Jack backs into the kid, then takes a sample and eats it. Rick puts the ambulance into gear.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Jack says, smiling around his toothpick. “You wouldn’t know him if you were sitting right next to him.” Rick just shakes his head.
Jack laughs and walks past the boy, then he quickly turns around.
“Rick! Watch this!”
He spins his baseball cap to face forward and walks past the boy for another free sample.
“See that shit?! Watch it again.”
He turns on his heels, spins his baseball cap around backward again, and then takes another hunk of elephant ear. The boy is understandably confused.
“I could do this shit all day. And this kid doesn’t even recognize me. If I had a fake mustache, I’d never buy groceries again.”
Rick is driving away.
“Rick! Hey! Watch your back, Rick!”
Jack spins his baseball cap around one last time, then flips up the visor. He plucks one more cube of powdered, greasy dough off a toothpick, then smiles at the boy.
“Sorry. Just making a point. So… you see any dogs around here today?”
“Dogs aren’t allowed on the rides,” the boy frowns. “They aren’t tall enough.”
“Good thing. They eat kids like Crackerjacks! World’s best kept secret. Ask anybody with a new baby.”
The boy looks up at the words on Jack’s cap. A stitched cartoon dog grins and reminds him:
“Beware Kids! Not All Dogs Are Friendly!”
Amusement park ride. Minutes later. A long line of Model-T cars are backed up on the ride, and it’s pandemonium. Children are crying, balloons are popping, and parents are hanging out of their cars and hollering, fake radios blaring, some even slapping the heels of their hands against horns that have never been functional. Jack is at the front of the line, refusing to move forward. Every family screams abuse at him from their cars, leaning almost far enough to fall, but so far afraid to step out as if it’s a traffic jam on a real highway. Jack sits calm, lost in thought, both hands behind his head and nowhere near his steering wheel, pretending this is where it happened, this is where it all went down, and he was the driver who crashed that car.
Larry tried to roll out from under the dead man on his back, and he somehow came up with a .38 Special. It had fallen from a holster that one of the officers had unsnapped way too early in the action in a sad attempt at intimidation. From the meager safety of the sandbox, Larry fired back at Bigby, who dove for the covered slide in fear. A shirtless, spiky-haired kid trailing popcorn and blood ran between them, and Larry saw what he mistook for tattoos of dog bites along the boy’s ribs.
What kind of idiot gets a dog-bite tattoo? he thought, taking aim. Here, let me draw some bullet holes on you, too.
But the trigger wouldn’t budge. The safety was on. Normally .38 Specials didn’t have safeties, but when cops made clicking noises with their mouths, it served the same purpose. Somewhere in the world, a cop made that noise. So Larry squirmed like a snake backing out of its skin, and the dead man still hung on awhile, finally tearing away the last shred of Larry’s shirt before he dropped.
Larry stood up in the glow of a hundred headlights, shirtless and trembling. Everyone could see him now, as well as the images covering his body. He panicked and began scratching long strips of skin free from his shoulders, arms and torso, like the ragged fringe of notebook paper, but more like marbled bacon. He stripped layer after layer until he’d uncovered every tattoo lurking in his bloodstream.
These were mostly movie tattoos that had burst forth inexplicably from Larry’s body, shimmering and shifting and taking shape in his seeping wounds. Movie fans would recognize them as tattoos from their favorite flicks, every one of them scribbled in washable ink, since there was no commitment to body art in the fiction of films. Once upon a time, these markings buried inside Larry’s trunk had been drawn on the shanks of actors by men and women with no dedication to the reality of their moment. But now, in this scene, with no explanation at all, they had stained Larry’s skin forever.
He wasn’t too surprised.
It was the usual suspects crawling on his epidermis, but this time he knew their real names. There was Kurt Russell’s cobra on his belly, last seen in Escape from New York, now doing battle with Nick Nolte’s devil tongue from the prison musical Weeds. Rows of Mel Gibson’s “Z’s” from The Bounty covered the ridge of Larry’s collarbone, where his knuckles, inked with Robert Mitchum’s infamous “Love” and “Hate” from Night of the Hunter, of course, rubbed and rubbed like they were trying to start a fire. Even Axel Jodorowsky’s huge eagle had landed, now draped across his chest like it was in the import Santa Sangre, a movie where a violent, primitive tattooing ritual was quite convincingly faked. A Geisha and a dragon from a Chinese New Year parade rode across Larry’s back, just like the one Maude Adams had to endure against her will in Tattoo. And “Death” tickled his toes, the same toes that Vince Gil stabbed the gas pedal with when he portrayed a surprisingly easily rattled Mad Max villain. Nicolas Cage’s (and Randall “Tex” Cobb’s) Mr. Horsepower logo from Raising Arizona made an appearance, the same bird that still got confused for Woody Woodpecker on a daily basis, two of them actually, smiling high and proud over Larry’s bicep and his black heart. Circling Larry’s spine were Rod Steiger’s lions and rockets and Mars (“Oh, my!”), still glistening like they did in that film, where they’d clearly been applied about five minutes earlier in the makeup trailer of The Illustrated Man, just in time for the leading man to start sweating. And, finally, on Larry’s shoulder, for Fantasy Island fans, there was even a tattoo of “Tattoo” on the shoulder of a tattoo of Ricardo Montalbán.
It made sense if you saw it.
It should have been enough to grab everyone’s attention. But their indifference to Larry was a glimpse into the future, when Hollywood would one day begin experimenting with CGI for hardcore sex in mainstream films to maintain the integrity of the stars, and how they’d accidentally stumble onto some of the real reasons behind the fading criticisms that everyone hated computer imagery and ‘would never never mistake it for reality.’ And in spite of the dwindling porn industry being the only voice of reason in this dystopia, when they one day organize a
naked march down Rodeo in protest of this technology, including a leathery, 75-year-old Jack with nary a picture anywhere on his body, the mob would be universally ignored, especially on television, where true nudity would be dismissed as a particularly unrealistic special effect.
Larry was dead-center in the burn of two hundred headlights now, with all that crazy shit all over his body, dramatically clicking off the safety of his weapon, but it still wasn’t enough to keep everyone’s attention when a real girl entered the spotlight.
Jacki’s car. Toni is watching her frustrated mother work to pass a slow-moving ambulance. When the other lane finally clears, Jacki speeds up to go around it. But once they’re finally in front, its flashers light up their world, and Toni puts her hands over her ears at the choked, turbine warble of its siren. Still clutching her head, she climbs up on the back the passenger’s seat to read the blood-red, backwards writing painted the hood.
“‘Ecnalumba’…”
“What?”
“What what, mommy?”
“What are you talking about?” Jacki asks her, distracted by her rear-view mirror. The ambulance driver’s face is shadowed by a ballcap, and Jacki slows to let it pass, peering in vain to see if it’s who she thinks it is. Then she looks over at Toni and sees her hands still tight against her head, eyes pinched shut now, and Jacki thinks of the toy screaming as she stomped it to death.
And the thing Toni did right after that.
She tries to calm her daughter down.
“You can put your hands down now, baby. Hey, you know what you look like? Do you? You look like the ‘See No Evil’ monkey!”
Toni makes a face somewhere between a smile and a frown and drops her arms. Then she takes out a red crayon from her Hello Kitty purse to write some backwards letters on her hand in her shaky childish script.
Oh, no, Jacki thinks. Not that again.
Toni had gotten back into the habit of writing backwards on her hands ever since she caught a certain horror movie on cable looong past her bed time. She always drew the letters with the red crayon, and she called them her “Redrubs.” Jacki never translated the word in the movie for her. She knew this would take the fun out of it.
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