Unger House Radicals

by Chris Kelso

  Maybe he recognised that familiar evil in my eyes, I don’t know?

  I watched him, through the viewfinder, finish the homeless drug addict off. This’ll sound shallow, but Swarthy was ridiculously photogenic.

  When he was done, we sat on some cardboard boxes and he revealed his back story to me in explicit detail. He did not attempt to give me the old gaslight treatment either. I was appreciative of his honesty, it was refreshing.

  *

  Swarthy began his criminal life as a thief, anything he could get his hands on. This developed into other practices, vandalism, arson, before it twisted and became something uglier. During his early days he served time in numerous prisons across the country. His favourites were: Fresno, California; Rusk, Texas; United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg; The Dalles, Oregon; Harrison, Idaho; United States Penitentiary, McCreary; Butte City Montana, Montana State reform School; Miles City Montana, State Prison Montana Oregon; Bridgeport Connecticut; New York's Sing Sing; Federal Correctional Institution in Big Spring; Washington D.C. and Leavenworth, Kansas. He said he liked these places because they let him read and watch movies. Constant incarceration did nothing to dull his criminal instincts.

  One thing which I found compelling about Swarthy was his overt sexuality. I don’t think he could help it; it’s the way his life had always been. He told me he was frequently in sexual contact with homeless people and went through a period of raping his male victims, not because he was gay but because he simply wanted to humiliate them. Before all this he was a teenage alcoholic and often told by his mother that he was a monster and that prison was his destiny. A familiar story I’m sure you’ll agree, but it was his openness about his past that made him stand out to me. Swarthy was also a victim of sexual assault and incest at the hands of many close relatives and acquaintances, including his next door neighbour—an overweight mechanic called Mr Pauli who had a belly like a sagging parabola always resting on his knees when he bent down to your level. He found this particularly traumatic at the time but has since come to appreciate the experience and its part in shaping who he has become today. Around this time he says he became a pyromaniac (something I can validate, he is often sexually aroused by fire in my presence) and enjoyed watching things he made burn to a cinder. He ran away from home early and lived in abandoned houses up and down the US, panhandling for cash whenever he needed food, although he claimed that he enjoyed the taste of human flesh and even ate the body parts of several homeless people who had died beside him while he was living on the streets.

  Swarthy confessed to me 152 murders and to having sodomized over 5,000 men and women.

  He returned to his home town somewhere in Arkansas, decapitated his parents and fed the remainder of their corpses to crocodiles. But this does not define the man. Swarthy is dutiful and unassuming. He also loves card games, baseball and movies—his favourite film is Koyaanisquatsi by Godfrey Reggio. He admires the work of Jean Renoir, Baudillard—even going so far as to quote references he’d memorised from ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. He is as aroused by the sculptures and artwork of Marcel Duchamp as he is by a blazing fire or a gutted junkie. He once even volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign. We were both like anti-academic street poets—living hand to mouth.

  So he wasn’t just a vicious killer, he was a culture vulture like me, a major film enthusiast who harboured dreams of becoming a celluloid legend himself. He explained that everything he ever did was just a performance, the greatest and most committed performance any man or woman had ever undertaken in the history of cinema. He claimed that he got little actual satisfaction from killing these days, but it was all part of some method-acting preparation ritual. It wasn’t long until he asked me to film his killings, no caveat—he promised. It was art that was on his mind.

  *

  Vince, it’s yer paw here. Haven’t heard from you in a while, I hope you’re keeping well and that wherever you are you’re being safe.

  Is it true what yer auntie Mildred says? Did you really go back to Louisiana? Did you really go to Unger House? These visions she has are rarely ever wrong yano. She sends her love by the way. I know Mildred comes across a little overbearing at times- heck even growing up she was a total ball-buster—but she loves you, we all love you Vince. If you can believe it, she once looked like Lucile Ball and had a real fun quality to her. We were all young once, even Mildred.

  They found your phone in an Acme Oyster House in Iberville. You got some crazy messages on that phone son, if you don’t mind my saying. I only had a quick browse through, just to see if there was anything I could use to track down your last known location. Like I said I was worried about you.

  Can I ask, who is this Brandon? Is he one of your student friends? There were a few messages exchanged between you, I couldn’t help noticin’, you were talkin’ about shootin’ some film and it’s yer intention to be as controversial as you can while you’re at it. If you’re in Louisiana, good luck to you. I’m not going to lecture you or tell you how to live your life son, I know that only pushes you further away when I do that. I know it’s none of my business, you think I’m just an ex-country bumpkin like yer auntie, but I was a young man once too yano? I know it seems exciting to drop everything and have adventures with exciting strangers, but more often than not the strangers stay strange to you.

  Granted I was never… into… the stuff you’re into, but I lived my life. Heck, imagine what it was like growing up out in the country? The city seemed like it had endless opportunities, that’s why I brought you to New York. I thought you deserved the chance to grow up without being bored all the time. Turns out you got bored anyway—but why head BACK to Louisiana? Why head BACK to Unger House? It’s just an old shed, ye can’t start a life there. Yer too far from any supermarkets and the nearest town is two goddamned miles up the road. It smells of wet-rot and the police never gave the go-ahead to start frequenting the property after that sick sonofabitch Otto Spengler had ‘is way with all those kids. I’m not judging you and no one is gonna be mad if you just come home now. You got another semester to get through, then you can go get a job, move out and do whatever the hell you want! But you gotta finish yer last year son, it seems silly to walk away when you’re so close to completing! I mean, you’re already the first Bittacker to even attend university, never mind finish it. You’ve always made me proud when it came to yer education Vince. Please, I’m beggin’ ya…

  “Great art picks up where nature ends.” Marc Chagall

  Much like any other actor, Swarthy was able to change his personality and his identity seemingly at will. He had several alter egos—Bill Enright, Jay McGovern, Dominique Albertacky, these are just the ones I can remember. The most interesting one I can remember was Devonkahli—a popular rock star widely recognised in various schisms of the solar system as a fine contrabass player. Oh, and he was also a fearless sailor of the Saturnian seas and passionate philanderer of Martian men and women. Yes…

  He also claimed that he could not remember his parents’ names, he only ever referred to them as ‘mutter and ‘vater. I’m not saying what we’d decided to do was ‘right’ but in the name of art I was/am willing to stoop to any level to appear original. I want to be as fearless as Herzog, as vulgar as someone like John Waters and rebel against the tyranny of popular taste. In Swarthy I had a wiling subject and collaborator.

  As a specimen Swarthy fascinated me, he continues to fascinate me, and if an old dingbat like my auntie can’t see the artistic merit in what we’re trying to do, then fuck her.

  Given the extent of my fascination with Swarthy as a subject and the complete abandon we’d shown up till this point, I suppose it’s hardly surprising that fascination soon manifested into something physical. It was what came after that I wasn’t prepared for.

  I had never been in love before.

  *

  We wanted to make Unger House the new Grand Guignol. Its naked simplicity appealed to the aesthetic we’d been
enforcing. With this film we could attract a whole new breed of moviegoer, the kind only concerned with what’s visceral and real, people in search for the one true authentic, diasporic subject. Something pure! We could create a new genre—and that’s exactly what we set out to do.

  Swarthy had the idea of calling it Violenza Verismo, which was basically just a variation of nouveau realism or sordid realism. I found the name a bit melodramatic myself, plus there was nothing implied in that description that hadn’t already been covered by people like François Truffaut or the other French filmmakers of old. Eventually we settled on Ultra-realism. He defined it as ‘a particular treatment of film-making as a form in such a manner as to emphasise its correspondence to the horror of every day actuality. Cinema without the artificiality, supernatural or forced exotic element—without any suspension of disbelief or stylisation; a cinema that never uses professional actors or mimesis; Cinema that would avoid all the conventions; where everything that’s implausible is eliminated except the unbelievable jolt of what you see unfolding before your very eyes.’

  He included murder as a prime example of this ‘every day horror’, because, he said—murders happen every day, don’t they? It was hard to disagree with him.

  What’s more real than murder? —he’d say—Nothing shocks the average schmo more than a good snuff film or found footage from a devastating disaster… or a leaked beheading video. It’s what makes these people feel alive. Ironic, eh? It has to draw in the masses. History remembers 3 things—numbers, numbers and numbers.

  To Swarthy, this was the whole point in cinema. If it didn’t elicit a reaction and stay in your mind long after it happened, then what was the point? This was not post-modernism, certainly not deliberately—nor was it going to be a documentary or even just plain old realism. Think Cannibal Holocaust but without the shtick and shot in the style of Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread. Ultra-realism is free from semiotics and statement, free from politics, religion or plot exposition. It is more than just torture porn, it will encapsulate everything it is to be human without ever directly referencing any part of our culture or collective thinking. Actions speak louder than words, as Swarthy would say. The radical favours drastic cinematic reform. It is something that should be challenged, rallied against almost.

  …and when he spoke, I tended to listen. I wasn’t afraid of Swarthy, just in awe of him and how he’d chosen to live his life. I think we could all learn a thing or two from him. But that’s why you’re here right? Because you want to see Ultra-Realism too…

  *

  The first thing we did was arrange our departure from the city. Self-imposed isolation seemed like the best avenue to pursue, we wanted to do this properly. The only thing I’d be leaving behind was a monthly stipend from my father that didn’t amount to much of a living wage anyway. I organised to meet Swarthy on a cold winter’s night. He said it’d be too risky to get a flight, and he didn’t have a passport anyway, so we decided to hitch to Philadelphia then rent a car in Baltimore. I wanted to listen to Justin Timberlake during the journey but Swarthy was resolute in his hatred for popular celebrity icons.

  We stopped only twice, once in Greensboro for gas and once in Jackson for something to eat (if a whole box of Caramac bars qualifies as a meal that is). It took us around 24 hours to get to Pineville and according to the odometer we’d covered over 1,500 miles.

  Swarthy didn’t kill anyone in the time it took us to get to Louisiana. He and I made a pact to wait off before we started filming to maintain the freshness and anticipation of the first kill. You might argue that this is an artificial imposition that we were somehow forcing onto the movie, a calculated device which nullifies the integrity of its authenticity—but you’re wrong. The first kill of the first frame of our first movie had to seem like it was happening very suddenly, or the effect would be lost on a largely desensitised audience who were used to bad acting and efficient looking executions. We couldn’t have Swarthy mutilating hitchhikers and truckers up and down the country then expect him to bring that same energy into his filmed performance—like I mentioned earlier, killing didn’t bring him a tremendous amount of satisfaction these days. It was a means of accommodating his personality and maintaining his enthusiasm for the project.

  He didn’t kill anyone, sure, but he did have an altercation with a trucker in a Greensboro gas station toilet which resulted in Swarthy breaking the man’s jaw. The man had apparently made a pass at Swarthy. By this stage he was completely dedicated to me and had obliged on himself a monogamous outlook with regards to our relationship. He expected the same kind of approach from me as well, which I was more than willing to offer him. The trucker, who apparently resembled Jerry Seinfeld, misjudged Swarthy’s appearance, mistaking his kind eyes and soft features entirely, figuring Swarthy for a gentle but thoroughbred fag. He hated this most of all, when people tried to fathom his other-worldly-ness without any kind of prior knowledge of his history. He hated judgmental people too, because Swarthy judged everyone by the same standards—except me for some reason.

  I have leaned over the side of the ship and ladled the cool anti-freeze ocean into my palm. I knew drinking it could be lethal but did it anyway. It tasted of pure ring-system alcohol.

  Vincent, ha! A slave to fear! His room is supposedly full of Ellen Burstyn posters. I never loved him, no, not ever, never even liked him. True, it’s true. Told him I did, once maybe I said it, but I didn’t. Ha, and led him away from his place of safety, out of the city, out to the old Unger place. Easy as that. Bourgeois scum flowing through his arteries and filling his skull with sickly delusions of grandeur. He also happens to be toothless and his nature anodyne. I can tell he repressed his homosexuality for a long time before revelling in it later on. I should shatter his protective vertebrae and sever the spinal cord in one fluid motion.

  I could destroy this little conservative philistine once and for all—I thought to myself so I did, although I suppose anyone’s bound to seem conservative next to me, a-ha!

  Kill him over and over again, better than just killing him once. That’s what I want.

  He was going to help me become famous. I put in too much work for this to go wrong, my performance is going to make me live long after I die. Too much effort expended so it was, so I… did….

  He thinks we shared a philosophy, he and I, but my philosophy is a little different—or a lot different, depending on how you look at it really. Ultra realism is more than what Vincent Bittacker is capable of making it. He’s too young and untested. His youth and naivety make him malleable, easily manipulated. I am the real director. Sure, I would’ve liked a more established film-maker to’ve been attached to the project, but I believe in fate and it was Bittacker who came to me, camera in hand, ready to go. I couldn’t turn that down, could I?

  The problem with Bittacker is that he thinks he is an auteur and that this, like Rothko’s paintings, will be the conscious end of cinema. But the end of cinema has to be more than this, it has to go out with a BANG. It can’t just be unbridled realism, it’s more than that too. It can’t just be a simple gut-punch, bish bosh, there ya go! —a two-bit snuff film, that’s what it’d be. It’s more. The end of cinema involves the following, please do pay close attention, ok?

  —begins with the primitive onscreen butchering of innocent women by a man/this will be a prolonged scene that lasts several minutes/camera doesn’t move, angle doesn’t change so fuck the auteur behind the apparatus/It ends with the killing of god, the defying act of the actor murdering the director—once and for all/the beauty of a blazing fire as it crackles and the charred flesh stink that overwhelms wet-rot. Bittacker will submit to me, carte blanche.

  The end of cinema is ME.

  On Mylar-5, at night you couldn’t sleep because of the wind shifting dunes, the ‘serenading sands’ they called it. It sounded less like a serenade and more like oysters screaming in a boiling pot.

  My entire body was sand-blasted. I’d covered 13000 to 17000 square kilom
etres, around 5000 miles of planet. I accepted my death here, among the living fossils in a sea of white gypsum.

  Central command was to conduct airstrikes as part of a bigger comprehensive strategy.

  I killed a truck driver, who looked more like Elvis than anyone, and raped his corpse in a gas station bathroom just to get me in the mood. Death resulted from a nasal fracture puncturing the cranial cavity…

  *

  The details of our sex life are not terribly interesting—I have omitted them from my story so far out of consideration for the conservative reader. I know not everyone is of that inclination, dwelling on the most basic of conquests and itemising each liaison appears to serve little purpose beyond seedy curiosity. But I know you’ll demand it of me. If you’ve come this far in the story you’ll want total transparency. You don’t have to be embarrassed by that. Like I said, if there’s one thing I appreciate—it’s honesty.

  The first time Swarthy and I had sex, or partook in a sexual act, was in the alleyway the first night we met. You might be shocked by this. In my opinion life is too short to wait about and be a prude. And anyway, it was such an animalistic thing—consensual to the point of being almost supernatural. We both knew exactly what we wanted. He wanted someone submissive, he wanted that instant gratification and I wanted to submit and gratify.

  Swarthy has a large penis, but nothing too off-putting. The first time I saw it was incredibly arousing for me. It was pocked all along the shaft and displayed evident signs of genital mutilation over the years. I gagged, even at the nub, which seemed to prompt him to push his way through to the hilt. It tasted faintly of blood and salt and his testicles hung loose like oversized avocados. I gripped his large thighs and clawed my way around to the bundled muscles of his buttocks. Both knees were scored with cuts and scars. His stomach was damp, pricked with fine, coiling hairs, but still firm and flat to the touch. Swarthy’s hands descended onto my scalp, rough, calloused palms, fingers ragged at the nail, and he proceeded to thrust at my skull like he was trying to bust down a door with his groin. The subsequent quota of ejaculate exploded inside my mouth and over my tongue with inimitable force. A creamy consistency with an aftertaste of transmission fluid.