Snuff

by Chuck Palahniuk

  I tell the kid, “Don’t expect she’s going to look that good…”

  Kid 72’s eyes – light brown, same as mine used to look.

  The girl up there, sucking the clit of Boodles Absolut, that girl used to say how she was going to rule the industry someday. That sweet young Cassie Wright, the way she told it, she could lick anybody in the world.

  But, looking around this room here, the motley collection of dicks they cattle-called today, I’d say how her career’s turned out the other way around.

  Kid 72 rolls his eyes all over Cassie and Boodles.

  “That’s a joke I made,” I tell him and give him the elbow. Today, anybody in the world can lick her…

  Some dude across the room, holding some kind of teddy bear under his arm, keeps eyeing me. Dude number 137, with a gold ring through one nipple. We’re talking stalker material here.

  Really, I tell the kid, he’d better hope he gets called soon. The production company’s got a reason they’re calling this The Whore to End All Whores. Won’t nobody be setting a new record after today. What we do here will stand for the rest of human history. This kid, me, dude 137 staring at us – after today, we’ll have a place in the record books.

  Kid 72, his eyes twitch and shift around on that video screen. His hands hold those roses close in and high against his chest, as if the flowers aren’t already garbage.

  I tell him, “Don’t expect Cassie Wright is going to live through this…”

  No, it’s got nothing to do with only three Nazi uniforms. The wrangler calls back number 45, then number 289, then number 6, some crazy order of guys, but really it’s to hide the fact that those cameras will run even after Cassie Wright slips into a coma. There’s dudes here who will do the deed thinking she’s just asleep. Ain’t no human body that can take a pounding from six hundred hard-ons.

  We’re talking one pussy fart getting pounded in too deep. Or eating snatch, one puff of air up inside her works and a bubble gets into her bloodstream. An embolism. That bubble zigzags all the way to her heart or brain, and it’s a fast fade-to-black for Cassie Wright.

  Saying this, I’m watching another video monitor, Cassie blowing some dude in World Whore One. Dude’s lips plumped thick and red as a fag’s asshole. Great triceps definition. No fuzz on his nut sack. I take off my sunglasses, and that dude up there is me.

  Kid 72 keeps watching Golden Blonde. Dude 137 keeps watching us.

  The reason they’re shooting dudes out of order is so the editor can cut the pop shots together, one to six hundred. After that, Cassie will moan and flop around as much with number 599 as she does with number 1. In between, she’ll only lie there like she’s sleeping, but really in a coma. Or worse. Nobody here, none of us shmucks, will know any different than the official press release: “Adult Superstar Dies After Setting World Sex Record.”

  Sure, she’s been in training. Kegel weights. Aerobics. Pilates. Yoga, even. Hard, as if she was set to swim the English Channel, but, hell, in the room back there, playing mattress underneath six hundred dudes – she’s being the English Channel.

  “Another joke,” I tell the kid and give him the elbow.

  But the truth is, won’t nobody call any ambulance until the set’s struck and this project is in the can.

  No, any inquest happens, and every dick here will swear she was alive when he was humping away. We’re talking major denial. After that, the American public will piss and whine. To get media time, religious do-gooders will climb on the bandwagon. Rabid feminist types. The government will step in, and no babe will ever set any new record of 601.

  Cassie will be dead, but us six hundred dicks here, we’ll go into the history books. Half us dudes will springboard off this – first-timers launching new careers, old-timers making comebacks. Every one of us wearing a T–shirt printed ‘I’m the Dick That Killed Cassie Wright’.

  Cassie Wright will be dead, but her backlist of videos, everything from The Ass Menagerie to her all-facial compilation Catch Her in the Eye to the classic A Separate Piece, will turn into solid gold. Bang the Bum Slowly. Boxed collector-edition sets. The eternal Marilyn Monroe sacrificial goddess of adult entertainment.

  This kid 72 keeps glued to the video monitor.

  The wrangler comes by, the Sheila babe, and she scribbles ‘600’ down my arms. Says, “Don’t shave off a nipple,” and nods at the razor in my hand, the triple blades buffing the shadow from under my pecs.

  I ask her, “Who’s the vulture?” The dude with the teddy bear. Number 137, eyeballing me.

  This babe Sheila flips some pages on her clipboard, dragging a fingernail down the list of names and numbers. “Wow,” she goes. “You’d never guess.” Sheila points her fingernail at my abs and goes, “You missed a spot.”

  We’re talking my treasure trail; it’s not symmetrical.

  Still shaving, I ask, “Do I know him?”

  Sheila goes, “You ever watch prime-time television?”

  Holding the razor, I tap the ‘600’ on my arm, saying how I outrank her, saying she needs to quit being a tease and tell me the dude’s name. No need to remind her what happens to this project if I bail. If Cassie Wright fucks six hundred dudes, she’s a world-beater, and this company has the season’s top product. But if Cassie fucks 599 guys, she’s just a big slut. And the company ain’t got jack shit to market.

  And this tease, she winks at me. This wrangler babe, she says, “You’re a bright guy. You’ll figure it out…” And the tease walks off.

  Dude 137, he’s still looking at me. Holding that bear. Some big-time player with a name and a face, slumming from the TV.

  Next to me, kid 72 says, “Hey.” He’s looking at me instead of the video, and he goes, “Weren’t you…” He cocks his head slantwise, squints up his light-brown eyes, and goes, “Didn’t you use to be Branch Bacardi?”

  Jerking my head toward dude 137, I ask, “What’s his name?”

  And kid 72 looks and says, “Wow. That detective from the series on Thursday nights.”

  The razor’s sliding across my abs, looking for pull, for the resistance of little hairs nobody can see yet. I ask the kid, what series?

  What’s the dude’s name?

  Why’s he staring at me?

  But the kid’s back to eyeing the video. Kid 72 nods at the screen, going, “You think I look like her? Cassie Wright. You think we look alike?”

  His brown eyes still on the scene of Cassie and Boodles, not even looking at me, the kid says, “No reason.” He goes, “I’m just asking.”

  Across the room, dude 137 touches one fingertip to a spot on his chest. Touching his gold nipple-ring. He points his index finger at me, then looks down and taps his chest again.

  And, looking down, we’re talking a long black line of blood just flooding out from my nipple.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  6

  Mr. 72

  A guy eating potato chips at the buffet they laid out, a second guy steps up next to him. The second guy, across his back is the number ‘206’, not only felt-penned, but tattooed in thorny, fat blue letters, the two on one shoulder blade, the zero on his spine, the six on his other shoulder. The guy cramming his mouth with potato chips, chewing and swallowing as his hand brings up more from the buffet table, a steady crunch-crunch loud as somebody walking on gravel, his arm lifting chips has ‘206’ scribbled down the bicep.

  The tattooed guy stoops a smidge, bending his knees, then stands fast and backhands the first guy across the face. Putting his whole body into the hit, the tattooed guy’s hand, the clap sound, leads a long spray of spit and potato crumbs toward the ceiling. The smack echoes, dull with the impact of hard knuckle bones knocking skull bones with almost nothing in between.

  Those knuckles padded by only a glove of hairy skin. The skull only cushioned with a cheekful of chewed potato crud and salt.

  With the potato-chip guy coughing on the floor, the tattooed guy twists his shoulders sideways. His slapping hand still raised high in the air,
he points his gun finger down at the numbers spread across his back. He says, “Two-oh-six…my number.” He bends to meet the eyes of the man on the floor and says, “Get other number.” Still twisting one arm to point at his own back, he says, “Is mine.”

  A red wash of blood pulsing out his nose, the potato-chip guy keeps chewing. Swallows. He wipes his lips with one hand, smearing red across one cheek. Wipes again, making a blood mustache straight across both cheeks.

  The girl carrying the clipboard and wearing a stopwatch on a cord around her neck, she walks over to the two guys and says, “Gentlemen.” Taking a handful of paper napkins off the buffet table and giving them to the guy with the bloody nose, the girl says, “Let me settle this.”

  The nosebleed guy sniffs back the blood and reaches for another handful of potato chips. His lips, swelled up with salt, split open and leaking blood.

  As the girl’s flipping through the papers on her clipboard, the guy numbered 137 steps up beside me. The guy from television. With the autograph dog. He says, “Someone certainly wasn’t breast-fed…”

  The stopwatch girl is crossing out the number on the potato-chip guy’s arm. She’s writing a new number.

  The tattooed guy lowers his arm, watching them.

  Rubbing the knuckles of that hand in the palm of his other hand.

  “Him with the tattoo,” I say, “the guy’s in a Sureno street gang from Seattle.” I tell number 137, “He killed somebody, served twelve years in prison. Been out since last year.”

  Guy 137, hugging his autograph dog to his chest, he says, “You know him?”

  I tell the guy, “Look at his hand.”

  On the web of skin between the thumb and gun finger of one hand, the tattooed guy has two short parallel lines with three dots along one of the lines: the Aztec symbol for the number thirteen – Aztec numerology and Nahuatl language being popular with the Sureno gangs of southern California. On his lower back, just above the waistband of his boxer shorts, is a scrolled fancy tattoo of the number ‘187’: the California Penal Code section for murder. Next to his bellybutton is a tattoo of a tombstone with two dates, twelve years apart, recording the sentence he served.

  Guy 137 says, “Are you in a gang?”

  My adopted dad taught me.

  Other guys around the room, I point out their tattoos. The Asian guy with black stripes tattooed around his bicep, he’s a member of the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, and each black stripe stands for a crime job he’s done. Another Asian guy, the ‘NCA’ tattooed across his back brands him as a member of the Ninja Clan Assassin crime family. Standing, walking around, waiting their turn are guys with a little crucifix on the skin between their thumb and gun finger. Three little lines sticking up mark the tattoo as a Pachuco Cross, the sign of Hispanic gangs. Other guys have three dots tattooed to form a triangle on that same spot. If they’re Mexican, those three dots mean Mi vida loca. “My crazy life.” If the guy’s Asian, the dots mean To o can gica. “I care for nothing.”

  Guy 137 says, “Your dad was in a street gang?”

  My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they’d load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they’d study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement.

  My adopted dad would use a single strand of mink hair to paint the number ‘312’ across the bare back of a tiny street-gang figure. To make a member of the Vice Lords of Chicago. It’s how gangsters declare their turf – they get a tattoo of the telephone area code, usually across their upper back. Sometimes their chest or belly. The guy who hit the potato-chip guy, he’s laid claim to the Seattle area code – what should be Norteno turf. I say it’s no wonder he’s so defensive.

  Members of the Blood gang always cross out the ‘C’ in any of their tattoos. To deny any allegiance to the rival Crip gang. If someone has a tattoo with a ‘B’ crossed out, that shows he’s a Crip.

  “Your dad taught you that?” says guy 137.

  My adopted dad. Working on his model-train set. He never cheated on my adopted mom, but he could spend days photographing hookers and painting tiny figures to match them. He’d never take illegal drugs, but his tiny junkies or meth freaks, each one was a little masterpiece. Using a needle-thin paintbrush, my adopted dad would tag the walls of dinky factories and miniature abandoned tenements and flophouse hotels.

  I tell guy 137 I’m sorry his TV series got canceled last season.

  Number 137 shrugs. He says, “So you’re adopted?”

  And I tell him, “Only since I was born.”

  Waiting his turn with Cassie Wright, a flabby blond guy with a long beard stands with both arms folded across his chest. His yellow beard so stiff and coarse the hair juts straight out from his chin, not falling down with gravity. Maybe so dirty. His pale forearms are blotched with blurry black As and B’s, swastikas, and shamrocks. Prison tattoos pricked with a broken guitar string, inked with the soot from burned plastic forks and spoons mixed with shampoo. The Aryan Brotherhood. Tattooed spiderwebs cover both his big, freckled elbows.

  Near the Aryan guy, Mr. Bacardi hooks a finger in the gold chain around his own neck. At the lowest point of the chain, dangling over his throat, hangs a gold heart. A locket Cassie Wright’s worn in a zillion scenes.

  Bacardi pinches the gold locket between his thumb and gun finger and slides it back and forth along the neck chain.

  “My real mom,” I say, “she’s a big star in movies, but I can’t say who.” I say how I’ve written tons of letters to her, care of her production company and distributors, even the agent that handles her, but she’s never wrote back.

  Guy 137 looks down at the flowers I’m holding.

  “It’s not that I want money or for her to love me,” I say. “All I’m after is just to meet her. How I figure it, right now I’m the age that she must’ve been when she had to give me away.”

  If her agent or somebody is intercepting my letters and trashing them, I don’t know. But I have a secret plan to someday meet her. My real mom.

  Number 137 says, “You know your real dad?”

  And I shrug.

  Across the room, a black guy, the back of his shaved head is tattooed with a flag rippling, the flag bearing the number ‘415’, symbol for the Kumi African Nation, a spin-off of the Black Guerrilla Family. At least according to my adopted dad, who’d recite these details as he held a magnifying glass in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, doctoring the little train figures that came from Germany as doctors, street sweepers, policemen, and hausfraus. Poking them with specks of new paint, he remade them as members of La eMe, the Mexican mafia; the Aryan Warriors; the 18th Street Gangstas. If I stood next to him and put my hand on his basement workbench, if I held still, my adopted dad would paint the ‘WP’ and ‘666’ for White Power at the base of my thumb. Then he’d tell me, “Hurry and go wash your hands.”

  He’d say, “Don’t let your mother see.”

  My adopted mom.

  Right now, up those stairs, the lady behind the door, she’s neutral territory. A shrine where you pilgrimage a thousand miles on your knees to pay tribute. Same as Jerusalem or some church. Special to white supremacists and Bloods, Crips, and Ninjas, a lady who transcends turf wars for power. Who transcends race and nationality and family. Every man here might hate every other man, outside of here we might all kill each other, but we all love her.

  Our Holy Ground. Cassie Wright, our angel of peace.

  Next to me, guy 137 dumps a pill out of the bottle of blue pills he bought. Holding his autograph d
og tucked under one arm, he dumps the pill into the palm of one hand and tosses it into his mouth.

  Somebody’s stepped in the nose blood puddled on the concrete floor. Different sizes of bare feet track bloody, sticky trails in every direction.

  I ask what he’s doing – right now, I mean – to restart his TV career.

  And number 137 says, “This.” And he shakes the little bottle of pills.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  7

  Mr. 137

  Some humongous Mexican bitch-slaps this fat slob at the craft-services table, and then actor number 72, holding the bouquet of dead flowers, walks over and begins to explain the attack to me. The fight has something to do with model-train sets and the city of Seattle. The Mexican mafia and the Vatican. Rattling on, number 72 tells me, “Sorry.”

  I tell him not to mention it.

  “I mean, about your TV series getting canned,” he says.

  I tell him to never mind.

  “I mean, about all those gossip magazines,” he says, “trashing you.”

  I tell him to forget it.

  And this actor 72 says, “What are you doing, I mean, here?”

  Branch Bacardi, number 600, holds a wad of toilet paper to his bleeding nipple, and every time I look in his direction he’s looking back at me. Any minute, he’s going to walk over here, and I don’t have a good opening line ready. The star of Butt Pirates of the Caribbean and Smokey and the Ass Bandit, and he’s cruising me.

  Wouldn’t you know it?

  A person can’t simply say, “Hello, Mr. Branch, I absolutely adore your dildo…”

  Everyone I know, man or woman, keeps your dick in their bedside table. The battery-powered vibrator, or the manually operated regular dildo. Yours is the Goldilocks of dildos: not a long pencil dick, like the one copied from Ron Jeremy’s erection. And certainly not one of those so massively big around that you feel plungered like a stopped-up toilet. No, with the length and girth of it, the Branch Bacardi is the one-size-fits-all of celebrity-replica sex toys.