The August Special Guest Writer is
Ed Gorman
You can visit Ed HERE
SCREAM QUEEN
by Ed Gorman
Allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Jason Fanning. Not that I probably need an introduction. Not to be immodest but I did, after all, win last year’s Academy Award for Best Screenplay.
Same with my two friends, Bill Leigh the Academy Award-winning actor. And Spence Spencer, who won the Academy Award two years ago for Best Director. People with our credentials don’t need any introductions, right?
Well...
That’s the kind of thing we talked about nights, after Vic’s Video closed down for the night and we sat around Bill’s grubby apartment drinking the cheapest beer we could find and watching schlock DVDs on his old clunker of a TV set. Someday we were going to win the Academy Award for our respective talents and everybody who laughed at us and called us geeks and joked that we were probably gay...well, when we were standing on the stage with Cameron Diaz hanging all over us...
We had special tastes in videos, the sort of action films and horror films that were the staples of a place like Vic’s Video.
If it’s straight-to-video, we probably saw it. And liked it. All three of us were on Internet blogs devoted to what the unknowledgeable (read: unhip) thought of as shitty movies. But we knew better. Didn’t Nicholson, Scorcese, DeNiro and so forth all get their start doing low-ball movies for Roger Corman?
That’s how we were going to win our Academy Awards when we finally got off our assess and piled into Spence’s eight-year-old Dodge Dart and headed for the land of gold and silicone. We knew it would be a little while before the money and the fame started rolling in. First we’d have to pay our dues doing direct-to-video. We were going to pitch ourselves as a team. My script, Bill’s acting, Spence name-above-the-title directing.
In the meantime, we had to put up with working minimum wage jobs. Mine was at Vic’s Video, a grimy little store resting on the river’s edge of a grimy little Midwestern city that hadn’t been the same since the glory days of the steamboats Mark Twain wrote so much about.
Even though we worked different gigs, we all managed to go hang at Bill’s, even though from time to time Bill and I almost got into fistfights. He never let us forget that he was the normal one, what with his good looks and his Yamaha motorcycle and all his ladies. We were three years out of high school. We’d all tried the community college route but since they didn’t offer any courses in the films of Mario Bava or Brian DePalma, none of us made it past the first year.
I guess—from the outside, anyway—we were pretty geeky. I had the complexion problem and Spence was always try to make pharmaceutical peace with his bi-polarity and Bill—well, Bill wasn’t exactly a geek. Not so obviously, anyway. He was good-looking , smooth with girls and he got laid a lot. But he was only good-looking on the outside...inside he was just as much an outcast as the seldom-laid Spence and I...
Do I have to tell you that people we went to high school smirked whenever they saw us together? Do I have to tell you that a lot of people considered us immature and worthless? Do I have to tell you that a big night out was at GameLand where we competed with ten and twelve year olds on the video games? If Spence was off his medication and he lost to some smart-ass little kid, he’d get pretty angry and bitter. A lot of the little kids were scared of us. And you know what? That felt kinda good, having somebody scared of us. It was the only time we felt important in any way.
And then Michele Danforth came into our lives and changed everything. Everything.
Spence was the first one to recognize her. Not that we believed him at first. He kept saying, “That little blonde chick that comes in here every other night or so—that’s Michele Danforth.” But we didn’t believe it, not even when he set three of her video boxes up on the counter and said, “You really don’t recognize her?”
Michele Danforth, in case you don’t happen to be into cult videos, was the most popular scream queen of all a couple of years ago. A scream queen? That’s the sexy young lady who gets dragged off by the monster/ax-murderer in direct-to-video horror movies. She screams a lot and she almost always gets her blouse and bra ripped off so you can see her breasts. Acting ability doesn’t matter so much. But scream ability is vital. And breast ability is absolutely mandatory.
The funny thing is with most scream queens, you never see them completely naked. Not even their bottoms. It’s as if all the seventeen-year-old masturbation champions who rent their videos want their scream queens to be pretty virginal. Showing breasts doesn’t violate the moral code here. But anything else—well, part of the equation is that you want your scream queen to be the kind of girl you’d marry. The marrying kind never expose their beavers except in doctors’ offices.
Couple quick things here about Michele Danforth. She was very pretty. Not cute, not beautiful, not glamorous. Pretty. Soft. A bit on the melancholy side. The kind you fall in love with so uselessly. Uselessly, anyway, if your life’s work is watching direct-to-video movies. And those sweet breasts of hers. Not those big plastic monsters. Perfectly shaped medium sized good-girl breasts. And she could actually act. All the blog boys predicted she’d move into mainstream. And who could disagree?
Then she vanished. Became a big media story for a couple weeks and then some other H-wood story came along and everybody forgot her. Vanished. The assumption became that some stalker had grabbed her and killed her. Even though she always said she couldn’t afford it—scream queens don’t usually make much more than executive secretaries—she had to hire a personal bodyguard because of all the strange and disturbing mail she got.
Vanished.
And now, according to Spence, she resurfaced 1500 miles and three years later. Except that instead of dark-haired, brown-eyed and slender, she was now blonde, blue-eyed and maybe twenty-five pounds heavier. With very earnest brown-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose.
We had to admit that there was a similarity. But it was vague. And it was a similarity that probably belonged to a couple of million young women.
The night the question of her identity got resolved, I was starting the check-out process when the door opened up and she came in. She went right to the Drama Section. I’d never seen her go to any of the other sections. Her choices were always serious flicks with serious actors in them. Bill and Spence had taken off to get some beer at the supermarket, the cost of it being way too much at convenience stores.
I’d agreed to the little game they’d come up with. I thought it was kind of stupid but who knew, maybe it would resolve the whole thing.
It was a windy, chill March night. She wore a white turtleneck beneath a cheap, shapeless thigh-length brown velour jacket. She was just one more Midwestern working girl. Nothing remarkable about her at all. She always paid cash from a worn pea-green imitation-leather wallet. Tonight was no different. She never said much, though tonight, as I took her money, she said, Windy. She went under the name Heather Simpson.
Yeah. Where’s that warm weather they promised?
She nodded and smiled.
I rang up the transaction and then as I handed her the slip to sign, I nudged the video box sitting next to the cash register out in front of me. Night of the Depraved was the title. It showed a huge, blood-dripping butcher knife about to stab into the white-bloused form of a very pretty girl. Who was screaming. The girl was Michele Danforth. The quote along the top of the box read: DEPRAVED to the Max...and scream queen Danforth is good enuf to eat...if you know what I mean! —Dr. Autopsy.com
“Oops,” I said, hoping she’d think this was all accidental. “You don’t want that one.” I picked up the box and looked at it. “I wonder whatever happened to her.”
She just shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never watch those kind of movies.” She took her change and said, “I’m in kind of a hurry.”
I handed her the right movie and just as I did so she turned toward me, showing me an angle of her face I’d never seen before. And I said, “It’s you! Spence was right! You’re Michele Danforth!”
And just then the door opened up, the bell above it announcing customers, and in came Bill and Spence. They’d left the beer in the car. Video Vic would’ve kicked my ass all the way over into Missouri if he ever caught us with brew on the premises.
She turned and started away in a hurry, so fast that she brushed up against Spence. The video she carried fell to the floor.
Bill picked it up. He must have assumed that I had played the little game with her—bringing up Michele Danforth and all—because after he bent to pick up the video and handed it to her with a mock-flourish, he said, “I’m pleased to present my favorite scream queen with this award from your three biggest fans.”
She made a sound that could have been a sob or a curse and then she stalked to the door, throwing it open wide and disappearing into the night. My mind was filled with the image of her face—the fear, the sorrow.
“She’ll never be back,” I said.
“I told you it was her,” Spence said. “She wouldn’t have acted that way if it wasn’t.”
“I wanna fuck her,” Bill said, “and I’m going to.”
Spence said, “Man, she’s nobody now. She’s even sort of fat.”
“Yeah, but how many dudes can say they bopped Michele Danforth?”
“Wait’ll we get to La-La Land,” Spence said, “we’ll be boppin’ movie stars every night. And they won’t be overweight.”
Our collective fantasy had never sounded more juvenile and impossible than it did right then. In that instant I saw what a sad sham my life was. Shoulda gone to college; shoulda done somethin’ with my life. Instead I was just as creepy and just as pathetic as all the other direct-to-video freaks who came in here and who we all laughed at when they left. Video Vic’s. Pathetic.
“Hey, man, hurry up,” Bill said to me. “I’ll get the lights. You bag up the money and the receipts. We’ll drop it off at the bank and then tap the beer.”
But I was still back there a few scenes. The terror and grief of her face. And the humiliating moment when Spence had spoken our collective fantasy out loud. Something had changed in me in those moments. Good or bad, I couldn’t tell yet. “I got this sore throat.”
“Yeah,” Bill said, “it’s such a bad sore throat you can’t even swallow beer, huh?”
Spence laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like a bad one, all right. Can’t even swallow beer.”
I could tell Bill was looking at me. He was the only one of us who could really intimidate people. “So what the hell’s really goin’ on here, Jason?”
I sounded whiny, resentful. “I got a sore throat, Lord and Master. If that’s all right with you.”
“It’s when I said I’m gonna fuck her, wasn’t it?” He laughed. “In your mind she’s still this scream queen, isn’t she? Some fucking virgin. She’s nobody now.”
“ Then why you want to screw her so bad?” I said.
“Because then I can say it, asshole. I can say I bopped Michele Danforth.” He looked at both me and Spence. “I’ll have actually accomplished something. Something real. Not just all these fantasies we have about going to Hollywood.”
“I shouldn’t have done it to her,” I said. “We shouldn’t have said anything to her at all. She had her own reasons for vanishing like that.”
“Yeah, because she was getting fat between movies and they probably didn’t want her anymore.” He laughed.
Hard to tell which rang in his voice the clearest—his cruelty or his craziness. Bill was climbing out on the ledge again. Sometimes he lived there for days. Times like these, we’d get into shoving matches and near-fights.
Spence’s attitude had changed. You could see it in his dark eyes. He’d thought it was pretty funny and pretty cool, Bill screwing a scream queen like this. But now I could tell that he thought it was just as twisted as I did. Bill always got intense when he went after something. But this went beyond intensity. He actually looked sort of crazy when he talked about it.
“Maybe Jason’s right, Bill,” Spence said gently. “Maybe we should just leave her alone.”
The look of contempt was so perfectly conjured up, it was almost like a mask. So was the smirk that came a few seconds later. “The Wuss brothers. All these fantasies about what great talents you are. And all the big times you’re gonna have in Hollywood. And then when you get a chance to have a little fun, you chicken out and run away. We could all screw her, you know. All three of us. A gang-bang.”
“Yeah,” I said, “now there’s a great idea, Bill. We could kill her, too. You ever thought of that?”
“Now who’s crazy? All I was talking about was the three of us—”
I was as sick of myself just then as I was of Bill. I was already making plans to go call the community college again. See when I needed to enroll for the next semester. I knew that maybe I wouldn’t go through with it. But right then with Bill’s mind lurching from a one-man seduction to a three-man rape...Prisons were filled with guys who’d had ideas like that. And then carried them out.
“I got to finish up here,” I said, working on the cash register again.
“Yeah, c’mon, Spence, let’s leave the Reverend here to pray for our souls. We’ll go get drunk.”
Spence and I had never been very good about standing up to Bill. So I knew what courage it took for Spence to say, “I guess not, Bill. I’m not feeling all that well myself.”
He called us all the usual names that denote a male who is less than masculine. Then he went over to a stand-up display of the new direct-to-video Julia Roberts movie and started picking up one at a time and firing them around the store. They made a lot of noise and every time one of them smashed into something—a wall, a line of tapes, even a window—both Spence and I felt a nervous spasm going through us. It was like when you’re little and you hear your folks having a violent argument and you’re afraid your dad’s going to kill your mom and you hide upstairs under the covers. That kind of tension and terror.
I came fast around the counter and shouted at him. Then I started running at him. But he beat me to the door.
“Good night, ladies.” He stood there. “Every time I see you from now on, I’m gonna punch your ugly faces in. You two pussies’ve got an enemy now. And a bad one.” He’d never sounded scarier or crazier.
And with that, he was gone.
*****
It was misting by the time I got back to my room-and-a-bathroom above a vacuum cleaner repair store. I had enjoyed the walk home.
The mist was dirty gold and swirling in the chilly night. And behind it in doorways and alleyways and dirty windows the eyes of old people and scared people and drug people and queer people and insane people stared out at me, eyes bright in dirty faces. This was an old part of town, the buildings small and fading, glimpses of ancient Pepsi-Cola and Camel cigarette and Black-Jack gum signs on their sides every other block or so, TV repair shops that still had tiny screens inside of big consoles in the windows for nostalgia’s sake, and railroad tracks no longer used and stretching into some kind of Twilight Zone miles and miles of gleaming metal down the endless road. There was even a dusty used bookstore that had a few copies of pulps like The Shadow and Doc Savage and Dime Detective in the cracked window and you could stand here sometimes and pretend it was 1938 and the world wasn’t so hostile and lonely even though there was a terrible war on the way. It was a form of being stoned, traveling back in time this way, and a perfect head trip to push away loneliness.
To get to my room you took this rotting wooden staircase up the side of the two-story stucco-peeling shop. I was halfway up them before I looked up and saw her sitting there. The scream queen. If the misting bothered her, she didn’t seem to mind it.
She smoked a cigarette and watched me. She looked pretty sitting there, not as pretty as when she’d been in the movies, but pretty nonetheless.
“How’d you find me?” I wondered.
“Asked the guy at the 7-11 if he knew where you lived.”
“Oh, yeah. Dev. He lives about three down.” I smiled. “In our gated community.”
“Sorry I got so hysterical.”
I shrugged. “We’re video store geeks. We can get pretty hysterical ourselves. You should’ve seen us at our first Trekkie convention in Spock ears and shit. If you had any pictures of us from back then, you could blackmail us.”
She smiled. “That’s assuming you had any money to make it worthwhile.”
I laughed. “I take it you know how much video store geeks make.”
“LA. I must’ve done three hundred signings in video stores.” The smile again. It was a good clean one. It erased a lot of years. “Most of you are harmless.”
“We could always go inside,” I said.
After I handed her a cheap beer, she said, “I didn’t come up here for sex.”
“I didn’t figure you did.” She glanced around. “You could fix this up a little and it wouldn’t be so bad. And those Terminator posters are a little out of date.”
“Yeah. But they’re signed.”
“Arnold signed them?”
I grinned. “Nah, some dude at a comic book convention I went to. He had some real small part in it.”
She had a sweet laugh. “Played a tree or a car or something like that?”
“Yeah, you know, along those lines.”
She’d taken off her brown velour jacket. Her white sweater showed off those scream queen breasts real real good. It was unsettling, sitting so near a girl whose videos had driven me to rapturous self-abuse so many times. And I had the hairy palms to prove it. Even with the added weight, she looked good in jeans.
“I’ll make you a deal, Jason.”
“Yeah? What kind of deal? I mean, since we ruled out sex. Much to my dismay.”
“Oh, c’mon, Jason. You don’t really think I just go around sleeping with people, do you? That’s in the movies. This is straight business, what I’m proposing. I’ll clean your apartment here and fix it up if you’ll convince your two friends not to let anybody know who I am or where I am.”
“Spence won’t be any trouble.”
“Is he the good-looking one?”
“That’s Bill.”
“He looks like trouble.”
“He is.”
She sank back on the couch—one night Spence and I managed to get a couple of girls up here and we all played a game of Guess the Stain with the couch—and covered her face with her hands. I thought she was going to cry. But no sounds came. The only thing you could hear was Churchill, my cat, yowling at cars passing in what was now a downpour.
“You ok?”
She shrugged. Said nothing. Hands still covering her face. When she took them down, she said, “I left LA for my own reasons. And I want to keep them my reasons. And that means making a life for myself somewhere out here. I’m from Chicago. I like the Midwest. But I don’t want some tabloid to find out about me.”
“Well, like I say, Spence won’t be any trouble. But Bill—”
“Where’s he live?”
I was thinking about what Bill had said about screwing a scream queen. Even if she wasn’t a scream queen anymore. It didn’t make much sense to me but it sure seemed to make a lot of sense to me.
“Why don’t I talk to him first?”
She looked relieved. Good. I’d appreciate that. I’m supposed to start this job next week. A good job. Decent bennies and from what everybody says, some real opportunities there. I want to start my life all over.
“I’ll talk to him.”
She was all business. Grabbing her coat. Sliding into it. Standing up. Looking around at the stained and peeling wallpaper and all the posters, including the latest scream queen Linda Sanders. She’s a nice kid. Had a real shitty childhood. I hope she can beat the rap—you know, go on and do some real acting. I saw her at a small playhouse right before I left LA. She was really good.
I liked that. How charitable she was about her successor. A decent woman.
Churchill came out and rubbed his head against her ankle. She held him up and gave him that smile of hers. “We both need to go to Weight Watchers, my friend.”
“The cat stays up late at night and watches TV and orders from Domino’s when I’m asleep.”
She gave him a kiss. “I believe it.”
She set him down, put out her hand and shook, that formal, forced way people do in banking commercials right after the married couple agrees to pay the exorbitant interest rates. “I really appreciate this, Jason. I’ll start figuring out how I’m going to fix up your apartment. I live in this tiny trailer. I’ve got it fixed up very nicely.”
*****
“You didn’t screw her, did you?” Bill said when he came into the store.
He’d been hustling around the place, getting the displays just so, setting up the 50% OFF bin of DVD and blu ray films we hadn’t been able to move, and snapping Mr. Coffee to burbling attention. When I told him she’d come over to my place last night, he stopped, frozen in place and asked if I’d screwed her.
“Yeah. Right on the front lawn. In the rain. Just humping our brains out.”
“You’d better not have, you bastard. I’m the one who gets to nail her.”
At any given time Bill is always about seven minutes away from the violent ward but I couldn’t ever recall seeing him this agitated about something.
“She isn’t going to screw anybody, Bill. Now shut up and listen.”
“Oh, sure, he said, “now you’re her press agent? All the official word comes from you?”
“She’s scared, asshole.”
“Listen, Jason. Spare me the heartbreak, all right? She’s been around. She doesn’t need some video geek hovering over her.” Then, “That’s how you’re gonna get in her panties, isn’t it? Be her best friend. One of those wussy deals. Well, it’s not gonna work because she’ll never screw a pus-face like you. You checked out your blackheads lately, Jason?”
I swung on him. When my fist collided with his cheek, he gaped at me in disbelief, then sort of disintegrated, started screaming at me real high-pitched and all, as he stumbled backwards into a display of a new Disney family movie. Most surprisingly of all, he didn’t come after me. Maybe I’d just stunned him. He’d always seen Spence and I as his inferiors—we were the geeks, according to him; he wasn’t a geek; he was a cool dude who pitied us enough to hang out with us—and so maybe he was just in shock. His slave had revolted and he hadn’t had time to deal with it mentally yet.
“She’s afraid you’ll tell somebody who she is,” I said. “And if you do, you’re going to be damned sorry.”
And then I couldn’t believe what I did. I hit him again. This time he might have responded but just then the front door opened, the bell tinkled, the first customer of the day, a soccer-mom with a curly-haired little girl in tow, walked in with an armload of overdue DVDs. Mrs. Preston. Her stuff was always overdue.
I had just enough time to see that a pimple of blood hung from Bill’s right nostril. I took an unholy amount of satisfaction in that.
*****
Michele didn’t want to see me. She was nice about it. She said she really appreciated me talking to Bill about her and that she really appreciated me stopping by like this but she was just in a place where she wanted to be alone, sort of actually needed to be alone and she was sure I understood. Because that was obviously the kind of guy I was, the understanding kind.
In other words, it was the sort of thing I’d been hearing from girls all my life. How nice I was and how understanding I was and how they were sure, me being so understanding and all, that it was cool if we just kind of left things as they were, you know being just friends and all. Which is what she ended up saying.
As usual, I’d gotten ahead of myself. By this time, I had this crush on her and whenever I get a crush of this particular magnitude I start dreaming the big dream. You know, not only having sex but maybe her really falling in love with me and maybe moving in together and maybe me getting a better job and maybe us—it could happen—getting married and settling down just as the couples always do in the screwball comedies of the Thirties and Forties that Bill and Spence always rag on me for liking so much.
Over a three day period I must have called Spence eight or nine times, always leaving a message on his machine. He never called back. I finally went over there after work one night. He had a two-room apartment on a block where half the houses had been torn down. I was just walking up to the front door when Spence and Bill came out.
They were laughing until they saw me. Beery laughter. They’d both been gunning brew.
Bill was the one I watched. His hands formed fists instantly and he dropped back a foot and went into a kind of boxer’s crouch. “You got lucky the other day, Jason.”
“I don’t think so, Bill. I think you got lucky because Mrs. Preston came in.”
Spence’s face reflected the disbelief all three of us were probably feeling. I couldn’t believe it, either. I’d stood up to Bill the other day but I think both of us thought it was kind of a fluke. But it wasn’t. I was ready to hit him again.
The only difference between the other morning and now was that he was half-drunk. Brew makes most of us feel tougher and handsomer and smarter and wittier than we really are. Prisons are packed with guys who let brew addle their perception of themselves. Or dope. Doesn’t matter.
He came at me throwing a roundhouse so vast in scope it couldn’t possibly have landed on me. All I had to do was take a single step backward.
“I don’t want to fight you, Bill. Spence, pull him back.”
Whatever Bill said was lost in his second lunge. This punch connected. He got me on my right cheek and pain exploded across my entire face. He followed up with a punch to my stomach that doubled me over.
“Kick his ass, Bill!” Spence said.
Even though I was in pain, even though I should have been focused on the fight I was in, his words, the betrayal of them, him choosing Bill over me when it should have been Spence and I against Bill—that hurt a lot more than the punches. He’d been my friend since third grade. He was my friend no longer.
Bill hit me with enough force to knock me flat on the sidewalk, butt first. If this had been the other night, I would’ve jumped to my feet and started swinging. But I was still hearing Spence say to kick my ass and I guess I didn’t have enough pride or anger left to stand up and hit back. I just felt drained.
“You all right?” Spence said to me. I could hear his confusion. Better to stick with Bill. But still, we’d been friends a long time and to see me knocked down—
“He’s just a pussy,” Bill said. “C’mon.”
I didn’t stand up till they were gone. Then I walked home slowly. I took the long way so that I’d go past Michele’s place. The light was on. I turned off the sidewalk and started moving toward the house but then I stopped. I wasn’t up for another disappointment tonight.
*****
Video Vic’s real name wasn’t Vic, it was Reed, Reed Patrick; and when I called him next morning and gave him my week’s notice, he said, “You don’t sound so good, kiddo. You all right?”
“I just need to be movin’ on, Reed. I enjoyed working for you, though.”
“You ever want to use me for a reference, that’ll be fine with me.”
“Thanks, Reed.”
That night, I surprised my folks by showing up for dinner. Mom had made meat loaf and mashed potatoes and peas. I figured that was about the best meal I’d ever had. They were surprised that I’d quit my job but my Dad said, “Now you can start looking for something with a future, Jason. You could start taking classes again out to the college. Get trained for some kind of computer job or something.”
“Computers, Honey,” my Mom said, patting my hand. “Jobs like that pay good money.”
“And they’ve got a future.”
“That’s right,” Mom said, “computers aren’t going anywhere. They’re here for good.”
“You should call out there tomorrow,” Dad said. “And my buddy Mike can get you on at the supermarket he runs.”
I pretended to be interested in what he was saying. I’d never seemed interested before. He looked happy about me, the way he had when I was a little kid. I hadn’t seen him look this happy in a long time. He also looked old. I guess I hadn’t really, you know, just looked at him for a real long time. The same with mom. The lines in their faces. The bags under their eyes. The way both my folks seemed kind of worn out through the whole meal. When I left I hugged them harder than I had in years. And all the way back to my little room, I felt this sadness I just couldn’t shake.
Over the next week, the sadness stayed with me. I’d realized by then that it wasn’t just about Mom and Dad, it was about me and everything that had happened in the past couple of weeks. I tried Michelle a couple more times. The second times she was real cold. You know how girls are when they aren’t happy to hear from you and just want to get you off the phone. After I hung up, I sat there in the silence with Churchill weighing a ton on my lap. I felt my cheeks burn. It was pretty embarrassing, the way she’d maneuvered me off the phone so fast.
The next night, no longer gainfully employed, I walked over town to the library. I was reading the whole run of George R.R. Martin fantasy novels. He was one of the best writers around.
Even though they’d bought six copies of his new hardcover, they were all checked out. I picked up a collection of his short stories. He was good at those, too.
On the walk back home, I saw them coming out of a Hardees. He had his arm around her. They were laughing. I was ready to fight now. Just walk right up to him and punch him in the fucking chops. He’d be the one sitting down on his butt this time, not me. And I’d remind her that she still owed me an apartment cleaning.
Good ole Michele and good ole Bill. That’s the thing I’ve never understood about girls. Hard to imagine a guy more full of himself than Bill, but she obviously thought he was just fine and dandy or else she wouldn’t let him have his arm around her. He was going to sleep with her and then he was going to tell everybody. I wondered how she’d react if I told her.
But I couldn’t. Much as I wanted to go over there and tell her what was really going on, I couldn’t make my legs move in that direction. Because I could live with my self-image as a geek, a loser, a boy-man but I could never live with myself as a snitch.
*****
A few days later I signed up for computer classes at the community college. I gave up my room on the rent-due day and moved back home. The folks were glad to have me. I was being responsible. Dad said his buddy Mike could get me on at his supermarket and so he had.
What I did for the next few nights, after bagging groceries till nine o’clock, was glut myself on the past. I still had boxes of old Fangorias and Filmfaxes in my old closet and I hauled them out and spread them on the bed and just disappeared into my yesterdays, back to the time when there was no doubt that I was going to Hollywood, no doubt that I’d be working for Roger Corman, no doubt that someday I’d be doing my own films and no doubt they’d be damned good ones.
But my time machine sprung a leak. I’d get all caught up in being sixteen again and grooving on Star Wars and Planet of The Apes and Alien, but then the poison gas of now would seep in through those leaks. And I’d start thinking about Michele and Bill and Spence and how my future seemed settled now—computer courses and a lifelong job in some dusty little computer store in a strip mall somewhere—and then I’d be back to the here and now. And not liking it at all.
On a rainy Friday night, my mom knocked on my door and said, “Spence is downstairs for you, Honey.”
I hadn’t told my folks about the falling out Spence and I had had.
I just said OK and went down to see him. He was talking to my dad. Dad was telling him how happy they were about my taking those computer courses.
I grabbed my jacket and we went out. I hadn’t so much as nodded at Spence. In fact, we didn’t say a word until we were in his old Dodge Dart and heading down the street.
“How you been?” he said.
“Pretty good.”
“Your Dad seems real happy about you being in computer classes.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound so happy, though.”
“What’s this all about, Spence?”
“What’s what all about?”
“What’s what all about? What do you think it’s all about? You took Bill’s side on this whole thing. Now you come over to my house.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. We just drove. Headlights and neon lights and street lights glowed like water-colors in the rain. Girls looked sweet and young and strong running into cafes and theaters to get out of the downpour. His radio faded in and out. Every couple minutes he’d slam a fist on the dash and the radio would be all right again for a few minutes. The car smelled of gasoline and mildewed car seats.
“He’s getting really weird.”
“Who is?”
“Who is? Who do you think is, Jason? Bill is.”
“Weird about what?”
“About her. Michele.”
“Weird how?”
“He’s really hung up with Michele. He won’t tell me what it is but somethin’s really buggin’ him.”
So, I’m supposed to feel bad about it?”
“I’m just telling you is all.”
“Why? Why would I give a shit?”
He glanced over at me. “I shoulda stuck up for you with Bill. The night he knocked you down, I mean. I’m sorry.”
“You really pissed me off.”
“Yeah, I know. And I’m sorry. I really am. I—I just can’t handle being around Bill anymore. This whole thing with Michele. She’s all he talks about and she won’t let him do nothin’. He says it’s like bein’ in sixth grade again.”
I wasn’t up for just driving around. I’d done enough cruising in my high school years. I said, “You seen that new Wes Craven flick?”
“Huh-uh.”
“There’ll be a late show. We could still make it.”
“So you’re not still pissed?”
“Sure I’m still pissed. But I want to see the Wes Craven and you’re the only person I know who’s got a car.”
“I don’t blame you for still bein’ pissed.”
“I don’t blame me for still bein’ pissed, either.”
*****
I didn’t hear from Spence until nearly a week later. After the Craven flick, which was damned good, he started talking about other things we could do but I just told him I was busy. Sometimes, friendships, even long ones, just end. One thing happens and you realize that the friendship was never as strong as you’d thought. Or maybe you just realize that you’re one cold, unforgiving prick. Whichever it was, I wasn’t up for seeing Spence or Bill or Michele for a long time. Maybe never.
I went my glum way to computer classes and my even glummer way to the supermarket.
He was in the supermarket parking lot waiting for me when I got off work. I walked over to his car. It was a warm, smoky October night. Big ass harvest moon. I wanted to be a kid again in my Halloween costume. I could barely—just quite—remember what it had been like to go trick or treating before the days when perverts and sadists hid stick-pins and razor blades in candy apples.
I walked over to the driver’s side of his car. I wanted to walk home. October nights like this were my favorites.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You doin’ anything special?”
“Yeah. Nicole Kidman called. She wants to go get a pizza with me. She said she’ll pay for it. And the motel room afterward.”
“Remember to bring a condom.”
“She’s got me covered there, too. She bought a big box them.”
We just looked at each other across an unbreachable chasm of time and pain. He’d been a part of my boyhood. But I wasn’t a boy anymore. Not a man yet, to be sure. But not a boy, either.
“He’s pretty fucked up.”
“We talking about Bill?”
“Yeah. Had the day off. Drinking beers with whiskey chasers.”
“Good. We need to drink more. Make sure we’re winos before we hit twenty-five.”
“I think maybe we should go over to Michele’s place.”
“Why?”
He stared at the passing cars. When he looked back at me, he said, “You better get in, Jason. This shit could be real bad.”
*****
It was one of the little Silverstream trailers that are about as big as an SUV. Except, given its condition, this one should have been called Ruststream. It sat between two large oak trees on a corner where a huge two-story house had been torn down the summer before. The rest of the neighborhood blazed with laughter and throbbing car engines and rap music and folks of both the black and white persuasion filling porches and sidewalks, most of them trying to look and sound like bad asses. Her trailer was a good quarter block from its nearest neighbor.
A motorcycle leaned against one of the trees. No lights, no sound coming from the trailer.
“Maybe he’s getting the job done,” Spence said.
“Maybe,” I said.
The door was open half an inch. I opened it wide and stuck my head in.
“What the fuck you think you’re doin’?”
I couldn’t see him at first, couldn’t see anything except vague furniture shapes. Smells of whiskey and cigarettes. A cat in the gloom, crying now.
“Get out of here, Jason.”
“Where’s Michele?”
“Where you think she is, asshole?”
“I wanna talk to her.”
“I told you once, Jason. Get out of here. I knocked you on your ass once. And I can do it again.”
“No, you can’t.”
Two steps led up to the trailer floor. I was about to set my right foot on the second step when he came at me. My mind had time to register that he was wearing jeans, no shirt, no socks, and he had a whiskey bottle in his hand.
Bill tackled me and drove me all the way to the ground. He meant to hit me with the whiskey bottle but I had the advantage of being sober. He smelled of puke and booze and sex and greasy food, maybe a hamburger.
As the bottle arced downward, I rolled to the right, moving slowly enough to slam my fist hard into the side of Bill’s head. The punch dazed him but not enough to keep him from trying to get me again with the bottle. This time I didn’t have time to move away from it. All I could do was grab the wrist and slow the bottle as it descended. It connected but not hard enough to knock me out. Or to stop me from landing another punch on the same side of his head as before. This one knocked him loose from me. His straddling legs loosened enough to let me buck him off. He went over backwards. He was drunk enough to be confused by all this happening so quickly. Now it was my turn to straddle him. I just wanted to make his face bloody. I hit him until my hands started to hurt and then I stood up, grabbed him by an arm and started dragging him to his motorcycle.
“Go get his stuff from inside, okay?” I said to Spence.
He nodded and ran over to the trailer. He didn’t need to go inside. Michele was in the doorway, dropping Bill’s shoes, socks, shirt and wallet one by one into Spence’s hands. She wore a white terrycloth robe. She had a cigarette going. “You stay with me for a while, Jason?” she said.
“Sure.”
Bill was on his motorcycle, roaring it to raucous life. Spence handed him his belongings. Spence said, “Looks like her nose is busted, man. You do that?”
“Shut the fuck up, Spence,” Bill said. Then he made his bike louder than I’d ever heard it before. Bill glared at Spence for a long time and said, “I don’t know what I ever saw in a pussy like you, Spence. Don’t call me anymore.”
“You beat her up, man. You don’t have to worry about me callin’ you.”
He roared away, grass and dirt churning from beneath his back wheel.
“Wait’ll you see her, Jason. He beat the shit out of her,” Spence said, then walked back to the street and drove away in his old car, leaving me alone with Michele.
The light was on in the front part of the trailer now. She was gone from the door. When I sat down at the small table across from her, she pushed a cold can of Bud my way. I thanked her and gunned an ounce or two. My head hurt from where he got me with the bottle. She’d fixed up her trailer just the right way—so that you forgot you were in a trailer.
Her delicate nose didn’t look broken, as Spence had said, but it was badly bruised. She had a black eye, a bloody, swollen mouth and her left cheek was bruised.
“Maybe you should go to an ER,” I said.
“I’ll survive.” She made an effort to laugh. “I let him sleep with me but that wasn’t enough for him.”
“What the hell else did he want?”
“Well, he slept with me but I wouldn’t take my bra or my blouse off. I said I had my reasons and I wanted him to respect them. In some weird way, I’d started to like him. Maybe I was just lonely. I never could pick men for shit. You should’ve seen some of the losers I went out with in LA. My girlfriends always used to laugh and say that if there was a serial killer on the dance floor, he’d be the up I end up with for the night.”
“So you made love and—”
“We made love. I mean, it wasn’t the first time. The last couple weeks, we’d been sleeping together. And he tried real hard to deal with me not taking my top off. I wouldn’t let him touch my breasts.” She smiled with bloody teeth. “My scream queen breasts.”
She shook her head. Or tried. She was halfway through turning her head to the left when she stopped. She had a bad headache, too, apparently. “It was building up. His thing about my breasts. And tonight, afterwards, he just went crazy. Said if I really loved him I’d be completely nude for him. I liked him. But not enough to trust him. You know, with my secret.”
She lit a cigarette with read plastic lighter. I’d never seen her smoke before this night. She looked around a bit and then back at me and said, “It’s why I left LA.”
“What is?”
“I don’t have breasts any more. I had this really bad kind of breast cancer. I had to have both of them removed.” She exhaled through bloody lips. “So how would that be? A scream queen known for her breasts doesn’t have any more? I went to Eugene, Oregon to get the diagnosis. I kind’ve suspected I had breast cancer. I didn’t want anybody in LA to know. I paid cash, gave a fake name, they didn’t have any idea who I was. I had the double mastectomy there, too. I had some money saved and I used it to disappear. I just couldn’t have handled all the publicity. All the bullshit about how my breasts inspiring all these young boys—and then not having them anymore. You know how the tabloids are. And then do a couple weepy interviews on TV. So I’ve just been traveling around. And I’ll be doing more traveling tomorrow. Because I know Bill will call some reporter or tabloid or somebody like that. I just don’t want to face it.”
Then she said, “C’mere, Okay?”
I stood up and walked over to her. My knees trembled. I didn’t know why.
She took my right hand and guided it to her chest and then slid it inside the terrycloth so that I could feel the scarring from the mastectomy. I wanted to jerk my hand away. I’d never felt anything like that before. But then a tenderness came over me and I let my hand linger and then she eased my hand out of her robe and kissed my fingers, as if she were grateful.
Then she started sobbing and it was pretty bad. I said everything I knew to say but it didn’t do any good, so I steered her into bed and just lay with her there in the darkness and we held hands and she talked about it all, everything from the day she first felt the tiny lump on the underside of her left breast to being so afraid she’d die from the anesthetic—she’d had an uncle who died while being put under, died right there on the table—and how she went through depression so bad she lost twenty-five pounds in three months and how that then turned around and become the opposite kind of eating disorder, this relentless urge to gorge, which she was battling now.
In the morning, I helped her load her car. She didn’t have all that much. I told her I’d pay the rent off with the money she gave me and return the key. She kissed me then for the first and only time—the kind of kiss your sister would give you—and then she was gone.
The story hit one of the supermarket papers three weeks later. She’d been right. The whole thing dealt with the irony of a girl who’d been made into a scream queen at least partly because of her beautiful breasts—and then losing them to cancer. A minister somewhere said that it was God’s wrath, exploiting your body for filthy Hollywood money, and then getting your just desserts. You know how God’s people like to talk.
As for me....tomorrow I’m flying to LA. My Dad has a friend out there who owns a video company that produces training films for various companies. Not exactly Paramount, or even Roger Corman. But a start. My folks even gave me five thousand dollars as seed money. They’re pretty sure that in a year I’ll be back here. And maybe they’re right....
It’s funny about Michele. I watch her old videos all the time. That’s how I prefer to remember her. It’s not because of her breasts. It’s because of that lovely girly radiance that was in her eyes and her smile shined back in those days.
I still watch them and I’m sure Spence does, too. He got a job in Chicago and moved there a couple months back. Bill joined the Army. I wonder if he still watches them.
But most of all I wonder if Michele ever watches them. Probably not.
Not now, anyway. But maybe someday.
Ed Gorman has been a writer for nearly three decades. Gorman's work has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines such The New York Times, Redbook, Ellery Queen and The Writer. He's the author of more than thirty novels and six collections of short stories. His work has been translated into eleven languages and two of his books have been made into movies.
When the British magazine Million called him "One of the world's great storytellers" they were joining other publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The London Sunday Times and Publisher's Weekly in acknowledging Gorman's skills.
Booklist called his novel Ticket To Ride "An absorbing mystery that offers an insightful portrait of small-town dynamics and has plenty of deadpan humor."
Pulp Serenade says, "The McCain books are some of the best-written portrayals of the complexities of small-town America with a noir twist."
Gorman's awards include The International Horror Writers award as well as the Shamus and nominations for the Edgar, The Stoker and The Silver Dagger (UK).
