The First One You Expect

by Adam Cesare

  “I’d like to see them sometime.”

  I offer to bring her a copy of my best one and she smiles.

  FOUR

  There are numbers on their spines.

  If they weren’t numbered, didn’t line up so nicely on a shelf, I wouldn’t have a hundred fifty dollars worth of Blu-ray discs in my online shopping cart.

  It would be a real shame to have them all on the shelf except a few numbers. That would be nuts.

  It’s possible, that in a world where they didn’t have numbers on their spines, I may not even be this drunk right now. It’s tough to tell, it may be a chicken/egg situation. Do I drink because it better enables me to buy shit I can’t afford or is the buying a result of my alcohol dependency?

  Whatever.

  I hit the one-click checkout button after setting the default card to one that won’t be declined, then close out the browser tab before I can read the final total. They have to charge tax now when shipping to New York. The fuckers.

  That box will show up in two days and I won’t remember having ordered it, but I’ll be glad that I did. For a day, at least. I’m not worried about it arriving and having my parents see it. I rent from them, live in the basement, but they both work more hours than me so odds are that I’ll have the box inside and open before my mother has a chance to hassle me about it.

  I’ve got maybe two fingers of Steel Reserve left in the can, so I finish it and click over to Twitter. I send out a bunch of messages to Dread Central and Bloody Disgusting, calling them out for not running news about my movies. They could at least review the discs I send them.

  Why no support for independent art @Mattfini? Fucking sellout. Too much of a pussy for THE DEBASER?

  It’s all boilerplate stuff, and I don’t really mean it, but it feels good to let the venom out. I have over five hundred followers, but I’m following nearly two thousand people. It’s not the ratio I want.

  After that’s done for the night, the room’s spinning.

  Half-hard, I try looking for Anna on facebook but realize that I don’t remember her last name. That or I didn’t know it to begin with. So instead I pull up Final Cut, trimming the footage we shot the other day while I jerk off.

  FIVE

  “You can’t be serious,” Burt says.

  He isn’t as big a fan of the idea as I am.

  “Look, she’s right. We need to get with the times,” I say. “A female slasher? A sexy female slasher? You know how those internet assholes eat up that ‘Women in Horror’ shit. There’s a whole month dedicated to it, shit’s bigger than prostate cancer month. The idea’s a goldmine. We’re being progressive!”

  “Kickstarter though? Are we that desperate?” Burt says, trying to hide the fact that what he’s really upset about is losing his place as our star.

  He doesn’t give a shit about us trying to use Kickstarter to get some extra money, he had suggested the same thing himself a few weeks ago. I even got far enough along with the idea that I created an account and applied.

  “The Debaser is going to be in it.” I say. “It’s not like you’re out of a job.”

  “I read the script, Tone. You fucking kill him.” Reading isn’t Burt’s strong suit, so I’m amazed that he’s cracked open the file I sent him already. It wasn’t a script, though, just a rough outline.

  Burt’s a few years older than me, we met in high school and he was a super senior when I was a sophomore. We didn’t start really hanging out until after school, but I knew him enough to know that he was in mixed classes, needed things slowed down for him so he could understand them. Dyslexia, maybe? He’s not dumb, just unlucky.

  “It’s a passing of the torch. And yeah, which slasher hasn’t died a few times? Cool your tits.”

  Turns out Anna liked the movie I gave her. A lot. Enough that she wants to help out.

  And I wasn’t too far off with that Suicide Girl observation. She says that soon she’s moving to the city to be a model. I knew a few girls like that in school. They’re not models now.

  So it’s just me connecting dots that she has already hinted at connecting when I say that she should be an actress. She says something like how she doesn’t think she has the talent, but I reassure her.

  Then the rest of it is all her idea, something she clearly had planned before I brought up her trying her hand at acting, and I listen to what she has to say, the two of us alone in the staffroom, her drinking water from a paper cone.

  I know I’m being played. I know that. But the idea is so good.

  And her lips are full and moist from the water.

  SIX

  The discs aren’t my only collection. No, I have many more things that I blow my no-money on.

  I’ve got more posters than can fit on my walls, the most valuable of which are in tubes in my closet because I haven’t gotten around to getting them framed. There are two milk crates under my bed filled with magazines, some of them rare German splatter zines, the kind of stuff that my mom leafed through once when I wasn’t at home and ended up calling the cops on me.

  I wasn’t arrested, it’s not like I had a Michael Jackson treasure trove under there, but the cops did talk to me for a good long time. We stood there in the basement, them pawing through my stuff, creasing the corners of every fucking thing they touched.

  That’s where my knife collection comes in.

  It’s the only non-horror thing I collect, but I like to think that the blades are at least tangentially related to my other hobby.

  They’re all real, unlike the props that we use in The Debaser movies. Artful lying, as I said, there’s no room on set for real knives if they’re going to pose a risk to any of my actors. Safety to people. That’s Lloyd Kaufman’s first rule of indie filmmaking. In many ways Lloyd’s full of shit, but that’s one area where it’s worth listening to him.

  The knife collection is what kept the cops there, grilling me. If it were just the magazines, they probably would have laughed at my batshit mother and apologized to me for the inconvenience. She thinks I’m some kind of serial-killer-in-training because of the stuff I collect. When the cop flipped open the leather suitcase I stash in the TV cabinet, that’s when their questions got serious.

  Where did you get all these blades?

  I go to a convention in Jersey every year, there’s a guy there that sells knives. He sells bootleg DVDs too, but I don’t tell the cops that.

  It was tough to explain that I just like them. That, okay, one time I did use them in one of my movies, but just as set dressing, a single shot of The Debaser looking at his knife collection and selecting the best one for the job. The knife he chose was one of our screen-ready knives, of course, one with a dummy blade so dull that you couldn’t even prepare a salad with it.

  Now I’m standing in the room and watching Anna go through the stuff.

  It’s the first time in years that anyone beyond Burt and my mother has been down here. I don’t invite my mother in, of course, but I know she’s down here when I’m not home. Checking for bodies, tossing out empties, and weeping for little Nicholas, who had been such a bright boy.

  My father’s not on my side, but he doesn’t think I’m the next Dahmer, either. To him, I just exist, the same way that Vinny Testaverde exists. But Vinny doesn’t play for The Jets anymore and I never did, so neither of us much rates.

  Anna is touching everything, but unlike the cops she’s gentle, she’s got a collector’s hands. Burt’s gentle too, but even he’ll crease a corner every now and again, place a disc the wrong way in a jewelcase.

  I can’t tell if the basement smells like dried load or whether it’s my imagination. It’s clean enough. I emptied the garbage pail this morning, spritzed some Frebreze onto my sheets and the canvas of my desk chair.

  “Holy shit,” she says, clicking open the briefcase. It could be the kind of holy shit that means she’s beginning to think of me like my mother does, or it could be something else.

  She lifts up a blade and pops open both s
ides of it. The one she’s holding, it’s made to look like a batarang. Not the Adam West kind, but the Christian Bale kind. Both ends are sharp as hell, the wings extending into four inch blades on each end, so you can grip it around the bat and have a weapon on either side of your fist.

  “This is really cool,” she says, the enthusiasm in her voice almost bordering on valley girl for a moment. How many parts are there to this girl? “What do you, ya know, use it for?”

  “I don’t. They’re collectibles.”

  “Sending your kids through college with these?” She says, whirling her fist around, pointing at everything in the room with the tips of the blades. Something about her scares me and turns me on at the same time. I want to backhand her and kiss her deep. But I won’t, of course.

  I’m no good with women.

  “So where’s your camera?” she asks, folding up the batarang and removing my Bowie knife from its sheath. I call that one Rambo. They don’t all have names, that would be silly, but that one does.

  “Why?”

  “Because we should shoot some footage before we make the actual Kickstarter video, right? A screen test to see how the costume looks. I read something like that online.” She pats the backpack she brought with her. She’s been dropping lines like this all day, how she’s been doing research online. Where exactly does one go to find out about this stuff in such a short amount of time?

  “You have a costume?” This is news to me, but somehow it shouldn’t be. Anna is big into her character already and we haven’t even come up with a name yet. In the pages I was working on I just call her ANNA, planning on pulling a find/replace when we decide on a name.

  I open my closet and reach to the top shelf. I have to climb on two milk crates to reach, it’s embarrassing. I can feel her eyes on me as I go to my tippy-toes, my shirt lifting up and my belt sagging so that I can feel my exposed lower back. I know that from where she’s standing she can see my hairy crack. I start to sweat.

  Using the shoulder strap, I bring the camera bag down and try to dismount with some modicum of grace. I turn around and she already has clothes from her backpack lying out on my bed. It doesn’t seem like she’s been watching me climb into the closet, which is good.

  “Turn it on,” she says. I unzip the camera bag, slide the battery into place and open the viewfinder.

  There’s the familiar ding and I nod to her. “It’s going. Action.”

  “Hello world, I’m Anna Diamond and this is Cat Killer’s first screen test.”

  Where are these names coming from? Her last name’s not really Diamond, it’s Friedman, I asked Deloris. Cat Killer? Is that my new character? The only thing that pisses me off about it is that I wasn’t allowed to think of it. Other than that, it’s great.

  She peels off her shirt and I feel blood rush everywhere. I’m a pale guy and I blush easy. I imagine that my face looks like I’m choking.

  She’s wearing a black bra, but it’s see-through. Her areolas are large and light. She’s got a tattoo running up her side from her bottom rib and headed down her jeans. I feel like I’m going to pass out.

  I’m never alone with them, Burt’s always there. I’m never not paying them, either.

  Taking a tanktop from the bed, she slips it on. It’s got holes in it, the print faded. It could be something from her own wardrobe or something that she’s weathered for this photo shoot.

  The jeans go next, she’s so quick to wiggle out of them that her panties slip down and I see the top of her pubic hair. It’s trim, orderly, but still dark. It’s like she’s been reading my diary.

  Troma-green fishnets under a simple black skirt. It works.

  “And?” she says. Her fingers and arms are spread, she stands pushing her breasts out. The camera soaks her in, I can practically hear the gulping sounds it’s making. Or maybe that’s me.

  “Well, the tanktop’s the problem. We can’t use the Nirvana smiley face without paying for it. If you got a plain one.” Before I can finish, she’s bent down, her ass to the camera, showing us how short the skirt is and digging through her backpack. The shirt’s off again and replaced with a plain black tank top before I have time to get embarrassed by her nudity.

  “Better?” she asks.

  I use the slider on top of the camera to zoom to her face. She’s smiling and I go wider again. By the time I’m zoomed back to a medium shot, she’s got Rambo tucked between her skirt and her bare skin. I jump.

  “Be careful with that. It’s sharp!”

  She tells me that she knows, and then we spend the next hour running through adlibs, trying to find Cat Killer’s style.

  SEVEN

  As soon as she leaves I call up Burt and tell him to come over. Or come pick me up and drive me to his place. Whatever, we need to hang out.

  It’s his place.

  He pours us both a drink and I show him all the footage. The look in his eyes tells me that he’s a true believer and he sips deep from his Solo cup full of screwdriver.

  “Dude, we work with that girl.” He’s either yelling at me or giving me a verbal thumbs-up, maybe both.

  “But does she look like lunchmeat to you, or a star?”

  “How much did you pay her?”

  “For this? This is gratis. This is her career here, this is what she wants us to help her achieve.”

  “It’s fishy, dude.” Burt throws a “dude” in there when he thinks he’s being serious. It just makes him sound like an asshole.

  Burt drinks again, I drink too so that he doesn’t feel self-conscious. I have a drinking and shopping problem, but Burt just has a drinking problem.

  “We hashed out most of the script for the Kickstarter pitch,” I say. “I say we ask for five grand, but I think we’ll make more. A lot more.”

  “Panhandling.”

  “No. Utilizing the talent that’s fallen into our lap. Hitching our star to her wagon.” When I get serious, I talk in clichés.

  “Your lap,” Burt says and snaps out the back of his fingers for a sacktap, but I move and he gets my thigh. Still stings, though. It’s a good thing that I’m friends with Burt, otherwise I would have stopped having my balls smacked in the 11th grade. This is his way, we’re all stunted, the geeks and the weirdoes. I obsess about shit that doesn’t matter, want to own more pressed plastic than everyone else, and Burt just wants a do-over on high school, maybe give his black sweatshirts and cigarettes a happy ending this time.

  “I need more, you need more?” he asks and I shake my head.

  I stay parked on Burt’s couch as he gets up to pour some more vodka into a splash of orange juice. I look down at the upholstery and, yup, there are still speckles of pink from our last shoot. The spots depress me, make me think of my mother scrubbing our bathtub until she gets all of the pink out of the grout. I’m not allowed to shoot in the house any more, it’s kind of the only term of my lease.

  Thinking of my own mother makes me think of Burt’s. He’s got his own place alright, a level of autonomy that I don’t have, but I wouldn’t trade him. Because his mother died ten years ago. Lung cancer, she was skinny ever since I started hanging out with Burt and would catch glimpses of her, but in those last few months she’d shrink between my visits, until she was nothing, dead.

  His dad had always been a space cadet, went even spacier after her dying like that, and moved into an apartment in Lindenhurst, leaving Burt the house. I don’t think they’re in contact, or at least I’m not kept up to speed on that stuff. We’re friends, see each other a few hours a day, mimimum, but there’s a bunch of aspects of Burt’s life that I’m not privy to. Either that or they don’t exist, he’s just a lonely dude that doesn’t exist when I’m not with him, just drinks and jerks off and channel surfs.

  “Look, man,” I start, trying to sound as sincere as possible. I like Burt. If I’m being honest, he’s my only friend. “Why don’t you slow down with that and we invite her over. She’d probably be down. We can watch a movie, talk a bit more about what we plan t
o do, involve you this time.”

  Asking Burt to slow down is one of his triggers, like I’ve offered him a fratboy dare. He upends his Solo cup, a stream of nearly-clear orange juice dribbling down his neck. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. Part of me is relieved, I don’t want these two spending any more time together than absolutely necessary.

  “This is a good thing for both of us and you need to see that.”

  Burt wipes himself with the bottom of his t-shirt.

  “I do,” he says after a moment. “I’m just jealous I didn’t get to see Anna do her striptease act.”

  “You will,” I reassure him, but part of me doesn’t want him looking.

  EIGHT

  That night I’m lying in bed and I see that I have a new follower on twitter. @Cat_Killer. Her profile picture is just cleavage, Rambo pressed over her chest.

  I wonder when she took that picture, but not for long. I press the follow button and start reading over the tweets she’s been sending out all day.

  She’s got ninety eight followers already, which doesn’t even seem possible. It took me months to get that much momentum.

  Under her info section she’s described herself as “One Sick Psycho Killer Slut! *Star* of the New Movie from @TonyAnastosfilmmaker!!!”

  I click on my own name and, sure enough, I’m up about thirty followers.

  It seems petty to think that my relationship with Anna has already borne me great fruit, thirty followers worth of fruit, but this is a new world. Social media’s full of assholes with shitty opinions who can’t spell worth a damn, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be embracing it, getting myself out there.

  I type up my own tweet.

  “Be sure to follow @Cat_Killer, bitch is getting ready to cut you up. :)”

  My stomach twitches as I type out the smiley face, cuteness gives me indigestion, but I read somewhere that people like that shit, it makes it more intimate, even from tough guys. Plus, the tweet is just as much for Anna as it is for my five-hundred mouth-breathers.