“If somebody had taken a movie of me, hanging from that fucking tree, I’d of been a fucking millionaire by now. People love to see death. They love it. Which is what makes Jamie Ford so fucking popular.”
I stopped, abruptly, causing a big bearded guy in a red-checkered shirt to spill his beer.
“Hey, pencil-neck—” he began to protest. But then he saw Wolf Bodell, and he shrugged and said, “What the fuck, okay? It’s only beer.”
“Jamie Ford?” I demanded.
Wolf Bodell took off his dark glasses. He had one glass eye, as blue as a summer afternoon, which stared right over my shoulder.
“Jamie Ford, that’s right. Presley would’ve told you. Jamie Ford’s been doing this for years. Jamie Ford’s the one and only. That’s why you came, yes?”
It was then that I turned toward the centre of the Golden Horses saloon, toward the dance floor. On most nights, a country and western band would have been playing; or couples would have been square-dancing or jiving; or drunken truckers would have been breaking chairs over each other’s heads. But tonight – through the drifting cigarette smoke, through the red and yellow lights – I saw the tall, gaunt structure of a gallows.
Jamie Ford. I should have known it. People love to see death. They love it. And who could show you death more vividly than Jamie?
Wolf Bodell ushered me up to the bar. “What do you want?” he asked me.
“Anything. Coors Lite.”
“You can’t face the Grim Reaper on Coors Lite,” Wolf Bodell cackled. “Leland – give this man a Jack Daniel’s, straight up, with a Pabst chaser.”
I took out my billfold, but Wolf Bodell shook his hand to show that he didn’t want me to pay. “Any friend of Presley’s is a friend of mine; and any friend of Presley’s is a friend of death. We’re all dying, my friend! All of us! So why are we all so bad to each other? What’s the point of snatching a woman’s purse when both of you are sitting side by side on a bus that’s going over a thousand-foot cliff? Die and let die. That’s my philosophy.”
I was handed my drinks by a busty barmaid with a white-powdered pockmarked face and a dusty red velvet basque. She must have been very beautiful once. She winked at me, but I saw nothing in her face except suffering. Eyes unfocused, nose not quite straight. A walking casualty of Smirnoff or crack or a violent husband, who could tell? No joy, for sure. Not even hope. I turned away, and she called out, “Don’t be so unsociable, lover!”
Wolf Bodell nudged me with his elbow and grinned. “You know what your trouble is? You’re too damned nice. All of Presley’s friends are too damned nice. Don’t play poker, do you? I relish playing poker with real nice people. Lambs to the slaughter, that’s what I call it. Nasdravye!”
He tipped back his Jack Daniel’s, and I tipped back my Jack Daniel’s and coughed. He snapped his fingers for two more, and I was about to say no, not for me, when the lights suddenly dimmed, and there was a rough, blaring fanfare on the amplifiers. A thin gingery man in a scarlet spangly cowboy suit stepped into the spotlight and raised one arm dramatically for silence.
“Maize darmsey maize sewers,” he announced. “Tonight, for your sheer excitement, for your outright in-cray-doolity, the Golden Horses presents the act of acts, the laughter in the face of Beelzebub himself, the mocker of mortality! The man who seeks his pleasures on the brink of death.
“Yes, folks … one more time, Jamie Ford, the Supremo of the Slipknot, is going to risk oblivion for your entertainment and his own sex-you-ell satisfaction. He will gen-yoo-inely hang himself from this here gallows-tree, as inspected and pronounced authentic, and based on the model used for the hanging of Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, in 1882.
“What you are about to see is one man facing death for the sheer purr-leasure of it; and he has signed legal documents which hold the Golden Horses blameless should things go awry.
“But be warned … the performance you are about to witness is strictly of an adult nature, and more shocking than anything you have ever seen before or will again. So if any of you are having second thoughts, or if any of you wish to have your money refunded, then you’d better do so now.
“Because here he is, maize-darmsey-maize-sewers, the Hero of the Hempen Rope, the Nero of the Noose … Ja-a-a-mie Ford!”
We were half deafened by a crackling cornet fanfare on the amplifiers, but scarcely anybody applauded. I looked around the Golden Horses, through the sliding cigarette smoke, and saw that everybody was too tense, everybody had their attention fixed on the gallows. Everybody had that same guilty, mesmerized stare – and I expect I did, too. We were like people driving past a fatal auto accident – horrified, fascinated. The emergency services would have called us ghouls.
“Here,” said Wolf Bodell, nudging my elbow and handing me another whiskey. “This is what I call a show. One of the best in the country, though I say so myself.”
“You’re the promoter?” I asked him.
“Well, manager, more like.”
“How do you manage a man hanging himself?”
Wolf Bodell tossed back his second drink. “Everything on God’s good earth needs managing. You don’t think that cows grow by accident? There’s always somebody who wants to do something and somebody else who wants to watch them do it. It’s as simple as that. But the skill comes in bringing the exhibitionist and the voyeur into the same room, at the same time, and making a profit out of it. That’s managing.
“Let me tell you something … I was bred and brung up in carny. My grandfather was carny; my father was Henry T. Bodell, the founder of Bodell’s Traveling Entertainments and Curiosities. When I was three years old, I was introduced to Prince Randian, the Caterpillar Man, who didn’t have no arms and legs, and got about by wriggling. I had nightmares about Prince Randian for years later, but, boy, I never forgot him. Never.
“Of course, those days are gone now, the days of freaks and bearded ladies. Very long gone. But every now and then, you still come across people like Jamie Ford, whose need for attention doesn’t fit into any of your usual molds. They’re still carny entertainers, even if the carnies are dead and gone. They still have the devil in them. They still have the need. What’s more, people still have the need to watch them. Deplorable, ain’t it? But there’s nothing in this whole world more fascinating than watching a human being die, except if it’s watching a human being die by choice. It’s like watching those Booh-dist monks, who set fire to themselves. I saw one or two of those out in Nam. Can you imagine doing that by choice? Because I sure fucking can’t.”
He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “It’s just like I can’t imagine why Jamie keeps on hanging himself. Don’t tell me the high is that fucking great. But he wants to do it, and people want to watch him do it, and it’s a pity to let a good psychosis go to waste.”
At that moment, out of the smoke, Jamie appeared, my old school friend Jamie Ford. He was much thinner and greyer, and his eyes seemed to have lost all of that bright, vicious sparkle. Now they were dead men’s eyes.
His blond hair was greasy and lank and almost shoulder-length now, and he wore a black and yellow bandanna tightly tied around his head. He was wrapped up in a faded black cloak that trailed on the floor, but as he stepped forward it parted a little and I saw his thin bare leg, and realized that – underneath the cloak – he was chicken-naked.
“And now!” cried the man in the sparkly cowboy suit. “For your extra delight … for your unmatched excitement … Mr Ford’s dee-lectable assistant … Ms Suffer Kate!”
There was another scratchy fanfare, followed by a desultory assortment of “yahoos” and wolf-whistles. A tall girl came prancing onto the stage, white-skinned, naked except for black stiletto shoes, a tiny black-sequined thong, and a headdress of nodding black ostrich feathers.
She twirled around, and the spotlights gleamed on her chubby, luminous flesh. Her breasts were enormous and wallowed on her chest like two white whales dipping and rolling in a
slow flood tide. Her stomach was rounded, but she had no stretch marks. She had the figure of a girl who drinks too much and eats too many hamburgers and too many taco chips and spends too much of her life watching too much TV in too many Howard Johnson’s.
She lifted her arms and blew kisses all around the crowd, and it was then that I recognized her. ‘Ms Suffer Kate’ was none other than Laurel Fay, the cheerleader from Sherman Oaks Senior High. A raddled, puffy, corrupted version of a once-beautiful ‘most-likely-to.’ I could have shed tears, believe me.
But I remembered that curse that Laurel had cursed, on graduation day, the day that I had caught her riding up and down on him while he slowly suffocated in Saran Wrap.
“Judas! Judas fucking Iscariot! He wants it! He needs it! It’s death meets life! It’s life meets death!”
Now Jamie was circling the gallows, eyeing it up and down, gripping it and shaking it to make sure that it was firm. The hi-fi played Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree’.
It wasn’t a proper executioner’s gallows, for all that the master of ceremonies had described it as an authentic copy of the gallows on which Charles J. Guiteau had been executed. The drop on a proper executioner’s gallows is more than twice the height of the man to be hanged. When the trap opens, and the man falls through, the chances are high that he will instantaneously break his neck. But this wasn’t a gallows designed for the quick judicial extinction of life. This was a gallows designed for long, slow strangulation.
Watching Jamie shaking that gallows gave me a spasm of utter dread, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I turned to Wolf Bodell and said, “Is there a phone in this place?”
“Sure, next to the jakes. But don’t take too long … he’s just about to do the business.”
I pushed my way through the murmuring, mesmerized crowd. As I did so, I think Jamie must have caught sight of me, because he stopped shaking the gallows and peered into the darkness which enveloped the audience, his hand raised over his eyes to cut out the glare from the spotlight. I dodged behind a large red-faced man in a crumpled business suit and continued my journey to the telephone with my face turned away from the gallows and my shoulders hunched.
I reached the booth, closed the folding door, and thumbed in a dime. The phone rang for a long, long time before anybody answered.
“Bryce.”
“Deputy Bryce? It’s Gerry, from the Bee. If I were you, I’d come on out to the Golden Horses with your foot flat to the floor. And bring some backup.”
“I just started supper. Can’t it wait?”
“Not unless you want a man to die.”
Deputy Bryce said something unintelligible, but I didn’t wait to hear what it was. I pushed my way back to the bar, where Wolf Bodell had already lined up another Jack Daniel’s for me. I was half drunk already, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “You can’t face the Grim Reaper sober,” he told me.
With Ms Suffer Kate prancing and pirouetting around him, Jamie mounted the low grey-painted trestle which stood directly below the noose. The trestle was arranged so that when Jamie himself tugged on a lanyard, the legs would collapse flat and he would be left hanging six or seven inches above the floor. He took hold of the noose and gently tugged it, to test that the rope was running free. The hi-fi music changed to ‘Stand By Your Man’. Jamie loosened the collar of his cloak – and it was then that I saw for the first time the terrible blue and red bruises and rope burns that disfigured his neck. His carotid artery bulged in several purplish lumps, and his Adam’s apple was crisscrossed with deep shiny weals.
He lifted the noose over his head with all the solemnity of a king crowning himself. I thought I caught the faintest trace of a smile on his lips, but I couldn’t be sure.
Ms Suffer Kate made an exaggerated Betty Boop O with her red-lipsticked mouth, her breasts bounce-delay-bouncing with every step she took.
Wolf Bodell grinned at me and said, “Heart-stopping stuff, ain’t it? The odds against him surviving are about three to one. So you see my livelihood’s going to be hanging by a thread, too.”
‘Stand By Your Man’ was abruptly interrupted by a long, thunderous drumroll. Jamie was standing straight-backed amidst the eddying cigarette smoke, the noose around his neck, staring at someplace far in the distance. I looked for sweat on his face, but he appeared dry and pale and almost saintly. I wondered what he was thinking; but maybe he wasn’t thinking anything at all. Did he really want to die? Or was he mortally afraid?
“Maize darmsey maize sewers, burr-ace yourselves!” screamed the master of ceremonies.
Jamie took a tighter grip on the lanyard. The drumroll went on and on. In fact, it went on for so long that I began to think that he wasn’t going to do it. Maybe he had lost his nerve. Maybe he had stood on this trestle and faced his Maker just once too often.
But then, with his left hand, he pushed back his cloak, so that it slid off his shoulders and revealed his nakedness. More red-lipsticked O’s from Ms Suffer Kate. She perched on the edge of the trestle and caressed Jamie’s scarred and bony legs, smiling up at him and O-ing the audience alternately.
Jamie’s penis hung heavy and dark between his thighs, not yet aroused. Ms Suffer Kate ran her hands up and weighed his hairy scrotum in her hand. Then she squeezed and rubbed his penis until it began to swell up a little. The drumroll continued, but they didn’t really need a drumroll. Everybody in the Golden Horses was staring at Jamie transfixed, their mouths open, their eyes wide, daring him actually to do it, begging him not to do it, fearful and fascinated at the same time.
I found myself pushing my way forward.
“Jamie!” I shouted. “Jamie, it’s Gerry! Jamie!”
Wolf Bodell snatched at my elbow. “Hey, come on, man, don’t break his concentration!”
“Jamie!” I yelled.
I forced my way right to the front and stood in front of the gallows. Ms Suffer Kate stared at me – crossly at first, but then with growing recognition.
“You?” she said, in a blurry voice.
She looked up at Jamie, and I did, too. He was smiling down at me with a wounded, beatific smile. The Hero of the Hempen Rope. The Nero of the Noose.
“Jamie,” I said, as loudly as I could, so that he would hear me over the drumroll, and over the impatient whistling of the crowd, and over his own dreamlike trance. “Jamie, it’s over. It’s time to come down now. You don’t have to do this anymore.”
“Hey, mister, mind your own fucking business and get out of the fucking way!” somebody roared at me; and there was a roar of approval and a locomotive-like stamping of feet.
Jamie looked down at me, and I don’t know whether he recognized me or not. I like to think that he didn’t. Because the next thing that happened was – without warning – he pulled the lanyard, and the trestle table collapsed with an ear-splitting bang. Jamie dropped three feet and then jolted to a stop as the noose tightened. He swung around, spun around, his feet bicycling wildly in the air, his hands clawing at his throat. He made the most terrible cackling sound; and when he spun around again and I saw his face J felt a surge of warm sick in the back of my mouth. His eyes were almost bursting out of his head. He was purple – a dark, eggplant purple – and he kept opening and closing his mouth in a desperate attempt to breathe.
I tried to push my way forward, but I felt Wolf Bodell gripping my arm. “You can’t help him, my friend. You can’t help him. It’s something he has to do. If you save him today, he’ll do it again tomorrow.”
Jamie was twisting around and around, and the crowd was baying in horror. A woman was screaming, “No! No! No! No!” and a man was roaring, “Cut him down, for Christ’s sake! Cut him down!”
The whole of the Golden Horses was surging with fear and disgust and a hideous unbalancing fascination. It was like wading through a warm, heavy swell with ice-cold undercurrents.
Jamie kept on gargling and kicking. Whenever he stopped twisting, Ms Suffer Kate gave him another push, so that he spun r
ound yet again, and again. His eyes were bulging so much now that I could see the swollen scarlet flesh behind the eyeball, and he had clawed at the noose around his neck so furiously that one of his fingernails was flapping loose.
Now, however, came the climax. As Jamie spun around again, Ms Suffer Kate stopped him, and steadied him, and we could see that his penis had stiffened into a hugely distended erection. His testicles were scrunched up tight, and the shaft rose thick and veiny and hard as an antler.
Ms Suffer Kate stood up in front of him and kissed him, leaving lipstick imprints all over his heaving white stomach.
Then she stepped back, so that she was at least six inches away from his rigid penis, and stretched her mouth open wide.
“Holy Mother of God,” I heard a man say; and his words weren’t a blasphemy; not even here; not even while we were witnessing a slow and deliberate self-suffocation.
There was a second’s agonized pause. Jamie’s entire body was arched like a bow. He had stopped scrabbling at his noose, and his hands were held up in front of him, his fingers skeletal with tension. He let out one gargling, strangulated breath, and then another. He was so taut, he was straining so hard, that his right eyeball at last squeezed right out of its socket and bobbled on top of his cheek, staring downward without expression at Ms Suffer Kate.
Then – with a sickening convulsion – he climaxed. His penis seemed to swell even more, the head swelled, and then a thick spurt of sperm flew out of it, right into Ms Suffer Kate’s stretched open mouth. It spurted again, and again, and again – more sperm than I had ever seen a man ejaculate in my life – and it covered Ms Suffer Kate’s lips and cheeks and eyelashes and clung in her black funereal ostrich plumes.
Throughout the whole ejaculation, she hadn’t touched him once. He had climaxed from lack of oxygen, from agony, from dancing with death.
Ms Suffer Kate turned around, and raised her arms, and nodded her plumes, her face still glistening with sperm. Then, with no more hesitation, she stepped up onto one of the trestles and released the locking catch that had prevented Jamie (when the table had collapsed beneath him) from reaching the floor.
Faces of Fear Page 21
