by Unknown
GARCIA: Go shove your test, you asshole! Next thing you’ll claim is that this is actually stress test HR52! The one that separates the high-risk security crazies from the just wanna-be crazies! Isn’t that what I’m here to prove?
JACOBS: No [shouts] Don’t you get it? It’s an act! Miss Garcia, I swear this really is the way we see if—
GARCIA: —I pass the test! [laughs] Final question is, are these real bullets going through your face or just … test blanks? [sound of apparent gunshots, then silence as machine is abruptly disconnected]
STRESS TEST HR51, CASE #041074
INTERVIEWER GINA A. GARCIA: What would you do if a patient demanded that you go down on him or he would initiate an act of serious physical violence?
APPLICANT GORDON M. WILLIAMS: Well, I’d see if he was just trying to get me angry or he if was really serious. You can’t always tell right off. [pauses] Excuse me, are you sure these questions are supposed to mean something other than to try and raise my blood pressure? I mean, you sound pretty off the wall yourself, asking such things.
GARCIA: Your personal opinions are not relevant here. You have five seconds to answer the question satisfactorily or this test will be terminated.
CHURCHES OF DESIRE
Philip Nutman
“What the twentieth century needed was eroticism; what it got was pornography …”
—Henry Miller
I know this has nothing to do with the fiction at hand, but if you’ve seen John Malkovich in the film Dangerous Liaisons, then you’ve seen Philip Nutman. The resemblance is more than similar—it’s frightening. In fact, the only major difference between the actor and the writer is their accents. Born in England, Phil Nutman speaks the language the way the guys doing voice-overs in American television commercials do when they’re trying to sell something classy. He moved to the States several years ago and plans to be a permanent resident and become a Yank. After many years as a journalist, Phil started selling his fiction to some of the major anthologies in the field (such as Book of the Dead and this one) and is currently working on several novels. Of “Churches of Desire,” I can only prepare you by saying it’s a brooding, richly textured tale which turns upon the classic theme of man’s search for identity.
Meredith shivered in his brown leather jacket as he stood before the porno cinema. The wind was rising, the streets devoid of life, yet his body shook not from the chill factor but from a deep, sudden sense of dread. After hours walking the Eternal City’s empty thoroughfares in search of a fellow soul with whom he could share a moment of sexual warmth, his journey ended here.
It was once said all roads lead to Rome; all the Roman roads he had travelled in his nocturnal hunt for release seemed to lead here. And as he stood before the building profound desperation pulsed through his tired, alcohol soaked body. Just looking at the place made him feel sick.
The facade of the Passion Pussycat cinema was an affront to good taste. Green and purple neon mixed to create an emetic spill of light that washed over the marquee to luridly shower the pavement. Its curved front was segmented by electric signs depicting nubile sixties-style go-go dancers with cat ears and tiny tails. There was no indication of what was screening inside.
A newspaper scuttled against his legs making him jump, then performed a dervish dance to the gutter. He ran his hands over the week’s growth of stubble that covered his face to massage his tired eyes. He guessed the program would consist of typical Scandinavian, German, and American hetero hardcore, par for the course and boring. But whatever was playing there would at least be some buggery to keep him entertained, although he hoped if there were German movies unspooling, the footage would not be as extreme as one he’d caught in a Parisian theatre.
The loop had started mundanely with a domestic scenario involving a couple, the man going to take a bath. The scene soon turned into a laughable water-sports sequence when the woman rinsed his hair with her urine after he had shampooed it, but this was succeeded by an anal scene with a surgical device that had been clinical in its presentation, almost abstract in its relentless close-up, and even to Meredith’s jaded sensibilities, offensive.
He stood hesitantly like a schoolboy on a first date, the promise of a sexual encounter almost unreal after the endless hours he had obsessed over the subject. Yet it was more than nervousness; a primal instinct made his balls contract painfully to the point of groaning. Still, there was no turning back. Not now. Not after the day’s hollow promises had faded as breath to the wind. All Rome had to offer was vague hopes of financial gain and a cold, dirty room at the pensione. That thought in mind, he walked up the steps to the door and opened it.
… and the world of concrete and glass, stone and slate, garbage, and dog shit disappeared, broken by a surging synaptic fracture … and what lay before him was in one instant an apocalyptic flash of total destruction, an unrelenting holocaust, a subliminal flash frame instantly replaced by the stronger all-encompassing vision of a Void: black, unforgiving.
He turned from the doorway to vomit his dinner of spaghetti carbonara, several glasses of mediocre frascati, on the grime-encrusted steps. He stumbled with a second heave, grabbing the incongruously fake Doric columns of the facade for support, easing himself into a sitting position a few feet away from the puddle of bile. He looked up the street in an attempt to clear his rolling vision. In the distance were two faint figures, one tall and painfully thin, the other short and squat. With the final wave of surreal nausea he wouldn’t have been surprised if they turned out to be the Walrus and the Carpenter. A coughing fit disrupted his eyeline, his mind rolling vertiginously, and a distant voice questioned how he had come to this, reached such a state of dissolution.
He knew the answer.
As the telephone rang for the seventh time a sense of hopelessness descended on Meredith like a carrion bird swooping to a corpse in a landscape.
Come on! Answer the damn phone!
The tension in his stomach tightened another notch. Since arriving in Rome two days ago he’d been feeling a sense of trepidation so strong he could almost smell it, an aroma that churned his gut and diminished his appetite. Thinking of stomach ulcers, he clutched the call box receiver so tightly his arm trembled, jarring loose a length of ash from his cigarette. His mouth was dry and he badly wanted to take a pull from the bottle of Johnnie Walker in his bag.
The tone buzzed for the eleventh time and he hung up, running a hand through his thick, black hair, pushing back the stray strands from his forehead, then threw the cigarette to the floor. On the opposite side of Via Paisello trees moved with the early evening breeze. It was 5:45 P.M. He would try Masullo one more time. After he took a quick pull from the bottle.
Where the hell was the producer, or his secretary for that matter? There was no reason why she should be ignoring the phone; he’d called each day at the same time in a frustrating attempt to get Masullo to fix a time for the proposed interview, already rescheduled four times in the past week. With the way things were going, it looked like Film Comment wasn’t going to get the definitive story of Italian exploitation movies. This was Masullo’s chance to gain some mainstream respectability, which, for a producer over thirty cheap horror movies and softcore skin flicks, was hard to come by, and Meredith couldn’t understand why he was being given the runaround. Still, the producer of such bad-taste gems as Emanuel and the Satanists, The Sex Crimes of Doctor Crespi, and pseudo-documentaries like Savage Africa, complete with scenes of clitoral circumcision, probably didn’t care about anything other than money. Sex, maybe, but Meredith could relate to both areas.
A sharp knock on the glass of the booth cracked him from his reverie. A large woman in a sickly green raincoat was rapid-firing unintelligible Italian through the glass that kept the chill of the Roman night at bay. Her face was a sour rictus, the corners downturned over cheeks the color of dough, like a bloated tragedy mask, and the coat fabric taut over the huge breasts.
Meredith vacated the booth as the woman pushe
d past him into the cubicle.
“Fuck you,” he said with a smile. On second thought, don’t.
The woman was truly gross. A dried shitty substance stained the back of her coat and legs, and her black hair hung in greasy rat’s tails.
As far as he could make out, all Italian women belonged to one of two groups: over twenty-five and overweight, like the whores at the hotel, or under that age and curvaceous. He’d seen one Dachau-thin woman in, he surmised, her late thirties, a walking skeleton who served in the cafe near the station. But she had to be the least attractive woman he had ever laid eyes on, a woman who seemed thinner each time he saw her. Still, the opposite sex wasn’t on his list of priorities.
He lit another cigarette while the woman dialed. The brown stain disgusted him. Rome was potentially the dirtiest city he had ever visited, the buildings heavily blackened from the cancer of carbon monoxide. And as soon as he stepped off the airport bus he’d trodden in a sizable turd—human, not animal. Great.
Dirty. Smelly. Winos in the gutters near the pensione, rubbish spilling from the bins by the Villa Borghese. Shit in the Tiber. Meredith had had enough.
He had, however, much more to worry about than shit and magazine articles. More to the point were screenplays and movie deals. If Masullo would agree to read one or two of Meredith’s novels he felt certain they could get a deal going. Film Comment would have to make do with what he sent them. At least he’d interviewed Dario Argento, Joe D’Amato, and Ruggero Deodato. But he had a lot riding on the idea of selling Masullo the rights to at least Blood Stunt, if not A Killing for Christmas. Throwaway thrillers deserved to be made into movies by hack producers, and Meredith was under no illusions about art: all he wanted was money. And soon. If he could get Masullo hooked he could be out of debt for the first time in seven years.
A grunting noise made him look up. The green blob vacated the phone booth, bustling past with a flourish of body odor. Meredith belched in response as he fished in his pocket for a coin and re-entered the cubicle.
The phone buzzed against his right ear.
One … two … three … four
Jesus! Answer the bloody thing!
… six … seven …
A click.
“Pronto?” said a woman’s voice.
“Zebrafilm?”
“Yes.”
“This is Bruce Meredith. I’m calling again about the interview with Signore Masullo.”
“I have bad news, Signore Meredith. Signore Masullo asks me to apologize for not being able to see you this evening, as was suggested. He has to go to Milan for a meeting. But he can meet you at 10:30 a.m. Monday.”
“What? Oh, I have to return to London this weekend. Is there any chan—”
“In that case. Signore Meredith,” the voice interjected, “I’m sorry. Signore Masullo has been very busy. Perhaps you will be in Rome again soon?”
Meredith threw down his cigarette. “No, that’s out of the question. The magazine deadline is in two weeks. Would it be possible to see him this weekend—say Saturday?”
Please say yes!
“No, Signore Meredith. That’s out of the question. Thank you.”
The line went dead.
Bitch!
Monday! Damn Masullo. Damn Rome. Damn the whole shitty country.
He stepped from the booth and stood awhile, worrying his bottom lip before fumbling in his shoulder bag for the bottle. He took a large pull, the Scotch hitting instantly, burning his gut in a fiery rush. Without further thought he began to walk.
A light breeze rustled the trees, which whispered their secrets in return. What could he do? He couldn’t really afford to come here in the first place and had only managed to do so by conning his sister out of five hundred quid under the pretense of repairing his car, conveniently neglecting to tell her he’d sold it. He couldn’t cancel the return flight, as he didn’t have enough to purchase another ticket. If he’d thought the situation through before coming he could have anticipated delays, made provisions for an alternative course of action, but as usual he had done everything in a rush. It was too much to think about, the decision requiring a ruthlessly objective look at his position, so he did the usual; procrastinated for several minutes while he paced up and down, neither thinking or acting, lit another cigarette. He looked vacantly at the trees, the pavement, the walls. He would decide tomorrow. He needed to rest, relax. And that meant one thing: sex. Yes, a night of fucking would burn out the cloud of depression that was already filling his system like ink in water. If he could get laid he’d awaken refreshed in the morning, be able to take the situation in hand. Sex always provided peace of mind.
He turned into Via Piciano, moving along the northeastern edge of the Villa Borghese. Each step he took, however, increased his sense of steadily deepening depression. His mind performed cartwheels. Images from the past appeared in a montage of disillusionment: Vanessa stating she’d need the money back by early November as it was for Christmas; Michael crying after a violent argument; Alison, his agent, informing him he had to cut back on the sex scenes, especially the rape of the pregnant woman in Dead Dogs and Englishmen, because every publisher she showed it to found the book gratuitous; Wilmott, his bank manager, turning down his request for a loan; Michael leaving, bags hurriedly packed, tension charging the smoky air of the flat.
“You selfish, self-pitying bastard!” his lover threw at him as he gathered his things in the hallway. “I’ll be back for the rest of my stuff.”
Meredith was silent, a contrite expression on his face, a bottle of Scotch still in his hand. Michael was so angry they had come to blows over the damn thing. Embarrassed, he tried to hide it behind him but Michael saw him.
“Put the bloody bottle down! Stop pissing your life away.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
Michael fiddled with the straps of his baggage as Meredith watched him, not sure what to say or do. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
No response.
Michael looked up, tears in his eyes.
“You’re always sorry afterward. But words aren’t enough. When you drink you’re like a little kid—and that’s all the bloody time.”
Meredith looked at the carpet.
“This is it. Over. Dead. You killed it.”
And with that. Michael was gone, the door slamming like a gunshot in the heavy air.
Although he’d felt a tremendous sense of relief after the last of Michael’s things had gone, the first few nights without him to hold had been an empty, cold time. But there were always other bodies to be found, and since the split his sex life had been a calm sea dotted with occasional faces floating like driftwood through a perpetual twilight. It was easier that way. But the immediate problem was how to find someone in this godforsaken place. The local cruising scene, if one existed, was nowhere to be found, and the only from of nighttime sexuality he’d seen was transvestism, which held no appeal. The only possible place he could think of was the Spanish Steps.
While passing them the previous night he had been surprised by the number of people spread out on the impressive monument and the relaxed atmosphere. Couples entwined passionately, all but copulating, locked into their own romantic universes. Cigarette smoke drifted on the breeze, mingling with the sweeter aroma of hash as a guitarist had strummed old songs. The Steps were a short walk away and would be a good starting point. Failing that, the main railway station would almost certainly provide what he was looking for.
He’d gone but a few yards and had turned into Via Veneto when he came across the first gaggle of transvestites he’d seen that night. One, a blonde wearing an awful wig, tried to waylay him but he continued without stopping, scowling. When he reached Piazza Barberini he paused to scan the headlines of English newspapers on sale at a cramped news cabin. Try as he might to focus on the front pages of The Sun and The Star, his attention was drawn to the cheap colors of the hardcore magazines on sale.
Teenage Lolitas promised all girls under sixteen wi
th text in English, German, and Italian. Who, he mused, cared about text? He’d always smiled at the French slang for such publications—books to be read with one hand. But what he found most interesting was the plethora of fumetti, pocket-sized, crude, explicit comics filled with a staple diet of black magic, murder, sadomasochism, rape, and mutilation. There were dozens of titles ranging from entrail-eating zombie stories to tales of futuristic sex and violence and more mundane tales of adultery and wife swapping. Nothing was left to the imagination, atrocities bursting forth on each page like rotten foliage, he’d found one in his room at the pensione. After skimming thirty pages of semi-literate dialog he could not translate his eyes had widened at a sudden explosion of brutal sex and degradation—close-ups of fellatio, sodomy, and a young man having his skull smashed open after orgasm by the husband of the woman he’d just serviced. Somehow, he felt these popular comics told him more about the Italian cultural psyche than he wished to know, a world view consisting of naked lust and commonplace violence. But this, after all, was the country that had made throwing people to wild animals the main form of entertainment. He laughed aloud as a black vision eclipsed all else; so this is what it all comes down to—two thousand years of civilization and it’s the same as it ever was. This is where it ends.
A soberly suited businessman examining S & M Sextacula looked intently at him over his glasses and Meredith walked away with the bitter laugh still on his lips.
As if submitting to the dark reality was his only means of finding hope, he felt a strange sense of correctness in his situation and he suddenly saw it all for the killing joke it was, a long, hollow laugh in the face of nothingness. He continued to chuckle to himself until he came to the junction, his attention shifting to the pleasing smells coming from a restaurant on the corner. His stomach growled in appreciation. He entered without further thought, drawing the aromas from the kitchen deep into his lungs.
