John sits on the edge of the bed, still in his office clothes except for his tie. He wants to put a pistol’s barrel in his mouth and burst the top of his balding head open, a shattered chrysalis, so that his brain might fly free from its imprisoning skull, if only in brief mayfly life. But he is too cowardly to even buy a pistol, let alone put one inside his mouth. He rises to undress for bed.
Scorpion Face has killed itself again, as it often does. It lies crumpled on the floor with a large black nail driven into its skull. But it will awaken soon, curled in the corner inside a cocoon of web. And it will shriek when it sees itself in the mirror, and realizes it is still—unendingly—alive.
Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?
Kaylee, Taffeta, Shenandoah and Latrina felt like movie stars themselves when they were interviewed by a TV correspondent outside the theater where they had just seen the movie Sssssss, which in its re-release was currently number one at the box office.
“Shhh!” Latrina hissed at Kaylee, who was still frantically trying to load a videotape into her VCR so as to record their ephemeral celebrity.
“Hurry!” Shenandoah shrieked, hands flapping with fingers tensed into claws.
“Got it!” Kaylee cried, upping the volume with her remote and dropping to the carpet on her knees to watch.
Taffeta squealed in delight as she saw her own face on the television screen, heard herself say, “I almost cried at the end…Strother—I mean Dr. Stoner—was only trying to bring peace to the world, by turning people into animals…just like Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau…”
“Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Shenandoah was heard repeating wistfully, in a whisper of reverence.
“Well,” Taffeta went on, “except that Marlon—I mean Dr. Moreau—was trying to bring peace into the world by turning animals into people.”
“Is Marlon one of your favorites, like Strother Martin?” asked the correspondent.
“Oh no…he was awesome in that movie, but he isn’t the same, really…”
“Why’s that?”
“Well,” Latrina responded, pushing into the frame, “he made so many movies when he was young, it’s hard to get young Marlon out of your mind. But I’ve never seen a young Strother.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” Shenandoah said.
“I don’t like to imagine he was ever young,” Kaylee said.
“So, is Strother Martin your favorite actor of all, then?”
“Well…it’s close,” Kaylee replied, “but if you held a gun to my head…”
“Or a microphone to your mouth?”
“Yeah,” she giggled. “I’d have to say my all-time favorite grandbabe would be Buck Druthers.”
* * *
Later, after the four friends had played the recording of themselves back several times, they sat in a circle on the carpet of Kaylee’s parents’ livingroom and paged through the latest issues of Teenscreen and Babe Parade. Though they all concurred that they hated singer Spunk’s new forward-facing ponytail and the bangs at the back of her head (the rest of her skull shaved bald below those bangs), they would all be wearing their hair like that within a month. The four fifteen-year-olds were already wearing clothing just like eighteen-year-old Spunk wore in this photo: super-small, super-tight white tee shirts with two holes cut out in the front for their bra cups to poke through, and super-baggy combat pants with open crotches covered by black mesh through which one could glimpse the alternating white flecks of their panties.
“Ooh, look!” cried Taffeta, holding up one magazine opened to a glossy full-page photo of actor Strother Martin, his long white hair uncharacteristically kempt, as Dr. Stoner in 1973’s Sssssss. Facing the photo was an article entitled, “Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?”
“Yeah, read that one, bitch!” Kaylee enthused. “This is good.”
Only stumbling over a word or two per sentence, Taffeta read aloud to her rapt audience, beginning with a few brief bio facts that mentioned Strother’s birth in Indianapolis and his role in movies such as Cool Hand Luke, from which came his most famous cinema moment, with the line, “What we have here is failure to communicate.” It was the big catch phrase right now; even the president, trying to seem hip, had used that quote in a speech this week. (And the president was looking sort of cute himself as he seasoned.) After the introduction, Taffeta got to the test itself.
“Dee…Da…Despite Strother’s demented and ornery characters, beneath his dangerous exterior lies the gentle heart of a true grandbabe. Do you have what it takes to make T-Bone’s heart beat for you?” The girls all knew that Strother’s nickname in life had been T-Bone. “Answer these five questions to see…”
The friends took turn responding to questions such as, “How do you think Strother would like to spend a date with you? Would you suggest: A: Dancing with Strother all night in the clubs. B: Swimming and sunbathing with S. M. at the beach. C: Hanging out with Mr. Wild Bunch in a video arcade. D: Snuggling in T-Bone’s lap while he reads you a cute bedtime story.”
“Ooh!” said Latrina, at the last choice. Like this was hard! They all selected D, and weren’t surprised to see that when the magazine was turned upside-down, they chose each answer correctly.
“Looks like he’d want all of us!” chirped Shenandoah. “We’d have to fight over him!”
They returned to their perusal of the magazines. Taffeta read out loud from an article on juicy Jack Elam, who was born on November 13th in 1916 in Miami, Arizona and went on to make films such as Cat Ballou and High Noon and guest on shows like Gunsmoke and Big Valley, which were in syndication again and quite popular with a new audience, as they always promised a wealth of grizzly-cheeked curmudgeons whose heady unwashed effluvium practically oozed out of the TV screen.
Latrina read from an article about Walter Brennan, born July 25th, 1894, who fought as a doughboy in “Dubbya Dubbya One” and went on to play that sexy old coot Grandpa Amos on the TV series The Real McCoys.
“Check this out, bitches!” Shenandoah gasped, after paging a little further through one of the magazines. She carefully freed and unfolded a mini-poster from the center of the publication, held it up for all to see. On one side was a photo of Buddy Ebsen from The Beverly Hillbillies, but the side she showed her friends featured a photo from the premier of the latest film from Buck Druthers.
* * *
Justin Spring despised Buck Druthers.
Justin was Kaylee’s seventeen-year-old brother, and he had a major crush on Shenandoah, with her cute spiky hair dyed electric lime green like singer Spunk had worn hers while she was dating Buck Druthers last year. (Now Spunk was dating the Stones’ Keith Richards.) Justin hated Strother Martin. He loathed afrobabes Scatman Crothers and Red Foxx. But Buck Druthers brought him close to fits. Perhaps, he thought, because Druthers was still living, whereas most of the popular grandbabes had passed away years, even decades, ago. But his sister and her friends didn’t want to hear that. They literally covered their ears with their palms and screeched at him angrily as he raged, “Walter Brennan is dead, Kaylee…he died in 1974, when he was eighty! Okay? I saw it on the web!”
“Shut up, bitch, it doesn’t matter!” Kaylee screamed.
“Go away, little boy!” Latrina yelled. “You’re just jealous because you’re a tadpole and they’re…um.” She rethought her analogy. “Because you’re a little larva and they’re like butterflies.”
“Butterflies? They’re like pterodactyls! They’re extinct! You guys are in love with rotting skeletons! Strother Martin hasn’t made a movie since 1980 because he’s dead! He’s buried in the Court of Remembrance in Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills…number G 62420!”
They knew this already. They had some friends who had made a pilgrimage to his grave site, burning candles and clutching 8x10 glossies, though like most girls these four chose not to address the issue of his death at all. They were aware his resurrected films were quite old. But weren’t movies and their stars about fantasy? Did
Justin really think he’d be screwing millionaire Spunk one day in his little bedroom with its posters of painted and long-haired wrestlers who looked like rock stars and rock stars who looked like wrestlers? It was what Strother represented. Though perhaps this was why Kaylee and her friends loved Buck best, they half recognized. Because he was still alive, out there breathing in the world right now.
“Why does it bother you so much, Justin?” Taffeta asked him, screwing up her face.
“Why? I don’t have a girlfriend, that’s why. And at this rate, I won’t have a girlfriend until I’m impotent! And watch…by the time I’m some stinky old hobo like Buck Druthers, the fads will all change and girls like you will want to date toddlers!”
“You’re sick, Justin,” Latrina said. “That’s why nobody wants to date you.”
“I’m sick? I’ve seen how you look at my grandfather, Latrina…and I saw you wriggling around in his lap last Christmas eve, when he was dressed up as Santa Claus. I think even Kaylee enjoyed sitting in his lap too much…”
“You bitch!” Kaylee shrieked at her brother like a descending hawk, springing to her feet.
“Grow up,” Shenandoah told him. “But you’re right, Justin…you’ve got a long way to go before any girl would want to go out with you.”
This final insult, coming from Shenandoah of all people, made Justin’s face flood red with embarrassment and fury, but he choked it down as best he could, turned and walked briskly out of the livingroom. Stomped upstairs to his own room.
“Don’t cry, little baby boy!” Kaylee shouted after him, triumphantly.
* * *
What Justin might not admit to his sister was that he actually liked Buck Druthers’ new movie, Heart Attack, which he’d seen in the theater last week only because his best friend Jason insisted. Druthers had played a serial killer who ate the hearts of his victims (teenage girls), pursued by a cop played by Burt Reynolds, called out of retirement to hunt the madman down. Justin had to admit that Druthers did a fair job in it, though the gory special effects impressed him more. Also begrudgingly, he had to admit that the guest appearance of a computer-generated Jack Elam was well achieved. This movie was a smash, closing in on the success of Sssssss, despite Druthers’ unsavory character. But grandbabes were expected to play wild-eyed kooks …they were often more popular for their dangerous roles than their cuddly grandpa characters.
It was the musical movies that Buck had brought into vogue that really rubbed Justin the wrong way. Since his unexpected arrival on the scene as Julia Roberts’ lovably loony grandfather in the immensely successful Good Glory, for which he’d won an Oscar, Druthers had become a sensation and almost single-handedly brought about the grandbabe phen-omenon (aptly seized upon and relentlessly pushed by canny marketeers). The song Druthers sang for his grandchildren in Good Glory had led to a spate of movies with greater musical opportunities, culminating most recently in a $300,000,000 remake of The Wizard of Oz in which Druthers played a scruffy and rusty Tin Woodsman alongside Jim Carrey as the Scarecrow and a computer-generated Cowardly Lion voiced by Robin Williams. In this film, Druthers soft-shoed along the yellow brick road and sang in his characteristic, trademarked style:
“If I only had a skibeddy dibbedy dibeddy dibeddy doo! Picture me…skibeddy doo…a balcony…skabeddy skibbedy doo…”
These kinds of little interjections had been used in his Good Glory song, and his audience had not tired of them. But songs like this in movies like that made Justin Spring want to hurl something heavy through the TV screen. He imagined pushing the family TV over like Robert DeNiro did to his TV as the alienated and sexually frustrated cabbie in Taxi Driver, one of Justin’s favorite movies. (Justin could quote from the movie at length, had each narrated diary entry memorized by heart.) Recently Kaylee had watched a video of DeNiro in Rocky and Bullwinkle and said the actor looked cute in it. Justin had cringed. DeNiro belonged to him. The younger DeNiro of Raging Bull and The Deer Hunter. Men of violent, decisive action.
* * *
Heart Attack was now the number one movie in America, and there was talk of another Oscar for Buck Druthers plus a sequel with Buck returning as the cannibalistic psycho Gustav Nife. Furthermore, Buck would be making a public appearance at the Boyd’s Megaplex Cinemas next weekend to promote a special screening of Heart Attack on every one of the Megaplex’s twenty-four screens. The money raised from that night’s box office would be donated to the National Heart Association.
Justin learned of the news when he heard Kaylee screaming downstairs. Consequently, she was on the phone for hours tracking down and informing her friends, so as to make arrangements for the four of them to be there. Justin overheard snatches of her conversations.
“Can you imagine if we get close enough to get his autograph, and touch him! Oh my God, bitch, I’ve got to wear my Buck tee shirt!”
“I’m going to wear my Buck Sucks tee shirt,” Justin said.
“Shut up, bitch,” Kaylee snarled. “Yeah, Shen, it’s my sibling again. Same old whining.” She moved the receiver from her ear. “Justin, Shenandoah says you’re jealous because you’re just a seed and Buck is a flower.”
“Tell her I’m a…a tasty baked potato with sour cream and he’s this really old potato in a cupboard with all these ugly weird growths all over it.”
“She heard you. She says to kiss her ass.”
“I wish,” he muttered to himself, stalking from the room.
* * *
Standing bedside the battered car his parents had bought him, parked at about the center of the Boyd’s Megaplex lot, Justin tried to imagine what the huge cinema complex would look like in several days, with limousines parked out front, perhaps huge spotlights sweeping columns of light across the bottoms of clouds.
He thought he might go in now and see a movie by himself, but he wasn’t sure if he were really in the mood. While he leaned there he eyed two teenage girls as they walked past him on their way to the cinema. One of them caught him staring and looked over at him. Justin smiled at her shyly. She just arched an eyebrow, sneered, and looked away. Justin watched her blue-jean gripped bottom recede, dwindle, become swallowed inside the theater where she would dream that Buck Druthers would want to eat her heart.
Buck skibeddy fucking Druthers. He was responsible for a rise in divorces, as fathers and grandfathers left their wives of many years to take on hot little high school girls who had suddenly found the old codgers irresistible. Young men just wanted to screw like panting dogs, Cosmopolitan advised, but older men took their time in making love (even if drugs were often needed to make it possible at all). How was Justin going to become a seasoned lover when he wasn’t getting any practice now?
Justin drifted closer to the theater aimlessly, thinking he might purchase some snacks at least, play some video games, half-blindly buy a ticket to something with a lot of soothing gunfights, car wrecks and explosions. But when he got close to the entrance, he was soured by the sight of a cute little redhead with her midriff bared up to the bottom of her breasts and down to the border of her pubis, holding the hand of a balding, white-haired man in a sweater that looked like it hadn’t been laundered since Dubbya Dubbya Two. Justin turned to face a huge poster of Buck as Gustav Nife in the window, and made his hand into a gun which he pointed at that seamed face with the stubbly cheeks girls imagined scraping against their tender flesh. His thumb fell like the hammer of the magnum his dad kept locked up in his gun cabinet.
* * *
Waiting in line at the Megaplex was like waiting to board a ride at Disneyland, but it only enhanced the anticipation, the intoxicating suspense shared by Kaylee, Latrina, Taffeta and Shenandoah, who had already dyed her green hair platinum blond like Spunk had it now, and was letting it grow out so she could make a forward-facing ponytail out of it. The girls babbled excitedly, all of them having a distinctly Latino and/or African-American sound-ing accent despite their being all too Anglo.
There were indeed spotlights painting the night sky,
white stretch limos and police cars and local camera crews. The mingled sounds of the crowd lent it all a tingling atmosphere like a carnival or perhaps more like a concert. Kaylee was visibly trembling nonstop, seized onto Shenandoah’s arm abruptly and tightly. “What if I got close enough to grab him and kiss him, Shen?”
“Oh, man, they’d grab you and arrest you.”
“It would be worth it, bitch, and you know it!” she cackled as if drugged. “I am going to stick my tongue down his throat!”
“I’m going to grab his sack!” Taffeta yelled. They all squealed loudly enough to splinter glass, at that statement.
“Just think, he was actually inside one of these limos!” Latrina said as they drew closer to the building, where Buck would be sitting at a long table in the lobby with representatives of the community and the National Heart Association, to shake hands, sign autographs and accept additional contributions. He himself had suffered a heart attack a few years ago and wore a pacemaker which pushed out his skin in a hard bump that young girls dreamed of cupping in their delicate hands, running their tongues over.
Honey is Sweeter than Blood Page 7
