EQMM, September-October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Well...

  That's the kind of thing we talked about nights, after Video Vic's 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 Video Vic's.

  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, Scorsese, De Niro, 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 asses 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's name-above-the-title directing.

  In the meantime, we had to put up with working minimum-wage jobs. Mine was at Video Vic's, 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 De Palma, 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 trying 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 with 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 blond 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 with most scream queens is, 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 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. And the marrying kind never expose their beavers except in doctors’ offices.

  Couple of 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 of 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'd resurfaced fifteen hundred miles and three years later. Except that instead of being dark-haired, brown-eyed, and slender, she was now blond, 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 what ever 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, 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 bang 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 bang her, wasn't it?” He laughed. “In your mind she's still this scream queen, isn't she? Some freaking virgin. She's nobody now."

  "Then why do 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. 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 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 around the counter fast and shouted at him. Then I started running at him. But he beat me to the door.

  He stood there. “Good night, ladies. 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 show 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?"

  "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."

  "L.A. 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.

  Af
ter 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. 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 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 okay?"

  She shrugged. Said nothing. Hands still covering her face. When she took them down, she said, “I left L.A. 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—"