“Can I stop a second, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?” Head Breakfast whined from another room, wiping the sweaty eggs whites on his temple. He was on double duty moving furniture around. Tricky when you’re naked. “I’m hungry!”
“Of course you are,” at least three people laughed.
“Fuck the shit out of that pussy,” Suzie grunted, those overplucked snaky sperm brows on her forehead all furrowed.
What did she just say? Larry thought. Nasty. He looked for the boom mic, hoped it hadn’t picked up that line. No one would want to hear something like that, let alone see it.
It was getting done. Until he started to obsess over the “Sammy” tattoo again, starting to wonder if there was a way they could cover it up. With a beach towel? Maybe a houseplant? Maybe a fire.
One time, Larry had to deal with a tattoo of a Dashboard Mary on one of his actresses. Her trick was bobbing her bobble head just like it. And he’d seen a four-armed Mary on another girl. “Mary Fishnu,” she called the creature. Sometimes he imagined his own Stone Mary coming off the lawn-ornament factory line with her teeth bared like a chimp and all four hands smashing cymbals, and those moments almost always led to silent screams. Sometimes he laughed.
Now the vein was back in his head. He thought he could cover it with blood if he had to.
But then he noticed the “Sammy” beginning to smear with the sweat and the friction. He couldn’t believe it. Tattoos were so popular now, people were apparently faking them with ballpoint pen. “Sammy” turned into “Hammy,” then turned into “Amy.”
There was no “Amy” in the movie either. It was more than he could take.
Right then, Joe started to lose his erection and jammed it back in Suzie’s mouth, pushing out her cheek again. Tap, tap, tap. “You feel that?” Tap, tap, tap. Deafening. And bad timing really.
Snap, snap, snap.
And before he knew what he was doing, Larry had a forearm under Joe’s throat and was throwing him back over a crackling, plastic-covered sofa.
“Hey!” Suzie yelled.
“Shut up, cunt!” Larry screamed at her. “And who’s this Sammy? Where the fuck is Sammy anyway? What does he think about all this?!”
It was amazing Suzie answered as calm as she did.
“My name is Sammy, Larry,” she said. “My real name. What’s yours again?”
Larry stopped a second, then turned all his attention to Joe.
“Hi, Joe. Hold this…”
He delivered a hard shot to Joe’s nose, the locomotive punch he’d learned from the fist of the Virgin Mary’s strapping lumberjack of a grandson earlier that morning, sending a starfish of black blood across his cheeks.
“But how did you know that?” Suzie was still asking, used to fighting all around her, apparently. “My real name, I mean…”
Joe soaked up the blow, then hit Larry back about fifteen times while Larry was thinking about Suzie’s question.
And Joe could fight. The fucker was scrappy, always in good shape, every appendage red and well muscled. And as Joe beat him into a defensive curl, he found himself eye to eye with the angriest end of his actor. Back when Larry first started doing commercials, they warned him that the camera always added ten pounds. But in porn, it turned out the camera took off three inches. And Joe still looked good.
Larry covered his head, deeper and deeper underwater. Porn kids were tougher than they looked. He’d heard they were about a year from fucking modified holes in their faces. Glengarry swore he’d seen this, in spite of it making no sense biologically. And this was Glen talking, one of the business’s foremost anal pioneers. They wrote it off as something they’d never understand, saying, “Every generation adds a new hole.”
But they still had the same weaknesses.
Desperate under the barrage of body blows, Larry finally fell back on what he knew.
“Skins always win,” his gym teacher told him once. Not today.
He grabbed Joe by his erection, catching it before it could turtle all the way back into his body for safety. No one believed it later, but Larry actually picked him up with it, held him off the ground like one of those retractable tape measures you would unspool just to see how long it could hover in midair before it collapsed. There was enough blood to bend it, bend it, bend it. Until...
Snap.
It turned out an erection broke like any limb, only it turned three colors first, even more colors after. Joe passed out from shock, but not before Larry straddled him to rap the top of his head just like the hollow coconut it was with a “tap tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap tap...”
“You feel that? You feel that?” Then Larry tried that stupid Eurotrash accent, “Are you coming again already?”
Just as everyone was tackling him, Larry dealt a dozen-some savage elbows. They landed easily, almost like he was dealing cards. And when he slipped the KY grip of his sound guy, and smelled the dank, wet-earth exhale of someone else lining up over his shoulder for a perfect shot, he delivered his last elbow so dead-on that the satisfaction rang through his bones like the sweet spot of an aluminum bat.
But it was poor, poor Head Breakfast who caught it, the only one on the set who didn’t deserve such a betrayal. H.B. stood up slow to stare at Larry in shock as tiny trickles of red yolk covered his Eggs Over Easy, now transformed into Eggs Benedict Arnold, pinballing through the stubble on his skull like Pachinko, finally filling the corners of his eyes until he blinked.
Larry escaped to his car eventually, shrugging off all the howls and threats, to drive around and steady his breathing again. He was desperate to find at least one station on his A.M. dial, but there was nothing but fucking “Seasons In The Sun” as always. So he settled on a dead stretch between the static where he thought he heard a voice. A voice that sounded an awful lot like a countdown. He’d heard the voices there before, usually on that stretch of highway where he sometimes saw shadows of giants moving in the woods. He had no idea this was the night the drive-in debuted their new technology: piping the soundtrack through the dead air on your radio so they could save money on those speakers that hung on your car window like cold food at the car hop.
If he had known this, it may have saved about eighty lives.
He turned up the volume so he could have a conversation.
When Billy woke up still alive, he was disappointed he didn’t get to hold up the toy “Space Shuttle” in his mugshot. Then, about an hour into imprisonment, something finally started to dawn on him. He was suddenly sure that, with her skill cultivated from years of watching monstrous movie lips out her bedroom window, the girl he loved must have known that Radio Shack clerk was talking to the cops.
She’d ditched him on purpose, almost got him arrested that time. And this time she did.
He paced his cell awhile, humming the only Cult song he knew.
“…talk about fun… talk about fun… talk about fun…”
Then, just like his dog, he put his nose on the bars and waited for no one to come and bail him out.
Billy was only in jail for three days, but he scratched himself to pretend it was three years. His uncle Lee had been in way longer than that, and when he came out, he had tattoos of hash marks across his ribs, one line for every day, the usual fag bundle of four sticks with a fifth slashed through the middle. The gashes ran the length of his body, and when he first showed the family at the neighborhood pool, everyone thought they were stitches. His uncle went along with this misconception, swearing he’d had his heart removed.
When he was in there, Uncle Lee had also been pressured by the Aryan nation to get swastikas on his arms. But to cope with this decision, he got tattoos of arms on his arms, with swastikas that never quite crossed the border onto his own body. Technically. The difference might seem minor, but it was enough of a rationalization to allow Lee to work out sleeveless. Until his release.
Inside, Billy lifted his shirt and cut days into his body that he hadn’t served. It made him feel good, like a martyr. Someti
mes he did this with one foot not quite nine inches off the ground.
Billy used to dream about Bully at least every other night before they started plotting together. Once the plan was locked down, it switched to every night. And even though he understood that dreams were by far the strangest things human beings experienced on a daily basis, just as they had no business in good fiction, they has no business in conversations with her. He’d made that mistake before, and Billy found this impossibly unfair. It was like a trip to outer space or stumbling onto your third-grade teacher killing himself with a banana (another frequent dream for Billy) and not being able to report what you’d seen to anyone. Well, you could, but nobody would care because everyone takes this trip to outer space every night, touching down in a crater on the supermoon, or watching botched suicide attempts with a vast variety of fruits and vegetables.
But there was that one dream that deserved special consideration, one that occasionally squeezed out the others, even her. Nothing too tangible after he woke up. Just the memory flash of a child’s skeleton, no, just the rib cage, lying in a shallow grave. Billy would remember climbing in the grave to get a better look and seeing a red rubber ball bouncing around inside, ricocheting off the curve of the bones. In jail, this dream took over after a cop hollered “lights out.”
On the second day of his incarceration, Billy started to study his tormentors. No sign of Bigbee, his White Whale, as he was that breed of exotic Highway Patrolman and wouldn’t be hanging out in the local precinct house. But one of the cops had a hint of a feather tattoo on his bicep, maybe hooked to a dreamcatcher ring under his sleeve, so Billy thought he might do.
The other officers called him “Bucky Balls” because of the “magnetic way he drew new collars in close to talk,” hopefully to confide, to “give up the goods,” as they say. And there must have been something to this nickname because Billy did start talking to him, telling him all about his crazy dreams. And Bucky Balls must have been starving for a sense of community because, after only a couple hours of chatter, he gave up everything. They apparently had video of Bully leaving the scene… of somewhere, or at least some hazy video from one of the new police “dash cams.” Recorded on tape was this small, blonde-haired girl leaving a parking lot near a crime scene at high speed. B.B. said they were trying to tie her in with another video, of a small dark-haired girl running along a concrete divider with a gym bag over her shoulder, just blocks away from another crime scene. One on Eerie Drive, Erie, Pennsylvania, which ended with a circle of dead police officers minutes after the detonation of a bomb.
“When was that?” Billy asked, terrified.
“1953.”
He rolled his eyes at the joke, but was secretly relieved. He was ready to believe that shit, and Bucky Balls knew it.
“Whereabouts currently unknown. Anything can happen on Eeeeeeerie…” B.B. laughed.
“Have you ever seen that movie they based on the ‘pizza bomber’ case?” one of the other cops asked.
“No. Why?”
“It was called Delivered Relatively Fast and Hot or Your Next Five Pizzas Are Free. I always thought they could have come up with something catchier, some other pizza-delivery saying. You know, like… I can’t remember. It’s on the tip of my dick…”
Billy still thought of him as a friend, probably suffering from what the newscaster in Die Hard wrongly referred to as “Helsinki Syndrome.” But it gave him something to believe in while he sulked in his cell. He even told Bucky Balls about their illegal funeral for her cat. And he probably would have told them even more, until his interview on Day Two, when about six more cops stood around him as they played Billy a series of cassette tapes featuring his own voice, detailing approximately six hours of bomb-making details, as well as the eerie blow-by-blow planning of the attempted kidnapping and murder of an Erie, Pennsylvania, K-9 officer.
When they flipped one of the cassettes over, Billy caught a glimpse of the labels.
“Bad Luck Bomb,” and “Billy’s Kick-Ass Mix.”
He closed his eyes, realizing that this was what she’d been putting into mailboxes on that officer’s regular beat. That these tapes were what Billy, amazingly, had raised the red flag for, to incriminate himself even more.
Luck bomb indeed, he thought.
There was also a witness who claimed to have seen Billy in the woods, right before he’d been choked out and arrested. Billy probably could have confused the witness at a line-up, as he’d purposely worn a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey to blend it with the other 50 volunteers. But he lost his temper at the mere mention of this witness, refusing to repeat the phrase, “Do we win anything for finding her first?” as any person would have fingered the asshole who said something so obnoxious during a missing-persons search.
Later that night when the grilling was over, Bucky Balls sat at a desk near Billy’s holding cell, watching a small black-and-white TV, listening in on the CB as two rookie officers declared their love for a certain dispatcher.
“I heard she just got engaged,” one of them muttered as the other deflated.
The television screen was tiny, but Billy could still make out the title card for Evel Knievel’s The Last of the Gladiators documentary. B.B. took mercy when he saw Billy’s nose rabbiting the bars, and turned the television and the volume up so they could watch it together. They even talked a bit about Evel breaking his arms, and that poor cameraman who lost an eye. B.B. brought up Happy Days, laughing about Fonzie always jumping sharks and fried chicken. Eventually, they decided Evel should have been a little more evil with a name like that.
In the middle of the night, a voice tried to scare him straight with talks of “graduating to the big house.” It whispered something about how huge everyone can shit in a toilet, then something about how that’ll tell you exactly the size you can “take up the ass.” Billy reminded the voice that his holding cell had no toilet, and that when he shit, it was typically nervous little rabbit pellets from lovesickness and lack of proper digestion, and the voice mercifully moved on to another cell.
When he woke, Billy asked for some water, and an officer whose name tag read “Mahoney” started to sing.
“Gimme some water... ‘cause I shot a man on the Mexican border...”
Ironically, this exchange would trigger an alternate future for Officer Edward Joseph “Money” Mahoney, who would now maintain his position on the police department for his entire life, never pursuing his dreams of music. Everything else in this timeline would remain exactly the same.
The morning of Billy’s release was also his last interview.
Impossibly, even more cops squeezed into that room, including the public defender. They came at him hard, ignoring the lawyer completely, but there was something else in their voice that gave him pause, even hope. They’d lost a bit of their swagger. Maybe their case.
“Let me get this straight, a vet put your cat to sleep?”
“No. Hers.”
“I thought you said-”
“It was my dog. She had a cat.”
“But I thought you said-”
“No, she was mad about her cat.”
“A cat named ‘Shaft.’ Impossible.”
“No. Well, sorta. More Shaft in Africa than Shaft, she would say. I told you…”
This made their eyes glow, and they left the room to huddle awhile. He wasn’t sure why he lied about that, but told the truth about so many more incriminating things.
“Here’s the thing, Billy Boy,” Bucky Balls said when they got back. “We actually found this strange cat mummy you described, washed up along Elbow Creek. It goes a long way towards backing up some parts of your story, but…”
Holding on to that glimmer of hope, Billy stepped it up. He was suddenly convinced they were just having fun, pretending there was a real crime in their insignificant corner of the woods. Like all small-town cops, they didn’t have shit to do except imitate television versions of themselves.
So Billy gave them the satisfacti
on. He begged. He pleaded. He cajoled. He negotiated. He bargained. He lied. And finally he just admitted he was trying to impress a girl.
And what the hell, the cop believed him. They let his ass out.
The night before Billy hit the street again, Bully broke into Bigbeep’s house to leave a dreamcatcher behind, just for kicks. After a cursory search, though, she realized it wasn’t necessary, that every cop was issued boxes upon boxes of Tactical Footwear, and the crusty pile of law-enforcing tube socks under his mattress meant that he’d been using them as personal dreamcatchers for years, wetdreamcatchers anyway, soaking up the ammo when he finished twirling his baton and walking his slumberland beat.
She took a bag of dog treats as a distraction, just in case he had a new partner, then left them all over the house like Easter eggs. She decided his next partner should be healthy if he wasn’t happy.
While she looked around the officer’s one-bedroom shitbox, she thought about the movie The Thing, as she often did, how the remake got rid of pesky females altogether, unlike the Howard Hawks original where Margaret Sheridan shrieked and flirted her way around First Contact. Her mother joked that the famous working title of the film, Watch the Skies, should have been Watch the Guys. She imagined herself more as Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady, forever strolling through the world with a roll of dynamite, daring anyone to get too close.
She kicked around the shitbox, and she was immediately convinced that the cop was building something, too. Maybe not a bomb, but he did have three bizarre, custom-made weapons laid out on his kitchen table, constructed out of various household items: an umbrella, a gigantic cellular phone, a very realistic toy pistol, a plastic sword. The last one was an object that, years later when the smoke cleared, would be given more lab tests than the rest of the weapons combined (lab rats would only discover he’d used it to scrape ice off of his windshield).
The Last Projector Page 17
