Snuff

by Chuck Palahniuk

  But, no, compliment or not, that kind of dialogue would just never read…

  Milling all around us, the too-naked men form a sea of tattoos and scars. Rashes and scabs. Stretch marks and sunburns. A catalogue of everything that can go wrong with your skin. Beyond the mosquito bites and pimples, Branch Bacardi stands with Cord Cuervo, the two of their heads leaned together, talking. Bacardi points at me, and Cuervo looks. Cuervo nods his head and whispers into Bacardi’s ear, and they both laugh.

  I say, let him laugh. The Cord Cuervo Super Deluxe tapers too much; from a circumcised head the size of a pencil eraser, the finger-long shaft spreads to a base big as a beer can.

  An ergonomic nightmare.

  One could always ask Bacardi about the mass-production aspects, the assembly lines in China where sweatshop workers wrap and package endless silicone-rubber copies of his erection, still hot from stainless-steel molds. Or they package and ship jiggling armies of pink plastic vaginas cast from the shaved pussy of Cassie Wright. Chinese slave labor, by hand, tweezing in pubic hairs or airbrushing different shades of red or pink or blue. Accurate down to Cassie’s episiotomy scar. Bacardi’s every vein and wart. The way people used to make death masks, casting plaster faces of celebrities in the hours between their demise and their decomposition.

  Long after Cassie Wright becomes old and demented or dead and rotten, her vagina will still haunt us, tucked under beds, buried in underwear drawers and bathroom cabinets, next to dog-eared skin magazines. Or, showcased in antique stores, Bacardi’s rubber erection, priced the same as the hand-carved scrimshaw dildos of lonely, long-dead Nantucket whaling wives.

  A kind of immortality.

  A person can always ask: How does it feel, that the cock of Branch Bacardi and the vagina of Cassie Wright are reduced to kitsch? Camp objets like Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s soup can.

  A person could ask: Thanks to the Branch Bacardi Butt Plug, how’s it feel to know that people around the globe go to work, to school, to church with your dick wedged up their anus?

  How’s it feel seeing your dick and balls, or your clit and cunt flaps, cloned a zillion times and sitting on the shelf behind some gum-chewing porn-store clerk? Or, worse, your most private bits heaped in some bargain bin, strangers lifting, squeezing, pinching, and rejecting them the way they would avocados at the supermarket?

  But, again, this dialogue just does not read.

  One could attempt a funny anecdote, a true story about a dear friend. Carl. A huge fan of the Branch Bacardi Super Deluxe. How one morning Carl looked in the toilet and saw thin pink squiggles in his bowel movement. Worms. Ghastly pinworms. But when he carried in a cardboard sample-box of his shit for testing, the lab results came back negative. The pink threads weren’t parasites. They were rubber. The pink rubber foreskin of his Super Deluxe had begun to degrade and flake apart. When Carl’s proctologist used the word, that’s exactly how Carl felt: Flaky. Degrading. Degraded.

  One could risk sharing the story about how Carl hooked up with a trick – oh, years ago. And the two men went home together, only to discover they were both big passive bottoms. To satisfy everyone, they shared a two-headed Branch Bacardi special. This happy bumping of sphincters worked fine until – wouldn’t you know it – Carl felt his paramour du jour was enjoying more than his allotted half. What had started as a casual, anonymous encounter turned into a savage butt-sex tug-of-war, only with no knot in the rope, no flag to keep one partner from gobbling down all the shared real estate. A greed guard. No Berlin Wall of silicone rubber to keep everyone honest.

  Yes, a person might risk such a story, but the last fact a celebrity cocksman like Branch Bacardi wants to hear is that his product is defective.

  And God forbid Bacardi think I’m Carl. That I’ve invented a friend to hide behind.

  Under my arm, I’m pitted out so badly that sweat’s soaked into Mr. Toto’s canvas skin, bleaching out Bette Midler’s message – “Let’s Always Stay Best Friends! Love, Bette” – leaving the words just a blotched blue smudge. Whether it’s from the blue pills or feeling nervous, I’ve sweated out Carol Channing and Barbra Streisand. “Our Weekend in Paris Was Heaven. Yours Always, Barbra.”

  This actor 72, shifting his bouquet from one arm to the other, he looks at Mr. Toto and says, “What’s Goldie Hawn like?”

  One can’t truly cry, because the Bette Midler was a fake. So was the Carol Channing. And the Jane Fonda. Okay, the truth is, they’re all fake. I wrote them all myself, in different handwritings and different colors of ink.

  One just cannot approach a star like Cassie Wright with an empty autograph hound. I wanted her to sign her own name among a galaxy of stars. As if we were all close friends.

  The truth is, I haven’t met any of these women.

  After Miss Wright signs, I plan to copy her handwriting and add, “Thanks for the Fuck of a Lifetime!”

  One just can’t ask a big star like Cassie Wright for that kind of personal inscription. Especially if it’s a lie.

  And you can’t tell an actor like Branch Bacardi that, thanks to his Super Deluxe, you have a callus on your prostate. Even if it’s the truth.

  His nipple must’ve scabbed over, because Bacardi’s stopped blotting it with the toilet paper. Instead, he’s fingering a necklace. A pendant. Some small gold something hanging from a chain around his neck. Using both hands, he holds the pendant with only his fingertips. Picking with a fingernail, he pops the pendant open and looks inside. It’s a locket or a box. No doubt, hidden inside is a little portrait or a lock of hair.

  Another form of immortality.

  The next time he looks over, if Mr. 600 does approach, perhaps I could tell him about the Vatican, how, if you ask politely, the curators will pull out drawer after drawer to show you the relics within. According to Carl, nested inside some drawers are carved marble dicks. Penises. In alabaster, onyx, obsidian. Row after row, drawer after drawer of ancient pricks, each one numbered, keyed to some masterpiece left castrated. This collection of hundreds of numbered dicks, they were all chiseled off Greek and Roman statues, Egyptian and Byzantine, and replaced with pasted-on plaster fig leaves.

  Bronze Minoan pricks, hacked off, small as bullets. Etruscan terra-cotta pricks, crumbling to dust. These priceless wieners, they’re nothing the righteous want you to see, but they’re still too important to discard.

  The same as, inside all those nightstands and glove compartments, all those Branch Bacardi dildos and Cassie Wright vaginas.

  I could tell Bacardi that the electric vibrator was first marketed in the 1890s. The first household appliances to be electrified were the sewing machine, the fan, and the vibrator. Americans enjoyed electric vibrators ten years before electric vacuum cleaners and irons. Twenty years before electric frying pans were brought to the market.

  To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.

  The talent wrangler walks past me, carrying a potato-chip bag stuffed full of bloody paper napkins from the actor with the split lip. Red blood and orange barbecue flavoring smeared into the white paper. At Branch Bacardi, the young lady stops a moment and he drops his toilet paper spotted with nipple blood into her bag.

  Watching the young lady, the boy with his flowers, actor 72, says, “I hate her,” his grip crackling, crushing, crumpling the clear plastic funnel holding his roses. His fists squeeze, tighter and tighter, until the thorns poke through.

  Watching the talent wrangler, actor 72 says, “How much you want to bet that bitch trashes every letter anybody sends to Cassie Wright, no matter how important what’s inside or how much a guy really just wants to tell Cassie how much she means to him?”

  If he comes over, that’s what I’ll tell Bacardi about: those Vatican curators with their dusty drawers full of priceless, faceless, numbered dicks.

  Inside his necklace is something no one else can see, but Branch Bacardi looks at it for a long time. Measured by the movies playing overhead, he looks at his secret for a three-way
…two blow jobs…and one clitoral orgasm.

  Wouldn’t you know it, then Bacardi looks up, at me. And he snaps his locket shut.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  8

  Sheila

  During my initial pitch meeting with Ms. Wright, I asked her what she could tell me about a Roman empress named Messalina.

  Our pitch meeting, our first face-to-face, we met in a coffee bar, drinking cappuccinos and bumping knees under a dinky marble-topped table. Ms. Wright sat twisted to look out the window. Legs crossed at the knee, the way that’s supposed to give you veins. Eyes not following anyone walking past. Not watching the dogs on leashes or the babies in strollers. Not looking at me, Ms. Wright asked had I ever heard of an actress named Norma Talmadge?

  Or Vilma Banky? John Gilbert? Karl Dane or Emil Jannings?

  Her false eyelashes made bigger with mascara, not blinking, Ms. Wright said Norma Talmadge had been a star in silent movies. The number-one box-office draw in 1923. Got three thousand fan letters every week. In 1927, it was this Norma person who by accident stepped into a patch of wet cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and started all the movie stars leaving their hand- and footprints.

  A couple of years after the concrete, Hollywood started shooting sound movies. Despite a year working with a voice coach, Norma Talmadge opened her yap and out comes a shrill Brooklyn squeal. Hollywood’s top male star, John Gilbert, piped his lines high-pitched as a canary. Mary Pickford, who played girls and young women, barked deep as a truck driver. Vilma Banky’s dialogue was lost in her Hungarian accent. Emil Jannings’, in his German accent. Karl Dane’s were drowned in his thick Danish accent.

  Low clouds kept it dark outside. The awning over the window didn’t help. Ms. Wright sat, focused on her own reflection, her eyes and lips reflected on the inside of the coffee-shop window, and said, “John Gilbert, he never made another picture. Boozed himself to death by age thirty-seven. Karl Dane shot himself.”

  All of these stars, the most powerful actors in film, they were all gone in an instant.

  True fact.

  What sound movies did to their careers, Ms. Wright said, High Definition was doing the same to a new generation of actors. Delivering too much information. An overdose of truth. Stage makeup didn’t look like skin, not anymore. Lipstick looked like red grease. Foundation, like a coat of stucco. Razor burn and ingrown hairs might as well be leprosy.

  Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer…or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded – the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty.

  True fact.

  In the past year, Ms. Wright had only been offered one script. A low-budget musical, a fetish vehicle based on the Judy Garland-Vincent Minnelli classic about a sweet, innocent young woman who goes to the World’s Fair and falls in love with a handsome young sadist. Called Beat Me in St. Louis.

  She learned the songs and everything. Took dance lessons. Never got a second callback.

  Looking out the window, her eyes fall shut long enough for her to sing, her voice almost a whisper, almost a lullaby. Her face tilts up a tad, as if to catch a spotlight, and Ms. Wright sings, “…I got bang, bang, banged on the trolley…”

  Her eyes peel open, and her voice trails away. Ms. Wright swallows nothing. Slumps to one side, to reach a hand into her purse on the floor. Takes out a pair of black sunglasses.

  Pries them open and slides them onto her face.

  Still looking at nothing outside the coffee-shop windows, not the street full of cars driving by or the sidewalk where people walked. An endless stream of extras. No-name characters opening umbrellas or holding open newspapers to protect their hair. Not watching any of this, Ms. Wright says, “So what’s your brainstorm?”

  My pitch. How come I’ve been phoning her agent. Phoned every production company where she’s done any work over the past five years. Written letters. Why I’d insisted I wasn’t a stalker. Some pud-puller.

  I asked, Did she know Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll?

  And Ms. Wright’s black sunglasses turned to look at me.

  During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution.

  True fact.

  Ms. Wright, her plucked eyebrows arch to show above her dark sunglasses. The black lenses reflect me. Reflect the paper rim of her coffee cup, smeared red with lipstick. Her lips say, “Do you know I’m a mom?”

  Her sunglasses reflect me wearing a tweed suit, my fingers slipping the latch, opening my briefcase, leaning forward, my hair pulled back, twisted into a French knot.

  For my pitch, I planned to develop a project based on that first sex doll. Work the Nazi angle. Work the history angle. Hammer together a story with genuine educational value.

  Ms. Wright’s lips say, “Yeah, I had my baby about the age you’re at now.”

  Do this Hitler sex-doll project, do it the right way, I say how it will make a pile of money for that baby. Whoever that baby grew into, Ms. Wright can give him a college trust fund, the down payment on a house, seed money for a business. Wherever that baby has ended up, he’ll just be forced to love her.

  Ms. Wright turns her face to look at herself, reflected in the window. The reflections of her reflections of her reflections, between the window and her black sunglasses, all those Cassie Wrights shrinking smaller and smaller, until they disappear into infinity.

  The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you’d be ruined. Overdosed on information.

  True fact.

  The wrong idea could take root and grow inside you.

  Ms. Wright, her sunglasses showed me. Reflected me opening a folder. Taking out a contract. Pulling the cap off a pen and reaching it across the table. My face, flat and smooth with confidence. My own eyes, unblinking. My tweed suit.

  Her lips said, “Is that 100 Strokes shampoo that I smell?” She smiled and said, “Now, who was that…?”

  The Roman Empress Messalina.

  “Messalina,” Ms. Wright repeated, and she took the pen.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  9

  Mr. 600

  Kid 72 is easy enough to find, now that his bunch of roses start coming apart, dropping a trail of wilted flower petals to follow him around the room. Dude 72, the kid, his white rose petals follow him as he dogs Sheila around, asking her, “Can I go soon?” Looking at the flowers in his hands, he goes, “Is it true?” He goes, “You think she’s going to die?”

  Dude 137, the television dude, goes, “Yes, young lady, when might we view the body?”

  Kid 72 goes, “You ain’t funny.”

  And the Sheila babe says, “Why would Ms. Wright want to die?”

  Six hundred of us waiting in one room, we’re breathing the same air for the third or fourth time. Almost no oxygen left, just the sweet stink of hairspray. Stetson cologne. Old Spice. Polo. The sour smoke of marijuana from little one-hitter pipes. Dudes stand at the buffet, scarfing down the candy smell of powdered doughnuts, chili-cheese nachos, peanut butter. Dudes swallowing and farting at the same time. Belching up gas bubbles of black coffee from their guts. Breathing out through wads of Juicy Fruit gum. Chewed mouthfuls of pink bubble gum or buttered popcorn. The chemical stink of Sheila’s fat black felt pen. The what’s-left smell of the kid’s rose bunch.

  Th
e locker-room smell of some dude’s bare feet, we breathe that smell like those cheeses from France that smell like your sneakers in high school that you’d wear in gym class all year without washing them.

  Cuervo’s laid on his bronzer so thick that his arms stick down the sides of his lats. His feet stick to the concrete floor. When Cuervo takes a step, his skin peels off the floor with the sound of somebody yanking off a bandage.

  Our one bathroom we got for six hundred dudes to share, the floor’s so wet with piss that dudes stand in the doorway and do their best to hit the sink or the toilet. The reek floating out of that doorway smells bad as any step you ever took when your foot slipped instead of landing, outdoors, slick enough you guess it’s a mess before you catch a whiff of the dog turd you’ll be digging out the tread of your shoe.

  Cuervo lifts one arm, making that bandage sound as the skin peels apart, pasted down with bronzer. Cuervo lifts one elbow and ducks his head to sniff that armpit, going, “Should’ve brought along more Stetson.”

  Coming off kid 72, we got the green smell of deodorant soap. The mint tang of mouthwash.

  To bait him, I ask dude 137, will this be his first time in front of a camera?

  Dude 137 shakes his head, throwing off the smell of cigarettes, under that the smell of his stuffed teddy bear soaked in armpit sweat.

  I tell him to go easy on the wood pills. Just now, watching him from across the room, dudes are taking bets on how fast he keels over from a stroke. Dude should see how red his face looks, the veins on his forehead standing out plain as lightning bolts. Either that, I say, or he should get in the pool, put some money down on a time. At least that way he’ll make a few bucks when he overdoses.