Snuff

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Smearing cheese log on crackers, dipping celery sticks in ranch dressing, I keep talking, telling Mr. Bacardi that what’s in that brown paper bag with my number, 72, that’s everything I own in the world.

  Balancing the bouquet of roses, I’m spearing toothpicks into little wieners.

  Holding the wet autograph dog under one arm, I’m wiping barbecue sauce on garlic bread.

  Mr. Bacardi’s eyeing me. He’s making wrinkles with his forehead and a frown with his mouth. He reaches one hand to behind his neck. Then reaches back with his other, both hands touching the back of his neck, the hair of his armpits showing, gray stubble. “Hold on,” he says, and the chain around his neck goes loose, comes apart. Mr. Bacardi dangles the gold heart, swinging from the chain hanging from his hand. He holds the heart out to me and says, “Now you have this: your key to fame and fortune.”

  Swinging the heart so it flashes in the TV light, he says, “Imagine never having to work another day in your life. Dude, can you? Picture being rich and famous from today forward.”

  My adopted mom, I tell him, she’s such a hypocrite. The day she caught me with the sex surrogate, she’d come home from her cake-decorating workshop. Her and my adopted dad sleep in rooms other than each other’s, since forever. My adopted mom stops me from surfing the Web, afraid I’ll get more corrupted, and her cake-decorating workshop hires a visit from a baker who does erotic cakes, those sex cakes of naked people for a joke, where, instead of asking for a corner piece or a frosting flower, everybody jokes they want the left testicle. Such a hypocrite. After that, she’s in the kitchen practicing boiled-icing scrotums and lemon-curd assholes, mixing food coloring to make clits and nipples. Wasting gallons of buttercream frosting to squeeze out row after row of foreskins on sheets of wax paper. You open our fridge, and inside you’ll find sheets of labia, leftover lengths of thigh or butt cheek, same as the kitchen of Jeffrey Dahmer.

  My adopted dad would be in the basement, detailing tiny German nurses, nail-filing their breasts down flat, painting their fingernails dirty, and blacking out their teeth to make underage prostitutes. My adopted mom would be dyeing shredded coconut to make pubic hairs, or twisting the end of a pastry bag to pipe red veins down the side of a devil’s-food erection.

  The wet autograph dog leaks a trickle of watery ink down my side, my leg, the inside of my arm.

  And Mr. Bacardi says, “Take it.” Holding the gold heart in my face, he says, “Look inside.”

  My fingers sticky with powdered sugar and doughnut jelly, I’m still holding the little pill Dan Banyan gave me, cupped in one hand, the drug for when I need to get my wiener hard. While I’m juggling the bouquet of roses, the wood pill, and the wet dog, my fingernails pry at the gold heart until it pops open. On the inside, a baby looks out, just a squashed wad of skin, bald, the lips puckered, wrinkled as the inflatable sex surrogate. Me. I’m this baby.

  The heart still warm from Mr. Bacardi’s throat. Slippery with his baby oil.

  On the other inside sits a little pill.

  Just a plain little pill. Inside the heart.

  “Potassium cyanide,” Mr. Bacardi says.

  He says to hide it in the paper funnel of my flowers.

  “Cassie’s a born masochist,” he says. “It’s the greatest gift a son could give her…”

  I don’t know.

  She wants it, he says. She begged him to bring it, even gave him her necklace to sneak it in here.

  Mr. Bacardi says, “Say it’s from Irwin, and she’ll know.”

  I ask him, Irwin?

  “That was me,” he says. “It used to be my name.”

  He says to give it to her and she’ll die and I’ll walk out of here a rich dude. I’ll have enough money, I won’t need a family, I won’t need friends. If you’re rich enough, Mr. Bacardi says, you don’t need anybody.

  The baby inside, all wrinkled and lumpy. The smooth little pill.

  What Cassie Wright didn’t want versus what she does want.

  What she threw away versus what she’s asked for.

  Mr. Bacardi says, “Your ma’s nothing if not strong-minded. She wanted liposuction, I paid for it. She wanted boob implants, I paid. All that money to suck out fat and inject plastic.”

  The baby’s picture, she’s wore it around her neck for most of her life.

  Mr. Bacardi says, “It was Cassie wanted to shoot a porn loop to escape her folks’ house. Cassie asked could I score her something to help relax.”

  The baby’s nose, my nose. The fat chin, my chin. The squinty eyes, mine.

  My mom swallows this pill, maybe only bites down on it, and her muscles paralyze. She can’t breathe on account of her diaphragm’s stopped, and her skin turns blue. No pain or blood, and she’s just dead.

  My mom’s just dead. This here’s the last world-record gang-bang movie ever. She’s a dead hero, and we all go into the history books.

  “Added benefit,” Mr. Bacardi says, “nobody has to follow the diseased teddy-bear dude.” He says, “You’ll be saving lives, kid.”

  All I need to do is hide the cyanide in my flowers, give her the flowers, and say they’re from Irving.

  “Irwin,” says Mr. Bacardi.

  I say we’ve got a big problem.

  The wet autograph dog, it’s printed the name Cloris Leachman on my side skin, only backwards. Next to that’s printed ‘You mean the world to me’, only in reverse.

  “I swear,” Mr. Bacardi says, “it’s what she wants most.”

  That baby looking up at both of us.

  And I say no. The problem is the light, the dim light down here. Cupped in the palm of my hand, the cyanide and the wood pill, I can’t tell which is which. What’s sex and what’s death – I can’t tell the difference.

  I ask which one to give her.

  And Mr. Bacardi leans in to look, both of us breathing hot, damp air into my open hand.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  23

  Mr. 137

  The talent wrangler does her best to show me the door. A couple laughs, not two puffs on a cigarette after I ejaculate across Cassie Wright’s lovely breasts, my sperm still warm and crawling around, and the wrangler’s shoving a paper bag full of clothes into my arms. She’s telling me to get dressed. Me, I’m telling Ms. Wright how moved I was by her performance as a struggling, unstoppable teacher yearning to make a difference among the disadvantaged students of a gritty inner-city school. She was inspired. Just inspired. Her character’s vulnerability and determination, she was the best part of watching The Asshole Jungle.

  Later released as How Reamed Was My Valley.

  Later re-released as Inside Miss Jean Brodie.

  Ms. Wright squealed. She actually squealed over the fact I knew the film. That I knew all her films, from Angels with Dirty Places to Sperms of Endearment.

  Her favorite color is fuchsia. Her favorite scent: sandalwood. Ice cream: French vanilla. Pet peeve: shops that ask you to check your bags as you enter.

  Sniffing my hair, she squealed again.

  The two of us, we chatted about cotton sheets versus poly-cotton blends. We gossiped about Kate Hepburn, dyke or not? Ms. Wright says: Definitely. We nattered about our mothers. Through all our small talk, I’m pumping away, in her vagina, in her bottom, in her hand, between her breasts. Us having our little hen party, just yak-yak-yakking away, and my erection’s going in and out, in and out.

  The talent wrangler stands next to the bed, just off camera, holding a stopwatch in one hand.

  Wouldn’t you know it? Ms. Wright and I, we’re barely into the subject of favorite diets when the wrangler presses the top of the watch with her thumb and says, “Time.”

  Next, I’m holding a bag of clothes, being herded toward an open door filled with sunlight. My briefs are still looped around my ankles, so I’m waddling, my erection swinging in front of me like a blind man’s cane, and the talent wrangler has the nerve to say, “Thank you for coming…”

  One shove from me standing in the alle
y, naked, my skin still hot from the set lights, I look in the bag and see an off-brand acrylic men’s two-button rugby shirt with a one-piece collar and contrasting stripes, banded sleeves, and not the slightest hint of taper, and I put my foot down.

  These are not my clothes. Yes, the bag’s marked ‘137’, my number, but my clothes, my shoes, Mr. Toto, they’re all still back in the green room. The wrangler needs to let me backtrack. She doesn’t let me go back and look, I tell the wrangler, and I’m calling the police. My bare foot tap-tap-tapping the concrete hallway one step from the alley, I wait.

  And, looking at her watch, the wrangler says, “Okay.” She says, “Fine.” She sighs and says, “Come back and look.”

  At the top of the stairs, looking down on the few actors still waiting, I say, Gentlemen. Wearing only my briefs, bowing from the waist, I spread both arms and say, You are no longer looking at a perfect Kinsey Six.

  Mr. Toto tucked under his arm, a potato chip stopped halfway to his mouth, the young actor 72 says, “Is she dead?”

  Branch Bacardi says, “What was the point?” Tapping a finger on his forehead, he says, “They couldn’t shoot your face. That means no publicity.”

  To draw out the moment, I take a step down the stairs. I take another step. On the monitors, Cassie Wright takes the hand of a deaf and blind actor. She folds his fingers into a pattern and presses his hand into her crotch, saying, “Water…” My favorite scene from The Miracle Sex Worker. With another step, I take another moment. A long pause of quiet as I stroll across the concrete to where Bacardi stands. Wordless, I nod to accept Mr. Toto from the young man.

  Still silent, I smile and lift one hand to brush back the hair from my forehead, the skin revealed, and written across it: “How I loVe U…” inscribed and autographed by Cassie Wright.

  To the young actor 72 I say, “Her own idea.” Patting the fingers of one hand against my lips, I blow a kiss toward the stairs and the set, saying, “Your mother is a bona fide angel.”

  His shaved chest bare, empty, Branch Bacardi rolls his eyes. The locket is gone, and he says, “So you managed to fuck her.”

  Not to brag, but I performed so well that I’m beginning to wonder if my poor dear father in Oklahoma isn’t in fact the pervert he confessed to be.

  Actor 72 makes a fist around something – the locket, with its chain dangling between his fingers. He looks at Bacardi and says, “I’m starting to wonder the same deal.”

  From her perch at the top of the stairs, the wrangler shouts, “Gentlemen, may I have your attention…”

  The row of bags line the wall, mine still among them. The room’s grown darker since I left. The ambient light from the monitors, less bright.

  Actor 72 says, “Mr. Banyan?” He opens his fist and lifts it to under my nose. Two pills rest in the hollow of his palm, and he asks, “Which of these did you give me for an erection?”

  “May I have the following performers,” the wrangler shouts.

  Both pills look the same.

  “Number 471…” the wrangler says. “Number 268…”

  I blink. Squint. I lean forward too far, too fast, and knock my face against the actor’s hand. “Hold still” I say. With my right eye shut, I’m blind. Open or shut, I can’t see anything out of my left eye. Wouldn’t you know? That mini-stroke or whatnot the wrangler and Bacardi were harping about.

  This moment, when Branch Bacardi’s under my thumb, this magic shining moment when he’s my bitch, I’m not letting him be right. I stumble until my hip brushes the edge of a buffet table; not seeing, I reach down and grab the first snack my fingers touch. I pop it into my mouth and start chewing. Relaxed. Nonchalant.

  The wrangler says, “…and number 72.”

  The young actor nods at his hand. He says, “Hurry, please. Which one do I take?”

  On the young actor’s hand I smell cheddar cheese, garlic, butter, and vinegar. And roses.

  But I can’t see. The room’s too dark, the pills too small.

  The snack in my mouth, my teeth gnawing away, it’s a rolled-up, brand-new condom. Lubricated, from the taste of it, the bitter flavor of spermicidal jelly. That slippery feel of K-Y on my tongue.

  The wrangler shouts, “Number 72, we need you on set – now. Right now.”

  Branch Bacardi, everyone, waiting.

  So…I just point. “That one,” I say, still chewing, choking on the bitter taste designed to kill sperm, prevent life, and I just point at a pill. Any pill. It doesn’t matter.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  24

  Sheila

  Leaning over Ms. Wright, my fingers pinching a pair of chrome tweezers, I’m squeezing the sharp points together around a single eyebrow hair. Biting my own tongue. Shutting my eyes when I yank the hair. Squeezing the tweezers tight around another stray hair.

  Ms. Wright, she doesn’t blink. Doesn’t flinch or lean back in her chair to get away. Says how somebody named Rudolph Valentino, when he died of his appendix, two women in Japan jumped into a live volcano. This Valentino hoagie-honker, he was a star in silent pictures, and when he died in 1926 a girl in London poisoned herself on top a collection of his pictures. An elevator boy at the Ritz Hotel in Paris poisoned himself on a bed spread with a similar collection. In New York, two women stood outside the Polyclinic Hospital, where Valentino died, and cut their wrists. At his funeral, a mob of a hundred thousand rioted and collapsed the mortuary’s front windows, trashing the wreaths and sprays of funeral flowers.

  Some wand-waxer named Rudy Vallee recorded a hit song about this Valentino bacon-banger. Called ‘There’s a New Star in Heaven’.

  True fact.

  When her eyebrows look even, I squirt moisturizer onto a little sponge and spread it across her forehead. Dab the sponge across her cheeks and around her eyes.

  Our crew of whitewashers, our six hundred sherbet-shooters, they’re still home, asleep, with an hour yet to go on their alarm clocks. Today still dark, barely just today. The lighting already set up. Film stock ready. Cameras ready. The Nazi uniforms rented and hanging, still in their dry-cleaner plastic. Nobody here but Ms. Wright and myself.

  Her eyes shut, her skin tugged in little directions by the spongeful of moisturizer, Ms. Wright says that morticians style a dead body, apply the makeup, and style the hair from the right side, because that’s the side people will see in an open-casket viewing. The funeral director washes the body by hand. Dips cotton balls in insect poison and crams them up your nose to keep bugs from setting up house. Fingers open an anal vent to allow trapped gas to escape. Stuffs plastic cups, like Ping-Pong balls cut in half, under your eyelids to keep them closed. Brushes melted wax on your lips to stop them from peeling.

  Me, I’m sponging on foundation. Smoothing a medium-tan shade around her mouth. Blending the edges under her jawline.

  Settled in the white makeup chair, the paper bib clipped around her neck, Ms. Wright says how some weed-whacker named Jeff Chandler, he was shooting a movie called Merrill’s Mauraders in 1961, in the Philippines, and he slipped a disk in his back. This Chandler wiener-wrestler was a big name, a rival to Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis. Recorded a hit album and several singles for Decca. Went under the knife for a quick disk operation. Doctors nicked an artery. Poured fifty-five pints of blood into him, but this Bone-a-Phone still died making that movie.

  Her eyes shut, lashes fluttering, brows arched for eye shadow, Ms. Wright says how the Hollywood juice-josher Tyrone Power keeled over dead from a heart attack, filming a sword fight in the film Solomon and Sheba.

  Ms. Wright says how, when Marilyn Monroe offed herself, Hugh Hefner bought the mausoleum niche next to hers, because he wanted to spend eternity lying next to the most beautiful woman who had ever lived.

  Ms. Wright says how the fist-flogger Eric Fleming was shooting on location for his television series High Jungle when his canoe overturned in the Amazon River. The current caught Fleming, and the local piranha finished the job. Cameras still rolling.

  True fact.
>
  While I’m penciling on her eyeliner, Ms. Wright tells me that page-paster Frank Sinatra got buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a pack of Camel cigarettes, a Zippo lighter, and ten dimes so he could make phone calls. Comic Ernie Kovacs is buried with a pocketful of hand-rolled Havanas.

  When fig-fondler Bela Lugosi died in 1956, they buried him in his vampire costume. His funeral could’ve been one of his own Dracula movies, him wearing those teeth in his coffin. The satin cape, the works.

  Walt Disney is not frozen, Ms. Wright says. He’s cremated, sealed in a vault with his wife. Greta Garbo’s ashes were spread in Sweden. Marlon Brando’s were spread around the palm trees of his private South Sea island. In 1988, four years after his death, Peter Lawford still owed ten thousand dollars on his final resting place at the Westwood Village Memorial Park – spitting distance from the most beautiful woman who’d ever lived. So Lawford was evicted, and his ashes were scattered at sea.

  By now, I’m brushing on Ms. Wright’s blush. Contouring the sides of her nose with dark powder. Tracing the outline of her lips with liner.

  The street door swings open to the alley, and a couple members of the crew step inside. Throwing cigarettes behind them. The sound tech and a cameraman, smelling of smoke and cold air. Light in the alley going from black to dark blue. The echoing, far-off ocean rumble of traffic. Morning rush hour.

  While I brush on her lip color, Ms. Wright says some wad-dropper named Wallace Reid, the six-foot-one ‘King of Paramount’, died trying to kick morphine in a padded cell.

  When sound movies told the world that elegant, ladylike Marie Prevost spoke with a low-class Bronx honk, she quit. Drank herself to death. Died behind her locked apartment door, and her starving dachshund, Maxie, chewed on her for days before the manager bothered to knock.