Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  Ian laughed. "I have no idea what you're talking about sometimes, Kev."

  Bastard affected a feeble British accent: "He speaks in riddles and in rhymes."

  Ian ruffled his big brother's mess of brown hair.

  "Fuck off," Kevin said amiably, ducking out of reach of his brother's fingers.

  Ian stood with a resigned sigh, taking what was left of the second bottle with him through to the kitchen. "If you need to crash, go ahead. That is, if you're not too proud for the couch, your highness."

  "My drunkness," Bastard corrected.

  Ian chuckled halfheartedly, heading for his bedroom. No silk sheets on the pillow-top, but he'd always preferred Egyptian cotton, anyhow.

  "E...?"

  Ian turned by the 3D TV in the living room. "Yeah, Kev?"

  Bastard had slid down in his leather desk chair, resting most of his weight on his back, a runner of drool glistening on his goatee. "You aren't really thinking of quitting, are you?"

  Ian pretended to look shocked. "No. Of course not. It was just hypothetical, that's all."

  "Good." Kevin's gaze, vacant-eyed, became nonetheless severe. "Don't forget who buttered your bread, bro."

  Ian nodded, and padded the rest of the way across the plush shag rug. He left the lights on in his room—much too bright for thoughts of serial rapists and dead girls. When he passed out a half hour later, he still held the bottle, the last inch of Macallan 18 dribbling onto his sheets as he snored.

  "THIS GIRL," BASTARD said, incredulous as he pointed at her profile picture. Frankly, he doubted Ian wasn't making it up. "This one right here."

  "That's her, I swear."

  "She's an eleven," Bastard said. "At least."

  "If numbers were hot peppers, she'd be a Trinidad Scorpion," Ian said. "On the Scoville scale, she's like at least a million."

  "I don't know—is that hot?"

  "That's hotter than hot."

  According to her Glamor Anarchy profile, the girl's name was Amber Dillon. The year was 2005, and Kevin and Ian had been in the business just two years. If things worked out well—and Kevin, still a year away from receiving the nickname The Mad Bastard from fans, had serious doubts they would be able to lure in a girl of her caliber—Amber Dillon would be their 35th satisfied customer.

  "Sounds like a nom de porn."

  "Who knows?" Kevin said. "She doesn't look familiar."

  I'm new to Miami, she'd written in her profile, and somewhat new to modeling/acting. I am looking to make new and exciting contacts in the business, and more! I would like to build up my portfolio, so to answer all of your very eager questions, YES, I'm willing to do time for prints, and YES, I am willing to do nudity, tho it is not my main interest and must be PAID-ONLY. I live in the Coral Gables area, but am willing to travel if expenses are paid UP FRONT. Let's chase our dreams together, babes! MUAH!

  "What's 'M-U-A-H'?" Ian wondered. "Some kind of acronym?"

  Kevin had been leaning over his brother's shoulder, his face and glasses—he'd get laser eye surgery in a few months—bathed in the blue glow of the monitor. "It's a kiss sound. All the time you spend in gay chatrooms, how do you not know this?"

  "Hey, at least I don't still say surf."

  "GBY."

  "What's that?"

  "Go Blow Yourself."

  Ian laughed. Kevin, focused elsewhere, tapped Amber Dillon's stats on the monitor. "Five-five. Supermodel looks, but she's too short for runway. We can exploit that." He was rubbing the beginnings of a goatee, deep in thought. Kevin believed it made him look dignified and intellectual, like Freud; Ian thought it made him look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but he let Kevin hold on to the delusion.

  That'd make me Fred, he thought, since Karl made a better Scooby.

  "Want me to message her?"

  Kevin zipped through her photos. A vintage sort of beauty: the big doe eyes of Marilyn Monroe (though Amber's were brown, not blue); the thick, slightly arched eyebrows of Sophia Loren; the cheekbones of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde; the full, pouty lips of Bridget Bardot in... whatever-the-fuck she'd starred in. Amber's strawberry-blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders in feathered thickets, like sheaves of wheat under a harvest moon. Taut, tanned and ample where it counted. Kevin simultaneously thought of Raquel Welch on the posters for One Million B.C. and Ursula Andress rising from the ocean in Dr. No. She was the sum of every Bond girl, and Mrs. Robinson, Barbarella, Catwoman, Princess Leia, Jessica Rabbit—she was all of these women and more, because she was real. Because she was unspoiled. Because the industry hadn't yet chewed her up and spit her out the other side.

  But it will, Kevin thought. Not before I get to you, though. Amber Dillon. My #35...

  "Let me do it," he said.

  A WEEK AFTER they'd kicked Nora West from their van, Ian had a shoot set up with a girl calling herself Zara Chase. She was nothing special, just another in a long line of desperate girls looking to break into the business, but 201 wasn't exactly a milestone.

  They piled into the van: Bastard, Meat and Ugly Karl. Kevin let Meat hop in first, clapping him encouragingly on the back of his Ed Hardy tee on the way up.

  Meat winced. "Ow! Fuck, dude!"

  "What's up your ass?" The Bastard asked, climbing in.

  Meat, born Alex Ephron, reached back awkwardly to rub his shoulder blade, looking pained. "New tat," he explained with a grimace.

  "Oh yeah?" Karl said from the driver's seat, peering back through the rearview. "What is it? Little butterfly?" He eyed Kevin with a sparkly-mouthed grin. "A dolphin?"

  "No, it's not a dolphin, Karl." He took off his shirt—he was bound to anyway—and peeled the gauze patch from his back. Then he turned his shoulder to face Kevin, displaying a slogan in what looked like Latin: ILEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM.

  "The fuck does that mean?" Karl wondered.

  A shit-eating grin spread across Meat's face. Aside from all the tattoos, the kid was handsome when he wanted to be, and when he smiled it really showed. Dumb as a fucking twig, but a genuine looker. "It means 'Don't let The Bastard grind you down,' and that's exactly what I'm gonna do," he said.

  "It's 'the bas-tards,' you shitwit," Kevin said. "Plural. Now put that bandage back on. You're not showing that nasty red thing on camera. Probably fucking infected."

  Meat's shoulders slumped, and he tried, desperately, tenderly, to put the gauze back on. Finally, Kevin peeled it off in a huff and spread it on smooth for him. Meat thanked him, giving him a curious look, as if The Bastard had never done something nice for another person in his life.

  The engine wheezed when Karl turned the key in the ignition. He tried it again with the same result, locking eyes with Kevin in the mirror.

  Fuck, The Bastard thought. She's dead.

  It turned over on the next twist of the key, and the van roared to life. Kevin climbed into the passenger seat and let himself relax, while Ugly Karl drove them to meet Zara Chase.

  MEAT NEVER SO much as touched Amber Dillon.

  By the time Kevin was able to reel her in, two other girls had come—or at least, had pretended to come—through the Lessons van. By then, she'd been promoted to #37.

  Ian had vetted her, since Kevin had been networking at the AVNs in Vegas the only time she was available. She'd assured him she was good to go, and Ian had assured Kevin she was just as gorgeous as her profile pics made her out to be, though she seemed much smarter to him than her profile had portrayed her.

  Kevin told his brother he was probably just dazzled by her beauty in the flesh. He'd put her on a pedestal, so that she'd seemed much more intelligent and interesting than she actually was. It had happened to him before—to Ian, not Kevin. Once the shine came off the diamond, Kevin had assured him, he'd see all its flaws.

  Kevin, it turned out, had been dead wrong.

  Amber Dillon seemed smart because she was smart: a Psychology grad student, writing a thesis paper about the changing role of women in pornography. She'd dolled herself up to look like a tart, with fishnet
thigh-highs and a frilly miniskirt and corset, the sort of thing nobody wore in the street unless they were clubbing or goth. Amber Dillon—her real name, as they would discover when the news broke of her death—was neither.

  She acted silly and flirty when they picked her up, but they found out pretty quickly she was a non-starter, zero interest in fucking Meat or any of them, on camera or at all. Karl asked if she was a lesbian, a classic Ugly Karl move, and she became infuriated, demanding to be let out. If she'd only played along, she could have turned a boring college paper into her 15 minutes of fame—she might even have lived. Instead, they dumped her out on the Julia Tuttle Causeway (a year before the area became a campground for registered sex offenders, nicknamed "Bookville" after its creator, lobbyist Ron Book), unaware that Jim Alan Biggs was following close behind, waiting for the dump. In his way, the serial rapist had been a pioneer, kidnapping Amber Dillon from a future haven for sex criminals. Tuttle, the Mother of Miami, must surely have rolled in her grave.

  Much later, Kevin imagined the look of surprise on Biggs's face when the girl left the van early, fully clothed. The ruthless motherfucker currently sat on Death Row in a North Florida prison near to where he'd been picked up, not for any of his seven rapes and murders, but for drunk driving, of all things. There'd been a public outcry after Amber's body had been found and linked via emails and texts to the Filthy Lessons crew. Kevin and the gang had been questioned for possible involvement in the kidnapping and murder. Miami P.D. suggested they had lured her for that sick fuck Biggs, that they'd "groomed" her, even.

  But Biggs was just a crazed fan, a member since the beginning, along with several sites of the harder fetish stuff: hardcore bondage, ropes-and-wired, squirting and milking, simulated rape and revenge porn, some obscure sites of Japanese ero guro (gore) porn, which contained plenty of blood, mutilation, urine and/or feces, and often, live tentacle—not testicle but tentacle, as in squids and octopi—insertions. Biggs's personal collection was all self-produced rape snuff, and videos of himself ejaculating on pictures of celebrities he'd printed off the internet, both of which the police were certain had been distributed through black market channels prior to being destroyed.

  And so, like the 13th floor of an apartment building, Filthy Lessons had simply skipped over #37's video, and without an actual tally on the website, nobody was the wiser. Technically, they'd been celebrating #201 the night before with Nora West. But since Meat hadn't fucked Amber Dillon before Jim Alan Biggs had gotten his freakish hands on her, and their own video no longer existed (or was stored, along with Biggs's snuff films, in some police warehouse), they'd decided it didn't count.

  Kevin and Ian had only seen the video itself once, marveling over the girl's balls for having managed to infiltrate their world, even for the short time she had. Neither of them needed a video to remind them of Amber's brief, confrontational stay in the Lessons van. Her visit to the gutter had etched itself on their pre-frontal lobes, a recording that could not be erased, no matter how hard they tried: Kevin with his drink, Bastard throwing himself into his work. God knew how Meat and Karl put the incident behind them, if they thought on such a conscious level at all. Karl smoked himself into a constant stupor, but it could be for any number of reasons. Meat just liked to fuck, although lately he'd become obsessed with getting tattoos, and Kevin supposed the pain of the needle might have helped to curb semi-literate thoughts of dead college girls.

  ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUMDUM, for fuck's sake. Where the fuck did he learn that from? The Bastard wondered as they drove to the agreed-upon meeting place, alongside The Shops' parking lot in Midtown. Zara Chase would have just finished her Christmas shopping (it was a balmy December day, 81-degrees and sunny), and they would find her "waiting for her boyfriend." They would wait with her, and if he didn't show, they would drive her home. Of course, he wouldn't—there was no boyfriend, at least for the purpose of this video. While Zara was in the van, if she was naughty and nice, they would offer her some cash for whoever she had left on her Christmas list. A basket of something nice for Grandma, perhaps.

  They parked by the lot entrance on North 34th, and waited. Karl began to pick his nose. The Bastard slapped the underside of Karl's elbow, hoping the index finger would jam up into Karl's brain, those abnormally long fingernails giving him a mental abortion. Karl jerked his finger free before Kevin's palm struck, and flashed his passenger an angry glare.

  "Find any Lucky Charms up there, Uggo?"

  "Suck my butt," Karl muttered, squinting out the window at the mall doors. Then he shouted, "That's her!" just about jumping out of his seat but for his seatbelt, which yanked him firmly back to planet Earth.

  Meat poked his head out between the two front seats, like a kid in the back wanting the attention of his parents. "I thought you guys said she wasn't hot?"

  Alex Ephron's taste in women was pretty subpar. He could get it up and keep it hard for a ditch pig, a quality that made him perfect for reality porn. The girls he brought home from the clubs, some of them looked like kissing cousins of the big guy from The Goonies. Even still, he'd videotape them, using spy cameras he'd bought over the internet from China, hidden all over his bedroom in Bubbe and Zayde's basement in South Pointe, often bringing the videos to the studio for the Howard brothers to watch. It was his version of vacation movies. Nobody wanted to watch these, either.

  "She's okay," Kevin admitted.

  He raised the camera, took the cap off the lens, and zoomed in on her: a brunette with long, skinny legs, somehow pale despite the Miami sun, lightly freckled around her too-big sunglasses. Black Irish, at a guess. She was peering around, hands full of bags, searching for their van. Then she spotted them, and when she looked directly at the camera, the sun winked off its lens, nearly blinding The Bastard. He dropped it from his eye and rubbed furiously.

  Karl started the van. Thank fuck it's running, Kevin thought. Ugly Karl pulled out of the spot and did a U-turn into the eastbound lane. He stopped near Zara, who was peering around, ignoring the men in the van, pretending to look for her imaginary boyfriend.

  Kevin brought the camera up and thumbed Record. "It's Thursday, around three o'clock. We're at The Shops, in the parking lot, and it looks like Little Bo Peep here's lost her boyfriend."

  "It's 'sheep.'" Karl said.

  "It's a metaphor, you asshole."

  Meanwhile, Zara appeared to be growing ever more frustrated, until The Bastard rolled down his window.

  "You lost?" he said.

  She barely glanced at him, kept scouring the roadway for her boyfriend's car. Good girl, Bastard thought.

  "Need some help?"

  Zara turned to them with an angry huff. "I'm not in the habit of getting into perv vans with strange men."

  Kevin grinned. "Hey, just 'cause we're riding in a perv van, doesn't make us pervs."

  "Speak for yourself," Karl muttered.

  I could kill you right now, Karl, you dumb, ugly fuck, Bastard thought. "I'm Kevin. People call me The Mad Bastard. We're making a documentary."

  "Oh yeah? What's it about? The life of the modern American douchebag?"

  Kevin laughed. "That's fair, that's fair. It's actually about Alex back there, and yeah, I guess you could say he's a bit of a douchebag. Lovable douchebag, right, Meat?"

  "That's me," Meat agreed.

  "We call him Meat. Say hi, Meat."

  Meat leaned up between the seats again and gave her a cheery smile and wave.

  Zara Chase raised an eyebrow. "What's so interesting about him?"

  "Meat? Well, he's a virgin, if you can fuckin' believe it," Kevin said with a shake of his head. "So me and Ugly Karl here..." Karl held up a hand, not taking his eyes off the car ahead. "...are trying to find out what it is about him that turns women off. Because he's obviously gorge, am I right, sweetie?"

  Zara lowered her sunglasses. Bright, pretty brown eyes studied Meat.

  Weren't they blue in her pics? Kevin thought, and he shrugged at his own question. Probably got
colored contacts, but who the fuck would willingly change their eyes to brown?

  "He's pretty cute," she agreed, and hid her eyes behind the shades again. "Maybe it's because you call him 'Meat.'"

  "He's a little dumb, unfortunately," Kevin said, feigning sympathy. "Hey, listen, you seem pretty astute. Maybe you could give us a hand? We shoot you talking to Alex—Meat—and maybe you can help us figure out what he's doing wrong. We'll give you fifty bucks for your troubles?"

  Zara did a decent job of looking unconvinced. Then she shrugged. "Fifty bucks, huh?" She made a show of swinging her head around again, looking annoyed. "Well, since my asshole boyfriend is late, I guess I could help you out. At least I could put these down for a minute," she said, holding up seemingly heavy shopping bags.

  Behind Kevin, Meat slid open the door. Zara squinted into the dim inside, and appeared suddenly unsure she hadn't made a mistake. "What's with the sword?" she wondered. Hung on the far wall, the side without a door, was a Japanese katana. A replica, Bastard thought, not knowing much about swords, aside from the pork variety.

  "It's a katana," Karl said. "It's Japanese, and it's super-sweet."

  "That's our Karl," Bastard said, full of unchecked disdain. "It's decorative. Ugly used to have it over his bed, until he started to get worried it'd fall off while he was sleeping and give him an accidental penectomy."

  The girl laughed. Karl snorted, then squinted out the windshield and lit a cigarette.

  "Can I scam one of those?" she asked, dropping her bags on the floor and sitting cross-legged beside Meat. Karl reached over the seat and held out the pack to her. She took one and nestled it between her lips, all pink and glossy and pouty. Karl lit it for her, and she inhaled deeply, then blew a lungful of smoke at Kevin. It rose around her in a blue-gray cloud, momentarily obscuring her face through the camera lens. Kevin coughed and wafted it away. He hadn't smoked in two years, and the temptation to start up again was intense. Karl knew it, too, and had done it to piss him off. But since Zara had asked for it, Kevin couldn't say anything without looking like a prick.