Seeing Red, page 25
Hackamore knew these things.
Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls was the only movie of the trio worth stabbing with his critical quill. Hollywood Boulevard offered only one theatre where the discriminating cinemaphile might catch three presentations of such caliber at a buck per flick—the World. It had calmed somewhat from the bad old days when armed police prowled the aisles, weapons and cuffs clinking in the darkness as some horror quickie bimbette got her throat opened up in Cinemascope. The snoring junkies and gang scruffs who came to slice up the seats and each other had migrated. The hypejive black dudes, the ons who always argued loud and long with the characters onscreen, still paid to do their thing. But you could find them and their brothers in any other theatre on either side of the Boulevard.
Its raunchy past glory was not what made the World special to Hackamore. It was a magical sanctuary. It was the one place his wife would never follow him, not after she'd blown a Quarter Pounder (with cheese) all over his Reeboks during the third reel of Embryo Suckers. The World had thus been baptized as sanctified turf Whenever Hackamore invoked the name of the place, Chloe reacted like a vampire with a crucifix up its ass. They had both sworn never again ... in different directions. In that instant their marital battle lines had been sketched in. Polarization had begun.
Under an impossible deadline, ducking salvo after salvo from Chloe, he had fled to the World, where Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls waited. He'd hated it going in. Corning out, he wanted to fuck it till it bled. A dynamite followup to his revised opening line—MegaProd's newest excretion—had concretized in his mind when Chloe interrupted, booting open the door and stealing another tiny chunk of his creativity, his palsied career, his cut-rate soul, his life.
"Aren't you done with that shit yet?"
Whatever marginal prettiness she had once possessed had been lost in the war—the determinedly grim battle to rope Hackamore into wedlock (as she had been humorlessly trained to do throughout her entire youth), then forge him into her parents' repressed ideal of a responsible hubby via some calculatedly accidental breeding. Three years of the rhythm method, two children, a sand-dune of bills, and many lifetimes of bitching later, the battle lines were inked in. Then etched in granite.
Chloe had the haunted look of a woman betrayed, one who had hitched her wagon to a falling meteor. Now her plain face looked horsey, punched-in, and sallow. For revenge, she extracted Hackamore's blood as often as she could, jerking his chain with an infantile, though sadistically smug kind of glee.
"You've been sitting on your ass watching stupid gore films all day—while I've been watching Ernie and Waldo since sunup!"
What passed between them telepathically was so familiar it did not require vocalization. Her tone, and the way she sneered words, were the incoming buzz bombs of the latest skirmshh. Hackamore internalized their sting. If he let her see him react, or bristle at her snide bait, she'd score points.
"I'm working. Give me an uninterrupted hour, and I'll take over." There was just a hint of threat in his response. He was dead set against letting her win.
"Working. Tch."
He emptied his lungs in a huge sigh and, with that breath, lost the words in his head. The encyclopedia of resentment in Chloe's whine caused his fingers to flinch back from the typewriter keys. She'd scored first, by stopping his work. He turned in his chair, so they could have at each other face-to. Little Ernie was clutching her green rayon stretch pants for support, his thumb plugged into his face, his china blue eyes bright with fear. Baby Waldo was crooked into one full and sagging breast, smack between a broad, wet patch in the armpit of Chloe's T-shirt and a nipple that aimed at the floor, just like its partner. Her breasts had mutated into pendulant udders while no one was looking.
"Working is when you wake up at a decent hour in the morning, and take a shower and get in the car and punch a clock and get a paycheck every two weeks, like normal people:' she spat angrily. She'd been rehearsing. "Working is having a regular job, and earning enough money to have a goddamn car in the first place—"
With bowed shoulders, he rode out this hailstorm, not rising from his chair because that would provoke her into physical vituperation ("Bald spot! Beanpole! Adam's apple looks like ya swallowed a baseball!"). Or she'd start hurling his stuff around. He let her rage out, and when she started to splutter, he gave her three beats, then overrode.
"Oh, it's the 'get a real job' rap again. Why don't you regurgitate it while I step out for a beer? Call me if you come up with anything new. Be a drone, that's what you're, saying, right, Chloe? Like your brother Malcolm, the no-accountant. Like that fat, flatulent frog who says he's your father." That froze her tirade in mid-rant. Hackamore had been rehearsing, as well. "What you're saying is fuck my career, if it means you have to do without a Toyota and a Trinitron. Am I warm? I told you before—you want a real job, hoist your expanding ass out onto the bricks and snare one. I'll watch the kids. They sleep, they play, they watch cartoons, they help me type. No problem."
This was not the correct answer. Chloe flushed scarlet, her mouth turning mean, her eyes backing darkly into her brow. "You're the husband! You're supposed to support the family! I'm doing my job! I'm raising your children!"
"So, why are you pestering me about watching the kids, if that's your job?" He smiled. It was the calmness and logic she hated most of all.
"Oh, grow up!" She was copping out, slapping on her Patented Chloe Attitude. "Be real. Be normal for a change!"
"Fuck normal." He dredged up his "why fight" expression, then cut her some ceremonial slack. "Chloe, just hang on, all right? Trust me." He held up a thumb and forefinger "I'm this far from the managing editorship of Gnteratolo -"
"Oh,fuck Kreuger and his stupid fucking magazine," she said with a lemon-sucking smile, showing him the middle finger of her free hand. Ernie started howling. Waldo seemed stunned into baby catatonia, half-smothered by the shapeless pillow of his mom's boob. When Chloe turned vulgar, it meant she was preparing to huff offscreen after slamming the door. "Fuck your stupid fucking gore movies!" She gave the birdie to the poster of Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls Hackamore had thurnbtacked to the wall after getting the presskit. "And fuck that stupid fucking writing that never fucking pays!"
Hackamore's control nearly snapped. "Think you can use the word fuck one more time, sweetums?"
"AND FUCK YOU!" she shrieked, in full livid flower now. Slam! Hackamore heard paint flakes and pieces of the door molding sift down. From without came Ernie's best banshee wail. The kid was bugeyed with terror by now.
Hackamore turned back to his typewriter. As Chloe had blossomed into anger, so had his headache as well, with regular thudding, one-two jabs to each temple. His neck muscles were grinding cement. His verve had been bled away, and Chloe's voice hung in the room like a vindictive ghost, telling him what a gross, crass, no-class, exploitative loser he was. He kneaded his eyelids, trying at least to distribute the pain evenly, and when he refocused he was staring at the poster, into the six-inch, dripping Day-Glo lettering: Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls. Softly, he cursed, his brain fighting to ignore the, adrenaline-spiking argument that waited to ambush him beyond the slammed door. It had to cease to exist in order for him to concentrate.
C'mon, he thought, c'mon, the movie was crap, they're all crap, you can reel out this review on automatic, you can rip out Blood Rape's heart without even looking
The poster depicted a skull-faced, rotting goon with one eye dangling from a pink stalk of ligament. Its decaying fist was oversized, in forced perspective, holding a shredded bikini top. Blood drooled from every likely orifice, and gobbets of glistening brown stuff webbed its fingers and were stuck in its broken teeth. Behind the goon, the tilting headstones of a hillside cemetery were silhouetted by a bilious full moon, and a nude cutie cowered in the middle distance, the R-rated bits of her anatomy artfully concealed by the configurations of a grave marker topped by a Star of David. Subtle, thought Hackamore. A masterpiece of lowbrow exploitation hog-calling. It inspired the closing line for his review: But for sleaze fans, it's got a great poster.
That was perfect—just the right amount of chic contempt. Get the one-sheet, forget the film, it said. Hackamore knew it was an insult from which he could work backward. He had written reviews inside-out before. Now to zero-in and annihilate each of the film's flaws, piecemeal.
The imbecilic ending, for one thing. Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls was another in a tediously long line of films that inserted an eleventh-hour kneejerk routine—a last-minute shock to make audiences jump. The effect was illogical, irrelevant to the preceding plot, and totally galvanic. In this case, Hackamore recalled, the Lust Ghouls had all been fricasseed in the morgue fire. The teen hero and his plucky bimbo squeeze had retired to the backseat of his GTO to drop trou and, in Chloe's words, get normal. There followed a quick cut to a rain-slicked alley and a character not seen earlier in the film. He's being stalked, he knows it, and he turns full face into the camera just in time to eat a gutturally razzing chainsaw. Pop to black; roll end credits.
The animals in attendance at the World had jumped on cue. The schlock shock had poked them, and they'd jumped—those that were not already asleep, unconscious, or beyond reality altogether. Stupid!
Hackamore channeled his seething frustration into his writeup, chopping and slicing and dicing the movie into helpless, bleeding chunks, then chasing the chunks around until even the most fleeting, accidental shot of the boom microphone could not escape unskewered. It was gore writing, sort of. It was the brand of relentless napalm attack he thought made him popular with the readers of Cineteratologist (by definition, "a student of the cinema of malforms, monsters, and dcviates quoth Kreuger, who was probably the ultimate fleapit weirdo).
Hackamore sat back and regarded his completed opening zinger: MegaProd's newest excretion, a nwgaturd entitled Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls, is a cinema coprophiliac's delight—this movie eats shit, and if you enjoy similar gustatory pursuits, you'll 'gasm over this ninety-two-minute spree of muff-diving zombie cannibals, tombstone-humping T&A inicrocephalics, and thu nk-spewing graphic mutilation.
Glowing inside now, Chloe exiled to a cold back burner of his mind, Hackamore leaned back in his chair to pat the poster that leered at him from the wall. Nice victim.
When his hand sank into the poster halfway to the elbow, he yelped and jerked it back out. His chair upended, introducing his butt to the hardwood floor with an ungainly thump.
He slammed his eyes shut; struggled to force his raging heartbeat into deceleration. When he stood, his knees were watery and knocking. He shook his head. He had to go easier on the damned imported beer.
It was okay; nothing had really happened.
He squared off with the poster loose-jointedly, like a gunslinger fixing to make some slow-draw schmuck bite the hardpan. Blood Rape's
goon leered back, unchanged. "Awright, pilgrim," he drawled, "let's see you try that one again." He was cocky now, goofy and amused in that silly-slow way good dope could leave you sometimes.
He pushed his arm right through the center of the goon's chest—zip! No resistance. No ectoplasmic goop, either. He reached in until his elbow was gone, and waved his hand around in a void he could not see. Cool air moved past his fingers. He withdrew his hand intact. It was like a very good special effect; no matte lines.
A pressure-valve laugh jumped out of him, sharp and sudden, like a bark. He stifled it. It would not do to have Chloe barging in while he was feeling up another dimension, or marveling with the sort of lopsided smile he saw most on those walking lobotomies who were bussed to visit the zoo in gangs. But for once his vast repository of words had failed him. Confronted with this overwhelming cosmic surprise, all he could find to say was, "Shiiiiiit..."
This was some unique poster, he decided.
He thought of shoving in a broom, or maybe his Polaroid. No. Chloe had already squandered the film on twenty sugar-cute shots of Waldo with his bare rump in the air. A broom or probe was not required yet; so far the poster hadn't done anything hostile. He reinserted his hand, finger-deep, tracing the inside border of the poster all
the way around, to see whether this was some kind of 4-D gap that might contract shut when he wasn't looking and snip his head off, or worse.
Nope. The access, the hole, the void was exactly the same size as the poster.
He knew what came next. He had to see; why wait? And what could possibly be more important?
He packed in a deep breath and breached his hands against the wall on either side of the poster. As his insides gave a rollercoaster horripilation, he leaned forward and penetrated headfirst, right above the dripping Blood Rape logo.
His hands trembled, threatening to dump him. He had to dare himself to pull his eyes open.
What he saw was mundane. But he was so astonished, he felt certain he might faint for the first time in his life, to hang limply, half-in and half-out. What a hoot that would be.
He was looking into a neatly ordered, pastel-coordinated bedroom. By itself, it was unremarkable. But Hackamore had hung the poster on
an exterior wall, and knew that the only thing on the other side of that wall, back in his world, was a five-story drop into the apartment building's collection of trash dumpsters.
He caught his breath. There was Earth-type air in this bedroom, spicy with the lingering suggestion of some bottled scent. There was also a double king-sized bed, covered with a bulky, salmon-colored comforter. A cedar chest stood at the footboard, near a matching antique rocking chair and hassock. There was a vanity with an oval mirror, an escritoire and a dresser and end tables in matched oak. Gallery prints hung framed in stainless steel, under soft, indirect lighting. The carpeting was lustrous brown, with the rich nap agitated in the traffic areas. The whole arrangement looked quite expensive and comfy.
Tilting his head, he noticed a full-length mirror that hung on the back of a half-open closet door. In it, he could see his head protruding from a poster of Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls that hung, somewhat incongruously, on the bedroom wall. He made a face at himself. It was for real.
Air shifted around his face and he heard a door close in an adjacent room: That was enough to freak him into yanking his head swiftly back. He plopped on his ass again, jaw hanging unhinged, metabolism whacking away, his brain pulsing, literally throbbing with excitement.
Quickly, he scanned around his office and when he spotted the pewter stein on his desk, he leaped for it, dumping its cargo of pencils, inkless pens, X-Acto knives, and erasers onto the floor. He used the edge of his sweatshirt to polish the smudges from both sides of the stein's glass bottom, then bounded hack to the poster. He inserted the base of the stein near the bottom line of movie credits, at a depth of about an inch, gently, as though trying not to ripple the surface of a pond. It slid silently through. Then he put his eye to it.
Hackamore gaped.
Strolling into the pastel bedroom was a gorgeous woman with ash-blonde hair that fell well below her shoulder blades. She was sheathed inside a clingy, diaphanous thing that was slit to show off traffic-stopping legs, and curved upward to model modest but perfect breasts. She glided through the room gracefully, and Hackamore imagined her scent as she moved. Her eyes were deep brown and serious, her face darkly complexioned, which made the contrast with her nearly snow-white hair more startling and stimulating. She pulled off a pair of crystal drop earrings, toed away her heels, and stopped to assess herself in the mirror. While Hackamore felt the jig would be up any second, she did not give any indication of noticing his spyglass, though she eyed the poster several times with marked distaste. The ambient light was quite dim; he was probably safe. He watched her shrug at her reflection, then pull a drawstring; the dress unfurled around her and she hung it in the closet. Halfway to the bed she kicked out of a pair of gossamer panties that were almost invisible. Hackamore gulped and nearly dropped his stein through to the other side. Then the mystery woman laid back on the downy comforter and began doing things to herself with a tiny amber bottle of hash oil and a couple of mechanical devices that made Hackamore acutely conscious of the sudden lack of maneuvering room inside his jockey shorts.
Crazily, he wondered if all the presskit recipients had gotten a poster like this one.
The woman petrified, like a cat on alert status. A man entered the room. They commenced a vigorous argument Hackamore could not overhear. He stared. He stared at the man because the man was him.
The naked beauty on the bed was arguing with another Hackamore. Same build, identical male-pattern baldness, equal six-plus height, and equally protuberant-Adam's apple. Hackamore recognized the way the veins on his forehead bulged redly when he was ticked off.
It was like watching a movie starring himself, and he'd seen enough plot twists like this one to extrapolate what came next. The poster was not just a fluke that permitted convenient crosstown voyeurism. He wasn't looking into some other apartment. He was looking into his apartment, in some parallel plane where everything was a ninety-nine-percent matchup except for his Miami Vice wardrobe, his sumptuous digs, and his centerfold-girl cohabitant.
In all likelihood, an enormous bank balance was waiting for him on the other side of Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls.
The moment Hackamore realized this was transcendent. He was at a unique pinnacle of bliss and excitement; it was the high point of his life. And he knew it. Most mortals saw the peaks of their lives only in retrospect. But here, now, Hackamore held his entire future in his hands ... and had a pretty good idea what to do with it.
