Genital Grinder

I.

Gabriel saw the dead man on his way home from the video store.

He’d been thinking about the shift at Movie Heaven as he drove. Carrie and Renee had both been there, the teen pregnancies waiting to happen. And what were they wearing on a sizzling August day? As little as the law allowed. Gabriel spent the five and a half hours playing pocket pool. The clock couldn’t pass slowly enough to suit him on days like this. He fully expected them to show up in Barely Legal any day now.

A stack of porno movies clattered on the passenger seat. He was allowed to bring them home, but he’d waited for Renee to take someone to the tanning bed and Carrie to restock some new releases before he’d made his move. If he had any chance of going out with either of them—and the past three months had provided precious little hope of that—it wouldn’t help his cause if they knew he was going home with Lesbian Airline Stewardesses, Carol’s Arse, Dildo Delirium, and that perennial customer favorite, Gaping Anus.

It all made for a bitter obsession. Working with the hot little sirens transported him through a time wrap right back into high school, as if there were a worm hole at the check-out counter of Movie Heaven. It hadn’t been long ago at all, so his memories of countless young things in skin-tight skirts, halter tops, blouses tied at the mid-riff, shorts barely longer than their underwear, and open-toed sandals were vivid. He couldn’t talk to them then; his tongue became like the knots in their blouses.

Who the hell am I kidding? he thought. I can’t talk to them now either!

What ingenious things had he said to Carrie and Renee today? “Hi.” “I’m going on break.” “Could you hand me that?” “Well, see you tomorrow.”

Yeah, a real mystery that he hadn’t scored with either one of them or—as he always daydreamed—both of them yet. The irony was that he wasn’t a bad looking guy at all. Kind face, cobalt eyes, fair hair—the typical angel blueprint. Did Carrie and Renee sense some kind of ugliness inside him? Sometimes it seemed like they must; them and all the beautiful ones he saw at work. He’d be happy just to get a sniff of even the middle tier women who frequented the tanning beds virtually every day that ended with a Y. Well, he could think of a thing or two he’d like to do at their Y’s. They looked like they knew he was thinking this when he confirmed their tanning appointments . . . an uneasy disgust in their eyes with a tilt of the chin, like he had snot hanging from his nose. Even when he wasn’t thinking anything untoward, he felt their derision. They sensed a strangeness, as if he had a pheromone that sent them all scattering instead of attracting a single one of them.

And there was indeed something Carrie and Renee wouldn’t like if they knew about it: the Taste of Death movies. He was even more cautious about taking those home than the pornos. They might think he was pathetic if they knew about the pornos, but if they knew about Taste of Death, they’d think he was psychotic.

It was the Taste of Death series Gabriel was thinking about when he saw the dead man. He was standing on the corner of 37th and Garren, and to look at him you wouldn’t know he’d had his head blown off on Taste of Death 5: Into the Grave.

These weren’t simply movies where a group of horny teenagers were slain with phallic implements. Like Traces of Death, Faces of Death, Death Scenes, Executions, and their brothers in the mondo video line, they were known as “shockumentaries.” They provided the audience with various clips of real deaths caught on tape—accidents, murders, and animal attacks featured most prominently. Offended people erroneously called them “snuff movies,” which differed in that a snuff victim was brought before the camera for the express purpose of being murdered. According to Channel Two News reporter Geisha Hammond (and the lips on that sizzling hot piece . . . Gabriel figured he’d blow the back of her head out approximately 1.5 seconds after she put those lush lips on his ramrod) in a story about “Mr. Drill Bit” Earl Newman just a few months ago, there was no evidence to support the claim that snuff movies existed anyway. Shockumentaries merely collected random atrocities where a camera just happened to grab the money shot.

One of Gabriel’s favorites was a clip which showed a man blasted in the face with a shotgun fired off-screen. A moment after he blinked with the incomprehension of a bovine, his hapless look was erased in a shower of deep red and mushroom colored fragments, too many to count even in slow motion. Above the sounds of blood droplets and skull pieces wetting the pavement, an unnamed narrator cracked in Crypt Keeper throwback, “The world’s foremost magician—now you see him, now you don’t.”

It was swift, senseless . . . a moment allegedly grabbed by a bored passenger tracking with a video camera at a traffic light. A graphic art born of nothing, never to be forgotten once seen. Gabriel certainly hadn’t, and yet that same hapless gent now stood on the corner of 37th and Garren, unaware that his head had once been liquefied into a Sistine Chapel of Rorschach artistry. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could fix with a tube of superglue and infinite patience; there wasn’t supposed to be any sequel for you on Taste of Death.

The company who released the videos—Chosen Few Pictures—had clearly swindled him. He’d never suspected otherwise, even though some of the other mondo films were faked. He’d blindly trusted this series because it appeared to deliver what it promised in bloody red letters on every box: COMPLETELY AUTHENTIC! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT REAL! ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN TAKE IT?? (Funny, but he’d swear he’d rented pornos with an almost identical tag line.)

Not so. The shotgun decapitation only looked genuine. Unless the man was a ghost. A phantom condemned to walk the earth for failing to avoid what had to be a rather obvious murder.

Gabriel blinked, and looked for the man again. He was gone, now obstructed by the buildings on Garren.

Whatever the explanation, Gabriel felt disturbed. He’d seen each Taste of Death at least three times. The new one, the ninth installment, was due out next week. He’d been looking forward to another ninety minute foray into the final, intimate misfortunes of strangers. But it was for naught. That age-old certainty of death wasn’t even for sure anymore.

He drove home to his parents’ house, still wondering.

II.

The next day, he picked up each of the Taste of Death boxes and searched them.

They all listed Chosen Few Pictures as their distributor, but none of them gave an address for the company. As far as he knew, this was the only line of videos they had ever released. They had nothing else available for order when he searched the computer at work.

It had begun to dawn on him how strange it was that he had seen one of the “actors” from Taste of Death. He hadn’t recognized the scenery in the movies, so it didn’t seem possible they had been filmed in his hometown of Bartok. Of all the places in the world, it was quite a coincidence that he’d seen the actor here.

He started to question if it was a coincidence after all. The chances of the guy having a twin brother seemed even more remote. Even in the scantily-clad company of Carrie and Renee he had difficulty thinking of anything other than what he’d seen the night before. His thoughts hadn’t been this concentrated since he’d first brought home a Taste of Death movie, on a whim. The ways the people lost their lives, the strangeness that someone happened to be there with a camera, and just knowing there were even more of these shockumentaries out there . . . it obsessed him. Would his own death end up on a

movie? Years of being alive, having friends, making an impact—however slight—would it all be eclipsed by a bizarre equation resulting in Gabriel Reynolds dying on Taste of Death 10, 11, 12, or whatever? Would he stop being Gabriel Reynolds and become “that dude who got snuffed on candid camera?”

The shockumentaries were a paradox. Even when you were certain that what you were seeing was genuine, it was still a concept that could not quite be grasped. How could these people you were seeing for the first time already be dead? Their deaths seemed real, but they didn’t.

He ran a search on the Internet for Chosen Few Pictures. Thankfully it wasn’t one of those names that would return hundreds of thousands of results. He found what he wanted right away—an official homepage for the company that had only recently gone online. It didn’t tell him much, aside from their past releases ($39.99 per . . . thank God he could cherry pick the damn things when overstock wound up in the “previously viewed” sale bin) and the announcement that the new Taste of Death would be out August 6th (it had been pushed back, though, according to the Movie Heaven release schedule, and wouldn’t be out until August 20th). It did, however, give him the contact address.

Chosen Few Pictures was run out of a post office box in Bartok.

III.

Not all of the clips could have been made in Bartok, though; Gabriel would have heard about it. For instance, Taste of Death 3 featured a burning skyscraper where several people chose to plunge to a messy death rather than burn alive. There were no skyscrapers in Bartok; the clip had to come from elsewhere. It was probably true of most.

The common way to accumulate all this footage was to take out an ad in Variety or some other movie trade magazine and request news stations, police departments, departments of transportation, and the like submit videos with violent footage to the address.

Did this mean a few deaths were faked in Bartok for supplemental footage? The series was good about not borrowing from other shockumentaries. Maybe the only way to reach ninety minutes without resorting to recycling footage was to create new scenes. It made sense, and it was hardly the first time a video was guilty of false advertising.

Gabriel thought it was somehow unnatural that Chosen Few Pictures was run in his city, but of course it had to be somewhere. It could have just as easily been some other skyscraper-less city with a horny video store clerk who thought it almost conspiratorially bizarre that a mondo video company would have its home base there. He became less apprehensive about the coincidences, but was more curious than ever to see how the next installment turned out.

IV.

On August 20th, he got his chance. Taste of Death 9: Grave Matters came out with no further delays. He took it home that night. Its plastic box seemed to radiate energy, something that promised his eagerness would be rewarded. He watched it slide around on the passenger seat as he drove, as if it would accidentally slip and reveal its true self.

The cover had been decorated with an autopsy table and a stainless steel tray featuring the tools of dissection. The back of the box warned of the violent content within, promising the death clips of a man who should have paid more attention to a DON’T FEED THE BEARS sign, movie stunts gone horribly awry, results of drunk driving on the Autobahn, alligator farm mishaps, PCP addicts in shoot-outs with the police, the final escape attempt of famed magician Isaac the Invincible, riots, tightrope walkers who laughed at safety nets, and assorted other punishments for hubris and just being in the wrong place at the right time. It promised to be the best shockumentary yet, a veritable extravaganza of morbid atrocities.

It sounded like just what the doctor ordered after an unproductive five hours of half-hearted banter that left no impressions on Carrie and Renee, or at least not any good ones.

He nuked himself a TV dinner, took it to his room, and parked in front of the screen. He was especially on the lookout for any possible Bartokians and local settings. As it turned out, they were more obvious than he would have believed.

“This young woman should have just called Triple-A,” the narrator opined, with the assurance of one who knows he has just gotten off a sterling quip. The scene was purportedly captured by a nearby security camera. The female in question was leaning underneath her car hood in an otherwise empty parking lot, hands constantly fidgeting to signal she had no idea what she was doing. The scene occurred at night and was somewhat obscured by shadows. Another figure, probably male, appeared beside the woman, his face a silhouette. He seized the car hood and repeatedly brought it down across her back and head, instantly bringing her to her knees. The killer stepped back to admire his handiwork, his face still cloaked by the night. Without the overdone shadow work, Gabriel would still have been able to assess the authenticity—or lack thereof—in this scene. Though her tormentor had remained hidden by the unrealistic lighting scheme, the victim herself had not.

It was Carrie, whom he’d been admiring at Movie Heaven a mere two hours ago.

V.

“I didn’t know you wanted to be an actress,” Gabriel said to her the next day.

“I didn’t know I did either,” Carrie replied smartly, rolling her eyes for Renee’s benefit. Renee giggled in that shrill fashion that always made her a distant 2nd to Carrie in his private list of Hottest Movie Heaven Trim. When his attempts at mirth with them inevitably failed, her refusal to laugh became a silver lining unto itself.

He smiled bitterly at Carrie’s predictably evasive response. Weren’t they a class act? Hiding things from him, sharing their meaningful looks, whispering to each other off in the corner (which always resulted in Renee’s ear splitting histrionics, like Carrie was Eddie Murphy or something, and of course Gabriel knew they were talking about him), playing their little games. How long had they been perpetuating the charade? All along?

“But I’ve seen your work,” he announced when Renee’s laughter blissfully ceased.

“What’s he talking about?” Carrie asked Renee.

“I don’t know . . . but I bet it’s sexual harassment, whatever it is.”

“On Taste of Death 9,” Gabriel explained, with a calmness that really surprised him. He felt anything but, especially with Carrie talking about him like he wasn’t there. He was already tossing around the idea of taking one of Movie Heaven’s rental VCR’s home so he could get a copy of Carrie’s death, just for ha-ha’s.

“Taste of Death 9?” She couldn’t have looked more disgusted if a leper had tried to solicit her for oral sex.

“Yeah,” Gabriel grinned. “You know, the one after eight, but before ten?”

Renee didn’t laugh at that, he noticed.

“How can you watch that trash?” Carrie asked, her face all knotted up into almost a natural Renee Zellweger look. “That’s really sick, Gabe.”

“At least I didn’t star in it.” He turned to check out a customer, a beady-eyed man who had selected an interesting variety of videos: Dumb & Dumber, The Ten Commandments, and Gaping Anus.

Gabriel felt compelled to comment on the last choice. “That one’s four hours long.”

The customer’s lips split apart to reveal teeth stained by nicotine and coffee as he smiled. “Yeah . . . I know. ”

By the time Gabriel had collected the man’s money and warned him about his snowballing late fees (he had a feeling that the customer, Greg Bracken, probably wouldn’t be getting these back on time either . . . four hours was quite a commitment), Carrie and Renee had deployed themselves to other parts of Movie Heaven, probably just trying to put some distance between him. He saw them huddled up over in comedy, inconspicuously standing in front of ‘80’s sex comedies like The Last American Virgin and The Joy of Sex.

No hee-hawing this time, though. Worried. That was good. They had every reason to be.

VI.

At the stoplight at 37th and Garren, he had to crack the window—he felt like he was suffocating.

The shotgun fatality was back, and so were eight other people he had seen meet some very colorful ends on the latest Taste of Death. There was the blonde woman with the ponytail who got her throat torn out by a rabid dog (“Man’s best friend, but not such a success with the ladies”). The guy with the crewcut who’d gone through his windshield after hitting a telephone poll (“He should have dialed 1-800-COLLECT”). Two of the promised PCP addicts who’d gone out in a blaze when surrounded by police, one screaming that he was Jesus Christ (“Somehow I don’t think he’ll get up in three days”) and the other pleading for someone to “Get them off me!” And still others.

He punched the accelerator and drove through the red light, narrowly missing one of the angel dust addicts on the crosswalk and a car making a wild left onto Garren, not letting up on the gas until he was home.

He didn’t get out of his car immediately. He sat there, his hand shaking, sweating bullets which had nothing to do with the August heat.

What in the hell was going on? He could accept that the shotgun man didn’t really die; pack a prosthetic head with blood-filled condoms and blast it, the effect would be very similar to the real deal. But what about the others? The woman with the ponytail, for instance. The camera never left her as the dog burrowed into her throat. There had been no chance to cut away for a special effect. He’d watched the life vanish from her eyes, and he’d seen the torn remnants of her throat and shards of neck bone when someone finally got a lariat around the dog and hauled it away (someone unceremoniously shot it in the head, again with no cutaway).

She’d died, he had no doubts about it. Same with the PCP addicts, because wherever they’d had their last rush, it hadn’t been anywhere in Bartok. If he lived anywhere else but here, he could rationalize this all as extremely realistic special effects.

Was he losing his mind? It would be the natural conclusion if he told anyone what he’d seen, and more importantly what he thought about it. His parents would have him committed to the Sunshine Elkins Institute over in Hasbrouck. There had been a guy from his high school who wound up at Elkins. A chronic masturbator. It may not have been such a problem, but any place became a good place for him to jack. The bus stop, the cafeteria, the bleachers at a pep rally, driver’s ed (once as a backseat passenger when it wasn’t turn), and the straw that broke the camel’s back, career day. A lot of parents and important visitors on hand that day . . . and he was on hand, too, right there during a presentation from a cop with a K-9 German shepherd who looked very puzzled by the whole display. An apoplectic PTA mom demanded the cop drag him off to the electric chair on the spot. The jokes about him had lasted until graduation, wondering what kind of business he could get up to with a whole graduation gown to hide the ol’ slapstick. It didn’t seem very funny to Gabriel now, though. He’d go insane if they locked him up . . . if he wasn’t already.

He thought of Carrie and smashed his hand against the dashboard. She knew what was going on . . . she was in on this. It was some kind of game. Why else would she have such a flippant attitude when he confronted her?

He didn’t get out of the car for quite some time.

VII.

Two things of interest happened the next day. Someone rented Taste of Death 6: To the Gory End. He wanted to open up to the guy about what he’d been seeing around town, but the girls had been right there, sharing a disapproving look when they noticed the title of the video. Why don’t you dumb twats go lez out in the tanning room? he wanted to say, but the idea caught his fancy and he found himself embellishing the concept in his mind periodically for the next three hours. He never entirely forgot about the customer, though, and when he showed up later in the afternoon, Gabriel felt a rush of excitement.

He knows . . . he’s seeing all the victims around town now, too. He has to see the ninth one now, with Carrie’s big scene.

Renee was on her lunch break and Carrie was back in the bathroom. He couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. But it was nothing like that.

The customer struggled to find the adequate words. “Uh, yeah, I rented this, like … earlier today?”

“I remember,” Gabriel said. The lack of urgency (and articulation) immediately diminished his expectations. It couldn’t possibly be what he had hoped. The guy would have practically walked through plate glass and barely noticed it if he’d really seen.

“Right, okay . . . uh, yeah, the tape is, like, blank and stuff.”

“Blank?” Gabriel echoed.

“Yeah . . . and stuff? It’s all, like, static.”

And stuff. Yeah, I know.

He’d been switching them out for the weeks leading up to the release of part 9. They had all played just fine. Some had more tracking issues than others, but they all worked.

“Sorry about that . . . we’ll see if we can fix it. Or do you want to exchange it for something else?”

The guy looked over his shoulder, and Gabriel briefly wondered if he thought he was being watched. Maybe this was all a charade to deflect suspicion.

Satisfied by what he saw, the customer turned around and quietly asked, “Is, uh, Gaping Anus back in stock?”

Gabriel sighed. “The new one, the 24th? No. Not yet.”

“Twenty-three, then?” he asked hopefully.

Descending order of availability finally made it all right with volume number nineteen, if a bit begrudgingly (the 4-hour “butt banging bonanzas” didn’t start until volume twenty, so “2-1/2 hours of butt stuffing madness” would have to suffice . . . and as obsessed as the customer seemed with the concept of “stuff,” he couldn’t have been too awfully disappointed). He also put himself on the reserve list for a Lolita Ream movie after confirming Gabriel’s work schedule.

Much later, the idea of the blanked video cassette seemed ominous to Gabriel. Yeah, maybe the guy wanted Gaping Anus all along and just didn’t want to bring it to the counter with Carrie and Renee standing around, although why not get something a little less off-putting if you’re worried what some hot girls might think of your choice? Gabriel obviously wasn’t going to test the movie out here at work, though. He took it home, unsurprised in the least to discover it played just fine, arguably with even less tracking interference than the volumes before and after it.

The other significant thing was that he went back to the Chosen Few Pictures webpage, and found a significant change.

Taste of Death 9 had been pushed back to August 27th. This update was made today, the 21st.

“But it already came out,” Gabriel said, dumbfounded.

VIII.

It being Thursday, Gabriel, Renee, and Carrie were at Movie Heaven until 9:30 as the closing shift. Renee’s mother picked her up just as the trio exited (she had not-so-politely declined a ride with him in the beginning, and he’d never offered again).

And then there were two, he thought.

He locked the doors to Movie Heaven, trying to hurry. He heard Carrie’s rushed footsteps, her sandals thwacking on the asphalt as she hurried to her car.

Must be my winning personality.

The lock and keys fought him, and Carrie’s car door was slamming shut even as he turned around. It enraged him, even though he knew she wouldn’t be going very far. When her car flooded, she slammed a fist across her steering wheel.

He thrust his hands in his pockets and began shuffling over to his car, singing an old Doors song, “Strange Days,” to himself. He threw a cursory glance around the lot. The other stores in the shopping center closed up at 9:00. There was just one other car in the lot besides Carrie’s, and unfortunately for her it was his.

Her hood popped up, and Carrie reluctantly slid out of her car, looking at Gabriel out of the corner of her eye. He knew what was going to happen now; what had to happen.

“Don’t start with me,” she warned as he closed in. “Just please tell me you know something about cars.”

“Naturally,” he said. He couldn’t so much as replenish windshield wiper fluid; that’s what his dad was for. He smiled at Carrie disarmingly, idly wondering if the patron from yesterday really planned to watch The Ten Commandments.

Carrie adjusted the stand to keep the hood propped, thus eclipsing the extent of Gabriel’s automotive know-how.

“Any idea what’s wrong?” he asked, trying not to laugh.

“I wouldn’t ask for your help if I did,” she answered in singsong.

“Well, I’m a Samaritan. I’d have helped anyway.” He leaned under the hood, feeling her spiteful look. He yanked something at random, and was rewarded when it slid out. “Hey, I might have found something. This thing here is loose.” He held it up for her inspection.

Carrie sighed with a bonus eye roll, even though Renee wasn’t around to enjoy it. “That thing tells how much oil is in the car.” She snatched it away from him and guided it back into its proper place, mouthing a stream of obscenities which he gathered weren’t in high praise of his character.

She hunched forward, brushing her fingers with her thumbs to wipe off grease. Gabriel enjoyed the rear view as he cracked his knuckles.

“You should have called Triple A,” he said, too quietly for her to hear.

“Hey,” Carrie said excitedly. “This wire isn’t—”

He smashed the safety bar with the palm of his hand, dislodging it. The hood slumped down, striking Carrie across the back. It wasn’t much, just enough to stun her. It was all he needed. He hoisted the hood up and slammed it back down, increasing his momentum by jumping. She sank to her knees. She made an effort to slide out of harm’s way, but he blocked her off and reaped some well-earned frottage as he delivered six more compacting blows in rapid succession The last few came down on the back of her neck, eliciting tiny pops as vertebrae cracked.

As the script called for, Gabriel took a few steps back and observed the scene. Carrie was sprawled in front of the car now, arms jutting out like broken wings. Motionless.

Gabriel looked back at Movie Heaven. He thought he saw a red light in the darkness, like the one which glowed on his father’s video camera when it recorded. He couldn’t see clearly, but he didn’t have to. The article in the paper this morning had told him what was going on, the simple headline reading BARTOK WOMAN KILLED IN RABID DOG ATTACK.

Seven simple words, all it took to make him see what was written . . . and what was prophesied.

IX.

The emissary of visions unclaimed found him again—the hapless individual at 37th and Garren. About to return to the wife and kids, maybe, or at least thinking he was. Not paying much attention to Gabriel, or the strange way he hunched over to obscure the shotgun as Gabriel stepped out of the car.

“Are you ready to do your magic?” he asked, approaching the man. He stopped five feet away from him.

And waited for him to blink.