“Dude, I need to borrow something.”
Knowing Denny, ‘something’ could be anything. I really didn’t want to know.
Instead of just telling me he said, “I need to show you something,” before he marched into his bedroom.
I didn’t want to see what he needed to show me, but I followed him anyway. Before Denny decided to take our weekend partying and make it a full-time lifestyle we’d been friends.
He pointed to the fifty-inch television propped up against the wall. On it was a frozen image, a still shot from a movie. I recognized the film, which made me kind of special. Only Denny, myself, the dude who made it and maybe his mother would recognize Bandsaw Bobby 2: The Brain Harvest from a single frame.
Even Alton Strode’s own mom probably gave up watching his films after Bandsaw Bobby 1. How Strode managed to make a sequel to a film very few people saw, and even fewer people enjoyed, is one of the great mysteries of the world. Except for Denny, the world forgot about Bandsaw Bobby. In a genre full of low budget cookie cutter mediocrity Bandsaw Bobby managed to be the film even slasher connoisseurs couldn’t give a shit about.
Denny claimed to have met Strode at an abandoned warehouse people went to these days to score drugs. Claimed being the operative word. While explaining the plot for the never made Bandsaw Bobby 3: Dismembers Only, Strode told Denny there were hidden messages in the movies. Denny dedicated his amphetamine-fueled life to finding these messages.
Denny pointed at the dog behind Bandsaw Bobby while he chased a bikini-clad actress and said, “There’s a reason there’s a dog in this shot.”
“Yeah, it wandered into the shot. Since only someone going through the movie frame by frame would notice it, they left it.”
“Strode is not the kind of filmmaker who does anything by accident.”
Strode struck me as exactly the type of filmmaker who put things in his movies by accident, but I didn’t want to argue.
Denny went to his laptop. The movies were never released on anything but videotape. Denny managed to turn his VHS digital just so he could study it.
He moved the film forward, froze it and zoomed in.
“See the book on the table?”
I did, though it was easy to miss since there was a pile of fake brains on the plate next to it.
“Tell me the third letter in each word, including the author’s name,” Denny said.
“I’m guessing you already know, so you tell me.”
“B,R,E,N,D,A,N.”
“Brendan?”
He moved the film forward. I interrupted before he could show me the next code, “Let me guess, the third letter on each word in the billboard in the background is going to spell kill.”
“Fourth letter, and ‘slay’.”
It made sense now, or at least batshit crazy tweaker sense. We’d known Brendan since middle school. Denny hated him since high school. Denny couldn’t get over the time Brendan banged his girlfriend. Which would have been understandable, if Vicky had actually been Denny’s girlfriend.
It looked like Denny came up with a convoluted excuse to murder Brendan. I wondered how many hours he spent finding the right combination of letters and symbols to tell him to do what he had wanted to do since high school.
Denny was fast forwarding the movie when I said, “Stop.”
“You need to see the next part.”
“No, I don’t. Let me guess, you want to borrow my gun?”
“Yeah, but there’s more.”
“You can’t murder Brendan.”
“It’s not murder if it’s necessary.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“You need to watch the rest. This is what Strode is trying to tell us.”
“Strode wants Brendan dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Alton Strode wouldn’t know Brendan if he was blowing him behind Taco Bell for a fix.”
“Do you have to bring that up? It was one time.”
“Sorry, the point is Strode did not make a movie…”
“Two movies.”
“Okay, even better. He didn’t make two movies just to tell someone he didn’t know…”
“He does know me.”
“Not when he made the movies he didn’t.”
“He was guided by mind travelers.”
“Mind travelers?”
“Yeah, from the future. They can’t travel back themselves, so they send back ideas and shit. They’re using Alton’s films to warn us. Some fucked up shit is going to happen.”
“And Killing Brendan will stop this fucked up shit?”
“I have to kill his dog too.”
“His dog?”
“Yeah, I can show you his name during the eyeball scene spelled out on…”
“Dude, you need help.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I called you.”
“I’m not loaning you a gun.”
“What part of ‘fucked up shit’ don’t you get?”
I opened my mouth to argue, but logic and common sense were beyond Denny. Nothing I could say would change his mind. Instead, I told him again, “I’m not loaning you my gun.”
“Then get out.”
The look on his face made me wonder if he was going to start combing the Bandsaw Bobby series for the letters in my name.
The glance over my shoulder before I walked out was the last I ever saw him. Brendan’s dog chewed out Denny’s throat and ate half his face when he broke in armed with a butcher’s knife.
***
“So this whole werewolf apocalypse is your fault,” Don said as he gestured broadly to the darkness beyond the light of our fire.
I shrugged and took a slug off the homemade corn liquor we took from the men Don and I murdered for their coats, “He said fucked up shit was coming. This does seem like some fucked up shit.”
“You really think it was connected? You think your crazy tweaker pal could have stopped all this by killing some douche and his dog?”
Something howled in the distance as I said, “Couldn’t have hurt.”
Before Tinder and Grinder and OKCupid, we had the East End Bridge. It was not a land of love but a land of fucks and you could give as many, or as few, as you wanted. But you came there to lie in a bed of used condoms, shit-covered leaves, and broken glass with one intention: to give, or receive, at least one fuck. Alcohol and drugs were merely appetizers, and the only restaurant you go to just for appetizers is TGI Fridays. All others either win or lose you with the main course.
Summer after summer, the East End Bridge boasted a loyal customer base. Even in the wintertime, you could find local kids embracing each other, panting little clouds of their warm live breath into the air, stretched out on a strip of cardboard if they were lucky.
A mediocre meal is better than no meal at all. Everybody’s got to eat.
Or, as my mom used to say, “Everybody’s got needs.”
We went there because most of us didn’t have our own bedrooms like kids in the movies. Most of our parents didn’t have jobs, at least not steady ones, which meant none of us had our own cars, let alone hot rides with leather seats.
Privacy was just another middle-class luxury we couldn’t afford.
You either went all the way under the East End Bridge or saved yourself for marriage like Pastor Jenkins commanded from the pulpit of our otherwise-abandoned strip mall church:
Chastity is a virtue. Chastity is divine. Chastity will save you from hellfire.
I had planned on saving myself for marriage less out of a concern for hell than a concern for cutting myself on a smashed bottle under the East End Bridge.
It was no bed of roses, even that time our biology teacher, Ms. Russell, tossed fifteen bouquets over the edge. Her fiancé sent the flowers, one for each month they’d dated, after she found him cheating with his niece.
A few of us were huddled around a bonfire that night when it started raining petals and thorns. While the blanket of red and green improved the scenery a little, our spot under the bridge was still just as sorry as it had ever been.
Yes, I’d claw myself out of town if I had to and lose my virginity someplace clean and quiet, anywhere but there. I didn’t think that was too much to ask.
Then I saw Pastor Jenkins fucking my mom doggy-style not even a week later.
Most kids hear their parents having sex at some point, but few have the misfortune of catching them in the act. Best case scenario, it’s Mom and Dad under the sheets with a careless moan here and there. His cock and her snatch remain a mystery.
Worst case scenario, it’s Mom with someone old enough to be your grandpa, both of them playing it rough with every wrinkle and varicose vein in plain sight.
Her tits are flopping faster than your cousin flips hash browns at the Waffle House down the road, his ass looks like something that belongs on a 100-year-old toad, and both parties are breathing so hard you’re convinced they’re about to break.
It’s poignant when the pastor cries, “Jesus!”
After that, I thought nothing of “fornicating” under the East End Bridge.
His name was Ned, he was in my Spanish class, and he rode me on a flattened Budweiser box.
Everything is as it should be,
everything is here, except
you and that changes
everything here,
Bessie the dog is sad-eyed,
the cats are sulking,
the radio is quiet,
t.v. off
your absence strolls
through the house, I
can feel you moving
by me; evening has
noticed, it’s autumn
presence falling like a
soldier weary of war,
putting down his
weapon and laying
down his head on the
earth to hear your
footsteps finally
coming home and
knowing everything
will be okay.
The Grande Ballroom in Detroit
dispensed music and sin seven days a week
for six years, until it ran out of money.
Even Ted Nugent sounded cogent
while describing his love for the place.
Alice Cooper, the MC5, Muddy Waters,
Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Who, BB King,
Frank Zappa, Iggy, the Grateful Dead
and countless other bands graced the stage.
The dressing room was open for groupies
and folks who wanted to tune Jeff Beck’s guitar.
Kids got down behind the stage.
Their parents couldn’t care less
what they were doing, or with whom.
A joyful, decadent time, before Detroit
collapsed into ruins, taking the Grande with it.
One frigid March afternoon in 2013,
I stood on the corner next to the Grande,
took cell phone photos of two friends
as they huddled beside the chain link fence.
They’d lived in Detroit their whole lives,
and had driven past the Grande
hundreds of times since its closure.
Still, they humored my need for documentation.
The two had been married
forty years, and were still in love,
but a little bored with each other.
He was an angry union guy on a vegan diet
who worked for the phone company,
and she had been fired ten years earlier
from her travel industry job.
They scowled as they leaned against
the crumbling bricks of the defunct ballroom,
the vivid pain of a Michigan winter
like angry red scratches across their faces.
Later, the woman showed me scars on her belly
from where her stomach had exploded
a few months beforehand. She almost died twice.
The scars were raw and purple, and
her skin bulged and sagged with their weight.
I stared, unable to comprehend.
Me: west coast girl, the one who escaped.
Seattle will collapse like Detroit, she said.
Everything on the west coast will one day
look exactly like the Grande Ballroom.
I laughed, said this was impossible.
A few months later, they stopped talking to me.
Of course, my friend was right, but I can’t
be blamed for my refusal to believe.
Like those kids behind the stage,
I needed my illusions to last forever.
Now, when I look at the mirror
and the street corner, all I see is wreckage.
Perhaps if I run fast enough,
I can twist the knob in reverse,
go backwards and restore everything:
the ballroom, Detroit, this damaged land
that somehow allowed me to survive,
my lost friendships, and more than anything else,
all the times I turned away instead of listening.
Jack and Dan were in their local boozer, The Flower Pot, known locally as – The Pot. They had been at the bar for a good two or three hours and were well on the way to being in a condition known colloquially as – Steaming.
‘Ow’s that internet dating lark going then?’ said Dan.
Both men were in their early forties and hadn’t had a relationship with the fairer sex for five or six years. In Jack’s case it was closer to ten. Nearly a decade without a woman had compelled Jack into drastic action. He had in fact joined the legions of lonely hearts.
‘It’s pony mate.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’ve signed up to a few, but all they want is money.’
‘Rip off is it?’
‘Proper. And there’s the birds.’
‘Tasty?’
‘Far from it. Before ya sign up you get to see all these pics of what on the surface appear to be little sorts, but as soon as you’ve paid up reality kicks in.’
‘Mingers?’
‘Mingers, pyscho’s, fruit loops, and just ordinary basket cases.’
‘I did try to warn ya – same again Vick and a pack of pork scratchings.’ Dan looked to Jack. ‘Pack of pork scratchings?’
‘Na, get us a pack of salted peanuts.’
When the drinks and savoury snacks arrived Dan continued the convo. ‘All the sorts get snapped up in their twenties by the ambitious fuckers. The ones who have to have something pretty dangling from their arm every time they go out and who see everything in life as a commodity. Every now and then an older sort might come back onto the market – you know when her old man has got tired of fucking her and traded her in for a younger model. But mark my words – if they’ve kept their looks and figure – they won’t be on the market for long.’
‘What about a young bird?’
Dan wondered if his best mate was on a windup. ‘What young girl, in her right mind, is gonna take one look at the likes of us?’
‘What about a retarded one or something? You know, fit body, but not all there upstairs.’
‘Fuck me, you really are getting desperate.’
‘I was joking.’
Dan eyeballed Jack. ‘Could’ve fooled me. Na, the only bird that would consider us as potential husband material will be either pig ugly or on her last legs.’
‘So what you’re saying is that as far as any relationship with the fairer sex goes we’re both fucked?’
‘Basically, yeah. But don’t worry my son it’s not all doom and gloom.’
‘It ain’t?’
‘No it ain’t. Little Legs told me about it the other day in the Swan.’
‘Told you what?’
Dan leaned in a little closer and began whispering. ‘About grapefruit love.’
Jack did likewise. ‘What the fucks that?’
‘Fuck wasting time looking for a Doris, just get yourself a grapefruit every morning.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Feels just like a cunt.’
‘What does?”
‘A grapefruit.’
‘What?’
‘You cut a hole just big enough for your old boy to fit in and then bash one out.’
‘Serious?’
‘Ya can’t tell the difference. All you’ve gotta do is close your eyes.’
‘Close your eyes?’
‘And put a towel down as it can get a little messy.’
‘Fucking hell.’
That night as he made his way home Jack passed the 24hr Turkish grocers. As he did he caught sight of a tray of grapefruits. Dan’s words floated through his boozy frontal lobe. ‘Feels just like a cunt.’
And before he knew what was happening he had stepped inside and purchased five grapefruits.
‘No tins tonight then?’ asked Hassan the proprietor, somewhat amazed.
‘Na, I’m going on a health kick. The grapefruit diet comes highly recommended.’
‘If you say so geez.’
The next day Jack awoke bleary-headed as usual, like his head was full of cotton wool. He got up, took a horse piss, and then grabbed a can of Tizer from the fridge, downed the contents in one, and clocked them. On the kitchen table was a bag, the contents of which had spilled onto the floor. On the laminate were five grapefruits. Jack picked up one of the grapefruits and wondered. Then he got to work. Always horny after a session, he grabbed a knife and cut a hole into the fruit about the size of a fifty pence piece, all the way down. He took a towel from the bathroom, lay it onto the bed, and placed himself onto the towel. Then he took the fruit and forced it onto his erect cock. At first the hole wasn’t quite big enough so he went back to the kitchen and enlarged the hole with the knife until it fit perfectly – nice and tight. He went back to bed and lay down. He closed his eyes and conjured up an image in his minds eye of his line-manager – a sexy redhead in her mid to late forties. He moved the grapefruit up and down. Fucking hell Dan had been right. It did feel like a cunt. His hand moved slow – then fast – as images of a sexual nature played themselves out in his imagination. Pretty soon it was all over and he had come all over his managers saggy tits.
Jack opened his eyes and looked towards his midriff. Grapefruit juice and bits of pulp covered his stomach and legs. And there was his cock, still erect, a spunk-splattered grapefruit stuck to it, harpoon style. Jack looked at the yellow ball and for the first time in his life contemplated suicide. Then he got up, chucked the messy fruit into the bin, and took a shower.
dim the lights
hit the music
and grab a
clean towel
it’s time to
release the
poison again
maybe, just
maybe
somehow
before i die
i’ll get to have
a partner in
this
i think we all
know why my
wrists are riddled
with arthritis
(Imagine, if you will, a dark desolate alternate reality)
A man enters a coffee shop restaurant with a briefcase in hand, wearing a black hat and a grey overcoat. He approaches the cashier:
“The weather certainly is nice, isn’t it?” says the woman.
“I haven’t seen the sun in 8 years” replies the man.
He gives her a small ticket and picks up his coffee which resembles a dark, murky substance. He sits down in the corner with a nervous posture, darting his tired cold eyes around the room to see if anyone has followed him. A woman, a different woman, suddenly sits next to him, seemingly appearing from nowhere. She has long blonde hair, and appears to be about 300 years old, although she doesn’t look a day over 25.
“What are you doing here on such a beautiful day?” she asks.
“I’m just visiting”
He looks outside to see a large storm brewing.
“I want to fuck you” said the woman.
The man looked at her with an expressionless stare an they share a minute of silence.
“What do you do for work mister?” She finally said.
“I am an accountant”
“My father was an accountant”
“Was he?” said the man “how interesting”
“Do you like sports” said the woman.
“I like killing people” said the man.
He looked at her with a grin from ear to ear.
“Would you like to see what’s in my briefcase?”
He began fidgeting with his arms, as if he was on some unknown drug.
“It has some of my most treasured belongings inside, and I would love to show you”
He opened the briefcase slowly, as to build up the anticipation, and he pulled out a small, shiny cube.
“This is a phase box. They are priceless from where I come from”.
“Where do you come from?” she said.
“I come from where the mountains are tall and the trees are grey”.
“Is that near the factory?”
“No”
The cashier appeared from the counter, bearing a large revolver. She then killed the woman.
The man took out a handkerchief, and wiped up the blood.
He finished his coffee and closed his briefcase.
To be a mother is to be a warrior!
First and foremost she is a mother of three, personal assistant, runs her own businesses, and is a model, traveller, and motivator well known in the creative industry. How does she do it? Julz gave me some tips while we ventured in a hired convertible and chose spots around the island of Waikiki, Oahu for our shoot, ending the day with drinks and an equally gorgeous sunset.
SbB: When did you know a career in beauty was for you?
L: I’ve always had an interest of beauty/make-up. As young as 4 years old; I remember standing in front of the beauty section and would not move until my mum brought me make-up.
While I was studying beauty therapy, I had an international make-up artist recommended to pursue further into make-up.
SbB: What prompted you to becoming a freelance beautician and masseuse?
L: When my dermatologist consultation was not sufficient enough for me. My curiosity gained a perfect opportunity to educate others of their self-worth and care.
SbB: Today’s woman is busier than ever. You’re a prime example! What is the easiest/quickest way to turn a day/work look into something that works for night out?
L: Glam eyes (darkening the outer corners of your eyes) and red lipstick.
SbB: How do you approach a style-conscious women of “a certain age” who wish to remain current but fear looking as if they’re trying too hard. What are some comfort-zone-friendly ways to rock the latest trends?
L: Go subtle; use natural tone colours and false eye lashes.
SbB: Speaking of age appropriateness, let’s consider the flip-side. Is there an age you, as a makeup-artist and mother, consider too soon for girls to begin wearing makeup on a regular basis?
L: I believe from 17 years old is reasonable on a regular basis.
Teenagers need to preserve their youthful skin.
Unless you do dancing and have an exceptional skincare regime.
SbB: Currently, what are your favorite beauty trends?
L: Bold; defined eyebrows and flawless bronzed skin.
SbB: What three makeup item should no woman leave home without?
L: Moisturiser, brow promenade and lipgloss.
SbB: Come the weekend, what’s your favourite thing to do?
L: If I am not working; my favourite thing is to stay in bed as long as possible with my partner listening to me snore.
Horror Sleaze Trash 