_______________________________________________________________________________ _ _ _ _ ((___)) ((___)) [ x x ] cDc communications [ x x ] \ / presents... \ / (' ') (' ') (U) (U) Top Gun a short story by Don Howland, from Forced Exposure 'zine #14 >>> A CULT Publication......1988 <<< -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- _______________________________________________________________________________ "SATANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN" Electric guitars exploded into static in the cheap speakers mounted on the roof behind matted furry bucket seats. Arnie Lemon reached down for the tape deck and turned up the volume. The pavement around him was wet black and immense disk-like snowflakes whirred from the low sky. The wind shook the spindly dead-looking branches of tall trees. Friday afternoon. "Fucking god!damned! shit-eating bitch! Cunt, fucking shithead cunt HAG." A blue haired woman two cars ahead of him seemed reluctant to make a left turn into the mall lot, despite there being no oncoming traffic within two hundred yards. The light was about to change. Arnie pushed angrily on his horn, which hadn't worked for months. The wire responsible for the horn in fact dangled beneath the car, touching the ground. The old woman sluggishly turned at last as the light turned yellow, with the car just behind riding her ass safely across. The left turn arrow flashed to red. Arnie Lemon wheeled his royal blue Dodge Swinger across the four lanes of oncoming traffic. A pickup truck with two fat bearded passengers honked at him and sped up if they might try to follow him. They didn't. He drove along the periphery of the huge parking area, cutting over when he thought he saw the red white and blue lighted logo of the Video America outlet. The bright colored light was at once warm and inviting and repellent int he frigid gray dampness. Arnie Lemon parked 100 yards from the store and walked in. He could've parked closer but reverse was no working well in the Swinger. There were three customers inside Video America. One, a middle-aged man in a tan overcoat who resembled Arnie's father, stood in the nook set aside for adult movies. He was looking at the wall well above the mounted cassette boxes, at nothing at all, perhaps trying to remember which ones he'd seen before, or when his wife was getting back from her sister's in Elyria, tonight or tomorrow morning. "I'd like TOP GUN and COBRA," Arnie Lemon told the clerk without browsing at all. The clerk glanced at the customer with brief suspicion. Arnie Lemon, with his eight inch long bird nest of hair and his white tee shirt with a paper towel logo on it, did not look the type of person to be renting these titles. The clerk thought this instantly, before reason overcame him: what the hell. "Ah, COBRA is out." "OK, OUT OF AFRICA then." Arnie presented a driver's license with a false name and address and paid the clerk the rental deposit in cash. He took the white paper bag and turned, bumping into the man who did not look so much like his father up close. The man had decided upon two colorful boxes with Oriental women on them, Arnie saw. Arnie returned to the Swinger and put the bag on the back seat with many other such bags. "Let's see now," not needing to think but satisfied with the day's work. "That's twenty-four movies from twelve different outlets." Twelve outlets scattered all over town; he'd been at it since ten. He drove home. Arnie took the loot upstairs in one trash bag. The cat had just shit and the small apartment was thick with the meaty shit stink. Arnie opened a window and watched the hot air swirl out. He sat on the throw rug and sorted through the bag. A nice haul: five OUT OF AFRICA's, three COBRA's, three POLTERGEIST II's, four SHORT CIRCUIT's, two INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM's, and the real prize: seven TOP GUN's. It was with a TOP GUN that he began his work. He fast forwarded through three quarters of a movie and then hit stop. He then hit record, at the same time hitting play on a second VHS machine. He'd rigged the machines to dupe the night before; wires tangled like Spanish moss behind the TV. The screen now showed five middle aged men having sex with and then repeatedly stabbing a bound and naked boy of about fifteen. They were in a red room with boxes on the floor and a full length mirror on the wall which only reflected the bright light for the movie camera. The naked bodies looked alabaster. The footage was inarguably authentic. The tail end of the four minute, crudely spliced sequence, when the camera focused jerkily on the boy's mutilated torso and then the gouged eye sockets gushing blood, made Arnie queasy every time he watched it, though he no longer vomited or even choked. By the time Arnie Lemon was done grafting the same footage into the twenty-four rented cassettes it was 3:3:0 a.m. How time flies. He needed his sleep as a rule, but he was working this night on coffee and Lucky Strikes. The filterless cigarettes made his throat ache and his stomach nauseous. Nausea, Arnie found, was the best guarantee for staying up past his bedtime, which was usually ten o'clock. He wasn't remotely tired now but went to bed anyway, sleeping fitfully until 11:00 the next day when his cat howled for her breakfast. Arnie got up and looked at his pale face on the medicine cabinet mirror, took a long clear piss. On the toilet top were his vitamins. He shook a Vitamin E from a white plastic jar. It bounced from his hand and fell to the floor, finally rolling to a stop among the pubic hairs on the piss slick around the toilet's base. Arnie bent down and picked it up. "Shit," he said aloud. He rinsed the clear gold vitamin under the faucet. It got softer under the warm water. It felt like a nipple, a fat nipple, Arnie thought. He put it in his mouth and washed it down with a drink of cloudy tepid water. Then he took a vitamin C and niacinamide. Empty jars of Chelated Multi-Minerals and vitamin A and D complex and a comb with a white film of dead skin shared the toilet top. The fey disc jockey on the classical music station was reading the weather forecast. High 30's, 100% chance of precipitation, freezing rain, hail. Arnie walked across the previous day's newspaper to the kitchen nook. No heat came from the wall vent. His bare feet were white and cold. No coffee; he didn't feel like it. Every day his head felt as though it were filled with white glue and coffee just made it worse. He took a bag from a box of herb tea his ex-girlfriend gave him after reading in a women's magazine that camomile was bad for you. Arnie rinsed the rice scum from a pot and put water on to boil over a blue flame. Breakfast, a bowl of bran with peanuts and sunflower seeds on it, raisins, plain yogurt, and milk he'd have to pour down the sink probably the next day. Arnie ate the same thing every morning but was too lazy to mix the cereal beforehand. He sat on the floor and read the Friday paper some more, reading a lifestyle article about Spam and, because there was nothing else left, the business section. Sister's Chicken was in trouble. Arnie loved their chicken; years before he'd gone there with his ex-girlfriend and snuck chicken parts into his plastic-lined coat pockets and ate so much that he'd nearly vomit. Ffff. The herb tea tasted like paper. He finished the article, then lay back on the rug and masturbated thinking about Pam Dawber and Mark Harmon having sex. He went to the library and read from an encyclopedia of philosophy and the current New Yorker. He never read books, never finished them. Today he did not finish any of the articles he began either. At five the library closed; at 4:49 he went to the audio visual department and signed out a tape by the David Murray Octet. He went home, ate again and watched a college basketball game with the sound down and the jazz tape on his stereo. He masturbated again at halftime, thinking about different things. The game was essentially over by halftime, but Arnie watched it all. Eighteen points separated the winner and loser. At 10:30, after drinking a room temperature beer and smoking two cigarettes, he put on his winter coat and ski cap. He put all the videotapes back in the green-black trash bag and left. Driving around the cold, wet city on a Saturday night made Arnie feel sad. By the college campus, despite the wind and rain, long lines of students waited to get into the bars; at the malls there were just a few lonely cars sitting about the dark edges of the parking lots. Red lights. Out on the mall strips the bright fast food restaurants were the only signs of life. "People are like fucking moths," Arnie thought. He was not hungry but stopped at a White Castle for two cheeseburgers and onion chips which he ate in his car in a dark corner of the lot by a loaded dumpster. He owed himself a treat, he figured. He chewed studying the frost-covered plastic bags that had spilled out of the dumpster. People were horrified by Arnie's videotapes. The first outraged phone calls were received by weary and uninterested police clerks on Sunday evening, and the newspaper ran three stories - the first on the front page - on the heinous tampering of popular videocassettes. Police doubted the added footage originated locally, it fit the description of a crime committed in Las Vegas which was rumored to have been filmed though no footage ever turned up in the initial investigation, and who was this sick "David Nicholas"? A police composite sketch that looked nothing like him except for the hair ran on the second day on the front page of the local section. On the third day, there was an article noting that local video rentals had not been hurt by the crime. Indeed, they'd been helped. TOP GUN and OUT OF AFRICA, the only two titles mentioned in any of the newspaper articles, were impossible to get hold of at any video rental outfit in town, the newspaper said. On the fourth day, Arnie put the paper down, had another beer and walked to the barber shop, where against the young barber's protestations he got a crew cut. Arnie looked at himself in the yellow plastic hand mirror and smirked wearily. "I look like a dipshit," he thought. His head was as red as a hothouse tomato, the blood flow to his head blocked by the barber's bib. He paid the barber a quarter tip and left, dizzy as the blood shot up to his head, a free man. _______________________________________________________________________________ Behavior Modification.....806/793-9462 The Dead Zone.............214/522-5321 Demon Roach Underground...806/794-4362 Dragonfire Private........609/424-2606 Question Authority........715/341-6516 Pure Nihilism.............517/337-7319 Tequila Willy's...........209/526-3194 The Metal AE..............201/879-6668 =============================================================================== 1988 cDc communications by Don Howland 12/31/88-99 All Rights Worth Shit