Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

It just so happens that I have some empty shackles between Aurora Fenech and Jenny. I guess the time is right for Katy Hindley. Elvin Avenue, wasn’t it?

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