Friday, March 4, 2011

Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood

These Hollywood parties never get boring. The sex, the drugs, the bubblegum pop. It feels good to be young, rich and famous, and there's never been a better year to be those things in than 1985.

Bowie and Jagger extol the virtues of dancing in the street, tantalising your ears with cheesy auditory bliss. The chemical sludge of phlegm mixed with quality cocaine oozes through your sinuses like a slow-motion river of pure heaven. Surrounded by the beautiful people where you belong, in this opulent mansion of decadence. Your eyes awash with narcotic glaze, you make your way through the throng of leather, denim and hairspray to the bar, where you grab a large unwatered-down scotch that's worth more than the bartender's annual salary. You quickly down two more, then head underneath the mirror ball to show off a few moves which look utterly ridiculous, but in this place, at this time, you will not be judged so harsh. The vibrations in the air urge you forward toward your latest conquest - another frantic, sweaty coupling that you'll immediately forget... but she never will. Who will the lucky lady be this time?

And then it happens. You spy a vision of pure beauty across the dance floor and your eyes lock. She's perfect. Like a mixture of Farrah Fawcett's sensuality, Madonna's attitude and Molly Ringwald's innocence. Her leather pants are so tight that removing them in under an hour would require an angle grinder. Her fluoro pink midriff top barely covers her natural, untanned tits. Her hair stands a full 8 inches high, like a lion's mane. But she's no lion. You are. And you've spotted your prey.

As you close in, the amount of product in her hair causes your eyes to sting and water, but it doesn't deter you. This is fate. This is destiny. It was meant to be. You move with fame fueled confidence into the cloud of CFC's, until you are finally face to face with this exquisite dream. And as the opening bars of Mr Mister's Broken Wings fill the room with liquid ecstasy, you stare deeply, passionately into her cleavage and utter the sacred words, "I am the Keymaster. Are you the Gatekeeper?" That's what you intend to say anyway, but your drug-addled vocal chords can only produce a stream of garbled nonsense. She seems impressed regardless. Of course she's impressed! After all, you're not just some nobody. You're Charlie fucking Sheen.

You take her hand to lead her somewhere a little more private. The main downstairs bathroom is no good as you know Rob Lowe is in there, getting blown by a 14 year old anorexic as he vacuums up lines of ketamine from between her jutting, razor-sharp shoulder blades. Living the dream. You drag her onward toward the guest bedroom, eager for that special moment of solitude that will both fulfil her starry-eyed sycophantic fantasies and ease the aching lust in your balls.

Through the living room, past the people crowded arounded the TV, watching some video.  Faces turn your way, shocked expressions set like stone, saying things like "You gotta watch this" and "Dude, I think this is real", but you have more pressing matters on your mind. You glance briefly at the screen to see a grainy picture of a dazed, near comatose Asian girl, barely conscious, tied to a bed as a samurai man slowly approaches her. For a split second, you consider stopping to watch, thinking it's one of the crazy pornos that Emilio picked up on his last Japan trip. But there'll be time for that later, only just before you turn away the man in the video pulls out a knife and drives it hard into the girl's wrist...

...

... and a wave of nausea sweeps over you so damn strong it nearly knocks you off your feet and suddenly you start to really, really regret that 43rd line of coke. The blade digs further into her wrist, carving through flesh, blood spattering onto the girl's face until the hand is severed altogether, the butchered wrist stump oozing blood onto the white sheets. The man starts to talk at the screen, but the words mean nothing to you. All you can think about is the gushing scarlet blood and how realistic it looked. Could this be the real thing? After all the rumours of snuff tapes circulating, are you now face-to-face with the genuine article? The picture is so grainy and the sound so muffled that you can't tell for sure, but then this kind of thing isn't ever likely going to get a crisp remaster with English subtitles now, is it? All you can do is keep watching. You can't not watch.

Now her shoulder is sliced open, gouts of gore spurting out as the blade parts flesh. Your hand is yanked by the woman who was to be tonight's entertainment, notch number 400-something on your tomahawk, but you barely even notice. Your surroundings fade into nothing until all that exists here with you is the fuzzy image of a bloodthirsty madman and his innocent victim, and the realisation that you are watching the slow murder of a human being. Your dream evening has become nightmare incarnate, far worse than any phantoms that have ever existed in a sleeping dreamscape - even worse than the time you dreamt that in the future you'd be a washed-up has-been starring in a terrible sitcom with an annoying kid. That was pure fantasy, but these pictures of a psychotic samurai proudly carrying a severed hand-less arm, this is real.

As a chisel is inserted into the deep rent on her shoulder, the wrenching sound of tearing cartilage vibrates through your gut, the sensitivity of your nerve endings heightened to ungodly levels by enough cocaine to give Tony Montana an embolism; each individual sound of rending and tearing flesh adding extra icicles to the cold sweat dripping down your back. And still it continues...

The girl's legs sawed off slowly, the back and forth slicing of the metal teeth through meat and bone echoing through your brain like a plague of locusts big enough to swarm over the USSR. The blood arcing through the air like crimson flowers. The entrails dragged out of her gut with cold methodical efficiency, slippery and slithering, the full glorious gory viscera that makes the human body function, now just a pile of offal - unattractive and unimportant... meat. The head sliced clean off to land in an unceremonious heap on the floor, only to be retrieved for further degradation as the eyeballs are clumsily scooped out. This is more than just murder. This is a complete deconstruction of the human form - splayed out on a butchers slab and taken apart piece by piece, treated like a carcass before it was even dead.

You can take no more. Your hands are shaking, your heart is pounding and your brain is throbbing like it's trying to escape your skull. You watched it; you can't unwatch it. Grabbing your companion by the arm (what was her name again?), you wordlessly drag her roughly to the guest bedroom, still in a state of disbelief at how someone could be so inhumane as to treat another person with such total disregard, as merely a source of personal amusement. Tomorrow, you'll turn the tape over the authorities. But for now, it's time to give this piece of ass a good 3 and a half minutes of passion that she can brag about to her friends afterwards. Snuff tape aside, you still have a reputation to uphold.

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