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                                    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 3:30 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.
_______________________________________________________________________________
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===============================================================================
 1988  cDc communications  by Don Howland                           12/31/88-99
 All Rights Worth Shit

