Snuff

  On bulletin boards, online message boards, where fans post details about every mole and eyelash Cassie Wright has, every color lipstick she’s wore, guys dissect every blow job, I don’t know, like it was for college-homework extra credit. Cassie Wright was born in Missoula, Montana. Her parents are Alvin and Lenni Wright. They live in Great Falls these days. And, yes, Cassie Wright had a baby she gave up nineteen years ago.

  Surfing the Web, I looked for pictures of her vacuuming carpet. Driving a car. With her clothes on and nothing getting stuffed inside of her.

  Some money orders I mailed, and nothing ever came back. But the first package I got was a Cassie Wright pocket vagina, the premium, limited-edition, numbered version. Number four thousand two hundred. Totally museum-quality. Mint condition. Small enough I’d carry it to school in my jeans pocket, with my left hand tracing the folds and soft hairs of her. In Modern American Studies, I’d sit in the back row with my left fingers Brailling, blind, deep in my pocket, until I knew every fold and wrinkle by heart. Ask me the state capitals of Wyoming or Phoenix, and I’d shrug. But ask me anything about the pussy flaps of Cassie Wright, and I could draw you a map.

  That pocket vagina, you could press the clitoris and it would pop out. Press it back inside the hood. Press again to make it pop out. I could do this until my fingertips were red raw, about to bleed. I slept with it under my pillow.

  My teacher Mr. Harlan, in my Dynamics of Science class – one day, handing back papers, he saw the calluses on my fingertips, already cracked and dark pink, and he asked if I was learning guitar. I don’t know. Let’s just say those hours and weeks of constant pleasure weren’t doing Cassie Wright’s vagina any good, either.

  Let’s just hope, looking at some of the six hundred guys here today, that the real deal is more durable than the latex version. As the vagina started to break apart, I saved newspaper-delivery money until I could send away for a previously owned Cassie Wright latex breast replica. I could only afford the left one, but anybody would tell you it’s the better of the two. Of course, it’s too big to fit in my pocket, too big for under my pillow. It’s too big to do anything but collect dust under the bed.

  So I mowed lawns. I returned pop bottles for the deposit. I walked dogs. Washed cars. Raked leaves.

  This part I didn’t tell Mr. Bacardi. How could I?

  Winters, I shoveled snow. Cleaned the black, stinking crud out of roof gutters with my bare hands. Washed St. Bernards. I hung Christmas lights and trimmed hedges.

  Nighttime, I’d squeeze my breast replica. Rub the dusty nipple against my lips. Lick it. Tweak it between two fingers until I fell asleep.

  I drained and changed the oil in big four-door automatic-trannie old-lady cars. Needing the money to buy a Cassie Wright replica, fully realistic sex surrogate, that makes you pretty much the bitch slave of every old lady in town. I don’t know.

  I went trick-or-treating for UNICEF, and those worm-eaten, starving kids in Bangladesh didn’t see one nickel of the thirty bucks that folks donated.

  The day the brown package arrived in the mail, my adopted mom called me at school to ask should she open it.

  Let’s just say I panicked. I told the worst lie a kid can. Told her, No. I said it was a gift – her special, secret Christmas present that I’d sent for to surprise her.

  On the phone, I could hear my adopted mom shaking the box. She said, “It’s so heavy.” She said, “1 hope you didn’t spend a fortune.”

  Shame, shame on me.

  Those lawns I mowed, the dogs walked, the cars washed, I told my adopted mom all that work went into buying her the best dream present ever, because she was such a great, wonderful, loving, terrific mother.

  And on the phone, her voice melted, saying, “Oh, Darin, you shouldn’t have…”

  When I got home, the package sat on my bed. Heavier than you’d guess, a weight between a big library dictionary and a St. Bernard. My adopted mom was gone to her cake-decorating workshop, and my adopted dad was at work. With nobody else in the house, I peeled open the box, and inside, all folded and wadded, looked like some pink mummy. Leathery and wrinkled as a peat bog mummy from the National Geographic magazine.

  The online auction sold it as being brand-new, a virgin, but the blond wig smelled like beer, and the hair felt patchy where it was pulled out. The inside of each thigh felt sticky. The breasts, greasy. On the bottom of one foot, I found the sort of stem you’d see on a beach ball. So you could blow her up.

  I unrolled her across my bed and started to blow.

  I blew, and her breasts rose, they fell, they rose. I blew, and some wrinkles went smooth, but then came back. I blew air into the bottom of her foot until lightning spots flashed in my eyes.

  Right now, here and now, while I’m waiting to hear my gang-bang number called, the girl with the stopwatch walks past, and I put out my hand. To make her stop, I touch her on the elbow, just my fingers on the inside of one elbow, and I ask if it’s true. What Mr. Bacardi’s telling guys. Could Cassie Wright die today?

  “Vaginal embolism,” the girl says. She looks at me, then her eyes go back to the sheets of names on her clipboard. Still running her pen down the list of names, she marks a check next to one guy. The girl twists one hand and looks at the watch on her wrist. She checkmarks next to another name. She says it takes a puff of air equivalent to blowing up a balloon, but due to the dense blood supply in a woman’s pelvic region, you can force a bubble of air into her circulatory system. “If a woman is pregnant,” the girl says, “it’s even easier.”

  In one case from 2002, she says, a woman in Virginia was using a carrot for stimulation and died from an embolism, but anything with an odd shape might trap and force pockets of air into the bloodstream. Other documented cases include batteries, candles, pumpkins.

  “Not to mention,” the girl says, “soap on a rope.”

  Vaginally or rectally, it can happen in either hole.

  “Every year,” she says, “an average of more than nine hundred women die this way.”

  Each woman dies within seconds.

  “If you need facts and figures,” she says, “then I recommend The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus by Violet Blue. Or the article ‘Venous Air Embolism: Clinical and Experimental Considerations’ from the August 1992 issue of Critical Care Medicine.”

  The girl looks at her watch again and says, “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  I don’t know…pumpkins?

  All those years ago, blowing air into my Cassie Wright surrogate, I almost blacked out before I heard the hissing. A faint, soft whisper of air escaping.

  After filling the bathtub with water, dragging the pink skin of her down the hallway, I held her under to look for bubbles from a leak, my hands spread under water, holding her submerged while her blond hair swam around her face and her eyes stared up. Dead. Drowned.

  Bubbles swelled at the sides of her neck. Bubbles outlined her nipples and the flaps of her pussy. Wide half circles of little holes, leaking air. Teeth marks. Bites through her pink skin.

  My adopted dad’s train set, he uses every plastic and glue you can find. With her pink skin spread over the mountains and villages of his plastic landscape, I daubed rubber and epoxy, doctored with clear nail polish and acetate, until I’d healed every bite mark.

  From my adopted mom’s dresser, the bottom of the underwear drawer, I borrowed a lacy honeymoon nightgown that had been buried there forever in layers of tissue paper. I borrowed the pearl necklace that my adopted mom never wore except to church on Christmas. Dressing the surrogate, I said every opening line from every Cassie Wright video I’d seen. Brushing the blond wig, I said, “Hey, lady, did you order a pizza?”

  Wiping my adopted mom’s lipstick on the lips, I said, “Hey, lady, you look like you could use a nice back rub…”

  Spraying on perfume, I said, “Relax, lady, I’m only here to check your pipes…”

  On my computer was playing a pirate copy of World Whore One, and whatever Lloyd George di
d, I did the same. Pulled down the pink thong panties. Unhooked the push-up bra. Lloyd and I were both laying pipe when Cassie’s breasts went from a D cup to a C. By now my dick was bumping mattress. She was leaking, losing air. The faster I pumped, the flatter she went. From a C cup to an A. Shriveling and wrinkling underneath me, wasting away. The more I pumped, the more Cassie Wright’s face collapsed, caved in. Her skin felt loose, baggy, and slack. With my every push, she aged a decade, dying, dead, and decomposing as I hurried, faster, pounding mattress, rubbing myself raw in my rush to get off. Pumping this pink ghost. This murdered outline down the middle of my twin bed.

  Each woman dies within seconds.

  I never heard the door open behind me. Didn’t feel the draft of air on my bare, sweating ass. I didn’t turn around until I heard the voice of my adopted mom. Her honeymoon nightgown. Her Christmas pearls. On my computer, Lloyd George blowing his load down the side of Cassie Wright’s beautiful face.

  My adopted mom, behind me she yells, “Do you have any idea who that is?”

  And I turn, my bone stuck straight out, a pole still wrapped in pink latex, me waving a flag shaped like Cassie Wright.

  And my adopted mom screams, “That’s your birth mother.”

  That, the last boner I would ever sprout.

  No, I never did tell Mr. Bacardi that part.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  15

  Mr. 137

  First opportunity, I sidle up and ask the talent wrangler how it is she knows so much about vaginal embolisms. Almost a thousand women dead every year? Killed by carrots and batteries forcing air inside them? That seems like a remarkably rarefied set of facts for anyone to reference offhand. “Sorry,” I tell her, “I couldn’t help overhearing.” Holding one end of a ballpoint pen, the wrangler taps it like a wand in the direction of each man still here. Her lips silent, making the shape of each number – 27…28…29 – she writes something on her clipboard, at the same time saying, “That’s why Ms. Wright pays me the big bucks.”

  The wrangler is Cassie Wright’s personal assistant, project researcher, gofer, she says. Looking at her wrist-watch, scribbling some numbers, an equation, on the top sheet of paper, the wrangler tells me, “She asked me to assess the risk.”

  I ask if it’s true. Does Miss Wright have a grown child?

  “It’s true,” the wrangler says and looks up at me. White flakes cling to the shoulders of her black turtle-neck sweater. Dandruff. Her straight black hair, she’s tied it back in a ponytail, not a hair hanging loose. The trailing hairs frizzed and bushy with split ends.

  I nod my head, just tilt my neck a little toward the kid, number 72, and I ask, “Is it him?”

  And the wrangler looks. Her eyes blink. Look. She shrugs, saying, “He certainly does look as if he could be…”

  Every week, Cassie Wright gets a pile of letters from a different thousand young men, each of them convinced he’s the baby she gave up for adoption. As part of her job, the wrangler has to open this mail, sort it, sometimes respond to the letters. An easy 90 percent of them are from these would-be sons. All of them begging for a chance to meet. Just one hour of face-to-face so each kid can tell her how much he loves her. How she’s always been his one true mother. The one love he’ll never be able to replace.

  “But Ms. Wright’s not an idiot,” the wrangler says.

  Cassie Wright knows, the moment you make yourself available to any man, he starts to take you for granted. Maybe the first time she meets her son he’ll love her. But the second time, he’ll ask her for money. The third time, he’ll ask for a job, a car, a fix. He’ll blame her for everything he’s done wrong in his life. He’ll trash her, rub her face in every mistake she’s ever made. Call her a whore if she doesn’t hand over what he wants.

  “No,” the wrangler says, “Ms. Wright knows this isn’t about love…”

  The young men who write, asking to meet. The month after, they write again, begging. Then threatening. They claim to only want to find out their genetic history, any predilection for inherited disease. Diabetes. Alzheimer’s. Some claim that they only want to thank her in person for giving them a better life, or they want to show off their accomplishments so she sees that she did the right thing.

  “Ms. Wright has never answered a single one of those letters,” the wrangler says.

  That’s why Cassie Wright’s largest audience, the only part of her audience still growing, is composed of sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-old men. These men buy her backlist movies, her plastic breast relics and pocket vaginas, but not for any erotic purpose. They collect the blow-up sex surrogates and signature lingerie as some form of religious relics. Souvenirs of the real mother, the perfect mother they never had. Frankenstein parts or religious totems of the mother they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to find – who’ll praise them enough, support them enough, love them enough.

  The wrangler says, “Ms. Wright knows, even if she found the kid, she’d never be able to meet all those demands.”

  She looks at Mr. Toto, at the writing on his white canvas skin, and asks, “How’d you meet Celine Dion?”

  Overhead, the monitors are showing excerpts from The Italian Hand Job, where a team of international jewel thieves are plotting to steal a billion in diamonds from a museum in Rome. During the heist, Cassie Wright distracts the guards by engaging them in a double-penetration three-way. The moment the museum alarms sound, the loud sirens and flashing lights, she clenches her pelvic floor and her jaw, effectively becoming a flesh-and-blood set of Chinese handcuffs and trapping the guards inside herself.

  The wrangler holds her ballpoint pen, tapping the air as she counts men around the room. “That’s why Ms. Wright’s shooting this project,” she says.

  Guilt.

  Guilt and payback.

  Especially if Cassie Wright dies, she knows this movie will be the last of its kind. Sales will last forever. Even if it’s outlawed here, copies will sell through the Internet. Enough copies to make Miss Wright’s sole heir rich. Her one kid.

  The wrangler says, “That’s not to mention the life-insurance money.”

  Here’s another aspect of the project that she researched: Insurers don’t list deaths caused by traumatic gang-bang orgies as exclusions in most life-insurance policies. Not until now. Until six of the top insurance companies will have to fork over payouts totaling ten million dollars upon the death by embolism of Cassie Ellen Wright, payable to her only child. No, Miss Wright didn’t want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She’d expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she’d made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.

  She’d expect that young man to love her in amounts she knew were impossible.

  Across the waiting area, actor 72 stands holding his roses. His head tipped back, his brown eyes watch Cassie Wright stash several cool millions in diamond ice deep inside her shaved pussy.

  “No,” the wrangler says. “Ms. Wright wanted to leave her child a fortune, but she wanted the courts to sort it all out with DNA testing…”

  The wrangler holds up her clipboard so that it blocks one side of my face, one eye, and she says, “Can you see out of this eye?”

  I say yes.

  She moves the clipboard to block my other eye, unblocking the first, and she says, “How about this eye?”

  And I nod yes. I can see out of both.

  “Good,” the wrangler says. The first sign of Viagra overdose is losing sight in one eye. Half blind, you lose depth perception. She looks around the waiting area, at the crowd of men jerking the half-hard erections still tucked in their shorts, and she says, “Maybe that’s why most of you wrote down ten inches on your applications…”

  I ask, “What about the father? Won’t he get part of Miss Wright’s fortune?”

  The wrangler shakes her head. “Ms. Wright’s family,” she says, “they disow
ned her years ago.”

  No, I meant the father of her child.

  “Him?” the wrangler says, staring at me, her mouth hung open, wagging her head from side to side. “The sick fuck who talked her into this awful business? The living piece of shit who slipped her Demerol and Drambuie, then set up cameras and fucked her from every angle?” Rolling her eyes, the wrangler says, “Did you know? He mailed an anonymous copy of that first film to her parents.”

  That’s why, when she went home pregnant, they threw her out.

  That’s why, to survive, she had to slink back to the sick fuck and make more porn.

  The wrangler barks out a laugh. She says, “Why would she leave any money to him?”

  No, I say. What I meant was ‘Who?’

  Who was that man, the father of the mystery kid who’s about to become rich?

  “The sick fuck?” the wrangler says.

  I nod.

  And wouldn’t you know it, she lifts a hand to point her ballpoint pen straight across the room – at Branch Bacardi.

  ∨ Snuff ∧

  16

  Sheila

  Valeria Messalina, a descendant of Caesar Augustus, was born twenty years after the birth of Christ and raised in the court of the Emperor Caligula, who – as a practical joke – forced her to marry her second cousin, Claudius, a dimwit thirty years her senior. At their marriage, Messalina was eighteen, her groom forty-eight. Three years later, Caligula was assassinated, and Claudius ascended to the throne.

  Once she became empress, according to the historian Tacitus, Messalina fucked gladiators, dancers, soldiers – and anyone who refused her, she had them executed for treason. Slaves or senators, married or single, if Messalina said you were hot – you had to put out.

  Talk about giving somebody performance anxiety.

  To cleanse her palate between studs and hunks and beauties, Messalina was famous for seeking out the ugliest man in the empire. Fucking him as a sort-of sexual sorbet.