The Last Projector Read online

  “…a hungry heart… to regulate their breathing…”

  Well, he thought that initially. Then he realized she was talking on a cordless phone bigger than Stevey’s, tucked up under her pink sweatshirt hood as best she could, frantic hand actions telling Larry she was dealing with a situation where she truly needed somebody’s help. Probably waiting on a ride, by the way she stared up and down the street.

  But this girl had the look he could spot from a mile away. An attractive girl with a phone pressed against her ear while a crisis unfolded around her, no ink on either arm? It was on his checklist of characteristics for recruitment. She’d be equally vulnerable for a movie or a relationship.

  The tragedy was that, until recently, if Larry were to notice a tattoo on the arm of a girl next door like this one, he would normally see dollar signs instead, because, ironically, just as a tattoo artist knew a naked arm would be more likely to be connected to a tough sell, Larry knew pristine skin was the most difficult to talk into getting in front of that camera.

  He hated how much he’d grown to detest them. He used to stick up for tattoos. One day, when some asshole walked onto the set and loudly declared tattoos were, “The self-inflicted permanent stamp of the proletariat,” he got a temporary stomp from Larry that begat a permanent limp, courtesy of Head Breakfast.

  This Girl Next Door was a little short, though (probably too short for decent lighting actually), and he was reminded of his unfortunate detour into dwarf porn. It turned out there was no good reason to ever use a “little person” because their torsos were the same as any normal-sized person. This meant they looked exactly the same in anything other than the widest shots. And who the hell wants wide shots in adult films? David Lean? He remembered long, drunken debates with Damon and how he wished their torsos were the freaky small part of their bodies, how their limbs should be normal length instead (“Then those little Rumpelstiltskins would be spinning gold!”). Larry tried to picture such a creature coupling and silently thanked evolution for denying the world these imps and “The Damon’s” “human spider porn” fantasy.

  He rubbed the remnants of Joe Fuck’s nosebleed onto his steering wheel, peering close under his skin at the black blood that had stained his hand forever. Back before high school graduation, before film school sunk him into debt, before his short-lived (but long story) adventures in the United Kingdom had him boomeranging back to the United States, he’d landed a temporary job on an assembly line making door hinges. And in this factory, Larry would accidentally pinch some part of his body in his vise at least once a week. On his very first day, he pinched the top of his hand so many times that he tried adjusting every angle of his routine when he directed the teeth to crush and curve the metal plates. But this only made it worse. This caused the vise to pinch him harder out of spite, five times in as many hours, so hard that the blood under his skin never dissolved back into the dermis. Just like the pencil dot on his knuckles that would apparently follow him from Kindergarten to his grave, this crisscross of pinches had permanently tattooed his hand with his body’s own ink. These marks might not have been noticeable if it hadn’t been for the pattern they’d formed, quite accidentally.

  A swastika. Right below his knuckles. The first thing anyone would see if or when they shook his hand. Even worse, the quadruple blood blisters made a terrible swastika, and Larry worried that people wouldn’t just dismiss him as a racist, but a moron to boot.

  His experiences with this symbol drew him to the song “A Boy Named Sue,” but he imagined Johnny Cash singing about “A Boy with an Unfortunate Tattoo” instead. Growing up in Southfield, Michigan, close enough to pretend he was from Detroit, Larry liked to think the clusterfuck of markings on his hand forced him to become a little bit tougher. At least until the beatings got real bad. That’s when he wised up and tried to get rid of the swastika, borrowing some lotion a secret-cutter ex-girlfriend used on the fake suicide scars across her wrists. He remembered her saying pregnant women used it to get rid of stretch marks on their bellies. But it did nothing for either of them. So, tired as he was of all the leather gloves he wore in the summertime and the drag races the gloves would provoke at every red traffic light, he attempted his own homemade tattoo removal. With a cheese grater.

  And it worked. But his hand still itched, even worse than everything else, something that made him suspect a swastika was still buried under there, another sneaky quadruple blood blister, still furious from all those fucking pinches, waiting to seep almost-but-not-quite to the surface to brand him again. For years, the threat of it made Larry afraid to scratch hard enough to satisfy his itching.

  “…missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing…”

  Larry knew that with the repetition in this song, his tape player would be eating Mr. Dolby shortly. So he was surprised when his stereo died a quiet death that afternoon without even a last meal. It just sighed once, twice, then a plastic rattle came from deep in the dashboard, like a fan blade slowing on a fingertip.

  It was done. Larry closed his eyes. He only had a factory stereo, A.M. no less, and finding anything worth listening to on the dial was close to impossible. He hated A.M. radio, not just because he met an A.M. disc jockey once when he was a little kid, the DJ running his mouth at the bus stop trying to cash in on his minor celebrity, getting in everyone’s face with his all-nighter power-drink breath smelling vaguely of an aluminum asshole. Larry chugged Red Bullet himself, when he was just starting porn and pulling all-nighters, but this was due to mishearing their radio spot as “It gives you things!” He cut himself off after the spin-off drink “Red Belly,” though, which ended up staining kids’ feces bright red and necessitated five more name changes in as many years.

  No, A.M. radio was just too muffled to use the static between stations for a game kind of like “hot and cold” (maybe more like Marco Polo actually), where you zeroed in on bursts of music to find your way out of dead spots on the road or the minefield of talk radio. With the A.M. band, you just had dead air and a strange huffing, something like blowing into a baseball glove, when you spun past the stations too fast.

  He played with the dials, frowning when he heard another voice that seemed to be speaking directly to him. He started to narrow it down and decipher this voice, but then people were hopping up and down in his rear-view mirror, waving Larry into the house. He looked past them for the girl in the pink hoodie, but she was gone. He rubbed the rest of his actor’s blood into his jeans, fighting the unbearable urge to scratch his elbows and those scaly, assistant-professor patches of dead skin, now finally tenured and ripe enough to rip free from his arms forever.

  Instead he covered his yawn with the old scars on the back of his hand and went back to work.

  “Work, my ass. You never had a job.”

  “I swear I did. See this sunshine? When I first started working up there, the people coming down the hill off the previous shift would drive by trying to wave at me. At least that’s what I heard they were doing, because I couldn’t see shit through the glare of the sun. It’s always in your face on this hill. And because I was blinded, I never waved back. So they all hated me. They thought I was trading their smiles or pleasant nods with this nasty look. You know that squinty face you make when the glare is the worst? Come on.”

  “I think you thought about it way more than they did,” Bully yawned.

  “Yawning, too! Did you know direct sunlight makes you yawn? But even on the cloudy days, I’d sometimes yawn at them, and they’d catch my yawn and yawn at the car behind me, who would catch that yawn and yawn at the next car in line. I swear I tossed yawns like beach balls at a concert right here on this hill. There’s probably still a yawn hanging here. See?!”

  Billy put his finger in her gaping mouth.

  “That was my yawn from three fucking years ago! Got ya!” She tried to bite it but missed.

  “Anyhow, this is a job,” he told her, pulling down the car’s visor.

  Billy and Bully cruised be
hind a supermarket at the top of an industrial park. Idling in a cul-de-sac in the distance, they could just barely make out the “K-9” on the back of a police car. They’d spent most of the day with their favorite cop in the world, never letting him out of their sight for long. At least his car anyway.

  Billy turned down his Billy Squier mix, even though he’d been waiting for the perfect time to serve up the guitar opening of “Lonely is the Night.” Hopefully, he could time the drums from “The Big Beat” instead.

  “Look at that motherfucker. Ever read their user manual? To Protect and Serve Man? It’s a cookbook!”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Silence for awhile. Bully practiced thinking about John Carpenter movies rather than talking about them. She thought about an alternate future where John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing is so popular that upstart Stephen Spielberg’s labor of love, E.T., is considered the biggest flop of the ‘80s. Carpenter’s The Thing is so good, it negates arguments for and against remakes all at once, since the world could finally imagine how unnecessary a third Thing, the inevitable remake of Howard Hawk’s remake, would be. In the future, all of The Things are so good that, years after that, Bully will sometimes forget she hid her pornography on a videotape labeled “The Things,” and will always be disappointed after she sticks it in. But something about The Thing will always make her want to sing. So she will talk instead.

  “So…”

  “I drove a propane truck for awhile, too,” he interrupted her. “You know, the ones with the signs on them saying they could blow up at any moment?”

  Bully sighed.

  “The weird thing is I never cared,” he shrugged. “At least until I saw that movie where they were hauling the dynamite and couldn’t hit any bumps. What was that called? Wages of Fire?”

  “You didn’t see that movie. I saw that movie. Then I told you about. Wages of Fear.”

  “No, because seeing that movie made me seek out the remake, Sorceress…”

  “Oh, my god. I saw that, too, dude. Right out my window. Double feature. One was in French, so I could almost read the whole fucking thing for once. Wait, was it really called Sorceress? Because for a movie about a couple of trucks hauling dynamite, that makes no sense at all.”

  “…and seeing those two movies changed everything about that job. Suddenly, it made sense. It was… wonderful.”

  Bully stopped yawning and stared at him until they both laughed. He knew she wasn’t going to let him get away with saying the word “wonderful” without repercussions. Not on her watch. Not after he forced her to sit through 2010, believing it would be anywhere near as good as 2001. Not after he dragged her to that teen holocaust Some Kind of Wonderful and she’d slapped him open-handed across the face when the hero wasted his money on stupid earrings.

  “You know what we need to give Bigbeep?” she asked after a few minutes.

  “What?”

  “A motive.”

  “You think?” He frowned.

  “Yeah. He needs one. Me, too, probably.”

  “But you have one! We have one. My dog. Your cat. We’re gonna strike a blow against vets everywhere.”

  A few minutes passed.

  “What do you think a police dog dreams about?”

  “Being bad.”

  “If a police dog could watch any movie, what would it be?”

  “A movie where the dog belongs to the bad guy.”

  “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  “You remember the last time I stalked somebody?”

  “Yep. That kid who kicked your ass in the ninth grade. You remember how that worked out, right?”

  “I told you about that?

  “Yep.”

  “I didn’t do shit?’

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m in a hurry or anything. I looked him up in the phone book, and the cocksucker still lives and works in exactly the same place. He makes it way too easy to stalk. That kills any sense of vengeance.”

  “I heard he hit you so hard everyone thought you disintegrated?”

  “What?! Shut the fuck up. I fell back into some bushes and you couldn’t find me for awhile, that’s all.”

  “Someone called 911 reporting a disintegration.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “They were blowing on blades of grass for hours looking for you.”

  “Obviously, that didn’t happen,” Billy sighed. Then, “I’d fuck him up now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was parked outside his house last week, and I watched him throw away his workout equipment. And it was the same chin-up bar I’ve been using for like eleven years! Get it? Now that’s a nemesis! Both doing the same exercises for over a decade? We would battle until the end of time…”

  “Let’s go. He’s leaving.”

  Billy pulled out to give chase in Bully’s Mustang, sneaking looks over at her every chance he got. Her wet, blonde hair was suddenly back to black, those dark curls all askew, sour look on her face at all times now. Totally his type after all. She looked like Maggie, actually, not just his first but his worst.

  The first time Billy saw Maggie was in math class. She’d just come to their school that morning and already seemed to have a boyfriend. So Billy didn’t think twice about her.

  The second time he saw Maggie was at one of those underage pool hall hangouts where she was working. Glass City Boardwalk it was called, and she was wearing a black Ted Nugent tour shirt that a teacher had made her turn inside out earlier in the day. It apparently depicted Ted standing on a dead Santa Claus with a shotgun, shouting “Seasons Greetings!” Billy learned this later, when all the kids were squinting at the shadow on her chest of what she was covering up, theorizing on what she’d worn that was so bad. You could see the hints of red, blood or Santa, who knew? But whatever it was, it made the boys stare at her all day, really noticing her for the first time. She fast became the most popular girl in school. At least for that one day.

  Then she started talking, and only Billy still followed her around after that. It was the first time he ever called a girl on the phone actually, when he called Maggie. He might have called her a little too much. A typical phone call would go like this:

  “I’ll stay on the phone with you.”

  “Why?”

  “At least until you get to your car.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s common knowledge that more females are attacked when they’re distracted and talking on the phone.”

  “So why don’t I hang up and call you when I’m in the car.”

  “I just told you why! I want to make sure you’re safe.”

  “But…”

  “Please, just keep talking to me until you’re on the road.”

  “You’re really not kidding are you?”

  “Slow down here for a second.”

  Her voice was high, like a little kid, but she was rude as hell, seemingly belligerent to make up for the high pitch of her vocal cords, and it was tough for people to take. But Billy decided he could take it right after he reached out to shake her hand, and she started thumb-wrestling him instead. He then obsessed about that thumb for a good 48 hours. Wait, this wasn’t her Billy was remembering. This was her…

  Billy and Bully followed the police car for an hour, staying about six car lengths behind, but getting closer when he would exceed the speed limit like the rest of those slippery badge-wearing motherfuckers they were suddenly seeing everywhere. That’s when Billy would match speed perfectly just to piss him off.

  Bigby was weaving through a residential neighborhood, sometimes slowing to shout out his window, and Billy was excited they might get to see some secret second residence, when Bully punched him hard in the meat of his shoulder to get his attention.

  “Slow down here! Pull up next to that house.” She cocked a thumb. Oh, how Billy remembered that thumb.

  He stopped the car and watched Bigby go. Then he turned to see her tossing som
ething into a random mailbox. She raised the flag. A red flag, of course. He was suddenly seeing those everywhere, too.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, she dug through her purse, hands rattling around a stack of audio cassettes.

  “What are those for?” he tried again.

  “Huh? Oh, I just use ‘em to get people to come to Glass City. Like advertising. They let me put a bunch of songs on them and leave them everywhere: bushes, gas pumps, drive-thrus. The name and phone number is on there to get more kids to come. I call ‘em Tape Bombs. I drop them all over, and...”

  “Yeah, yeah, you said that. You ever drop them into cereal boxes? I’d love to get one for a prize instead of those bullshit stickers.”

  “I’ll do that for ya.”

  “Wait, where do you drop those tapes again?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, I didn’t see you drop a tape just now. That was a piece of paper. Hold on, whose mailbox was that?”

  “Nobody’s. That paper was just a flyer for movies showing at The Kid. So I can make some extra money. I’m like their papergirl.”

  Billy drove on, not really convinced. He made a mental note of the next intersection, mapping it so he could come back and retrieve the tape or flyer or whatever and see what was up. But now thinking about a “prize inside,” Billy remembered the dream he’d had the night before, the one dream he always had with the red ball rattling inside the tiny skeleton. He’d dreamt about that tiny skeleton at least a dozen times now, never able to get the rubber ball out of the ribcage. Tonight he vowed he’d tell her about if it happened again. He had no idea that everyone in the world hated to hear about other people’s dreams.

  Later, both their hearts contracted when they thought they were getting pulled over again, but it was just a siren in a song on the radio.

  It got them every time.

  Firemen try to untangle the dead boy from the tree while a paramedic strains on his toes to check for signs of life. But the way the boy is arched, his limbs corkscrewed up high and out of reach, both femurs cracked upwards at the pelvis like a doll crammed uncaring into a toy box, there’s only one part of the body hanging low enough to reach.