Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780385526920
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

18

Mr. 72

Mr. Bacardi stares up at the TVs they have hanging from the ceiling, showing porno, and he keeps saying, “No…no fucking way…”

Mr. Bacardi just stands in one place, staring up at the TVs, maybe using two fingers to pinch the loose skin under his jaw, pull it tight, and let go. He’s staring at the movie on TV, running his fingers over his cheeks, stretching the skin back toward his ears so his wrinkles around his lips disappear, saying, “Fucking camera dude, he made me look like shit.” His skin in some spots as wrinkled as my pink plastic sex surrogate, Mr. Bacardi keeps saying, “No way I look that trashed. Fucking lighting dudes…”

Guy 137, who used to be Dan Banyan, he holds up his autograph hound, staring it straight in the button eyes, and says, “Somebody’s in denial…”

The headlines on those newspapers they sell at the grocery-store checkout counter, they’re true. The gossip stuff about why Dan Banyan got his TV series took off the air. That gossip they printed was real.

“I was starving. I was a starving actor,” says guy 137, his head tipped back but not looking at the TVs. Instead, he’s grinning at the ceiling. Laughing at the nothing there. And he says, “If anybody can identify with how Cassie Wright feels at this moment, that person is me…”

Above us, on the TVs, my mom’s starring in The Italian Hand Job, where she plays an international mystery woman looking to steal the crown jewels of some place.

Mr. Bacardi sucks in his stomach and stands taller, saying, “The cheap-ass video like this, the resolution is crap.” He says, “They might as well have shot this from a damned satellite.”

Anger, guy 137 calls it.

“I was your age,” the 137 Dan Banyan guy says and looks at me. He takes a big breath and lets it out, slow. His shoulders shrug up, high to his ears, and he says, “The finance company kept phoning me about repossessing my car. A couple late payments on my credit cards, and they jacked the interest rate up to thirty percent.” His shoulders drop so his hands sag almost to his knees, and he says, “Thirty percent! On a balance of twenty-five grand, that looked like the rest of my life to pay off.”

So he made a porn movie, he says.

“It can only take a moment,” the 137 guy says, “to waste the rest of your life…”

He asks did I know a movie called Three Days of the Condom. He says, “Well, it paid off my car. Didn’t touch the principal on my credit card, but I got to keep my car.”

He didn’t figure anyone would ever see it. At the time, his acting was going nowhere. It was ten years before he got his big break in Dan Banyan, Private Detective.

That condom movie’s been hanging over his head ever since.

“Doing an all-male gay gang-bang movie is an act of resignation,” he says and waves one hand, his eyes sweeping over half the room.

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