East Side Video was in an okay section of town and it had lots of videos. We looked around the store for a while, then went over to the fellow behind the counter. He was in his late twenties, with longish red hair done up in corn rows. He looked up at us. He had a pimple on his chin like a volcano. It had such a puss head on it you wanted to hit it with something.
“Help you?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for a special kind of movie.”
“What kind?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t see it on the shelves. It’s… a little different.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You mean in-and-out stuff? We got that, but we don’t put it out next to Mickey Mouse.”
“It’s under the counter, then?” Leonard said.
“Yeah. We got some stuff you can look at.”
“What we’re really looking for is a little different from that,” I said.
“How different?”
“Real different,” Leonard said. “We were told you had some tapes, some stuff like they make in Japan.”
The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah? Who told you this?”
“Some guy,” Leonard said.
The counter man nodded. “We got some tapes we sell that are a little different.”
“One we’re interested in… well… it’s got queers getting the shit kicked out them,” Leonard said.
The redhead grinned. “Yeah. Some people think they’re real. They look real ’cause they’re so sloppy. Yeah, we got that. It’s not common knowledge, but we got it. We sell ’em. Not good quality. I mean, it ain’t gonna be Ole Yeller, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Sell a lot of them?”
“No,” said the counter man, “but at a hundred dollars a pop, we don’t have to sell a lot. Come to think of it, I guess we do a pretty good business with it.”
“Against the law?” Leonard asked.
“Why you ask?”
“Just wondering,” Leonard said. “And if it is, maybe we got to think twice about buying it.”
“Technically it’s covered by the First Amendment. ’Cause it ain’t real. Just looks real. But there’s folks don’t like the idea, so we keep it under the counter.”
“We seen the one our friend had,” Leonard said. “It looked real.”
“’Tween you and me,” the counter man said, “it might be real. But the people make ’em claim they ain’t. They get cornered, they say they bought them from a video enthusiast and they’re just showin’ what someone took a video of. Kind of like reporting the news. You know, like that fellow few years ago did the video of executions. We got that one here, you want it.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
“These queer kick videos, I figure what the hell, one more queer with a black eye ain’t nothing to me. I’d kick one of the little faggots myself, make him suck my dick I wanted it sucked, though I ain’t so sure I’d want a queer’s lips on my tootie-toot, know what I’m sayin’? AIDS and all. Fucker might bite me.”
I could sense Leonard’s tension. This guy kept it up, he was gonna wake up with a shelf full of videos shoved up his ass.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll take one. If it’s one thing we like to see, it’s a queer get his.”
The kid reached under the counter and brought out a tape in a cheap box with a photocopied cover that read: KICKIN’ FAIRIES.
“Nice title,” I said.
“Yeah, they ain’t real original,” the kid said. “But I seen this one, and I tell you, if it’s set up, it’s set up good. It looks real as a car wreck.”
I peeled a hundred dollars out of my wallet, just like I had it to spare. I put it on the counter.
The kid took the money and shoved the video at me and said, “No receipt on this stuff. No returns. We don’t buy this shit back. We can run off another one cheaper than we can fuck with that.”
“I.R.S. might not like you not keeping records on this stuff,” Leonard said.
“I.R.S. might not know,” the kid said.
We drove into the nightfall, cruised mostly silent back to LaBorde, the video on the seat between us.
18
I won’t describe the video we bought in great detail. We watched it when we got back to Leonard’s place. It gave me nightmares. Like the kid said, if it was set up, then it was a horribly beautiful setup.
In this one some thugs in the park, presumably the same cowardly thugs from the first video, still wearing their bar codes across their faces, took a brick and knocked a young man’s teeth out and made him suck them, bloody mouth and all. Then they kicked his ass and left him lying in the dirt. If it was special effects, it was damn good special effects. But considering the way the rest of the video looked, I doubted there was anything artificial about it.
“Do we show this to Charlie?” I said.
“Not yet,” Leonard said.
“Why not? I don’t like the idea of this thing being in my house.”
“We’ll put it inside the couch at my old place, with the rest of the stuff.”
“I don’t like that either.”
I took the video out of the machine and put it back in its box.
“I never thought I’d live to see such a thing as this,” I said. “I can’t believe it. What in the hell has happened to everyone? Every time I turn around, I’m amazed at how little I know about human nature. About anything, for that matter. But this…”
“Whatever it is,” Leonard said, “I’m tired of it being given names and excuses. Guy sells drugs, it’s because his grandma died. Poor kids sell drugs, it’s because they’re poor. Guy goes off his rocker, kills someone, it’s because he eats Twinkies and the sugar gave him a rush. I reckon sometimes it is those things, but you know what? I don’t give a shit. I think a person ought to be responsible for being an asshole. Used to, person had to be responsible, had to pay the price, there was less of this shit then.”
“There’re more people now, Leonard. More pressures.”
“There are more assholes,” Leonard said, “and it ain’t got a damn thing to do with pressure. Or say it does. So what? You ain’t been pressured, man?”
“Leonard, you yourself are talking about going out and eliminating some people. What’s the difference?”
“Difference is, I’m responsible for my actions. I ain’t gonna say I got a bad hotdog and it gave me a bellyache and that made me do it. I’m gonna do it ’cause I want to do it, and I got my eyes wide open going in, and if I can do it and get away with it I will. As for you, I only want you to go so far. I don’t want to be responsible for your actions.”
“It would be hard for me not to help you,” I said.
“I know,” Leonard said.
“What about Charlie?”
“Wait a bit.”
“How long?”
“A bit. I want to see we can find some things on our own. We solve it, we got things laid out so the chief can’t tuck it under his ass, then we show it to Charlie and maybe I don’t have to empty my box of shotgun shells.”
A day later I started looking for honest work. The dough I had made offshore had been damn good, but at the rate it was going, it wouldn’t be long before I had nothing more than an empty palm and a flapping wallet.
I went first to the aluminum-chair factory, but just walking in the door made my stomach hurt. Factories and foundries, and I’ve worked in both, were my idea of hell on earth. I stood there a moment smelling machinery oil and listening to the thud of the machines at work, watching people shuffle about as if they were pushing great boulders up a hill, and I went out of there.
I went to a local feed company for a try. The foreman told me quite frankly, “We mostly just hire niggers and wetbacks ’cause they work cheap.”
“I work cheap,” I said.
“Yeah, but the way we work someone, we wouldn’t do that to a white man.”
“Well, that’s certainly white of you,” I said.
“Yeah, ain’t it,” he said.
I left that cocksucker to it, drove all over town, tried a lot of places, but there wasn’t much available, and what was available wasn’t worth having. I put in some applications. One that looked promising was a job at the chicken plant, being a security guard. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but at my age exactly what I wanted I couldn’t get and what I could get I didn’t want.