Popcorn Read online

  “I didn’t steal your drugs,” Bob said.

  Errol sat down at the table, oblivious of the dying woman who lay across it. He was at his wits’ end. He and Mr Snuff had searched Bob’s apartment, his car, his clothes. Where on earth could the missing drugs be?

  “Could a person get a kilo of heroin up their ass?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” said Mr Snuff. “People get all sorts of things up their asses.”

  A pair of plastic gloves lay on the table next to a set of scales. Errol had been wearing them earlier on when weighing out the heroin. He picked up one glove, shook Toni’s blood from it and put it on.

  “I don’t have no heroin up my ass, man.” said Bob, hoping, perhaps, to save Errol the trouble of further investigation.

  “Well, I wish I could trust you, Bob,” said Errol. “To tell you the truth, I am not relishing the prospect of probing your butt with my finger any more than I imagine you relish the prospect of having your butt probed. But I cannot trust you, Bob, which is what all of this unpleasantness is about.”

  Errol stuck his hand down the back of Bob’s jockey shorts and executed his investigation. “No drugs up here,” he said.

  “Maybe she’s got them,” said Mr Snuff, peering up between Toni’s legs. “No drugs here, I think,” he said from beneath her skirt, “but a very nice—”

  Then suddenly a voice from nowhere said, “Thank you. Stop right there.”

  And they stopped.

  Errol froze. Mr Snuff froze. They all froze. There was not the slightest movement. Mr Snuff’s head remained under Toni’s skirt, Errol’s expression remained one of bored indifference, Bob’s grimace of pain seemed to have been painted on. Everything had stopped — not just stopped but really stopped. Nobody was doing anything. Toni was not bleeding any more. Nobody was even breathing.

  FIVE

  The voice spoke again. “Go back, but slowly, nice and slowly.”

  Mr Snuff removed his head from under Toni’s skirt and Errol put his finger back up Bob’s backside.

  Toni’s body began to suck back into itself the blood it had lost. The red stain shrank across the table. She even appeared to revive slightly.

  Errol removed his finger from Bob again and returned to sit by the table. He seemed to be in pain: he made sad, guttural noises. He took off the glove, got up again and, backing away from the table, addressed Bob in the same strange, incomprehensible sounds. He drew his gun and pointed it at Toni.

  A miracle was affecting Toni. Her wound was healing. Almost all the blood she had lost was back in her body, and all that was left of the gaping blast was the bullet.

  Then Toni shot Errol.

  Or at least shot at him. A bullet emerged from her body and hurtled towards the gangster. Fortunately for Errol his gun was in the way, and the bullet Toni’s body hurled at him disappeared straight up the barrel.

  The disembodied voice spoke again.

  “All right. Thank you. Let’s leave it there for a moment.”

  And suddenly there was darkness. Bob, Toni, Errol and Mr Snuff all disappeared. It was if they had never been there at all. For the moment at least, they had ceased to exist.

  “I just wanted you to see that last sequence backwards,” said Bruce Delamitri, “because I think it’s easier to deconstruct the shots when you’re not being distracted by the narrative flow. Remember that trick when you’re checking your edits.”

  What a sentence! Calm, commanding, all-knowing. Bruce could feel the sap rising — deep within his Calvin Kleins. The good feeling he had got earlier that morning from obliterating Oliver and Dale on Coffee Time USA was as nothing to the buzz that now surged through him as two hundred fresh-faced, puppy-like college kids hung on his every word. They were sitting there, awestruck, scarcely able to believe that the main man, the mainest man, the mainest, mainiest, most main mongous man of them all was really there, talking to them!

  Bruce loved showing off in front of students. Especially the girls. Punky ones with great big Doc Marten boots on the end of slim, delicate legs. Preppy ones in smart little jumpers and cute John Lennon glasses. Goth types swathed in black, with pale skin and purple nail varnish. Tough, vampy ones with pierced belly-buttons and who knew what else. It wasn’t that Bruce was a dirty old director. In fact women liked working with him: he was a recognized non-predator. But this was different. This was a treat. When Bruce had attended college he had been something of a dork and had had to work extremely hard to get anywhere at all with girls. Oh, they certainly liked him. They all found him funny, with his perfect impression of the sound effects in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and his plastic space-gun, stolen when he was an extra on Star Wars. His contagious enthusiasm for absolutely anything and everything to do with movies had always been attractive. But being funny and enthusiastic does not get you laid. Nor does it get you respected by the other guys — who had all been into Kurosawa while he was into James Bond.

  “Of course The Magnificent Seven is a better movie than The Seven Samurai,” he used to say. “For one thing it doesn’t have subtitles.”

  Bruce had been popular at college but no kid had ever stared at him the way these kids were staring at him now.

  He was home. The film studies course of the University of Southern California where he had spent three happy but sexually frustrated years. He had returned at last to the one place in the world where he really wanted to show off. This was why he had agreed, on Oscars day of all days, to drive clear across LA from the Coffee Time studios to address his Alma Mater. To spend three precious hours viewing and discussing clips from his movies. To show off. What other reason would anyone have for going back and addressing their old college? When the heads of student committees write and ask famous old boys or girls to return and speak, they imagine they are asking an enormous favour. They themselves think the place is crap and can’t wait to get out of it. But for the old boy or girl, that invitation represents acceptance at last, an opportunity to finally come to terms with the gawky nerdiness of their late adolescence. A rare chance to reach back across the years and — in thought at least — consummate all those glorious student flings that had never been.

  So there Bruce sat, a king on his podium, puffed up with pride and eagerly anticipating a splendid hour or so humbly making it clear to these fine young people exactly how brilliant he was.

  Opposite Bruce sat Professor Chambers, a sad-looking, dusty old Mr Chips whom the students had asked to chair the occasion. A teacher in the chair! In Bruce’s day it would have been an ace king of teenage cool doing the job, but times had changed. The two-decade sixties hangover, when youth still seemed full of infinite promise, had finally evaporated. A colder wind blew now, and students had become much more timid, more conservative. Hence their decision to invite a professor to chair this major event: they felt safer with an authority figure around.

  “So,” said Bruce, “any questions or observations about the clip we just saw? Let’s hear what the future’s got to say.”

  This was, of course, greeted by silence. Fear of looking stupid or uncool is a powerful censor, particularly if you’ve just been referred to as the future.

  “I would like to ask something if I may,” said Professor Chambers.

  Bruce cursed inwardly. Surely this old turd was not going to have so little style as to try and grab some reflected glory for himself? Bruce had not given up three hours of Oscars day to discuss the finer points of postmodern film noir bullshit with an anal academic. He had done it in order to strut about in front of nymphs.

  “Go right ahead, professor,” he said, throwing a half-smile at the kids in the audience as if to say, “Let’s humour the sad old goat.”

  “Do you feel that the same effect could perhaps have been achieved in your scene without delving into the female protagonist’s private parts?”

  Bruce was somewhat taken aback. Was this guy criticizing him? Surely not. Bruce was Oscar-nominated, for Christ’s sake.

  “Say what?” Bruce de
manded.

  “Ahem.” Professor Chambers cleared his throat, uncomfortably aware that all eyes were most definitely upon him. “I was just wondering whether you feel that the same effect could perhaps have been achieved in your scene without delving into the female protagonist’s private parts.”

  There was a pregnant pause while Bruce debated whether to crush the professor like a small, bearded insect beneath his super-cool pointy-toed boots. A moment’s reflection convinced him that this would look uncool. He didn’t want to imbue the man with more significance than he deserved, which was none. Instead Bruce opted to wither him with a look of hip bemusement.

  “The girl’s private parts are not shown,” Bruce said. “Didn’t you watch the piece, professor?”

  “I realize that the girl’s private parts are not actually shown,” said Professor Chambers rather nervously. “Nevertheless, they seem to play a disproportionately central role in the proceedings.”

  The guy was criticizing him. As if he was the subject of some essay. Bruce decided that this had already gone on too long. He wanted to talk to cool kids not old jerks.

  “I do not make exploitative pictures,” he said with an air of finality, and turned away from the professor to feast his eyes again on the sea of adoring and expectant young faces before him.

  Professor Chambers sighed. He looked older than his years, with his lined face and grey beard. He felt like a schoolmaster forced to confront a brilliant but wayward pupil. A genius boy physicist who spent his time making stink-bombs, or a gifted young writer who insisted on putting swear-words into all his creative-writing assignments. He did not consider himself old-fashioned or a bore; he had once written an appreciation of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the Boston Literary Review. There was however, in his opinion, a limit. Eroticism was one thing, pornography another. He felt that the place for delving into people’s private parts was a doctor’s surgery or in the context of a loving relationship. Not while searching for cocaine.

  “Nevertheless,” he said to the back of Bruce’s leather jacket, “the character Mr Snuff does stare up the girl’s private parts. That is the case, is it not?”

  “Ironically,” Bruce replied without turning round.

  “Ironically?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Bruce drew upon all his reserves of patience, which was almost no patience at all. “The character Mr Snuff,” he said, as if addressing a man who had donated his brain to an organ bank, “stares up the character Toni’s private parts in a manner that will imply an ironic juxtaposition to the audience. Didn’t you get that, professor?”

  “No, I’m afraid I missed that. Any ironic juxtaposition entirely passed me by. Am I being terribly dense?”

  Bruce threw a look of tolerant exasperation at the audience, but the sympathetic response he anticipated was not forthcoming. The students were a bit lost: most of them thought that ironic juxtaposition was something dirty you did in bed. Some of them giggled nervously.

  “With respect,” the professor added quietly, “I thought it was just rather rude.”

  Things had suddenly become a little tense. Bruce, like most people, hated tension. His whole pose was one of laid-back street cool. He was the grown-up teenager in the Ray-Bans who just didn’t give a fuck. The naughty thirty-something genius who broke all the rules. It was his job to needle authority figures like college professors, not the other way round. And on this day of all days, Oscars day, when he should have been luxuriating in the sweet ecstasy of fame, basking in a hormone-packed wave of adolescent admiration, this dusty old fossil was pissing on his parade.

  Bruce struggled to stay cool. He reminded himself just how far above the old turd he was. Only that morning the New York Times had published an adulatory two-thousand-word profile of him, using phrases such as ‘cultural icon’, ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘defining images of the last decade’. Cultural icons did not let bearded gnomes with pens in their breast-pockets wind them up.

  “You remember that the next shot is the POV of the girl’s snatch, right?”

  This got an easy laugh, as Bruce had calculated it would. Using rude words in lecture halls showed just how much of a fuck he did not give.

  “POV?” asked the professor.

  “Jesus! I thought you ran a film course here. POV. Point of view, for Christ’s sake, point of view.”

  “I know what POV means. I just don’t—”

  “We see Mr Snuff’s face from the point of view of Toni’s vagina.”

  “The vagina’s point of view?”

  “Yes, the vagina’s point of view.”

  This was an entirely new concept for the professor. He wondered how a vagina could have a point of view and, if it could, what its attitude would be.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t—”

  “Mr Snuff stares at the vagina,” Bruce snapped, “and in a subliminal way the vagina stares back at Mr Snuff.”

  “And that’s ironic, is it?”

  “The irony is in what we take away from the image, professor. I want to show that this is all in a day’s work for Mr Snuff. I need to see his face in these extraordinary circumstances, so that I can show his expression of casual indifference. He’s almost bored. This is just a job, an American job.”

  This bland assertion was too much for Professor Chambers. A faint note of irritation crept into his voice; you would have needed a sharp ear to spot it, but it was there. The students, who knew their tutor, shifted nervously in their seats.

  “Is shooting women in the stomach and then rummaging about in their vaginas for drugs a common occupation in your experience?” the professor enquired.

  “Killing is, pal. Being a killer is a career option in America, like teaching or dentistry.”

  “Perhaps not quite as common.”

  “Ha! You wish.”

  “Statistically, I think you’ll find I’m right.” Professor Chambers decided to drop the point and move on. “Mr Snuff’s next line is perhaps one of my least favourite moments in your motion picture, Mr Delamitri.”

  “I’m heartbroken.” Bruce smiled wearily at the students and they rewarded him with a laugh.

  “Hmm, yes, well, I understand that taste is subjective and that you are indifferent to mine. Nevertheless, Mr Snuff’s observation ‘nice pussy’ seems to be beyond the bounds of taste altogether.”

  Bruce groaned audibly. He was genuinely offended now. He no longer cared what the pretty young things thought. It was between him and this pathetic man who seemed to be going deliberately out of his way to apply an attitude of archaic prurience to Bruce’s brilliant, startling and challenging images.

  “ ’Nice pussy’ is an important line, a pivotal line — the keystone line of the movie! I put it there so that even dummies wouldn’t miss the point I’m making.”

  The audience was becoming genuinely uncomfortable. Confrontational debate like this was a rarity on campus these days: the consequences of giving offence to one special-interest group or another were too severe. Bruce sensed the nervousness and attempted to moderate his anger.

  “Look, Mr Chambers, I am not insensitive to the fact that some people might find this sequence unsettling. I am also not blind to the possibility that other people might be titillated by the images I present. The woman has been brutalized and violated, tied down, shot, had her clothing removed, and as she breathes her last she finds herself being intimately inspected by a strange man. I do not offer up these images lightly.”

  “I am delighted to hear it.”

  “I am aware of my reponsibility to place all this in a suitable editorial context. That is why I took the vagina’s POV of Mr Snuff’s reaction.”

  “Which was to smile and observe that the character Toni has a nice pussy.”

  “Exactly!” Bruce exploded. “Listen to how he says it for Christ’s sake! He doesn’t say, “Wow, get this! I am searching a dying girl’s private parts. Is that amazing or what! Am I going totally insane here?”
He shrugs and he says it’s ‘a very nice pussy’. It’s a throwaway. He is relaxed, he is indifferent. He’s at work. Like I say, to him, it’s just a job, an American job. That’s what I want people to take away from this scene.”

  The professor sighed. He was sick of studying film. Drugs, bullets, vaginas, this never-ending use of the term ‘motherfucker’ — it was all so very depressing.

  “Perhaps we should take the next clip,” he said, nodding at the student technician.

  The film rolled and the scene began. It was set in a low-life roadside bar and grill. A near-naked woman was dancing seductively to slow country music playing on a jukebox. Two aggressive and unpleasant truckers were leering at her from the bar.

  “Now,” Bruce thought, “the old swine can’t possibly object to this one.”

  SIX

  The young man and the scrawny girl were still lying on the bed in the motel chalet. Coffee Time had long since concluded and now they were watching videos.

  There was a woman on the screen, dancing to the juke-box in a roadside bar and grill.

  “I’m sick of watching the tube, honey,” the girl said.

  “Quiet now, baby,” the man replied. “This is important. What I’m doing here right now, hon, is researching.”

  “Researching what? You ain’t doing no researching. You’re just watching dumb movies which you seen a hundred times already. I want to go out.”

  “What I am researching, sugar,” the man said, his tone hardening slightly, “is our salvation. Y’hear me now? Because what I have here is a plan to get us saved. You want to be saved, don’t you, precious?”

  “Sure I want to be saved. Everybody wants to be saved.”

  “In that case, honey pie, shut the fuck up.”

  He fixed his eyes on the TV and cranked up the volume. Slow, sugary country music filled the room, music recorded thirty years ago, which had been utterly and terminally uncool for every one of the intervening years. Music that had become briefly hip. Everything gets credible if you wait long enough; one generation’s cringe is another’s kitsch cult classic.