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  The woman kept on dancing. And such a woman. A truck driver’s dream. A cowboy’s fantasy. Poor white trash, but what poor white trash would look like had it just descended from Mount Olympus. Tanned, shapely legs stretching up for ever from the glossy painted toes on her bare feet to the jeans cut down to a tiny pair of shorts that inadequately covered her buttocks. A naked, undulating stomach, writhing to the rhythm. A perfect naval, like a cup, a bronzed abdomen contrasting beautifully with the white cotton of perhaps the smallest vest a woman might wear and still hope to keep her breasts from public view. Breasts which knew nothing of Sir Isaac Newton or his absurd gravitational theories. Above it all a cloud — no, a mane — of impossibly blonde hair crowning sleepy eyes and a fat mouth. A fat, wet mouth that never closed but hung lazily ajar, lips slightly parted, ready, one might easily imagine, for anything.

  There is a children’s movement exercise in which the kids are told to dance ‘in the manner of’ an abstract concept, like hunger or the wind. The girl in the bar was dancing in the manner of an orgasm. Her hips, her behind, her shoulders, her bare feet sliding on the floor, all seemed to suggest that dancing on her own to a juke-box in the middle of the day in a shit-house bar was to her the ultimate in sexual excitement. As she danced her hands even stole occasionally to between her legs, brushing at the little concertina of denim that disappeared below the zip of her jeans.

  If this woman wasn’t masturbating to music in a public bar she was by way of doing a very good impression of it. An impression that was not lost on the two large good of boy cowboy trucker types who were leaning against the bar resting their beer bottles on their beer bellies. They were, of course staring at the dancing woman, leering in fact. Dribbling would perhaps not be too strong a word. Their jaws were dropping, their erections were rising. Had it not been for the vast expanse of gut between the two, jaw and erection might well eventually have met.

  “Hurrr hurrrr,” said one good of boy.

  “Hurrrr,” replied the other and despite the poverty of their language it was clear that they were discussing the young woman’s charms. Perhaps she was flattered by their obvious attentions, because she seemed to be directing her dancing towards them. A rough translation of her body language might have read, “Should either of you two gentlemen feel in any way inclined to screw me rigid, you would not find me an unwilling collaborator.” That, at least, was how the bigger and uglier of the two good of boys interpreted her look, for he released the bar stool that he had clamped between his vast buttocks and, pausing only to spit some tobacco on to the floor, grunted his way towards the near-naked siren dancing before him.

  What a contrast they made. One so beautiful it was almost unbearable, a walking, talking, living doll, a sex puppet, achingly seductive. The other a repulsive slob, beer bottle in hand, so many chins it looked as if he had rested his face on a stack of crumpets, his belly so vast that one side of it was in a different time zone from the other. The woman’s chest might defy Newton’s laws, but this colossal gut seemed to exercise it’s own gravitational pull. At least, the woman certainly appeared to be drawn towards him, and it was hard to imagine that this had come about through any sort of desire.

  And yet everything about her demeanour suggested that it had. It really seemed as if she was attracted to this man. She pouted at him, wiggled at him. His lumpy movements and phlegmy grunts seemed to excite her and spur her on to greater displays of lithe sexuality. She took his beer bottle from him and, even though there was only an inch or so left in it, took a pull. The man had clearly been nursing that bottle for some time and one could only guess how much of the beery dregs was made up of his spit, yet the woman sucked greedily at it, her fleshy lips pouting round the bottle neck as if to say, “Normally, of course, I prefer to do this to a fat, ugly truck-driver’s penis.”

  The woman emptied the bottle but instead of putting it down she rolled it around on her tummy, apparently so hot that she needed to take any opportunity to cool down. Having rolled the bottle around for a while she turned it upside down so that a small dribble of the remaining foam ran down over her belly-button and into the top of her tiny shorts, drawing attention (as if this were required) to the fact that the waist button was undone and it was only the zip that was holding the shorts closed.

  “Hurrr,” said the good of boy, as well he might.

  The woman put the bottle down on top of the juke-box and closed the gap between herself and her new companion. Now her body was against his, her hips grinding back and forth. The trucker, clearly feeling that some gesture was required on his part, put his arms round her and in lieu of a formal introduction gripped her buttocks.

  “My name’s Angel,” she whispered at two or three of his many chins.

  “Who cares what your name is, honey?” the trucker said. “Pussy is pussy.”

  He had struck the wrong note. Whatever Angel had hoped to hear from this disgusting man, it was not that. Her mood changed even as he gripped her more tightly.

  “Loosen your grip, buddy,” she said. “I like to keep my tits on the outside of my rib-cage.”

  Her appeal fell on deaf ears. Digging his huge, fat banana fingers into her behind, he dragged her body harder against his.

  “Honey, if you dance like a whore you’re going to get treated like a whore,” he growled. “Now, how about you pucker up for daddy?”

  “I’d rather kiss the stuff I cut off my dog’s ass,” Angel remarked in a forthright tone. With that she reached out an arm, grabbed the beer bottle from the top of the juke-box and brought it down on top of her dancing partner’s head, shattering the base of the bottle. This gesture was understandably enough to make the man do as he was asked and disengage himself, but he did it with no good grace and indeed seemed ready to draw back his big pudgy fist and punch the woman. She was, however, ahead of him. There was a heavy glass beer jug on the counter. Somehow or other it got into Angel’s hand and she swung it against the side of the big man’s head. Down he went, semi-stunned, to the filthy bar-room floor, where he lay prostrate in the mud and the blood and the beer. At the bar his pal began to release his stool from the buttock-clamp in which his ass held it. Angel dropped the jug and, reaching into her tiny shorts, produced — by some kind of miracle, for it certainly could not have been there before — a little snub-nosed pistol.

  “Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up,” this woman of strange emotional contrasts shouted, levelling her weapon at the second trucker. You could almost hear the fear as the terrified fellow reinserted the stool into his enormous Tardy backside and shut up.

  Meanwhile Angel turned her attention back to her ex-dancing-partner, who still lay semi-stunned upon the floor.

  “Cocksucking son of a bitch!” she screamed in wild, uncontrollable, unbalanced fury, kicking the stricken man in the head and face. “Still want me? Still looking for pussy, you goddam faggot bastard? Well, you’ve had your last piece, you rat turd!”

  The broken bottle with which she had begun her assault was still in her hand. Dropping to her knees, she rammed its jagged edge into the stunned man’s loins. Blood geysered out of his fly.

  The man touched the video remote control and the image froze, the blood stopping in mid-air as it hurtled towards Angel’s face.

  “I wuz just starting to enjoy that, honey,” said the girl.

  “Got to take a leak,” said the man. “Don’t you mess with that control, now, girl. ‘Cos’ I’m working here. What I got is a plan.”

  SEVEN

  A hundred miles south, in the university lecture hall Bruce and Professor Chambers sat beneath the same frozen image of blood geysering from the fat trucker’s loins. There was applause from the students, which Bruce graciously acknowledged. He felt back on safe ground. Surely the senile, bearded old back issue sitting opposite him could not object to such a vigorous and empowering piece of film-making. It transpired, however, that he could.

  “Don’t you think that’s rather a clichéd scene?” Professor Chambe
rs enquired.

  Bruce could scarcely believe the effrontery of the odious little gnome. Who did he think he was? In fact, and more to the point, who was he? A teacher. What did he do that was so great?

  “Have you any idea how much I earn?” Bruce wanted to shout. “Are you aware that the Academie Française has given me a dinner?”

  He didn’t say that but he might as well have done. He hit the tweedy old jerk with everything he had.

  “Cliché? Cliché?” he said, jumping to his feet. “Well excuuuuuse me if I opine that the meanest, most derivative cliché I ever produced is more original than everything you have ever said plus everything you have ever done.”

  It was a mistake. It was meant to be a joke, sort of, but it didn’t come out that way at all. Bruce had hoped to look sarky and disrespectful, the street punk in a leather jacket and pointy-toed boots thumbing his nose at authority. He forgot that he was not a punk but an impossibly rich, Oscar-nominated director, whereas Professor Chambers was a public servant on forty grand a year. Bruce was Goliath and the professor was David, not the other way round. The kids in the hall began to whisper to each other. Sweat trickled down Bruce’s back and into the the top of his black 501s. He had let himself get angry; getting angry was uncool and he knew it. He was supposed to be the guy who didn’t care. He realized that he must get a grip, bite the bullet, chew the carpet, go home later and kick the dog.

  “Just kidding,” he said, with a little-boy smile. “You don’t ‘dis’ the prof, right?”

  The students relaxed a little. Bruce had concentrated all his considerable personal charm into this jokey semi-apology and it worked — for the students. Not, though, for the professor, who was looking at the screen again and shaking his head sadly. The woman in hot pants was still astride the trucker, the broken bottle was still embedded in his loins, the geyser of blood still hung in mid-air like a cruel red spike.

  “I’m supposed to feel all right about this piece of violent soft porn because the woman triumphs, am I?”

  “Well of course,” said Bruce. “It’s immensely important that the female protagonist is shown in a befittingly empowering light.”

  This provoked a smattering of applause from some of the young women in the audience. Bruce was even gratified to hear a couple of whoops.

  “Right on!” shouted a girl with a ring through her nose.

  “Hmmm.” Professor Chambers sucked on his pen as if it was a pipe. “You can have no idea how tired I am of film-makers like you cynically cloaking their salacious, smutty entertainments in some laughably two-dimensional anti-sexist agenda.”

  This was getting silly. Bruce was a guest for Christ’s sake! When was this nasty old man going to give him a break? Bruce took further refuge in self-righteous feminism, the modern equivalent of hiding behind a woman’s petticoats. “Maybe you find images of strong women threatening?”

  “Right on!” shouted the girl with the nose-ring. Bruce wanted to kiss her. Fortunately he didn’t; had he done so she would have brought a civil action against him for rape. Professor Chambers did not seem even to have heard her.

  “I do not consider a woman who deliberately titillates some ignorant and unpleasant oaf merely to bury a broken bottle in his private parts, strong, I consider her psychotic.”

  “Listen, pal, a woman can dress and dance any way she wants.”

  “Any way you want. This is your fantasy, Mr Delamitri. The whole scenario is a fiction created by you, and the actress playing the role dressed as you wanted her to and did what you told her to do.”

  The young woman with the nose-ring kept quiet. They all did. The debate was getting out of their league. They liked things simple, and an uncomfortable suspicion was dawning on them that what their professor and their hero were discussing was not simple at all.

  “Yes, I created it,” Bruce admitted, “but what did I create it from? These things are going on out there.” He was no longer concerned with looking cool. He had a point to make, a position to defend. He wanted to get through to the professor in the same way the professor had got through to him. “The connection between sex and violence is for real. It’s out there and it’s happening, USA-wide. That isn’t my fault. I didn’t start it and I didn’t kill anyone. I just hold up the mirror.”

  “Rather a flattering mirror, isn’t it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The professor let him have it. “Why do your murderers and psychopaths have to be so attractive, Mr Delamitri? So cool? It seems to me that if the scene we have just watched had involved the near-rape of a plain woman, a fat, boring woman, then you would probably have let her get raped. Except there never would have been such a scene because the whole purpose of the entire grubby business was to show us a beautiful woman in a state of provocative near-undress—”

  Bruce did not let him finish. Chambers had walked into a trap. Bruce had heard this ancient, purile argument many times before, and he was in a position to crush it with the utter contempt it deserved.

  “You ever see a Greek statue of an ugly chick? You ever see a painting of a battle when the guys didn’t look cool and noble? Where the blood didn’t look exciting and seductive? Artists make pictures and stories. That’s what we do. Dull, ugly people leading boring lives devoid of sex and adventure do not make good stories. I’m not a journalist. It is no part of my duty to report life. I am an artist. My duty is to my own muse, my creative self. I take what I want in order to create what I like.”

  “Really? I thought you said you were a mirror.”

  “I’m…I’m…” Bruce knew when to throw in the towel. “Actually, I’m running kind of late here.”

  In the motel cabin the tough-looking guy had returned from the bathroom, grabbed a beer from the mini-bar and lain down again beside the girl.

  “That sure was a fine motion picture,” he said. “I may just have to watch it one more time.”

  “Oh, honey,” said the girl, “can’t we go out now? Do something?”

  “You want to go to prison, sugar pie?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You want to burn in the chair? You want to feel your eyeballs melting before you’re even dead?”

  “Don’t go saying stuff like that!” Suddenly there were tears on her pale cheeks.

  “Then just you go get me another burger and let me watch my movie. Cos what I am working on here is our salvation.”

  EIGHT

  Dusk had fallen.

  The searchlights that explored the sky above the theatre could be seen from miles away. The crowd was getting thicker and Bruce’s limo slowed down. It’s a funny thing about stretch limos: you can usually hire them for no more than twice or three times what an ordinary cab would cost and yet they remain a potent symbol of colossal wealth and celebrity. It crossed Bruce’s mind that he ought to be able to extrapolate some great truth from this observation, but he couldn’t think what it was.

  The great car crawled forwards a few yards, clinging to the number plate in front, a pink number plate which read STAR. Bruce smiled. If there was one thing he knew about stardom, it was that if you had to stick it on your fender you hadn’t got it.

  A limousine jam. Only in Hollywood could you have a genuine limousine jam. An entire traffic snarl made up exclusively of stretch limos. Here was another observation from which a pithy and illuminating irony could surely be gleaned. No matter how long your car is, in traffic they’re all the same length: they stretch from the one stuck in front of you to the one stuck behind. Not bad, Bruce mused. He might trot it out to the press tonight to show that he still had his feet on the ground despite being so very special.

  The car stopped altogether.

  Bruce leant back in the baby-soft black leather, his wrap-round Rays between him and the world, a drink in his hand and an Oscar very nearly in his pocket.

  His mind began to dwell on a particularly gruesome and pointless murder that he was planning. He had it in his head pretty clearly now. A run-down Korean drug
store in the Valley. Two white kids enter the store. White trash kids. Better still, middle-class white kids pretending to be trash. Talking dudespeak, of course, or whatever other hellish dialect the generation with no brain affected these days. (“Generation X? Generation X-tremely fucking stupid,” Bruce would say at parties.) The two kids approach the counter and ask for a quarter of Jack plus some Pepsi Max to mix. But the old Korean lady knows the law and doesn’t want to lose her liquor licence, so she asks for some ID.

  “Here’s my ID, bitch,” says one of the boys and hauls out a machete. Not some stupid little knife, but a machete. Obviously the old lady tells the kids to forget about the ID, in fact she reaches down a whole pint of bourbon and offers it to them on the house. But it’s too late. She has crossed the line with these kids. She has ‘dissed’ them. They have been pushed too far and they ain’t gonna take it any more because, quite frankly, they are sick of the bullshit. So the boy swings his weapon towards the terrified woman in a huge arc and cuts her head off. Blood starts spurting out of the dead woman’s neck, which so excites the two kids that they hop over the counter and hack her up into a million pieces.

  Bruce would do the whole thing to music, heavy-duty rock ‘n’ roll perhaps, or maybe something witty and ironic like ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ or ‘All You Need is Love’. He would make it look like a pop video. Maybe he could have a TV on in the background, with a Tom and Jerry cartoon showing. That way, while the two kids were slicing up the old Korean woman, Jerry could be ironing Tom with a steam iron, or dicing him in the lawn-mower.

  “What were you trying to tell us by juxtaposing your brutal murder with cartoon mayhem?” assholes like Professor Chambers would ask.

  “I was telling you that the Korean woman had Tom and Jerry showing on her TV,” he would reply enigmatically, and hundreds of film students would write essays about irony.