Genital Grinder

untoward, he felt their derision. They sensed a strangeness, as if he had a pheromone that sent them all scattering instead of attracting a single one of them.

And there was indeed something Carrie and Renee wouldn’t like if they knew about it: the Taste of Death movies. He was even more cautious about taking those home than the pornos. They might think he was pathetic if they knew about the pornos, but if they knew about Taste of Death, they’d think he was psychotic.

It was the Taste of Death series Gabriel was thinking about when he saw the dead man. He was standing on the corner of 37th and Garren, and to look at him you wouldn’t know he’d had his head blown off on Taste of Death 5: Into the Grave.

These weren’t simply movies where a group of horny teenagers were slain with phallic implements. Like Traces of Death, Faces of Death, Death Scenes, Executions, and their brothers in the mondo video line, they were known as “shockumentaries.” They provided the audience with various clips of real deaths caught on tape—accidents, murders, and animal attacks featured most prominently. Offended people erroneously called them “snuff movies,” which differed in that a snuff victim was brought before the camera for the express purpose of being murdered. According to Channel Two News reporter Geisha Hammond (and the lips on that sizzling hot piece . . . Gabriel figured he’d blow the back of her head out approximately 1.5 seconds after she put those lush lips on his ramrod) in a story about “Mr. Drill Bit” Earl Newman just a few months ago, there was no evidence to support the claim that snuff movies existed anyway. Shockumentaries merely collected random atrocities where a camera just happened to grab the money shot.

One of Gabriel’s favorites was a clip which showed a man blasted in the face with a shotgun fired off-screen.  A moment after he blinked with the incomprehension of a bovine,  his hapless look was erased in a shower of deep red and mushroom colored fragments, too many to count even in slow motion. Above the sounds of blood droplets and skull pieces wetting the pavement, an unnamed narrator cracked in Crypt Keeper throwback, “The world’s foremost magician—now you see him, now you don’t.”

It was swift, senseless . . . a moment allegedly grabbed by a bored passenger tracking with a video camera at a traffic light. A graphic art born of nothing, never to be forgotten once seen. Gabriel certainly hadn’t, and yet that same hapless gent now stood on the corner of 37th and Garren, unaware that his head had once been liquefied into a Sistine Chapel of Rorschach artistry. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could fix with a tube of superglue and infinite patience; there wasn’t supposed to be any sequel for you on Taste of Death.

The company who released the videos—Chosen Few Pictures—had clearly swindled him. He’d never suspected otherwise, even though some of the other mondo films were faked. He’d blindly trusted this series because it appeared to deliver what it promised in bloody red letters on every box: COMPLETELY AUTHENTIC! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT REAL! ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN TAKE IT?? (Funny, but he’d swear he’d rented pornos with an almost identical tag line.)

Not so. The shotgun decapitation only looked genuine. Unless the man was a ghost. A phantom condemned to walk the earth for failing to avoid what had to be a rather obvious murder.

Gabriel blinked, and looked for the man again. He was gone, now obstructed by the buildings on Garren.

Whatever the explanation, Gabriel felt disturbed. He’d seen each Taste of Death at least three times. The new one, the ninth installment, was due out next week. He’d been looking forward to another ninety minute foray into the final, intimate misfortunes of strangers. But it was for naught.  That age-old certainty of death wasn’t even for sure anymore.

He drove home to his parents’ house, still wondering.

II.

The next day, he picked up each of the Taste of Death boxes and searched them.

They all listed Chosen Few Pictures as their distributor, but none of them gave an address for the company. As far as he knew, this was the only line of videos they had ever released. They had nothing else available for order when he searched the computer at work.

It had begun to dawn on him how strange it was that he had seen one of the “actors” from Taste of Death. He hadn’t recognized the scenery in the movies, so it didn’t seem possible they had been filmed in his hometown of Bartok. Of all the places in the world, it was quite a coincidence that he’d seen the actor here.

He started to question if it was a coincidence after all. The chances of the guy having a twin brother seemed even more remote. Even in the scantily-clad company of Carrie and Renee he had difficulty thinking of anything other than what he’d seen the night before. His thoughts hadn’t been this concentrated since he’d first brought home a Taste of Death movie, on a whim. The ways the people lost their lives, the strangeness that someone happened to be there with a camera, and just knowing there were even more of these shockumentaries out there . . . it obsessed him. Would his own death end up on a

movie? Years of being alive, having friends, making an impact—however slight—would it all be eclipsed by a bizarre equation resulting in Gabriel Reynolds dying on Taste of Death 10, 11, 12, or whatever? Would he stop being Gabriel Reynolds and become “that dude who got snuffed on candid camera?”

The shockumentaries were a paradox. Even when you were certain that what you were seeing was genuine, it was still a concept that could not quite be grasped. How could these people you were seeing for the first time already be dead? Their deaths seemed real, but they didn’t.

He ran a search on the Internet for Chosen Few Pictures. Thankfully it wasn’t one of those names that would return hundreds of thousands of results. He found what he wanted right away—an official homepage for the company that had only recently gone online. It didn’t tell him much, aside from their past releases ($39.99 per . . . thank God he could cherry pick the damn things when overstock wound up in the “previously viewed” sale bin) and the announcement that the new Taste of Death would be out August 6th (it had been pushed back, though, according to the Movie Heaven release schedule, and wouldn’t be out until August 20th). It did, however, give him the contact address.

Chosen Few Pictures was run out of a post office box in Bartok.

III.

Not all of the clips could have been made in Bartok, though; Gabriel would have heard about it. For instance, Taste of Death 3 featured a burning skyscraper where several people chose to plunge to a messy death rather than burn alive. There were no skyscrapers in Bartok; the clip had to come from elsewhere. It was probably true of most.

The common way to accumulate all this footage was to take out an ad in Variety or some other movie trade magazine and request news stations, police departments, departments of transportation, and the like submit videos with violent footage to the address.

Did this mean a few deaths were faked in Bartok for supplemental footage? The series was good about not borrowing from other shockumentaries. Maybe the only way to reach ninety minutes without resorting to recycling footage was to create new scenes. It made sense, and it was hardly the first time a video was guilty of false advertising.

Gabriel thought it was somehow unnatural that Chosen Few Pictures was run in his city, but of course it had to be somewhere. It could have just as easily been some other skyscraper-less city with a horny video store clerk who thought it almost conspiratorially bizarre that a mondo video company would have its home base there. He became less apprehensive about the coincidences, but was more curious than ever to see how the next installment turned out.

IV.