Tag: fiction

I present the following excerpt from my upcoming Kindle book, The Making of Indecent Betrayal: Two Versions.

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“I have some news that’ll knock your jock off,” Frank told me one morning as I wiped down the espresso machine. We were baristas at Coffee Clutch, the airport development district’s latest upscale coffeehouse. “I’m going to direct my first movie.”

“Really?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to direct.”

“Neither did I, till a few weeks ago. I thought, why the hell not? I’ve always liked movies.”

“That doesn’t mean you know how to make one.”

“Anyone can make a movie if they really want to.”

“Whatever you say, Spielberg,” I said, placing an eighteen-ounce bag of Coffee Clutch Dark Decaf Ground Coffee, Special Yellow Ribbon Edition (an unspecified portion of sales going towards unspecified 9/11 charities), onto the shelving unit next to the machine.

“I’m serious,” Frank said. “I went to the city last week and bought some pretty advanced filmmaking equipment—uh, let’s see, two digital videocams, some tripods for the videocams, some digital recording gear, some special-effects software, a couple of spotlights, even one of those clapperboards that you clap down on when you wanna start shooting a scene? Yeah, I bought all that stuff. It cost a little over five grand.”

“Wow.”

“Told you I was serious about directing.”

“Where’d you get the money?”

“I maxed out my Discover card, the only card I had left. The only card I hadn’t already maxed out? The one I try to avoid using, ’cause it charges a million and a half percent interest each month? I’m that serious about directing. I’ve even written a screenplay, my first one ever.”

“What’s it called?”

“Indecent Betrayal. It’s an erotic thriller. I grew up watching erotic thrillers on cable. What can I say, I like boobies.”

“Right. So when do you plan to start filming?”

“This Saturday. At the mansion.”

“Do your parents know?”

“Uh-huh. I told them. They thought it was cute I wanted to direct, like they thought I was five years old and I had said”—high-pitched voice—“ ‘When I gwow up, I wanna be a fi-wuhman, or, or an astwonaut, or, or, or Chief Justice of the Supweme Court, yaaaay!’ ” Frank had clapped during that “yaaaay!” part but apparently not loud enough for our supervisor to hear in the backroom, or else she would have stepped out front and berated us. The two or three customers sitting in our coffeehouse (it was the mid-morning lull) apparently hadn’t heard, either.

“Anyways,” Frank continued, “my parents did permit me to film there, at the mansion, as long as I didn’t do any damage. Plus they’ll stay out of my way, ’cause I knew even before asking that they’ll be in Miami for the weekend on business. But they don’t know about the mature content I plan to film, so”—Frank lifted his finger to his lips—“Shhhhh.”

“Yeah.”

I put some Coffee Clutch Maximum Mocha Cake Pops into the display case.

“So I was wondering,” Frank said. “Would you like to help me out on Saturday?”

“Help you out?”

“With the cameras, the lights, all that technical stuff.”

“I don’t know a thing about movie-making.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem for you, Mac.”

“I guess not.”

“I’ll give you a copy of the screenplay beforehand, soon as I can get copies made.”

“Okay.”

“So you in?”

“I don’t know. How much you paying me?”

“Nothing. But I can give you five percent of the profits from DVD sales. I plan to make this a direct-to-video release.”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, seven percent. That’s as high as I can go. Whaddaya say, Mac?’

I paused.

“Go fill the napkin holders,” I said.

Copyright © 2023 by David V. Matthews
December 2, 2023

            I rather insufferably considered myself a thrift-store record aficionado back in 2011, at age sixteen, having reached the high point of adolescent insufferability, I guess, when you need to create what you consider a sophisticated persona to differentiate yourself from what you consider the cultural lamestream engulfing you.  In my case, as with many other people of whatever age, I collected, sold, and pontificated upon obscure, decades-old consumer items that the lamestream had once considered beneath notice but now slavered over as the epitome of, to use the cool spelling, kewl.

            So one afternoon back then, while rooting through the vinyl at Pearl’s Thrift Shoppe, searching for my specialized genre, Eighties hard rock (the cheesier the better) I could sell on the Internet, I found a sleeveless seven-incher: fair to good condition, plain white label, “Masturbating Rhythm,” presumably the song title, printed all in caps in a smeary black font, no other information, no label or song on the B-side, probably from sometime before the Eighties or even before the Seventies.  Or maybe even before the Sixties.  Though a prodigious amount of the rock I enjoyed dealt with sexual topics in a somewhat overt manner (to say the least), I’d never seen any record with “Masturbating” in its title.  Ordinarily, I would have purchased such as unusual release, only forty-nine cents, but—I don’t know, maybe I’d considered that single too unusual, too antediluvian, too un-kewl by Internet standards.  By the next day, when I’d changed my mind and returned to Pearl’s, the record had disappeared, though I did find the self-titled debut album by Mascara, VG+ condition more or less, ninety-nine cents, an album I eventually sold on eBay to some guy in Santa Fe for twenty-six bucks.

            As for “Masturbating Rhythm,” I’d forgotten about it until the 1/6 Trumpnoid rampage at the Capitol a decade later (Capitol Records, yeah), when I guess I needed to distract myself from the live streaming coverage.  So I Googled that release but turned up nothing.  I even went on Bing, with the same results.  No one anywhere had written about the single, offered it for sale, or uploaded it.  However, I did discover that it most likely spoofs “Fascinating Rhythm,” an exceedingly old-timey song (from early last century!) by these guys named George and Ira Gershwin.  And thus the search ended, due to my sudden craving for alcoholic beverages.

            Perhaps on this, the one-year anniversary, I’ll resume my “Masturbating Rhythm” search or listen to “Fascinating Rhythm” or both; or I could turn my Pearl’s encounter into a bittersweet memory, the record that got away, giving myself substance, I guess making myself more impressive to my fellow aging collector geeks and to young hipster chicks with daddy issues.

Copyright © 2022 by David V. Matthews

January 2, 2022/January 5, 2022

Turhan Bey Fan Club (2021)

A familiar sight during my childhood: my old man in his shirtsleeves, slumped over the kitchen table at night, beer bottle in hand, complaining to Mom about his day, specifically about the employees at the department store he manages, about the customers who try to rob him blind, about how no one appreciates what he does, much less deserves it—complaining in that tone, equal parts grandiose and self-pitying, that makes me grind my teeth into nubs as I lie on the living-room carpet, in the adjoining room, watching TV.  I’ve just turned twelve.  Mom, of course, sits next to him, not saying a word.  His performance goes on so long, I imagine visual clichés from those old movies she loves: hands twirling around on clocks, pages flying off the calendar.

Finally, the usual crescendo of his complaining arrives.  He asserts he’s done everything he could, and what more can he do?

“Killing yourself would help,” I mutter, softly enough for my parents not to hear; otherwise, either of them, or both of them, would have leaped up, run into the living room, and commenced their usual disciplinary method of beating me in a whirlwind of slaps, punches, and kicks.  I’ve never said anything like that about my old man before.  For a few moments, I feel guilty.  “Ha ha, how fuckin’ embarrassing, right?” I say seven years later when relating this anecdote to my fellow soldiers in the jungle in Vietnam, causing them to go into detail about the butt-kickings they’d endured as children.  Laughs all around, drawing us closer together.

Copyright © 2021 by David V. Matthews

Do you remember Mad magazine? You might have read it as a kid. Lots of kids used to read it. But I didn’t. Growing up during the Nineteen-Seventies, I read a competing humor magazine called Loony, essentially a blatant imitation. Instead of Don Martin, Mad’s Maddest Artist, they had Pete Zukko, Loony’s Looniest Loon, who drew similar comics complete with capsule-headed, floppy-toed characters and even the same type of sound effects—SKRUNCH, FLABADORP, BLIPPLADEEBLIPBLIP. Instead of Spy vs. Spy, in which one pointy-nosed secret agent would elaborately, if bloodlessly, murder another, they had Spookorama (spooks as in the slang word for spies), in which one potato-nosed secret agent would elaborately, and gorily, murder another, limbs and intestines flying toward the reader like some two-dimensional three-D movie. Instead of the Fold-In, they had the See-Through; rather than folding in the inside back cover accordion-style, you’d hold it to the light, and the outside back cover would shine through, creating a new image that would refer to some current celebrity or pop-cultural property. Et cetera. I knew Loony was pretty much a ripoff, but I didn’t care. I preferred reading it because it was also an underdog. Or because everyone else preferred Mad, and I felt like indulging in contrarianism. Or both.

■

A few casual Fridays ago, Zach Breen, that nose-pierced, nineteen-year-old temp in the processing department, walked up to my desk, wearing a black T-shirt with a color photo of Angela Lansbury’s disembodied head on it, above the words WRITTEN IN BLOOD, in blood-red. “Like my shirt?” he asked me.

I nodded out of politeness.

“It’s about Murder, She Wrote.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You ever watch that show?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Me too. I watch it all the time. That show fuckin’ rules, man.” Pointing at Angela Lansbury: “She’s the biggest serial killer ever.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s the one who murders someone new every week, then frames someone else for the crime.”

“Don’t the people she accuses of murder always end up confessing?”

“She’s hallucinating that they do. She’s that fuckin’ insane.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Come on, think about it. If your grandma, like, kept runnin’ across dead bodies everywhere she went, wouldn’t you start to get suspicious?”

“Yeah.”

Pointing at Angela Lansbury again: “Plus she’s a widow, and she prolly killed her husband, too, before the show began.”

“Yeah.”

“Though I guess if you’re an old person, killin’ people would prolly be way more exciting than, like, playin’ fuckin’ bingo. Unless you killed ’em during bingo.”

“Yeah, that would—”

“B-7. I-25. N-44 Magnum!” He turned his hand into a gun, the muzzle consisting of his forefinger and middle finger, and pretended to shoot at me. “Bang.”

Copyright © 2021 by David V. Matthews