dance for dollar bills
Webster comes in, and talks to one of them,
slips her a twenty, shows a photograph,
the stripper — standing close enough that he
could touch her (but they’ve bouncers on patrol
weird steroid cases who will break your wrists) —
admits she thinks she knows the girl he means.
Then Webster leaves.
INT. WEBSTER’S CONDO. NIGHT.
A video awaits him at his home.
It shows A WOMAN lovelier than life
Shot from the ribcage up (her breasts exposed)
Advising him to “let this whole thing drop,
forget it,” promising she’ll see him soon . . .
DISSOLVE TO
INT. MCBRIDE’S HOTEL ROOM. NIGHT.
McBride’s alone and lying on the bed,
He’s watching soft-core porn on pay-per-view
Naked. He rubs his cock with vaseline,
lazy and slow, he doesn’t want to come.
A BANG upon the window. He sits up,
flaccid and scared (he’s on the second floor)
and opens up the window of his room.
His sister enters, looking almost dead,
implores him to forget her. He says no.
The sister shambles over to the door.
A WOMAN DRESSED IN BLACK waits in the hall.
Brunette in leather, kinky as all hell,
who steps over the threshhold with a smile.
And they have sex.
The sister stands alone,
She watches as the brunette takes McBride
(her skin’s necrotic blue. She’s fully dressed).
The brunette gestures curtly with her hand,
off come the sister’s clothes. She looks a mess:
her skin’s all scarred and scored; one nipple’s gone.
She takes her gloves off and we see her hands:
her fingers look like ribs, or chicken wings,
well-chewed, and rescued from a garbage can —
dry bones with scraps of flesh and cartilage.
She puts her fingers in the brunette’s mouth...
AND FADE TO BLACK.
INT. WEBSTER’S OFFICE. DAY.
THE PHONE RINGS. It’s McBride. “Just drop the case.
I’ve found my sister, and I’m going home.
You’ve got five hundred dollars, and my thanks.”
PULL BACK on Webster, puzzled and confused.
MONTAGE of Webster here. A week goes by,
we see him eating, pissing, drinking, drunk.
We watch him throw HIS GIRLFRIEND out of bed.
We see him play the video again...
The VIDEO GIRL stares at him and says
she’ll see him soon. “I promise, Webster, Soon.”
CUT TO
THE PLACE OF EATERS, UNDERGROUND.
Pale people stand like cattle in a pen.
We see McBride. The flesh is off his chest.
White meat is good. We’re looking through his ribs:
his heart is still. His lungs, however, breathe,
inflate, deflate. And tears of pus run down
his sunken cheeks. He pisses in the muck.
It doesn’t steam. He wishes he were dead.
A DREAM:
As Webster tosses in his bed
He sees McBride, a corpse beneath a bridge,
all INTERCUT with lots of shots of food,
to make our theme explicit: this is art.
EXT. LA. DAY.
Webster’s become obsessed.
He has to find the woman from the screen.
He beats somebody up, fucks someone else,
fixated on “I’ll see you, Webster, soon”.
He’s thrown in prison. And they come for him
The man in black attending the brunette,
Open his cell with keys, escort him out,
and leave the prison building. Through a door.
They walk him to the car park. They go down,
below the car park, deep beneath the town,
past shadowed writhing things that suck and hiss
and glossy things that laugh, and things that scream.
Now other feeder-folk are walking past...
They handcuff Webster to A TINY MAN
who’s covered with vaginas and with teeth,
and escorts Webster to
THE QUEEN’S SALON.
(An interjection here: my wife awoke,
scared by an evil dream. “You hated me.
You brought these women home I didn’t know,
but they knew me, and then we had a fight,
and after we had shouted you stormed out.
You said you’d find a girl to fuck and eat.”
This scares me just a little. As we write
we summon little demons. So I shrug.)
The handcuffs are removed. He’s left alone.
The hangings are red velvet, then they lift,
reveal the Queen. We recognise her face,
the woman we saw on the VCR.
“The world divides so sweetly, neatly up
into the feeder-folk, into their prey.”
That’s what she says. Her voice is soft and sweet.
Imagine honey-ants: the tiny head,
the chest, the tiny arms, the tiny hands,
and after that the bloat of honey-swell,
the abdomen enormous as it hangs
translucent, made of honey, sweet as lust.
The Queen has quite a perfect little face,
her breasts are pale, blue-veined; her nipples pink;
her hands are white. But then, below her breasts
the whole swells like a whale or like a shrine,
a human honey-ant, she’s huge as rooms,
as elephants, as dinosaurs, as love.
Her flesh is opalescent, and she calls
poor Webster to her. And he nods and comes.
(She must be over twenty-five feet long.)
She orders him to take off all his clothes.
His cock is hard. He shivers. He looks lost.
He moans “I’m harder than I’ve ever been”.
Then, with her mouth, she licks and tongues his cock...
We linger here. The language of the eye
becomes a