Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Other, more “grown-up” books: Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm, and Frank Norris’s The Pit. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the collected Sherwood Anderson reader. All Chicago authors; Celly never forgot her roots. I saw a small cassette recorder on a table and flipped through the tapes. Came across Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock soundtrack. Imagined him singing the title song, “You’re So Young And Beautiful.”

I heard a moan.

It was the head. Mouth open, like a dog begging for a biscuit. The tip of the tongue was bitten off. It recognized me. It was showing me.

JAILHOUSE ROCK

I ran out the door and into the john, vomit already nearing my teeth. Sweating, numb. And there he was in the doorless stall nearest the entrance, my new friend. The man who had been in Celandine’s room before me.

The man with blood on his lip. He smiles then, said how the head felt no pain. He knew I knew what he was talking about. Said it was like raping a girl and then killing her after because she knows who you are.

Do the crime without doing the time.

When he smiled a bloody thin-lipped grin and compared it to having your cake and eating it too, hiking up his belt like a real man, I hit him. Caught him by surprise. I pummeled him until my knuckles were bloody. Left him face over the chipped porcelain bowl, hair hanging into the water like he had got a swirly.

I walked past the condom machines to the mirror. Took my Ray-Bans off and stared at my bulging face. Beat holy hell out of the mirror, out of my reflection.

But had the common sense to wash my hands and calm down.

Went back to the stage with my hands in my jacket pockets, told Norm I wanted to head back to the Plaza.

The girl dancing on stage as we walked out the door had two mastectomy scars.

* * *

That night, I dreamt horrible things, like a guy forced to sleep the night before he is to be strapped down into the electric chair.

I was back at Belladonna’s, sitting front centre stage. Celly was dancing, glassy-eyed. Cradling the head as Patsy Cline belted out “I’m Back In Baby’s Arms.” The crowd going nuts.

Celly snake-dancing to “The Stroll,” winnowing across the stage, the head dangling over the edge. Men stuffing dollar bills into its mouth. Celly standing and swinging her head back and forth, the cystic head below flopping like a colostomy bag. Celly oblivious to me, the head the only one recognizing me in the whole place, the whole city, the whole world.

Down on her hands and knees, shoving her ass in someone else’s face. Inching down the stage, flashing red, blue, red, orange. Her nipples tiny points. Celandine’s pussy seemingly enormous in the shadow of her body. The stage covered with wadded bills, spat out of the head’s mouth.

The head with a mind of its own, making Celly move towards me.

So that the zombie tongue could lick the dried blood from my knuckles.

* * *

I woke up to find it was almost two in the afternoon. Norm was watching CNN. He told me that it was about time I got up, he’d been awake when I got back.

I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

He told me that halfway back to the Plaza, I got out of the cab and said I wanted to go back to Belladonna’s. Then he told me to go do something about my breath.

* * *

We got back to Denver okay. Part of me wanted to go back to Vegas, to Celly. But I was embarrassed, shocked, even sickened at the depths I had lowered myself to. I took some spare Tegretol for my headaches. I tried for months to forget what I had seen at Belladonna’s.

I watched the WGN superstation for Chicago news after the Cubs and Bulls games. Read about The Painkiller, killing wheelchair victims in the Loop back in Chicago in late ’88, and of Richard Speck (still unrepentant) dying a day before his fiftieth birthday, bloated from distended bowel, although the cause of death was listed as emphysema, in December 1991. Everyone felt cheated that the drifter who had mutilated eight nurses in 1966—around the time Celly and I were getting to know each other better—got off so easily.

Norm Brady and I hung around The Lion’s Lair in the evenings and I spent my days rereading old medical textbooks from the Denver Library on Seventeenth. I also read the Rocky Mountain News, my native city showing up increasingly as the civil war in the former nation of Yugoslavia continued unabated. My home town was indeed a melting pot, much of the coverage came from the Chicago wire services. Items about the Midwest in general, the Mississippi flooding from the Quad Cities to St. Louis, a crazed gunman killing patrons at a Kenosha, Wisconsin restaurant. A skinhead shooting a plastic surgeon who “dared” change someone’s Aryan features; what would the neo-Nazi think of myself or Celly?