TOY CRIME STORY PART 11

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The investigation cooled off after that. The toys went back to the way they usually did things. Wally and Mimi would occasionally visit Joey’s room, but they didn’t do anything suspicious. Mostly, they cried. They hated themselves. They never came here together.

Nightbeat tried to keep a full head of steam, but it all leaked out of him. He spent some of his time with Felix getting drunk. Sometimes with Angel, and even—every once in a while—with Spike. Cat taunted Nightbeat a great deal, and he tried to let it roll off his back, but it really hurt him. Joey had been a great kid, and now Nightbeat had failed him. More than once he found himself passed out in the closet from the previous night’s drinking.

One night, sick of the whole thing, Nightbeat drunkenly approached Cat, who sat on Joey’s bed with the brim of his hat perked up, making him look kind of dopey.

“I know you did it, you bastard,” Nightbeat said. He could barely stand by this point.

“Did what, now?” Cat asked. He smiled so far his head could have been split in two.

“You killed Joey. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. I can’t prove jack shit. But you did it.”

“Oh, poor Nightbeat!” Cat said. His voice now took on the feel of a croon. “I didn’t do anything. But I expect nothing less from someone who couldn’t even figure out who tried to kill you.”

“You did that, too,” Nightbeat mumbled.

“Not I. But I know who did.”

Nightbeat was too drunk to figure out what Cat had just told him. He pointed a finger at the beast. “An’ ‘nuther t’ing. You’re a piece’a shit. I’ll see you unstuffed ‘fore the end’a my yerz.”

“I think not,” Cat said. He cocked his hat, and the shotgun inside blew Nightbeat off the bed and into oblivion.

The world around him ran red and flicked like flames. He saw through molded plastic Wally’s young face as he opened Nightbeat’s package. He’d been a Christmas present from Wally’s mom. Wally loved Transformers, and Nightbeat was his favorite. There were others back then, too. Cowardly Starscream. Heroic Bumblebee. Cosmic Cosmos. There was Galvatron, but Wally’s parents never got him Megatron, who looked too much like a real gun. Oh, the adventures they shared! Nightbeat solving crimes and fighting Decepticons. Wally had a good feel for storytelling through playtime, and Nightbeat got to enjoy a lot of stories.

But Wally grew up. He got into girls and rock and roll. Not so much sports, but plenty of weed. Nightbeat disapproved. He remembered being handled by one of Wally’s weed-smoking friends. It seemed like a harmless enough drug, but it made the room smell bad. Wally’s parents knew all about it, of course, but they kept a tolerant view of their boy. At least he wasn’t getting into any trouble.

Nightbeat screamed through the adolescent years until he was boxed away for what he felt would be forever. In that time, all he had was his mind and nothing else. He wasn’t even with the other toys. He was wedged between cardboard and a stack of papers. He spent a lot of time thinking about what would eventually become of him, if anything.

Nightbeat shoved through the light and into the hands of baby Joey. Never unsupervised, of course, but Wally wanted his son to enjoy the same things he’d liked as a kid. As Joey grew older, he got to play with more toys, but not very many Transformers. He overheard Wally telling Mimi once that they’d been thrown out by his mom when he left home. He pondered how much they would have been worth. Nightbeat thought it was an odd way to think about toys. They were worth more than money, right? They had to be. Memory was a lot more important.

Joey grew older until he couldn’t anymore. Nightbeat raged against the visions of Joey being pushed down the stairs by an unseen assailant. Thumping down near the end. Breaking bones. Breaking his neck. Dying at the bottom of the steps before his mother could help him.

That unseen being turned to face Nightbeat, and its face was a swirling miasma of faces, all familiar, all with their individual voices.

“Show me!” he screamed. “Show me your face!”

“No,” it growled. Teeth buzz-sawed out of the glop of ever-changing features, reaching out to take Nightbeat to pieces. “You know me.”

“I know! I’m going to rip the stuffing out of you until you’re nothing but a fucking rag!”

It laughed and swallowed him whole. Nightbeat rushed through a pink tunnel, and images of Joey’s death played on the walls around him. Joey screaming. Crying. The dry snap of his neck breaking. The anguish of his parents. The horror Nightbeat felt when he realized that this was a murder.

Joey screamed into infinity, and Nightbeat followed down with him. The railings at each side turned into sharp fangs, and the stairs warped into a long tongue. It took Nightbeat a moment to realize they were both falling down Cat’s mouth. The roar of genteel laughter boomed around them, filling Nightbeat’s chest.

Once past the teeth, Joey faded from existence. Nightbeat fell alone down a tunnel made of white and red stripes, just like Cat’s hat. “Poor stupid Nightbeat,” Cat whispered. “You can’t even solve your own attempted murder.”

Nightbeat crashed down on a flat floor, his gears rattled. Disoriented, he stayed down until he could get his bearings. The red and white checkered tiles beneath him didn’t help much. It had a hypnotizing effect that took more than a moment to shake off.

Around him were prison cells. All of them contained the rotting remains of a dead child, but they all still lived on, singing and talking and reading to while their time away. The cells rotated until Joey’s came into view. He stood in the center, his head dangling loosely from his neck like fruit from a tree. Rotten fruit. His skin was ragged and sloughing off in places. One of his eye sockets was empty. It stared at Nightbeat.

“Joey. I’m sorry. I—”

“You might as well have killed me,” Joey said. There was no passion to his voice, no anger or sadness. Just . . . nothing.

“That’s not true,” Nightbeat said. “I just haven’t found the killer yet! I’m still working on it! Give me time!”

“NO!” Joey roared. Still no passion. He opened his mouth wide, and the word boomed out, kind of like a speaker connected to a radio. “You failed me. I’m dead and in hell and you failed me.”

“I can fix this,” Nightbeat said. “Give me a chance.”

Joey slowly sank into the floor. “It’s too late.” Melting like a candle, leaving no puddle. His remaining eye filmed over with white before he disappeared. The bars slipped away, and Nightbeat fell to where Joey had been standing. A single drop of blood remained. He touched it, but it was dry. It still wouldn’t flake away.

The rest of the world shrank, and Nightbeat noticed that all of existence was a tiny disk of white and red that he knelt on. Blackness surrounded him. Then, a faint glow of red from below. He had a feeling in his guts like he was being lowered, though he couldn’t tell just from looking around. The red grew brighter until he saw it came from miles of flames just below him. Flames made from unstuffed toys. The stink overwhelmed him, and if he hadn’t already been on his knees, he would have been driven to them by it.

The fire came closer, and the disk showed no intention of stopping. Nightbeat found that he didn’t care if he burned or not. He’d failed Joey. He deserved to burn. He had no stuffing to remove, but fire would destroy him until he was nothing but a twisted metal carcass.

He felt warmer and warmer and hotter and hotter, and he screamed as it became unbearable and—

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #744: THE HORRORS OF HOLLYWOOD

 Maybe about twenty-five years ago I decided that I was going to give Hollywood a try. Oh no, don't worry. I have no acting ambitions. I like to help out my filmmaking friends by being in their movies or helping behind the scenes occasionally, but I have no serious desire to be an actor. No, I decided I was going to be a screenwriter.

My first lesson was that this is even harder to do than getting a book published by one of the Big Five. Since I already had experience getting rejected by the Big Five, I figured I'd give it a shot anyway.

So I started reading screenplays of movies that I thoroughly enjoyed. Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs comes to mind. So do the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink. Mario Puzo's adaptation of his own book, The Godfather. And one of my favorites, Unforgiven by David Webb Peoples.

This, by the way, was before the internet was so ubiquitous, so I found them the old fashioned way. Some of them I bought from Borders in book form. Some of them I was able to hunt down at the Elmhurst Public Library in the 800's section, which was the section I worked in as a page. I know it will not come as much of a surprise to you, but I sat on the floor reading these things when I should have been working. The problem with actually doing my job was, I was good at it, and I was fast at it. So they would give me other people's work to do. I'm opposed to that sort of thing, so I started hiding out in the stacks when I was done with my own work, pretending to make sure the books were in order.

So I started writing screenplays using their example as opposed to how-to books, which is essentially how I taught myself to write prose. I thought I was decent at it, but I'll bet if I looked up one of my screenplays now, I would be horrified by how bad it is. Perhaps, as an object lesson, I should post one of them for your perusal. It would make a lovely entry into the John Bruni Museum of Mediocre (At Best) Shit, which I've not added to in many years.

The key to writing for Hollywood, though, is you kinda have to move there, and I didn't want to do that. Also, the more I learned about the preproduction process, the more I realized that kind of thing just wasn't for me. I deal with enough narcissists at my various jobs. I would not want to work with any for the writing part of my life.

It's been a while since I thought about these things, but then I read the horrifying account that I'm about to share with you. And shockingly this is only part 1. Part 2 has yet to be posted. Ultimately I think what I'm trying to say with this GF column is to be open to constructive criticism, but you should have confidence in the writing you believe in. Don't let anyone tell you that you're unprofessional, especially not a fucking producer.

This is long. You might want to save it for tomorrow, but if you're a writer thinking about a Hollywood move (after the WGA hands the studios their ass, of course), you should really give this a read.

(Hey, if you work a desk job with no internet monitoring, save this for when you're at work looking to kill some time. I know that's what I would do.)

Without further ado, brace yourself for the horror.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #743: THE POWER OF NO

 

There's this odd feeling in the world. Or maybe it's just the US. I can only speak for my own country, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is an American feeling. When you're looking to do business with a company, you expect them to bend over backwards for your money. So even if that company does not do the work you want them to do, you expect them to do it anyway.

This feeling is, of course, dead wrong. But that doesn't stop that feeling, does it?

Here, I'll give you an example. Say you went to McDonald's for dinner, but you have a taste for steak. When you get up to the counter (or, God forbid, the fucking drive through), you decide to order steak even though it is not now, nor has ever been, on the menu. And then you get angry when they say they don't do that. You insist that they make you a steak despite the gathering line behind you.

You are dead wrong.

One of the good things about my current job is, if we don't do a service, we don't do it. Period. End of sentence. This sentence you are reading right now of further denial is redundant.

And it never ceases to amaze me how angry it makes people. They'll call in and tell us the service they want. We tell them no. They now demand it instead. We tell them no again. They double down. They'll say such-and-such competitor does it. We tell them no again. How can that be, they ask, that you don't do this thing I need? We just don't do it. FINE! I'LL TAKE MY BUSINESS ELSEWHERE! Ah yes, the business that we would have never taken in the first place. Yes, take wing, my padawan, and go to that competitor you're gushing about.

It turns out that I love telling people no. Telling people no is so satisfying it's almost sexual in nature.

I'm not needlessly cruel. If they accept my first no, then good. We're on the same page. We need torment each other no further. However, if they don't accept that no, and they double down, triple down, quadruple down, then my pleasure begins. Take a look at that picture of Bugs Bunny up there. That is exactly how I feel when I'm talking to such a person. It's a shitty job, so I have to take joy wherever I can get it, however I can get it.

No is a great word. No is a gratifying word. No is a magical word.

People should say it more often.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #742: EMOTIONAL SCENES IN MOVIES AND TV

 I'm a little short on time tonight. Today was a busy day at work, which means I talked to more people than usual. The more people I talk to, the higher my odds are of talking to difficult people. And I talked to a lot of difficult people today. I'd rather not think about it all that much.

Instead, I have a question. Why are actors in intense emotional scenes always out of breath? I've thought back over all the intense emotional moments in my life, and I was rarely, if ever, out of breath, even if I was in a shouting match with someone. Why do movies and TV shows do this? Are the words not enough? Or is it some kind of a Nic Cage-ish mega-acting thing?

I'll bet you've never noticed this before. No one seems to know what I'm talking about, and when I tried Googling such scenes, the internet was not very cooperative, so I don't have examples. It's probably too late tonight, but the next time you watch something, keep an eye out for these kinds of scenes. And check if the actors are out of breath. I'll bet they are.

This is just something I've been thinking about for a few months, and I can't think why people would do this. Have you ever been panting, out of breath, during such a moment in your life? When you're arguing with someone, do you need to catch your breath like you just ran a mile in five minutes? But you need to keep talking or you'll lose the argument or maybe not prove your point?

Just think about it. Take two morphine pills and call me in the morning.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #741: MORE IS NOT THE ANSWER

 I realize that I'm going to come off as an asshole for this one, but I'm OK with that. I don't know what it is about fast food places, but when they fuck up something, they just give you more stuff. I don't need more stuff. 9 out of 10 times you'll give me something I don't even eat. Like Taco Bell with the cinnamon twists.

"Sorry for the wait. I gave you some fries for the inconvenience."

I don't want the fries. I can't eat fries all that often because they get stuck going down my esophagus, and once they're down they make me feel like I ate a hot air balloon. I only eat fries when I'm at the Country House or I've gotten some from Portillos because of the survey coupon. At no other time do I eat them.

"Sorry about that. I upgraded you to a large drink."

This always happens on lunch break at work because I never order a small at any other time. I'm ordering a small because I have to get back to work and brush my teeth before I punch in. I don't want the large. The large is going to get poured down a fucking sewer. Thanks for your concern.

Instead of giving me additional or bigger things, just comp me the meal. It's not taking a big chunk from your bottom line. I never order more than fifteen bucks anyway, and it's more likely that I spent eight bucks. And it will never be more than twenty. I don't go in places anymore, and I believe it is a crime against humanity to order anything more than $19.99's worth of food when you're at the drive through.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #740: NOTES FROM THE PAST

 I feel certain that I've mentioned here before that I'm somewhat of a used book detective. I like to find out about the previous owner of a book through the notes they leave or what they highlight or even the condition of the book. I'm 95% positive I've written about it before, but 740 GF columns are a lot to go through, and I'm not going to do that now. (Or ever, probably.)

I was going through my things, packing my books away, when I found this book. I don't recall how it came into my possession. It's not something I would have picked up at a used bookstore. I have a suspicion I inherited it from somewhere, which happens sometimes.

It's almost a hundred years old, so I'm thinking it might be something Mom had, possibly from her grandparents or great aunt or uncle. But the note left inside is pretty cool:

At first I thought it might have been my stepfather's parents, but the date is wrong. They would have been in Germany still. And I doubt they would have inscribed it in English. It's not from Dad's side of the family. There's no way it would have come to me through him. I doubt it's from Gramps's side of the family. They would not have written in English, either, back then. It would have been Greek. That leaves Grandma's side. Most of them were in America long before that written date, and none of them would have written in another language.

But who are Georgia and Frank? More importantly, who is Bada, aka the Old Puzzle Maker? All I know is that Bada would have been born in 1866, a mere few years after the Civil War.

I haven't said it in a while, so perhaps it bears repeating. History is never far behind us.

TOY CRIME STORY PART 10

 CHAPTER TEN

Nightbeat turned his mind downstairs for further investigation, but it led to nothing. Wally and Mimi came home shortly after with a bunch of visitors. Some were children, and they were ushered into Joey’s room.

“Are you sure?” a young woman asked. “I know how it must feel—”

“It’s fine,” Mimi said. “It would actually feel good to hear someone having fun in that room again. It would be nice to give the toys some company.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Forget it. I mean, do you ever think about a child’s toys when they are no longer needed? In particular in . . . in Joey’s case?”

Nightbeat regretted hearing it. He hoped none of the others had, too, especially Bunny and Fox. He glanced over to them, but neither gave any indication.

The children entered the room one by one, looking like they were cows being led to slaughter. None of them expressed anything at all, not even camaraderie. There were four of them, and they sat on the floor, barely acknowledging each other. One of them picked up Cat and flicked his tail around. Nightbeat saw Cat perk up, and the asshole made like he was going to bite the kid’s neck.

Then one of them picked up Nightbeat. “What’s this supposed to be? A Transformer?”

“I guess,” another said. “It looks like the old kind. Not the cool kind like we got.”

The kid tried to transform Nightbeat, but after twisting and turning him in all directions, he gave up, tossing Nightbeat to the floor. “Doesn’t this Joey kid have anything cool?”

Another picked up Don Snowy. “Nope. Just this baby stuff.”

“Hey, I like Felix the Cat,” said another. “Look. There’s a bunch of him.”

The only kid who hadn’t said anything so far cleared his throat. “Don’t you guys feel kind of weird?”

“What do you mean?”

“Us. In this dead kid’s room. We didn’t even know him, and now we’re playing with his stuff. It’s weird, right?”

The others shrugged. One said, “I don’t know. These are stupid toys, though.”

Spike winked at Angel. No one but Nightbeat and Angel noticed.

“What do you think’s gonna happen to ‘em?” the loner asked.

“Prolly sell ‘em at a garbage sale.”

“You mean a garage sale.”

“I thought it was garbage sale.”

“Me, too.”

“Prolly just throw them out,” another kid said. “Who wants to play with stupid toys?” He kicked Bunny, and Nightbeat winced.

“It’s kind of sad,” the loner said. “I’d hate to die and have my toys get thrown out.”

Another kid picked up a couple of the goombas. “Ever notice how these things look like peepees?”

“Ew! You’re gross!”

“Shut up! You thought so, too!” He demonstrated by putting one of the goombas by his crotch.

One of the other kids went to slap it out of his hand, but the kid double-downed. “Trynna grab my peepee? Go on! Grab it!” Thrusting it out with a stupid grin on his face.

The kid who tried to slap the goomba picked up Don Snowy and hurled him into the goomba-peepee kid’s face. He fell backwards. “Ow! I’m telling!”

“You tell, and I’ll tell about you doing the peepee thing!”

“You wouldn’t!”

“I would!”

“Guys!” a voice from downstairs called out. “What’s going on up there?”

A chorus: “Nothing!”

The toys were very happy when the kids left after about an hour. Don Snowy picked himself up, muttering to himself. “Stupid toy? We’re stupid toys? Yo! I’m no stupid fuckin’ toy! I oughtta beat that kid within an inch of his life!”

“Oh?” Nightbeat asked. “Interesting choice of words.”

“Yo, fuck you, pig!”

“Yo!” the goombas shouted. “Yo! Yo! Yo!”

Don Draper staggered to his webbed feet, looking for his scotch. The sound of the goombas attacked through his hangover haze. “Shut the fuck up!” he shouted. “Shut up, or I’ll . . .” He trailed off for a moment, then lurched toward the closet. He barely made it before they heard the sounds of his hurling.

    Nightbeat sighed. It would be a long night.