You’re Eating Yourself, You Don’t Believe It
(Originally published in Angry Thoreauan #28, Easter, 2001)
Back in College, my room-mates Jeof and Ken and I once decided to make a movie. Back then we had lots of ideas, most of which ended in dispiriting failure and occasional emergency room visits, unlike today when the last ten ideas I had were variations on the lets get a drink theme. Back then it didn’t seem so crazy that we would make a movie with a single video camera, no money, actors, or experience. Why not? We were, after all, brilliant, or so we thought. I still don’t know what went wrong — all the signs of unrecognized genius were there: General messiness, absent-mindedness, bad grades, ennui, depression. I suppose it’s easy to make a mistake, since those are also, apparently, the signs of dumbness.
I was the writer in the apartment, so it fell to me to write a script. At the time my two greatest artistic influences were David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which had seriously terrified me and my room-mate Ken only a few weeks before when we viewed the final episode on a stormy night, alone in the much bigger and nicer house we’d rented before our current place, and Styx. You can imagine that those two pieces of pop culture swimming around My Dumb Brain, performing complex water ballet moves, rubbing off on each other — I was about five years away from the twin epiphanies oh my god Twin Peaks IS just an affected mess and oh my god Styx really sucked, didn’t they? I set to work and quickly concocted a story about our mutual associate Rob going crazy and beginning to murder us, cook us into tasty meals, and feed us to the survivors, until there was no one left. It was conceived one evening during a brainstorming session with Jeof and Ken held over peppermint schnapps martinis. The idea was that we would include all sorts of mind-bending little visuals, like hidden messages written subtly on the walls, subtle changes in scenery that would hint at all sorts of horrible things. We mapped out tracking shots and the skeleton of the story — which really boiled down to Rob luring us down into the cellar one by one, clubbing us over the head, making us into sausage, and then throwing dinner parties. We never really got around to scripting any kind of climax, mainly because beyond these rough notes and hungover memories I never actually wrote a script.
Enthused, we immediately blocked out the first scene for us to rehearse, figuring we’d film it to get a feel for how things were actually going to work out. It was a scene from the beginning of the story, where things would still be normal but there would be all sorts of portents, including the subtle touch of having the camera pan away from Rob at one point, only to find the word MORE written in blood on the wall behind him when it panned back. Overnight, you see, I had realized that it wasn’t Rob who was finding Ken, Jeof and I tasty morsels, it was the unholy and ancient evil which lived in our apartment. While I couldn’t swear that The Amityville Horror had been on TV recently, I’m pretty sure a quick survey of the broadcast records would confirm it. Our special effect for the blood-writing was going to be Rob himself, who would be sitting against a white wall with a piece of white paper hidden on him, with the word written on it. One side would be adhesive. When the camera panned away from him, he would quickly slap the paper onto the wall behind himself.
Here we encountered the first sad fact of our film-making careers: we had not yet acquired Rob’s services for the film. This lesson in contractual realism settled in and made us realize something else: we had no cameraman. While we were all capable of handling a video camera, we had also all assumed we would be in every scene of the film, even, I think, after we were supposed to be dead. That was a problem for a later time; first we had to figure out how to rehearse a scene we were all in when we were missing Rob and someone to work the camera. We solved this via dummies.
It was here, I think, that the long, slow slide into a Lord of the Flies situation began, a slide that ended with us at each other’s throats, with no movie to show for it.
The dummies were constructed from two stuffed animals, Bill the Cat from Bloom County and a teddy bear. We dressed them up, gave them arms, and sat them at the kitchen table where we were supposed to be in the scene. They stared at us with wide-eyed, knowing stares, mocking us, obviously knowing with alien intelligence what was to come. Jeof, the most unstable of us all, immediately began to be affected by the Dummies.
The scene was a tracking shot wherein I would answer the door and greet Ken, come to visit Jeof and I in our heterosexual living situation. Ingeniously, I decided that the scene would be shot from my point of view, allowing me to participate in the scene and work the camera. For some reason (now I believe it to be psychic influence of the Dummies) when we reached the kitchen table, we decided that the scene would shift to an objective camera and we would use the Bill Dummy to stand in for me. The scene went well enough until, towards the end, Jeof Vita glanced casually at the Bill Dummy and said “Say, Jeff, you’re looking a little peaked.”
I dissolved into laughter, and everything was ruined. I thought Jeof was joking. I didn’t realize, yet, that this was just the beginning of our slippery slope.
Jeof, Ken and I had been living together for several years by this point, trapped inside the World’s Smallest, Dimmest Apartment like plane-crash survivors huddled in the wreckage on some distant mountain-top. Over this period of time, a weird convergence of ESP and psychotic hatred blooms like the dark fungus eating our bathroom fixtures in millennial increments. Not only could we finish each other’s thoughts and sentences (the unspoken words picked up in our minds like stray radio signals), we didn’t much like each other’s thoughts and sentences. Anyone who has lived with the same people for a period of time can attest to this phenomena, I’m sure.
By the second day, filming broke down. I had scrawled a short page of script the night before in a final flush of faith and enthusiasm, and then Jeof took over the camera and began filming his own private documentary, wandering the apartment barefoot, filming us, and providing a running commentary on our lifestyle, personality deficiencies, and hygiene. Ken and I were simultaneously annoyed and exhilarated by this new filming project, and soon all of us were taking turns behind the camera, wandering the four rooms of the apartment aimlessly and filming each other and anyone unlucky enough to wander in, most probably wondering where we’d all been the past few weeks. We ate it all, everything that came within sight was sucked up into the camera. After a while, we stopped talking, realizing, now that we had magnetic evidence, that we’d said it all before, many times.
By day four, we’d stopped answering the phone or watching TV, bathing, or doing anything at all except filming each other performing increasingly desperate skits to entertain our unseen audience and ourselves. The amusement was barely masking a growing hatred and despair, however. One evening while I filmed Ken cooking ground beef in the kitchen, I realized that we were no longer performing for the camera, we were just silently, grimly filming each other, wordlessly consuming video tape and our own energy. I was wearing a yellow bathrobe and bunny slippers, and Ken was dressed in just a pair of soiled boxer shorts, undisturbed by the spitting grease of cooking meat. He was staring at the camera while obscenely fondling the frying meat with a spatula.
Jeof, naked and holding a steaming cup of instant coffee, walked into the shot. To my mind’s eye he was marked by the blinking LOW BATTERY signal.
“Boys, I’ve realized something,” he said quietly. “If we’re going to finish this movie, there’s only one thing to do. We’ve got to actually eat each other.”
* * * *
That night, we began filming the climax.
The tape still exists, somewhere. Every few months a clip appears on the Internet, grainy and random. Pieced together, they show me, first, emerging from my shadowy bedroom with a Bloom County T-shirt on, a wooden baseball bat in my hands. Then there’s Ken, creeping out of his own room with a large kitchen knife glinting in the artificial light of the dungeon-like apartment. Finally, Jeof bursts from his own lair, a crazed grin on his face that still sends shivers down my spine. The camera watches blandly as we each sneak into the kitchen, where we disappear from sight. Everything fades to black.
I have sworn to never speak of the events which occurred in that kitchen, and I never will, and the only physical evidence of it are the two jagged jaw-shaped scars on my buttocks. We moved out of that apartment a few weeks later, and never spoke of it again. To this day, whenever someone points a camera at me, I salivate.