THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU
The Dead Hand Loves You started as a joke. Or more like a dare. He should have been more careful about it, but the fact was he’d been blowing a fair amount of dope around that time and drinking too much inferior-grade booze, so he hadn’t been fully responsible. He shouldn’t be held responsible. He shouldn’t be held to the terms of the fucking contract. That’s what had shackled his ankles: the contract.
And he can never get rid of that contract, because there wasn’t any drop-dead date on it. He should have included a good-only-until clause, like milk cartons, like tubs of yogourt, like mayonnaise jars; but what did he know about contracts back then? He’d been twenty-two.
He’d needed the money.
It was so little money. It was such a crappy deal. He was exploited. How could the three of them have taken advantage of him like that? Though they refuse to admit the unfairness of it. They just cite the fucking contract, with those undeniable signatures on it, including his, and then he has to suck it up and fork out. He resisted paying them at first, until Irena got a lawyer; now the three of them have lawyers the way dogs have fleas. Irena should have cut him some slack in view of how close they were once, but no, Irena has a heart of asphalt, harder and drier and more sun-baked every year. Money has ruined her.
His money, since it’s because of him that Irena and the other two are rich enough to afford those lawyers of theirs. Top-quality lawyers too, as good as his; not that he wants to get into a snarling, snapping, rending contest among lawyers. It’s the client who’s always the cracked-bone hyena’s breakfast: they take bites out of you, they nibble away at you like a sackful of ferrets, of rats, of piranhas, until you’re reduced to a shred, a tendon, a toenail.
So he’s had to ante up, decade after decade; since, as they rightfully point out, in a court case he wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d signed it, that infernal contract. He’d signed it in red-hot blood.
At the time of the contract, the four of them had been students. Not exactly dirt poor or they wouldn’t have been getting a so-called higher education, they’d have been patching frost-heave in the roadways or setting fire to hamburgers for minimum wage, or turning tricks in cheap, vomit-scented bars, at least Irena would; but though not paupers, they didn’t have a lot of loose change. They were getting by on summer-job earnings and grudging loans from relatives, and in the case of Irena, a mingy scholarship.
They’d met initially through a ten-cent-a-draft beer parlour group given to snide quips and whining and boasting – not Irena, of course, who never did such things. She was more like a den mother, picking up the tab when the rest of them were too pissed to remember where they’d put their dimes and quarters or too slippery to have brought any along, not that she didn’t get her cash back later. The four of them had discovered a common need to spend less on accommodations, so they’d rented a house together, right near the university.
It was in the early ’60s, back when you could be a student and rent a house in that area, if only a narrow, pointy-roofed, three-storey, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, run-down, pee-flavoured, peeling-wallpapered, warped-floored, clanking-radiatored, rodent-plagued, cockroach-riddled, red-brick Victorian row house. That was before those houses turned into restored Heritage Buildings worth an arm and a bladder, with historical plaques on them affixed by halfwits with nothing better to do than dodder around sticking plaques on overpriced, snootied-up real estate.
His own building – the building in which the ill-advised contract had been signed – has a plaque on it too, saying – surprise! – that he himself once lived there. He knows he once lived there, he doesn’t need to be reminded. He doesn’t need to read his name, Jack Dace, 1963–64, as if he’d only been alive for one fucking year, with underneath it the tiny print that says, “In this building was written the International Horror Classic, THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU.”
I’m not a moron! I know all that! he wants to shout at the oval, enamelled blue-and-white plaque. He should forget about it, he should forget the whole episode as much as possible, but he can’t because it’s chained to his leg. He can’t resist peeking at the thing every time he’s in town for some filmfest or litfest or comicfest or monsterfest or other. On the one hand, it’s a reminder to him of his idiocy in signing the contract; on the other hand, it’s pathetically satisfying to read those three words: International Horror Classic. He obsesses over it too much, that plaque. Still, it’s a tribute to his major life accomplishment. Such as it is.
Maybe that’s what it will say on his tombstone: THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU, INTERNATIONAL HORROR CLASSSIC. Maybe nubile teeny girl fans with Goth eye makeup, and stitch marks tattooed on their necks like the Frankenstein creature, and dotted lines around their wrists with CUT HERE instructions, will visit his grave and leave him tributes composed of withered roses and whitened chicken bones. They send stuff like that to him already, and he’s not even dead.
Sometimes they lurk around events he’s attending – panel discussions at which he’s expected to drone on about the inherent worthiness of “genres,” or retrospectives of the various movies spawned by his magnum opus – clad in ripped shrouds, with their faces painted a sickly green, bringing envelopes containing photos of themselves naked and/or with black ropes around their necks and their tongues sticking out, and/or baggies containing tufts of their pubic hair and offers of spectacular blowjobs to be performed by themselves while wearing vampire teeth – edgy, that, and he’s never accepted one of those jobs. But he hasn’t resisted other blandishments. How could he?
It’s always a risk though, a risk to his ego. What if he underperforms in the sack, or rather – because these girls like a stimulant of moderate discomfort – on a floor, up against a wall, or on a chair with ropes and knots? What if they say, “I thought you would be different” while adjusting their leather undergear and slipping back into their spiderweb stockings and repairing their glued-on festering wounds in the bathroom mirror? It’s been known to happen, more frequently as age has withered him and custom staled.
“You wrecked my wound” – they’ve even said things like that. Worse, they’ve said them straight, without irony. Pouting. Accusing. Dismissive. So it’s best to keep such girls at a distance, to let them worship his decadent satanic powers from afar. Anyway, these girls are getting younger and younger, so it’s difficult to make conversation with them at those moments when they expect him to talk. Half the time he has no idea what’s coming out of their mouths, when it isn’t tongues. They have a whole new vocabulary. Some days he thinks he’s been buried underground for a hundred years.
Who could have predicted this odd form of success for him? Back when everyone who knew him thought he was a wastrel, including him. The Dead Hand Loves You must have been pure inspiration, from some tacky, pulp-hearted, flea-bitten muse; because he’d written that book straight off, with none of the usual stops and starts and dawdlings, the crumpling of the pages, the tossings into the wastebasket, the fits of lethargy and despair that had usually kept him from finishing anything. He’d sat down and typed it out, eight or nine or ten pages a day, on the old Remington he’d scored at a pawn shop. How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. It had taken him maybe three weeks. A month, at the max.
Of course he hadn’t known it was going to be an International Horror Classic. He hadn’t run down two flights of stairs in his underwear and yelled in the kitchen, “I’ve just written an International Horror Classic!” And if he had, the other three would only have laughed at him as they sat at the Formica table drinking their instant coffee and eating the pallid casseroles Irena used to cook up for them, using a lot of rice and noodles and onions and cans of mushroom soup and tuna because those ingredients were cheap though nourishing. Irena was big on nourishing. Value for the dollar, that was her thing.
The four of them would deposit their weekly food money in the dinner kitty, a cookie jar in the shape of a pig, but Irena contributed less cash because she did the actual cooking. The cooking, the shopping, the paying of the household bills such as light and heat – Irena liked doing all that. Women once did like performing such roles, and men liked that part too. He himself had enjoyed being clucked over and told he should eat more, no denying it. The deal was that the other three, including him, were supposed to do the dishes, though he can’t say that happened with any regularity, or not in his case.
To do the cooking, Irena put on an apron. It had a pie appliquéd onto it, and he has to admit she looked good in that apron, partly because it tied around her waist so you could actually see that she had a waist. Her waist was usually concealed under the layers of thick knitted or woven clothing she wore to keep warm. Dark grey clothing, black clothing, like a secular nun.
Having a waist meant she also had a visible bum and some tits, and Jack could not keep himself from picturing what she’d look like without any of her sturdy, nubbly garments on, not even the apron. And with her hair falling down, her blond hair she wore rolled up in the back. She’d look delectable and nourishing, plump and yielding; passively welcoming, like a flesh hot water bottle covered in pink velvet. She could have fooled him, she did fool him: he’d thought she had a soft heart, a heart like a down-filled pillow. He’d idealized her. What a sucker.
Anyway, if he’d come into the noodle-and-tuna-scented kitchen and said he’d just written an International Horror Classic, the three of them would only have laughed at him, because they didn’t take him seriously then and they don’t take him seriously now.
Jack had the top floor. The attic. It was the worst location. Boiling in summer, freezing in winter. The fumes went up there: cooking fumes, dirty sock fumes from the floors below, toilet stenches – they all wafted upward. There was nothing he could do in retaliation for the heat and the cold and the smells except stomp around on the floor; but that would bother only Irena, who was directly below him, and he didn’t want to annoy her because he wanted to get into her underthings.
These were black in colour, as he’d shortly had an opportunity to discover. He’d thought black underwear was sexy at the time, sexy in a sleazy way, as in grotty five-and-dime police magazines. He’d been unacquainted with real-life panty colours other than white and pink, which was what his dates in high school had worn, not that he’d ever managed a good look at those panties in the frustrating darkness of parked cars. He’s realized in hindsight that Irena’s choice of black was not provocative but pragmatic: her black was a penny-pinching black, devoid of lace or any crisscross or peek-a-boo features, and had been selected not to display flesh but merely to hide the dirt and save on washings.
Having sex with Irena was like having sex with a waffle iron, he used to joke to himself later, but that was after the sequel had distorted his retrospective glance and sheathed her in metal.