“J.F.K, Jackie O., Marilyn, and Me”
by RJ Zeman
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.
John F. Kennedy wakes up in the second story his father's estate. He wakes up sweating from a nightmare about PT-109. The Japanese Destroyer pierces his back, his skull. His legs are paralyzed, his penis floats limp in the water. He dies in a waterfall of green and blue liquid, his body floating motionless in the ocean. His father is an eyeball in the sky. The eyeball opens up, looks down at the blood stained water, and laughs. He screams, someone comes into the room, wakes him up. A fire is going downstairs, the warmth coming in through metallic heat vents in the wall. Sweat drips down his stomach and onto his thighs. He reaches for his crutches, goes downstairs to eat Thanksgiving turkey. He winces in pain as he takes the first step on the wooden flight of stairs, then the next, then the next...
Jackie O. sleeps naked in a bedroom in Nantucket. Her legs are spread. Her feet and legs are curled up like a contortionist under a thick, warm blanket. Something is wrong. Her body twists in pain. Her brain is connected to her husband's via remote control. She has the same symbiotic nightmare he does. Their dreams unite, collide. This time, he fails to save his shipmate. The wounded man falls off the PT-109 into the ocean and drowns, slipping from J.F.K.'s firm, tan grip. The eyeball in the sky turns bright red. He swims on, leaving behind a wet corpse in the cold waters of the Pacific. The eyeball in the sky is slanting now, little yellow fingers shooting little guns at his swimming body. He reaches land, makes up a story about his shipmate being shot, has it classified, remains a hero and never talks about it again. She wakes up to the sound of the alarm buzzing on the wooden bureau, its shrill high wail piercing her eardrums like Japanese gunfire.
M.M. wakes up alone in a graveyard, searching for the ghost of her father. She never finds him, just the scars, the orphanage, a face in the mirror. One day she meets a photographer. They go back to a dirty apartment. He takes nude pictures of her, strangles her with her own stockings, and rapes her on a green couch in the living room. The flashbulbs go off. Tears stream down the cheeks of a million teenage boys jacking off forever in some warm closet.
Soldiers come back from Europe; they are buying television sets, hibernating in the suburbs after the close of the war. The war has left millions of dead Jews burning in ovens, screaming forever in one huge chorus of fear. They find all the lost European art in a bunker under Berlin, sell it on the black market, use the money they make to fund LSD and AIDS research for the next fifty years. The black veterans can't find jobs in Montgomery today because their bodies are attached to ropes hanging from trucks and tree stumps. They are buried in a shallow grave or just set out for display. Southern people drive by in new cars; they don't even bother to turn their heads. JFK eats his meal in silence, chewing the turkey, letting it collapse into the walls of his stomach. He clutches his chest in pain, reaches for an aspirin...
We are all jacking off to LIFE magazine and thinking about the possibility of the world exploding. Someone lights a match, it goes up in flames like a stick of dynamite. All of earth is on fire and nobody can stop it. A boy is masturbating to a picture of M.M. Her breasts hang out lewdly, her nipples pink and swollen. The magazine catches flame just as the final spray of his ejaculate hits the news print; the cum and the magazine die together as one. M.M. lives on in eternity as some twisted Hollywood nightmare. With no alarm clock to wake it up, the dream lives on forever, caught in some twisted inferno, a forest fire of our own collective American soul. The boy gasps for one last breath as he inhales the carbon monoxide that will strangle him, falls down dead in the third aisle of a small town supermarket. He is screaming for help as the building burns, the roof caves in, and people run wailing high mad into Atomic streets...
I am an anachronism in this story, yet I am still breathing down M.M.'s neck. I can feel the sweat and perspiration building on her skin, her plunging neckline revealing her opulent white breasts. I reach down to fondle them but she disappears. I am somewhere in a distant graveyard. I am standing over the deathbed of Jackie O. She is surrounded by famous graves. They are thick marble slabs with words written all over them. Some of the words don't make sense. I lift the covers up, smell her vagina, and taste the skin of her stomach with my tongue. Her flesh tastes like power and money. I am excited. The eyeball looks down at me from the sky. I turn my head up to it, smiling. It tries to scream at me, but has no mouth, no form. I raid the Kennedy vault. Men in uniforms chase me. I run through woods screaming wild at the top of my lungs, my hot red American blood running through me like a river. I run hand in hand with M.M. Her fingers are only skeletal, they shrivel up and decay in my hands.
The communists have weapons pointed at 3,000 American cities, huge bombs waiting to orgasm in death and terror over our suburbs. People build bomb shelters, huddle in corners. Men work eight hours a day, come home, beat their wives, and don’t talk to their children. THE WHOLE WORLD IS GOING TO GO UP IN SMOKE, THE REDS THE REDS THE REDS ARE COMING! M.M. gets a job in a factory, builds tanks, and stains her fingers with grease. Machines and smokestacks pump all night making more missiles. Women go to sleep with bruised faces. A million teenage boys masturbate to LIFE magazine: images of death, movie stars, violence. It makes them cum. It makes the blood in their hearts beat faster, blood vessels contracting in one big pulsating mess of nightmares and sex. As the Russians build the bombs, left ventricle beats into right ventricle, one big explosive heartbeat ready to blow up the entire black and white planet...
Close up of Marilyn on the set. Jackie O. cries in the corner. M.M. smiles, her tight pale skin tracing the faint outline of her skull. Her brain is decaying from too many pills. She cannot think straight. The light bulbs flash, explode. All the images are caught on film. Men dance behind her as she prances around set in a pink dress. She is given a box of chocolates. The candy melts, staining her dress. Men smile, pat her on the back. More light bulbs go off, more photographs explode. They are on fire; the negatives have all been swallowed up in a billowing cloud of black liquid smoke. Someone has to develop them. Hollywood sells her like a call girl; Hollywood the cheap hustler on a suburban street corner. The buyers line up in suits and cigars, a million dollar bills, each one scarred with a bullet hole or a bottle of pills.
We roll the film in a movie theatre: I am standing behind M.M. as she leans over a sewer grate. The wind blows her skirt up, I reach behind her to fondle her ass. I clutch her ass and realize that her skin is melting off. She is radioactive, planted by Hollywood and the Russians in some twisted Red Scare plot. Her skin melts the skin on my palms, her ass is napalm. "What the fuck, baby?" I say, pulling a cigar out of my mouth. Her legs melt, her body collapses. The only thing that survives the attack is a white dress, floating around in a pool of melted flesh. "We've got a defect here," I say. "Get this bitch off the lot and find me another girl, pronto!” Men nod their heads at me; I reach up for the cigar in my mouth with what's left of my right hand. I have a strange taste in my mouth like battery acid. All quiet on the set. I walk into a black limousine waiting for me on the corner.
Meanwhile, back at the Kennedy estate, bootleggers sit around a chart in an office, rigging the election. They smile as they sip from their glasses, whiskey burning their throats. Cheating the entire nation, they tell dirty jokes and look over at J.F.K. He sits crippled in a chair, smirking, holding onto a pair of crutches. The cushion on the chair dulls the aching pain in his spine. The eyeball in the sky looks over at him from the seat of the desk, emotionless. The pupil is dilated; the white yolk of the eye is turning blood red. It's built like a Russian tank. In his mind, he pierces it with a pencil, but he knows he can never do this. Without its retina feeding him information, he will never see again. They share the same optic nerve. The lights turn dim as the moon hovers over the estate; Jackie O. sleeps nude in a separate bedroom, a book laid over her chest. The men file out of the house slowly, driving off into the night in expensive cars.
August 5th, 1962: M.M. lies dead in her bedroom, covered in a white sheet. They find pills next to her on the table; her blank dead eyes stare up at the ceiling. The photographers arrive before the police; the light bulbs flash, explode. Someone drops a reel of film into the camera. They snatch away the sheet covering her body, revealing her naked flesh. They take a close up of her vagina, still wet with the moisture of life and fame. They leave quickly, wiping up all the fingerprints. The police arrive, an ambulance screams down a highway towards Hollywood. The Russians fine tune their atomic bombs, aiming one directly at Los Angeles, ready for the World War III. The photographers sell their negatives to Hush magazine, American men masturbate forever to the same floating blonde image on a million screens.
This is not how the film was shown. This is not how the negatives turned out. But someone has to develop them.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.
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