A Dance at the Slaughter House

"Someone probably wanted to make a copy of another tape."

"And he didn't have a blank cassette handy so he used this one instead. But why use a rental tape and then turn it in the next day? It doesn't make sense."

"Maybe someone made a mistake," I suggested. "Who was the last person to rent it?"

"Before Haberman, you mean. Let's see." He consulted the computer, frowned. "He was the first," he said.

"It was a brand-new tape?"

"No, of course not. Does it look like a new tape? I don't know, you get everything on computer and you can keep records like never before, and then it does something like this. Oh, wait a minute. I know where this tape came from."

A woman, he explained, had brought in a whole shopping bag full of videocassettes, most of them good solid classics. "There were all three versions of The Maltese Falcon, if you can believe that. One from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady, with Bette Davis and Warren Williams. Arthur Treacher plays Joel Cairo, and the Sidney Greenstreet role is played by a fat lady named Alison Skipworth, believe it or not. And then there's the original 1931 version, with Ricardo Cortez playing Spade as a real slimeball, nothing like the hero Bogart made him into in 1940. That was called The Maltese Falcon, but after they released the Huston version the first one was retitled. Dangerous Female, they called it."

The woman had said she was a landlady. A tenant of hers had died and she was selling off some of his things to recoup the back rent he owed.

"So I bought the lot," he said. "I don't know if he really owed back rent or she just saw a chance to pick up a couple of dollars, but I knew she wasn't a burglar, she hadn't gone and stolen the tapes. And they were in good condition, the ones I looked at." A rueful smile. "I didn't look at all of them. I certainly didn't look at this one."

"That would explain it," I said. "If he owned the tape, whoever he was-"

"And he had a tape to copy, and maybe it was the middle of the night so he couldn't go out and buy a blank cassette. Sure, that makes sense. He wouldn't record on a rental cassette, but this one didn't become a rental cassette until I bought it from her, and by then he had already dubbed something else onto it." He looked at me. "Really kiddie porn? You weren't exaggerating?"

I said I wasn't. He said something about the kind of world it was, and I asked the woman's name.

"No way I'd remember it," he said, "assuming I ever knew it in the first place, which I don't think I did."

"Didn't you write her a check?"

"Probably not. I think she wanted cash. People generally do. There's a chance I wrote out a check. Do you want me to see?"

"I'd appreciate it."

He took time out to wait on a customer, then went into a back room and emerged a few minutes later. "No check," he said. "I didn't think there would be. I found my memo of the transaction, which is amazing enough. She had thirty-one cassettes and I gave her seventy-five dollars. That sounds low, but these were used items, and it's the overhead that's everything in this business."

"Did you have her name on the transaction memo?"

"No. The date's June fourth, if that's any help. And I've never seen the woman before or since. I gather she lives in the neighborhood, but I don't know anything more about her than that."

He couldn't come up with anything else, and I couldn't think of any more questions to ask him. He said that Will had a one-night rental of The Dirty Dozen coming, an unimpaired copy, and at no charge.

When I got back to my hotel I looked up Will's number- it was easy now that I knew his last name. I called him and told him he could pick up his free movie whenever he wanted.

"As far as the other movie goes," I said, "there's nothing for either of us to do. Some guy copied a tape onto his own cassette of The Dirty Dozen and it wound up finding its way into circulation. The man whose tape it was is dead and there's no way of finding out who he was, let alone tracing the tape back from him. Anyway, items like that get passed around and around like that, with people interested in that sort of thing copying each other's tapes because that's the only way to get the stuff, it's not available on the open market."

"Thank God for that," he said. "But is it all right to just forget about it? A boy was killed."

"The original tape could be ten years old," I said. "It could have been shot in Brazil." Not likely, not with everybody speaking American English, but he let it pass. "It's a pretty horrible piece of tape, and my life would be every bit as rich and fulfilling if I'd never seen it, but I don't see that there's anything to be done about it. There are probably hundreds of similar tapes around the city. Dozens, anyway. The only thing special about this one is that you and I happened to see it."

"There's no point in taking it to the police?"

"None that I can see. They'd confiscate it, but then what? It would just go in a storeroom somewhere, and meanwhile you'd have to answer a lot of questions about how it happened to wind up in your hands."

"I don't want that."

"Of course not."

"Well," he said. "Then I guess we just forget about it."

EXCEPT that I couldn't.

What I had seen and the manner in which I had seen it made a fairly deep impression on me. I had been speaking the truth when I told Will I had never seen a snuff film. I heard rumors from time to time- that they'd confiscated one in Chinatown, for instance, and they'd set up a projector at the Fifth Precinct and screened it. The cop I heard it from said the cop who'd told him had left the room when the girl in the film had her hand cut off, and maybe it happened just that way, but cops' stories get improved with the telling the same as saloon stories about Paddy Farrelly's head. I knew there were films like that, and I knew there were people who would make them and others who would watch them, but the world they lived in had never before impinged upon my own.

And so there were things that stayed with me, and they were not what I might have expected. The boy's laconic air when the filming began- "Is that thing running? Am I supposed to say anything?" His surprise when the party got nasty, and his inability to believe what was happening.

The man's hand on the boy's forehead in the midst of it all, gentle, solicitous, smoothing the hair back. It was a gesture repeated intermittently through the proceedings, until the final cruelty was inflicted and the camera panned to a drain set in the floor a few yards from the boy's feet. We had seen the drain before but now the camera made a special point of seeking it out, a black metal grid set in a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Blood, red as the female performer's lipstick, red as her long fingernails and the tips of her little breasts, flowed across the squares of black and white, flowed into the drain.

That was the final shot, no people in it, just the floor tiles and the drain and the blood flowing. Then a white screen, and then Lee Marvin again, making the world safe for democracy.

For a few days, maybe as much as a week, I found myself thinking about what I had seen. I didn't do anything about it, though, because I couldn't think what to do. I had stashed the cassette in my safe-deposit box without looking at it a second time- once was enough- and, while it seemed like something I ought to hang on to, what was there to do with it? What it was, really, was a videotape in which two unidentifiable persons had sexual relations with one another and with a third person, also unidentified, whom they mistreated, presumably against his will, and almost certainly killed. There was no way to tell who they were or where and when they did what they did.

One day after a noon meeting I walked down Broadway to Forty-second Street, where I spent a couple of hours on the nasty stretch between Broadway and Eighth. I walked in and out of a lot of porno shops. I was self-conscious at first, but I got over it, and I took my time and browsed in the S-and-M sections. Each shop had some- bondage, discipline, torture, pain, each with a few sentences of description and a still photo on the outside to whet your appetite.

I didn't expect to see our version of The Dirty Dozen offered commercially. Censorship in the Times Square shops is minimal, but kiddie porn and murder are still prohibited, and what I'd seen was both of those. The boy might have been old enough to pass, and a good editor could conceivably have trimmed the worst of the violence, but it still seemed unlikely that I'd run across a soft version offered for sale.

There was a possibility, though, that Rubber Man and Leather Woman had made other films, separately or together. I didn't know if I would recognize them but I thought I might, especially if they appeared again in the same costumes. So that's what I was looking for, if indeed I was looking for anything.

On the uptown side of Forty-second Street, perhaps five doors east of Eighth Avenue, there was a hole-in-the-wall shop much like the others, except that it seemed to specialize in sadomasochistic material. It had all the other specialties as well, of course, but its S-and-M section was proportionately larger. There were videos ranging from $19.98 all the way up to $100, and there were photo magazines with names like Tit Torture.

I looked at all of the videocassettes, including the ones made in Japan and Germany and the aggressively amateurish ones with crude computer-printed labels. Before I was halfway through I had ceased really looking for Rubber Man and his heartless partner. I wasn't looking for anything. I was just letting myself soak up this world to which I'd been so abruptly introduced. It had always been here, less than a mile from where I lived, and I had always known of it, but I'd never let myself sink into it before. I'd never had reason to.

I got out of there, finally. I must have been in the shop for close to an hour, looking at everything, buying nothing. If this bothered the clerk he kept his annoyance to himself. He was a dark-skinned young man from the Indian subcontinent, and he kept his face expressionless and never said a word. In fact no one in the shop ever spoke, not he, not I, not any of the other customers. Everyone was careful to avoid eye contact, browsing, buying or not buying, and moving into and through and out of the store as if genuinely unaware of anyone else's presence. Now and then the door would open and close, now and then there'd be a jingly sound as the clerk counted out change into somebody's palm, quarters for the video booths at the back. Otherwise all was silence.

* * *

I took a shower as soon as I got back to my hotel. That helped, but I still carried the aura of Times Square around with me. I went to a meeting that night and took another shower and went to bed. In the morning I had a light breakfast and read the paper, and then I walked down Eighth Avenue and turned left on the Deuce.

The same clerk was on duty, but if he recognized me he kept it to himself. I bought ten dollars' worth of quarters and went into one of the little booths in back and locked the door. It doesn't matter which booth you select because each contains a video terminal hooked into a single sixteen-channel closed-circuit system. You can switch from channel to channel at will. It's like watching television at home, except the programming is different and a quarter buys you a scant thirty seconds of viewing time.

I stayed in there until my quarters were gone. I watched men and women do various things to one another, each some variation on an overall theme of punishment and pain. Some of the victims seemed to be enjoying the proceedings, and none looked to be in any real distress. They were performers, willing volunteers, troupers putting on a show.