Real Monsters

thethemeis: Monsters

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   Standing up from his chair before the word Cut! has even finished leaving his lips, Greg Tourettes pushes past his assistant to clear the way to his trailer. Scott, his assistant, is a ratty little kid with a hunchback who visits strip clubs at the weekend, and takes an Action Man doll with him to place naked on a stool next to his own. 'Don't dance for me,' he'll snarl, as nearly-nude exotic teenage dancers grind their thongs against his knees, 'Dance for him. Only then will I pay you.' Greg's assistant, he gets off on their awkward movements as they struggle to keep dancing, knowing that their customer is a lifeless doll and its owner is a soulless pig only out to degrade them. Then he comes into work on Monday and tells Greg all about it, as if Greg is supposed to care. 

   The set is for Greg's next blockbuster horror, Suburban Evil. It's been billed as Greg's "most exciting project to date", and the "horror of the decade", and it hasn't even been filmed yet. Greg has spent his life making feature films about monsters, and now he sees them everywhere.

   'Mister Gregory,' pants one of the caterers, whose name Greg Tourettes can't even pronounce, 'we have no steak sandwich. No steak sandwich and no crisps of any kind. I so sorry, Mister Gregory. I so sorry.' Rumour is, this caterer comes from some eastern European country where she's wanted for killing her whole family in the middle of the night. Her seven brothers and four sisters, her mother and father and grandmother, she suffocated them all one by one and fled the country before their bodies were even cold. The cast and crew avoid her because the rumours grow more extreme and the body count rises by the day, but Greg ignores them because even if they are true, she makes a shit hot steak sandwich. 

   'Yeah, yeah, alright,' he says, waving her out of his way like a bad smell, 'just give everyone their food, will you?'

   Greg wants nothing more than to be alone in his trailer, sleeping off this whiskey headache. If his beeline wasn't so littered with obstacles and yapping mouths he wanted to avoid, he'd be there already. 

   'Hey Greg?' comes a female voice from the set behind him. Turning, Greg sees the bloodied, bruised face of Zeph Manson, the sexy young star of this pantomime he is filming. In the scene they've just finished taping, she was being raped by a man with shotguns for hands and seven inch screws for teeth. She managed to release herself from his grip by spraying body spray into his eyes and lighting it with a lighter. His eyeballs melted onto her pert breasts and she ran away screaming, as her tits jiggled from side to side spraying fresh eye juice all around. The makeup and pyrotechnics were incredible. 

   She still has no bra on. 

   'What?' sighs Greg. 

   'Do they have any steak sandwiches today?' Zeph is the kind of girl who will sleep with a guy once, and become obsessed. She is so insecure, this miniature psychopath, that she will shamelessly call him at all hours of the night asking when they can see each other again. She'll wait outside his house, ready to beg him to bed her as soon as he embarks on even the shortest of trips. Hell, she'd do this even if she hadn't slept with him - a guy asking for a picture of her tits in an MMS is enough to spark her crazy. Then, when she's decided enough is enough, she'll spend the rest of her days warning his future conquests, 'Oh, honey, I know what it's like, being seduced by him. I know how easy it is to succumb to that charm. But he's bad news, sweetie. He's only out to hurt you, like he hurt me.' Thinking about the big ball of crazy in that tiny little venus flytrap head where so many men want to stick their penises, Greg shudders. It disturbs him to think that although her behaviour seems odd, the majority of women are capable of it. Greg has known more insane women than normal ones. And because Zeph is another typical fucking mental bitch, Greg tries to steer clear of her whenever he can.

   'Yeah,' he says, his limp lips curling into a crafty almost-smile, 'you can have mine, too. I'm not hungry.'

   ‘Awwww, thanks, honey,’ she says, pouting and pushing out her chest, still uncovered. Greg flashes her a polite smile, then a sly grimace, then walks away. On his continued journey to the trailer, he manages to avoid Carl Steamer, the lighting guy who’s so addicted to gambling that he sold his kidney and his wife’s kidney and his child’s kidney all to fund his failed football predictions; Jenny Trump, the graduate sound technician who has spent the last three weeks sucking off the male members of the crew after work for ten bucks a pop; and Steve Whateverhisnameis, the fat fuck who seems to get paid by the film company to watch every scene with Zeph Manson in it with one hand down his pants and one hand fingering his belly button. All these people want some face time with the director, and the director manages to avoid every one; but not Taylor Dansen. Greg Tourettes has no hope of avoiding Taylor Dansen, when he’s sitting on the steps of Greg’s trailer in wait.

   ‘I need you,’ Taylor says, twitching and tossing a lighter from hand to hand, wearing a vest and sweatpants stained with testosterone.

   ‘I don’t need you, so get the fuck out of my way,’ growls Greg, his head pounding to a crescendo.

   Taylor Dansen is the male star of the piece. For the first half of the film, he was the boyfriend of Zeph Manson’s character; but halfway through, in a scene that was filmed just twenty-three hours ago, Taylor’s character was torn limb from limb by a seven foot tall hulk in red overalls with a samurai sword for a cock and ears that leaked puss. After his arms and legs were torn off, he was fucked in the mouth by samurai dick until his brains fell out of the back of his skull.

   ‘I was thinking,’ Taylor blurts, standing and twitching with equal enthusiasm, barely able to keep eye contact, ‘maybe what if my character wasn’t dead? What if perhaps he didn’t die in the last scene?’

   Taylor Dansen wasn’t Greg’s choice of male lead. If Greg Tourettes had had more of a say in it, Taylor would be just as dead in real life as he was in the second half of Suburban Evil. Taylor, you see, has been calling in favours to get himself back into the A-list again for months now, ever since he fell from grace when he beat that film star girlfriend of his up so bad that she couldn’t walk for a week. He’s hit girls before, obviously; but never before has it been the most famous film starlet of the moment, and never before have the photographs of her wounds been uploaded to every news website that has ever been read by human eyes. That boy is a monster; after breaking her heart and her face, he begs for jobs to repair his public image so that she has to see him on the TV every day. He ate her heart, and then he ate her brain. Greg Tourettes hates the cowardly, whiny, talentless little prick, and he has made no effort at all to hide that fact.

   ‘Fuck off,’ he replies through teeth that grit a cigarette he plans to light as soon as he gets into his trailer, ‘I hate you, you cowardly, whiny, talentless little prick.’

   Taylor Dansen just laughs, stepping out of Greg’s way. ‘So you’ll think about it, yeah? Thanks, buddy!’

   Greg Tourettes slams the door in the slimy little cocksucker’s face.

   He wets a towel with hot water and drapes it over his eyes as he lies back on the shitty old sofa in his trailer and lights his cigarettes. With his eyes closed, he prods his hand around searching for the bottle of whiskey to pour into his mouth. His mobile phone rings in his jeans pocket, and the door rattles loudly from whoever is knocking on it from outside.

   Whoever these people are, Greg doesn’t want to hear from them. They can fuck right off. Greg’s mother, with her racism; Greg’s brother, with his flagrant homophobia; Greg’s agent, with his hatred of disabled people; the executive producer, with his crystal meth addiction; Greg’s girlfriend, with her addiction to cocaine and starring in budget adult movies; Harold Janks, who only phones when he needs to borrow a large amount of money he never intends to pay back; Terrence Goldman, the journalist who spends more time committing fraud than he does writing; Kevin Kaplan, the billionaire heir who was cleared of killing that pedestrian he ran over last year purely because he could afford the best lawyer in town… whichever toxic fuck is calling his phone and knocking on his door, Greg doesn’t want to know them.

   Tomorrow, Greg is filming a scene where Zeph Manson tortures the film’s villain with a rusty corkscrew, before beating him to death with a hammer and eating his lungs with mashed potato as a side.

   But today, Greg Tourettes is sick to death of monsters. He’s sick to death of monsters not because he has spent nearly two decades making films about them, but because real monsters surround him every minute of every day.