Body double

... Why?
Simply because I know that there are lots of little nonsensical things in me brain that are unexplainable -even for myself-, things that surely are unappealing and puzzling and annoying, if not downright disgusting, that's why.

Therefore I don't expect anybody to understand me, not even to stand me, my mind doesn't work... well.

Why somebody should like or understand someone with an abnormal mind? A mind built in manias which deforms the reality, why?
It's a sad condition, my condition, it's the condition of a mentally ill individual... for example I feel a weird attraction for magnetic recordings, really, either audiocassette or VHS -also Betamax and 8 track cartridges, why not-.
I think there's something alive in the tape, something closer to the skin and to the heartbeat that's drastically absent in the elevated, hard and flat perfection of any digital recording.

You may say that also a vinyl combines something of this je ne sais quoi, due to its analog condition... but no. Not really.
Not at all

it's the tape, only the magnetic abyss of the tape and its omnipresent, raw and surd hiss which possesses this life, and nothing else can substitute that.

Because there's something in the tape whose imperfect and soft simplicity it's still an unexplained intríngulis to me (see that I'm not reasonable? Ha ha! See?)... Because there's something in the tape related to the cerebral cortex, to the sexual desire, to the coagulation of blood and to the nervous system.
Something related to the sleep, to the respiration and to the dream.
And precisely the hiss, it's the oxygen in which all that life contained in the tape develops itself and takes place, its ubiquitous background, its atmosphere, its physical universe.

No, I'm not normal... but I'm not insane... of course I'm not insane, insanity is... something else

insanity is... one step beyond.

One enormous, almost infinite step... into the beyond
insanity is the definitive loss of control, as if the mind would crash in 1000 little pieces and... I still hold complete control, and I still know too well who I am and what I do and... in fact I'm -as you already noted it- quite a nice, pleasing and agreeable guy so, while you eat your salad, and I drink this large and spumous cup of coffee, let me tell you something that happened, not long time ago, in a suburb of that enormous spider-city called Los Angeles.













Pat Bale lived in Inglewood, LA (W Magnolia Avenue Nº 7..), in a cute prefabricated house of wood that he used to call his cottage (although it was not a cottage, just an average wooden house for Californian lowlife of suburbia).

Unemployed couchpotato, Bale used to spend his nights home-taping movies from the TV

slightly odd -or maybe not that odd- stylistic combination of movies that could be interesting for him, for diverse reasons
for example "Basic Instinct", "Body Double" (he liked to masturbate to these movies), "Robocop", "In the Cold of the Night", the "Conan the Barbarian" and "Terminator" sagas, "Body of Evidence", "Last Call", "Body Chemistry II: Voice of a Stranger" or "The Golden Touch", to name a few, films that kept him hypnotized in front of the screen for long hours, every day.

What there was in that screen, that fascinated Pat Bale to the point of losing perception of the outside world?
What secret there was there that absorbed him that way?

His sister, Mars Bale -a stripper, call girl and, eventually, prostitute at the burlesque "El Pozo Voluptuoso" of Pasadena-, she visited Bale periodically, generally to bring him canned food, and to see her petcat, Anal (she left Anal with her brother because her diminutive flat in Burbank was too small for an animal, and besides she used to take her clients to her apartment to fuck and some disliked the presence of animals in the place).


The day 9 of July of 1999, in the morning, Pat Bale was found dead by his sister

he was naked and seated on a brown chair, in front of the TV, with a leather belt around his neck
on the chair and the floor there were stains of dry semen.
The TV, connected to the video cassette recorder, showed on the screen a blue and sad memory image.




As I try to narrate, ordering these appalling facts in my mind, the coffee stayed untouched in the cup... it's cold already, sorry, I go to the kitchen and come back in a moment.





































Here I am back, sorry... just tried to pour some fresh and hot coffee in the cup but my hands are clumsy as fuck and spilled it all over the floor, so I had to clean everything and serve again.

Now I forgot what I was saying.

Oh, yes... well, immediately after the gruesome find Mars Bale reported it to the police.
The coroner confirmed the decease of Pat Bale by autoerotic asphyxia, which was an obvious fact at first sight.

Bale was cremated, and his ashes were deposited in a blue urn, which stayed on a shelf of the wooden house, by request of Mars Bale, only relative, as their parents died in a tragic car accident in 1991 near to Cedar Rapids.

Mars Bale was consternated

she


decided to have some vacation from "El Pozo Voluptuoso" and move to the wooden house for some time
any time, an unspecified amount of time, got me?

A whatsoever of a time.

The time of a lifetime or the time of a month time.

And in the still of the night, in bed, she noted cars passing by the street
in the still of her nights in bed at the wooden house of Patrick Bale which was hers now
cars rolling by and by with the soft, nervous and neverending distress of certain things that are heard but are not seen


on the wooden wall of the room, a portrait of Pat Bale smiled from times of University, the youth

on the blanket, over her little feet of parochial sex doll, Anal pretended to sleep purring as if its heart was about to emerge out of its mouth

and the VHS's observed all this contradictory theater from the shelves, beside the urn of the ashes
because the destiny likes to join the domestic and the pathetic with the unexpected some many times

and I observed from behind the wall of her sleep.












Despite her logical pain after a death in the family, the mornings were gentle, pleasant and relatively enjoyable for Mars Bale, as the days passed she started feeling more alleviated fortunately:
she walked naked through the house like a pornette in permanent vacation
on the radio cassette recorder a copy of Mötley Crüe's "Too Fast for Love" sounded constantly, which may come like an odd fact, perhaps, unless you understand the mind of an Angeline

but "Merry-Go-Round" was the song that emotioned her, for some reason, and every time it sounded, she repressed the tears, and stopped her matinal activity momentarily, staying with her stare lost in the air, until the song ended, then she recovered her former vivacity and enthusiasm

and sang along, and prepared pancakes, and poured honey on them, and tasted it, and pushed with that black coffee without sugar that the Americans like to drink
and then went to the bakery
one block away
and returned
and tasted some pancake again
and remembered the fruit and vegetables lacking in the fridge
and walked to the greengrocer's
not too far
and here and there on the sunny street some guy looked at her in the way how the guys look at the girls on the street some many times
and she made very subtle but categorical gestures showing how much she disliked him
and she passed by the grocery by the way
and returned
and fed Anal
and...

why some people get hysterically active in the mornings?

They are like birds, human sparrows

why do I get hysterically lively when the night is tall and profound?
This is why I like cats, they really live in the night... every now and again the Mormons rang the bell, she attended them with impatient affability

-"No... thanks anyway... no, erm, yes, my mother was Cathol...
I'm not... ok, thank you anyway... no thanks, yes thanks...
just that I... um... years ago, I think?
I'm not really into relig... yes but... thank you anyway, bye... "

She closed the door and left the leaflet on the table.


Despite she was used to cope with sexual perverts, being the sister of a pervert who died because of his own vice was not a nice feeling, and the feeling included a tenuous and indescribable sensation of dirtiness, which maybe was not only related to Pat Bale, but to the whole house, and more specifically to the TV set, the videocassette recorder and the home-taped movies on VHS stored on the shelves of the room.

But this nebulous feeling of sordid naughtiness was also tied to an increasing curiosity
an interest for those tenebrous VHS's piled there, among which there wasn't any porno, just some banal action or sci-fi movies, plus a considerable amount of erotic thrillers, some of them pretty well-known, and many others quite inglorious and obscurely unmapped.


Mars Bale served a large glass of orange juice, 70% natural, and took a look at the sordid vidéothèque

the first title -at random- that caught her eye was "Eve's Beach Fantasy", written with a BIC on the spine of a TDK HS 120, video-taped by Bale -same as most of his collection- from a local TV channel without broadcast license that aired soft adult movies after midnight.

Mars Bale sipped from the glass and introduced the VHS in the VCR, pressed play, and seated on a small, brown and tatty sofa (the first thing she did after the death of her brother was trashing the chair on which he died. She couldn't stand the presence of that... sordid piece of furniture in the house)

the first scenes of the movie and the titles appeared on the screen:

"A Henri Lumiere Film... "

Some of the first images showed a buxom, tanned and blonde girl in hot white lace -a typical female of erotic Californian imagery-... a close-up showed the hands of a guy caressing her round buttocks, the scene was backed by lame instrumental music... the lover guy took her white brassiere off slowly and handled her full-bosomed boobs.
Mars Bale felt a sudden mixed sensation: a sort of pity for her dead brother combined with a weird sexual arousal that she deemed ridiculous, and tried to repress ignoring it and smiling alone in that room

laid on the bed, actually on the pillow, purring almost imperceptibly, with the shameless felicity of the feline laziness, Anal reposed awake with its eyes closed, alien to the complex human mental puzzles

"Starring April Adams"

"With Brendan Claybourn"


Mars Bale sipped some more juice and kept watching without knowing really why... and how crazy is that, in life, some things we do without knowing really why, turn out to be the best things.

Or at least some of the most outlandishly and excitingly memorable things... we did.

But this movie was not precisely memorable... the plot was mediocre, the rhythm was pachydermic, the performances of the actors were cliched and lame... as the film goes on, the plot narrates the story of a bimbo-exuberant, Valley Girl-student (the one of the hot white lace of the beginning), who moves to a flat near a beach.
Her new neighbors are a lascivious couple who fuck anywhere... the movie is, in part, developed as a concatenation of wet dreams of this blonde bimbo girl, she sees the couple fucking several times, she spies them, she is aroused and frustrated at the same time, and she realizes they are teasing her voyeurism, and inciting her to join them in a threesome.


In front of the ovoid screen, Mars Bale feels the arousal coming back, robust, without smiles this time, a solid and insitent turn on that starts invading her pelvis, her sweetest... she slides the zipper of her Levi's and starts fingering her vaginal flesh

she feels nasty and absurd, she can't believe what she's doing, but she can't help her:
she stretches her legs on the sofa and takes her jean off, sliding down the thong
the clitoris gets a massive erection in the act, and it's insane the fact, but she senses something very strange... few times she felt so much wild and intense pleasure masturbating as she is feeling in that right moment

her tongue gets twisted while her centre is possessed by a hell of ascending muscular and nervous delight, she couldn't stop now... and she doesn't want to stop either:
an electric spiral of spasms makes her cum, the afternoon gets crowned by her screams. It's 4:45 PM.


The next day found Mars Bale in front of another video-taped piece of un-art, and the next day too, and the next, and soon she acquired the taste and, finally, enjoyed her afternoons, and the watch always found Mars Bale masturbating at those movies

and the more lame the plot was, and the worse the actors acted
the hotter was her turn on, and the hornier was her calentura

and the more improper and wrong she felt in her act, the more ardent and unstoppable her act was... as if the scenes played on the videotape gained progressively a more and more incarnate and actual reality in the eyes and the cerebrum of Mars Bale

as if the fictitious nature of the cinema turned slowly into the factual and palpable physicality in situ

day by day, more solid, more material, as if Mars Bale could feel cutaneous contact with the characters of the videos, tactile sensation

smell, breath, muscular contraction, temperature, texture

unbearably present
sexual, animal

skin.
































The day 9 of November of 1999, in the morning, Mars Bale was seated naked on her sofa of inexplicable pleasures
in front of the TV, with a leather belt around her neck
beside the shelf with the ashes, with her inert fingers in her vagina.

The TV, connected to the video cassette recorder, showed on the screen a blue and sad memory image.