Nathan was disappointed for a moment as the realisation sunk in that they had satirised the planet by killing. So much killing had saturated the planet through the media of television and movies and newspapers that Christianity had all but faded into a whimper. It was true the world had finished with a whimper and not a bang. The family of his own and the family of the planet…
They laughed together and sometimes they killed together. They laughed and perhaps shed tears over the killings which they kept hidden from Nathan in the closet along with their homo experiences and thoughts. Not that it mattered to Nathan, one homo experience could be much like another as far as he was concerned. Perfect.
His father had always gone on about the closet and how it existed but Nathan thought he knew better having come out earlier in his lifetime as bisexual, with little or no fanfare and change in his life, in his way of thinking and in his morals and scruples. Perhaps the way he masturbated had degenerated into rockmelons and pieces of steak … and boy queens ….Hell, you don’t want to know if you didn’t already but it was never to the point of a killing…There is a season… and Nathan couldn’t change that part of him during his Indian summer.
And now killing was a game, to be initiated into the club or closet of killing; a brotherhood, a sisterhood, a lemon-hood, a faggot-hood…. Conform of be cast out! Three times up the arse and you were a faggot on one hand, it was oh so technical. And so they actually killed and counted it on the fingers of one hand … Three on the other hand. Once is enough. Perhaps LOVE on the one hand counted their love of the same or different sex while HATE counted the same in the name of the number of kills they had achieved in a lifetime. Nathan was left handed and so it didn’t matter to him as he could not work out which hand the bikies actually used to put their tattoos, or the surfies, or the police, or the army, or whoever. And all that time he didn’t know why THEY were after him and hated him so. Or grew to hate him so… turn, turn, turn… the world forever off it axis and out of kilter. Death ruled in their minds and Nathan didn’t want to know the guilt.
His family of killers wanted him dead: not necessarily the mother who bore him all the time, but his father, two sisters, auntie, uncle, cousins and in particular his cousin’s husband and nemesis named Flip who had started the campaign of two years or so ago. The family plot however was well entrenched. Nathan didn’t realise the extent of the family plot until he simply put two and two together.
All for a fucking house!
Now the secrets of the world had all been revealed, or so it seemed and it didn’t matter in the slightest to Nathan. He now understood the haunted and frightened expressions on the faces of the quakers somewhere in Blackwood. Snapped two centuries earlier, they had fought all their lives to keep their property from gaslighters and greedy locals only to gift it to the state. Their gaslight was before liquid gas, before electricity, before a bump in the night couldn’t be ignored without thinking the whole world or a state of the nation seemed against you. Perhaps the nation, perhaps “zee vorld” to quote Adolf Hitler and Jerry Lewis. Were the quakers guilty too, or fair game as the Aussies would say?
Nathan found out about the gaslight family plot through nutty Auntie Pandora’s son in law who he had loved and respected just like he thought he could love and respect almost any human being on the planet. It was Flip and flip this guy over and he was not the calm karmic surfer he claimed to be, easy to have a drink with, so cool, calm and collected. Down to earth but a surf Nazi, complete faggot, well, not complete since he had fathered three sons, but three times and counting if you know the sort of, kind of, you know…thing. A complete psychopath and sociopath – gaslighter Royale. In reality, a killer who had strangled a friend while Nathan’s cousin Simone stuck needles in perverted lesbians necks at the hospital only to hold her hand over their face for good measure as other staff looked on. Flip learned his gaslighting tricks and others at the local prisons.
Suddenly the picture on the fridge of Nathan and his young cousins and his sisters in their teenage and childhood years was no longer sentimental and only the slogan Eat My Shorts on Nathan’s Simpson’s t-shirt bore any resemblance to reality.
Simone’s brother Manny had been retreating from her family in the suburb of Paradise and surrounded himself with Christian trappings to survive the perfect family and create another of his own. The word Spartacus saw him punched in the face once too often. For the surf Nazi nemesis Flip it meant a Red Planet visit to Nathan with his perfect body and a face like the Portrait of Dorian Gray for gaslight. Forever gaslight. For him Spartacus was no longer a by-word or a bi-word, it was pure faggot addiction as Nathan discovered but it was not Red Planet but the real world. If Nathan had a faggot addiction it was on Red Planet purely because no girl would touch him there and he found consolation in the Greek philosophy of educating teenage boy queens to take a cut cock and be free of the confines of the modern world where a cut cock was now increasingly hard to find. Thus Nathan must die under the aegis of the Fourth Reich in Flip’s overzealous mind. Prey on yellow star. Kill the lone jew boy who’s up himself.
It was a fluke that Nathan was still alive thanks to an almost cast-iron stomach and a fondness for potions such as Eno which saw him get up in the night several times like some crazed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to settle his stomach without choking on his own vomit.
This family of Auntie Pandora’s would gather to laugh together as if Nathan were not in the background to hear their laughter which in itself simply satirised their greedy caricatures of happiness, broken marriages times two: Auntie/Uncle and Simone/Flip, where happy families was the key to their success and greed was a key to the house and contentedness was measured sexually on Red Planet and in reality. Sated yet tortured, easily tortured, especially Flip. They were happy but just like Johnny Rocco of Key Largo they wanted more in this measurement of this happiness since on Nathan’s scale it really didn’t exist.
Speaking of the house at Moon City where Nathan stayed for short spells and where his parents lived, Flip had the key to the house. It was meant to be Nathan’s house once upon a time… Flip had got it from the network of gaslighters in Moon City; the tradesmen who couldn’t fix a television connection for shit (‘Oh, I’ve run out of them’) and the locksmith who couldn’t change a lock or secure your house to the specifications you required (‘It’s against fire regulations’). Not to mention the technician who lived next door who snipped the wire to the antenna at a cost of many hundreds of dollars and whose attitude it was to bleed Nathan’s father dry, not to mention Nathan of every penny he had. There were keys lying around for the gaslighter including previous ones from the real estate office and also one Nathan had left under the flower pot which any remote viewer could use at any time.
Nathan had faced gaslight all his life, even back in Queensland and knew they were in the neighbourhood of Moon City once more. In Moon City, he kept the two gas cylinders empty next to the kitchen and the gas turned off. This, all in case the pilot light of the oven or the hot water system got turned off and turned on again flooding the house with gas and killing the occupants. Nathan shut doors behind him and used the electrical system for the hot water as a safety measure. Thus is gaslight in its most lethal form and the name for it has become synonymous with a missing cigarette lighter swiped at a party and the gaslighter flicking the lighter in the background. Not to mention driving Ingrid Bergman insane in the movie of the same name which was the usual usage of the term.
Sadly Nathan wasn’t the only target of gaslight in terms of the coveting of the house and his two parents and his niece suffered a gas leak and near death experience. Three kills in one. But the gas was smelt by the niece Lucille and their lives saved. It was as if the family had met some tragic end, that broken family of Nathan’s shattered by conservatism and greed, broken by an unnecessary move from state to state once again. Sylvia Plath never had it so good by having the predatory Auntie Pandora’s family on Nathan’s case and theirs. Gaslight.
And while Nathan wrote his story, his latest nemesis Flip laughed and whispered like a child in Simone’s ear on Red Planet flicking his lighter as if Nathan were himself a child again and would worry paranoid-like about what they were possibly saying. Eavesdropping for another hurt furphy, as they tried to one-up yet again and again and again… turn, turn, turn… And Nathan remembered it was forever killing season on planet Earth… May its hell on Earth and contained within crash into the sun sending fireworks to be discovered by some civilisation more enlightened.
Nathan was hardly Einstein although the palm reader and astrology readers told him flatteringly he had a mind in the order of a raspberry being blown out of a lesbians arsehole. Pure genius. He had however worked out this much … already. Flip sadly coveted foreskin as a nut and dare I use the word ‘faggot’ again to the point of all consuming non-erotic madness. Which is perhaps beside the point. Nathan didn’t know how they identified with the word and how for boy queens it remained a coveted word. Flip was and continued to be an out of control gaslighter who saw the whole of Nathan’s family as expendable along with the rest of Auntie Pandora’s family… His family would triumph along with all the children of the sperm donations he made. He would party in their yard and celebrate this family…And Nathan repeated it in his head because he still had to get over himself for losing the house.
Nathan’s mother Ma Joad was caught up in a web of deceit and lies as the matriarch of her family expendable even in terms of divorce from her own husband, who would go so far as blackmail her to walk home five kilometres using his bank account and kaput mind as a tool of mental torture despite her ageing Jane Darwell appearance at eighty and after nearly sixty years of marriage.
So by pure chance Lucille had so far ended the ‘last’ attempt on Nathan’s family by Flip and Uncle Judd and ended for the time being Auntie Pandora’s dream of owning Nathan’s mother’s house and the sideboard her grandfather had built. Happy kibbutzers they all would be without Nathan in the picture. At first both families before Flip and his gay friends in the house of Ma Joad… Poor Ma Joad or was it Ma Baker with Lucille sleeping on Nathan’s bed that once belonged to him in Moon City and Ma was shocked that Flip sniffed and rolled and wanked and made love in that bed too, the same one that Gosseemtoo had used with Nathan. It was up to Nathan to continue to find out why and motive and idee fixe with gaslight were the only answers for greed and lust.
But what was the meaning of life? Yes, the root of all evil was the love of money and its trappings… the parties, the family, the children, the moments that would pass for life. The meaning was elusive… for Nathan. But he would realise it was within him all the time, dawning on him slowly again and again once he had realised the way of the world…elliptical as himself and the planet… turn, turn, turn.
Poor Auntie Pandora with her red wig, dreaming of the eradication of her sister’s family and the establishment of hers as a dynasty in Moon City, lock, stock and barrel…including that fucking dresser! Then there was Uncle Judd the ex-copper in his wheelchair with their stash of money safely tucked inside his brain along with all their bloody brains stuffed and pickled in an old preserves jar. Like pickled eggs, the brains were in the jar and all the knowledge could be digested like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. Such was the legend of Uncle Judd, who told him the tale of sucking eggs instead. Ma Joad and Nathan’s father were already pickled eggs. The nerve of Nathan was to make the premises a premise in terms of gaslight.
Nathan had known him for years as the renowned unbent copper of the family and Nathan respected him like a friend and listened to the gory and exciting stories of police life and had also heard of his florid nervous breakdown on the streets of suburban Adelaide after one six-pack too many.
“The car went past three times,” was the paranoid quote Nathan heard around the neighbourhood of a man crazed and wandering the streets psychotic and drunk, his Cathy missing from their city estate. Thus the so-called real man was vulnerable, this mastermind and financial wizard who learned just like Flip the tricks of the financial trade through the criminals and bent coppers he associated with on their way to prison. Their star friendship perhaps remained.
Anyway, Nathan would soon find the thin blue line didn’t exist anymore within Judd and if it didn’t exist it could be bent like anyone else. Is a wavy line curved or bent? A retired copper could became more bent in his mind to the point where it drove him crazy. Judd’s reminded Nathan of the old man in Faster Pussycat Kill Kill. And for some reason Nathan liked his generosity to impart wisdom as well as letting him put heart monitors on his sweaty hairy chest for some oddl and homoerotic reason. As for his creepiness with his niece’s young friends as he worked out to rap music… Let’s not go there!
He would turn out to be the ringleader among ringleaders in the Moon City gaslight plot. The brains among the happy family of upwardly mobile middle class killers who forgot where they had come from and were not really concerned about where they were going to.
Apart from the gaslit water-heater, the bathroom was also the scene of one of the most amazing crimes in Nathan’s life, well at least in Flip’s mind of three naked perfecto boys leaving wet towels in a row in the bathtub. Nathan found it more annoying rather than erotic in the same way James Stewart chased Kim Novak off the bell tower to her death in Vertigo as one bold step too many gave her conspiracy away. All the conspirators were linked since Flip had the audacity to take his boys there. It had possibly been meant to be homoerotic and funny. But the eldest boy under sworn testimony said the towels had been put there by his father. This innocent soul has since been put into the protective custody of Uncle Judd’s closet of pickled minds and not the police lest he turn into the gaslighter he possibly is himself. He went on to become the ne’er do well he always wanted to be. Just like the world needed.
“Thus Nathan must die!,” said Uncle Judd, with his own service revolver if need be, as it would settle everything in terms of the family getting the home where those final years could be spent in peace among the blossoms of the nectarine tree the roses disappearing from Auntie Pandora’s cheeks as she broke her hip reaching for an orange which was just out of reach just like Nathan’s dream of once fucking living there!
Nathan now realised on this level why he was an outsider and it was only half of the story. Not only was his killing tally zero as far as he knew but he was a zero with the rest of his so called immediate family too. Ma Joad… no wonder she felt like a tacky arsehole. That bright and wonderful planet Earth, not Forbidden Planet but a similar one, where the people had given up on the idea of peace for their idea of freedom, where to tally a killing each and enough money could guarantee you a life of acceptance and perhaps lushery if not luxury, especially if you couldn’t face the fact guilt remained a key part of the closet and closed minds.
If they were not closed minds they were kaput. Nathan had to be kaput on three levels in terms of the world hit-list; sexually, intellectually and physically. Sadly his heart was still beating regularly, his blood pressure was fine even thought he forgot to take his heart tablets every now and then. A female voice in his head was whispering: “You’re kaput” blown into his ear from some latent lesbian who wished to erase any of Nathan’s grace under pressure. Nathan could still come up with the most amazing thoughts while his penis still spilt serious amounts of semen for a man who was entering the dark passage into death. And he had experienced death and the rapture in one week. Black with no sound, no thought and no light. It was nothing. Death was nothing. A moment to enter and fortunately for Nathan a moment to depart again. The scary thing for Nathan was could a person live with themselves in death? It’s a premise no-one can answer. This was the place where Flip and his cohorts hoped to put Nathan this last year or so…. Kaput. Death was incidental.
Was there any more damning clues or revelations to be uncovered? There was the sand on the lounge suite where Nathan imagined Flip’s kids had been watching television and tellingly the fireplace had been used after Nathan had filled it with newspaper and wood. Nathan wasn’t that daft. Flip had been so confident it was his house and would be until the day he died dynasty and all… The house and the reunions. Clits-mess and peace on Earth.
Even Lucille wanted Nathan dead and the house to herself as she also had one kill under her belt. Her next step would be to turn Nathan into a faggot and let nature take its course. She had offered an eight inch prick on Red Planet and now she offered to paint Nathan’s nails like he were a queen. This was a silly and spoilt little girl at work in league with the other family. Ma Joad’s family… He would spare Ma Joad, but his father would have to wait.
“Would you like your nails painted?,” Lucille asked.
I’d prefer to get blue eye shadow painted on my eyelids like Agnetha in Abba and dance to Dancing Queen, thought Nathan, who found Frida better in bed in one wet dream.
“No thanks,” said Nathan and puffed on his tenth packet of cigarettes.
The characters drawn and defined in their guilty essence would have to stew in their guilty essence and there they must stew like Auntie Pandora’s much dreamed apricots and nectarines that Nathan had hoped to enjoy once upon a time. It was Nathan’s house once upon a time… remember?
And meanwhile Nathan had awoken psychically to the evil in Moon City, the gaslighters had inadvertently created a monster according to some… A Tommy-like coma from the age of ten for some reason after he went deaf dumb and blind to Red Planet after an argument with his father. If he was ever on it at all. He woke to find himself innocent with no kills and one arse fuck into a world of greedy Ann Margrets and Oliver Reeds and where he had been framed as Wicked Uncle Ernie. Nathan that dirty, scummy, smelly, fat, ugly, faggot, queen, arsehole, cunt… Every name under the sun he had been called and yet he still felt something about him was good and that the world was still a possibility. Could good triumph over evil and Karen Carpenter come back to Earth on some interplanetary craft when the aliens decided not to avoid the place…
Ma Joad and Nathan’s father, his two sisters… The gaslight plot against Nathan had gone on for two years both in his early understanding of Red Planet and in reality. Back many, many years to his father’s cleaning out of his so-called closet and his sister and her husband the rugby player and their greed in terms of the property Nathan occupied in Queensland. Nathan seemed to attract all sorts of people on this planet, and now it saddened him to find it was his immediate family too. Do souls choose to be loved by their family?
His family had killed as well, they all had killed… Was there any chance of hidden Quakers amidst all the horror of Red Planet and the real world. Did children have any hope? Or would they have to surrender themselves to its underbelly. Kill, kill, kill…
Nathan had survived several attempts by vomit attacks both on Red Planet and Planet Earth in concert in Queensland where a bump in the night would see an upset stomach turn into choked upon vomit. Where possibly there were those warlocks and witches who could induce vomit attacks from a distance like a pregnant woman feels ill in the presence of another person. The missing pieces once linked had been all so fucking unbelievable in terms of the natural beauty of the world… But Nathan knew that waking up with a mouthful of Weetbix vomit in his mouth meant somebody up there liked him for some reason while somebody down here certainly did not. Gut rot almost killed Nathan along with his theories of Scanners and Suspiria. Too many horror movies were making him start to imagine things. The second brother in law had nothing to do with the plot to take his apartment, did he?
Nathan’s life had been ruined by a dick pic!
Somewhere along the way after that dick pic he chose to sell up and move to Moon City with the blessing of his scheming father and sister and brother in law.
And with the family plot half in motion with this move interstate and ready to be executed finally in Moon City, a man and what passed for his family was destroyed in Nathan’s mind.
Yes, a dick pic was all it took for Geddy Lee’s so called garden of respect to crumble as Nathan was enjoying unmasking his sister and her husband’s greed and want for an extra kill. Perhaps Nathan was bipolar and got carried away and sent a picture of his dick happily to his 20 year old nephew. Sadly, it was taken by Nathan and not a very funny nor attractive one. In fact, it was a revolting cock, horribly revolting and not perfecto at all, which his nephew was, since Nathan had observed since he was a child. Something Nathan’s father had left him for as well, killing Nathan on Red Planet instead. Coveting a perfecto cock. Anyway, this led to his would be rapper nephew Hero Dogg-Dogg to be a typical boy queen narcissist unrealised. Perhaps he should have sent him a perfecto. The cock was scorned like a woman and Nathan’s sister and husband who learned of the photo immediately, eventually called the cops and through their neighbourhood family plots of greed for Nathan’s apartment… they hoped to sell it at the cheapest price to themselves through crooked real estate agent hangers. The whole neighbourhood laughed or were stunned in the meantime as they watched Nathan get picked up by four policeman and whisked off to borstal for four months in the clutches of Doctor whatever her name was . All over a fucking dick pic…. Not to mention a swastika and red wine but that’s another story. Nathan told the story in a whirlwind, but he rode that whirlwind and whether he was sane or not, it was still reality.
It only destroyed Nathan’s health as his father’s mind got in on the plot as well to the point where he wanted Nathan put in hospital forever to die. Nag, nag, nag… Twenty years erased from a lifetime and grey hair and white beard… Should I mention his arsehole was still more or less intact except for perhaps the va fangulo of legend as a baby or young child. Fuck you, cut cunt! I prefer Dogg-Dogg now and I no longer love you. I don’t even like you. Such was dad. Gaslighter extraordinaire also. Key player in the plot, keeper of the key to the house. Watcher at the door Nathan couldn’t close that night at Moon City to masturbate with his boy queens on Red Planet. Except for the old man … It could have been a happy ending. Lucille would get it all.
Nathan’s sister laughed from so deep within the closet with their father, the family could no longer talk straight to Nathan. They hadn’t spoken straight in years. Pruding themselves when it was not necessary. They now joked and conspired while Ma Joad tried to keep her cool only to lash out angrily at every chance a conversation was possible with Nathan. She lost her mind somewhere along June’s Journey after telling Nathan he was nothing several times over a lifetime.
Nathan heard the voices on Red Planet, Nathan knew the plot for the apartment in Queensland went further than just his opportunist sister and brother in law and enjoyed the night of uncovering the last of the family plot and the world’s obsession with killing by his latest bout of masturbation. He had found yet another boy queen who wanted to be deflowered on Red Planet by Nathan’s cut cock, if only it was just a novelty. The two of them pulled their foreskins together in the dark in reality at separate addresses as if they were in beds that were side by side like two ghostly teenagers staring at each other’s faces momentarily to talk trash and their cocks. Then they dreamed of erotic fucking on another level of Red Planet. It was there for a moment that all four of them could come at once… two in bed separately and two conjoined at the arsehole. For a feverish moment they pulled and pulled… and fucked and fucked It wasn’t necessarily going to be ground shaking or anything but fuck it was good while it lasted. Fucking on Red Planet cut boy and uncut boy with cut boy and uncut boy jerking off in reality as well. It was another race to the finish line… The boy queen and Nathan were in heaven for that moment, the briefest of moments but then it faded just before the boy queen could come. Perhaps they came on Red Planet … It was gone and the orgasm fell short… gone forever. And the curtain fell.
And as for the three towels in the bathroom? Nathan thought of Judy again and the necklace in Vertigo that Alfred Hitchcock movie with that little bit of evidence too far… and Red Planet faded away back into the family plot which lay heavy around the old house and then it was though a spell had been cast and they could no longer imagine their fucking as the two of them eventually rolled over to sleep or the boy queen went on to other conquests… into the night. Nathan fell asleep looking forward to another tomorrow of cigarettes, wine and bad songs when quiet moments were as elusive as the perfect orgasm and as elusive as the perfect crime. Look at this it’s perfect, he imagined Uncle Judd’s colleagues say as they turned up the latest suicide. And Nathan saw Uncle Judd weep over Nathan, real tears as he knew the respect would never be as innocent or the same again. He knew he would never see him again in the same way.
That night Nathan dreamed of his cousin Simone with her needle plunged into his neck while he slept. A puncture with air done oh so very delicately once again forcing bubbles into the bloodstream, or one bubble as he learned somewhere along the way. Nathan had cancer so it didn’t matter to Nathan in this dream. It was all over, the dream was over, the secrets of the world seemed to have been solved. He was ready to go into the ether… for no reason but his own and it still would be on his and not on their terms. Even if they forgot him which they would in their shallow lives… Simone stared into Flip’s eyes as Nathan fell into convulsions and passed away with her hand across Nathan’s mouth for that last gesture of: Don’t speak, don’t speak. And she would count the seconds until he passed away. But really she did speak that line from Scanners as the family had committed the perfect crime… Nathan dead.
“We’ve won… we’ve won,” said Simone, such was the family’s scorn of Nathan. Finally, but for that final spit on his grave.
And the score for Nathan. One up the arse and no kills. For Nathan the meaning of life was won. It was one.
Cult Film Alley 