MTV Impressionism – Marc Labelle
May 23, 2019
ORLÉANS, ON. October 31, 2019—Night falls carelessly from designer peach nude gallows like a suicidal high school cheerleader on shrooms swinging night moves over erogenous XXL cesspools of botched teenage mutations or appears to. Urgent fingers blurry and unfamiliar as if seen through someone else’s tears wipe the warm white ooze of flesh withdrawal from off a cracked phone with this icky cum rag of a page. The screen is trash. It looks like some kinda freaky Mayan shit etched in translucent stained glass by a hand that is no longer a hand after an atomic blast or something. Silent quivering outlines melt into factory fresh protoplasm of present time.
It’s late and the sky’s an illuminated sleeve tattoo of the Virgin Marysia as Lieutenant Commander of the Sea Org in a rave outfit rowing merrily merrily merrily above the effects of the flesh-eating virus. It might rain and I’ve been crying and drinking pretty much for two days straight but at least that’s the right mood for this.
Halloween falls on a school night this year and every cool kid is blasted on chemical treats. Earlier today Spandex posted a picture on her Instagram showing the teachers handing out free pacifiers and homemade rainbow cereal bars at lunch with the caption: “Ms. Cooper wore a Balenciaga choker in class today. Cringe lol. She taught us all about these magic circles we can draw in our bedrooms and the risks of ‘putting out’ just because the slimy abominations we conjure bring us garbage pails full of free weed. She said if The Exorcist happened today Pazuzu would totally get #metooed. Legit. Demons can be such dicksssssss. Remember that time I fucked with Gregg’s crystals and my so-called life turned into something straight outta Child’s Play? Gross me out. #safesexmagick #demonsemenseason #JordanCatalano.”
Minutes later after biting into some ecstasy she Tweeted: “YO would I look hella cute in a bleached mushroom cut with purple pink bangs, or am I tripping?”
Spandex is the class of ’23’s token emotionally unavailable hedonist sexpot. She was named “girl most likely to be interrupted.” Will swap fluids for depressed housewife drugs. After graduation she plans to travel Europe and seduce the future of electronic dance music.
“Less clothes, more acid parties.” Fleshed in drugstore pure girl substance and what that means she ambushes boys and leaves them feeling destroyed. Young sexual cruelty drifts from her open mouth like the filthy ectoplasm of some other species’ idea of the afterlife. She pulls in and out of wet spots on waves of silent authority, twisting in spasms of human sacrifice, dissolving in sugary sweetness. “Je suis wet pour le DJ.” Score cross-fades to gorgeous Chloé Voracious’s remix of “Connected” by Stereo MC’s, “Natalie Connected”. Unexplained voices dissolve in spurts of vibrating green orange jelly that hum the visible bio image line. “I’m creaming.” She mutates.
Spandex is a walking Kirlian photograph covered with spider webs.
The set is a glitchy candy-coloured hologram ruined by this residual, still kinda gooey smear of guy germs running down the dividing line. Gag me to the max. Now picture an anatomically correct autopsy collage done by a popular ninth grader, but the wounds and incisions are Skittles and gummy worms lightly frosted with Fruity Pebbles, and you will get an approximation of this space we seem to have entered and how every inch of it is mutilated and oozy. There is this dreamy almost forbidden sense of sexual confusion here that glistens the way things do under a locker room shower after gym class. But slowly and not so reluctantly that feeling disappears in a dark, diffuse cloud of ink and the set begins to take shape, customized to standard for bipolar hearts. Watch it strut right up to the spotlight all done up in blue blue electric blue, that’s the colour of this teenage bedroom borrowed from an ’80s slasher film starring guys I want.
Faraway blue sound effects of kids screaming for their lives as if they have the thing inside them. Above, 666 UFOs cross a psychotropic sky swept by rancid urinal winds sputtering fireworks of melted teenage flesh all over a house like any other. Residual pigments green with the poison slip in through cracked venetians like DMT stirred into the prom punch bowl by a thin boy encrusted with the adolescent structure and eat the darkness alive with evil, infected pixels from outer space. The better to see this lithe, out-of-focus teenage creature drift abstractly through the room like a teasing, consensual presence—the smoky spectral blemish confronting my pretty dark fantasies and the confusing frustrations they house. I blink and blink and blink blink blink to refine this nebulous mass out of the mess of amphibious mutilations and into a real live boy. All for us in this hush, it’s okay secret private operation. Presently a sluggish elastic sea-green film arches back from my corneas and uncurls, trailing strands of viscid gurgling jelly. And just like that *poof* the film peels off thin as blotter acid.
There. I can now fully savour the boy I’ve just conjured. Doesn’t that make you feel better? This is like one of the most, you know, peak, I guess, life experiences I’ve ever had. Like I’m going to cry. His name is Anton. He’s pretty, right? Little bit pretty.
When the moon is at its full it turns into a glowstick the colour of steamy Gothic jungles calling all hormones to incite pubertal riots. What’s next is 100 manic Day-Glo maggots scatter across this page in horror, like the first time I slipped into someone else’s bed with no clothes on and opened fire.
(Long time between paragraphs reaches out with aging fibrous tentacles to touch soft quivering flesh.)
Fade-in at two incompatible speeds—Anton’s image crystalizes as a pretty raw casting couch Polaroid taken as he was moistening his lips and preparing to pucker for god knows what mutant. The words THE SURPRISING TRAUMA OF ANTON ABUSED streak across his chest like a frisky comet squirting pearls of expensive delight from consecutive orgasms all over his tasty silhouette. Slime play and gurgling sounds, that’s what life is all about. Then the words they fade like right now.
Cut to Anton eyeballing his reflection in the mirror. He is haunted in a fragile way. Like when he dreams his outlines blur and smudge, but sometimes he goes clear, tenuous and premature in the flesh deprivation tanks of repressed emotional memory some pundits call sleep. The feeling is not of this world. He says his astral body or whatever it’s called crosses soulless galaxies on the unseen currents of his raging libido. Says it’s like floating over vast Coachellas of infinite biological potential, moving in and out of grimy-ass pink crevices, back alleys, past Bratty’s house, twice. But here he is instead striking super nasty dangerous poses for no one. Him pouty. Him aloof. Him so fucking bored out of his mind he could slit his wrists.
Tomorrow night he and Zeno (a.k.a. Claire’s Knees, a.k.a. Lil SSSssssss, a.k.a. Kid Icarus—you gotta check out his NSFW full moon rituals on his Patreon and support your local abomination) will be filming the music video for their SoundCloud racket “Guilty by Gucci” down in swampland. They write about the shit they live, you know what I mean? They’ve been through a lot of very bad heavy evil shit for kids their age. People respect the fuck out of their honesty.
With vacant, almost well-behaved eyes, Anton turns his gaze to the window and sees his reflection spontaneously replicate where other horrible creatures emerge in blue twilight. Can people really spontaneously combust? He worries a lot about shit like that. It used to be he was scared of quicksand but quickly decided that was stupid kid stuff. He lives in Orléans and besides, there is something hot about being smothered to death in the mouth of a rotting cannibal planet. Really, like, there couldn’t be a more fitting end. Period.
It occurs to Anton that he’s the definition of jailbait flashing naked adolescent need, so he ups the ante by slowly tracing his very dangerous lips with his tongue like he’s seen girls do in so-called mature grown-up videos. Part of him hopes there’s someone out there right now watching this ultra-slimy forbidden peepshow he’s putting on for free. Boy galore. RED DIRTY BLUE GREEN light globes buzz Live*Nude*Boys. The spine tingles. Anton closes his eyes and dissolves into a naughty fantasy where a Christian Slater look-a-like circa Heathers beats off behind the safety of Anton’s mother’s rose bushes, edging closer and closer towards transcendental bliss and then … gushes sparks. Anton bites down on his lower lip and ouch feels drips. Sigh. He moves closer to the window until he is eye-to-eye with himself. He exhales a dab painted mess of offal colours infused with the essence of pepperoni pizza and Lucky Charms. His sweet but right now kinda scummy index draws a greasy sigil on the glass to emphasize god knows what soap operatic shit.
He lights a joint and obliterates coherence. Weed makes him feel vaguely semiconscious and super horny. Like someone should take advantage of him right now. So, he summons an elite internet slut and casts himself as the baby pink bubble gum she absently tongues. Like a star our girl commands him to spread against her lips. On three she will blow him to smithereens. One. It’s dazzling. Two. Shredded phantom winds light up green screaming SI SI SI SI. And th—.… Oh god, yes. He’s gonna … he’s gonna …
Fuck.
The fantasy is aborted, yanked out by the brutal, nagging drip-feed of self-hate. Sigh.
Last he looked it was 1:13 a.m. It is now 1:48 a.m. I hope 6 a.m. never comes—he says this out loud to himself like putting the thought out there into the world like in actual words, that it would like somehow I don’t know operate as a black magic spell that could alter the spazzy glitches that grope the fun-to-touch bits under reality’s slimy skin-tight fabric. Calling yourself a witch feels so gauche, unless that’s your full-time job. Other people decide that for you. It takes years. A lifetime. But at 15 Anton had already changed witchcraft the way lean had changed rap. I promise you.
The laptop transmits Lil Bo Weep’s “i wrote this song 4 u” for the sixteenth or whatever time in a row. Tranced-out merry melodies on repeat give it to Anton spicy. The screen radiates a sickly greenish purple glow that shows a picture of Tweety Bird splayed and torn to shreds in the gutter like a second-hand prophylactic partially eaten by incurable venereal diseases.
After he’s dead Anton would like to be remembered as the guy who believed in an infinite universe whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere.
It’s getting cold. Anton slips into a ratty Hellraiser hoodie that reeks of hormones and stares blankly at his face reflected in the cracked phone and decides he hates it, his face. He peels the freshest scab from his knee and wets his lips with pure uncut boy plasma to better invoke the ancient powers of a convincing leer. Pretty. Queen Leer with delicious neon sparks popping all around his crotch. He can feel the full moon energy. For a second he thinks of scouring his sister’s room for that sparkly strawberry lip gloss she’s always using as a lure to hook dumb jocks, and some eyeliner, maybe put his hair up in pigtails, a bra. His long, straight bleached hair falls over his face covering everything but his mouth as he takes another in a series of sulky, self-obsessed-in-an-obvious-way selfies. Pastel goth is what he’s going for, or says he is. No star. He seems about fifteen, sixteen. Kurt Cobain skinny. Vicious vacant eyes from an exquisite strain. Suddenly spectral glitches dismember the laptop’s sultry glow with the flickering claws of pestiferous viruses. See how they rise from the screen and sweep past Anton’s face in a dizzying sense-obliterating tornado of paranoid porno picssssss. Cue thunder and lightning. Cyberspace is haunted. Maybe he’s too stoned. He flashes a numb, knowing smile at fucked if I know, and searches YouTube for a different song. That awkward moment when you type in “rape me live” …
Ugh.
He shuts the laptop.
There’s a ton of real heavy shit going on Anton’s head right now and he’s sick and tired of being totally immobilized by anxiety. Like he’s just real bummed and nervous about everything, you know? Life’s heavy. His lips say fuck. He almost forgets to breathe, so he sparks another joint. Stale green taste fills his mouth. His body crackles and changes colour. Would kill for a Xan. Even just a half.
Anton yawns, splays in bed, and languidly flips through a library book on parapsychology. He’s just now starting to remember a sexy dream he had last night. They’re always kinda sexy. Even the sick ritualistic murder/suicide ones are erotically charged, but in a raunchy rom-com-directed-by-a-sadist sort of way. Imagine a mashup of Gilmore Girls and Irreversible. So, in this one, Zeno had the starring role of Brando in Ultimo Tango. But the plot was messed up and dubbed by a psycho bitch named Charlie Monroe. Is she still fifteen? Feels like she’s been fifteen for eighty years. Didn’t Billie Eilish say that? Oh well, whatever, never mind. This dream was about a prophetic book Zeno had written under demonic hypnosis that foretells the rapture and exposes dangerous truths. The book would later become a cult classic. A bona fide Bible in some queer esoteric circles. There’s a scene towards the end where Maria Schneider is reading it in the tub. She’s in an active trance state and there are like 100 of these nasty mucoid toads in there with her, just flopping around between her tits, croaking and belching and shit. It’s repugnant. Like super gross. Then, she blows out this cloud of pure violet smoke and says, looking straight into the camera, “I smoke it, I suck it.” Her tongue’s a snail full of hairy spotted warts, and she says, “Imma make our triple platinum love come si dice go viral.” I think she likes me. But anyway, Zeno’s picture was on the back cover of this book and there was just uh something a little, you know, off about the shape and size of his head. Like, were those lime green XXX stitches across his eyes I saw? Snakes. He remembers snakes. And rotten green skulls floating in an iridescent lagoon under a warped Loony Toon sky black as Venusian midnight. Bratty Ex’s lush bust breaks through this murky mush like a life-size anatomy aid for cleavage and Anton decides he now has a hardcore crush on her. He imagines her and her bff Spandex skinny dipping in the lagoon under a colour-corrected moon, secretly synchronizing these wild acrobatic contortions through his swirling pipes of milky white pee, exquisitely blissed-out and trancy. When Bratty and Spandex hug they squeeze tightly almost melding together and bounce around and jiggle. And they’re always hugging. Maybe Bratty winks at Anton. Her eyes say, “Get a face tat, then we’ll talk.” But her lips say, “I totally think of you when his dick’s in me.”
Bzzz goes his phone. Its intense jittery spasms uselessly beam flashes of aseptic light against the ceiling like a pathetic Ouija signal asking the silent question: u up?
It’s Zeno. Again.
Anton breathes out vapours of blue longing and digs his fingers into his eyes, picturing rapturous wet things pop girly flavours all over his concept of reality. He reluctantly lifts the phone to his face and assumes form.
“Hey.”
“Hhhhi.” Zeno’s got a mouth full of gum. You can hear it wet squishy pink. He’s obviously stoned. He always sounds so erotically paranormal when he’s stoned. Like he’s traversed to the other side and only exists in the algorithms of a cellular network.
“What do you want? It’s late.”
“What are you dressed as?”
“None of your beeswax.” Anton pictures Zeno in a Beetlejuice costume with these heavy splotches of Estée Lauder concealer and foundation applied to every single ameboid comprising the 120 purple heart-shaped hickeys constricting his neck like he’s just come back from a one-night-stand with the Hillside Strangler. Anton smiles at the thought of sore lips. “And, besides, why don’t you just text me like a normal human?”
“I bet you a tablet of drugstore pure Dilaudid I can guess.”
“Ugh …”
“Alright, then how ’bout you show me the merchandise?”
“The what?”
“You know, a dick pic.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Please, just … listen.” Zeno clears his throat like he’s a fucking academic orator about to deliver a TEDx Talk. There’s an abnormal intensity in his voice. He’s electric. He’s pure saint. God, I could just listen to him for hours. “‘Anton slips into a ratty Hellraiser hoodie that reeks of hormones and stares blankly at his face reflected in the cracked phone and decides he hates it, his face.’”
“…”
“‘For a second he thinks of scouring his sister’s room for that sparkly strawberry lip gloss—’”
“Fuck me.”
“Yeah? Can I?”
“You wish.”
“Shall I go on?”
“What in the actual shit, Zeno?” Anton scans the room, remembering the time Zeno had secretly hidden a live webcam under a pile of dirty clothes and had it aimed at his bed. He filled in the blank with a fuller number which produced conflicting emotions in Zeno.
“I think I’m possessed by Pazuzu.”
“No way. Everyone knows he’s only into little girls.”
“Then I’m the fucking reincarnation of Nostradamus. Listen. Shit … Fuck.” Like a burnout Zeno drops his phone in his lap and this singular event startles him very profoundly for some reason. He is whipped to his core for like a split second, but at the time it felt to him more like eternity unfolding for the last time in history or some stupid existentialist bullshit routine like that. It almost gave him a stroke and a new, healthier outlook on life. But he’s already forgotten all about that by now. He just jumps right back into waxing demonic. “Sorry. Jesus. I’m tripping. What was I just saying? Oh, right. So, like this afternoon I drew magic circles under my bed and tried to call him, you know, Pazuzu, to ask for some uh favours. Like I want this boy I saw last Saturday at Medusa’s, right? Spitting fucking image of Jamie Stewart. If it had been anybody but Jamie Stewart, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed him. But you know how Xiu Xiu gives me hardcore feels. And now I’m like actually clinically obsessed with this kid, right?”
“Are you talking about Kyle?”
“Who?”
“You know, Kyle, that ultra slutty S&M poser that’s in this stupid suicide sex pact with Gregg. Loves, and I mean l-o-v-e-s loves to be choked out while doing it.”
“Yeah, whatever. I don’t—”
“I think he’s in a thrill kill cult and gets stupid in the dark with dangerous men dressed in leather. He’s all over Pornhub. Just type in ‘slutty suicidal goth teen ga—’”
“Damnit, Ant. Just shut your fucking face hole and listen to me, okay? Jesus … So, like after I call out to Pazuzu and shit, like two minutes later maybe I *poof* black out for like five, six hours and I come to just after midnight and things are, you know, different. Like my computer’s on and there’s an entire XXX satanic novel typed up on the screen for all to see. And I’m kinda really freaked out right now ’cause like the whole novel is all about you. Some pretty fucking dark shit, like that time you woke up half naked and bleeding in the woods. And other parts I don’t even think happened yet, like the more I read, the more future leaks out. It’s sick. And like, I’m in it, too, so’s a gang of us, but I don’t even remember writing any of it. Yo, I swear. I fucking promise you.”
“What happens in it?”
“I didn’t read it all yet. Just tell me I’m not crazy.”
“Read me the last paragraph.”
“Right, okay. Hold on … Okay, here: ‘Now by the time we found Anton he was partially eaten. What’s next is a pack of bloodthirsty Sade Boys pulled up in a black Chrysler LeBaron and Le Corpse Peach jumped in with them. Like Bonnie and her Seven Clydes they rode off into the dreamy neon haze of a vintage L.A. sunset going nowhere fast.’”
“Le what? Did you say Peach? Like the fruit?”
“Le. Corpse. Peach.”
“What kind of fucked up name is that?”
Forbidden photos surface behind Anton’s eyes like poisonous sea snakes in gelid crystal water. Now here’s one of Sister Ray when he was no more than just this cute little mutilated glam boy from the boonies being cruised by huge velvet swamp things in furs. That was before the quote “episodes”. You remember, it all started that night when he uh spun her head completely—never mind. Never mind.
Zeno pops a bubble. “Hey? You still there?”
“Yeah, just feeling a little … aloof.”
“I just got a text from Pop Rocks. He’s on his way to Spandex’s. Says her parents are out for the night and shit. Bratty’s there. You wanna come?”
“What does your … you know, novel or whatever say will happen if I do?”
Zeno laughs, but the sound is modulated. Presently the phone signal cuts in and out like a scrambled frequency. It’s eerie. Zeno’s laughter feeds back and overlaps his multiple personalities. Pause for dramatic effect. Now in spectral whorls of manic purple Zeno sayssssss: “Do you know anything about … witches?”