Story: The Biggest Fan

I pulled up in front of this guy’s house, and it’s like, totally normal. Bland normal, you know, like this is how the construction company left it when they finished, thirty years ago. No grass to speak of, coupla scraggly trees, and one sad-looking bush was all.

My guess, the inside would be a fuckin’ shrine. I wouldn’t be here if Diltman wasn’t the bitch’s biggest fan, after all, and those kinda people get fuckin’ obsessive over that shit. I seen guys had whole rooms plastered with Britney Spears pics or Cameron Diaz posters or life-size standup things of Madonna or something, with articles and shit stuck on the walls and a little table set up where they could pray or jack off facing east or whatever it was they did. No telling what this guy had.

There wasn’t any shortage of slimy little porno marketers that’d slice off, fry and eat their left nut for what I had to sell, but they’d all be middlemen looking to buy me off cheap and make their millions selling copies. I wanted to find the best buyer and up my price, and all the collectors I found on the Internet said this was the guy to see. He was eager enough, he answered my e-mail within an hour and arranged a meeting. Didn’t even blink at the price range I floated and that always cheers me up.

The little plastic bag on the seat next to me just sat there, smelling like money. I grabbed it and headed towards my payday.

Diltman answered the door on the second knock and stared right at the bag in my hand immediately. Yeah, this was a sale. This mook had probably been oiling himself up all day, just waiting for this. He looked like a man made outta milk, all ivory white and smooth. Little bit of slick, black hair, coulda been painted on, WalMart slacks and a button-down shirt buttoned up to the neck. Not a muscle on him. For all I could tell he didn’t have bones. There weren’t any pens in his pocket but this might be his casual look.

“Mr. Jackson?” he said. Even his voice sounded milky. It was mild and cool and made me a little sick to my stomach. Guess I was Diltman-intolerant.

“Who else,” I said. He let me in, fidgeting like a little kid.

“No one followed you?”

I gawked at him and laughed. “This ain’t a fuckin’ drug deal, boss. Not like I’m dealing in nukes or little boys or something. We’re just two guys doin’ a little business. Got something for you.”

Time to show him his candy. I had places to be and things to buy. I reached in my bag and pulled out the tape. His eyes bugged out. I had to fight the urge to move it around to see if his eyes would follow along.

It was a plain black videotape, like you’d use to tape football games and shit. On the label someone had hand-written “4-24-04″ and added a little heart, so goddamn sweet I wanted to cry.

“Oh, my God,” he said. If Jesus climbed down off the cross and goosed the Pope, you wouldn’ta seen a more awestruck expression. “Is it… real?”

“Yep. First class home-made porno tape of–”

“Don’t say her name!” His scream echoed around the room, startling both of us. He took a deep breath to calm himself and then continued like he was explaining something to his parole board. “Please, I’d rather you didn’t use her name. It seems… wrong, somehow.”

“Whatever you say, boss.” Whatever you say, whacko. “Bet you never thought you’d ever see her naked, huh?”

He let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “My fantasies are my own, thank you. But I certainly never expected this. Wait a minute! Oh God, I need to preserve this…” He had a spinning little hissy fit and dug through the stuff on his shelves and on the computer desk just inside his living room, finally turning around with a digital camera in his pudgy mitts. “I want a picture of it.”

“Look, after I’m gone you can–”

He screeched at me. “Now!” Jesus. He was strung tighter than I thought. Suddenly I was sorry I hadn’t just mailed it to him. “Hold it up, quickly!”

I held the tape out at arm’s length while he took some quick shots, praying the whole time he wasn’t going to ask me to lube him up or hold the TV for him to aim his whanger at or something. Wasn’t there a Star Trek convention somewhere he should be at?

Finally he stopped and looked at me. “I’ll need to… um… you know…”

“You want to check it out? Don’t blame you, my man. All those celebrity sex tapes out there, there ain’t a hint about this one, and it blows ‘em all away. You got a VCR?”

“Of course, it’s… um… over here,” he said, gesturing vaguely towards the living room. I looked around a little. The inside was even more boring than the outside. I seen crack houses had more décor. It was desperately clean, though, in an eerie, Stepford Wives kinda way. Shrine was probably in the bedroom but there wasn’t enough rubber gloves and Lysol in the world for me to go back there.

Dinky TV, didn’t even have cable, but he had a decent VCR and DVD setup. I popped the tape in while he sat nervously on the edge of the couch. “Takes a minute to get to the good stuff, but it’s worth every minute,” I said over my shoulder. When I looked back I saw the first hint of his real life: there was a rack crammed full of DVDs and videos, and every single one of them had her in it. I mean, I guess, ’cause some of ‘em I’d never heard of. Foreign films, old b-movies, some obvious home-made tapes, everything. Even one that looked like a studio audition tape. Damn. Wonder what that was worth? He might not notice if I…

“You’ve watched it?”

For a second I didn’t know which one he was talking about. Oh, right, the smut. I punched Play and sat back on my heels. “Wouldn’t known what it was otherwise, would I? Sweet stuff, I’m telling you.” The screen fuzzed for a second and then snapped into focus. “I mean, Pamela Anderson doing this kind of shit on camera you expect, you know? Centerfold and all that. But the most prissy, dignified, stuck-up actress in the free world gettin’ nastier than a Hong Kong whore. Boggles the fuckin’ mind, man.”

Showtime. It was obviously a home movie. There was a blonde woman standing in a kitchen, stirring something in a pan and trying a little too hard to ignore the camera.

Behind me, Diltman gave a little gasp. Even without the makeup and fancy lighting, no way that face could be anyone else. After a minute or so she looked up and faked being surprised, really cheesy like. I chuckled. “The Oscar people saw that, they’d make her give hers back.”

That’s the best part of these celebrity sex tapes, watching some famous chick get down and dirty. Pam Anderson, that skating chick, Gena Lee Nolin, Paris Hilton, that lady wrestler, the babe from Survivor… all those years of acting high and mighty before their lowly fans and then there they were on all fours, fucking and sucking away. What’s not to love?

‘That’s her,” he said. “It’s really her.” I looked back. He was fuckin’ captivated, leanin’ forward and starin’ like he was starving and she was made outta peanut butter. Right away I decided to double the price.

On the screen a hand appeared, obviously belonging to the cameraman, and started grabbing at the woman’s buttons. She giggled and pulled away but not before a couple of them popped. She was wearing a white lace bra underneath, real plain, like my sister used to wear. The woman pouted at us and tried to pull her shirt back together. A male voice said, “Come on, babe. Let’s see you.” She made kind of a frowny smile at him and turned away, like she wasn’t gonna do it.

Then she turned back and her shirt was hanging open over the bra. She started doing a sexy little dance.

“Turn it off,” Diltman said. His voice was all shaky.

I couldn’t believe it. “What? This ain’t nuthin’, you gotta see what she does with–”

“Turn it off, I said.”

Huh. Whatever. Guy must get embarrassed easy. But me, I was getting into it. Maybe one more quick peek… I hit Stop and punched Fast Forward real quick, and turned back to hide it. “Hey, no problem, whatever you want. Me, I was paying that much, I’d want to see it first, but it’s your deal. Whoops, here we go,” I said, and hit Play again real quick.

Things had progressed. Now she was bareass and bent over a couch, facing the camera which musta been set down somewhere. Her husband was behind her, pounding her into the upholstery. Her face, even twisted up in that pleasure-pain thing, was something to see. Those famous, world-class titties were squished between her arms, bulging with every thrust, and you coulda cut sheet metal with them nipples. For a woman who made her career playing high society ladies and god-fearin’, inspirational, chick flick women, she sure yelled some nasty shit.

I started getting a boner myself. Goddamn, this was sweet! The lighting sucked, the angle was wrong, and neither of them were doing anything particularly cinematic. They were just fucking the living shit out of each other and the shock of seeing that angelic, dignified face doing those dirty things got me harder than calculus. Last time I saw her in a movie she was playing some imperiled nun or something, and now this. “Not bad for her first-ever nude scene, huh,” I said. I had hit it just right, any second now was the part where she–

Diltman stood up, shaking, and yelled, “I said, turn it off!”

Jesus, for a second I thought he was gonna hit me. “Got it, chief!” I couldn’t help it, I laughed a little while I popped the tape out. He was standing there all imperious but he had a little chubby action working in his slacks. “What, am I sullying the moment for you? Intruding on your special time?”

He twitched a little. There was finally some color in him; he was turning red as a beet. “Let me get your money,” he said.

“I think the price might have gone—” I started to say, but he interrupted me by pulling a bank bag out of a desk drawer, reaching in, and shoving a wad of cash in my hands. Before I could bitch about how small the wad was I saw the numbers on the bills and stopped cold. “What the… this is, like, three times what I asked for!”

“Yes, it is,” he said. His voice was really tight and he was working that empty bag between his pudgy hands like a rosary. “I’m not haggling with you. I have to have this.”

“Hey, no problem,” I said, and handed him the tape. “Glad I could help. Hope you two are very happy together.”

He wasn’t listening. He had the love of his life in the palm of his hand. “She is without a doubt the finest actress of this generation, and I am, without question, her biggest fan. I have seen every movie, play, commercial, and home movie she has ever appeared in, no matter how small or obscure. I have seen the two movies she did that were never released. No one else can own this.”

I started edging towards the door. Got my money, I didn’t need to hear about this chump’s pathetic life. I stopped when he asked, “And this is the only copy?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

He followed me to the door, still clutching the bank bag. “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you get it?”

“You askin’ if there’s more? Don’t think so. I know her husband a little, they invited me over to a barbecue they had last month. When I ducked inside to take a piss I saw the door to their video cabinet open and this was in the VCR. Seemed like a wise investment, you know? Guys made fuckin’ millions off Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton and shit. Better than a fuckin’ lottery ticket.”

Diltman nodded. “Do they know you have it?”

“Ha! No way, boss. No one knows but me and you. When I asked around online for buyers I didn’t mention the name, figured I could charge more if I sold the surprise along with the tape. Savvy, huh?”

“Very,” he said. He stepped into his tiny kitchen and came out with a bucket. Something sloshed inside, and there was an odd chemical smell. He looked at the tape for a long second, and then he dropped it in the bucket. There was a hissing noise.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I cried. I lunged forward in time to see the acid bubbling around the plastic case. Already the tape inside was melting away. “You goddamn idiot! If you didn’t want it why did you–” I pulled back when he shoved his face over the bucket and took another picture, this time of the dissolving tape. “You didn’t even watch it!”

He stuck the camera on a little stand by his computer and pressed a button on it. A window popped up on his screen. “I didn’t want to.”

Look, I got no problem with someone wasting money as long as I get it, but this made no fuckin’ sense at all. “The hell you didn’t want to, you were slobbering all over your coffee table! You said you were her biggest fan!”

Diltman stood in front of me. Suddenly he looked less pathetic than he had before. Well, no, he still looked pathetic, but now it was in a scary, Norman Bates kind of way. “I am,” he said. “I love and admire her above all others. No one knows more about her or understands her better. Not her husband, not her mother, not her dog.”

“Then why–”

“Do you think the man that sold the Paris Hilton tape loved her?”

I had to take a second to change gears. The sound of the hissing plastic was distracting. “Wasn’t that her boyfriend?”

“To display a woman to the world in such a situation, without her consent. That’s a kind of rape, I think.” He walked over to his computer and started typing something. “No one who truly loves someone would want to publicly humiliate them like that. I couldn’t bear to see such a private moment downloaded from every x-rated website on the net. They’d stream it, offer clips, make wallpaper, use screenshots to make animations. Inside of a month they’d be selling DVDs from some Russian website and her life would be ruined.”

I backed up against the door. “Well, whatever, but I’m keeping the money.”

“Go right ahead. We made a deal, you and I. And I know that you were truthful and there are no other copies. If you lied and there are more, I expect you to destroy them immediately. Neither will you try to impose on their friendship to look for more, ever again.”

“What? That’s wasn’t part of the deal!”

He reached into the bank bag and pulled out a little snub nose pistol. Piece of shit for anything farther than three feet. Just perfect to tag someone standing in your foyer, though. Fuck.

“I’d like to show you something.” He brought up a window I recognized as an e-mail. He must have had it all ready, with big type so I could read it from where I was. It had my name, what I look like now, a description of my car, my license number, and my apartment address. I felt a headache starting. “This one’s addressed to your wife,” he said. “She’s been looking for you and your missing support payments for quite some time, now.”

“How the fuck–”

“You gave me your real name when you wrote me. There was no  reason not to, I’m harmless. I’m also very, very good at finding things online. Rare movie clips, one-of-a-kind photographs. Police records.”

“Don’t..!”

He clicked once and it disappeared. I screamed at him but he ignored it and brought up another right away. Same thing, this one addressed to the local police department.

“I figure you’ve got some time before your wife gets to you. She might not check her mail that often, might not be able to get here fast enough. The police would show up right away, though, they’re good at that. Outstanding warrant for breaking and entering, another for grand theft auto, and they’ve got some questions to ask you about racketeering. Half an hour after you leave this house they’ll get this, so that’s how much time you have to get away.”

Double fuck. Two clicks of a fucking mouse and this geekwad was ruining my life. I screamed at him. “Why are you doing this? You got the tape, I got the money, what’s the goddamn deal?”

His eyes were dark, glittering beads. There was a beast hiding in the milk now, lurking below the surface, and it was furious. “You raped my beloved. You took something from her that was not yours to take, and you were willing to humiliate her to the world just because you could. There must be a reckoning.”

“Christ! You’re fucking crazy, you know that, right?”

“I prefer ‘devoted.’ One more thing. See this?” He gestured towards the computer screen one last time. There was the picture he’d taken of the tape, clear as anything, with me holding it and smiling like a car salesman. The label was plainly visible. Triple fuck, with almonds.

“If one word of this tape’s mere existence gets out, or there’s any sign that more tapes are missing, and I send that picture to her. She and her husband can make your life much more miserable than I can, I’m sure.”

“I stole a three dollar videotape!”

“Ah, but look what I was willing to pay. That makes it grand theft, at least. I’d certainly be willing to testify as to its intrinsic value.”

He sat back down, keeping the pistol on me, and starting typing left-handed. With every keystroke I could feel my world crashing faster.

“I’m writing her now, anonymously, and sending her the picture of the tape in the acid so she won’t worry. She must be frantic. She needs to know that her private life is still private. You can let yourself out, can’t you?”

For a split second I leaned forward, ready to rush him anyway, but finally I turned and ran for it. Didn’t want to take a chance on Mabel getting her mail and calling the cops to get me. I tore ass home and packed up, left half my shit behind and was out of the state in three hours.

I did take a moment to burn the backup tapes I had made for myself, just in case. Fucker might be watching me, for all I knew. I caught myself looking in corners and hallways for hidden cameras.

For the life of me, I still don’t understand. I mean, you loved someone, you’d want to see her naked, right? Right? When nobody else would know?

Wouldn’t everybody?

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