Daddy's In A Snuff Film

by Kelby Losack

Kelby Losack is a great author and a good friend of RC Industries, but we must call a spade a spade and admit that our boy has gone absolutely MAD. He has a new short story collection available for pre-order and is offering half of the first batch of royalties to one lucky reader who pre-orders. Secure your copy and perhaps the bag HERE

And if you don’t believe us, listen to Kelby tell you himself

Crazy, right? Anyways, as much as we advised Kelby against doing something like this, we must respect his decision. He was gracious enough to allow us to share a story from the collection with the RC family. Without further adieu, here’s Daddy’s In A Snuff Film

I’ma tell this story backwards so it has a happy ending. Thought about leaving no letter at first, just to be extra sure you grow up wanting to be nothing like your old man. Lowkey, though, the best way to be sure you hate me forever is to just tell you everything. Tryna imagine how old you might be when you find this. I’ma fold this letter up into a little square just big enough to write “I love you” on one side and “I’m sorry” on the other, then I’ll slip it inside your piggy bank. If all goes down the way it should, and if bad luck ain’t genetic, you won’t have to go breaking that open for a hot minute. Right now, you’re rolling across the living room floor from one end of the rug to the other, back and forth, your slobber-soaked fingers collecting lint and dirt and I’m telling you “no no no, quit shoving your dirty fists in your mouth,” but you’re cutting teeth, you ain’t gon listen to me. You just gazed up at me with those big hazel eyes that take up half your cute little head and the way you just cooed and chuckled will forever be the way I know the sound of your voice. 

I love you, and I’m sorry.

Here’s how our last night together is finna go down: I’ll take you down to the beach and we’ll walk together through the tide, your hands wrapped around my index fingers while I’m hunched over, puppeteering you since you ain’t walking on your own yet, and you’ll giggle at the feel of the slick sand and the seafoam bubbling over your feet and I’ll take pictures on my phone to send to your mom. The sun’s been setting closer to eight lately, so the sky will be all pink and purple, or maybe red—I don’t really know how the sun decides what colors to set in, but the pictures will be pretty. Then I’ll find a crab shell and hold it up to your ear and say, “hear that? It’s the sound of ghost whispers. It’s daddy saying he loves you.” You won’t remember this, but maybe this shell is still hanging around somewhere, lost in a drawer or a shoebox of random baby shit. Maybe you can still pick it up and hear me. 

I love you, and I’m sorry. 

After the beach, you’ll be hungry, because you’re always hungry, so I’ll prop your bottle up with a blanket across your chest and you’ll fall asleep eating in your stroller on the walk home. It’s a three-mile walk, bout an hour to go under the piss jar-colored light of street lamps and the flames blowing out the tops of the burn towers. This would be my chance to think twice about everything, if I had any better ideas. 

Fucked up part is I can’t even kill myself the old fashioned way, since you gotta pay for life insurance to have it.

Learn from daddy’s mistakes: take out a life insurance policy. Better yet, aspire to be more valuable to your loved ones while you’re still breathing. 

Later on, when your mom gets home, she’ll unwind on the front porch with a coffee and a cigarette. She’ll swat at june bugs and moths flying kamikaze halos round her head and she’ll play a puzzle game on her phone. Then she’ll come inside and shower off all the glitter clinging to her face, her shoulders, her thighs, her C-section scar. Flakes of silver and gold that don’t make it down the drain become stuck in the no-slip ridges at the base of the tub; this leftover glitter forming constellations for you to float across when you pretend to be an astronaut during bath time. 

You remember doing that? 

When she gets out of the shower, your mom will slide up next to where me and you are crashed out on the couch. I’ll be sitting there with surrendered arms at my sides, snoring at the ceiling with you sideways across my lap, stirring and stretching from a Statue of Liberty pose into a baby crucifix, a stream of drool running cross your cheek, into your ear. She’ll gently lift you from my lap and carry you to your crib and she’ll part your curly hair to kiss your forehead. She’ll whisper wishes of sweet dreams into your ear and she’ll mean it because she won’t know what happens next. 

When I bought the chainsaw, I meant to make us some money with it, just not in the way you probably know by now. Your old man never wanted to be a star. Just wanted your mom to worry less, wanted you to have an easier go of things.

One thing I’ll say is learn some type of trade, something people don’t usually think they can do themselves, like plumbing. Or HVAC. Summertime spells death to air conditioners all over Texas—that’s called job security. Better yet, you know the median salary of an electrician in this state? You can be an uneducated felon with swollen pockets if you’re the one swapping knob-and-tube out for Romex in these old-ass houses folks cop on the low. Just don’t be a carpenter like your old man. By the time you’re grown, homes will be metal-framed concrete atrocities furnished in plastic, cabinets built out of some Dow-trademarked chemical compound that will be the source of a class-action lawsuit for causing cancer in fifty years. If I’d have learned a trade in anything outside of lumber, well.

Maybe I’d be saying all this to your face.

There’s only so many “nevermind”s and “lemme save a bit”s you can take before you go from quoting someone on a beach house balcony to standing in line at the pawn shop—tool box in one hand, shotgun in the other. Repeat until you’re down to a screwdriver on top of the fridge and a Glock under the driver’s seat and you’re still choosing the lights over the phones come first of the month.

Saying shit like, “Kids don’t even remember their first birthdays.”

I love you, and I’m sorry.

Wasn’t even that your old man was stubbornly tryna get it the honest way. Your mom had been tryna talk me out the game for a minute before you came along as the final ultimatum.

“Us or the pills.”

It was an easy choice until the ramen joint got shut down for gutting pigs right there in the alleyway, and your mom went from making dogshit per hour serving noodles to dogshit per hour sliding down a pole. Whole time, your old man walking around with a pocket full of “nevermind”s and stolen packets of baby formula, thinking if she gon get it by any means, so am I.

Problem with selling pills is you gotta have pills to sell, so you gotta know niggas with pills. In the timespan you went from two solid lines on a stick to a screaming little creature with your mother’s eyes and lips, all the plugs I used to know got themselves locked up or buried. Dead end. So I quickly learned how big a plasma needle is (bigger than my veins, which is probably why they blew out both arms and sent me home with a thirty-five dollar courtesy comp and cotton balls tied to the crooks of my elbows). Then I learned any app that has you drive around picking up groceries for people costs you half what you make in gas. I learned that being a test dummy for a new migraine medication will score you fifty bucks plus tinnitus and a migraine. I learned you can cram all this bullshit into a week while waiting on a potential client to hit you back with a “nevermind” on building their bathroom vanity and you’ll end up with a whole third of what you need for groceries and shit.

Just now, you crawled over fussing to be picked up and so I picked you up and you vomited on my lap. I made you a bottle and changed your diaper and now you’re rubbing your belly with one hand and holding the bottle with the other and you’re grinning up at me from where I laid you down on the couch and there’s streams of formula running out both corners of your mouth, dripping down your chin. You’re making it hard to see this through.

I keep reminding myself how many times this year I’ve held your mom in fits of panic, how many times she’s shoved me off and wished I was someone who knew how to take care of the two of you, how many times she’s had to dance through a sinus infection or a toothache just so at least one of us is making some bread.

This would be so much easier if you’d please stop smiling and start hating me already. 

You want to know some behind-the-scenes shit? 

The chainsaw wasn’t in the script. I haven’t actually seen the script, if there is one, but I know the premise, and I know the director got the idea to use the chainsaw when I told him bout how I’d been going door to door with this chainsaw offering to cut down trees.

My pitch would go like this: knock on the door, stand there like a sweaty idiot with a chainsaw, move on when no one answers, then when someone finally does answer, say, “aye bro/excuse me ma’am, could I cut down this tree for you here? This one out near the driveway that look like it’s ready to fall over and total that Sonata you got there?” Then I’d wink and say, “Unless that’s what you praying for—I get it, why you think I’m out here with a chainsaw?—but anyway, check this out,” then I’d go and push on the tree and go, “see, I ain’t even gon need the saw for much besides chopping it up for the trash man, this bitch finna fall over on its own. So what you think, sixty bucks and I’ll take care of this for you right now.” And they’d say they ain’t got the money, but they’d think about it and could I leave a card or my number, and they’d be saying this just to get rid of me, I know, ’cause they’d be shifting their weight from one foot to the other, taking their hands in and out of their pockets like they knew they were finna get robbed by a skinny peckerwood with a chainsaw. So I’d say, “How bout twenty bucks? Please. I got a kid to feed.” And they’d say no. They’d say please leave before they call the cops. And I’d take off down the road and round the block and start knocking on doors again, the sweat hiding the tears.

If I hadn’t shared that story with the director, who knows what he’d be taking your daddy’s head off with. Maybe a samurai sword. That would have been crazy. 

It wasn’t tree-cutting that brought me to the director’s door, though. The Budget Motel off 288 going down to Freeport doesn’t even have any trees around.

Nah, I ain’t go down there with the chainsaw, I went down with the Glock. Rolled up splashing through the potholes in the parking lot and hopped out too quick to lose the nerve. Hands in the pockets of my Carhartt, ready to pull that thing out soon as the chump in Room 626 opens the door, ready to up that barrel in his eye socket and shove him back into the room to kick the door closed, tell him to come off it, all of it, whatever he’s got, think I’m playin, nigga, try me.

What fucked the plan up was assuming he’d just open the door for anyone. Of course he’d check through the peephole, hoping to see lil shorty from the pictures I posted on this local hookup subreddit, and when instead he sees this sketchy ‘wood with his hands stuffed in jacket pockets, he’d open up just a crack—chain lock still in the slide—and he’d up his own piece at your daddy’s torso, ready to blow the ramen noodles out his guts.

Your daddy would say, “Shit.” He’d turn grey while his heart pounded in his skull and he’d fight to stay standing on gelatin legs.

The director, though, as if he was half-expecting to get someone like me, he’d say, “Come inside, son. I think we can help each other.”

I don’t know the casting process of other snuff film stars, but people get discovered in crazier places, probably.

I don’t know.

Probably not.

I hope to god you ain’t seen this movie.

Supposed to be one of those slow-burn psychological joints, shot POV style through the eyes of a killer.

But you wouldn’t know he was a killer for most of the movie, ’cause I guess he’s not, at least not at first.

The director said he’s got all the footage leading up to the climax.

Shots of the chemical plant silhouetted against a blood red sunset.

A blue crab dragging a used condom over balled-up fast food wrappers on the beach.

Scenes of the not-yet-killer white-knuckling a sink or a steering wheel while the camera—representing his vision—wobbles and warps while the film’s droning score of buzzing and shrieking climbs to an ear-piercing crescendo. You know, to give the vibe of going crazy or whatever. The director said it’ll come together in the editing.

Sounds like a movie bout nothing with a random murder at the end. All I know is I got an address to a barn way the fuck out near Matagorda, off 35 somewhere outside Bay City, and I can’t forget to bring the chainsaw. That’s the money shot, the viral moment. You want to know some more behind-the-scenes magic? The director said he’ll fix your daddy up with some fenty, so I won’t be feeling it too-too bad when all those spinning teeth on the chain start biting at my neck. The most authentic arterial spray ever caught on camera, that’s what the director’s going for. I’ll be floating on a black cloud somewhere high above my own body before the saw cuts through the neck bone.

I didn’t even need to know all this. I was in when the director said it’d be fifty racks paid out as an anonymous donation soon as we wrapped. He already had the donation page made and ready to go. Had me input my bank routing number to receive the posthumous funds. So while he was going on bout how this was finna put him in the ranks of those Italian niggas who cut up real life turtles on screen, all I was thinking bout was what you and your mom could do with fifty Gs.

I love you, and I’m sorry.

Lupe, the old lady next door, says we’ve been hit with el mal de ojo, the evil eye. That’s why we’ve been so unlucky. That’s why the hurricane dropped that tree onto your mom’s car same time we were cutting back on insurance payments. That’s why the freeze came same week we brought you home from the hospital. Talmbout five days of no power with a six-pound newborn. Extension cords running out the window to the generator, plugged in to the heat lamp clamped to your bassinet, where we swaddled you with the thickest blankets and took turns drying your tears so your face wouldn’t freeze.

If life flashes before your eyes at the end like people say, I hope mine plays in rewind and stops at when I met your mom, my first job out the pen washing dishes at the noodle shop, taking up smoking just to bum cigarettes and flirt on our breaks. But first, let it play through the first time you lifted yourself up on hands and knees to crawl across the living room, a moment of pride and joy for the three of us, but also of fear for your mom and me at all the shit you were finna get into now that you were mobile. Rewind to late nights stripping you down and holding you in front of the fridge, tryna lower your temperature while you wailed at the pain of cutting your first tooth. Rewind to when the doctor said you had the umbilical cord wrapped around your neck and we had to move quick, had to wheel your mom down the hall to a room big enough to pitch a tent over her body up to her neck, a room big enough for all the nurses running around with whirring tools and pipe clamps and napkins soaked in blood to not trip over each other, a room I stood outside of dressed in the scrubs they threw at me, ready to bust in if they didn’t come grab me soon and say I could come run my finger down your mom’s cheek, tell her it’d all be okay, and shed more than a couple tears when it turned out I wasn’t lying to her. Rewind to the first time I heard your voice, the first time you opened up your lungs and screamed to tell us you were here, you were alive.

Now fast forward back to our last night together. After your mom lays you down in your crib and kisses your forehead, whispers wishes of sweet dreams in your ear, she’ll come back to the couch and rub my chest to wake me up. She’ll sit in my lap and wrap her arms around my neck and ask how the day went, she’ll say the pictures we took at the beach were adorable as hell, she’ll pull me towards the bedroom and act like she’s not about to fall asleep as soon as her head touches the pillow.

It’ll be five in the morning. I’ll be dressed already, chainsaw the only thing to grab on my way out.

Before slipping out, I’ll leave a separate letter just for your mom on her nightstand.

It will simply say I love you, and I’m sorry.