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“Yeah,” he answered with a giggle. “It makes them all fulla holes. I get terrible toothaches.”

“Maybe you should try to control that.”

“I was gonna make a movie about it that maybe would scare me into cuttin' it out. This kid, see, he keeps eatin' these Milk Duds—like me—until one night his teeth get so mad they all give him a toothache at once.” He burst out in a big, chocolate-spluttering laugh. “Only there's nothing scary about toothaches. It's just funny, y'know, this guy rollin' around in bed moanin'.” More laughter, more chocolate.

“Well, it's a bad habit, Simon.”

“Maybe what could happen is the guy's teeth decide to have like a mutiny against him … and eat his head.”

He salted the idea away for later consideration.

Simon seemed to have movies lined up in his mind for years into the future. I asked him to tell me about them. It was the one question that got him talking a blue streak—though in such a state of excitement that his stutter accelerated. I had to slow him down if I was going to learn anything from him.

His next film at the time was going to be called
The Birth Defectors.
This would be “sort of science fiction, about all the poisons and everything that're everywhere, and how that made all the babies become birth defectors.”

“Birth defectors?”

“Yeah. Because they don't wanna be born. So they try to hide.”

“Hide? Where?”

“Inside of the mothers.”

“I don't get it.”

“See, they have to be hunted around for and forced to be born.
And anyway, when the mothers see them they wanna kill them because of how they look.”

“The babies hide inside their mothers? Babies can't do that.”

“If they're different they can—because of how the poisons made them.”

“Different?”

“Sort of wormylike. Or all oozy.”

Again, I could discern the Cathar angle behind all this; the allegorized rejection of birth, the degradation of sex and the body. But Simon saw I found it pretty gross. He hastened to assure me, “It'll be funny. Like how they make it a crime not to want to be born. So all the birth defectors get arrested and sentenced to death by the big, bad judge.” That brought on a wheezy sort of laugh, which I didn't share with him. “But first, the cops have to chase them all around inside, and the mothers get all twitchy and twisted up…”.

I decided I didn't want to hear any more about that one. So we went on to something called
American Mouth.
This, Simon told me, would be about shopping.

“Shopping?”

He explained. “First time somebody told me about this mall in Santa Monica, I thought he said ‘maw.' Shopping maw. I had this dream about it. A big maw—where you go to shop. And it would chop you. A chopping maw. So we're gonna rent this mall in Ventura. We got that just about worked out. And see, this mall is really the mouth of hell. Like this.” Simon pointed to a half wall of illustrations he had collected. A couple of them were from Bosch: people being gobbled down a vast demonic muzzle. The rest were mainly medieval sketches of the proverbial mouth of hell with devils at work pitchforking the damned to their fate.

“Most of the picture,” Simon went on, “is just of people buying and buying and buying. Real greedy. We speed that up like the Old Keystone Cops. And then the whole inside of the maw becomes alive and opens up and they get swallowed, and they can't get away because they're loaded down with everything they bought, all this crazy stuff.”

“Will this be funny too?”

“Oh yeah.”

More distant projects included the working titles
They Came from Toxic Seepage, Cannibal Salad, Interviews with Assassins.
Somewhere three or four years down the line he had plans for an especially
dreadful item called
The President's Other Head.
This was so nauseatingly extreme that I cut him off abruptly after a couple minutes of description. “God, Simon,” I blurted out, “just stop, will you?” A mistake, I realized. I'd wounded his feelings.

After a few moments of hurt silence, he turned to me with a malicious gleam in his eye. This was a Simon I hadn't seen before, a vicious little imp whose voice suddenly took on an unexpected strength and steadiness. “You think that's bad?” he asked. “Maybe you'd like to see something.”

“What?”

“Something. Tomorrow. I'll show you.” It was almost a menacing promise.

And that was how I came to know about the sad sewer babies.

Even in the darkness, I knew she was in tears as she spoke the words. I could hear them in her voice, the deep pity that lay beneath the anger. “It is worse when you are here than when you stay away.”

“But you're always telling me I spend too much time away,” I protested, knowing there was nothing I could say that would placate her.

“Yes. But when you are here, you still are not with me. Not really. You don't want to be with me. Not like this. Tell the truth!”

Jeanette could mount an effective attack when she had to, a combination of little-girl poutiness and legalistic pugnacity. It always got to me. “Oh no,” I insisted, reaching across the bed to draw her close. But even as I did so, I could feel the fibers of my body turning liquid, going limp, rejecting the scent and moisture of her. She was right, I couldn't stand having her flesh against my own. But I wouldn't admit it, refused to admit it.

“Do you know how long it has been like this?” she asked, freeing
herself from my insultingly feeble embrace and moving farther off. “Since the beginning. Since the first night I was here. Always there is nothing. You think that is satisfactory?”

“Oh come on, we've made good love many times.” My heart sank to hear the words. When you have to say things like that, the cause is already lost.

“Oh, is that how you remember?” She was sitting up now against the back of the bed, her knees drawn up defensively against her breasts. “You are wrong. Do you know how many times we have made love in all the months I am here? Two times, three times. That is all.”

“That can't be right.” Or could it be? I found myself struggling to remember, like a man fighting off amnesia.

“Yes. It is right. And almost never complete. Like in Paris. There is no finish.”

“Paris?”

“Yes. You don't remember also that? Then too, there was nothing. But I do not know you so well. So I think perhaps you are very shy or very tired. I think perhaps that is how people make love from California, because that is how they learn from the swamis.” Even though she was berating me, that brought a laugh. “Well, I do not know. That is what Victor tells me.”

And that choked the laugh in my throat. “You told Victor about us?”

“Why not? I did not expect to see you again. But now, here, it is again the same. And not because of the swamis. Always you tell me you are not in the mood. Not in the mood! But now it is worse. Now instead of nothing, there is something. Something
bad.
Disgust. I disgust you.”

“No, no, no.”

“No? Then tell me how you feel. Tell the truth!” She rolled toward me, searched to find my hand and forced it tight between her legs, against her damp, fleshy cleft. I let her do it, but there was no denying the fact that I wanted to flinch and draw back. At the touch, my mind teemed with sensations of loathing. But I stubbornly kept my hand where she'd placed it, hoping to prove her wrong. It was useless. She could tell what my true response was.

“There, see?” I said. But my hand was making no effort to caress her, to offer pleasure or take it.

“You lie to yourself, Jon,” she said, thrusting my hand away. “You
pretend we are lovers. No, we are not. There has been no love in this bed. You are not … capable.”

By this time, there was no turning back. I realized that Jeanette and I were in the stormy middle of a decisive conversation. I could already see where it would end. For a while longer I argued back as best I could, offering excuses, telling her how fatigued I often was, how distracted, or perhaps how jealous of the other men in her life. But I knew these were lies. She was right. I'd been deceiving myself. And not only with her, but for some time, through several transient relationships that had left the recent women I'd been seeing bewildered, hurt, even outraged. One—a student of mine whom I briefly dated before Jeanette came visiting—had finally asked me, with infinite pity, if I was gay, so tenuous and inconclusive were our intimacies. I'd laughed the question off and quickly broken with her. Before that, there had been another fleeting episode with a woman in the English Department from which I'd begged off on grounds of illness after a second disastrous night. I could tell she would have been pleased to learn that it was a terminal condition.

Amazingly, I'd managed to sweep these embarrassments out of mind as if my sexual false starts didn't really matter. And they didn't. That was the worst of it. I had to admit that the end of each relationship, no matter how wrenching, had come as a relief. I was chilled to realize that the same would be true even now of Jeanette, with whom I'd been waking each morning in a cold and loveless bed, pretending there had been many nights of passion sometime in the past. But that wasn't so. Night after night—but less often in recent months when I'd been sleeping away—I'd lain beside this lovely, utterly compliant young woman and done nothing more than stroke her shoulder and kiss her once goodnight. Sleep always seemed more urgent than desire. I could recall the many times she'd teased me about it in little, hesitant ways. I'd offered excuses; she'd been patient. But this time she was having none of it.

“Don't you know why this is, Jon? It is the boy.”

“The boy … ?”

“Don't be stupid with me. Simon. His films. They are poisoning you. I can see it happening. So much morbidity, ugliness. It is too much for you. You cannot tell?”

Her words were echoing what Clare had told me years before when she called Castle's movies “evil.” I hadn't taken that warning. I was so certain I could ward off the effects, especially since I knew what
they were intended to be. But if Jeanette was right about Paris—and I knew she was—I hadn't succeeded in defending myself. The movies I'd exposed myself to for so long—Castle's dark thrillers, Simon Dunkle's nihilistic nightmares—had taken their toll.

As far as I could clearly remember through layer upon layer of stubborn denial, the only real sexual arousal I'd experienced in years had been Olga Tell's kinky exercises in Amsterdam. I might have continued denying that fact now. I might have been ready to turn Jeanette out and shore up my sagging psychological defenses once again. But the conversation we were having came three days after Simon had introduced me to the sewer babies. The impact of that was too vivid to be waved aside.

The full title of the movie was
The Lonesome Lovesong of the Sad Sewer Babies.
Simon had never shown me an unfinished work before. This one might not be completed for years to come, due, he said, to certain technical problems—a mysterious remark that was made to sound like a military secret. Nevertheless, he seemed eager to screen the film for me. In part, his motivation was prankish. He brought the film to me the way teasing little boys exchange disgusting stories when they're playing “turn green,” trying to gross one another out to see who has the strongest stomach. But there was something more to it than that. Simon seemed to have something to prove as a matter of professional pride. He wanted to demonstrate how “good” a “bad” film could be, meaning how serious a message could be wrapped in one of his cheap little shockers. Accordingly, I prepared myself for another onslaught of gore and horror, only to find I'd been outflanked.
Sewer Babies
aimed at a different, more disturbing effect. No violence, no mad slashers or cannibal gangs. And no earsplitting soundtrack. Instead, only a quiet descent into absolute despair.

As I write these words, I realize that the
Sad Sewer Babies
offers me my one chance to describe a Simon Dunkle film the world hasn't seen—and may never see. But I take no satisfaction in this cinematic scoop. If I could, I would prefer to erase the film from my memory, hoping that it survived nowhere else. Or perhaps that Simon Dunkle himself won't find the stamina to complete it. If he does, I suppose it might be his masterpiece—given the purpose his films are meant to serve. Other than its producers, I may be the film's only audience. Or rather victim. Because the
Sewer Babies
isn't a movie—not really. It's a kind of optical acid that burns through from the eye straight down into the vital organs.

As in a number of Max Castle's films, the movie begins before the eye has ingested a single image. There is—for some ninety seconds—nothing but the broiling dark screen, writhing with invisible or barely perceptible movement. Sound predominates. Heavy, labored breathing, counterpointed with whines and low groans, cleverly composed, but prolonged to intolerability. Stifled cries, clearly female, struggle to be heard but are held back. At last, a murky, slow-motion montage emerges from the darkness. Flesh, flesh, flesh in gaudy, flared colors. Body parts. Women's bodies. Legs, stomachs, knotted muscles, blood streaming over bare skin in small, turgid rivulets. The camera jostles maddeningly, refusing to yield a whole and solid image.

Then, deep in the background, seeming to rise from beneath the floor, there is a rhythmic pulse, a water sound, surging and fading, familiar but elusive. It takes many minutes to become identifiable. A toilet flushing. Then more toilets. Gradually, against ever more contorted glimpses of female anatomy, the sound builds to a crescendo loud as a waterfall. Finally, voices emerge. The Stinks, but this time their raw, amateurish caterwauling has been disciplined into a somber, elegiac, and highly sophisticated fugue constructed out of just a few phrases.