Collector's Item

A short story

Collector’s Item

A story by Chuck Palahniuk

So wouldn’t you know it would be David Ziggler who brings over the tape so we can watch it together, so nobody tells Jeanne Alvarez so she’ll come and not bail, so she’s got no idea.  We were so glad it wasn’t a Betamax tape, so we all went there so we could eat microwave popcorn and Crunch ‘n Munch like back in the day, so Jeanne Alvarez wouldn’t suspect a thing.

So the front end of the tape is all old MTV so stupid people don’t know what’s really going on so we have to sit through the music video where A-ha jumps off a cliff and turns into a fish, so we fast-forward to where Erasure dances in laundry so we hit Pause so everyone can get more froYo and Mr. Pibb so Tracy Dillard can rewind to the “Dress You Up” video so she can say, “Earth to Madonna! Nineteen-eighty-one wants its batik jacket back!”

So maybe this wasn’t the most culturally sensitive scheme we hatched.  So kill us.

So then the ZZ Top video comes on where the three hot girls empower the ugly girl by giving her a slut makeover, so David Ziggler fast-forwards to the good part, just so nobody bails, the part so good he dropped a wad of crypto on Silk Road so we could pile into Tracy Dillard’s family room so we could watch it on her ex-husband’s VCR because who has a VCR anymore?

So nobody works the remote so good, so we way overshoot to the part where Dan Fitzwater, good old “Fitz of Rage” Fitzwater stands naked and tied to a beam with handcuffs. So camcorder home video. His arms spread above his head to where they’re handcuffed to the ceiling so he makes a big X with his ankles cuffed far apart on the floor so we can see his skin is the yellow of Twinkies so the inside of each arm looks the way the underneath of a Twinkie looks with those big injection sites with white Twinkie filling so it’s leaking out so it has to be pus like he’s a yellow Twinkie with eyes the color of beer, so Fitz of Rage is like this bony skeleton of yellow sponge cake injected with hepatitis C so his dangling junk is just this smaller yellow Twinkie flopped down between his spread-open legs so Tracy Dillard rewinds so we can find the start-start, rewinding so far we have to watch a Smiths video.