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Footprints on My Face

Joshua Copeland

    Davey was the gay roommate. Hando was the tuffie. Cheryl was the purring seducer. These are the only ones that mattered. You know the shtick, “We are seven people,” “Picked to Live in a house together...” this particular show took place in Tokyo and you got lost easily; it has seventeen downtowns. So none of us strayed too far from our house. It didn’t matter that at each corner there was computer monitor that spoke in seven languages, “What language do you speak? You are here. Where do you want to go?” Sometimes there’d be lines to these machines.
    How bad was it living in a house with these people? A few months into the show, we were all in the living room, drinking it up and playing pool. Cheryl was hitting on me. When I went to the bathroom to take a leak, I heard everyone quiet down, like they were whispering. I shook it, zipped up, and walked back in. Cheryl read palm.
    “That’s weird,” she said. “It means something like, ‘you are a clown.’ Whatever that means, it beats me.”
    Then, a little later, she said, “Jake, let’s go up into my room.”
    “Sure thing. But I’m tense. Can’t we wait until I got a little more beer in me?”
    Hando massaged my shoulders and told me to relax and be cool. The rest of the roommates cheered us on. Cheryl and I walked up into her bedroom. She asked me to pull off my pants and boxers and lay down on the bed. I took them off and lay down.
    Then she said, “I’m going to turn off the lights. It will be easier for me that way.” And she began. I’ve had better, but this was good, though she did rake a bit. After a while she said, “I better go borrow a condom from Hando. Close your eyes and don’t move.’ She walked out a I waited.
    I heard the door open and close, then open and close again. She put the condom on me and went at my dick again. This attempt was a lot better than what she did before. When I spermed I was pretty loud. Breathlessly I snapped off the condom. And the lights came on. Davey was standing there. He grinned. Cheryl was gone. I didn’t know what to say. “Guys, isn’t this rape?” I asked.
    I heard the gang of them in the living room laughing it up. Davey ruffled my hair. “Don’t be so homophobic,” he said.
    But that incident was way into the show. The harassment began as soon as I entered the first day. I walked into the house and the three cameramen are right up in my face. One of them warned me, “Be careful. Someone lost a snake in here. A Texas Rattler. And they can’t find it.”
    One by one my housemates arrived. They went skinny dipping in the pool. I didn’t want to. “What’s the matter?” Hando asked. “Not so big, are you?”
    They disrespected me a lot, and I didn’t have the social skills to stand up for myself and talk back. So I just laughed it up and sported my panama smile, all the while thinking, Oh my God, this is going to be on television.
    And they had sex all the time. The girl roommates brought home guys, the guy roommates brought home girls, save Davie, who brought home men. Haters filled the bars. The patrons threw chairs and tables at us. The Orientals picked on me the most: “You be banjo boy in Deliverance!” “You and your sister do nasty!” “You product of incest!” I never hooked up once, unless you count Davey.
    MTV gave us the job of working as factotums and janitors in a scat porn studio—which mostly shot girls receiving enemas. Scatological porn is big in Japan. The studios comprise a forty-floor skyscraper that’s all windows from every floor to every ceiling. Each floor is a separate studio in and of itself. And the windows can be opened. For example: A shoot starts on the first floor, and by the end of the day the place reeks so bad they’d open all the windows on that floor and leave for the day. The next day shooting took place on the second floor. Same thing, at the end of the day: open all windows. The next shoot was on the third floor, and on and on, till they finished on the 44^th floor, the top floor. Then, back to the first floor, and everything starts all over again.
    Each shoot began with a prayer: The director turned off all the lights, let the blinds down on all the windows. It was total black, and their crew gathered in a circle and prayed. My roommates could not participate because we could not understand what they were saying. Then, lights on, the day started.
    All Japanese porn stars are named Princess. Princess Zumi, Princess Hiata, Princess Yen. It was my job to stick the rectal bulb syringe up the star’s rectum, holding time about a minute, then she would let loose. We Americans gagged on the smell. Some days we had a cream coroners use, you rub it under your nostrils, and it blocks the smell in the studio.
    To help the shoots out, the studio would order the hottest Mexican food and water bottles of Mexican water, the latter straight from Mexico: Caliente Agua. Soon the place stunk with the models’ farts, and then it’s me and the enema bulb, and whoosh, like Niagara Falls.
    The director saw my job demeaned me, and as a “reward,” he placed me in his two minute experimental video. An actress playing an anchor on the nightly news in a news studio appeared on screen. As she read the news, five men—including me—jerked off in her face, and all the while she kept reading the news, semen hanging off her face and hair like a messy sneeze. The director said he made a mistake using me, since I couldn’t get it up. I was too anxious
    Hando hated me. He was a brawler. As the weeks went on he began to call me, a faerie, a faggot, a limp wrist, etc.
    A few days after Davey sucked me off the producer called us all into the living room. He dressed in the mid-80s style of Hawaiian pants and shirts and sunglasses. His claim to fame was a three month stint as assistant director on Miami Vice. The guy set up a TV and VCR and played for us the news that the US invaded Iraq. He said he thought it was the show’s responsibility to let the house know this. Then he and his assistants took the equipment and left.
    The producer had sparked my roommates. They were gung ho for the war, shouting around as they dribbled down their bibs. When I asked what if we’re wrong about the chemical weapons, Hando said, “Well, to be frank, I don’t think Iraq should have a BB gun.”
    “God Bless America,” they screeched in unison and toasted.
    “Guys,” I said, “This is a complicated situation, not a matter of ‘for’ or ‘against.’”
    Davey said, “Jake, I thought I was the biggest bitch around here...Looks like I was wrong.”
    And Cheryl called me a pansy. “The only good sand nigger is a dead sand nigger,” she shouted right in my face. I smelled sperm.
    Then Hando got up in my private space and started to shove me, asking me to punch him. He screamed, “Words! All you got is words! All you got is your voice! Let’s see you swing at me! Bitch! Please, just one tiny punch is all I need! Me vs. you!” He went into the kitchen and came out with a large steak knife. He threw it at my feet. “Pick it up, Jakey.”
    All the roommates are shouting at me to pick it up. I left to my room.
    The next day the producer and I sat down on the balcony. He dressed like someone dynamited a flower bed. “Jake, I want to talk to you about Hando, and fist fighting in general. Your roommates punk you every day. I think it’s pathetic. Many a time you need to stand up for yourself. It’s gotten so bad, you’re disgusting, the editors and cameramen are so fed up with you and your humiliations they’re threatening to quit. It’s like nails on a blackboard. We all agree: You are an embarrassment.” He sighed, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “We all got to start being a man sometime. Stick out those pects and walk like you’re walking through windows.”
    Later that day in the confessional booth I said, “I’m scared.”
    Things went from shoving sessions to outright fighting. Hando is lean, big boned and 250 pounds. I’m five foot five and weigh in at 127 pounds. None of the roomies broke up the brawls. We’d start out boxing, but it always ended in wrestling. He wrangled me into a headlock a lot. One bout I had on loose jogging pants, and I gagged as I huffed out, ‘Hey Hando, this doesn’t count! My pants are falling off!” Soon I couldn’t breathe, just gurgle. The cameramen threw down their cameras and broke it up. This angered the roommates. The producer strutted in a few hours later and reprimanded the three cameramen: “Rule #1 in reality television: keep the cameras rolling. They got lots of machines at the hospital to bring people back to life from strangulation.”
    One day I was taking a dump, just sitting there, away from the cameras, away from my roommates, just relaxing...and Hando kicked in the door. The three cameramen and my roomies stood there, pointing and laughing and pinching their noses. “Ewww,” teased Cheryl. What could I do? The piece of feces was only half way out. If I stood up and pulled my pants up, the crap would drop into my boxers.
    “Come on guys, leave me alone for once.”
    Later that day Hando beat me down. While I lay there in my blood, my ear to the floor, making sucking sounds every time I moved my head, Hando smoked a cigarette.
    Man am I dumb: I slept in boxers, no pants, until one night Hando and Cheryl ripped the covers off my bed, for all the cameras to see, and then dragged me across the floor by my legs. “I had to do it,” Hando said. “I hate peacenik faggots. No offense, Davey.”
    The beatings got so bad that I had to talk to someone. So I called my parents back in Vegas. They begged me repeatedly to come home. But I didn’t want to pussy out and surrender. Some crazy part of myself told me I needed to beat my roommates. And if the show aired all my humiliations no one out in public would respect me.
    One call I told them how Hando busted in on me while I was taking a dump. My mom and dad started to sniffle, like they were crying. My mom kept telling me to go to the police, but I told her what the producer said, that MTV is such a huge corporation, the cops won’t involve themselves in the show no how, no way. I worried as I spoke. I didn’t see anyone else in the room. I didn’t want my complaining to anger my roomies. I added that a lot of the harassment would be my word vs. my housemates, the three cameramen, and the producer. And anyway, if I called the police, the show would make sure I paid for it.
    “You’ve got to do something, son,” my dad said. “Come home to us, where it’s safe. No one will beat you up here. It hurts us to hear your stories about what goes on in that house.”
    Just then someone turned off the lights. Total black. I felt a jagged pain in my lower torso. Like someone stuck me with an ice sickle. I screamed. The lights came back on. A flower of blood bloomed around my ribs on my right.
    “Mommy! They stabbed me! Oh God! Mom! Aggh! It hurts! It burns!”
    My parents screamed so loud I couldn’t understand them. They didn’t yell, they howled. “My son! My Son!” my mother wailed.
    I called 101 (That’s the 911 for Japan). The cops interviewed everyone. They all said they didn’t do anything. And the lights were off, so I couldn’t identify anyone. The producer arrived. I puked on the carpet. The producer grabbed me by the back of my neck and tried to shove my face into the vomit. When he saw he couldn’t do that, he ordered me to clean it up.
    Once the cops found out this was a worldwide MTV show, they asked a few more questions, didn’t write anything down, and left. They drove me and the two cameramen to the ER. I know I enraged my roomies by calling the cops. I needed to think. What to do. Tunnel vision: Get out of the house as soon as possible. Get back, pack, call a cab to the airport and take the first plane out of the country.
    I got fifteen stitches. No internal damage. I thought I saw the cameraman zoom in on the stitches.
    When I got home the whole cast seethed in anger. “Good thing you came back, snitch,” Hando said. “It’s out of the frying pan into the fire.” I picked up the phone, pressed two for English, and ordered a cab to the house. The operator said it’d be there in half an hour.
    I bulldozed my way past my roomies and walked up to my bedroom and packed. I didn’t fold my clothes, just threw them into the suitcase. The suitcase filled before I had all my things in, fuck it, I’ll leave the rest here. My housemates watched at the door. Cheryl was chewing gum and tapping her foot. “Watcha packin for?” she asked.
    “I’m outta here,” I said.
    “That’s what you think,” she said. “There are some things we need to settle first. “
    “Settle them without me.” I zipped up my suitcase, grabbed it, and brushed by her.
    Hando grabbed me from behind and squeezed me into a headlock. Breathing was hard. It was like bull riding. I was the bull. I screamed nonsense and fought like this was a rodeo. I wanted out. Just get out the fucking door. “Go at it,” Hando yelled to everyone. “I got him tight. I got his snitch ass.” They pulled down my pants and boxers. I almost shat myself.
    “No!” I squealed. “No! What are you going to do!?” I was always told that if you’re trapped like this, don’t yell for help, yell “Fire!” But who would hear that would care? My psyche prof said people in this position usually scream for their mothers. I did that on the phone when they stabbed me. I would not do that again.
    “I will not call out for my mother!” I screamed in a child’s accent.
    Hando bellowed, “Soon we’ll have you shouting for your mama!” Then he imitated me in a high pitch, “Mommy! Mommy! I’m a helpless little boy! Please come and save me! Mommy!”
    Then Hando and Davey discussed who would go first. I fought harder and smelled Hando’s deodorant.
    They flipped a quarter. Hando would go first. I noticed the three cameramen all up in there, shooting.
    It felt like someone shoved a hot poker up my ass. It felt like someone was ripping my insides open. When they were done, both of them shone with that post-orgasmic high, while I lay there like a red, soaking rag, blood splashed all over the bed. The cameramen moved up in my face for a close-up. I sobbed. All my roommates went out drinking. I was hoarse from shouting.
    The cameramen filmed me as I waited outside for the taxi. When I got sick of standing, I sat down and felt a brutal, animalistic pain in my backside, and I screamed as my ass hit the sidewalk. The cameramen cackled. Soon the cab arrived. I stood up slowly, yelling and wincing, stepped into the taxi, and I left the house behind.
    And then came the four month wait; in four months the show would air. Then the persecution would really begin.

    THE END?

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