Peter Marra

Deleted Scenes

from Naked Kisses from a Broken Doll

 

 

Lee Harvey Oswald hid in a movie theatre after the assassination; he was in the Texas Theatre watching “War Is Hell” starring Audie Murphy when he was arrested. Some say Oswald wasn’t the assassin. Anyway, he was shot and killed by Ruby on November 24 1963. The assassination might have been a slight of hand, a special effect.

 

John Dillinger died July 22, 1934 in front of a movie theatre. He was betrayed by the Woman in Red after having watched “Manhattan Melodrama” at the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. Some say it wasn’t Dillinger who had been killed but another poor bastard who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it was a last-minute switch at the crucial moment. Maybe John was saved by the kind of trick that only film can offer.

 

Charles Starkweather patterned his life after the movies, he studied James Dean incessantly and tried to dress, act, and walk like him. He invented the killing spree with his girlfriend, Carol Fugate, and he was killed in the electric chair June 25, 1959. It happened in Nebraska.

 

They came to the movies to lie in the projector’s glow and hide in its arms forever. Their solace was the umbrella of comfort that only celluloid can offer. Their fevered brains were soothed by the cool hands of the Image.

 

Sometimes we open doors that we shouldn’t be opening, and we walk through them as blind bastards. Other times we walk through them looking for a thrill, a brief shot of electricity to the soul.

 

The young girl sits at the kitchen table, not noticing that the neuron surrounding her home is stretched to the limit, but she senses something is wrong…Extremely wrong….

 

She likes the movies, but just for entertainment. She’s only 11, thin and geeky, not knowing how things really are, not knowing the experiences of sex and death. She has had inklings of what these things are but he isn’t exactly sure about it. She isn’t certain if she is afraid or happy about this. She hasn’t had the Jones for the movie narcotic but it will come soon. The sexual urge will follow. Soon she will take the shot of boiled down celluloid, the mother’s milk, a shot that will send a fever to the brain and soothe her fears. Once it goes in it never comes out.

 

“Goddammitt!” the father screams as he takes a chair and smashes it and smashes it to the floor. The mother is upstairs yelling and nagging.

 

“Goddammitttt!”

 

The wood splinters dance in the air then settle to the floor. The girl keeps on doing her homework; if she keeps on doing his normal routine things will be okay. The Spelling assignment that she is working on requires her to make a story from the 10 words of the week.

 

“This will be a good story,” she says to herself. “A story of deep red and purple things. Black and blue and what’s in between.”

 

The chair smashing goes on and the girl stops her homework, leaves the kitchen and enters the television room. She switches the TV on and watches and watches, drowning out the noise in the kitchen. The sound of the chair breaking, the sound of her mother screaming, drowned out as the loving hands of the cathode ray tube take her away.

 

It doesn’t matter what’s on the tube right now, just as long as there is movement on the screen. Every so often he glances towards the kitchen where the noise of splintering wood is continuing. It doesn’t bother her anymore; the television is here. She watches the screen intently; the vampire on the screen is pale and thin lipped. She moves seamlessly through the fog and the darkness.

 

“She looks like I do when I have an asthma attack.”

 

Suddenly the noise has stopped and a door slams, followed by a thud and some whimpering. The father is gone, went out for a walk, the daughter imagines. Maybe he’ll come back and take her to the antique toy store tomorrow. They could talk to the proprietress, Aurora. She was very entertaining, and her collection of antique broken toys was fascinating to the young child. Some of the toys were made of iron, some of wood, no plastic.

 

Her mother is silent also. The only sound is from the television. Pale and wan, the girl watches and watches while shadows and images ricochet off the walls of her brain. She falls asleep in the chair briefly then wakes up. She goes up to bed, clutching her favorite toy – a troll doll with blonde hair. She knew it was lucky because branded on the figure’s soles were horseshoes. She is not concerned. She is not bothering to see what happened to her mother nor wondering where her father went.

 

“I start here and it ends here. Then we can rewind.”

 

She goes to bed and doesn’t dream.

 

The neuron band gets tighter. The white noise gets brighter.

 

The demon crept in during the early morning. He was laughing softly to himself and he crept inside the girl, always chuckling softly so the child didn’t hear. The trickster offered her images and solace; the child obeyed and rid herseld of the pain.

 

Morning had come quietly and there was no sign of what had happened the night before. The girl walked around the house admiring the handiwork. The splintered chair was gone, the mother was gone and so was the father. Smiling broadly, she went to the refrigerator and took a box of Wheat Chex down from the pantry. She filled a bowl with the cereal, then added some milk, got a spoon and had breakfast. The young woman was calm and not afraid. She brought the cereal into the living room and switched on the television. She watched contentedly and ate her breakfast. When she was done eating, she left the bowl in the living room and went upstairs. The television was still on. She wouldn’t come down for a while. The white noise grew brighter. Meanwhile, the grinning shadows she had left behind started to cry. They missed their daughter.

 

 

 

Originally from Gravesend, Brooklyn, NYC, Peter Marra lived in the East Village from 1979 to 1993 at the height of the punk / no wave / art and music rebellion. He has had a lifelong fascination with Surrealism, Dadaism, and Symbolism; some of his favorite writers being Paul Eluard, Arthur Rimbaud, Tristan Tzara, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Miller. Peter also cites Roger Corman and Russ Meyer as influences.

 

His earliest recollection of the writing process is, as a 1st grader, creating a children’s book with illustrations. The only memory he has of this project is a page that contained a crayon drawing of an airplane, caught in a storm. The caption read: “The people are on a plane. It is going to crash. They are very scared.” His parents were always disturbed by that first book.

 

A Dadaist and a Surrealist, Peter’s writings explore alienation, addiction, the function and misuse of love and attraction, the curse of secrets, the pain of victimization and the impact of multi-obsessions. He has had over 200 poems published either in print or online in over 25 journals.

 

His published works include approximate lovers (downtown materialaktion) from Bone Orchard Press, Vanished Faces (a performance of occult infections) from Writing Knights Press, and Peep-O-Rama: Sins of the Go-Go Girls & Random Crucifixions: Obsessions, Dolls & Maniac Cameras from Hammer & Anvil Books.

 

Peter was Danse Macabre's 2018 Artist-in-Residence.