Free B-Movie Attack by Alan Spencer Page A

bad.”  
    “I heard she’s not really re-married. She just told that to Dad so he’d let her go. She’s all over the place, finding that inner swinger. I heard this from a friend of my mom’s who still lives in Chicago. Something snapped in her, I think. Dad’s an overbearing son-of-a-gun, I’ll tell you. God, he rode my ass in sports. T-ball, he was screaming and foaming at the mouth at the umpire. And when I came home, he’d drill my ass. ‘Why didn’t you catch the ball?’ ‘Why did you miss a fucking ball sitting on a rubber perch with a baseball bat? It’s impossible.’ And before police academy, he had me jogging in the morning with him at least four times a week. Early training, he called it.  
    “I love him, don’t get me wrong. He genuinely cares about me. Never laid a hand on me or mom or yelled at us or abused alcohol or any of that average bad childhood stuff. He was overzealous, obsessed with having the best for me, and somewhere along the way, he got it trapped in his head that I wanted to be a cop. I thought I wanted to be a cop once upon a time, but I changed my mind. I once wanted to be a garbage man. Seriously. I thought it was so cool hanging on to the back of the dumpster rigs. Or I read somewhere there’s a Pez store. I could sell Pez collectables and hold Pez tasting parties and celebrate the coming of new Pez dispensers. I hear there’s Pez based on the entire cast of Seinfield .
    “My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and once she went back to school and got her degree in massage therapy—dog and people—she escaped my dad. She’s a surfer girl now riding those California waves. Back when she got pregnant, she didn’t have much of a choice to stick with the family. Her parents were Catholic and so were my dad’s. Once you had a child, it was shotgun wedding all the way. And I know she was cheating on him when I was small. Neighbors. Personal trainers. Friends. You name it. But it was a happy secret. My dad didn’t care.”
    Billy gulped his alcohol-enhanced beverage. “Whoa, that just came out of me, didn't it?”
    Nelson agreed. “It sounds like you’re very pent up. Scary situations bring out those things in people. When Wayne gets better, you should talk to him.”
    “He’s not a bad guy,” Billy reiterated. “He was a beat cop once. Something so simple took him out of the rat race and into a security job. He stepped out of his car, there was a deep pothole, and his left leg stepped wrong, and it fucked up his back. He wasn’t the same after that. That was what, ten years ago?”
    “What does Jessica think of him?”
    Billy raised his shoulders. “Honestly, we’ve only gone out to dinner a few times. She knows about his ambitions for me.”
    Death Reject caught his attention again. The man was standing at a street corner wearing that same evil grin and exploded. People in nearby cafés and crossing the street were struck by rib bones and white shards. “Christ, that’s exactly what happened this morning.”
    “Seriously,” Nelson said. “Same people and everything.”
    “No, I’m serious. Maybe somebody was inspired by this movie.”
    “This movie is super rare and hard to find. The movie itself was seized before it got to play in theatres back in the late seventies. A group of upright Christians seized the prints. Later on, I heard someone else stole the original reels, made a print of it, and then put it back into the safe they stole it from to avoid prosecution. They distributed it on-line to start a cult following. Nothing really happened, though. Me and some other people were interested, and that’s about it. I don’t think anybody would watch this and be inspired to blow themselves up over it.”
    “People are crazy enough—crazy enough to pirate bazillions of movies like you.”
    Nelson clinked his glass against Billy’s. “Free movies are the way to be. Viva revolution.”
    The credits to the film rolled; Billy missed the final scene. “What