Paul Wilborn’s new novel, Florida Hustle, is set in the world of cheap 1980s slasher films. In the opening chapter, aspiring horror filmmaker Michael Donnelly, 17, gets a limo ride to his favorite video store “Horror Time Video.“
Excerpt:
Closing his eyes, Michael conjured his establishing shot:
EXT. – Palm Beach – Day
Tight on a long black Cadillac cruising streets as smooth as alabaster. The camera pulls back, the B/G music soft but with a steady beat. The limo’s graphite-gray windows give away no secrets as it glides past rigid hedges, putting-green lawns and coquina-colored privacy walls.
A title card superimposes over the action for five seconds:
Palm Beach January 1982
The shot pulls back as the limo makes a left onto a four-lane avenue, lined with coconut palms, the east and west traffic divided by a lushly landscaped median. Small knots of extras – costumed in pastels and carrying shopping bags – sashay along wide sidewalks, lined with shops and restaurants that wouldn’t be out of place on the Italian Riviera.
Roll main titles as the limo crosses an ornate, old-world drawbridge. On the west side of the bridge, the tone shifts from The Great Gatsby to Serpico. The buildings along the waterfront are shiny and solid, but the downtown beyond is all for-rent signs and empty storefronts. A bleary-eyed drunk, rousing himself from an inset doorway, raises a bony finger as the limo turns north onto an urban thoroughfare thick with cars headed somewhere else.
Hold on a final card: “A film by Michael Donnelly.“
“Stop!” Michael shouted from the back.
The driver dutifully stomped the brake, tossing the aspiring 17-year-old auteur off the leather backseat and onto the floor, as other drivers shouting curses and pounding horns – dodged around the suddenly stationary limo.
Michael had snapped out of his film reverie just as the Cadillac passed a strip center housing Larry’s Discount Liquors, Soap and Suds 24-hour Laundry Palace and Horror Time Video, its picture window painted black and plastered with posters for Friday The 13th, Halloween, The Omen II and a dozen more blood-soaked titles.
“Sorry about that.” the driver said, calmly looking over his shoulder at the empty back seat. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Michael whispered, from the black-carpeted floor. “But you passed it.”
“Don’t worry kid,” he said. “I got this.”
The man at the wheel, Randy Stewart, was currently a resident of the Donnelly’s pool house. He was Alex Donnelly’s best friend, tennis instructor and the bass player in Alex’s Tuesday night jam sessions. He also drove the limo when the regular driver was off. At 39, Randy’s tight curls had gone salt-and-pepper, but he still looked like an athlete – tanned and muscled, and always dressed in tennis whites and sneakers. A ranked player in the early 70s, Randy was most famous for a U.S. open quarterfinal when Ilie “Nasty” Nastase frisbee’d a racket at his head. POTENTIAL CUT
While he was still an excellent tennis player, Randy was a terrible driver. To get back to Horror Time Video, he attempted a U-turn that immediately blocked all four lanes. As more horns blared, the limo bumped over a curb into a motel parking lot. Randy’s driving mantra was “speed trumps safety.” so he didn’t bother to check for oncoming cars when he bounced back over the curb onto the highway, setting off another round of horns, screeching tires and angry shouts. Michael pulled himself up off the black-carpeted floor and back onto the leather seat.
Punching the gas pedal, Randy made a hard right into the strip center parking lot. Too fast now, he again slammed on the brake, sending Michael tumbling off the seat a second time. When the limo finally stopped, the chrome grill was extended across the front sidewalk, two feet from Horror Time’s poster-filled picture window.
“Jeez, sorry, kid.” Randy said, seconds later, as he held open the back door and stared inside at the boy on the floor. “Let me help you up.”
Michael waved him away.
Stepping back, Randy watched a gawky mantis of a kid, with a spiky mass of brown hair, unfold from the car, his bony six-foot frame swathed in black jeans and a gray Psycho Killer T-shirt.
“You okay?” Randy asked, pulling out a pack of Salems.
“I’ll live.” Michael said, already striding toward the store and not looking back.
Randy lit a cigarette, leaning back against the driver’s door as he exhaled.
“Take your time, Mike,” he said. “I got all day.” POTENTIAL CUT
The wooden front door of Horror Time Video was hidden behind a life-size black and white cutout of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. Pushing the door open set off Horror Time’s version of a door chime, a woman’s terrified SCREAM!
Pausing inside the door, Michael sniffed the store’s acrid bouquet of mold and burnt wicks. Ray, the owner, favored ambiance over commerce, so his horror video store was lit by thirty-six candles flickering atop a half-dozen Liberace-style candelabras set on tables around the low-ceilinged room, the tarnished bases gloved in pleated jackets of wax. Stepping from a sun-washed Florida day into this shadowy den, Michael felt like he was nervously descending a basement staircase in The House On Haunted Hill.
God, he loved this place!
He picked up one of the silver, baton-style flashlights Ray provided for customers on a table by the door, the pale beam revealing racks of VHS boxes garish with Godzillas, teen-agers from outer space, and masked slashers waving hatchets or machetes. Poster board knives, dangling from strings, pointed out Horror Time’s various specialty sections, each blade marked with a jagged, hand-lettered inscription: CORMAN, HITCHCOCK, WHALE, 5Os SCI-FI, SLASHERS, VAMPIRES, WITCHES AND WARLOCKS, JAPAN’S FINEST and more.
Michael bypassed the video racks, heading directly to the checkout desk in the back. Ray had called the day before saying he’d located “something I know you’re going to really like. I got it all wrapped up for you.”
Ray Villadonga, a horror film savant, who appeared to be gestating triplets under his grimy T-shirts, was the closest thing Michael had to a friend. Crystal Donnelly had home-schooled her son, and until her untimely exit, she had been his main companion and confidant. Now, except for occasional trips to a mall movie complex or Horror Time Video, where he and Ray jousted for hours over arcane bits of horror movie history, Michael was at the drafting desk in his bedroom, sketching out storyboards for the fright films he was certain would catapult him from Palm Beach to Hollywood.
A toad-like teenage clerk, his cheeks dotted with fresh constellations of acne, hunkered on a stool behind a blood-red counter reading the latest Conan the Barbarian by flashlight. The clerk hadn’t looked up when the door SCREAMED. He didn’t notice the restless customer idling in front of him.
“How much for that one?” Michael finally asked, his flashlight focused on the promo poster for the upcoming Slasher High, featuring the screaming face of Dawn Karston, the film’s blonde teenage star.
The clerk’s head made a lazy swivel, following Michael’s flashlight beam to the wall behind the counter. He quickly returned to his comic.
“Not for sale.”
“But I want to buy it.”
Setting his own flashlight on the counter, the clerk closed his comic book with feigned care, taking a long breath before looking up.
“You can want to buy it, but you can’t. It’s not for sale. The movie isn’t out until next week. We got old posters in the corner.” The kid nodded in that direction before going back to Conan the Barbarian. He didn’t see Michael pull a fat roll of cash from his pocket, but his head jerked up when Michael slapped a fifty hard on the counter.
“I want to buy that one.”
It’s not….”
Another fifty slammed down.
The clerk aimed his flashlight at the bills, just to be sure. Then, setting the glowing baton back on the counter, his hand crept crab-like toward the bills, thick digits fluttering briefly above the face of Ulysses S. Grant. The decision didn’t take long. His hand came down on the crisp fifties, sliding them back across the counter and into the pocket of his jeans.
“You want me to roll it up in a tube? Or what?”
“Yes. In a tube. Did my order come in?”
“Who are you?”
“Look under the name Bava. Mario Bava. Where’s Ray? Or Tony? They know me here.”
The clerk searched under the counter and came back with a VHS tape, wrapped in a sheet of lined notebook paper with “BAVA” scrawled on it. Snapping the rubber band that held it and crumpling the paper wrapper, the clerk shined his flashlight on a video box for Bay of Blood, Collector’s Edition. On the cover, a screaming woman, the tops of her breasts breaking the surface of a bloody pool, was about to be stabbed in the throat by a curved blade wielded by an unseen attacker. There, just below the title, was the director’s credit: Una pelicula de Mario Bava.
The clerk lowered the video box and shined his light in Michael’s face.
“You don’t look like a Mario to me. You made these movies?”
Looking away from the light, Michael pushed a hand through his unruly hair. He couldn’t believe this.
“Let’s just say I’m a fan.” he said, reaching out. “Can I have it now?”
The clerk aimed the light back at the blood red cover.
“So who is this Mario guy?”
“He’s the goddamn Fellini of gore!” Michael almost shouted, as he reached out again for the tape. “Can I have it now, please?”
“Hmmm.” The clerk hummed, turning the box over and reading the back. “Never heard of him.”
“How’d you get this job?” Michael barked, his patience gone. “This is Horror Time Video, right? Bava’s the father of modern horror. There’s a knife with his name on it right over there. Friday the 13th was a direct rip-off of Bay of Blood.”
“Yeah, Friday the 13th was cool.” the clerk said, still eyeing the back of the box.
“No. It wasn’t,” Michael shouted. “It was shit. Does Ray know you work here?”
“You mean, Uncle Ray?” the clerk asked, holding the box out to Michael. “Yeah, he knows.”
Florida Hustle, released by St. Petersburg Press, is available locally at Tombolo Books and Book + Bottle.
