Tuning in on the Meat TV
By Robert Masterson

     The store was called VueMasters, Vu Master or View Masters depending upon which sign one found most credible. All were homemade and “crude” did not quite describe their oddly repellent lettering. One was painted directly onto the street-side’s blacked-out window with the words “rear entrence” [sic] and “XXX” added beneath; another was fashioned from a metal plate and hung above the alley-facing door leading into the store, and the third adorned the door itself. Simultaneously redundant and aberrant, each sign presented its version of the store’s name in sickly combinations of green and violet; green letters floated on a purple background; purple letters were outlined in green; a snaky kind of day-glow combination set both colors throbbing.
     Ray thought the whole thing was stupid and funny. In his head and to his friends, he called the store “The Amistad.” Sometimes when he left at the end of his shift, when he stepped out into the alley and paused under the green and purple metal sign and looked out into the 2:00 a.m. gloom through which he’d have to walk to get to his studio apartment just in time for the 2:25 a.m. gloom that awaited him there, Ray would mutter under his breath and to no one but himself, “Give us free.”


     “Hey,”the sort of bummed-up looking guy squawked after doing a slow 360˚ between the display counter and the magazine racks. “You know what this place is, right?”
     Oh, shit, Ray thought. Here we go.
     It seemed as if every couple of weeks someone like this bum-looking guy came into the store with some kind of chip on his or her shoulder. Men and women, well-dressed and in rags, wild-eyed and sullen, they’d look at all the hard-core by which they found themselves surrounded and they’d get that broken, fanatic look on their faces and they’d go off. Their religions or their politics, their senses of social justice, their innate senses of right and wrong were assaulted by all the imagery of ass and pussy and cock, the haptic public repetition of all things private and wet, the stricken chords within themselves shamefully vibrating in response to acts remembered, imagined, or deliberately repressed. The store was the belly of their beast and, thusly offended, they would squawk. That was all they usually did, but if they did anything else, Ray could always reach for the phone.
     “This place?” Ray replied. “Oh, man, I don’t know. This
place? How about an abyss? Is it a sinful abyss? Or a fleshpot? Maybe a carnal cesspool? How about an abomination unto the Lord? Anything ringing a bell?”
     The bum blinked.
     “Well, sure,” he answered slowly. “I guess so. But that’s kind of abstract, you know. All I really meant was, do you know what function this place serves? Do you know why they built it?”
     Ray considered.
     “Umm... to make butt-loads of money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week because ‘we never close’ and I don’t get paid shit to sit here and rake it in for them?” Ray ventured.
     The bum laughed low in his throat.
     “Better,” he said. “But, that’s a given. Whatever they do, they always make money. I’m asking if you know why they built this store in this shape at this time in this place?”
     Ray leaned forward, resting his forearms on the display case’s glass top.
     “How would I know something like that?” Ray answered. “Why would I want to know something like that? Do I look like I’ve got some kind of investment here?”
     Again, the bum laughed and drew closer to the counter where Ray oversaw the sales floor and the door leading into the angled hallway lined with booths used to view pornographic videos in privacy.
     “No, you don’t look like an investor,” he said and Ray felt a flush of indignation at this bum’s judgment that he was somehow not investment material.
     “You look like a little cog in an enormous wheel that is part of an unimaginably large machine the workings of which you are completely unaware. You are a flea riding a rat in the basement of a factory producing something you’ll never understand or even see. You’re a worm in the garbage behind the cafeteria where the workers eat. You’re a piece of....”
     “Hey, hey, hey,” Ray cut him off.
     “Too much?” the bum asked sheepishly.
     “Way too much,” Ray replied. “Now just tell me what the fuck you’re talking about before this ceases to amuse me and I start thinking about throwing your ass out of here.”
     “Fair enough,” the bum agreed and moved to also lean his forearms across the counter’s glass though at a fair remove from Ray’s cash register position. “So what I’m asking you is, beside the obvious, do you know what this store does?”
     “I have no idea what you’re trying to get me to say so I will say ‘no.’ I will say, ‘No, I do not know what this store does.’ Now will you tell me what you’re talking about?”
     The bum-looking guy breathed out heavily making a sort of “huh” sound and deliberately looked about the store, the displays of artificial body parts, the magazines and books, the vibrators and penis pumps, the marquee teasing the filthy films playing in the filthy arcade; he looked at all of it.
     “It’s like a generator and a battery and a radio,” the bum guy told Ray.“It’s like a collector and a storehouse and a broadcaster. I call it the Meat TV.”

                             ***

     Ray looked at the definition again. It wasn’t helping him much.

     The last mathematics Ray’d learned was during his undergraduate days when he took a brace of classes designed for athletics and art history majors commonly referred to on campus as “numbers for numbskulls” or just “bonehead math.”
     The geometry represented in the description of a trapezohedron was far beyond anything he’d encountered before and he felt humbled by the angles and planes. It was an illustration of the irregular, almost coffin-shaped crystal that finally broke through his ignorance of symbolic language. And Ray could see how that crystal was the same shape as the video arcade where he worked. Ray looked at the illustration on his home computer’s screen, the diagram that had come up in answer to his internet query for “trapezohedron” and compared it to the mental blueprint of the store’s arcade he carried inside his brain. They were, as far as he could tell, identical in shape and proportion. Ray’d swept and mopped it often enough to memorize its peculiar layout and contours. The regular irregularity of the arcade had made it inconvenient and difficult to clean and he had often cursed the blind corners and sharp turns needlessly built into the structure.
Since the bum’s jagged discourse, however, it made sense to Ray. The angles and steps of the arcade’s hallway reflected the corners and lines of the illustration. The bum had been correct when he told Ray the shop’s XXX-video arcade was designed and built in the shape of a trapezohedron.
     “A shining trapezohedron, man,” the bum had elaborated. “Think of this place, all those video monitors glowing and all those guys whacking off in front of all those screens. It’s fucking glowing, man.”
     And what was a trapezohedron but a prism? And what was a prism but a kind of lens? And what do lens do to light? Lens focus light. If the store was, indeed, some kind of giant lens, what did it focus?
     “Think of how much frustration, cum, hatred, self-loathing, piss, loneliness, shit, rage, sweat, shame, vomit, and misery gets poured out into those booths, man,” the bum had explained. “You clean it up each night, right? You see all that shit, all that fucking human debris, right?”
     “I see it,” Ray’d agreed.
     “Think of all that shit as the evidence of energy, of bad human emotions being channeled and amplified by all this fucking porn, this sick, depraved shit you sell and show to your sick, depraved customers. It amps up their fucked-up feelings and they jizz it back out, they shit it out, they breathe it out into the middle of this trapezohedron.” The bum had begun to hit his stride as an orator. His elbows had remained on the glass, but his dirt-streaked hands had begun to move, to describe with smooth arc and parabola the hideous thing his words were constructing in Ray’s mind.
     “Okay,” the bum had continued and his hands continued to accompany the text of his speech. “Think of people like electric guitars. When they’re in good condition and tuned-up right, they sound sweet and pure. You can distort them and fuzz them and amplify them, but the chords will still sound pure.”
     “If you say so,” Ray’d replied.
     “Humph,” the bum had snorted and he had shot a Ray a look. “Anyway, if the guitar is already warped and out-of-tune with missing strings and whatnot, it will never sound right. If you amplify a guitar like that, you just amplify its wrongness. That’s what this store does. It amplifies all those fucked-up jack-offs’ wrongness.”
     Ray’d rolled this over in his head for a while the bum continued describing this same concept with different analogies and metaphors, each one more vehement and loaded than the last.
     “Think of people as pus-filled leeches...,”the bum had begun.
     “Okay, okay,” Ray’d interrupted and he’d held up a hand, palm toward the bum, for silence. “I got it.”
     “Too much?” the bum had asked.
     “Getting there,” Ray’d answered.
     And after his shift had ended and after he’d mopped up all the shit, cum, piss, mucus, and vomit from the cement floor of the arcade and after he’d been relieved of duty by one of the many, many and widely varied individuals who seemed only to work the store’s graveyard shift, Ray went home to look up just exactly what this trapezohedron thing really was.
     It was a lens.

     An intriguing notion, really, this idea that the store’s arcade was some kind of collector, battery, and amplifier, that it was a giant emotional lens. Ray turned the concept over in his head for a few days and, when walking the angled corridors of the arcade itself, he tried to feel what this strange lens was catching and what it was focusing. If the bum-guy was right, there was a current of frustrated psychosexual perversion somehow coursing through the building that somehow became amplified as it coursed and then was somehow focused by the prismatic design of the building itself. That was a lot of “somehows.”
     But then what? What if all that was somehow true? If the store truly was a lens that focused the accumulation of deviant emotional energy captured within the arcade, where was that beam directed? And for what purpose? Because some of what the bum-guy had told him seemed to be making the most distorted and frightening kind of sense imaginable, Ray felt almost obligated to remain skeptical about the rest of the story, a story about a trapezohedron in a black church in Massachusetts and about fucked-up sex beams aimed at one of the moons of Neptune, and about the kinds of things that were feeding from those beams.
     “And they’re getting stronger and stronger. And they’re getting tired of waiting,” the bum had added.
     Ray had to draw the line somewhere, though, and, as weird as it sounded, the ability and the desire to tap into twisted sexual energy didn’t seem all that farfetched. Shit, any number of people and corporations would love to bend some of that American perv lust toward votes or sales or consumer satisfaction or consumer dissatisfaction. Figure out what pushed those deep dark buttons locked away inside our skulls and they could figure out how to make some serious money or acquire power or both. It seemed likely that this technology was shooting its creepy sex data to Seattle or Los Alamos or Washington or Atlanta. At least it seemed likely to Ray and it sure seemed a whole hell of a lot more likely than whatever that bum had been frothing about tentacles, black goats in the forest, three-lobed burning eyes, and “night gaunts,” whatever they were.


     Ray could concede that even a lunatic could be half right, and so he began to look for clues on his trips to the arcade. At the end of every shift, he put on his headlight and pulled the bucket of greasy, gray water into the dark arcade. By the dim light on his forehead, Ray pushed the string mop back and forth across the gray concrete floor and scanned the debris for evidence of nefarious activity beyond the normal.
     Ray worked four nights a week for five hours a night, twenty hours a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, 9:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. He wore blue jeans and a sweater most nights since it was always damp and often cold inside the store no matter what the temperature was outside. August, April or December, the thermostat on the wall always read 72˚ and it never was.
     The chill was good to keep the smell of the customers and the customers’ foul activities back there in the private booths down, but it was unnerving to see the fog of his breath when mopping up the insanely foul floors. He’d always wondered how the customers had been able to stand the cool air and jack off without their dicks shriveling. Ray’d often wondered why the customers stood for it. There were plenty of places to go to see naked girls do depraved things but nobody ever complained and everybody seemed to come back. Ray began thinking that all the customers were regulars, that they were all familiar faces. They jacked off in the booths, that was a given. It was the function for which all good porn arcades were designed. The customers dropped their semen and semen-filled tissues to the floor, that was a given. They universally ignored the small wastebaskets placed within each booth. Whether that small gesture was one of defiance, contempt, or exhaustion had never troubled Ray before, except that he had to pick those tissues up, he had to mop up those spent watery fluids. Since the bum’s visit, however, Ray was pondering just what everything at the store might mean and discarded cum-rags deserved new scrutiny. Customers seemed to also enjoy urinating or defecating as well. Finding their blood spattered around a booth or pooled upon its floor was not uncommon nor was finding their vomit. Other more gelatinous or viscous of their accreted secretions he’d always left unidentified but perhaps such blobs and clots were evidence of something.
     I wonder if someone in the Chemistry Department could analyze this stuff, Ray wondered, and be began scraping little samples of disgusting things into plastic sandwich bags he brought from home.
     On the floor and under the seats, he often found objects they’d abandoned or lost. Women’s undergarments and men’s undergarments both clean and soiled, photographs, jewelry, drugs and drug paraphernalia, money in both paper and coin, were commonplace. Ray would push it all into a pile and poke it with his mop handle. Most things he shoveled into a black plastic garbage bag to haul into the alley, but some things he kept. If something looked worth keeping, he would separate the desired object from the rest of the pile, use a dustpan to carry it to the bathroom sink, and (while wearing his rubber gloves) wash and disinfect whatever it was, and it was usually money. Since starting at the store, he’d accrued almost $150 in singles and change, and Ray’d found and kept numerous small bags of marijuana or various powders, a black switchblade knife, and a fake Rolex watch.
     I wonder who could trace this stuff? Ray wondered. How can I find out who these people are?
     Since the bum’s visit, though, Ray began to examine the detritus his broom and mop corralled at his feet with what he imagined was a detective’s perspective. He did a lot more poking at the piles he made and began to inspect such things as wads of charred, dirty hair and what looked like small gobbets of congealed chicken fat with an interest he’d never paid before. Jesus, Ray thought. What the fuck are they doing back here?
Since the bum’s visit, Ray’d gained a concrete objective. He began to really inspect the arcade, to look for some kind of sign or signal to tell him what was really going on here at his until-this-time rather mundane employment in a rather sleazy business. Ray began an investigation. Ray began to research the store, to examine it with new eyes. He really didn’t know what he was looking for, but Ray felt confident he would know it when he did find it. Or them. Or whatever.

________________________________________________________________

END
 

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