Origin
Leatherface-Age 13
By
Barry Eysman
He whumped them good. He always chainsawed them good. He liked the bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz sound. He liked when it struck meat dead on, and the screams of the victim, soon to die, and the whirring as the blade bit, straight and true, and began to eat away, to slice through flesh and bone, as it licked up the gouts of blood from the torn in half body, or the headless neck, or the severed limbs. It was good on moonless nights to see dying, to feel that surging power of the saw. THE SAW IS FAMILY. In English script on the blade. Magnificent. Strong and huge and taking no prisoners. He was Leatherface forever bold, with the dead faces stitched and put on his own ugly nauseating face with a missing nose, just nostril holes, and his teeth like craggy cemetery head stones seen from a distance canted over and turned and torn by the misshapen birth the damned woman had of him.
All the pot and booze and cigarettes she had ingested when he was turning round in her womb, just beginning, and never having had a chance, a prayer from day one. And they would always run from him when they saw his face, little Russell Sawyer and the freak and the chainsaw made them run even faster but he caught up with them. He knocked them down and saw their eyes make wide-open O's, and it tasted good to see their death twitch, and the horrible fear of hell in them. They would, each and every one of them, have rather been chainsawed for always rather than to see what was on their bloody other side. All those Christers, all those war mongerers, so here's some war from little Russell Sawyer, the backwoods kid with the scary face. The mongrel kid with the dirty shirt and torn jeans he wore the same every single day of school and weekends.
They never gave him a chance, therefore he never gave them one. Brother was dead and uncle too. Grandfather had finally succumbed at age 123. Everyone else had been killed. The house of horror was through. The myths though lived always. The house had been cleared of its bones, its gristle, its body parts, its chicken in a hung cage, the parts of animals, the sick sweet taste of blood, the house cleaned by cleaners who had the special cheery job of cleaning up the bloodiest crime scenes. And Leatherface was dead, with a chainsaw through his belly, clean cut from front to back. And he had had his arm severed and he could not use the saw again as he bled to death in the killing pen as the cows mooing the last sounds he had heard on this earth.
And Russell Sawyer smiled. As he curled in his bed and hated being popular, hated being cute, hated old women pinching his apple cheeks, and his intelligence that didn't get him beaten up at school, but got him admiration from his friends, from girls especially who were always clustered round him, always in competition to see who could sit closest to him at the lunch table, and it was all wrong, for the most wrong thing of all, that blended this all together, was that he was meek, and mild, and had a soft watery voice, he was level headed and saw the good in everything, putting his troubles behind him when another's came first, and another's always came first.
He had all the Chainsaw Massacre movies on DVD; many were bought several times, for new remastering, for new extras, and new commentaries. The first one, the only real one, and the ones after. Even The Next Generation, which was screwy as hell and finally made no sense. And the actors who played Leatherface could come nowhere to close to Gunner Hansen who created a character out of him, while the others were just hulking brutes, no different than Jason, just killing machines, but there was something to Gunner Hansen's performance, and make no doubt of it, it was, that kept intriguing him, that kept him coming back for more. And the film—the astrology, the sun spots, the huge old round watch with the massive nail cutting through it into a tree, there were keys, there were hints this was more than what you were seeing. There was something else.
Not in Russell's world. Everything was how they were seen; everything was surface, and it was a nice suburb and he had nice parents and sister who was not too big a pain in the butt. School went well. Halloween was a week away. There were no Leatherface costumes and he never made one or a cardboard chain saw, for that would have made a clown out of a deity, not to mention Russell's blowing his cover as a good kid. He loved horror movies and the Chainsaw ones, even the pure garbage like Chainsaw Hookers, were just ones of tons that he had, buried among them, his obsession, his need to be different, his need not to be good at sports and be in all these clubs, not to win awards. His need to hurt and dismember.
Because it seemed that was what all these people, even his dog Lundy, the school, his nice home, his kind dad and thoughtful mom were doing to him—they were tearing him apart. He was 13, the lucky age, and he didn't have any dreams. He would be a banker like his father. He would marry someone resembling in looks, deeds, and brownie making for when his own kids got home from school. They were in effect quite simply taking him and flensing him and he shouldn't know words like flensing because it was stuff like that that had caused him to be made to skip a grade. He had tried pot once. No high. He had tried cigarettes once, what was the big deal? He had tried a beer, one sip, tasted godawful. He never said words like godawful. And he knew how Leatherface died.
They put him in a cage. They made him into a performing monkey. They liked him for what they saw and the act he put on was becoming not an act. He had read as much as he could find about Ed Gein, the Plainsfield murderer who danced in the moonlight wearing skins of his victims, from grave robbing, graduated to murder, as he was slicing his latest and last woman hung upside down in his barn when the men found him, this mousy getting old balding man who had been doing this for years, and Robert Bloch's Psycho delved into that idea, and Russell killed a spider, a little water spider on his sink last Wednesday night, at seven forty p.m. and got sick over crushing it with his hand and hurled his entire dinner and some of his lunch in the toilet.
Don't he wanted to say all in one whirlwind whoosh of words, don't like it when they dress you in all the cool clothes, don't like it when you get chosen for the team any team don't be happy you aced a test, don't want to grow up so fast so you can be in charge because you will never be in charge. Don't look forward to a date because they are after the same thing you are and you and they are not the subject at hand at all at all.
Russell had all his Fangoria magazines stacked next to his mint condition Famous Monsters of Filmland that his father had preserved from his own boy hood when monsters had clay face and zippers up the backs of ill-fitting monster costumes. Russell wanted to kill them. He wanted to splatter their blood with his grinding chainsaw all over this sunny roomy all the fancy doo dads of a house. He wanted to chainsaw his not too big a pain in the butt sister's head off, the momentum of the Sawyer saw shooting it in great bloody comas right into the giant wall wafer thin plasma TV with the Fox logo burned into it at the bottom left, damn repubs., he thought, got what they deserved on that. He wanted to chop off her fat little 10 year old fingers, and put them out on the laundry line with clothes pins to dry them off, for his mother was a fifties kind of woman.
He wanted to bzzzzzz through his teachers, the ones who liked him the very most, to the ones who liked him the most—those being the only categories. He would tie them to the trees in the woods one-yard from the school football field, just like the woods in the Chainsaw movies. He would wear the mask of his dead sister's face and he would pull the cord and start up the people-eating machine. He would dwell on their fear and on their sweat and on the blood that sang in their veins, he could almost hear it now, as it almost suicidal like rammed to the walls of their canals wanting to be tasted by the chainsaw's gripping grinding tearing teeth.
His room had the requisite computer, his DVD player, his Blu-Ray player, his DVDs stacked beside the horror movies on the blue carpeting, all taken out and used and touched and worshiped so that it was impossible for them to ever get one speck of dust on them. And the walls papered with horror movie posters, autographed pictures of horror writers like David Silva and Eli Roth, and of course first and forever foremost, Gunnar Hansen—oh how Russell would like to meet them in person, and stumble trip over effluvium coming from his so awkward mouth.
It was Saturday morning and he had no CDs or Ipod for he cared nothing about music. It was the gore was his score. It was the horror that felt so good when it was sprung full and then touched into utter staples biting into his eyes, so it felt, an awesome visceral pain that was like white hot electricity at the core of him, even better than an orgasm, an orgasm rather taken to a million volts higher. Sis would sleep till noon like every Saturday; dad was on a hunting trip, which Russell did not approve of. The animals had done nothing to him; therefore he would do nothing to them but let them live. And be kind to Lundy who was still asleep dreaming terrier dreams on Russell's end of bed.
Russell mentally tabulated what films to watch today—tomorrow was Sunday church he was forced to go to with his family, which roundly ticked him off, all that phony baloney piety just unnerved him like no horror film ever had, and ruined horror film watching Sunday afternoon. But today and tonight. Starting with Africa—Blood and Guts, new and unedited, and then a little Pieces, stupid and fun, then one or two more films he liked all right, not the Freddy stuff, which just made him sleepy cause no Freddy in the films till sleep and that made him yawn. Then when he could not put it off one more second, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he studied like a textbook. Not Tobe Hooper, who had immense help on the film, and who after Eaten Alive had proven himself a hack by a succession of movies, each worse than the one before, till it was straight to video, straight to satellite TV—why did this man keep getting work?
So readying himself to get out of bed, to pull down the shade, to put on his clothes, jeans freshly washed and pressed, natch, shirt the same, and socks and tennis shoes, to get the video of Africa-Blood and Guts, he noticed his door opening and dweeb girl entered the room. With a chainsaw that was so huge, it would have given the late Edmund Purdom of Pieces a fit and a half with a cherry on top. She wore penny loafers and petticoats and a blue dress with white ruffles on it. She smiled a dimpled smile and she had her golden hair in pigtails. As Lundy ran out of the room. She wore white bobby socks. Her knees looked cute.
She walked to Russell who lay in bed in total WTF shock and she held out the chainsaw that had in old English script carved on it THE SAW IS FAMILY. She pulled the cord. He didn't think her spaghetti arms would have that much power. But she got it revving with the first try. His thoughts flew at lightning speed--tell me about that watch with the nail in it she's going to kill me I should be the one killing her I'm Leatherface's love child we are the descendants of the chainsaw Sawyers she is the little girl in the first rip off, not counting Tobe Hooper's own rip off, who liked to kill people bloodily for her brothers time-wise and age-wise it can't be so then why are my parents standing behind her with their own chainsaws revving and those peaceful contented looks on their faces I am so used to and should I not be getting the hell out of here as they all came closer to him.
And he felt his eyes form the O's he had seen in the movies. He felt his blood strain to get to the saw's teeth, to be chewed up by them. He wanted to ask why and then thought lie down. Lie down and let it happen. This is no dream, Rosemary Woodhouse, this is really happening, and sis who turned out to be a bigger pain in the butt than he had realized stuck the blade into his bare left arm, while Dad and Mom smiling as sweetly sawed off his other arm and right leg respectively and he screamed and would rather be chainsawed endlessly than die and go to hell, and he screamed and screamed and sis dug her huge chainsaw into the middle of his bare chest as he felt the blood geyser and saw it too. And he hoped his death rattle would be as good as the ones in the movies and Dad had kept his Famous Monsters magazines in mint condition all those years and blood striped the room and Russell who wasn't a Russell or a boy any more, was head sliced, his eyes seeing as they and what they were screwed into hit the plasma TV splat success and his brain had one last thought, don't bloody up the movies or posters or my DVD players, please take care..then he lost thought as his head slicked down the screen and plopped bloodily to the floor.
Dad and Mom and Sis, after cleaning up the room and putting the pieces of Russell in body bag or two, for they had been doing this for years, always kept a store of them, and knew the procedure of getting them to the inferno of the fires at the garbage dump, having made those trips there in this town or like dumps in other towns where they lived, cleaned themselves up, put their clothes in the washer, redressed, then went to the dining room where they had breakfast of orange juice, coffee, hash browns, fried eggs, and buttermilk pancakes.
"We have to do this more often," Sis said. "It's just my second." And she smiled as she forked a piece of pancake to her smiling mouth. Her parents eating heartily did the same. Surface is as surface does; therefore they were always going to be safe and undiscovered.
"Yes," Mom said, sipping coffee, "Let's."
Dad laughed. They finished their breakfast. Shared clean up duties. Then went about getting rid of the former kid. Afterwards they went to the Cineplex at the Mall to see "The Dark Knight," stuffed themselves with Coke and popcorn and had a very good time. At movie's end, Sis pointed to a boy who looked very nice and polite, as he came up the aisle. She said, "That one." And so eventually that one it was. It too was very satisfyingly bloody.