The next scene opens in a boy's bedroom. The various items decorating the room are extremely '90s-centric. Large posters of Marilyn Manson, The Smashing Pumpkins, Sublime, Fiona Apple, My Bloody Valentine, Garbage, Nirvana, Hole, and Sonic the Hedgehog line the walls like windows to other worlds. A wire hanger mobile hung ironically with plastic skulls dangles from the ceiling. The room is dark and probably quite smelly. A dusty bass guitar that its owner has never bothered to learn much about leans in the corner. Sleeping in the bed is a lump of a person, of which only a wiry sprig of dyed-purple hair is visible.
BETTY ANN'S NARRATION: Danny was a doofy little goth kid who lived with his mom and dad in a trailer park. All he ever wanted to do was listen to music and play Sega Genesis and look up pictures of girls in bikinis on his 28k internet connection, but his mom always wanted him to do stupid things like go to school or play with the neighborhood boys.
TUCKER'S NARRATION: What's a bikini?
BETTY ANN'S NARRATION: Be quiet, TUCKER.
ERIC'S NARRATION: Yeah, dork! Everyone knows what a bikini is!
GARY'S NARRATION (quietly): Yeah, everyone knows that.
BETTY ANN'S NARRATION: Anyway, it was a Friday morning in the middle of summer vacation, and much like every morning, Danny's neighbors were at the door, wanting him to come out and play.
Danny's dream broke apart with three sharp bangs on the trailer door. He let out an awful groan and crushed the pillow down over the back of his head, trying as hard as he could to hide from it all. But he couldn't hide from much inside the tiny trailer, and he was powerless to stop himself from hearing his mother get up to answer the knock.
Two voices exclaimed in wobbling, overlapping harmony: "Hi-Missus-Pescatori-can-Danny-come-out-and-plaaaaay." The voices were somewhat droning—they spoke this exact sentence all the time, and its delivery had become a matter of dreary routine.
"Well, boys!" Danny's mother exclaimed. "Let me go and find out!"
"Danny," she shrieked hellishly a few seconds later, just feet from his bed. "Danny, you get'cher ass up and go out and play!"
Danny groaned again and rolled over. His eyelids smacked open. He glared at the ceiling, at his skull mobile turning a lazy circle overhead.
"I don't want to play," Danny announced. "I hate Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink."
"Danny!" Danny's mother said, clearly stung. "Those boys are the only friends you got! Now it's already past noon, so you get outta bed and go play with 'em!"
"That's Sahh-doh," Mister Sardo said pettishly outside the trailer. Doctor Vink contributed his opinion in the form of a wild giggle.
Danny's mother drug him out of bed by the ankles. He kicked at her weakly, but she held on tight, and soon he was sprawled on the floor in his pajamas.
"Go play," she ordered.
Ten minutes later, Danny was standing on the steps of his trailer, looking up at the sun. The sun bothered him, due in part to his gothic lineage. Danny's father was goth, as was his father before him, and his father before him. The men of the Pescatori family had always worn eyeshadow and white makeup. Every time Danny spent more than an hour or two outside, he came back in looking like a boiled lobster.
"Hyaah!" Doctor Vink bellowed, waving two plastic light-up He-Man swords savagely above his head, one in each hand, as he and Mister Sardo clambered over the lawn toward Danny in a Power Wheels Jurassic Park jeep.
Danny jumped off the step and dodged the little electric jeep. It traveled slowly and could turn only in wide, sweeping arcs due to the considerable heft of its two occupants. Doctor Vink and Mister Sardo were both portly middle-aged endomorphs with colossal bellies and unkempt sheets of kinked and wiry hair that fell nearly to their shoulder blades. Doctor Vink also had a full beard that quivered below his huge flat face and beady eyes. His mouth was a tiny opening in the beard through which his gnashing teeth could be seen. Each time Doctor Vink ate something, the smell of whatever he had eaten remained like a ghost inside his beard until it was replaced by something else. Doctor Vink was too overweight to either run or jump. He could move about in no fashion other than walking or riding in Mister Sardo's Power Wheels jeep. Mister Sardo had spent his life refusing to learn how to drive a car, and his parents had eventually given up on helping him. He was allowed to transport himself only short distances, to a small collection of pre-approved destinations within the neighborhood, and only by way of the Power Wheels jeep, which had a relatively safe top speed of six miles per hour. Mister Sardo's parents were extremely strict.
"Hyaah! Outlander!" Doctor Vink screeched, trying furiously to turn his head and shoulders far enough around to watch Danny as the jeep made a wobbling turn. "Hyaaaaah!" One of the plastic He-Man swords cartwheeled through the air and landed at Danny's feet.
Danny went to his bike. He mounted it while the jeep was still turning around and charged off in the other direction. The jeep would never be able to catch a boy on a bike.
"Chicken, chicken, bawk bawk," Mister Sardo chanted shrilly. Soon Doctor Vink joined in.
"Chicken, chicken, chick-chick-chicken!"
"Ka-bawk!"
"Chicken nuts! Chicken balls!"
"Bawka-bawk-bawk, ka-bawk!"
When Danny was finally around the corner onto the next street and could not longer hear the two men shouting at him, he pulled his bike over and shot the kickstand. He pressed the heels of his palms into his temples and stewed with anger. The wind tumbled his purple hair. Danny hated Mister Sardo and Doctor Vink. He could make no sense of his destiny, his damnation, as their permanent friend. And the fact that his mother not only sanctioned but encouraged his spending time with Doctor Vink and Mister Sardo added up to even less.
Danny took his bike onto the sidewalk and went at a somewhat slower pace through the little town. He made a few random turns, hoping to lose himself in some new scenery, at least for a while. He passed other trailer parks, a Pizza Hut, a Kroger grocery store, a ramshackle post office semi-hidden in a copse of trees. As usual, Danny's thoughts turned to his crush, Emma. Emma was the girl at school for whom Danny had more admiration than any other. She wasn't goth, but some of the ways she conducted herself seemed to suggest gothic instincts. She had a favorite t-shirt with a picture of a Mickey Mouse glove giving a middle finger on it that she wore every second or third day, and she swore more than anybody he had ever met. She had also once been banned from checking books out of the library for returning one that had been hollowed out and filled with the corpse of a frog.
After a while, Danny came upon a strange video store called "Ultraviolence 4 U." Signage in the windows promised the craziest, bloodiest revenge, the most savage sexploitation and blaxploitation, the most shocking wild west massacres, and the most diabolical demonic summonings ever committed to tape. Danny parked his bike and went inside.
"Who goes there?" cawed the store's proprietor—a hunched old man with a cane in each hand and blank white eyeballs that looked soaped over. Danny shrunk back from him and said, "Danny."
"Danny, eh?" the old man said. He sniffed at the air. "Tell me, son: are you goth?"
"How'd you know?"
"Like calls to like," the old man told him triumphantly. He ripped his cardigan open to expose an elaborate chest tattoo of an inverted crucifix being licked by a huge-titted succubus. "I'm goth too!"
"Whoa!" Danny said.
"You like that, eh? What kind of movie are you looking for, son?"
Danny looked around the dusty little store. He and the gothic old man were the only two people in it.
"Something," he said, "that would scare the pants off these two idiots who follow me around. Something really dark." He thought eagerly of the possibility scarring Doctor Vink's and Mister Sardo's tiny minds forever with a movie so depraved that no normal human being would be able to stand it.
"I've got just the thing," the gothic old man croaked, and shuffled to a rack of two-for-a-dollar westerns. "Check this out, boy. The Regulator."
Danny took the box from the old man and looked at it. On the cover, a cowboy was riding on two horses at the same time with a foot in each saddle, straddling a desolate dirt road filled with mangled corpses. In each hand he wielded a huge revolver.
"Dang!" Danny said. "What's it about?"
"The Regulator," the old man told him.
"Oh man! Sweet!"
The old man rang up Danny's rental. Then he leaned in so close that Danny could smell the menthol chest rub the old man had used that morning. Danny moved back slightly.
"Don't watch it after midnight, though," the old man warned him. "Remember. Not one second after midnight."
"Why not?" Danny said.
The old man winked one of his dead eyes. "Too scary," he said.
Danny paid and took the video tape out into the afternoon sunlight. It looked to him like any other video tape. But the label simply read, "The Regulator." No film length, rating, or anything else. And there was no store label; nothing at all to suggest it was a rental that had to be returned.
Danny turned to look at the store so he could at least commit the name to memory and saw that there was no store at all. Behind him was an empty lot full of weeds and broken glass bottles.
He tucked the video tape into his jacket and began to pedal home with an uncharacteristic grin on his face. He was extremely excited that the store had disappeared. It was the most gothic thing that had ever happened to him.