A Cold Day In Hell

I wake up wiping sweat with my hands as my eyes get used to the lack of light around me. Something glitters, off in the distance. Something...green. I reach out in front of me to a dark empty space. I make out a small dark lit room with a bed, two night tables at my left and a television set at my right. I'm in a motel room.

"Thought you'd never wake up"

Someone's in the room with me....a woman. She's staring out the window into the abysmal night from where a neon green light shines at us. Her voice is low and swift, like swiping through water. I try to compose myself. I'm in a couch sitting in the dark looking straight at her. I'm wearing a suit, it feels uncomfortable. The air is stale and hot, dry like my throat.

"Go clean up to the bathroom, we have to go"

I want to talk but the words don't come out. My mouth feels sore and stingy. Swallowing what feels like razorblades, I stumble to an awkward stand as I notice my whole body aches. My legs and shoulders hurt, my arms are void of strength, my hands feel weird and my head hurts. Bad.

I turn to see a door, open it and head for the sink. I turn on the lights, turn on the faucet, and wash my face and mouth. I'm wearing a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. The shirt has blood on it. I look up to find my image in the mirror in front of me after being able to see properly. It scares me.

The left side of my face is bruised and my beard is full grown. It wasn't when I went to bed. But the bruising is bad. Either I was being a very naughty boy or someone really doesn't like me.

I fall back into the room shaking at the sight of my shiners were the woman stands taking puffs out of a cigarette looking cool and pretty. Her image somehow begs me to understand I was probably the luckiest idiot the night I came across such a beatiful dame. Either I said the right words or had the right money, she just looks too out of my grasp, but something about her feels like I just signed my soul to the devil. She doesn't fit with any of it. Not this room, not with me, not with those clothes.

I look at her and at the room, I know I'm not dreaming but I don't even dare ask her where I am. My head is turning, my heart is pounding and my left side feels heavy, stiff. Like something's pressing on my ribs.

"Shape up Tommy, we gotta make bail"

I smell alcohol in my clothes and wonder why am I bruised like this, why my shirt has blood on it, whose blood is it. My throat still feels like I swallowed a sword. With certain reluctance I muster -Greg- and sit on the bed for a while. She just says -What?- as I try to pick my thoughts and make up from down.

"My name is Greg"

A part of me expected her to say I was being stupid or crazy or tell me to stop playing, after all, she did call me Tommy with certain confidence. Instead a silence overwhelms the room till I finally look back at her and confront her stare. Somewhere, somehow, I struck a nerve. She stays mute standing in the middle of the room with the window looking out into the street. -Stand up- she says dry and cutting unlike before.

She doesn't pace her steps anymore and rushes me out the door, down the hallway, down the stairs to the parking lot towards a light brown Lincoln. She looks at me and asks -What's my name?- to which I stare at her, unable to respond. She's scared. She looks everywhere before popping up the trunk of the car.

"I know how this might look, I KNOW HOW IT MIGHT SEEM!!"

For a brief second I sense a small sob coming out of her mouth

"You told me to show you this if necessary. You said it might help. Tommy, we have to get out of here, now!"

After her small, nearly-impossible to hear little yelp, she motions me to look inside.

There's a man inside the trunk. Dead. His jaw is bent out of place, his eyes are white, his face is twisted and punched into a funny looking way. Some bones are visibly broken, piercing through his suit and somebody slashed his neck deep. Real deep, almost decapitated this poor bastard. I can see he's missing an ear and there's dry blood everywhere.

But the truly shocking thing at that moment isn't that I'm looking at a brutally murdered man, or the fact that I'm far away from home, or the woman, or the bruises, or the suit or the motel, but that I know this guy. I'm picturing him in my mind, fully dressed in business attire, with glasses waving his hand, extending it to meet mine. I know him, I can picture his house, I know it's his house. I have recollections of being with this man, golfing, fishing going and coming as if we were friends our whole life.

I remember him, for a second I remember my school before it all becomes a blur and wonder for just a split moment how are we conected.

I know who he was

I know I did this to him.

I know it was me who got into his house one night and did this to him. I don't know why, I don't know how. I just know I pulled up the strength and courage to do it.

I tortured and killed a man.

I can picture my hands beating him. I look at my hands; there are tattoos on my knuckles. On my left hand there are the four suits of a poker deck and on my right hand there are several markings on the backside of my palms that go up my sleave, god know how far up my arm.

When I went to bed I didn't had any tattos.

The knuckles on both hands are scratched and worn as if I've been whailing away at brick walls and shattered glass. I take a look around in search for anything that can tell me were I am. It's very dark. I look at the plaques in the car and they read NEVADA, but around me there are forest-like areas filled with pine trees. I'm not anywhere in Nevada.

I look at the woman who's now standing still on the side of the car, smoking frenetically. With the help of the light from the neon sign, I can see her eyes are glassy and bloodshot. She's taking drags off the cigarette and looking worried. She's also lightly bruised.

I'm still picturing the man in the trunk and how he looked like alive. I see him one more time. There's no way I can know how this man looked like when he was alive just by looking at the body. No one could.

I could run, shout, head the other way. I still feel something pressing at my ribs. Something is pressing at my ribs. I put my hand on over my coat and I feel it. I don't even have to look inside, I know it's there. For a brief second I wonder if it's loaded.

I move towards the woman, ask her name. Her glassy beautiful eyes look back at me. No doubt she's trouble. She stays still, swallows and says...

"Eve"

My head swirls, suddenly I feel relaxed. I grab the cigarette in her hand, take a drag and ask for the keys. I open her door and as she gets inside I get a strange feeling. I move on to the driver's seat and open the door.

Right before I get inside something stings and I turn around abruptly. Nothing. I move on, get inside, turn on the engine. It's all too natural. I drive out the parking lot and into the highway. I know I'm far away from home, have been for long judging by my state. I know I'm in trouble, somehow, someway.

I know I did that to the man in the trunk. Now I've got a hunch and by now the only genuine thing that scares me. I feel like someone's watching me. Back at the motel, before I got into the car...It was like could someone's eyes darting at my back, seering my skin.

We're a couple of miles away from the motel, none says anything. She looks forward without a peep coming out of her mouth. I can't even hear her breathing. Maybe because I'm having trouble hearing anything other than my own. A gun rests inside my coat against my ribs, I might need it. There's a dead man on the trunk and I'm making a run for somewhere at 2:45 in the morning.

I can't shake the feeling that someone's watching me.

A Cold Day In Hell revised

FRIENDS AND FOES! BEWILDERING CREATURES OF CREATION! MY MOST BEAUTIFUL AQUAINTANCES!

I welcome you and all to a dark universe in which shadows hide dangers far beyond the reaches of the human mind and night seems to be the perpetual state of time. Reality seems tainted by the sins of men and madness creeps behind every step you take. WELCOME, be you all, TO A PLACE that would put FUN HOUSES to shame!!!!

Welcome, to the stage and chamber in which you shall play your biggest role yet.
A museum of sorts, should you look at the walls. Thou shall findeth that the doors..are...CLOSED!!!

Nobody escapes; nobody ever gets out, not before the trail, not before the laughs. A place built for, and BY, paranoid schizophrenics with delusions of being chased and split personality disorders. A look in the mirror means a look at your face or a sentence for life.

Crowded streets that turn empty at a sway of your feet, madmen leading a turbulent carnival at your expense.

I WELCOME YOU, to my world.

A world of deceit and black magic. A place without real love. Were innocent men mingle with troubled women and fall into a spiraling vortex of DOOM. This is my home, this is the place.

Night never ends in the FILM NOIR universe.

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Finally, after a year put on hold, the subject has surfaced again. In my not-so-meticulous-though-I-rather-wish-it-was mission to shed some light on movie matters I have failed on previous occasions to make an honorable mention at one of cinema's most beloved genres and for the matter one of my own favorites.
Film Noir has raged and evolved in such a manner without actually loosing it's essence to which an unaccountable number of followers and scholars have broken time barriers. Here I am, for example, now 21 and clamoring at something long before my time. It wouldn't surprise me there were younger persons, perhaps ignorant to the fact that they also love the genre.

The thing is that, you can't overlook the superb quality in the storytelling of a Film Noir. I am one of the many who had no fucking clue I loved it after some time. I believe my first encounter with the subject was, and I shit-you-not, in a Garfield cartoon.

First, some history...and I promise it won't be shitty.

Back in the 1940's, even when Technicolor technology already existed (which means movies could be in color now, and did for over 20 years) some studios started distributing movies that used black and white filters. Not only that, as time would tell, but they also made some unusual uses of low-key lighting to create heavy shadows and dim scenarios. The obvious was that the movies had a darker, somber tone to them.

The visual symbols were plain. Film Noir, literally translated to Black Film. But the darkness did go beyond just the lighting, it went to the storytelling, to the cast and script and circumstances.

Movie critics, connoisseurs and the public in general started noticing the sudden back trail at the colorless features and notices one too many aspects in the films. Finally a French critic named Nino Frank baptized the genre as Film Noir.

Now to get real dirty, Film Noir has stretched to unimaginable lengths when dealing with characters and storylines, yet keeps a distinctive feeling to all. The movies dealt, in their majority, with subjects close to the decay of human nature.

Almost all are crime dramas, with the main characters being the average Joe, the hardboiled detective or the ambivalent gangster. All cut by the same knife, middle age men who were hard drinkers and chain smokers with questionable morals drawn to attractive women, who meant trouble, and trouble in general.

They would always be drawn to situations where the world was directly or indirectly against them. They were the good guys even though they were the bad guys. They were tough and loners, standing ground for no one but themselves and the few people they actually trusted (which in most movies turned up dead).

Fighting rackets, mob guerrillas, vicious scumbags from all sorts and sizes and in general falling desperately into a viper’s nest, a wolf’s lair. The dragon’s mouth. Street wise and able to withstand anything from a beating to a heavy dosage of mind alliterating drugs. These were the heroes; scruff, dirty, mean and real, these were the ones whom I believed in, unlike the pristine ones.

The women were trouble because they meant business. Film Noir never knew such a thing as the weaker sex. Sometimes they were straight up bad ass, others they used their sexuality coming on as fragile and naïve when in reality they were…well…bad. And then there were the times when they were the criminal masterminds, plotting to commit a crime and get away with it, letting some poor sap take the fall. These were the femme fatales, women who were as smart as they were sexy. And shit bang, were this women hot.

The dialogues were jewels. Over the top, 50’s urban oriented lingo; like wise guy talk. The detectives talked like the scumbags they were after and all of this, you can bet you sweet ass to more, to a Jazzy, cool soundtrack.

Film Noir saw its run end somewhere among the 1950’s after stories of ruthless cops, corrupt cities, dangerous good looking dames, criminal masterminds and a solitary all-for-nothing-no-holds-barred detective or their criminal counterpart that drew the line somewhere who fought all the previous were no longer interesting…

..Or so it was thought.

Film Noir resurfaced as Neo-Noir which in turn branched into a serious of noir oriented movies that go from the Sci-Fi Noir (Terminator, Blade Runner), Psycho Noir (Blue Velvet), and a weird but subtle, neo-noir of sorts called by Wikipedia parody noir of which stands out the, and I quote, quintessential Neo-noir of the 70’s.
Not for nothing it’s my favorite movie of all times.

Modern day, Noir based works of art could be found in Sin City (both the graphic novel and the movie), Max Payne (The videogame, not the shitball fucked up movie), some Batman works (The Long Halloween for example) and of course, the classics. I loved it, all my life, because I saw something in these people. Perhaps it was the fact they weren’t muscle masses like most action heroes whom I saw a definite line of separation. Maybe it was the cool atmosphere of cigarette smoke, whisky glasses and Jazz tunes. It could’ve even been the lonely guys, fighting of the world and the shit, one dirty fuck at a time.

But I love it, none the less, and now I invite you to look out for one of cinema’s most beautiful, inventive and impressive genres.