Insectopedia (43 page)

Keith Toogood’s arrest was just the beginning, Jeff told me as we sat talking in the afternoon sunshine outside a Starbucks in suburban Los Angeles.
⁶
The British animal activists alerted the Humane Society in Washington, D.C. That organization, in turn, directed the district attorney’s office in Ventura County to Steponit, a video production company operating in its jurisdiction. On viewing the tapes, the L.A. cops reacted with the same disgust as the U.K. customs officers, but they were unable to build a case: the participants in the films were unidentifiable, visible only from the legs down; Steponit had already gone out of business; and it was unclear whether the videos had been produced within the three-year statute of limitations stipulated by the California animal-cruelty laws, the legislation that the D.A.’s office decided offered the best chance of a conviction.

Frustrated, law enforcement took the operation undercover. Calling
herself Minnie, Susan Creede, an investigator with the Ventura County D.A.’s office, signed on to the Crushcentral discussion board and, in January 1999, made contact with Gary Thomason, a local producer and distributor of crush videos. Soon they were chatting online, and Minnie told Thomason how much she enjoyed stomping on mice with her size-ten feet in her boyfriend’s garage and, more important, how she had ambitions to star in a video. Thomason, whose productions till this point had been restricted to smaller animals—worms, snails, crickets, grasshoppers, mussels, and sardines—was taken aback by Minnie’s uncommon enthusiasm but was nonetheless intrigued. They met in person in early February, and with Minnie’s encouragement, Thomason felt emboldened to try something new. As he explained to
California Lawyer
magazine’s Martin Lasden, “Mice are very popular to at least 30 percent of the crush community, which makes them well worth the effort.”

Lasden reported that communication cooled off for a while. Then, in late May, Thomason wrote to tell Minnie about a new movie he’d completed, in which an actress had crushed two rats, four adult mice, and six baby mice, known as pinkies. He sent Minnie a clip, to which she responded, “Nice work.”

Three weeks later, Minnie, along with her friend Lupe—a Long Beach police officer named Maria Mendez-Lopez—arrived as scheduled at Thomason’s apartment. Thomason headed out to the pet store. Minnie asked him to pick up some guinea pigs, but when he returned thirty minutes later, the five boxes he was carrying each contained a large rat, sold to him as food for snakes. The guinea pigs, he explained, were too expensive.

From then on, it was all over pretty fast. Thomason closed the blinds and locked the front door. With some difficulty, he secured a reluctant rat by taping its tail to the top of a glass table—a valuable prop in that filmed from below, it affords a last-gasp point-of-view shot of the woman’s bloody soles. Lasden reconstructed what followed:

“They were the most vicious cops you’ve ever seen,” Jeff told me. “They broke all his stuff. They stole his coin collection. They answered his phone when one of his relatives called: ‘Yeah, we know Gary. Did you know Gary was a fuckin’ pervert?’”

The police let Robert go but charged Thomason with three felony counts of cruelty to animals carrying a possible three years’ jail time. Bail was set at $30,000. Rifling through his confiscated computer, they found files identifying the actress in his previous rat movie. When they caught up with Diane Chaffin in La Puente, California, she still had the guilty shoes.

The section of the California Penal Code dealing with the inhumane treatment of animals was written in 1905, when the animals uppermost in legislators’ minds were farm stock. It defines an animal as any “dumb creature” and sanctions any person who “maliciously and intentionally maims, mutilates, tortures, or wounds a living animal, or maliciously or intentionally kills … [one].” The defense lawyers in
People v. Thomason
sought to limit the reach of this clause by citing the Health and Safety Code’s injunction that California residents have an obligation to exterminate rodents in their homes “by poisoning, trapping, and other appropriate means.”
⁷
In the abstract, it seemed plausible to argue that mice and rats were excluded from protection (along with invertebrates, whose killing excited no legal controversy) and, moreover, that the approved methods of extermination also involved mutilation and torture. In practice, however, the prosecution had only to show the judge a few brief clips of Diane Chaffin in character for legal niceties to lose their traction. (“Hey, pinkie,” the court heard her tell the baby mouse, “I’m gonna teach you a lesson. I’m gonna teach you to love my heel.”)
⁸

“You can kill animals all day long,” commented Tom Connors, the Ventura County deputy D.A. overseeing the case. “They do it in slaughterhouses. What matters is
how
you kill [them].”
⁹
Nonetheless, Chaffin
was charged in only three of the deaths. The D.A. was uncertain he could demonstrate cruelty in the cases of the other nine animals. What this meant in reality, Jeff Vilencia explained, was that the struggling of the adult rats was visible whereas the death throes of the tiny babies were not. “Isn’t that the most convoluted thing you ever heard in your life?” Jeff asked me.

Squish
and
Smush
are just two of Jeff Vilencia’s many crush-movie credits. The other films were released in his
Squish Playhouse
series of fifty-six titles, which he sold via mail order, mostly by word of mouth and through ads in porn magazines. None of these videos made it onto the film-festival circuit, nor were they intended to. “They were made for private masturbation,” Jeff told me, “for guys who had the fetish.”

The
Squish Playhouse
movies are in color and are much longer than the art films, lasting for at least forty-five minutes. They might involve crickets, snails, and pinkies as well as worms. They feature Jeff as an off-camera master of ceremonies and interviewer. And they employ plot conventions familiar to viewers of low-budget “amateur” porn, in which a premium is placed on the ordinariness of the women involved and the production of a fantasy of normality, the fantasy that these events could happen anywhere, anytime, that right now your doorbell might ring and a girl show up who’d love to do all this just for you, too.

It all happens in what looks like Jeff’s apartment. He starts out by interviewing the actress, his voice disembodied, deep and strong, like that of a friendly radio host. It’s low-budget but professional, though he laughs a lot, nervous laughter, and it’s clear he’s excited. He’s set this up and is running things, but there’s uncertainty in the air.

The actress sits in front of a white drop sheet. “How tall are you?” he asks her. “How old are you?” “How much do you weigh?” “What’s your shoe size?” He wants to hear fetish talk: “What drew you to the bug-squishing ad?” he asks. Elizabeth, the tall, dark-haired star of
Squish Playhouse 42
, dabs at her runny nose with a tissue and responds without hesitation. “Money!” she says, and they both laugh.

The woman might be shy. Jeff coaxes her into talking about how they met—in a parking lot!—asks what she knows about the fetish, how she feels about insects, about squishing insects, what her mom would think about her doing this, what she thinks of the guys who get off watching her do this. He elicits embarrassed giggles and a few insect-killing anecdotes. (“What kind of shoes were you wearing?”) He teases her. (“You
are
a monster!”) She goes to work.

It’s basic: a large square of white paper, a change of shoes, a few small animals. She might be wary, like Elizabeth, or she might be enthusiastic, like Michelle in
Squish Playhouse 29.
(“What did that feel like?” “It felt artistic.”) She pushes the animals around with her toe. He coaches. She pushes some more. The camera pulls in and focuses on the action. She crunches a few, grows in confidence, maybe gets angry with them, threatens them, mocks them, laughs at them, laughs at the situation, plays with them with her foot, pretends they’re her ex-boyfriend. (“You’re an asshole, you’re a prick, you fucked me over, you fucked my best friend, you humiliated me, you deserve to die, you need to die painfully, you need to have a very horrible, painful, excruciatingly, horrifically painful death,” Michelle says in a strangely uninflected voice.) She lets them escape a little, catches them again, kicks them around, applies more pressure, less pressure. Jeff pulls in for an extreme close-up on a cricket’s head sticking out from under her shoe. (“Look at him squirming, that’s cool, they suffer more that way,” Michelle observes.) They take a break to discuss the mess on the sole of her shoe. They start again: new paper, new animals, sometimes a whole new outfit.

There’s no slick editing, no effects, no pretense. It’s homemade, it’s right here, it’s happening in real time with real people. But what is happening? With the camera fixed on Michelle’s blushing face, Jeff prompts her to explain:

Michelle tells Jeff that she prepared for her role by watching his movies and dipping into the two volumes of
The American Journal of the Crush-Freaks.
Jeff tells me that these scenes were never rehearsed.

I know where Michelle got this idea that the men picture themselves as the bug. I’ve read the same books, watched the same movies, and I’d guess I’ve had some of the same conversations with Jeff Vilencia. It seems straightforward: “picture themselves” as a gentle shorthand for that intense identification at a moment of wildly disorienting arousal. But what exactly are Jeff and his fellow crush freaks identifying with?

At first, I pictured some kind of
becoming
, some kind of cross-species melding of two beings into something new, a bug-guy/guy-bug, something attainable by the triggering of ecstatic moments in the detailing of the fantasy. I imagined that this momentary bug-guy somehow felt himself
to be occupying the psychic and physical lifeworld of the insect. And I liked that idea, because it opened the possibility of this being an unusual struggle to escape the limits of being human, rather than that more familiar human struggle for fulfillment and expression. It seemed utopian, in an unusual, messed-up kind of way.

But then I noticed that in Jeff’s fantasies—or at least in his fetish stories and movies—the woman always knows that the bug-guy is no bug. She knows that the bug-thing writhing on the carpet is Jeff. Sometimes—actually, quite often—she’ll have her big, strong boyfriend (often called Sasha) crush him for her, and Sasha might not know he’s crushing Jeff until she tells him afterward, or sometimes she might never tell him and Sasha might never know. But the woman always knows, and it’s the woman, the arbiter and architect of punishment, who matters in these stories.