Pirate Cinema (2 page)

Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.

But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it.

Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself at ‹
http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/
›.

There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.

I'm proposing that we put them together.

If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of
Pirate Cinema
, email ‹
[email protected]
› with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to ‹
http://craphound.com/pc/donate/
› by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.

If you enjoyed the electronic edition of
Pirate Cinema
and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to ‹
http://craphound.com/pc/donate/
› and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to ‹
[email protected]
› so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.

I've done this with a ton of books now, and gotten thousands of books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification." That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?

Me again. That's all the forematter. I admit that there's rather a lot of it. You're not obliged to read it all (though I think it's pretty cool, especially
the part about buying copies to give to schools and libaries
).

And you're not obliged to read this interlude, nor the ones that follow. I've been giving away free ebooks for nearly a decade now, and my readers have rewarded my generosity with generosity of their own. I've had a pair of
New York Times
bestsellers, quit my day-job, and now I write full time. And I'm still giving away ebooks, and trusting that you, the reader, will reciprocate. You can either buy a book or ebook (always, always, always DRM-free) from one of the big online sellers, or
buy a copy from a local bookseller
.

USA:

Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook
(DRM-free)
Google Books
(DRM-free)
Apple iBooks
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Amazon
Booksense
(will locate a store near you!)
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Chapters/Indigo
Amazon.ca

Audiobook:

DRM-free download

For Walt Disney: remix artist, driven weirdo, public domain enthusiast

I will never forget the day my family got cut off from the Internet. I was hiding in my room as I usually did after school let out, holed up with a laptop I'd bought third-hand and that I nursed to health with parts from here and there and a lot of cursing and sweat.

But that day, my little lappie was humming along, and I was humming with it, because I was about to take away Scot Colford's virginity.

You know Scot Colford, of course. They've been watching him on telly and at the cinema since my mum was a girl, and he'd been dead for a year at that point. But dead or not, I was still going to take poor little Scoty's virginity, and I was going to use Monalisa Fiore-Oglethorpe to do it.

You probably didn't know that Scot and Monalisa did a love-scene together, did you? It was over fifty years ago, when they were both teen heart-throbs, and they were co-stars in a genuinely terrible straight-to-net film called
No Hope,
about a pair of clean cut youngsters who fall in love despite their class differences. It was a real weeper, and the supporting appearances in roles as dad, mum, best mate, priest, teacher, etc, were so forgettable that they could probably be used as treatment for erasing traumatic memories.

But Scot and Monalisa, they had
chemistry
(and truth be told, Monalisa had
geography
, too -- hills and valleys and that). They smoldered at one another the way only teenagers can, juicy with hormones and gagging to get their newly hairy bits into play. Adults like to pretend that sex is something that begins at eighteen, but Romeo and Juliet were, like,
thirteen
.

Here's something else about Scot and Monalisa: they both used body-doubles for other roles around then (Scot didn't want to get his knob out in a 3D production of Equus, while Monalisa was paranoid about the spots on her back and demanded a double for her role in
Bikini Trouble in Little Blackpool
). Those body-doubles -- Dan Cohen and Alana Dinova -- were in
another
film, even stupider than
Bikini Trouble
, called
Summer Heat
. And in
Summer Heat
, they got their hairy bits into
serious
play.

I'd known about the
No Hope/Equus/Bikini Trouble/Summer Heat
situation for, like, a year, and had always thought it'd be fun to edit together a little creative virginity-losing scene between Scot and Monalisa, since they were both clearly yearning for it back then (and who knows, maybe they slipped away from their chaperones for a little hide-the-chipolata in an empty trailer!).

But what got me into motion was the accidental discovery that both Scot and Monalisa had done another job together, ten years earlier, when they were
six
-- an advert for a birthday-party service in which they chased one another around a suburban middle-class yard with squirt guns, faces covered in cake and ice cream. I found this lovely, lovely bit of video on a torrent tracker out of somewhere in Eastern Europe (Google Translate wouldn't touch it because it was on the piracy list, but RogueTrans said it was written in Ukrainian, but it also couldn't get about half the words, so who can say?).

It was this bit of commercial toss that moved me to cut the scene. You see, now I had the missing ingredient, the thing that took my mashup from something trite and obvious to something genuinely
moving
-- a flashback to happier, carefree times, before all the hairy bits got hairy, before the smoldering began in earnest. The fact that the commercial footage was way way down-rez from the other stuff actually made it
better
, because it would look like it came from an earlier era, a kind of home-film shakycam feel that I bumped up using a video-effects app I found on yet another dodgy site, this one from Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan -- one of the stans, anyroad.

So there I was, in my broom-cupboard of a bedroom, headphones screwed in tight against the barking of the dogs next door in the Albertsons' flat, wrists aching from some truly epic mousing, homework alerts piling up around the edge of my screen, when the Knock came at the door.

It was definitely a capital-K Knock, the kind of knock they Foley in for police flicks, with a lot of ominous reverb that cuts off sharply, whang, whang, whang. The thunder of authority on two legs. It even penetrated my headphones, shook all the way down to my balls with the premonition of something awful about to come. I slipped the headphones around my neck, hit the panic-button key-combo that put my lappie into paranoid lockdown, unmounting the encrypted disks and rebooting into a sanitized OS that had a bunch of plausible homework assignments and some innocent messages to my mates (all randomly generated). I assumed that this would work. Hoped it would, anyway. I could edit video like a demon and follow instructions I found on the net as well as anyone, but I confess that I barely knew what all this crypto stuff was, hardly understood how computers themselves worked. Back then, anyway.

I crept out into the hallway and peeked around the corner as my mum answered the door.

"Can I help you?"

"Mrs. McCauley?"

"Yes?"

"I'm Lawrence Foxton, a Police Community Support Officer here on the estate. I don't think we've met before, have we?"

Police Community Support Officers: a fake copper. A volunteer policeman who gets to lord his tiny, ridiculous crumb of power over his neighbors, giving orders, enforcing curfews, dragging you off to the real cops for punishment if you refuse to obey him.
I
knew Larry Foxton because I'd escaped his clutches any number of times, scarpering from the deserted rec with my pals before he could catch up, puffing along under his anti-stab vest and laden belt filled with taser, pepper spray and plastic handcuff straps.

"I don't think so, Mr. Foxton." Mum had the hard tone in her voice she used when she thought me or Cora were winding her up, a no-nonsense voice that demanded that you get to the point.

"Well, I'm sorry to have to meet you under these circumstances. I'm afraid that I'm here to notify you that your Internet access is being terminated, effective --" He made a show of looking at the faceplate of his police-issue ruggedised mobile "-- now. Your address has been used to breach copyright through several acts of illegal downloading. You have been notified of these acts on two separate occasions. The penalty for a third offense is a one-year suspension of network access. You have the right to an appeal. If you choose to appeal, you must present yourself in person at the Bradford magistrates' court in the next fourty-eight hours." He hefted a little thermal printer clipped to his belt, tore off a strip of paper, and handed it to her. "Bring this." His tone grew even more official and phony: "Do you understand and consent to this?" He turned his chest to face Mum, ostentatiously putting her right in the path of the CCTV in his hat brim and over his breast-pocket.

Mum sagged in the door frame and reached her hand out to steady herself. Her knees buckled the way they did so often, ever since she'd started getting her pains and had to quit her job. "You're joking," she said. "You can't be serious --"

"Thank you," he said. "Have a nice day." He turned on his heel and walked away, little clicking steps like a toy dog, receding into the distance as Mum stood in the doorway, holding the curl of thermal paper, legs shaking.

And that was how we lost our Internet.

"Anthony!" she called. "Anthony!" she called again.

Dad, holed up in the bedroom, didn't say anything.

"
Anthony!
"

"Hold on, will you? The bloody phone's not working and I'm going to get docked --"

She wobbled down the hall and flung open the bedroom door. "Anthony, they've shut off the Internet!"

I ducked back into my room and cowered, contemplating the magnitude of the vat of shit I had just fallen into. My stupid,
stupid
obsession with a dead film star had just destroyed my family.

I could hear them shouting through the thin wall. No words, just tones. Mum nearly in tears, Dad going from incomprehension to disbelief to murderous rage.

"
Trent!
"

It was like the scene in
Man in the Cellar
, the bowel-looseningly frightening Scot slasher film. Scot's in the cupboard, and the murderer has just done in Scot's brother and escaped from the garage where they'd trapped him, and is howling in fury as he thunders down the hallway, and Scot is in that cupboard, rasping breath and eyes so wide they're nearly all whites, and the moment stretches like hot gum on a pavement --

"
Trent!
"

The door to my room banged open so hard that it sent a pile of books tumbling off my shelf. One of them bounced off my cheekbone, sending me reeling back, head cracking against the tiny, grimy window. I wrapped my head in my hands and pushed myself back into the corner.

Dad's big hands grabbed me. He'd been a scrapper when he was my age, a legendary fighter well known to the Bradford coppers. In the years since he'd taken accent training and got his job working the phone, he'd got a bit fat and lost half a step, but in my mind's eye, I still only came up to his knee. He pulled my hands away from my face and pinned them at my sides and looked into my eyes.

I'd thought he was angry, and he was, a bit, but when I looked into those eyes, I saw that what I had mistaken for anger was really
terror
. He was even more scared than I was. Scared that without the net, his job was gone. Scared that without the net, Mum couldn't sign on every week and get her disability. Without the net, my sister Cora wouldn't be able to do her schoolwork.

"Trent," he said, his chest heaving. "Trent, what have you done?" There were tears in his eyes.

I tried to find the words.
We all do it
, I wanted to say.
You do it,
I wanted to say.
I had to do it
, I wanted to say. But what came out, when I opened my mouth, was
nothing
. Dad's hands tightened on my arms and for a moment, I was sure he was going to beat the hell out of me, really beat me, like you saw some of the others dads do on the estate. But then he let go of me and turned round and stormed out the flat. Mum stood in the door to my room, sagging hard against the door-frame, eyes rimmed with red, mouth pulled down in sorrow and pain. I opened my mouth again, but again, no words came out.

I was sixteen. I didn't have the words to explain why I'd downloaded and kept downloading. Why making the film that was in my head was such an all-consuming obsession. I'd read stories of the great directors -- Hitchcock, Lucas, Smith -- and how they worked their arses off, ruined their health, ruined their family lives, just to get that film out of their head and onto the screen. In my mind, I was one of them, someone who
had
to get this sodding film out of my skull, like, I was filled with holy fire and it would burn me up if I didn't send it somewhere.

That had all seemed proper noble and exciting and heroic right up to the point that the fake copper turned up at the flat and took away my family's Internet and ruined our lives. After that, it seemed like a stupid, childish, selfish whim.

I didn't come home that night. I sulked around the estate, half-hoping that Mum and Dad would come find me, half-hoping they wouldn't. I couldn't stand the thought of facing them again. First I went and sat under the slide in the playground, where it was all stubs from spliffs and dried out, crumbly dog turds. Then it got cold, so I went to the community center and paid my pound to get in and hid out in the back of the room, watching kids play snooker and table-tennis with unseeing eyes. When they shut that down for the night, I tried to get into a couple of pubs, the kind of all-night places where they weren't so picky about checking ID, but they weren't keen on having obviously underage kids taking up valuable space and not ordering things, and so I ended up wandering the streets of Bradford, the ring-road where the wasted boys and girls howled at one other in a grim parody of merriment, swilling alco-pops and getting into pointless, sloppy fights.

I'd spent my whole life in Bradford, and in broad daylight I felt like the whole city was my manor, no corner of it I didn't know, but in the yellow streetlight and sickly moonglow, I felt like an utter stranger. A scared and very small and defenseless stranger.

In the end, I curled up on a bench in Peel Park, hidden under a rattly newspaper, and slept for what felt like ten seconds before a PCSO woke me up with a rough shake and a bright light in my eyes and sent me back to wander the streets. It was coming on dawn then, and I had a deep chill in my bones, and a drip of snot that replaced itself on the tip of my nose every time I wiped it off on my sleeve. I felt like a proper ruin and misery-guts when I finally dragged my arse back home, stuck my key in the lock, and waited for the estate's ancient and cantankerous network to let me into our house.