Excerpt of PLEASE LET ME DESTROY YOU by Rupert Taylor
One afternoon I was sitting at the bar swirling ice in my glass, when I saw a long fake eyelash lying in the grit on the tiled floor. I picked it up, and when I stood up, a young woman pointed a DSLR camera at my face. She wore white sneakers, cut-off denim shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt with lobsters printed on it. A solid outfit. 10/10. I had seen her in the bar before, but she never asked me to play pool, or to go upstairs. Most days she sat alone at the bar, sipping orange juice and watching what looked to be YouTube tutorials on her phone. Click. Click click click. She shot me holding the eyelash in front of my right eye. “Hang!” yelled Blossom, pointing her nail file like a sword. “No photos down here! I told you!”
Hang took her camera up the stairs. I hung back for a second, then trotted up after her. Smile Bar was situated in a tall narrow building, with a wooden staircase zig-zagging up the middle. On the first floor landing, a young woman lay sleeping, her jet black hair spilling over the steps like a pool of ink. I stepped over her and Hang glared back at me.
“Why do you follow me?”
“I want to see the photos you took of me.”
“You have to pay.”
I shrugged.
Then she shrugged.
Then she walked up to the third floor and slipped through an open door. When I poked my badger face into her room (I don’t have a badger face but snooping like that made me feel like some sort of badger so let’s go with it) I saw a queen bed with red sheets, a sink, and an oval mirror hanging over the sink. Scooters beeped on the other side of sheer red curtains. Hang sat on the end of the bed, scrolling through the shots of me and the eyelash on the screen on the back of her camera.
“You should use some purple light.”
“You should not tell me what to do.”
“I like purple light.”
“I don’t care what you like.”
“But I’m really good.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m hiding.”
“Hiding from what?’
“Everything.”
She looked up at me.
“Go under the bed.”
I crawled under the bed, where I stared up at the brown stains on the bottom of the mattress, and thought about the millions of DNA strands coiled in its fibres forever. “Now put your feet out,” she said. I did as she said. Then I peered down the gap between my body and the bed, and saw her sneakered feet standing on either side of mine. Her camera clicked. She told me to come out and wash my face in the sink, and she watched me do it. She told me to do it again, but this time take off all my clothes except my socks. The nakedness didn’t bother me, but my odd socks did. One was yellow and one was purple, and the purple one had a hole in the big toe and the nail peeking out needing cutting. She took a photo of this nail. It made me squirm. But I wanted to please her. To be a supple and obedient muse.
“Wash the hair on your chest.”
“Place your toe to your stomach.”
“Look out the window, with your eyeball touching the glass.”
“Lie on the floor with the sock in your mouth. No, the yellow one.”
Three hours, twenty seven poses, four hundred and ninety two clicks later, we sat on the bed, scrolling through the shots. It was like seeing myself as a newborn baby, or a very old and vulnerable man. Like looking at a version of myself I knew but was also a total stranger.
“Do you shoot photos of all your customers?”
“You are not customer.”
“I know, but, I mean, all the men who come here.”
“Not all.”
“How many have you shot?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ball park.”
“What?”
“Two hundred? One hundred?”
“Maybe one thousand.”
“Do they like it?”
“Some like it, yes. Some no.”
“Can I see?”
“Hm.”
She pulled a MacBook out of a blue backpack and flipped it open. We looked at photos of young men, old men, obese men, skinny men, American men, Chinese men, Icelandic men and Syrian men. Men with disabilities, men missing toes, one missing an eye. I saw men with tattoos of their children on the backs, muscled men looking wounded, old and frail men with eyes that beamed out eternal life. They lay on the red sheets, on the tiled floor, wearing looks of post-coital bliss, looks of despair and warmth and fear and longing. In every shot she had captured a brutal truth the man had spent years trying to hide. I’m not afraid to say it, her photos made me weep. Looking at them was like peering through the bars of a cage that held a withered and scarred but still powerfully beating heart. The contents of my stomach (an iced coffee, a chicken banh mi and a choco pie) swirled around then dropped down a foot or so to the left. How had she done it? Did she have any training? Where had she come from? Armed with a lens, she had taken the power these men had over her and she had flipped it. I was in the presence of genius, that much I knew. “You ever show these in a gallery?” I asked. “I don’t think they will like it.”
An idea formed in the slimy stem of my brain. She was my new main character. Her story – the sex worker who shoots photos of her customers and rockets to international art stardom – would be the arc of the first season of the Untitled Original Series Set On Multiple Continents. What an excellent show. A real watercooler type series. We’re talking serious buzz. People would watch the shit out of a show like that. I saw it all so clearly, streaming into homes all over the world on HBO or Netflix. Created by Apollo Jones.
Excerpt from Please Let Me Destroy You © 2024 Rupert Taylor
While participating in a casino heist in the Cambodian jungle, Apollo Jones has a crippling panic attack. He's no seasoned criminal—he's a filmmaker, caught up in an absurd casino heist plan in the hopes that he can use the story for the first season of a preposterously ambitious TV show he dreams of selling to HBO or Netflix or some other global streaming powerhouse. Spoiler alert: his panic attack stuffs up the heist and as punishment, his partners slice off his right pinky. But the show is all he has, so Apollo bandages his stump and heads off on a multi-continent search for content.
From person to person, country to country, and through all kinds of addictions, Apollo chases adventure while struggling to find his own identity. As he generates, purchases, and even steals stories for his show, Apollo risks destroying himself, his relationships, and the people he comes to love.
Literature and Fiction Literary [Author Self-Published, On Sale: July 16, 2024, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781953610645 / ]
Rupert Taylor spent ten years honing his craft as an award-winning writer and creative director for an international ad agency. He wrote a film called BEVERLY that screened at exactly one film festival. He also won a major international screenwriting competition that led to absolutely nothing getting made, but he does have several TV series in development, so you never know. Taylor’s short stories have been published widely including in Hobart, X-Ray, Maudlin House, Points In Case, and more. Please Let Me Destroy You (July 2024, No Frills Buffalo) is Taylor’s first novel. He currently lives in Sydney, with his partner and his daughter, who likes unicorns and shouting.
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