The screen splits. Upward-scrolling credits taking up the left third. The rest of the screen is occupied by two men in tie-dye labcoats, standing behind a stainless-steel counter on which a twelve-ounce jar of WorkPellets is arranged between two oversize dropper-bottles.
“I’m Donny Mark,” says one.
“And I’m Greg Biscuits,” the other one says.
“If you don’t know us already,” says Mark, “we’re PerFormulae Abuse Labs, and what we like to do is exactly what it sounds like we like to do!”
“Stack ’em and abuse ’em!” says Biscuits.
“The PerFormulae we’ve got on abuse tap for you this week,” says Mark, spinning the dropper-bottles around so that the labels face the camera, “are BullyKing and Screamer.”
“Two doses of BullyKing at the same time is how you start,” says Biscuits.
“Two doses droppered onto a WorkPellet, so you can be sure your little robot gets it all up inside itself.”
“Yep!” says Biscuits. “And then, no less than an hour after administering that big old double dose of BullyKing, and no more than three hours after, you’re gonna feed that angry little double-BullyKinged jerk a second pellet that’s been triple-dosed with Screamer.”
“And then what, Biscuits? What kind of completely unexpected results does this highly creative and experimental type of PerFormula-stacking and -abuse produce? I bet it’s not a screamer!”
“Nope, not a screamer.”
“You saying it’s a bully?”
“Not a bully either.”
“Perhaps a screaming bully? A bullying screamer?”
“You know it’s not either, Don. And what is this, anyway? The department of redundancy department? Ha! What you get’s a little something,” says Biscuits, removing a cure from his labcoat’s pocket, “that we here at PerFormulae Abuse Labs like to call…the Bitchy Elvis.”
Biscuits sets the Curio on its feet, in the middle of the table.
The Curio gyrates its hips while its mouth twitches and one eyebrow hikes, and it shakes its head, as if to say, “No, not you.”
Close-up of the Curio, continuing as before.
“Awesome!” says Biscuits, offscreen.
“Best one yet, I think,” says Mark, offscreen.
As the 20/20 theme song rises, one of the P.A.L. Brothers index finger–flicks the Curio off its feet, and it lies on its back, continuing to gyrate, hike its eyebrows, and mouth-twitch.
Uncut Interview 2 (DVD extra)
from The Story of Spidge
1999, HBO Films, USA
[9 minutes]
A teenage girl strapped with multiple CureSleeves sits at a sunlit kitchen table, pulling her faded-pink hair into a topknot. On the table is a paper plate and a cheeseboard. On the cheeseboard is a Curio, facedown and dead.
The girl chopsticks the topknot and lowers her hands. “So I guess there’s an art to unzipping them,” she says. “Or better call it a skill. It’s about as artistic as paring an orange one-handed or whatever, but you know—not everyone knows how to do it. Here’s how.”
From her overalls’ bib pocket, she retrieves an X-Acto knife. She pushes the Curio’s legs together, then lays its tail in the space between them. She decapitates the cure, then amputates its limbs at each of their points of origin—one cut per arm, and one that takes care of both legs and the tail. She picks up the torso and, using the side of her knife-holding hand, sweeps the amputations to the plate beside the cheeseboard. She wipes her hand and knife on her overalls, leaving clear stains. She makes an incision that runs from one of the torso’s former underarms down to the waist. She turns the torso over and repeats the process. Then she sets the torso back down on its stomach, makes an incision on either side of the neckhole, and sets aside the X-Acto knife.
“That was the easy part,” she says. “And now there’s this, which, actually, isn’t that hard either.” With one hand, she reaches into the neckhole and pinches the top of the spine. With the other hand she pinches the skin on the back of the neck. Holding the spine in place against the cheeseboard, she gradually pulls the skin she’s pinching toward the torso’s waist. The flesh of the back peels away from the skeleton. She drops the flesh on the paper plate. Beneath the top of the spine, she inserts the thumb of the hand she used to peel the skin off, pinning what remains of the neck’s flesh to the cheeseboard. With the hand that is pinching the top of the spine, she pulls upward, gradually, while simultaneously pushing the thumb of the other hand forward.
Now that the torso is almost entirely free of flesh, she holds it vertically while gently tapping its tailbone against the cheeseboard until the remaining organs spill out from the bottom of the rib cage. A few remain attached. She severs them with the X-Acto knife, then sweeps the organs and flesh remnants onto the paper plate beside the cheeseboard.
“So there. So now you see there’s a little bit of muscle and stuff still clinging to the ribs and the spine. The first thing you do is just get your thumb in here like so”—she sticks a thumb between the ribs and the spine—“and just pop ’em off like…that”—she breaks the ribs off three at a time—“cause, see, you don’t want the ribs anyway. And so now…Now what you’ve got is a nearly clean spine. To get the rest of the stuff off…” She fishes around in her overalls’ bib pocket, comes out with a toothbrush. “You just need a toothbrush, see? Easy. You scrub it front and back a little, and anything left’s just color—it’s not gonna affect the quality of the spidge to any, like, matterful degree. So, anyway, that’s pretty much it.” She sets the spine on the cheeseboard, repockets the toothbrush.
“But you haven’t turned it to spidge yet,” says a woman’s voice offscreen.
“Well I can’t do that for at least a couple days or so—the spine has to completely dry out first. The inside of it, you know. It’s—”
“We’re only on campus til this evening.”
“Oh, well, I guess, um…I have some other…” The girl walks off camera, returns a moment later with a wooden salad bowl, on the outside of which the word “UPSIES” is written in green marker. She moves the cheeseboard aside and sets the bowl in its place. Inside the bowl is a pile of spines. “These are dry. You want me to, like…”
“Prepare them.”