THE MOST FUCKED UP THING I’VE EVER SEEN: Mannequin Men
Jan 25, 2012
In which Miles Raymer tells the story of The Mound.
BY MILES RAYMER
I've always been one of those people who for whatever reason loves watching fucked up shit. Scenes of stomach-churning violence towards the human body both staged and actual. Pornography centered around fetishes so obscure that it's hard to believe they exist even as you're seeing them performed. Japanese movies that combine both of the above. Compilations that combine all of the previous elements, along with things like senior citizen jazzercise videos and clips of James Brown on talk shows high out of his mind on angel dust, all diced up and edited together in a way that reminds you both of MTV reality shows and the film they showed Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange.
Usually you know what you're getting into with these types of things. They come in a case marked "BANNED IN 32 COUNTRIES" or in the case of stuff so far underground you can't buy copies of it - say, the on-camera suicide-by-gun of former Pennsylvania state treasurer Budd Dwyer - with a verbal warning from whoever's showing it to you that it is in fact some deeply fucked up shit. The most fucked up video I've ever owned came with neither.
It came from my friend Aaron, who got it from some guys we both know back in Detroit. I first saw it at a party at my friend Aaron's house when he waved me over to his laptop with a stupid grin on his face and told me he had something I had to check out.
The story is that the guys we know back in Detroit played in a band and like a lot of guys in bands when they weren't touring they used their van to run a part time moving business. They were hired by this man whose brother had recently passed away to clean out his late brother's house. From the way I was told it the man didn't want to anything from the house, or even to know what was in there, and just wanted these guys to remove everything from the house and dispose of it. I was also led to believe that the man seemed complexly sad in the way that people are when they lose a loved one with major troubles, where there's more than a little relief mixed present alongside their grief and they obviously feel guilty and terrible about it.
When the guys got to the brother's house it was apparent why. The brother had held a job at a Detroit auto plant for a long time back when a strong industry and strong unions made Detroit auto workers some of the best-paid people in the state of Michigan, and probably the best-paid blue collar workers in the country. He also had something out of whack deep inside his brain, and so had used his hefty salary to buy a split-level house in a suburb just outside the city and fill it floor to ceiling with women's clothing.
Our friends' job turned out to consist almost entirely of loading up vanful after vanful of women's clothing and hauling it away for disposal. Typically for someone with a native Michigander's fashion sense it was all tacky stuff sourced largely from the ladies' section of J.C. Penney. Apparently a lot of the pieces still had their sales tags attached.
During the course of cleaning out the house our friends discovered a video cassette. This is where the footage on a DVD-R on a spindle on a shelf underneath my TV came from.
The video opens with a man standing in front of a mirror dressed in white high heels, black pantyhose, a white corset, and white panties, which he's pulling his erect penis from. Penis freed, he sits down on a chair and masturbates. The scene may have been considered freaky in the Eisenhower years, but if you've spent any time on the Internet at all you've probably seen video of a masturbating man in fancy lingerie without even meaning to.
The weirdness becomes pronounced at the beginning of the next scene. The man is wearing a outfit based around a gold bodysuit, and has added a wig to his ensemble. If you're a Kids in the Hall fan, he's about on the level of the Sizzler Sisters in terms of believability as a woman. The weirdness creeps in as you realize that the mirror, where he can watch himself masturbate while dressed as a woman, is an essential part of his kink, and when you notice that there are piles - huge, avalanching piles - of women's clothing covering most of the room's horizontal surfaces. It becomes acute when he starts getting really worked up.
Having reached some sufficiently aroused state the man sits down on a chair next to one of the clothes piles, reaches over, and starts frantically grabbing armfuls of clothes and building a new pile on his lap. When it's as big around as his arms can reach and tall enough that it threatens to tip over he begins to fuck the mound of clothes.
As he has his way with the pile the man continues to add more to it. He accumulates a drift of high heels on his chest while breathlessly repeating the word "shoes," then heaps even more clothes upon himself until the mound is taller than he is, and from where the video camera's positioned his face is almost entirely obscured. After a few minutes he comes to a grunting climax and then pushes the assemblage off his lap.
The guy having sex with an enormous pile of clothing is only partly responsible for the video's fucked-upness, and the fact that it's women's clothing barely factors in at all. What's unsettling is the complete abandon with which he acts on his fetish, the desperate abandon with which he piles clothing upon himself. Here is a man so in thrall to his own desires that he's lost a sizable chunk of his humanity, who's so devoted to his own masturbatory fetish that he's alienated family and presumably friends and has by all available evidence made it the centerpiece of his whole existence. The ecstatic, dead-eyed look on his face while he goes at it is beyond words, but once you've seen it it's hard to shake.
And then there's the fact that he's videotaping his masturbation ritual at all. If you stop to think about it at all the only possible purpose for the video documentation that makes any sense is that he would jerk off to them. Imagining a man masturbating to videos of himself masturbating while watching himself in a mirror is enough to make you dizzy. It's an ourobouros of warped desire, something like the visual feed that happens when you point a video camera at the TV it's plugged into, except with an infinite loop of boner stroking. Trying to follow the man's train of thought will give you serious vertigo.
Before my brain had even recovered from being blown to bits by my first viewing of the video I had already asked Aaron to make me a copy. Before he turned the DVD over to me he made me swear I wouldn't put it on the Internet, which was of course exactly what I wanted to do with it. Apparently the guilt over taking the tape from the man's house, and the possibility of it getting back to his poor, already-guilty-feeling brother who hired them was too great for our friends. Discovering evidence of a new flavor of human sexual deviance is for most of us a once in a lifetime situation at best, and to have to give your word to not spread it around on the Internet - human sexual deviance's natural habitat - was like discovering evidence of alien life and being told by the government that it was top secret.
Despite the temptation I've stood by my word. I've never even ripped the DVD-R labeled "Mounding" onto my hard drive. But occasionally when someone comes over to my apartment, especially when they're intoxicated and therefore more psychically vulnerable than normal, I'll find it on the spindle it shares with other, less thoroughly fucked up DVDs. I tell them that I have something that they have to check out. And I never let them know how fucked up it's going to be.
Mannequin Men's self-titled album is out now on Addenda Records. Visit the band at their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/mannequinmen
MANNEQUIN MEN INTERVIEW FROM NOISEY.COM:
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