POW Greatest Hits

At sixteen I was sick, at military school but still a social rung beneath the fatties and retards, and severely broke. Dad ran out of good favour and started selling off all his assets—antique jars, jewellery, our dignity, his youngest child’s education—so I was put in the barracks with the rest of the mouth-breathing poverty-cases. I was only moderately aware that my family’s finances were not dissimilar from theirs and, in any case, had zero hope of improvement. When my peers turned eighteen there would be some kind of government stipend so they didn’t go crazy and start killing the wrong people but I was born fucked. A bad luck charm or a silvery dog tag rubbed between calloused fingers.

I didn’t stay there like everybody else. I was sat waiting for discharge when I remembered the POW Greatest Hits torture tapes they showed us. Bad luck is one thing, but “normal” kids probably never had to see what we did. There was this one video that I guess was somewhere in-between pornography and snuff because this blond guy had his dick out the entire time, totally blindfolded and with his hands taped beneath his back, and was sort of cluelessly shuffling about his cell with it, I don’t know, just flopping about. It wasn’t the nudity itself but rather the extended stress masturbation session followed by a subsequent and thorough beat-down: bruises all over, shaved head, tetanus needle in his forehead carefully spelling out C O C K S U C K I M G  B I T C. Then he must’ve died or whatever because, for whatever reason, I still can’t remember what happened next. We saw a few others, mostly some abstract pixellated beheadings, but none of them really made an impression apart from blondie stumbling about on a bloodied stone floor. Even in its own genre, it was beyond innocence—without the zoom stretching its neck out, its angles, its lights, the videos had a sort of natural quality to them, like a lady grasshopper eating a male after mating, something that just happens. But it was forced, weird. It didn’t look right at all. It looked at us and we looked back.