Consequenz I
Adventures of a Die Guy
Some people are born with a destiny. For a very few that’s being a hero. Lucky them. For many, many more it’s being one of the bad guys, that die through the hands of the hero. So he may fulfill his quest. Nice for the hero. Not so nice for the die-guys. This story tells us about one of them.
1. The Die-Guy
I thought it’be an easy job, when me uncle got me across the Atlantic. Join his gang, do guard duty, get shot. Then die. Easy. How wrong can you be?
I’m a simple guy. No need to be educated at all. I was raised for one thing only. Basically all I need to do all my life is step out of cars and look mean. Or I walk up and down hallways or on roofs as a guard and then get shot, stabbed or knocked out. Last one if I’m lucky. I get to be played by a not too handsome young unknown dude. I die, he may get to play someone else later. The guy playin’ me, determines my face. In this case, he’s black haired. Brown eyes. Small scar on the chin. And one earring. You know. A few details to make me look like a real person. With such details, you’re bound to have a close-up just before you die. Or you get to stand lookin’ dangerous in an illegal drugs exchange scene, just before the shootin’ starts. This face makes me look a bit too cocky for me own good. The kind of cocky that gets you killed in any hero movie, just because you misjudge the strength or smarts of the hero. That’s why you there. To make the hero look good.
I know you watch them movies about them heroes. Entertainin’ stories they are. But who tells the story of the victims they make? Like it’s okay to keep on killin’ us gangster guys with no remorse. I lost three brothers cause of that. Hey, they were bad dudes, but they were family too. Like they had wives and kids and stuff. Like our mothers like poppin’ out kids to die in a few violent scenes just to please audiences around the world. You ever think about them? No, you go: Batman, Iron man, James Bond, Expendables, John Wick, B-movie hero, jay! Screw them. Fuckin’ assholes, punchin’ out their enemies like they ain’t humans fendin’ for a living.
So our story, for once, got a right to be told too. I’m one of those minions that’s got to die, like a nobody. I’m one freakin’ exitin’ moment in a movie for you. Me bein’ the gangster fallin’ dead from a roof or the guard who gets flung over a railing or silently disappears, stabbed from behind with a hand over his mouth, before he can raise the alarm. You know them moments. Boombadaboom.
The first thing they ask me, when I arrive in the US of Abomination, can you help guard this place? It’s the underling from my uncle Vinnie asking. He tells me I get to play a nephew from another uncle. Uncle B. A godfather type. You know. Evil dude who likes cruelty. A master fighter who gets a good dyin’ scene when it’s his turn to go. He points at a big square worn-down storehouse in the ugliest neighborhood ever. You don’t ask what needs to be guarded, even when you kind of notice a girl protestin’ an screamin’ and shit.
So my duty. I walk up and down these iron stairs on the inside. I hate those. Always good for long falls or clangin’ down the stairs. And the thing is, when your character dies, you die. The actor moves on, I stay dead. Die-guys like me, mostly, only live once and very short at that.
I can tell you, they don’t show you our cryin’ mothers, wives an’ family. They don’t show you our poverty, which made us take such positions. It’s my purpose. Yet, I don’t have to like it. In fact, it really pisses me off to be just your entertainment for what, 2 whole seconds, if I get lucky, when your hero kills me. And they call me the bad guy? Dude, you’re sick when you love that shit.
People don’t know. Whenever a movie character is born, he has a life too. We are born too. I mean we have a character, some vague history, and a personality that is present. We are as made up, as your own personality. Sure that’s a story too, even when you hate to hear that. So let’s not explore that. Hehehe.
Well, I’m one of them special characters. I’m born a character set to die in an unimportant scene. I’m nameless. Sorry. Born like that. I’m born to be a bit of gratious, or some other word, violence entertainin’ you. And this is my story. The first amazin’ thing in this story is that I get to tell it. Wow. You get why that is indeed amazin’. I’m tellin’ it. The other amazin’ things are in the story. Boombadaboom.
And right on. Fuckin’ hell, next day: big shoot out. One guy storms us with blazin’ guns, kills at the least thirteen of my uncle’s men. And then leaves with the screamin’ chick.
I get very lucky. I’m the openin’ of the rescue scene. Hero sneaks in through a small window. It’s the toilets. He gets me when I leave the toilet durin’ a break. I pull up my zipper. I look up. Benggg. A fist straight in me face. A very lucky break for me. That guy just smacks me knock out. It’s the funny moment in the warehouse shoot-out. I get to smack backward into a dirty toilet. Huge fun to watch, no? I blackout. A broken water pipe pouring water over my body.
For the others there’s a shootin’ on the stairs, two guys fall over the railing. Flat pudding at the bottom. Third guy gets riddled with bullets just before he can fire his own gun. Then he trashes down the stairs and then, yes, over the railing too. Fuckin cheap B-movie I’m in. The rest gets shot, stabbed, thrown from high places, riddle each other by accident with bullets. When I wake up I just find dead bodies. Die-guys like me. Dead now. And the girl is gone.
So I survive. Wow. I got to tell the story to my uncle. In the movie edit, it starts with me looking afraid, shitted over, staring at the floor. Like I just told what happened. And then my paranoia nitwit uncle thinks I’m league with this invader. Because I lived? Like I talk to anything in blue, not. His consigliere says it’s not the police. We are under attack by mafia with a conscience.
‘So waz goin’ on here?’ I ask me uncle B. Buzzer. You gatta know he’s the head bad guy in this flic I’m in. So he goes all head gangster over me like I’m not allowed to ask. I get lucky to be left alive by him, he says. Fuckin’ shit you won’t believe, in them movies. Head gangsters killin’ their own men every time they get pissed of. Now really!? Do that three times, you have a bullet in the back from your own men. Then my stinkin’ self gets send off-screen.
Okay, I get out alive of that confrontation, perhaps because it’s not important anymore, or the producers called they need to speed up. Most likely they need me to die by the hero in the finale. So now I have to guard my uncle’s white mansion. I even get an Uzi. I don’t like it. As soon as I can, I exchange it for a normal pistol with another die-guy. He can have the blazing death. Uzi guys always have to die clearly. They’re just too dangerous and make for great fightin’ scenes. Like fallin’ backward in a pond, sprayin’ bullets into the air, while actually already bein’ dead. With a pistol, I may succeed editin’ myself out of a dyin’ scene. I think this is not cowardice, this is how it works.
If the hero invades in movies, you shoot. And I’m in a fuckin’ movie. In reality, if it's one guy against a gang, the ‘hero’ is a dead man walking. If the police invade you better surrender. But we’re in a movie where I don’t wanna die for my uncle, playin’ a practice target for the hero. We’re the bad guys, I know. Yet, even at home, we don’t just shoot police or any other heroic invasion. We shoot the mayor if he don’t take our money. You gotta trust the guy never sends the police over or will phone you when the heat’s comin’ anyway. European flics are way more subtle and you may end up gettin’ shoved in a police van as your last scene, with handcuffs on. That was the kind of loser-but-alive-guy I aspired to be, until me uncle hired me. Now I must end like this nitwit die-guy in the US of Awful. Do I like it? No way José. Yet as the cheap scene guy I will die violently. Dot. End of story?
Next day. It’s the big final confrontation scene, you know, the big fuckin’ fight. The same guy and some of his friends, they invade the mansion and shoot almost all of us. Blow up stuff. I don’t wanna see it. I hide. I hide and I don’t get a scene. I get forgotten. I tell you, it’s the only way out. From hiding I see the hero savin’ another young girl. Very sweet young innocent thing. Sure. A virgin. Could’ve been my niece. At the last moment, the world has been saved from demonic shit that me uncle wanted to unleash. Heroes and virgin leave the building and then silence.
I get out of me corner when sirens approach. First thing I see, me dead uncle B. Has an elephant tusk now, though at the wrong place. It sticks from his back thru his belly. He definitely lost his fight. He’s lyin’ in the middle of a big room backward on the table. Quite a picture I tell ye. Around him half the walls are gone and at places there’s burnin’.
But there’s sirens comin’, so I quickly scan what can be had. I leave with two suitcases, and no one stops me. I crash thru the bushes at the back of the garden as the first police cars enter at the front, climb the wall and be gone. Then I take a cap at the bottom of the street and am off. That’s when me adventure really started. Me runnin’ of with two suitcases of whatever. How could I know me uncle had been a demon king? ‘Cowboys and Aliens’ was a huge success. So now there are cheap lookalikes. This one bein’ ‘Mafia & Demons’. How should I have known what that meant? I’d only been in two normal Mafia scenes.
Before I leave town I go to them funerals. It’ me distant family, hey? At the first three diggings they look at me like I brought the bad luck. No minion like me gets to live thru two whole big fightin’ scenes, just like that. Either I am a traitor or refusin’ to be dead. Their stares would have been a major scene if the audience cared for consequenzes of shoot outs. Nobody ever asks for these scenes, the burials of all the dead minions of the bad guy. So. Them family of mine, all look at me, like them are possessed by aliens. Them starin’ at me like I am somethin’ they’d like to coldly and slowly pluck apart in deep space experiments. All except uncle Vinnie. He looks at me, like candy, and him being the vendor of it. So I leave. What can you do? Makes me miss the other 23 funerals of all the henchmen that got killed at the mansion. 26 funerals in a row. And nobody looking for that in the paper. Like I care. Should I’ve died with them fucks? That’s the one funeral I hope to not attend too soon: me own.
That’s it. When heroes start shootin’, you better duck and be gone. I know how stories end. The bad guys die. And in those rare cases you get to shoot one of them heroes, you gotta stop the fight for a damn five minutes so they can say last words or somethin’ to a loved one. They even get music when one of ‘m dies. We just gotta shout, ‘argh’, ‘umph’, and mostly just die clean and quickly. No last words, instant death. Nobody wanna see us suffer. Would make us human. We’re not human, we’re the enemy. Think about that.
The bad bosses, now, they get to realize they lost. You know, the really cruel evil guys. You see a close-up of their faces in the final scenes, realizin’ all is lost. Then they die. Nasty. People love that revenge shit. I get that. But that’s not the thing. Thing is, I wanna live now. I’ve survived a typical die-guy movie. Yet, who cares.
I tell you I live in a freakin’ Tom & Jerry world. Tom the cat strikes once at the mouse, because he’s a cat. The rest of the cartoon mouse in many evil ways hurts the cat. Great fun, accordin’ to most. Them Americans don’t even see it. I see Tom’s one silly terrorist and Jerry the whole freakin’ American army, a massive powerhouse of self justified revenge, plunder and expansion, callin’ it ‘spreadin’ democracy’. Yeah, right.
It’s like 9/11. Some 3000 people die or what? Bad terrorists? Yes!? You right, of course, they were assholes, them terrorists, yet all those that die because of the US invasion goes way beyond 500,000 including Saddam's henchmen, soldiers, and them Taliban boys, at the other side. And nobody cares. Boombadaboom. So many lost people, whose worst crime it was standing around at the wrong place. Moreover in these numbers are also countless even more innocent women, children, an’ elderly also standin’ in the way. Yeah, read that line again. Women. Children. Elderly. Innocents.In the way. Out of the way. Dead. Boombadaboom. Die-people in the real world. Don’t even have a scene. Just a vague number on a website. Boombadaboom.
And what’s more, And just because they is shootin’ at each other now, over there, because of the anger, pain, lack of stuff even, crazy religion, still nobody cares. They’re the non-people. Right on. So that’s the double standard heroes get away with. I tell you, these heroes is mad murderous maniacs and you like ‘m because they’re yours. No, I say, they’re created to sell you a stupid sense of how the world works and shit. They tell you the good guys may do everything, tenfold the bad guys do, and get away with it. Tenfold or over. Your heroes are the real mad murderous maniacs.
But you don’t have to believe me. I’m not educated. I’m a lowly minion set to die in, what, half a second scene, playin’ a stupid guard or something. And now that I do speak, now that I have a voice, the tradition goes I wanna be head boss myself, and turn nasty and a traitor on me own people. The reward for that is dyin’ in a good fight scene or in a cruel way, like with your own hand grenade down your trousers. Well, I’m walkin’ out of that pattern with two suitcases and no guns. When I don’t wave guns; don’t treat anybody badly, no hero can blaze me away. That’s how I’ve seen it works. Now let’s see if I can get away with it.
Sure would love to call my mother and tell her I’m still alive. I bet she gets a heart attack or somethin’. Nobody in my family who got to cross the Atlantic ever lived beyond a single fightin’ scene before, let alone a whole movie.
