I interviewed Monty All The Time twice over the course of our storied careers. That had kind of been my specialty back in the 70s, doing pieces on those shock artists who seemed unilaterally obsessed with not so much pushing the envelope as tearing it up into little shreds. Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, that woman who filmed herself drilling a hole in her head. You know the type. I almost got to talk to Andy Warhol but our schedules never matched up.
It just fascinated me, the whole thing. It always had. You get an idea of what art is in your head, you go to the museum to see Picasso and Degas and all those other smarmy bastards and you think you know what art is. Then you go to the cinema and you watch whatever shit the big Hollywood system is trying to push down your throat and you think you know what film is. But then you have these guys and these women who are saying NO, who are going out and doing all this stuff you thought people just weren’t allowed to do. It was a lifetrip. It’s impossible to try and describe without being there back then and going on the lifetrip for yourself. As soon as I was in the scene I was hooked for good.
I didn’t start out in journalism, you know, and I never had any formal training in it or anything. In the late 60s I was at a film school in California, and that was what I’d wanted to do with my life, shooting pictures. There was this flick that came out while I was in school, a Haskell Wexler piece—I don’t remember the name but it was about this guy, a journalist, who wasn’t even alive, he had nothing going on in his brain except filming and recording. There’s a scene where he’s standing watching TV with his woman and they’re both quiet and watching for a solid minute before this guy just says, “Jesus I love to shoot film”, out of nowhere. And that scene always stuck with me, because that was exactly who I was back then—I didn’t know anything, didn’t want anything. I just loved to shoot film.
But I got in a lot of trouble over my capstone project the year I was set to graduate. It was a short day-in-the-life sort of thing about this buddy of mine and his girlfriend, who was a transsexual. I went around and filmed them waking up together, eating together, going to work and class, going on a date to the movies. Then making love, with her penetrating him—that was an important part of it for them, that their sex life be part of the picture, so I filmed that too. I interviewed both of them, her about her life growing up, him about what people thought about him dating her, the two of them about their relationship and how they met. That was the first official interview I ever ran. Somewhere along the line when I was editing I got this great idea to splice in a bunch of church footage, sermons. To create thematic contrast, you know. So I went out to any church service I could find that would let me shoot and took a load of film. Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, People’s Temple—oh, no, that was way before what happened, of course. This had to have been ’70, ’71, maybe. So I edited it all together and I called it Adam & Eve, which I thought was kind of cute. Looking back it was amateur stuff, but I felt really strongly about it at the time. It was the first and only real film I ever made.
I went ahead and presented it to the film board and I was in the room when they watched it for the first time. All this time I had been kind of preening myself, thinking I was really something, but all these professors were shocked, disgusted. They shut it off before it was even finished and they yelled at me. They yelled at me, can you imagine? A bunch of old men screaming their heads off at this smug 23-year-old faggot wearing mismatched socks and a suit that was too big for him. How dare I, they said, bring this kind of filth into an institution of learning and pass it off as art. I had a big mouth in those days and I fought back—that it wasn’t filth, it was love, and couldn’t we use a little goddamn love on the tube these days, a little love in between all the war that was getting pumped into these people’s living rooms every hour on the hour? It wasn’t any more profane than what any freshman could go and see in one of a hundred Los Angeles porno theaters.
They weren’t particularly swayed by my argument. They said there was no way they could pass me. I wasn’t going to be able to graduate, not that semester, anyway. Could I reattempt my capstone next semester? No I could not. But I was more than welcome to pursue another track, perhaps marketing, they told me. Marketing! I was pretty furious by then, and—in retrospect this was probably where I made my mistake—I said if they were going to lock me out of my discipline, my art, why not just kick me out full stop. Well, they were more than happy to do that, too.
I wasn’t too bugged out about it at first. I actually felt like it gave me a sort of edge, that I was just too counter-culture for their bogus institution that wasn’t really doing anything but holding me back, anyway. I felt that way for about two hours before I walked back around the building and saw my film sitting in the dumpster. All torn up to shreds, with all their half-filled evaluation sheets crumpled up around it. It was completely unsalvageable. I’d been coming to ask if I could have it back, and seeing that—Christ, it was like coming home from a good day at work and finding your living room trashed and your wife raped and murdered. It did not compute.
No matter now fine I felt with getting expelled, that film was the first thing in my life I had ever made. It was obscene, sure, it was supposed to be…but it was also, I don’t know, tender. That stuff I’d said about love wasn’t just me being contrarian; I really felt that way about it. It meant the world to me. I’d made it on borrowed equipment, and I didn’t have enough money to buy my own camera or my own sound gear or my own film. By that point my buddy and his girlfriend had dropped out to go live on a commune in Vermont. The work was unrepeatable. Even if it had been… I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to do it. Seeing my shredded film in the dumpster took something vital out of me that I never got back. It ended the lifetrip… or at least took me out of the driver’s seat.
I moved out of my shitty dorm room and into my ex boyfriend’s even shittier apartment, and for a long time I just sort of hung around like a kicked dog with all the artistes of the type I used to fancy myself being. They’d all heard what happened, and kind of pitied me, I supposed. I liked hanging around them, and I really liked talking to them about what they were making. I would just talk and talk and talk—I’m sure that’s not hard for you to imagine! Eventually I got in the habit of recording those conversations with my ex’s secondhand reel-to-reel, and then they weren’t conversations so much as they were interviews. I don’t know why I started doing it; maybe because I wanted to hold on to those conversations physically, so I could listen to my reels and think about art and feel like part of it again. Whatever it was, I was real good at interviewing—it felt natural, almost the way shooting film had felt. Never quite exactly that way, but close enough. I got permission to sell a few of those interviews to local magazines, and then those few sales turned into solid gigs, and soon enough Emery Hayes had gone from film school reject to bonafide journalist with nobody the wiser.
Looking back now, I probably could have kept making pictures. Once I got enough cash from the interview gigs I could have walked away and bought myself a shiny new camera and gone to town. And God knew I had enough weirdos in my life to film. But every time I thought about doing it, even in passing, I would see Adam & Eve in the dumpster again and my stomach would curl into a tight knot of pain and sweat would break out on my forehead. One time I saw my ex cutting up some film he wasn’t going to use, that had gotten overexposed, and I had an honest-to-god panic attack. I’d given myself a complex I didn’t have the slightest clue how to kick.
After a couple of years it started to bleed into the corners of my normal life. The knot was there almost all of the time, and I couldn’t even go to the movies anymore without this dreadful fear and jealousy knocking all the breath out of my lungs. I started to despise Los Angeles, nauseated by the lights at night and the trucks honking and what I imagined was the faint club music emanating from Tinseltown, where the stars smiled with big white teeth and clinked glasses of champagne together.
It wasn’t enough just to get out of the city, or even the state. No, I had to get out of the whole damned country. That or kill myself, veer my car into the steel highway barrier on the way to the airport and go out like James Dean. Tempting, yeah. But in the end I got on that plane and headed to London with one carry-on suitcase and forty-five dollars in cash. I wasn’t entirely impulsive—my ex had an ex who had a friend who worked for Famous Monsters of Filmland, and this friend Sheila had promised she had a place as a roommate and a low-salary job covering trashy genre flicks. But I still felt like I was jumping out of the blue and straight into the black. The more I think about it now, the more I’m sure I was right.
I first saw Monty All The Time on a videocassette cover in a narrow little store a block away from Sheila’s apartment. This was about a year or so before that whole video nasty ordeal kicked into high gear over there, so you could still have covers that gruesome on display. The movie was called Virgin Genocide II, and it was this illustration of him from the waist up mid-dismemberment by a chainsaw. Right there on the cover where anyone could see. He was looking down at the blade in a kind of ecstasy of terror, blonde hair a fluffy halo around his face, eyes wide and stunningly green, full lips slightly parted.
I was so enamored by this image I went and bought the tape—I didn’t watch it for months, but I looked at it all the time. I actually—I actually kept it on my nightstand, like a picture of a high school sweetheart. I was totally enthralled by how strange it was. It was the sort of pose you usually saw women in on these things, to start. And he had a kind of feminine look to him, too, but not one that softened him; on the very contrary it put a wild look in his eye, the spark of female rage and desperation. The day after that I looked into him some more and wasn’t surprised to see the news found him as compelling as I did—as a corrupter of children, a gorehound, a snuff peddler. I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I got an interview with him.
But it took me another eight months in London before I got to talk to him for the first time: the summer of 1976. It’s strange to think it really only happened over two months, before summer turned to fall and before London, too, was rendered harsh and uninhabitable to my rotten brain and my bleeding heart.
—
Transcript: Emery Hayes interviews Monty All The Time, June 10 1976
Emery: I want to thank you again for taking the time to come and talk to Filmland. I think our readers will really appreciate it.
Monty: Of course, of course. It’s a pleasure.
Emery: Why don’t we kick this off with you telling me a little bit about yourself?
Monty [after a small pause]: Well, everybody at your little magazine knows me already, don’t they?
Emery: Sure. But that’s Monty according to us. We want our readers to get Monty All The Time straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Monty: Sure. [another pause] I’m just like you. I live in a flat in London, I’m twenty-nine years old, I go to work every day just like you. Only I don’t point a microphone and take notes all day. I get paid to chop people up into a billion little pieces for the camera.
Emery: And get chopped up.
Monty: Right, that too.
Emery: What’s that like? I imagine it has to be a real bitch getting in and out of all those prosthetic effects.
Monty: It isn’t actually all that much of a hassle once you get used to it. And it’s fast. I usually spend about an hour or two in the chair for makeup before and after, maybe three if it’s something complicated. The worst part is the itch from the body-safe glue they have to stick it to you with. The bigger ones are more difficult, too. For Virgin Genocide II… did you see that one?
Emery [after a small pause]: Not yet. I bought it on videocassette the first day I was in London, though.
Monty: You bought the whole tape and never sat down and watched it?
Emery: I said not yet.
[Monty laughs]
Monty: I’m just teasing you. Look, your whole face is bright red, now.
Emery: Glad this isn’t a TV interview, I guess.
Monty: You know, I’ve never been interviewed by someone who’s actually seen any of my movies. Even one of the baby 15 ones like Teen Caligula. Something about you journo types, none of you are much into the whole grindhouse thing. You all tend to be rather fussy.
[A pause.]
Monty: No offense, of course.
Emery: None taken. Do you think I’m fussy?
Monty [after a pause]: Not really, actually. You seem alright for a journo type. That’s a pretty big handicap to surpass, mind you. And I like how red you got just now. I think you really will go home and watch that tape after this just because I want you to.
Emery: Sure I will.
Monty: You’ll have to tell me what you thought about it during the next interview.
Emery: The next interview?
Monty: As long as you don’t blow this one. You’re doing pretty okay so far. Go on, ask me some more questions about my extremely bizarre and fascinating life.
Emery: Can do. Where does the name come from?
Monty: Well, when I was about fifteen years old…
—
The first thing I noticed about Monty when I met him was how pale he was—most people I met in London were pale, but Monty made the whitest Londoners I’d seen look like they’d had a day at the beach. It was almost frightening, sometimes. Some of the Filmland interns would joke that he was a vampire, and as things went on I thought about that sometimes, if that could be the explanation for all of it. Whatever he was, it wasn’t a damn vampire.
We met a couple of minutes before the interview and he gave me a firm handshake that I recoiled from—his hand was room-temperature and slightly rubbery, like a doll’s hand. Later on I learned that this was because his palms were almost entirely scar tissue, and then I would feel even more embarrassed about it than I did when it happened. For Monty’s part, he just laughed.
“Sorry,” I muttered under my breath.
“Got nothing to be sorry for,” He quickly countered. He had the androgynous voice that would have gotten him called queer in the states and whatever the local word was in London. A heavier accent than most of the people I knew, too, louder and far more gregarious than I was expecting from a man of his stature (he couldn’t have been taller than five-six). “Emery Hayes, right?”
“Right.”
“Great to meetcha. Really it is. How long have you been in London for?” And that threw me a little by surprise because by that point I had been living there what felt like a while, and I thought I’d shed my foreign awkwardness.
“Since October last year.”
“Where were you from before?”
I opened my mouth to speak and found that I was struggling to get the words out—starstruck, and totally caught off guard by the power of it. I couldn’t seem to decide where to look at him, eyes darting all around, the whole time with my brain shouting Jeez! That’s the guy from the box art! Because it was, but at the same time it wasn’t it. That was the dissonance of it, as I tracked all these little inconsistencies in the otherwise mirror image. They hadn’t gotten his nose quite right, for example, and in real life he had dimples and a little scar on his chin. He also had on these huge, coke-bottle glasses he never rocked in his films—he was functionally blind without them, as it turned out. Above all he had looked so alive, alive in a perfectly rendered final moment before an impending death-by-chainsaw. Here in the flesh, he somehow looked… dead.
But that wasn’t a disappointment to me. It actually impressed me—here was a man who made his whole career off of dying on screen, and in real life too he seemed little more than a walking corpse in everything but the continual spark of life in his green, green eyes. The most re-animated of them all. By the end of the summer that would start to disturb me, as most things about him did, but in the moment I was just impressed to have met someone who was so irrevocably committed to their art, their shocking and offensive and body-demolishing art. I was so impressed I couldn’t speak, only squeak a little. “California.”
“I thought so. I made a little bet with your craft table boys” —here he hiked his thumb over his shoulder to point out said boys—“and I said to them, ‘this American bloke who’s interviewing me, what do you say he’s from California or Florida?’ and they said five pounds you were from Chicago. So you, my friend, have just bought me a cup of coffee. How’s London treating you so far?”
He talked so fast, too, that was the other part of him that felt alive. He always spoke like someone was going to make him stop. It took me a solid second to even process what he’d said before I could get a thought, any thought, to the front of my brain in response. The one I came up with was pretty fucking stupid, but I figured it was better than standing there and saying nothing. “Pretty cold.”
And that made him laugh like a maniac, a big and loud sound that made me jump a little with how sudden and how strong it came out. Other than that I don’t know how to describe the way it felt hearing it, other than that I thought about it all the time while I was living in London, and I still think about it today. I even dream it sometimes, though I don’t ever see his face. “Pretty cold,” he repeated, obviously cracking himself up over it. “That’s cute. Mate, if you think it’s cold in June, you’ve got a real kick in the trousers coming your way in December.”
Then he smacked me on the cheek, two light and playful taps with one hand, and gave me a smile full of big white teeth. During the actual interview I think he made some little joke about my face going red, but the truth was I had started blushing long before that, after he touched me.
—
Transcript: Emery Hayes interviews Monty All The Time, June 10 1976
Emery: Do you have any hard limits?
Monty: What do you mean by that?
Emery: I mean anything you absolutely won’t do on camera. That might be a weird question, because to the average viewer it probably looks like you’ve done everything there is to do. But I want to know if there’s something that’s too much for even Monty All The Time.
Monty: I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. That’s a bloody good question, I’ve got to think about it.
Emery [laughing]: My whole job is coming up with good questions.
Monty: There are only two that come to mind. The first is that I never do any sexual violence. I do plenty of sex, and plenty of violence… and I think the line between the two blurs, sure. Lots of the violence in my films is very sexual——sexualized, maybe. But never rape. That’s something I absolutely refuse to do.
Emery: That’s very admirable.
Monty: And the second is that nothing can happen to my face.
Emery: Oh?
Monty: Whatever horrible disgusting happens to me in the picture, anything you can think of——dismemberment, burning, drowning, general hacking-up——even decapitation is fine. The whole head is fine. Just not the face. Never the face.
Emery: Any particular reason why?
Monty: It’s for a couple of reasons. The first might shock you, but I’m not really that good of an actor.
[laughter from both]
Monty: Don’t laugh! I’m not kidding! When it gets down to it I’m a pretty dreadful actor because I like being one. And in my line of work I don’t have to be anything more than that.
Emery: Right. There’s a reason you didn’t see Richard Burton in many grindhouse flicks.
Monty: Exactly right. And I could never live the kind of lifestyle Burton lived at the height of his career.
Emery: Not even if you got Liz Taylor out of it?
Monty: Not even then.
[more laughter]
Monty: But I think I would be——intolerably bad without this handsome face to fall back on. And it’s about the principle of it, too. When you’re an actor, your face is your whole image. It’s more you than you yourself… it’s the symbol that you have to become. It’s your selling point, sure, but it’s more than that. Always more than that. So if it were to get all ripped apart and destroyed in one of my pictures… it would be bad for business. Bad for morale. Kind of like how you lot aren’t allowed to burn up the American flag or——or blow your nose with it or something, I don’t know. It just brings up bad things. It’s a bad look.
Emery: You know, there are a lot of people in the states who’d like to crucify you for that comparison.
Monty [after a pause]: Well, that’s not too bad. I got crucified for Breed and Bleed just last year.
[even more laughter, for a long time]
—
We wrapped up the first interview and said polite goodbyes with another firm handshake, one I braced myself for and didn’t flinch from. Then he did me one better and gave me a hearty pat on the back, nearly pitching me forward onto my hands and knees with a force I wasn’t anticipating—that made him laugh, of course. I laughed too, even though I knew I was the butt of the joke.
He’d really taken to me over the course of our interview, and I’d taken to him too, maybe even more so. I don’t know. It’s stupid to think you can know someone from an interview, really, because I’ve done enough to know that they’re advertisements first and confessionals second. But I never once got the sense from Monty that he was bullshitting me, or trying to sell something. He took questions well and spoke candidly—and he asked me questions. We’d had a real conversation. It had taken me back to those first interviews I had done, when it was just me and somebody I knew shooting the shit about art and laughing over each other; the interviews that had felt like I was there and part of it, the closest I could feel to shooting pictures once again, not enough but the most that I could get. And I had a damn good feeling I would be getting that second interview.
As soon as I got home I made a beeline for Sheila’s VCR and watched Virgin Genocide II. I was immediately lost on the characters and the plot, or anything that was going on, really—there must have been more of a story in the first one than I was anticipating—but the thing that struck me the most was the visual effects. Those pearl-clutchers at the Daily Mail hadn’t been kidding when they tossed around the phrase video nasty in its first iterations. This was nasty stuff. Even I was a little disgusted by it—disgusted and utterly fascinated. By this point in my life I had seen all kinds of shit. I saw Burden do Shoot, for God’s sake! That was real! But this fake cheapo gore flick had me sweating like a pig and feeling queasy.
The crowning moment of course was the scene on the box art, the one where this beautiful naked brunette slices him in half with a chainsaw all slow while he screams and screams and screams. Usually they have all kinds of close-ups and cuts in those scenes to hide how fake their effects look, that special brand of movie magic that tricks you into thinking you’ve seen more than you really have. But this scene was a longshot—his whole body on display—and it didn’t cut even once. Just three solid minutes on this woman ripping him up, from the same unchanging angle, everything out in the open right where you could see it.
When she made contact the first time and the blood started to ooze out, I thought to myself, well, that isn’t so bad, until all at once it was. It looked real. To be fair, I’d never actually seen what someone looked like chopped up by a chainsaw, and after that I didn’t have any desire to. I felt like I’d seen close enough. But there was a second, one blinding second like an icepick to the eye, where my suspension of disbelief was so strong that my brain screamed out Christ, that’s his motherfucking INTESTINES! And I gagged hard enough that tears started streaming out of my eyes.
Then I watched it about five more times. I was obsessed. I mean I felt like I was going to tear my hair out if I couldn’t figure out how they did it. I made Sheila watch it when she got back from work that day, and she couldn’t work it out either. We even called her boyfriend, who was a visual effects guy, and he must have watched it ten times over with a legal pad and everything—he was taking notes. And when we asked him what it was he just threw his hands up in surrender. “Whatever it is, I need the phone number of the guy who did it yesterday,” he said.
The buzz wore off by that night, but I went to bed still thinking about it, marinating it in my brain. I kept seeing the scene over and over, the expression he’d had, and I felt like I was on the precipice of some great mystery, staring over the edge into the all-important and indecipherable face of Monty All The Time. When I took off my hoodie to get ready for bed, something fell out of the hood and onto the floor—it was a little folded up piece of paper, and when I opened it up it was a phone number. I was confused by it at first, and then I remembered Monty patting me on the back before leaving from our interview. I’d been wearing that hoodie all day after that and I hadn’t felt anything at all; I could just as easily have thrown it in the wash without ever knowing. I didn’t call him, but I took the little piece of paper and tucked it inside the case for Virgin Genocide II.
I didn’t think about it like this at the time, but I was building a kind of shrine to him, piece by piece.
—
Transcript: Emery Hayes interviews Monty All The Time, July 27 1976
Emery: You’ve made quite the splash on this side of the pond.
Monty: Not in the states?
Emery: Not yet. I’m sure you’ll get over there eventually. But Christ, you’ve seen how they write about you, haven’t you?
Monty: A little bit here and there.
Emery: I picked up a copy of the Daily Mail this morning——here, I brought it with me, actually. [a rustling of paper] I just want to read you this real quick. “Monty All The Time is to be hung this upcoming holiday weekend; unfortunately, it’s only in his latest picture.”
[laughter]
Monty [still laughing]: That’s good! That’s real good! Oh, is that about Sickest Man In The West?
Emery: Must be. Which I’m looking forward to, by the way, that trailer they’ve whipped up for it is fantastic.
Monty: Thank you.
Emery: But that’s not even the worst of it. There are fringe groups——you’ve seen the billboard up in Piccadilly Circus?
Monty: Oh yes! God, what is it——the mums?
Emery: Right! Mothers United Against Bad Taste. Hell of a name they’ve given themselves, as an aside.
Monty: Preaching to the choir. Well, I can’t argue with their definition of bad taste. And I appreciate how gung-ho they are, offering——how much money is it again?
Emery: Five thousand pound sterling to anyone who kills you. I went past it on the way over here.
Monty: That’s disappointing. I always hoped I would go for at least ten.
[laughter from both]
Emery: But that doesn’t worry you at all?
Monty: No.
Emery: I mean, this is a threat on your life. Assuming they’re serious, of course.
Monty: The way I see it is… [a pause] I hope I’m not about to sound like some male chauvinist pig over here.
Emery: Careful, buddy, this is on the record.
Monty [laughing]: I’m just going for it. Frankly, I’m not particularly worried about a bunch of angry mothers wringing their hands over some gory movies. Even if they have the budget to advertise in Piccadilly Circus.
[Emery laughs]
Monty: Besides, I think any person or persons who wanted me dead would have gotten on with it by now.
Emery: Say more.
Monty: I just don’t think I would be particularly hard to get. I don’t have bodyguards or anything like that, like real big actors. I go out and do my own shopping or my own groceries like anybody else. When I started out I was working at a Gregg’s, for God’s sake, and I never got a bit of trouble. If there was anyone out there who was really serious about killing me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. They would have——dragged me into an alleyway or pushed me in front of a train years ago.
Emery: But what if they’re waiting for some kind of public appearance from you? Something televised, maybe, so a lot of people see it. The whole world is watching, that kind of deal.
[a pause]
Emery: Getting dragged into an alleyway or something, you know, that’s how you kill a person. Not that you’re not a person, of course, but at the same time you’re… I don’t know… a representative for more than that, for a lot of people. A symbol. I mean, you’ve told me as much yourself. As for them specifically, I think they’ve latched onto you as a sort of living embodiment of ‘bad taste’. It’s probably easier to take down one person than to tackle the whole muddy concept of it, so they’ve made you the Adversary. And you can’t just quietly knife the Adversary in some dark corner of Hackney… he has to be made into an example.
[another pause]
Emery: I hope I’m not being too morbid.
Monty: Oh, no, not in the slightest. I’m just thanking my lucky stars this is a print interview.
[laughter]
—
After that second interview Monty invited me to a party at his house, and I accepted the invitation immediately. Even after almost a year in London I hadn’t managed to cultivate a social life that wasn’t glued to Sheila’s at the hip, so I jumped at any chance to go somewhere, do something. I was also jumping at the chance to spend more time with him, see him for the first time outside of a professional context.
He didn’t live in a huge mansion or anything, like some of the more successful actors I’d interviewed for Filmland, but it was a nice house just about a twenty minute drive out of the city. By the time I got there it was around 10pm, and too dark to make out much of the façade other than the warm yellow light spilling onto the lawn from the many windows. I don’t know if I’d be able to identify that house if you took me to it right now, but if we went at night I’d recognize it in an instant. The other thing that struck me about it was that it was quiet. Never before had I been to a party, especially a party put on by movie people, that didn’t have music and laughter going that you could hear from the outside. And it wasn’t like I was early and it just hadn’t started yet either—I was actually about a half an hour late from the time he’d given me at the interview. I was already pretty uneasy just from that alone, but I pushed it down and went inside anyway.
When I went into the house at first, I didn’t see anyone—the foyer and the hallway leading further into the house were totally vacant. That was another strange thing, too; usually at these things you had more people than you knew what to do with, and you had to pack them in anywhere they would fit. I could hear the slightest murmuring of conversation further down the hall, a dim light emanating from an occupied room at the very end… but that was it. That was the moment I really truly considered crapping out and heading back into my car, before I heard Monty’s voice calling me from the unseen interior of the house.
“Hayes! Thought you weren’t gonna show, you bastard. Come on, we’re all in here.”
And after hearing that there was no way I could leave, not in good conscience, anyway. The living room was taken up in the middle by one big conversation pit, where Monty and ten or fifteen other people were shooting the shit and eating or drinking off a small coffee table. The ceiling was high and the second floor hallway created a sort of ring around it, like a loft where if you were up there you could stare down into the conversation pit over the wooden railing. It had one of those skylights, too, a big glass panel where you could look up into the sky—I kept staring up at it over the course of the night, the black hole it created out of that dark night sky.
To start out it was pretty much like any other small party I’d been to in the last couple of years. There was booze and there was coke. We all did some, but it was nothing crazy. All the other guys there were suits: studio executives with their little giggling girlfriends sitting in their laps. They didn’t want to talk to me at all, and they talked to Monty only in passing, when he would make the occasional good-spirited attempt to kick up a conversation that inevitably fell flat. Not for lack of trying, of course. Monty talked a lot—and he drank more and did more coke than anyone else there, no contest. But he was always talking at someone, never to them. He didn’t talk to me, either, not in any way that felt more than surface level. I couldn’t talk to him the way I wanted to, either—not with all those suits around, murmuring and giggling to each other in clothes that cost more than my rent. It annoyed me, sure, but more than that it made me… I don’t know… sad. It was like he didn’t have any friends.
Around midnight the topic of the conversation turned to the interview I’d done, and I shored up a good bashful laugh and a dismissive hand gesture as my total contribution. Monty, of course, took off with it and ran—by this point he was totally drunk and twitching a little from the blow as he paced around the edge of the conversation pit and drew the uninterested eyes of a couple suits.
“Monty All The Time is to be hung this holiday weekend,” he squawked in haughty repetition, words slurring into a verbal soup. “Unfortunately it’s only in his latest picture! Christ! Who comes up with this stuff? It’s hilarious. I hope whoever wrote it got the bonus of a lifetime. I mean I hope they took that happy bastard into the director’s office and sucked him off right there.” He cackled with laughter and it made me shiver, like it was a bad sound, like I already knew what was going to happen.
“I’ll be right back,” he giggled effeminately and dashed off, stumbling on his eager feet. He went up the stairs to the second floor and disappeared into some room I couldn’t see—the light was off inside. I nearly fell backwards trying to crane my neck and see him.
“Where did he go?” I turned and asked some girl whose name I didn’t ask and never learned. She looked dazed for a second, like she didn’t quite hear me, but then she laughed hard enough to make me think it was at my expense.
“Oh, I think I’ve seen him do this trick before. You’re going to get a real kick out of it. Bloody crazy, isn’t he? A real laugh riot. I just love going to these kinds of parties,” she gushed. The man she was attached to grunted quietly in agreement, but that was his only contribution to the topic at hand.
“Trick?” I asked stupidly. She didn’t give me any answer.
Monty came back a few seconds later with a bundle of rope in both hands, and when he approached the railing I saw that he had a noose tied around his neck. My heart suddenly jolted in my chest with very real fear, but then I remembered what the girl had told me: some kind of trick. The way he held the bundle up into view and said “Huh? Huh?” until we gave him a mediocre cheer seemed to point to the same conclusion. I huffed out a forceful breath to calm my nerves… but it did very little. I don’t want to give myself too much credit, but I knew as soon as I saw the rope that something bad was going to happen. Something sinister.
Monty did what Monty All The Time did best: he put on a show. He whistled as he worked, tying the heavy rope to the banister alongside a borderline burlesque bump-and-grind of his hips. People laughed, and I don’t blame them. It was funny, you know, same old Monty. At that point I felt I was still in on the whole thing, and I was starting to blame my spike of anxiety on the coke. That’s always the first mistake.
“It’s just so hard sometimes, you know,” Monty bemoaned as he climbed up and sat on the banister, idly kicking his legs like a schoolgirl in love. He was still doing his bit, of course, but there was a split second where… it sounds stupid to say. There was a second where the quiver of his lip and the small whine that undercut his words felt genuine and razor-sharp, and it made me feel bad for him. He was a better actor than he ever gave himself credit for. “Being so popular and so famous and so sexy. Even I can barely stand it. And recently I’ve begun to think… well… maybe I ought to put myself out of my misery.” He raised his hand to his forehead in a foppish woe-is-me display… and then he opened his eyes and looked at me. His facial expression suddenly changed.
He looked at me… tugged on the noose around his neck… and mouthed, to me alone, “It’s real.”
Then he winked.
That’s when I freaked out.
“CHRIST, SOMEBODY GET HIM DOWN FROM THERE!”
I jumped to my feet, stupid with terror, and was momentarily shocked and outraged to find that I was the only one to do so. It hadn’t occurred that ‘somebody’ could have been me. I stood, sweating like a pig with fear and feeling like a real idiot, and the rest of the party stared at me like I was… annoying them. Monty laughed, but I wasn’t looking at him and didn’t see it.
He jumped right as I turned back around.
At that point in my life it was the worst thing I had ever seen. The way his neck snapped—the sound that it made—he hit the perfect jackpot to end his life in a second. I think I might have started screaming then, but I couldn’t hear it over that terrifying crack of bone, over and over and over again in my head. His body hung limp in the noose, unnaturally straight from where his head was, and one leg twitched erratically before stopping and leaving him unnaturally still. It happened too fast. I stood there, looking at him, still screaming my damn head off—still the only one, though at that point most everyone else in the room had ceased to exist for me. And then—
Okay. I want to be completely transparent here. I was on a lot of drugs that night—there had been coke and there had been hash and there had been other things I don’t remember. I’d done a little of everything, and that means there’s a lot of blur. Sometimes I still try and convince myself that’s the explanation; I was high out of my mind and it really was a trick. But I know in my heart it isn’t true. Nobody can take a fall like that with a noose and live. This is the first time I’ve ever told this story to another person, so, maybe you can understand that I’m a little hesitant. I don’t know if you’ll believe me. I want you to promise that you’ll publish this, okay? Even if you think it’s a load of bullshit. I just want you to share it like I tell it, no edits, no comments, nothing. Okay?
Okay.
I stood there, screaming… and then Monty opened his eyes. A huge grin—a huge living grin—spread across his face, head still cocked deadly to one side. He glanced to look at me, look at me right in the face, and as the rest of the party started to laugh pleasantly and clap in appreciation of the trick gone right, he gave me a big old V for victory.
—
Transcript: Emery Hayes interviews Monty All The Time, July 27 1976
Emery: Tell me about the girl.
Monty [after a pause]: What girl?
Emery: You’ll have to humor me a little on this one. I’ve done a lot of interviews like this, you know, and so I have this theory. I think that somewhere behind every great creative mind there’s a girl.
Monty: How very romantic.
Emery: No, not in a romantic way. Or, it doesn’t have to be. She could be, I don’t know, your friend, or your kindergarten teacher, or your mother. But there’s always a girl somewhere fundamental in the mind of anyone who makes good art. So I want to hear about yours.
Monty: Who’s your girl?
Emery: You have to go first! Come on.
Monty [laughing]: I’m teasing, I’m teasing. God, I have to think about that one.
[a pause]
Monty: Okay, I think I’ve got it.
Emery: Lay it on me.
Monty: So this was a girl I met in the States, actually, in ’71. An actress. Name was Sharon. I had to shoot a scene on-location in… Florida, I think it was. Somewhere swampy with lot of gators around, you know, I was going to get bitten. Sharon was a bit-part, a big beautiful blonde with a penchant for real short skirts and those funny bullet-bras American girls used to wear in the 50s. Me and her got on quite well.
Emery: Of course.
Monty: Is that a bit of sarcasm I detect, love?
Emery: Don’t worry about me, handsome, get on with the story.
Monty: You’re so cruel. Anyway, me and Sharon. We got on quite well, but the problem was she had a man, right? They always do. But she told me it was okay because this is when ‘Nam was in full swing over there, and her man was out on tour. No problem. We had the house to ourselves whenever we liked. And let me tell you, Em, this girl was freaky.
Emery: I think you might have misunderstood the assignment.
Monty: No, I didn’t. The sex was great, sure, but it was a lot more than that. We were very artistically compatible. She’d come up with these disgusting gory movie ideas——and this was on the surface your perfect American girl, apple pie and gingham and all that corny shit. I loved it. We were starting to think about making a film together, actually, around the time it happened. One night we’re at her place, fooling around, and I hear footsteps coming down the hall——heavy ones. She’s distracted, of course, so I don’t think about it too much because I hear things sometimes. Call it manifestation of my guilt, or whatever. But her man is supposed to be on tour for another four months. So no problem, right…?
Emery: I have a feeling I know where this is going.
Monty: Don’t give it away! Me and her are going at it, and I mean really going at it, when all of a sudden the bedroom door opens and there’s our good old American boy, still in his uniform. Sees the entire thing. Needless to say he is not pleased.
Emery: I can imagine.
Monty: The whole thing is a mess immediately. He’s shouting at her, she’s screaming back at him and crying, I’m just standing there looking like a fool with my trousers around my ankles trying to figure out what the bloody hell is going on. Then he turns his attention on me and throws me against the wall in a headlock——and he turns me to face her and pulls his gun.
Emery: Christ!
Monty: Puts it right up against my neck. This is no joke of a handgun we’re talking, by the way, it was this giant Smith & Wesson, had to have been like a .44. At this point Sharon’s screaming her bloody head off, waking up all the neighbors, dogs are barking and cats are yowling. Now it’s everybody’s business, and I actually hate to cause a scene like that, if you can believe it. Super embarrassing. Sharon’s screaming, trying to talk him out of it, I’m just limp like a ragdoll in this guy’s arms——trying not to make any more problems for myself than I already have. And then——[laughing]
Emery: What?
Monty: Oh, wow, I don’t even know why I’m laughing. It’s going to sound horrible and you’re going to think I’m a real psycho.
Emery: Okay, now you have to tell me.
Monty: Well——he shoved the pistol against my throat and he pulled the trigger. Right in front of her.
[a long pause]
Monty: I told you it was bad.
Emery: You’re bullshitting me.
Monty: Am not. Here, take a look.
[shuffling (clothes?) sounds: Monty stands, walks across to Emery (showing)]
Emery: Oh my God!
Monty: Told you.
Emery: He shot you? He actually shot you?
[no answer]
Emery: He shot you point-blank in the neck with a .44 and you lived?
—
“You have a little crush on me, don’t you?” Monty told me as he pulled me into a hall closet and started kissing my neck. I didn’t say anything, because he was right. By that point in the night he’d had even more to drink, and was borderline incoherent as his hands wandered like his mind. I felt more sober than ever. It kept repeating every second in my head, the jump, the snap, the grin afterwards. V for victory.
But I put my hands on him, and I felt his cold skin, because he was right and I had a little crush on him and I guess that says whatever it says about me. If I had been staring over the precipice before, now I had fallen totally into whatever black void it overlooked, and I touched him because I wanted to and I figured there wasn’t much that mattered anymore. I had gone insane. These are all retroactive musings, by the way—at the time I wasn’t in any state to think anything, at all.
We—what’s the polite way young people put it nowadays?—we did it right there in the closet. I don’t know. It was fast and slow. We started it in the dark, by touch, and the most I could see of him was that awful broken neck and those beautiful green eyes through his glasses, tilted at a bad angle. Then I heard the rustling of clothing and immediately I took my hands off like he would burn me, like I had to wait. Quietly, he said, “I want to show you something.”
By that point in the night I wasn’t interested in anything he had to show me, but I said alright anyway. I didn’t have any other choice. He reached up—blocked out those eyes with the amorphous dark shape of his arm—and turned the light on. It was sudden, blinding, and it put a stinging white film over my eyes that I missed the minute I had to live with the thing it had been blocking out.
Monty stood in front of me, nude, and his body was a warzone. Not one patch of skin went unscarred. Burns, cuts, punctures—God, everything. Innumerable wounds turned him into a sickening kaleidoscope of flesh-tones, discordant textures, like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster… below the neckline. His face was smooth and handsome, untouched, human. His cheeks were flushed with what little color they took, and I knew he was feeling me up with his eyes, half-lidded and shining darkly.
I couldn’t bring myself to meet them. I was still looking at his scars, reveling in the horror—and I realized I recognized one.
It was this thick, jagged line that went all the way across his midsection, raised and angry red, flanked on both sides by the dots of former stitches. Heavy, heavy damage.
Like someone cut in half by a chainsaw, maybe.
I didn’t know what it meant then and I don’t really know what it meant now. I have my conspiracy theories, of course, but you can’t just understand a thing like that. I feel like I’m doing a really shit job at describing how special he was to me… how important of a person I believed he was then and still believe now. You can’t do it in words. You had to have been there, and known him, and spoken with him. Or even just watched his films. That’s why it just makes me so sad, and it’s probably why I still dream about him all the time. Maybe you just think I’m an overzealous fanboy, reading too much into a couple celebrity interviews. That could very well be true. But I really thought I saw him, and I knew him, and it was so awful and I was just so sad because I was thinking, all the time, if we could have… you know, if things had gone differently…
Oh, it’s so stupid.
But if things had been different somehow we could have… it could have been real… in a real bed, and everything—
—
Shit—
[Do you want to take a break, Mr. Hayes?]
No, no, I’m okay. Christ, how embarrassing.
—
Transcript: Emery Hayes interviews Monty All The Time, July 27 1976
Emery: What advice would you give to a young person who wanted to make the kind of art that you do?
Monty: Oh, stop, you’ll give some poor woman a heart attack. Mummy, when I grow up, I want to be a grindhouse star.
Emery [laughing]: Well, some of them will! So what are you going to say to little Tommy who wants to make nasty pictures?
Monty [laughing as well]: Give me a second, give me a second.
[a pause]
Monty: Alright, I got it.
Emery: Shoot.
Monty: I tried to stay away from the cliché of oh, you have to give up everything for your art. I don’t think you have to go that far. But I think you have to be willing.
Emery: Elaborate on that.
Monty: You have to be willing to give up everything. I mean, really, you have to enter a kind of zen mode about it, and be ready to give up things you think are… vital to yourself. If you can think of a single thing you couldn’t do without, you’re going to fail before you even start. Sure, most of the time it doesn’t come down to that. Hardly ever comes down to that, even. But it’s about the mindset. You know, you could work for years doing this stuff, from the time you’re fifteen bloody years old, sleeping couch to couch and making movies nobody sees and nobody pays you for. Years. And then somebody might come up to you at a wrap party and say, “I’ll help you, I’ll give you the thing you need to make this happen, but the price will be terrible. I mean just God-awful.”
Emery: Deal with the devil.
Monty [laughing]: Yeah, maybe that’s what it was. But the point is when it comes to that you have to have deep pockets. You have be able to say, “Sure, mate, anything you want, God knows I need this. God knows I want this more than anything, anything in the world, whatever that oh-so-terrible price might be.”
—
I never saw him in person again after that. I couldn’t. He called me a couple times, but I couldn’t do that either. I think at the time I explained it to myself as a bad trip, and I guess it was, when you get down to the bones of it. Worst fucking trip of my life. But even then I knew there was something more sinister there, something I couldn’t explain and was too scared to even try.
I lived my life best I could as though I had never met him, like it had been some long, detailed dream I woke up out of fuzzy and slightly disoriented. I’m sure you can guess that was a hell of a lot easier said than done. Sheila gave me a hard time over it, asking who’d dumped my sorry ass—she thought I’d had a breakup, I was so mopey about it to start. In a way, I guess I had.
But it stopped feeling that way. I got over myself and did more interviews, different interviews with people who were far safer and far more boring than he had ever been. Life went on. Little by little I started to… not forget, exactly, but be alright with everything that had happened. I let it take whatever space it needed to take in my perception of myself. And I was sitting on Sheila’s couch watching TV, totally unbothered, when twelve representatives of the Mothers United Against Bad Taste assassinated Monty All The Time on live television on September 14th, 1976.
That’s what you’ve been itching for, isn’t it? Be patient. I only watched about ten minutes of the actual interview before it happened; it was promotion for Black Shuck, one of only three 15-certified films he made over the course of his career and his single posthumous acting credit. But maybe all of his acting credits were posthumous. God, I don’t know.
But there he was, talking to some middling-name newsman in a suffocatingly small studio, and—it was like he’d aged a decade from the last I’d seen him. His hair was limp and greasy-looking, and his eyes seemed burrowed further down into his skull. More stunningly than that was the fact that he was wearing one of those mesh shirts that would go on to be all the rage. All the time I’d known him he’d worn long-sleeved and erratically patterned polyester button ups, done all the way up to the collar. I’m sure you can imagine why. Here, you could see everything—well, it was hazy through the mesh, sure, but you could see enough. That angry line on his stomach was clear as day. I must have missed the part of the interview where he walked on stage and everybody pointed and stared and gasped; you couldn’t look at a thing like that and think this man was alright.
He talked a bunch of ass-patting niceties about Black Shuck—it was the worst and most commercial piece of his filmography—and then there was a scuffling off-camera that made him lose his train of thought. He looked, and the newsman got out of his seat and shouted “Hey!”, but it was too late at that point. The camera never even had the chance to pan to the women who shot him. All the British public saw was Monty All The Time, plugged full of lead from twelve separate shotguns, rapidly taken from man to meat. There’s no polite way to put a thing like that. It pulverized him in about half a second, face and all.
And—and I hope from the bottom of my heart that it killed him. Really, I do. I hope that was the thing that finally broke whatever spell or curse or devil’s contract that stupid bastard had gotten himself living under. In any case, it killed his career. You see, it’s easy to play off getting shot in front of one or two people—you can call the girl hysterical and the man psychotic, and you can play disappearing-corpse, and you can maybe get people to believe there was no homewrecking, no giant Smith & Wesson, after all. But there was no telling how many people had seen him—seen his face—get obliterated from the comfort of their millions of living rooms. It was, to use his phrase, a bad look.
The women who did it were all convicted and they all went to prison for a very, very long time. That’s the good part of this story. As for me, I moved back to Los Angeles about three months after it happened. I was home in time for Christmas. London, which I had romanticized as my way out, had become just as unlivable as the city of angels was that distant, dreamy day I had decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I had no choice but to slink back with my tail between my legs and my brain altered slightly and forever by the terrible thing I had seen. When it came down to the evil I knew and the evil I had just been introduced to, it was easy.
If he is still alive he’s sixty years old, the same as me, and I suppose he lives as a hermit somewhere far away from human society. What remains of him is the record. There are scraps of him here and there—my interviews, those Daily Mail articles, promotional material, news coverage of the shooting. I’ve tasked a small group of my journalism students with helping me keep up his Wikipedia page. They give us hell about our citations, since most of it is from my memory, but they let us keep it up anyway. It’s good to be able to gather all of it in one place. I feel like I’m doing something for him.
But his movies are gone.
Yep. Every last one. He was in a lot of them, too—a lifetime of work. Maybe over a hundred, all gone without a trace. I’ve made a fool of myself at every Blockbuster in West Hollywood looking for them—no cigar. I threw out my copy of Virgin Genocide II the night I saw him, and I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. Other than that, I’ve asked around on a hundred different web forums, but no luck there, either. In the five years I’ve taken on this little project of mine—to reintroduce him to the world—the closest I’ve come is a video clip one of my teaching assistants managed to find on what he calls a liveleak, God knows what that is. Said he’d found this video—this minute and half long clip—of somebody getting shot to death on a talk show in the late 70s or early 80s. He didn’t get a great look, he said, but he thought it might be ‘my man’. He thought right.
It’s a piece taken from the interview, which is sealed so tightly in the BBC vault of shame that I will never see it without a lifetime’s worth of clearance, and it is the violence isolated, out of context. Maybe twenty-five seconds of him in the middle of talking and the rest, as they say, is history. How it got online I couldn’t begin to tell you. I’ve seen it, of course. I had to identify it, like a dead loved one in a morgue. I’ve seen what it’s been titled, too: ‘Brit Gets Blasted By Ten Remingtons ON LIVE TV! 1981’. Factual errors aside, it’s what exists of him on film now, in perpetuity. I think he would have found great humor in that.
Sometimes in my moments of weakness I curse him for showing me. If he hadn’t done that, I would have gone on with my life knowing he was dead and gone and buried, and maybe that would have been the best. Maybe then he wouldn’t haunt me. It’s been the great puzzle of my life, trying to figure out why he decided I needed to know—why I needed to be forced to know—the terrible thing about him that should not have been possible. Sometimes, at the worst, I think—
No, it’s stupid.
No. I mean it, it’s idiotic.
…
If you really want me to, then.
Sometimes at the worst I think—I think he wanted me to help him. I think he wanted me to run and tell somebody, open my big mouth to any news outlet I could find until every billboard in Piccadilly Circus was plastered with the news that Monty All The Time Is The Thing From Beyond The Grave. It would be out and over with. But really I just ran. I couldn’t take it and I ran, and when he didn’t have me to spill his guts he went on television in that gaudy mesh top so somebody else—everybody else—would do it.
I don’t like thinking about it that way, because it makes it my fault. No—no, it does. I’m not sugarcoating it. But what was I supposed to do, huh? What would have happened if I had really done it? I would have been laughed out of every next job I had. I would have never worked again. And suppose somebody had taken me seriously—how would I have explained how I knew? You know what the second line of that billboard would have been? And Emery Hayes Walked With The Zombie, Har-Dee-Har-Har-Har. I was out, sure, but I wasn’t stupid. And what would they have done with him afterwards? Put him up in some freakshow? Get him on the carnival circuit? That kind of voodoo magic wasn't supposed to happen to people in the real world; only in grindhouse movies. He knew that as well as I did.
And after lying to me about it, too. That’s the other part that makes my head hurt and reminds me I’m getting around to being an old man. He talked all this wonderful bull about sitting in the makeup chair and blood hoses malfunctioning and all those itchy prosthetics, hahahahaha. He said it all so easily because he was a good actor, until that night when he decided he didn’t want to be an actor anymore. He wanted to be a human being and he decided the time to be a human being was in a mothball-smelling closet with his cock in my mouth and his neck broken. From hanging himself. What kind of sick son of a bitch does something like that?
I can’t tell you. He was a creature of impulse, and that was the most I ever really learned about him, and it was enough to make me love him. Plain and simple. I think at the end of the day he told me because he needed it out of himself, needed it in another person. A secondary penetration, if you want to be crude about it. Or maybe it was his way of saying he loved me. Loved me, too.
Either way—
I can’t be at fault for running, can I? For loving him and running? For abandoning my journalistic integrity and covering my eyes and ears in the face of a truth I could never report on?
Can I?
