The title alone had me glued to the page. As I read the opening lines it brought to mind a short story I'd written as a teen. It, too, was a story about torture. After you read Jack Handey's intro I will tell you about my story.
May 30, 2022
MY TORTURE IDEAS
BY JACK HANDEY
People think it's easy to come up with torture ideas. I wish! You can spend hours walking along a tranquil beach, or sitting in a meadow full of butterflies, and not come up with a single torture idea.
Some torture ideas will come to you out of the blue. Your mother and stepfather might be visiting, and suddenly a great torture idea will occur to you.
But most torture ideas come from just putting your nose to the grindstone--locking yourself in a small, dark room with a lamp shining in your face staring down at a pen and a blank piece of paper, until the ideas are forced out of you. Eventually, whipping yourself, you become the proud author of hundreds of torture ideas--many with helpful illustrations. But here's the catch: nine out of ten ideas need to be thrown out. Biting snails? Powerful suction cups? What was I thinking?
Read the rest here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/coming-up-with-torture-ideas-is-harder-than-you-think
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WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
CONTINUE YOU AT YOUR OWN RISK
I may have been 15 or so when I wrote my story involving torture. In fact, the torture scene was the primary feature of the story. There was little to no character development, and probably not even a description of what these gangsters looked like or talked like. (I was just a kid. I never got closer to a gangster than my TV, though on retrospect, maybe...)
In the scene a friend and I are being held captive by these bad dudes in suits. The location is sketchy but it is definitely inner city. We're in a room on about the fourth floor. The room has large windows on two walls (must have been a corner office) showing the scale of this concrete jungle.
In the middle of the room stood a table and a large grey desk, industrial strength, while remaining insignificant.An assortment of tools and implements re-purposed for generating suffering lay strewn across the table.
The story is told in first person and I am on the receiving end of this scene. The manner in which they secured me in my chair is as follows. First, they pushed a small cable into my cheek and out the other cheek. Then the secured the ends of the cable (to pipes on the wall?) in such a way so as to keep me fairly immobile. The only way to escape would be to jerk my head back and rip my face apart.
Now that I think about it, the bad guys did have a motive. They were looking for information. Neither my friend nor I had a clue what they were looking for. We were the wrong guys.
In my story one of the torture implements was a belt sander, which made a mess of my friend's toes and shins. Funny how I can't remember hardly any of the other horrors except when they strung up my friend by his tongue with a fishhook.
Again for the record, I was 15.
Torture seems to have become more mainstream since that time. Dustin Hoffman's worst nightmare in Marathon Man; Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory; James Caan in Stephen King's Misery; George Clooney in Syriana. And who can forget Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, that scene in the warehouse with "Stuck in the Middle with You" as soundtrack.
I once read that if you want to generate sympathy for your main character, hurt them.
In my story, they went a little too far with my friend, whom they ultimately eviscerated, filling his torso with fast-drying concrete and dropping him into the East River. You know how New York gangsters are, always making bodies disappear in the East River. In New Jersey they leave them in the Great Swamp.
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More thoughts on this topic are marching into my head, but I'm going to turn the page. Enjoy your weekend. And stay away from people who think torture is fun. It's not.
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