PART III: THE COWBOY - THE TRUE STORY
Separating fact from fiction can be a tricky game, especially when the line between the two is considerably blurred. Such is the case with The Cowboy.
The character of The Cowboy is based on a real guy. Yes, it’s true, for the most part, as crazy as that might sound. He’s not a murderer, at least as far as I know, but he is a crazy fucker, make no mistake. I met him at a party in 1998. I got really trashed and passed out while everybody was watching GATES OF HELL. The next morning I woke up, he was the only other guy still there, so I asked him for a ride home.
At the time he drove a rusted out old Cadillac with really shitty breaks. He’s also the most reckless driver I’ve ever had the misfortune to have my life endangered by. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he usually drives at around 110 mph. If he still has his license it should be taken away. Fearing for my life, I nervously asked him what he does when his breaks go out and he’s rapidly approaching an intersection. Nonchalant, he answered, “I just lay on the horn to warn the other drivers.” I found this answer anything but assuring.
The next time we met was when The Cowboy was working the graveyard shift at a grocery store. He explained that he was just going to stock shelves, but when they saw he had a masters degree they hired him on the spot as the night manager.
It was a pretty laid back gig. The night crew he commanded was mostly “misfits and retards.” His words. We went back to the office and he offered me some drugs, which I declined. I don’t claim to be Mr. Innocent, but the stuff he had to share was a little too hard for my taste.
He asked me if I wanted to see something cool. I said sure. He opened the safe, pulled out around twenty grand in cash, and tossed it on the desk. He then took a revolver out of the desk drawer and brandished it for a moment. He opened the gun, took out all the bullets except one, then closed the cylinder again. He offered me the gun and said, “Put it to your head and squeeze the trigger. Do it the money’s yours.”
I refused, but not before giving it a few seconds thought, just for show, of course. I didn’t want him to think I was a total chicken-shit. I don’t think he would have let me do it, though. He just wanted to push me a little, see what I was made of. He put the gun away and told me about how he played Russian roulette a few times in Vietnam.
That was the thing I found most fascinating about The Cowboy. He had a story for everything. He never shut up. Ever. But he never talked just to hear his own voice. He was a storyteller, and he enjoyed entertaining people with tales from his adventurous life.
After that, we started hanging out frequently. Most of the time at his place. He was renting a garage apartment from an eccentric lesbian couple. They decorated the house with medieval paintings and sculptures, dragons and elves and shit. They were young, attractive, and if memory serves me they were registered nurses.
The apartment was small, just one room and a bathroom, no frills, but very secure. The house was located in the most crime infested part of town, but the property was impenetrable, a fortress. I have never seen anything quite like it. The property was completely enclosed by a ten foot block wall. And above the wall was about six more feet of razor wire fencing. The only way in or out was a heavy, steel door that they kept chained and locked at all times.
The Cowboy was into women, but he was also into a lot of other unusual things. He hung out from time to time with a transsexual, a Black girl named Veronica, who I believe was probably a prostitute. She hung out with us from time to time, doing drugs, listening to music, and playing video games.
The Cowboy also enjoyed picking up crack whores and partying with them. He showed me a stack of Polaroid pictures one time. I flipped through them, barely able to hold back my lunch. They showed him having sex with a really revolting crack whore, holding a gun to her head, and beating the shit out of her. There is no way I could ever make a horror movie more disturbing than the images I saw in these pictures.
In addition to this, he enjoyed fisting, and had no problem bragging about it. He fisted chicks dudes, whatever. The way he described it, “It ain’t sexual. It’s about the power. You’ll never feel more power than when you’ve got your arm jammed up somebody’s butthole. It’s like they’re your puppet, and you control them.”
These were fun times. The lesbians threw lots of parties and The Cowboy was always invited. And in turn he would invite me. So I ended up at a lot of lesbian parties. The parties were extremely decadent and almost always had a fetish theme. There’s nothing quite like partying with a house full of intoxicated lesbians, especially when they’re dressed in fetish gear and engaging in hot sex acts right out in the open.
The central conversation piece of the house was a real electric chair. It was one of those old fashioned wooden ones you’d see in the movies. And it actually worked, sort of. It wouldn’t kill the person seated in it, but it was modified so you could definitely hit them with some juice. At one of their Halloween parties I watched as one chick sat naked in the chair, blindfolded, as they turned on the power. All the lesbians gathered around and watched. They even videotaped the whole show.
One time he opened up to me about the love of his life. I forget her name. Sheryl, or something like that. She owned a ranch and she bred horses. This was a long time ago, when he was a young man. He told me about how they would care for the horses and ride them around together. His gaze became distant, like he was reliving the memory. He claimed they even rode naked occasionally. It sounded like a fairy tale romance. It all came to an end, however, when one of the horses got spooked and kicked him through a barn wall. He said the horse got him with both back hooves and collapsed one of his lungs. After that, he didn’t see that much of her.
After the horse episode, he moved to another town where he got a job at a slaughter house. He told me he had to wear a big rain coat and rubber hat because of all the blood. He also bragged about a belt he wore that held all his knives. His story was almost word for word what I wrote for MASKHEAD.
One time he took some acid before heading in to work. A lot of acid, actually. I know this sounds completely beyond belief, but if you knew this guy it wouldn’t seem far fetched at all. He came on strong while in the slaughter house and he freaked. The next thing he recalls is walking along the interstate when a police car pulled up behind him. As he explained, “I was covered in blood, head to toe, and I’ve still got all my knives still in belt. The cops get out behind me and start screamin’ all sorts of shit. I turn around and they’ve got their guns pointed right at me. But I had so much acid in my head they looked like skeletons with glowing eyeballs. Then a big eagle flew over my head, about the size of a 747 airplane. It flew off into the distance where it ripped off the entire top of a building with its claws. All I could do was laugh.”
The Cowboy was easily addicted to whatever fun thing he was doing at any given time. He never did anything half-assed; It was all or nothing for him. I stopped hanging out with him around 2005, and it was during this time that he got hooked on meth. Those around him described his downward spiral as shocking and intense. One mutual friend told me, “I’ve never seen anybody lose everything so fast.”
In the past, he had done more than his fair share of drugs. One time he overdosed on animal tranquilizers and couldn’t remember his name for a month. But that was child’s play compared to his collision course with meth. Something about it really sunk the hooks into him. He lost around sixty pounds in less than a month. He was awake for two weeks at a time. He claimed “shadow agents” were following him everywhere. He covered his windows with tinfoil and stayed inside for days on end doing nothing but smoking that stuff.
Everything came to a head the day he lost his job and was kicked out of the garage apartment where he was living. At the time he was working for the gas company. His bosses discovered an alarming amount of charges he had made that month with his gas card. It was something like thirty thousand dollars, or some outrageous sum. Turns out he was scaming the company by paying for other people’s gas and pocketing the cash. He’d then go and spend the money on meth. When the bosses confronted him about it, he allegedly became so hostile that somebody in the office called 911. He fled the scene and in the end the company declined to press charges providing that he never return to the office.
The lesbians had grown increasingly afraid of him that month. They tried everything to get him out, including listing their house for sale. Nothing worked, however. He failed to take the hint. Finally, they resorted to paying a couple thugs to move all his shit outside the wall. When he arrived home after being fired, the thugs informed him that he no longer lived there.
After this, details about The Cowboy became fuzzy. Around a year later he showed up at my front door and rang the bell. I wasn’t there. My wife was so terrified she hid and pretended nobody was home. He rang the bell persistently for about thirty minutes then left. She called me in hysterics after he drove away, telling me he looked like a zombie.
It was around then that I saw Veronica for the last time. I was driving in West Hollywood, near the corner made famous by Eddie Murphy. It was around seven in the morning and it was fucking freezing. I spotted her standing outside a sleazy motel wearing a thin, tiny dress and dancing on the sidewalk, probably high on something. She was in rough shape, too. She didn’t notice me, thank God. I just kept driving.
The Cowboy and I crossed paths one more time at a Wienerschnitzel in Van Nuys. I nearly shit my pants when I saw him. This was about a year after Veronica. I was shocked by the mere sight of him. He was a ghost. He resembled an Auschwitz victim, not the friend I once knew. He claimed he was living in government housing and receiving a check. He showed me his new tattoos, works in progress which he was paying for with his welfare money. The tattoos were depictions of pain and suffering, cruelty and torment -- no doubt a reflection of his inner madness.
I wanted to cry. It took everything I had to hold back my emotions. I sat down with him and talked while we ate our food. There were times that he snapped back into focus and he was the same old crazy Cowboy. But then he’d suddenly snap back and I wouldn’t recognize him.
He told me about how “the shadow agents” tracked him down and destroyed his life. He said men in black were hiding in trees and that a S.W.A.T. Team crawled across his apartment floor with guns, coming after him. He also talked of a mysterious, beautiful woman who lived on the other side of the glass in his dresser mirror. Spooky shit.
That’s the last I saw of him. Of all our mutual friends, I was the last one to have contact with him. Safe bet they say is he’s dead, but I don’t hold that theory. The Cowboy is a survivor. He’s like a cat, nine lives and always lands on his feet. Nothing kills him. He’s out there, somewhere. I know it. He probably figured out a way to put his life back together, maybe not perfectly, but enough to milk the system and get by for a while longer.
And the crazy thing is, I'm not sure how many times this sort of thing has happened to him in the past. When I first met him, he might have already lost everything and gone insane two or three times.
MASKHEAD tells the depraved tale of Syl and Maddie, a lesbian couple who produce extreme fetish and dark specialty movies. With the help of their sociopathic associate, The Cowboy, the ladies audition numerous up-and-coming talent to star in their top selling, stomach-turning fetish series: “MASKHEAD,” which features a large man in a bizarre mask who tortures and kills his “co-stars” on camera.
