Eric La Barr and Efrem P. Towns | Slate / 2012

remembering the dead by forgetting the living

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric La Barr (screenplay), Eric La Barr and Efrem P. Towns (director) Slate / 2012 [17 minutes]

 

Within the first five minutes of this short film, Slate (Eric La Barr), who has been through a series of sexual encounters forced upon him by his pimp Terrence (Efrem P. Towns) is kicked out of the apartment he shares with the overweight, lazy pimp because of a cancellation.

    Sleeping on the roof of a local business building, he is discovered the next morning by the plant manager, Johnny (Kellan Rhude), who not only ignores Slate’s breaking and entering transgression but makes a date with him for that very evening. A relationship quickly develops between the two young men.

    Even when he returns home with a full night’s pay for his hustling, Terrence demands he get up and bring him back some food. There is no rest for the boy who was obviously brought under the pimp’s control when he was a young boy without any home and financial possibilities. He remains as a slave, while also being used as a sexual toy for his truly obnoxious pimp.

    Slate, however, hasn’t yet seemed to catch on to the rules of being a hustler. He begs for a day off to meet up with a friend (Johnny). At first Terrence pretends not to care, happy only if Slate pays his “part of the rent.” But when asked why Terrence doesn’t get a job, the pimp slaps him, reminding that he gave him a home and that without him he would be nothing.

    Slate’s answer, “I am nothing,” further exacerbates Terrence’s anger. Again, Terrance tries to calm the boy down, reminding him, however, that he still has two appointments that day, starting at 3:00.

    When Slate finally rebels, arguing that he’s “done,” Terrence beats him and locks him in a closet.

    Johnny stops by, and when told by Terrence that he has the wrong room number and he hears Slate’s muffled voice from the closet, he breaks in and frees Slate.

    They run off, but Johnny now is furious, wanting to know who the man at the door was, and yet when Slate attempts to explain, is terrified of hearing what he might suspect. “I’m glad I helped you, but I can’t do this. It’s too much!”

     If only he knew. Slate explains that he was locked up for drugs some years ago, and Terence got him out of jail; homeless he had no other place to go. We started having troubles making rent…and well the rest is the story we know, Terrence selling his roommate to johns for sex.

    “Why didn’t you get out?” Johnny demands to know.

    “Who’d I run to? No one helped like you did.”

   Johnny insists that he’s there to help Slate now break free. But the pimp is relentless, and soon enters Johnny’s place of employment and brutally beats him, kicking and stopping on him even after he throws him to the concrete floor.

    In the next scene Johnny suggests to Slate that Terrence will probably leave them alone, if they just disappear. But the blond haired boy insists that Terrence won’t leave them alone until he finds them, destroying them in the process. “He won’t stop. Terrence feels he owns me.” The only answer is to kill him.

    Understandably Johnny wants no part in Slate’s solution to their problem. “I can’t murder someone, Slate. That’s insane.”

    Slate openly announces that Terrence has been sexually abusing him for a while now. But still Johnny can’t bring himself to kill another human being.

     Slate can get a gun, he argues, and he’ll pull the trigger if only Johnny will help him with everything else.

    Shockingly, Johnny agrees.

    When the time comes, Slate hands Johnny a bat, asking him to hit him over the head while he takes care of the rest. “Okay,” says Johnny. “You sure?” Slate responds. Johnny’s final words are “Do I have a choice?”

     In this abbreviated work, the actual events are whipped out from view. On a black screen we hear both their voices as Slate pretends to return and apparently Johnny lifts the bat without being able to use it. He hear slugs, shots, the words from Terrence, “I knew you were a coward.”

     In black-and-white images return. We see Terrence dragging a covered body to the swimming pool and tossing it in. Behind him, now in color, Johnny appears with the gun, saying “It’s over,” as he shoots Terrence whose body also crashes into the pool. We observe both Slate and Terrence floating in the water. When did these two figures, Slate and Johnny, suddenly change their weapons?

    The last few frames show what look like Slate walking in woods-like setting, talking about how vast the universe is and that he hasn’t yet found a way to set himself free, but he’s sure he will someday. Presumably this is his spirit, a ghost wandering in the afterlife not yet free from its earthly restraints.

     But spare me, I’d argue, the imaginative niceties, the religious pieties. What happened to the very caring but now equally guilty Johnny? What about this good Samaritan’s soul, a man who tried to save his new-found friend, but discovered himself instead entwined in such a brutally corrupt world of abuse and hate? Surely, he might have been arrested. Or has his otherwise eventless simply turned into a life of grief and guilt. Is he, now with blond hair also, supposed to be the figure at the end seeking a way to set himself free? I truly doubt it.

    You can open a tragedy with a ghost—Hamlet being a perfect example—but it’s simply absurd to end one with a spirit seeking release. The living have been left out of this triangulation.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).