The Bobo

Shut the fuck up.

2011-11-10T00:19:00.000-08:00

Sometime West is the only answer. But how long can you keep moving till you end up back where you started? Our perspective is distant. When I think of you, it's all snake skin boots, and homemade tattoos, and broken bones, and innocence lost to colorful teenage rebellion. It's the cold north of home. Family secrets forged in alcohol, a death, a stroke, you in a dress, in some nocturnal, bloody, Gothic frenzy. Late night at Denny's, an orgy, or out on the Strip in the lost hours between 9pm and nowhere. A slip of a girl on your hip, a gamine, a Gisele, an ideal prop; a depository. Your powdered wig tucked into your back pocket, searching for Mozart on the sly. It's fun to break windows. To smash the crystal and have them put it on your tab. We may have nothing, but we rejoice in that -- dancing barefoot around the lead vault that is our indestructible, undeniable id. Our fingers on the keys -- ivory, plastic, notes, letters -- not a birthright exactly, something stolen from the primordial sandbox, the genetic lottery won. I accept that it's mine now. It's always been yours. So I look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and righteously declare to myself to "shut the fuck up." Good advice from a friend. Stubborn pragmatist. Renaissance fuck. I am the .04% and tonight I run West. Maybe just a block or two, but never unaware of who we are and what we aren't. Maybe I'll run West till I find myself on your back porch again, having traversed the globe, the physical pain dropping off somewhere around Jerusalem. Wouldn't that be something? I'd be covered in customs stamps -- not pretty. We would laugh about it, have a beer, and then you would walk me to my car.

The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 4

2010-04-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

It started months ago, during a hail storm. But first, picture this. It's Christmas and there hasn't been any snow. The sky is a teasing, slate-gray and the air is perfectly still and freezing cold. Imagine yourself sitting by the window in a perfectly ordinary suburban home. It's quiet. You are alone. You watch the sky but your focus keeps shifting from the outside to the glass where you can see the reflection of Christmas tree lights blinking on and off at a tiresome pace. All the lights on the tree are blue, which feels more cold then festive, and the ticking of the clock refuses to match their silent beat. Nothing about this scene is warm. You shiver. The house is empty and the emptiness sucks at you. It presses against every object in the room like it's fighting for more space, more emptiness. Then it starts to get dark. You consider moving but what would be the point? To relocate ones self in the emptiness would only serve to reset the awareness meter. For a moment things might seem different, lighter, but once your bulk settles again, the process would begin again and there you would be, still taking up the same amount of space within the emptiness. So you stay by the window and watch it get dark. You watch the street below. It must be cold. Freezing even. The kind of cold that is void of life. A clean cold. It would be mad to open the window but that's what you do. You like the idea of a clean cold. You want to feel it just for a moment, because, well, you are closer to it now then you are to anything warm. To make it to something warm would take energy and effort, but the cold is so close so cleansing. You open the window.

It all started months ago. During a hail storm. I was at church. I go to church sometimes, not for any reason other then to be there, which up until recently I felt made me a bad person, a liar. But on the day of the hail storm, I saw something new. The church I go to, went to anyway, was very much like the one I grew up going to. Built in the seventies, drywall mixed with stained glass, a wholly unsatisfying attempt at churchiness encased within what essentially amounted to a cardboard box. There's a mural I like, and some pleasing sconces, but the pale peach walls take me out of character. Much like an actor in a period theme park or a shoddily put together Renaissance Fair, no matter how hard you blur your eyes, it just doesn't cut the mustard because it can't. There will always be an electrical outlet, or a kiosk, or a plastic rock formation to take you out of it. And of course, the tourists. I like my churches to be churches, I would find myself musing through the reading from Saint Paul according to John. I want my senses to be enveloped fully in the atmosphere of what it was selling, not put off or distracted by crappy carpeting, fluorescent lighting, or puckered ceiling tiles. It's a wonder the church doesn't think more about these things. We could wear costumes. Robes. In lieu of the authentic, an art director might just be a worthy investment to dial up the needed intimidation factor as bit. Add a smoke machine, candle light, but hey-ho, I just missed the whole reading thinking about interior design. A thought that led to the original thought about me not deserving to be there. But this day was different. People seemed different. No they weren't wearing robes, quite the opposite. They were regular people, just like me. And somehow I knew that while they might not have been thinking about turning the place into one of the set pieces from "The Bells of Saint Mary", they were thinking that they didn't belong. I immediately chalked this up to the hail. You could hear it tap, tap, tapping against the stained glass, against the roof. It must have been God pelting handfuls of frozen tears at our unrepentant souls, giving us a little scare. It felt dark outside even though it was mid-afternoon and when the time came for Communion, a practice I have sat out of since the eighth grade, something compelled me to rise and get in line with everyone else, for everyone in that church on that unusually dark afternoon, took Communion. Every last wide-eyed, embarrassed cynic from the bowels of Hollywood. We all rose and systematically ingested the body of Christ. Amen.

So you wanna hear the fantasy? It's like this. I go up to the priest and hold out my tongue. He places the Communion wafer in my mouth and says, "Body of Christ", to which I reply, "Amen". I drink the wine, and presumably the backwash of my fellow absolved, and as I'm walking back to my pew, I'm overtaken with a feeling of intense nausea. My body starts to wretch and I can feel my gut sucking at my entrails like a vacuum cleaner, pulling the sin from my body, all the infection, all the years of self abuse, all the pollutants, all the disease, all the weight, all the evil from wicked thoughts, to bad memories, to bad decisions, all the shit from life, either manifested by me or imposed on to me, into a black ball of writhing slime that forms in my stomach. I fall to the ground and feel the cool of the tiles on the side of my face and open my mouth. I'm like a fish gasping for air. My mind holds a single thought, mercy, and I wonder if I deserve it. I wonder as I feel the blackness descending, and then, I cough. Several more times as my face turns crimson, as someone has run off to call an ambulance, as the priest looks on in knowing horror, as mothers hide their children's eyes from the sight of me. I cough and out it comes. I breathe and look down. On the cheap mismatched tiles is everything wretched, everything impure everything that has weighed me down and now, I am free. I am light. I am with God. For now, I believe.

This is what it would take. The hail was not enough. For any of us.

I think I go to church for this fantasy. It's also why I like a church to be a church. Such a scene deserves a great setting. I took the Communion and felt queasy. I hadn't eaten yet that day and the wine was cheap, probably from a box. It made me sick and for a moment, just a moment...

You open the window. It's still outside but the cold hits you like a stone wall. You can't remember a time when you felt such cold. It almost makes you giddy. How insane. How fortunate that we live in a time where such elements can be controlled and kept at bay by a thin pane of polished sand. It's humbling. We ascribe so much power to things that don't exist and walk around ignoring, and often disrespecting, the power that holds our lives in its very hands everyday. The cold is that kind of power. The cold is right there, you can feel it. This cold can kill you, but it can also, maybe, absolve you. You stand and go to the door. You open it. In just your slippers and a nightgown you make your way through what feels like needles across the frozen lawn to the blacktop of the deserted street. You can no longer feel your face. You lie down. The warm soft parts of you are instantly grabbed by the dead cold ground, which seems to suck at what warmth you have left, a devilish purification, but nonetheless, what is happening is real. It's as real as that cardboard church is not. You open your mouth. Nothing comes out but steam and perhaps a Rhinemaiden or two, maybe a laugh, and as the process intensifies, you look up and notice that the blue lights of the coldest Christmas tree in creation are still blinking in the empty house, and you promise yourself to add some red ones next year.

The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 3

2010-03-22T01:55:00.000-07:00

Oh where, oh where can my Bobo be? Oh where, oh where can he be?

Sometimes levity can be found in desperation. A little song, a little dance. Is the pain in my foot fading or increasing? Is life getting harder, here in the land between, or is the place itself rendering such questions mute? I was having a hard time. I see that now. It bubbled to the surface like the black goo of the La Brea tar pits. My God. It's a sad day when you realize that life has snared you. That you have become all the things that you swore to yourself you would never be. That your inner child has gotten old and that you are still ten years behind. And other sad cliches. But then, one day you find yourself wrapped in a particularly lucid dream. A dream where the tree bark is made of fine flaky chocolate, and you say to yourself, at least I have this. At least the trees are made of chocolate, because if they weren't, I might be tempted to jump off this cliff.

She was confused. That's my eulogy. It's also in the eye of the beholder. And I agree. For most of it, before it ended, before the walls came crushing in, I was confused. And as I sat there, sit here, (I forget what tense I was/am in), I could see quite clearly the confused person I had grown into. What does confusion do? Nothing. It does nothing. It gets by. It sits still. Afraid to move in any direction for fear that it might be the wrong one. It lets things happen to it, instead of doing things, anythings, for itself. It builds a prison with pretty walls, and good smells, and old chairs, and comfy blankets, and it keeps out the world. It observes. And inevitably, it longs. (Oh God, does it long...) And inevitably, it dies.

I sat on the precipice, feet dangling into the abyss and had this thought -- I have too much blood. I could feel it pounding in my ears, in my veins, and pulsing, not in my heart, but in my foot. Without Bobo, I was sure the end was near so I comforted myself with thoughts of proposals past. I had been proposed to seven times. Of the seven, one was in person, two were in writing, one was by phone, and three were by text. I accepted the first, but never made it to the wedding. Confusion saw to that. Confusion is a death sentence. I inched a bit closer to the edge, attempting to see through the fog. It sparkled. Who tempts sirens to their end, I wondered? The ghosts of dead sailors coaxing them onto land? Do they shimmy on their fish tales, into taverns and sushi joints looking for love, only to find they have gone too far inland? Have I shimmied in too far? Are my gills drying out?

"Tell me what to do," I said to the sparkling abyss, "lead me now, out of confusion and deliver me from evil, or into evil, anywhere. Just deliver me. Just lead me. Give me a rule. Something to follow."

It is a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Oh, God...

"You're pathetic."

I turned so quickly that I almost killed myself by accident, but his strong, gloved hand saved me. Saint Peter. How I envied his clarity. He had gotten a jump on life. They all had, all the Saint Peters I had known.

"Bobo is missing. Please..."

I was tearing up looking at him. He was standing over me in his dirty suit, lies drying on the pant legs. He told me so many times that I was his one and only. And I probably was, in my universe anyway.

"Bobo's fine. He went after a squassum."

"A what?"

"Body of a possum, tail of a squirrel. Or is it the other way around?"

"Why?"

"They're irresistible to cats." Fey, nonchalant, sexy, as if he was smoking, but not.

"No, why did you do this to me?"

"Dulcinea..."

He called me that from time to time. Dulcinea. The princess of La Mancha. 'Her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.' But he said it with sadness and a tinge of irony, making the slice in my leg hurt less by comparison. His feet crunched over the blades of sugared grass. He sat, elbows resting on his knees, on a tortoise shell, sans tortoise.

"You betrayed me, and it took the clarity of pain to show you just how much. There is a lesson here. You can stay and learn it or you can go back to your prison. Your choice. But remember, when your time ends and your body is planted in the ground, when your marble bosoms fall away and turns to mulch, you will stand in judgment before Me. The abyss that tempted you will become your new prison. You will fall. And you will never stop falling."

"You loved me once. How could you be so cruel?"

Saint Peter helped me to my knees and pulled me close. With his ever-gloved hands he traced the lines of my face and neck, mumbling Cervantes under his breath. I could feel him falling into me, his passions rising, his breath quickening.

"Dulcinea..."

I put my hands on his chest, strong and elusive, with no sign of a heartbeat. I could feel the pulsing in my heel and imagined it was coming from him. I inched my fingers toward his collar and the perfectly placed tie, both spotted with trace stains of lipstick, saliva, and the faint commingling scent of hundreds, upon hundreds, of different perfumes, post coital cigarettes, and late night hotel menu items. My fingers slid to his neck and made contact, flesh on flesh, for the first time. But before the touch could become a feel, he seized my wrists and pried them off, holding me at arms length, a fire in his eyes. For a moment I was sure I had just kissed my other Achilles heel goodbye. But he didn't harm me. He spoke.

"I never said I loved you."

And with that he returned me to the sticky ground and vanished.

I dozed. I licked at the grass, which tasted like lime soda. A drooled a little and languished in my thoughts. Ah, sweet confusion. Could I perhaps make a little decision? One to trick myself into thinking I was on an upward path? A psychiatrist once told me to imagine a ladder in the desert. What did it look like? How may rungs did it have? Mine was made of aluminum. It had six, no seven, rungs. It magically stood at a forty-five degree angle though there was nothing holding it up. What did it mean? But my hour was up. My hour was up. Lick, lime soda. My hour was up. Lick, lime soda.

"What the hell? Did you go retard?"

"Monkey?!"

Oh God, he was back. I couldn't help myself, I grabbed him and cuddled his fur. I cuddled it like it was going out of style. My monkey. My chicken. My little love.

"Okay. OKAY." He jumped down and shook me off, and I could tell he had a little cock in his walk.

"Never. Never. Never do that again. You scared the crap out of me, Bobo."

"It was worth it though. Look at this, mom."

He hopped over the tortoise shell like a baby lamb, and after a bit of a scramble, dragged the ugliest amalgamation of possum and squirrel that had ever been set upon with human eyes.

"Oh... Bobo... You caught yourself a squassum. Good boy."

"I caught it for you. You appreciate it, right? You're gonna eat it, right?"

In our past life, the one in which I did all the talking, Bobo would bring me gifts from time to time. I never had the heart to tell him that what he found to be the purest gesture of love and respect, I found to be completely nauseating. And looking into his two-tone eyes, so full of pride, I knew that I would have to afford taking Bobo the same courtsey.

"I love it. And I'm really gonna enjoy eating it later on."

Bobo straightened up and gave his front paws a satisfied licking. I decided to let him have his moment and revel in it before telling him about my little talk with Saint Peter. I wanted him to be in a good mood when I told him that I'd passed up a one way ticket home in favor of a quest.

The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 2

2010-03-18T02:50:00.000-07:00

In my dream, my foot was stuck in a crusher. I was on a conveyor belt with hundreds of beekless chicks. My foot, the bad foot, had jammed the machine but the conveyor was still operational, delivering a seemingly endless amount of fuzzy, yellow, baby chickens my way, and then, for some reason, doughnuts. I remember being happy as I watched in excruciating pain while the chicks nibbled on the doughnuts rather then meeting their violent end, ground up into God knows what, until I had the horrible realization that the doughnuts were made from the ground up chicks. Soilent Doughnut. It made no sense. It was pure horror, not reason. But terrifying nonetheless. I retched. I woke up. The purple sky was gone.

My heel still throbbed. It would for some time, I imagined. I tried to recall all I had learned about pain management from my days as an erotic pain management consultant, but nothing prepared me for this. This was not the kind of pain that could be managed. There would be no channeling this through my Kundalini. No pushing it down through my core into the pubic knot. No using it as an outlet for stifled emotions. No crying it out. No orgasming through it. No. This was the kind of pain that required the good drugs. This was a war injury. I was afraid to look at it. It felt as if the bottom of my calf muscle had begun to roll up towards my knee. I was sure that's what was happening, and expected to see a chambered nautilus made of muscle crawling slowly up the back of my leg, bone exposed in it's wake, a lost heel dangling somewhere below. But when I did look, all I saw was a foot, poorly wrapped in blood soaked paper towels, resting on a small hill of sand.

Where the hell was that cat? How had we gotten to a beach? I lifted my head again and scanned the sand for paw prints. There were several. And one fresh set leading towards the water. Bobo. I scanned the coastline for signs of him. Nothing. The mother in me worried. My baby pie, where was he? Then I saw something pink. He ran towards me at an alarming speed, shaking and cursing as he came.

"What's wrong with that water? Damn it. Damn it to hell."

Bobo sat in the sand and started licking himself, then he cursed again and made a funny cat-who-has-mistakenly-licked-the-peanut-butter face. He was pink, wet, and covered in sand. He looked hilariously adorable.

"What happened, Monks?"

"I was trying to wash the blood out of my fur, okay?"

I could see why he was tempted to try. The water was a crystal blue azure and calm as a mirror. If I hadn't been so thoroughly fucked, I would have run for it myself. The beach was hot, the sand scorching.

"But cat's hate water. Why didn't you just clean yourself like normal?"

"I thought I'd try something new. Is that such a crime?"

He was being pissy.

"Nope. Not a crime at all. I'm proud of you."

"Well, that water tastes terrible."

"It's salt water, Boo."

"Why the hell did they put salt in it? Jeez..."

He kept on with the licking and spitting. I guess talking Bobo, much like regular Bobo, hadn't ever been to the ocean.

"Listen, Monkey, how did we get here?"

"You passed out again. That little girl, the one in the party dress, she and her evil cohorts ran out of things to fling with that catapult and decided on us. I was too small to stop her, but gave her a few nice scratches for her effort before she counted down from three and sent us sailing. Look around."

The beach was indeed spotted with all my worldly possessions. My dresser, or parts of my dresser, was being gently lapped by the surf, and the ugly chair bobbed about thirty yards out to sea. My lamp had gotten tangled in a bright blue banana tree, and books, scripts, and papers occupied a fifty yard radius up the beach a ways like a an emergency library drop gone horribly awry.

"We fell from the sky?"

Bobo the independent, allowed me to wipe down his fur with my sweater, which I had taken off due to the increasing heat. He pretended not to enjoy it.

"That was the strange thing. We sailed through the air for a long while, but didn't quite land. The altitude knocked me out too, and when I came around, we were here. I found the kitchen stuff. There are cans, and some of your food seems to have made it too. I suggest you pull it together and pack a bag so we can get out of here."

"And go where?"

"To confront your lover, mother. Wherever he may be."

We needed a plan. The sun was rising in the sky making it next to impossible to think, but I managed to make a list of all the things I needed Bobo to find, the first being a small bottle of Vicodin. It took him at least a half an hour of nasty metaphors, but eventually he did find the pink striped bag in which I kept all my toiletries. The pill bottle was there, and though it only contained three precious Vicodin, it would be enough to get me through the day. I disinfected my wound with some peroxide and wrapped it up tightly with gauze. Bobo had to bite my arm to keep me from passing out again, but once the clean bandage was in place, and the drugs started to take hold, I felt ready to move, or wade rather, through the cottony haze of pharmaceutical bliss.

We packed a bag with cat food cans, power bars, water bottles, and bruised-by-catapult fruit. I took along a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, a book I had promised myself I'd finish reading before dying, which, by the looks of things could be sooner then I thought, a few more first aid supplies, and a half-empty bottle of vodka for when the Vicodin ran out. I threw in a tin of cat nip in case Bobo really started to get on my nerves, a few clean pairs of underwear, and a blanket with a poem about daughters knitted into it that my mother had given me for Christmas. A piece of drift wood served as a walking stick, and slowly, Bobo and I made for the wall of blue banana tress separating the beach from the technicolor jungle.

We walked for a while through a Dr. Seuss fantasy. A spongy, hot-pink ground sprouted with blue and orange trees, some of which grew upside down. Bobo, being color blind and not particularly interested in flora, couldn't care less, but I was on painkillers and found it all terribly entertaining.

"It makes so much sense now," I said to Bobo as we navigated a clearing of green flowers with yellow stems, "Saint Peter hid his whimsy. He didn't even bother to undress when he fucked me, remember that?"

"You think I'm watching, but I'm not," Bobo quipped in a tone that implied pity for my inebriated state.

"He didn't!" I could sense I was revealing too much, but felt helpless to stop myself. "He would let himself in while I was sleeping, pull back the covers, whip it out, and do me. It was that way every time, remember?"

"Nope."

"It was so sad. I mean it was hot, I found it hot, but now that I think about it, it was so... sad."

"LALALALALA..."

"I never felt his hands on my flesh. Or mine on his. He wore gloves, and had that dirty suit of his buttoned all the way up to his collar. I never dared touch his face. That would have been too intimate. I felt him inside me, but I never touched him. Isn't that sad? Then, when he was done (he was always so quiet when he came, like thunder rolling over a neighboring town when the afternoon is deathly still and humid), he would rumble, rumble above me while he shot into me. I know it wasn't normal. It didn't feel normal. It felt like knowledge. Like a liquid thought that had the ability to pass through the usual fleshy barriers and make its way to my spinal fluid. Then it would travel up into my brain and deposit a thought. 'You're mine', it would say, 'my possession, my property, my easy earth girl.' And I see it now. He did it all for me. What if all this weird beauty is really him and he was too afraid to show it? What if he appeared to me the way he did, all leathery and cool, because he wanted to make me happy? Bobo?"

I stopped under a blood red tree with Swarovski crystal leaves and scanned the area.

"Bobo!"

Ahead there was what looked to be another clearing and I made my way towards it screaming his name at the top of my lungs. What a mess, I thought. Just like me to spread my damage and confusion over a situation like spicy jalapeno jelly and alienate everyone I touch. But not Bobo. Not my pure little man. My sweet little guy, my innocent. The only living proof that I'm not a complete fuck up. Bobo; well behaved independent, polite, sweet, and gone.

I limped my way over fallen crystal leaves, which crushed under foot like thin panes of sugar towards the white hot sky. But it wasn't a clearing I found when I got there. It was a cliff. And below, for miles, there was nothing.

I imagine the first 2 scenes of LOST, Season 6!!!

2010-01-26T05:55:00.000-08:00

Hello LOST geeks. If you simply can't wait till next week to find out how the new season begins, take a look at the teaser for my spec episode! I totally made this up, wrote it myself, and have no idea how the first episode, which is titled "LA-X" actually begins. But I had fun speculating. Hope you like it!

LOST

“It Can Only End Once”

Spec Episode

TEASER

INT. THE BLACK ROCK - DAWN

VIRTUAL DARKNESS.

It’s the summer of 1847 and we find ourselves below deck of the trading ship, BLACK ROCK. The camera pans and weaves slowly through what is shaping up to be a VERY bad scene.

The emaciated bodies of AFRICAN SLAVES are shackled together, some sleeping, some very possibly dead. one MAN, MOANS a tune of guttural despair.

THE CREW isn’t doing much better. Thin and drawn, a couple of LISTLESS SENTINELS guard the slaves with glassed-over eyes. They are unshaven, dirty. One of them prays.

FOOD SUPPLIES are ravaged. EMPTY BARRELS OF WATER roll with the movement of the ship. Hitting into BOXES OF DYNAMITE. No one cares. This is a GHOST SHIP waiting to happen.

Then, a light, at the end of a hall... Coming from under a door. The ship sways and the door swings open.

INT. STATE ROOM - CONTINUOUS

We see the back of THE FIRST MATE, long brown hair, sitting at a desk, writing -- we don’t see his face. Above him, a hanging lantern sways. Outside his small state room window, the sun is moments from rising.

The first mate, in VOICE OVER, strained, weak:

FIRST MATE (V.O.)
Log of the Captain’s First Mate, Black Rock, Portsmouth. July the 17th, Year of Our Lord, 1847. Though I write this entry with a heavy heart, I fear the order of the day is mutiny. Getting off this ship is our only chance of survival. If the Captain is right about the island being cursed, I’d rather die at its hands then in the hands of fear.

He dips his quill into some ink. Blots it. Just as he is about to resume writing, a shaft of morning sunlight pierces the room and falls on the face of our mystery man.
He is bearded, his lips cracked, his skin sun-burnt to beef jerky, but his identity is unmistakable. It is RICHARD ALPERT.

RICHARD (V.O.)
It’s been three months since Hanso returned from the island...

We follow his gaze into the sunbeam. Over expose to a flash of...

BRIGHT.

EXT. THE BLACK ROCK - DAY - FLASHBACK

THREE MONTHS EARLIER.

Shot from above, flags waving, THE BLACK ROCK in all its glory, sailing the high seas, looking sexy, powerful, bustling with life. You can almost hear the sea-shanty reverberating off the deck, but not quite.

A YOUNG DECKHAND repels down a ROPE from the LOOKOUT TOWER.

YOUNG DECKHAND
Land ho! Land ho!

The boy bounces over DECK SWABBERS, and weaves through SAIL HOISTERS, making his way to the bough. He pushes his body up against the rail and gazes out, squinting. Suddenly his eyes go wide, as in -- WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

OTHER SAILORS join him. Some remove their hats, some scratch their beards. WHAT THE HELL, indeed...

INT. THE BLACK ROCK - BELOW DECK - MOMENTS LATER

A SAILOR makes his way quickly down a dingy hall to the CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS. He knocks on the door.

CAPTAIN HANSO (O.S.)
Come.

INT. CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS - CONTINUOUS

CAPTAIN MAGNUS HANSO, a burly beast of a man in his 50’s, with a shock of blonde hair and Nordic features, pours over a MAP. Richard is beside him, assisting, as usual.

SAILOR
Captain, we’ve spotted land. An island, about four kilometers off the starboard bough.

CAPTAIN HANSO
Yes, I heard. Whatever it is, it’s not on our maps.

Hanso doesn’t look up. The sailor lingers in the doorway, he seems anxious. Richard turns to him.

RICHARD
That’ll be all, sailor.

SAILOR
Sir, I think the Captain needs to see this.

EXT. THE MAIN DECK - MOMENTS LATER

We PAN UP the side of the ship past the portholes of the SLAVE GALLEYS. The faces of the imprisoned SLAVES look out, mouths open, in utter amazement and fear.

PAN HIGHER. The number of MEN at the bough has tripled. The whole crew has come above to see... well, YOU-KNOW-WHAT.

Hanso, followed by Richard and the sailor, make their way through the parting crowd to the bough of the ship.

THEIR MOUTHS DROP. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

CAPTAIN HANSO
(under his breath)
Taweret.

RICHARD
Captain?

CAPTAIN HANSO
Richard, put together a team. Eight of my finest men. And bring us in closer. I want to greet her in person.
(a bark, to his crew)
The rest of you, back to work.

The crowd disperses. Hanso turns, his back to the island and the giant, 30 storey Statue of Taweret, which we can see now, small, over his shoulder. No big dramatic pan this time, she’s just there, watching from a distance.

RICHARD
Magnus, perhaps you should think this through. Someone built that thing and they didn’t do it alone. Eight men might not insure--

CAPTAIN HANSO
I’ve see her before, Richard. When I was a boy...

SMASH TO:

EXT. OVERBOARD - LATER

Rope speeding through pulleys. A SMALL BOAT drops from deck level onto the water below. SMACK, it hits with a belly flop.

The rest of Hanso’s story is told in VOICE OVER as we watch the EIGHT MEN and their Captain descend via rope ladder into the boat.

CAPTAIN HANSO
...I was on my first voyage, with my father. We were returning home from Siam. There was a storm.

EXT. ON THE OCEAN - MOMENTS LATER

The little boat sails toward the island in a heave-ho of British paddling, Hanso staring ahead, entranced by Taweret.

CAPTAIN HANSO (V.O.)
When it cleared -- we saw her. I thought it was a dream, because the storm started up again and she disappeared. The Egyptians call her Taweret. The Mistress of the Horizon, the Goddess of Rebirth...

Taweret looms, massive and intimidating. This is the view of her we’ve been waiting for, scary crocodile-hippopotamus face and all.

CAPTAIN HANSO (CONT’D)
The Queen of the Northern Sky.

INT. RICHARD’S STATE ROOM - NIGHT (NEXT)

TIGHT ON THE JOURNAL. A HAND writes down the words, “Queen of the Northern Sky.”
PULL BACK to Richard sitting at his desk writing when we hear a commotion from above deck. He pulls on his uniform jacket and heads toward the noise...

EXT. ABOVE DECK - CONTINUOUS

Wind, ominous sky and all out MADNESS. Men scramble to their stations. HANSO’S RETURNED and he’s FREAKING OUT. Shouting orders, hair wild, no jacket, dirty, bloody, an injured arm.

CAPTAIN HANSO
Raise anchor! Hoist those sails!

Richard emerges from below deck and runs to Hanso.

RICHARD
Magnus! Magnus, what happened?

CAPTAIN HANSO
We have to get out of here, Richard. Now. As fast as we can.
(to the crew)
Get those sails up! UP! UP!

RICHARD
Where are the men?

Hanso has CRAZY EYES. The kind you get from seeing what a Smoke Monster can do.

CAPTAIN HANSO
They’re gone, Richard.

RICHARD
Gone?

CAPTAIN HANSO
There’s no time. Turn the ship around. We need to get as far away from that Island as possible. Set a course due north. Go.

RICHARD
Ay-ay, Sir.

Dutifully following orders, but sufficiently spooked, Richard heads quickly for THE HELM. We pull back and watch as the ship begins to move silently over the sea...

EXT. THE SHIPS HELM - DAWN (NEXT)

It’s a misty morning. Fog, light rain.

On Richard. He is asleep sitting up against the ships rail. He spent the night at the Helm.

The call of the young deckhand wakes him at first light.

YOUNG DECKHAND
Land ho! Land ho!

Richard wakes and sees a COUPLE OF SAILORS puzzling over a compass.

RICHARD
What’s the matter?

HELM SAILOR
I don’t know, sir. It must be the compass. We’ve been heading due north at close to 18 knots all night long.

Richard stands. He takes his own compass from his pocket and compares his findings with the mens. Both needles point in the exact same direction. NORTH. All three look up.

RICHARD
Impossible.

You guessed it, in the distance, through the morning mist, THE ISLAND AND TAWERET slowly come in to horrible view. It seems that letting the Black Rock leave is not what THE ISLAND had in mind...

END TEASER

Okay, a little more for ya....

ACT ONE

EXT. THE STATUE - NIGHT

WE ARE BACK IN 2007.

After realizing that the man inside the STATUE with JACOB and BEN can’t possibly be JOHN LOCKE because his dead body is rotting in the sand behind them, RICHARD, ILANA, BRAM, and THE OTHERS form a silent circle around the opening to JACOB’S LAIR, WEAPONS DRAWN, waiting.

FRANK and SUN, who are not in on all this “OTHER’S DRAMA” stand with them, watching.
A slow pan of the Other’s stone faces, READY FOR WAR. Stop on Sun who is, more then slightly confused.

SUN
Who is he, Richard?

RICHARD
An imposter.

FRANK
(re: dead Locke)
Oh yeah? And how do you know? How do you know that the dead guy in the sand isn’t the imposter?

RICHARD
How do you know when you’ve been knocked unconscious with the butt of a rifle?

FRANK
You don’t. Until you wake up.

Case and point.

The door stirs. The group readies themselves, straightening like a firing squad. Frank pulls Sun back a few steps, protecting her.

And then, as if he were casually stepping out for a midnight stroll, LOCKE emerges from the plinth. He assesses the situation in with a quick scan of the crowd. THE JIG IS UP.

The tension is palpable as hell, then as if he were greeting a neighbor at the mailbox, he gives a little nod to...

LOCKE
(beat)
Richard.

And starts to walk away.

The sound of GUNS cocking, metal on metal. The Others take aim, their sights set on Locke.

BRAM
Don’t move.

Locke stops and turns back, barely suppressing the shit-eating grin on his face. He puts up his hands in a half-assed mock surrender.

LOCKE
(sarcastic)
Don’t shoot.

RICHARD
Who lies in the shadow of the statue, John?

LOCKE
Not who you thought, Richard. He lied to you. All of you. But it’s all about to change. I saw to that by killing Jacob. Now if you’ll excuse me...

SILENT HORROR among The Others. Some lower their guns. Some step back in fear.

RICHARD
We can’t let you leave here, you know that, right?

LOCKE
What are you gonna do, Richard? Kill me? You know for a fact that it’s not that simple.

Ilana rushes forward, enraged, and puts her rifle in Locke’s face.

ILANA
You’ll pay for this.

Locke takes the barrel in both hands, pulls it in to himself, then and HEAD BUTTS her with it, sending her backwards onto the sand. Bram goes to her aid.

LOCKE
Ilana, how nice to see you again.

He turns to go. The Others are helpless to do anything about it. Without turning back he says...

LOCKE (CONT’D)
Sun, you might want to join me. I’m going to see Jin.

Frank puts an arm out, to stop her -- bad idea.

FRANK
Sun...

SUN
(to Locke)
Jin? How do you know where Jin is?

LOCKE
(turning)
I think the more appropriate question is how do I know when Jin is. It’s a long story. I’ll explain it on the way back to the cabin.

Ilana pulls herself up from the sand, her nose is bleeding.

ILANA
There is no more cabin. We burnt it down.

She spits out a bloody glob.

LOCKE
Well then, I’ll just have to build another one.

Locke walks off toward the tree line.

As the Others gather around Ilana, Sun heads down the beach. She intends to follow Locke.

...Dun, Dun, Duuuh!!! That's all I got, kids. You're just going to have to wait till next week for the real thing! xoxo, A.

Top 20 Favorite Movies of the Decade!!

2010-01-03T17:21:00.000-08:00

A writer's hell. Cage as Kaufman in my favorite movie of the decade, "Adaptation".

ADRIA'S FAVORITE FLICKS OF THE 00'S!

1. Adaptation.

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

3. Synecdoche, New York.

My first three picks were all penned by the great Charlie Kaufman. And though listed 1-3, really tie for first place in my opinion. He was the writer who inspired me most this decade. A poet who makes the sublime frustration of the human condition his canvass. Truly beautiful and powerful stuff. Nods to Spike Jonez and Michael Gondry for their direction of 1&2 respectively, Kaufman directed Synedoche.

4. Grizzly Man.

Werner Herzogs portrait of Timothy Treadwell and his plight to save the grizzly bears. In the end it was Timothy himself that needed saving as he was eaten by one. I watched this film once, then immediately watched it again. Beautiful and sad with moments of hilarity tossed in, if you're sick enough to laugh at them that is. A truly unique film.

5. Dogville.

6. Antichrist.

Two nods to the Von Trier. My next favorite writer/director after Kaufman. Dogville with the production value of a high school production of Our Town, kicks ass in the creepiest of ways and Antichrist is the closest movie on this list to a horror, and is present on this list for the first five minutes alone. I should have also added Dancer in the Dark, it was made in 2000. Quite a decade, Mr. Von Trier. Quite a decade. Oh, to be manic depressive and Danish...

7. Oh Brother Where Art Thou?

A Cohen Bros gem. A fun ride with awesome music and great acting by all involved.

8. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

Part of the Old Boy trilogy, this female centered ass kicker is beautiful, stylish and devastating. A Korean Kill Bill, in a way.

9. Y tu Mama Tambien.

An amazing and heart wrenching film by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón.

10. Pan's Labyrinth.

I thought I was seeing a children's movie. I was wrong. What I saw rocked my world.

11. Funeral Brides.

My very own Grandpa made this beautiful film in his native Serbia about a village with no men. It's a well shot fairytale about the sisters charged with the task of finding a few and bringing them home.

12. Inglorious Basterds. Kill Bill, Part 2.

Well, Duh. Basterds is QT's masterpiece. Kill Bill not far behind. Nod to the casting of Christoph Waltz as Landa. Can't wait to see more of him in the future. He's the kind of actor you want to write for, or at least I do.

13. Molholland Drive.

If Kaufman tries with his films to understand what it means to be human, and Von Trier is pushing humans to the brink to find out what happens, then David Lynch is the filmmaker of human dreams. Like a painter, he shoots what he sees in his head -- and seldom feels the need to explain. Fans of his get this and love him for it. Molholland Drive is a film that works really well as a film to almost in spite of itself. The acting is great, with a special hat to Naomi Watts. Her audition scene is the best of the best.

14. The Wrestler.

Devastating, funny, well cast and awesome. Should have won the Oscar last year, but we all had Slumdog fever. Whatevs.

15. Capote.

I know I'll get shit for this one, but I totally loved Capote. Also, In Cold Blood is one of my favorite books, and PS Hoffman is amazing, so what? The other films that could have taken this spot is," Monster." Let's call it a tie.

16. There Will Be Blood.

Four Words: "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE." DD Lewis is a freakin genius. Deal with it.

17. American Beauty.

We know it, we love it. The perfect film in many way.

18. Tropic Thunder.

Because a best movies list is not complete without a comedy... Tropic Thunder was a masterpiece of insanity. With Tom Cruise in his best role to date. My head physically hurt from laughing watching this movie. Should almost be higher on the list.

19. District 9.

Peter Jackson produced this genre reinventing sci-fi parable about alien racism. Neil Bloomcamp directs. Another actor to watch -- Sharlto Copley. He did an amazing job as the bumbling Wikus Van De Merwe, security company suit turned government target and alien infectee. I wanna write the film in which Waltz plays Copley's dad and they go back in time or something. :-)

20. Moulin Rouge!

Because what list is complete without a musical? Loved it.

EXTRAS!!

Also a nod to the following which I was reminded of after, "Little Children", "Let the Right One In", and "Vicki Christina Barcelona".

The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 1

2009-11-04T08:08:00.000-08:00

In vile confirmation of all my worst fears, I seem to find myself, once again, in purgatory. This is not a metaphor. It is a whole truth that spans eons and stops only when the very basic parts of the thing start to break down. The cell walls of all involved would have to crack and spill their atoms and protons and neurons all over the floorboards in order to erase the truth of what I'm about to tell you. So bare with me as I relate to you this horror story with the fear and reverence it deserves, lest I shatter anymore bones, lest I pop my other Achilles' heel, for contrary to popular belief, pain and purgatory are not mutually exclusive. In fact, pain is increased seven-hundred fold in the land between. The moment of inception repeats over and over again, stuck mercilessly in a groove. Imagine stubbing your toe every five seconds for a billion years. Imagine drowning one-hundred times a day, forever. Imagine that while you listen to my tale.

I was sitting in my room in a large decorative chair that I bought for twenty-five dollars at the Salvation Army. When you enter my room, the smell is familiar. It smells of burnt corn tortilla shells and floral perfume. It smells of a leaky gas oven and of cigarette smoke, and occasionally of sex, cat hair, and basement. This conglomerate of smells gives it a sort of character. It's not the kind of place you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in due to its low ceiling and its oppressive, postage-stamp size. Sad that we found it charming once. Like a tomb of ancient Egypt it is stocked floor to oppressive ceiling, with cheap, worthless belongings. Neglect coats them in much the way that a greasy head leaning against a train window coats the glass with oil and sebum. In some cultures the objects inhabiting this room would be burnt for fuel or used to test catapults. The chair for example. The chair is a monstrosity. Probably liberated from a funeral home or the lobby of a motel or gentleman's club, half of its weight is most likey sweat and dust mites alone. And that was before the blood.

In it I sat, smoking a cigarette, blowing my exhale past the African Violets and out the window. That's where I was the night I got my last visit from Saint Peter. I can't exactly say I was happy to see him, or him me. Contrary to popular belief, Saint Peter isn't a kindly old man in a white robe with a ledger, he usually wears a black suit spotted with suspicious stains. His nose looks as if it has been broken several times over, and his skin is all leathery and scared. Still, he has a kind of animallistic charm that makes my heart flutter ever so slightly in it's ribby cage when he shows up in my room. This, in turn, makes my breasts swell and all the other pertinent parts of me light up like a ping-pong machine after a perfectly deployed ball. Sometimes we make love. He likes to talk dirty. But tonight he came by to snap my Achilles' tendon and send me to purgatory.

I knew it was coming. Usually, when acts of such intentional violence are coming at you with a scythe, you can narrow them down to a specific set of circumstances that put the whole bloody thing into motion. I was thinking about my transgressions as he leaned into me and reached down, grabbed me between the legs, and lifted my whole body onto the bed. For a second I thought he might want to be intimate, but with one quick move he grabbed my right leg out of its sock monkey slipper, hugged it to his chest and with a small, curved, silver blade, pressed with all his might against the rubbery tendon. I felt it sever and snap, and blacked out immediately from the pain. When I woke up he would be gone.

Bobo roused me what must have been just a few minutes later, because I was still bleeding profusely. He was doing his best to wrap my foot with paper towels, but without opposeable thumbs he's pretty much useless when it comes to first aid. His white fur was soaked with blood and the mother in me was immediately worried. What if Saint Peter had hurt him after I passed out.

"Monkey, are you okay?" I gasped through the most intense pain I have ever felt.

"I'm fine. Jesus. Why didn't you call me?"

"You're a cat. You never come when I call."

"Yes, not usually, because all you want to do is fuss over me. When it's important I know." He shook the bloody paper towel from his paw and wiped it on the bed. "This is madness, you know that right?"

"Maybe you should go get help. I'll be okay."

"Go where exactly?"

"I don't know, Giselle's house. Remember that time I sent you over to help her change that light bulb?"

Bobo rolled his eyes, jumped down off the bed, and pulled back the curtains using the top of his head.

"We're not in Echo Park anymore, ma."

I lifted my head and looked out the window. He was right. We weren't in Echo Park anymore. We were somewhere else. We were in a place that over the past few weeks Bobo and I have dubbed "Limbo."

"It looks like a Salvador Dail painting out there," I said, but I was just being pretentious. It looked more like Palm Springs. Or Mars.

Bobo jumped down and started pacing, leaving little bloody foot prints on the floor. I was going to tell him to watch the rug, but what did it matter now? The bed and the chair were soaked through and the pain in my leg was starting to send me off again into the soothing nothingness of the unconscious.

"Don't you pass out on me," Bobo snapped, "you know I can't open those cans myself."

"I'm bleeding to death and all you can think about is your stomach?"

He jumped up onto the kitchen counter.

"I can't turn the faucet on either and I'll be damned if I have to drink from that bowl, I swear to..."

He got all quiet for a moment.

"Are you thirsty?"

"I wasn't. I was just proving a point. But now that I'm up here... Yes. Sorta."

"I'm sorry, kid."

"Well, you should be. I knew you shouldn't have gotten mixed up with that guy. He was bad news from the start. You had me fixed when I was a kitten, maybe you should have taken some of your own genius advice and tied that mess up before it was too late."

"I didn't declaw you."

"If you had, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"We've never had a conversation. You're a cat. I'm assuming this is all a pain related hallucination."

He jumped down from the kitchen counter like a flash, up onto the bed, and perched on my chest.

"Listen to me and listen good. I'm all you got right now and I think we can get out of this but I need you to do exactly as I say, okay?"

"Sure."

"Don't be sarcastic."

"Yes. Sure. Okay," I said with enough conviction to get him off my case. "Why don't you ever sleep on my lap like a normal cat?"

"You smell weird."

"Fair enough."

"Now get your laptop out. I need you to set the cursor on scroll so I can go through all the emails you exchanged with Saint Peter just by pressing my paw on the mouse."

"You can read?"

"Just do it. Then do your best to wrap that foot as tight as you can. We're gonna have to leave here eventually and I need you mobile."

I did as I was told. I assumed without saying that the pain had caused my personality to split in two. The rational leader in me had taken refuge away from the pain and manifested itself in my cat Bobo, while the passive part of me stayed put and took orders. It sort of made sense. Now if I could only figure out why the sky outside was dripping purple, I would be one step closer to figuring a way out of this.

Bobo stared at the screen, pressing his little paw down every few seconds as months of emails with Saintpeter_101 went scrolling by.

"People amaze me," he mused as I carefully wrapped my foot, "he told you who he was. He told you what he would do to you if you told, but you did anyway. Why?"

"Um, I don't know Bobo, because there is no Angel of Death and cat's can't talk, maybe?"

"Maybe. He says here, that if you ever tell anyone what you know about him he will 'come to your house, hobble you,' which I assume is what has happened here, 'and throw you into the land between, which is neither death or living, just a sock hanging on a clothes line in the unfathomable infinite.'"

"I thought he was putting me on."

"How about when he says, 'this is real. I'm not putting you on. You don't know how lonely it can get being immortal, I have a hard time finding someone I can trust,' etc, etc, how about that?"

"Whatever. Now what?"

"Well, it's his realm and I don't think you can die... we have to go find him and you have to beg for forgiveness."

"He practically cut my foot off! And I have to beg forgiveness?"

Just then the walls started to shake and rattle like an earthquake. Glass began to break and plaster to crumble.

"Come on, we have to get out of here!"

Bobo lept out the bathroom window just as it collapsed in a pile of rubble. I dragged myself to the door and hopped up on my good leg to open it. The rush of blood to my foot sent my head reeling and I almost passed out again.

"Come on, mom! You can do it!" I looked out the glass panel in the door to see Bobo sitting on his hind legs waving me over. He looked so cute I wanted to wear his little face as a hat, so I reached my arm through the broken glass and opened the door from the outside, swinging my body around and hopping 10 or so feet to safety. I looked back and saw my room standing crypt-like sans the house it once was part of. It was being demolished by huge yellow trucks being operated by little girls in party dresses. One of them saw Bobo and approached with eager trepidation.

"Is he friendly," the little girl asked?

Bobo instinctively rolled onto his back, a move which seemed vulgar now that he could talk. The little girl took his cue and rubbed him to the point of purring.

"What's her name?"

"Bobo. He's a boy. Why are you and your friends destroying my house?"

"Uncle Peter told us to," Bobo was drooling now, off somewhere in kitty euphoria, the girl's words were lost on him. "And we need more stuff to test the catapult."

Love Poem

2009-11-04T05:03:00.000-08:00

I found my perfect lover, but there's something you should know.
He beats me every morning, and fills my boots with snow.
He locks me in the woodshed, rubs thistles in my hair,
He strips me of my garments, and leaves me naked bare.
He ties me to the bed post, feeds my dinner to the cat,
He tells me filthy stories, of an Irishman called Pat.
He's not what you'd call handsome, he's ugly as a stump.
But he holds me in the night, curled up heavy on my rump.
I found my perfect lover, this I know is true,
I found my perfect lover, O my lover, it is you.

Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles...

2009-11-02T04:03:00.000-08:00

Fucking ellipses...

Happy daylight savings time to all, here and abroad. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means I have an hour to write to you before my regularly scheduled bedtime of 5am-ish. It's only 4 right now and until I'm used to it, I can kick back and enjoy the fall back in time. I don't like to diary-blog. It's boring, so I hardly ever do it. My brain moves faster then my fingers and I tend to just kind of toss my thoughts in a lumpy pile. That's an odd confession for a self-proclaimed writer, isn't it? To admit the fact that I don't write that often is sad, but I don't. Anymore. I remember a time when I would stay up all night perving around in the lizard brain like a scavenger in a junk yard, picking things from dirty piles and rearranging them to suit my needs. To decorate my cardboard box, or whatever project I happened to be working on at the moment, but not anymore. I dread The Stack, you see.

Under my broken TV with the disconnected cable box, behind the pile of random DVDs, and give-away CDs, a hole punch, and a ceramic cat, lies "The Stack". It's a wretched collection of pages about 20 inches in height. It is, give or take, everything I have ever written. I can't honestly say it's collecting dust, because dust doesn't really get back there. It's beyond the reach of dust, in a kind of vacuum.

I was at Target today PMSing my tits off. My body was coursing with organic chemicals, nasty, malevolent, baby making chemicals, that had me in the toy isle pawing at little girls Halloween costumes and holding back tears at the thought of my wasted eggs. May wasted chances to spawn and breed something that would look cute dressed as Snow White. I was a salmon, all of a sudden, fighting my way up stream. Past an isle of Transformers to the dreaded Barbie Dolls. I stood glass-eyed staring at their painted faces hermetically sealed behind plastic in their pretty dresses and thought to myself -- Fuck. Dust. Dust can't in. And then -- it's as if I were fisted in the uterus by the lubed up hand of fate. Something about action and character hit me all of a sudden. And how actions strung together make up character. What a sap I had been. Afraid of a stack? Bah! I needed to DO something.

I high tailed it to the electronics section an asked a borderline comatose sales clerk to point me in the direction of the vacuum sealers. After a series of confusing dead ends, and a bottle of shoplifted children's Triaminic in grape flavor to dull the edges, I was in the housewares section loading the very last vacuum sealer into my cart. It was made to seal meats and things for freezing, which conjured images I like -- one of my favorite words is "bounty" followed shortly by "pantry". It also reminded me that it was time to defrost my own freezer. As I skipped to the checkout I tried to remember what exactly was frozen in the block of ice hovering above my fridge. Maybe I could compose a 140 character pun about it on the ride home to post on Twitter, maybe. But for now I had more important fish to fry and when I was done with my new project the fridge itself might not even be necessary. So I got in the car and drove home.

I opened the fridge. I wanted the melted ice of the freezer to drip onto the floor and ruin things. I wanted to cook up the Trader Joe's vegetarian ribs that I knew were in there and see how they tasted after a year frozen in ice. But first I wanted to hermetically seal The Stack section by section and sail them one by one down the LA river.

It took me a while to figure out how to use the sealer, but once I got the hang of it the whole process was a breeze. I sealed whole feature scripts, nine of them. Ten short stories at a time. Plays in twos. Novels, in threes and fours. I went through drawers to make sure I wasn't missing anything, letters, postcards. I even sealed some books that I had made copious notes in, just so I wouldn't miss a word. And when I was done, I looked at them, all laid out on the bed, suffocating. They didn't put up much of a fight. They died the way they had lived, neglected, ignored. By the world? Maybe. By me? Definitely. My children, my babies. Created in a moment of passion, pooped out like dumpster babies at the prom, and stored away in the basement by a cruel mother suffering from Munchhausen's Bi-proxy. For a second I wanted to rip them open, to try and save them, but my second screenplay, The Parlor, being about suicide, had sputtered out early and I didn't think it fair to save some and not others. No, this was genocide on a pan-genre level. I ate the rubbery veggie rib while they all glared at me from under plastic with their contemptuous fonts. "The world won't miss you," I drooled through my tears, two-year-old barbecue sauce drying on my chin like blood. Fucking cannibal.

I cleaned up and decided to catch a movie. The Laemmle in Pasadena was playing a film that starred an ex-lover of mine. "A REAL movie," I told the plastic sheathed corpses as I stuffed them into my trunk alongside a sweaty yoga mat, some laundry bags, and -- fuck! Three copies of Code 98, my stage play about a post-apocalyptic whore house. I went back inside to fire up the sealer one more time...

Twenty minutes later I was standing on the Pasadena bridge flinging them into the inky darkness of the LA River. Plop. Plop. Plop...

The movie was lack lustre. My dead babies were so much better, I thought as I erased my hard drive, killed my e-mail accounts, and uninstalled Final Draft. It's all gone now and I feel, somehow, lighter. Anyways, that's my hour. Over an hour really. Wow, when I get started, let me tell you! I'm gonna have a cigarette now and go to sleep when I wake up I was thinking of getting rid of some more of my stuff starting with the refrigerator. I'll Twitter about it so you guys know what's up! Good night!!

xo,
Adria

For the Sake of the Vine

2009-06-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

Prologue...

“Pick one.”
Zachary looked up at his father. The low autumn sun was hitting Horst Bartlett—Roman nose, Parisian ears, Athenian jaw—at just the right angle, making him look as large and grand as an ancient unnamed God. In front of him, in his vine-weathered hands, the winemaker presented a cluster of grapes, his wry smile suggesting to the boy some kind of game the likes of which, if played correctly, would result in such sublime joy that one or both of them might burst into flames.
Zachary glanced around the vineyard for his twin sister Angelina. He was that kind of child—sharing came naturally. He spotted her in a cloud of dust, chasing a few of the migrant workers’ kids through the vines.
“What about Angie?”
“The monkey can play later. Go on.”
Horst bent down on his right knee, the tell tale dirt patch on every pair of light linen pants he owned was as much a part of his person as his Berliner forehead.
Zachary wondered, perhaps not consciously till many years later, how his father was able to spend all day in the vineyards and come out looking as pristine as when he went in save for that lone dirt patch on his right pant leg. It was as if the vines parted for him, ever so slightly, out of respect for their master— the all knowing, all seeing creator that nurtured them from seed to bottle, the attentive, never arbitrary, yet ultimately cruel, God of the Vines.
Zachary scrunched up his face. They had been on the hill picking grapes all day. What made this cluster special? Still, he chose carefully. A shiny one caught his eye, it looked like a black marble compared to its neighbors, which were still blanketed in their natural bloom. He was confident in his choice.
“This one,” Zachary said proudly.
“That one, eh? Let me see it.”
He handed the grape to his father who held it gently between two fingers, examining it in the sunlight as if it were a rare gem.
“She’s a good one, Zachary. A beauty. Here, hold her for a moment.” Horst’s Franco-Germanic accent was perfect for communicating with children. It was soft and lilting like the man himself, at least the man he was in those days.
Zach put out his hands, palms up, and received the little grape Messiah tenderly. It rolled there, a perfect sphere with its puckered mouth flashing lewdly. Its underside was still a yeasty midnight azure making the tiny miracle of nature look like a half moon, or a Satanic, velvet acorn.
“What do you see?”
“A grape.”
“What else?”
Zachary stared at his hands.
“Do you see the skin? Do you see how fragile it is?”
Entranced. “Uh-huh.”
“If I were to run a blade over its skin and your skin, with the same pressure, I could break both.”
With a dirty nail Horst traced an invisible line across his sons pudgy forearm.
“What about Angie’s skin?”
“Angie’s too. And mine, and your mother’s. We are all as fragile as this little grape. We start as a tiny seed, then we grow into a vine, and eventually if the conditions are just right, we get to make something spectacular.”
“Grapes?”
“First grapes, yes. Then wine. Wine!” He roared. And as if to punctuate his little lesson with a somewhat cruel visual aid, Horst clapped his son’s palms together flattening the little grapelet between them.
Zachary let it fall from his hands and wiped its juices on his overalls, consumed in a fit of sadistic giggles. Horst smiled and stood up, a thin sheath of sweat glistening on his brow. His father was Dionysus during harvest season and everyone reveled in his spiritual intoxication.
These days were the crowning jewels of Zach’s childhood memories, long warm days, cool nights, getting lost in row after row of vines, the smell of the earth and sometimes even the river coming over the hills. It was a commune with nature so intimate it had all of them locked in his own anthropomorphic romance.
“Daddy? Do the vines miss the grapes when they get picked?”
“What?” Horst turned to his son suddenly and curiously. So much so that Zachary thought he had said something monumentally stupid.
“Nothing.”
“No son, it’s all right. You want to know if the vines miss the grapes?”
“I dunno.”
Horst bent down on his knee again, this time on his left. To Zachary that had always seemed strange. He had no way of knowing that his father was so distracted by his question that it caused him to momentarily break from the part of his brain responsible for involuntary habits. That simple question filled Horst with more pure, unadulterated, parental pride then he had ever felt before or since. Later that night he would write in his journal:

He is truly my boy and my boy is an amazement. He knows by simple instinct what it took me my whole life to understand. That the life of the grape does not cease when it is severed from the vine, but transcends much like a human soul, through the crude and painstaking processes of fermentation, aging, blending, filtrations, e.g.; purgatory—spiritual, embalming—physical. The soul’s journey is only suspended, not stifled. It is up to the winemaker to resurrect it back to life through careful chemistry (ritual) involving, but not limited to pressure, time, temperature, sacrifice, sweat, pain, obsession, blood, witchcraft, and all-consuming love.

But those were after thoughts, after thoughts that gave birth to preliminary thoughts of another, darker, nature. When he looked at his five-year-old son and saw for the first time Zachary’s face as a tiny mirror reflecting his own swelling pride, he spoke in a way that a child could grasp but never fully understand.
Zachary would not forget his father’s words that day as they marked both the apex of his sanity and the beginnings of his madness.
“They don’t miss them,” he whispered, “they envy them.”

Nonnie

2009-04-02T02:33:00.000-07:00

Socrates said that “death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” And while I’m not so sure I agree, it was the one quote I found--after hours of searching the internet--that I could see Nonnie shaking her little hands in agreement to. She was not afraid to die, if anything she had a kind of on-going, one-sided, correspondence with death, as if it were a long lost relative who refused to visit for reasons unknown. The great beyond is never very far away in an Italian household. Jesus, Mary, the Saint’s, and our ancestors are located in various picture frames around the house so they can be accessed directly. And while Nonnie believed in heaven, she had a pretty good feeling it was located on her back porch, on warm summer afternoons, when the setting sun hit the wisteria vines just so and turned everything purple, green, and gold.

One of the most uniquely special things about my grandmother was her poet’s appreciation for the beauty of the world. I can recall so many times driving her to the Big Banana for example, she would point out the green of the trees along Long Beach Road, a street not known primarily for its flora. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She would say. They were, when you took a second to really see them. And of course, more obviously, her garden in all its incarnations, with string beans, tomatoes, zucchini, mint in the summer to go in the Orzata, and the African Violets on the windowsill, the Camellias, the Dahlias, all flourishing to an almost supernatural extreme.

Her beautiful garden was physical example of her capacity to nurture. Her amazing cooking, to nourish. The countless dresses she would sew for me until she was physically unable and even beyond--I would thread her needle the way she did for her grandmother. The home she kept, and the feeling it instilled in all who entered it, a feeling of security, safety, and love. A warm place with good smells. She was mother. She was nature.

The other day at the wake I was sitting alone thinking about how in the world I was going to write a eulogy for Nonnie, a task I have been dreading since she and my mother nominated me for the job a while back. I borrowed a pad and pen and tried in vain to scribble something coherent through my tears. I failed. The only thing that surfaced was the following sentence that I must have written at least ten times.

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

Because how do you thank a person who has loved you unconditionally, beyond all measurable bounds of reason since before you can remember? A person who no matter what state of mind they’re in, (half asleep, headaches, dementia,) greets you with the most radiant of smiles the second they see your face. A person who from practically their deathbed wants to fix the drooping hem of your sweater so you look as nice and neat as possible? All we had to do was admire something of hers and she would offer it. Not to spoil or bribe, but for the sheer pleasure of making us smile. I don’t know if I have ever loved that purely, but I feel I am a better, kinder, and stronger person for having received hers.

Nonnie was at her core, a generous woman. She instilled that quality in her children and grandchildren. Brian the teacher, Kevin the protector, Darren and I, the writers and Christopher the healer. Her son who ushers life into the world, her youngest daughter who cares for creatures great and small, and especially in my mother, the caretaker, who gave more of herself then she had to give and was there for the long haul and till the very end. On that night Socrates was right, and death came in the form of a blessing. Under the full February moon, in the arms of her female descendents she stepped from a bodily vessel that had ceased to serve her, and pushed open the screen door onto her back porch, eternal summer, the magic of nature, and the loving embrace of the infinite.

I am grateful to have had her as such a huge part of my life for as long as I did and I will miss her with all my heart. We can honor her memory by passing on the family traditions, the stories, and the recipes, the generosity, and most of all by taking her most poignant piece of advice to heart. “Love yourself,” she would simply say. The longer version, as interpreted by yours truly, “love yourself the way I love you and you won’t be able to settle for anything less then the best.” Thank you, Nonnie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you forever, and may you rest in peace. Xoxoxo.

Thoughts...

2009-04-02T02:30:00.000-07:00

What if someone were to offer you the sum of your deepest desires? Not the surface ones, the ones you'd like to think you want, but the base ones, the realization of your deepest, darkest fantasies, available to you under one condition--total surrender? Would you be able to do it? Would you be able to circumvent your ego completely and give your self over to absolute pleasure? Even if much of that pleasure consisted of both physical and emotional pain? Or humiliation? All of it underlined by the kind of obsessive love only found in the pages of Shakespeare? De Sade? I don't know if I can. I like to think that I could. In the past, in the throws of relationships less then fulfilling, such an offer was the stuff of dreams. So why do I hesitate now? Maybe it's the waking dream of a life less then realized. Or the sadness that comes from being forced to face ones self at close range. The thought of letting go of the tiny bit of control you have convinced yourself that you have over life, to kiss the ground, his boot, to be low, goes against every urge--it's like holding your breath. Or sinking when you know you should be swimming, As you've been doing all this time, your whole late life, fighting to keep your head above water, struggling, treading, when all he's saying is--let go. Let the water take you. Learn to breathe it. Grow gills. It's a whole different world down here. Life is pain, broken up by glorious instances of sublime beauty. Sometimes the two collide and these are the moments for which we live. (Nonnie's hands in the coffin clutching an African Violet.) Can I give all this to him blindly? Can I take him at his word? Can I trust him with the gilled creature such an exercise will undoubtedly produce? He wants a leap of faith, but self preservation is a powerful force. I need to slide the needle into my own vein, to push the plunger down and brace myself for the ride. It's that, or shake off the urge, put the syringe down and swim on. On into an endless sea of flat, blue nothingness, hovering miles above a liquid universe of what could have been.

The Ivy (Apples and Oranges)

2008-09-11T01:16:00.000-07:00

The Ivy

In a high-fashion magazine dated 1979, the year of her birth, she read that he often took an early lunch at The Ivy when he was in Los Angeles, so she began going there once and a while, not so much hoping to see him, it had been thirty years, but to indulgently bask in the possibility of seeing him, yet, in all honesty not so much that either. It had more to do with sharing his preference for the place, its sights, smells and tastes, and for a time, to let her mind wander, free from financial panic, the most coveted luxury (in her mind, anyway) of the rich and famous.
Ivy days, carefully worked into the monthly budget, were chosen at random with the help of two darts launched at the kitchen calendar on the first of each month while she sipped cold coffee from her unwieldy futon. Friends were neither informed of, nor invited along on her lunch dates (tenebrously labeled in crayon); the days were hers and hers alone. A rare escape that she afforded herself with much self-congratulation. “It sure beats therapy,” she would tell the mirror in the ladies room while practicing her disinterested face.
Her costume varied, but circled around central themes, classic, simple lines, vintage, sixties inspired, basically anything one of his leading ladies would have worn. Jackie-O sunglasses, silk scarves, pencil skirts, and occasionally a fitted angora/cashmere blend, pale-blue sweater with tiny rhinestone buttons along the dainty cuff. On cool days she featured a raw silk, knee-length, tailored coat with small blue, white and brown flowers, and in the pits of the summer she plucked her wardrobe from an ever-growing garden of simple cotton sundresses that had taken root in her tiny hall closet. Clean, tasteful, she never overdid it. For this was a covert exercise. Garnering attention was not the goal.
Once a young waiter asked after her profession. “I’m a perfectly cast extra in the drama that is Hollywood,” she replied, trying her dandiest to channel Audrey Hepburn, “I do nothing. I am no one.”
This simple comment brought with it a shroud of mystery she could not have paid for even if all the speculations that eventually grew around her were true. She became a haughty regular--her privacy, respected. She was promptly delivered a glass of 2004 Los Camaros, Benziger upon her every arrival. And all the waiters, even the new ones, knew to ask if she would be starting with the Heirloom Baratta salad.
This didn’t happen overnight of course. It took months of silence, generous tipping, and carefully selected reading material--The New Yorker, The Times, and occasionally just a notebook and pen, “So, you’re a writer?” “No, but I will have another glass of Chardonnay.” What fun it was to sojourn amongst the privileged. What a guilty little thrill to up her position in life simply by keeping silent and wrestling with an arrogant forced humbleness. How exhilarating to catch a look from a passing television star wondering behind his Christian Dior sunglasses, just who is she?
But these were merely the perks of investing one-fifth of her income into the Ivy lunches. The meat of the excursions was getting to spend time with him. Oh, sweet obsession, as indulgent as candy covered sex chocolate, she had always preferred ghosts in favor of the living. She had her fill of fleshy disappointments, expectations never met, sour smells and hangovers, dirty sheets and betrayal. The Ivy was the great purger, the eraser on the chalkboard of her soul, a place where all the ugliness in her life was unwelcome. It whimpered away from the hovering archangels of perfume, coffee and lobster bisque. It cowered at the infantry of celebrities, white-coated waiters, and fresh cut flowers. And like a cherry on top, sitting in the corner since 1979, engaging a table full of executives, or sometimes alone with The Times, he sat.
She’d seen every one of his films, three times, at least. Her favorite was a black and white picture from the late 50’s in which he played an artist. He wasn’t the star but he stole the show with ease. She loved his ease. The way he seemed far more comfortable on the screen than any other actor he worked with. How comedy was like breathing for him, drama, like eating a sandwich. He marveled her. His hand movements, his control, and a wry smile so intrinsically his he could have had it copyrighted. How she longed for one thimble full of his brilliance. Not that she wasn’t talented, she was. Albeit unmotivated at times, but that wasn’t her fault. Hollywood, she reasoned, was not a good place for the talented. The talented tended to get lost. To get correlated in giant piles that sat in corners of offices, collecting dust. Or on rare occasion, used to balance a shaky desk. No, there was only room for two kinds of people in Hollywood--the wildly attractive and the genius.
She dressed in front of the oscillating fan, pulling control top pantyhose up over her bony hips while gazing with disdain at her rectangular torso. A pink ribbon she had tied to the protective cage over the blades tickled her belly button, an outie that she vowed to make into an innie as soon as the casting directors who came to her acting class removed their heads from their respective asses and the money started rolling in. She had recently dyed her bobbed hair auburn, but hated the way it looked in the light. It’s purple, she thought. She had specifically asked the stylist not to give her plum tones, that she wanted warm, not cool. It’s just that he was so atrociously Alpha, and people like that easily intimidated her. She chose a green and white cotton dress that accentuated her A-cups, and flats because she was tall for a girl. Most movie stars are tiny, she had been told. Even her paramour was only five-nine, which gave her a three-inch disadvantage, he also tended toward curvier women: blondes in bullet bras, kitten-on-the-head, fountain dancing types with accents. So how did the fantasy play out? How did she win him twice a month, while staring blankly at the air above the corner table, mindlessly wrapping an anchovy around a soggy crouton to save for later? In what reality would he, could he, ever be hers?
Well, there was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the one where he looked at her and recognized a kindred soul. Then there was the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy, in which she knew his future and was able to offer him advice taken from the pages of his own worn autobiography. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, such as speaking seven languages or playing the mandolin, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation. Or maybe they were friends, close friends, until one night…
Such fantasies (intricate, lengthy and detailed) humiliated her, truth be told. She knew that only immature, stupid people obsess in such a way. That there was very little separating her from a teenage girl salivating over Lindsay Lohan in the latest issue of Tiger Beat. The very definition of “infatuate” is to make a fool of, so she kept it all very close to the chest, intellectualizing it. It was her escape, nothing more. Some people had tennis, hiking, yoga, religion; she had lunch that was all. Until the day he walked into the Ivy.
The last time she had laid eyes on him, the current him, the eighty-two-year-old him, was two weeks earlier on one of those Access Hollywood type shows. She was at a friend’s house, and the friend, knowing her to be a fan, turned up the volume on the television while commenting on how fortunate they were to have stumbled onto the program since he never has the TV on. She sat in the center of the couch with her legs tucked under her body sipping a glass of warm, two-dollar Cabernet, known to a certain set of Angelinos as two-buck Chuck. Horrified by the concept when it was first introduced to her a week or two after her west-coast relocation, it had inspired a sense of pity and repulsion, conjuring images of UCLA frat parties and washed-up, wine guzzling child-stars. But like so many things about Los Angeles that she had once found repellent, she now gulped, mindlessly, refilling her glass from the bottle, leaving rings on the Ikea coffee table.
Poor dear, he looked like a prune. It made her sad. Aging made her sad. His eyes seemed glazed over with a milky-white film. And his smile, oh that smile, it had cut her deep to the loins on so many occasions, and now? Wretchedly ironic, like hearing an out of date commercial jingle decades after the product has ceased to exist. It awoke that familiar twinge of embarrassment and she told her friend to switch it off.
But him in The Ivy: that she couldn’t turn off, that was unacceptable. She was contemplating escape when the waiter brought her wine. They were out of the Benziger, so would she please accept his choice, a glass of the Yulupa free of charge? But she was distracted and he could tell.
The waiter, an Abercrombie and Fitch model named Dylan, who while very kind, made her feel ugly, followed her glare to where the actor and his companion were settling. Not the corner table, but a simple booth, two booths down from hers.
“Oh, he comes in here all the time. Has been since, like, the eighties.”
She wanted to correct him. He had been coming since 1979. But she caught the impulse in her nerd-net, leaving Dylan unaware that he bastardized historical facts.
“Is that so?” she said, trying to seem as though she were pretending to be impressed rather than actually being impressed which, would have made her look weak somehow.
“But I waited on Britney, yesterday, so, ya know…” Dylan gave her that little look so intrinsic to the Hollywood waiter who has seen it all. A bored, quick, half-eye-roll, followed by a cute self-deprecating grin. Dylan was stunning. Too young for her of course, and he probably had some blonde surfy-thing who drank Malibu Rum and pineapple juice following him around. Oh sure, that might get boring, she thought. He might desire the learned arms of the slightly older woman, but she had no future with Dylan. She smiled and accepted the Yalupa, half expecting it to taste like it came from Taco Bell, and when (almost to her surprise) it did not, she drank the whole glass down in under five generous sips.
She couldn’t bring herself to look up. The actor was in her line of sight. She knew that, she could feel it. It was even possible that he had looked at her already. That her mousy image had bounced from his frosted corneas up to his exceptional brain and played there like an image in a slideshow. He might even, by now, be able to pick her out of a lineup. She tried to read, translation, eavesdrop on whatever conversation was happening between him and the younger man who shared his table. But lunchtime was rapidly picking up. It was impossible to hear.
She felt exposed suddenly. Alone. This had never been an issue at The Ivy before. Like a Christian in the throes of the Rapture, a question tortured her mind. Now what? She could have hit him with her desert spoon. There was no escaping this. She couldn’t leave; his gravitational pull was far too strong. The years of emotional energy expended left her ultimately exhausted, her mortification weighing her down, sticking her sweating calves to the banquet and trapping her there. She couldn’t even use her phone to call a sympathetic friend. What if he could read lips, or even worse, was offended by cell phone use in restaurants?
She glanced in his direction. Easy. Okay. He was wearing a jacket, dark, and a shirt, blue. No tie. His head looked like a ball of gray yarn with glasses, but she had only looked quickly. This was a catastrophe. His presence put her life up until that point into such stark perspective that she wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone in the restaurant broke out into rolling waves of laughter directed at her. So she sat and drank, for that was all she could do, and as mid-day turned into afternoon, and two glasses of wine turned into three, she decided that this would be her last trip to The Ivy.
Twenty minutes later, the wine having brought with it a heady sort of devil-may-care confidence, she willed her body towards the bathroom, sailing past his booth without so much as a peek at him. She did however look at the table. He was attempting to coax a particularly stubborn shrimp onto his fork with the aid of a butter knife, while his lunch companion, a younger man whose eyes she did meet (dark, familiar) was becoming increasingly irate.
“Why not?” he said, attempting to maintain control of himself. “I never heard of such a thing. She’s your daughter. You can’t just…”
In the bathroom she’d be quick, but not too quick, to powder her nose. She was hoping to catch a second act to put the scene she witnessed into context, but the ladies room was choked with chattering Barbies who took so long in the stalls you would have thought they were in there giving birth. Five minutes passed. He was probably gone by now. Seven. God!
Finally, the handicapped stall freed up. The seat looked as if it had been left out in a toxic rain and she was glad to have something to hold onto as she hovered drunkenly, pressing down on her abdomen to save time. She practically ran from the bathroom, not bothering with the hand dryer, wiping her hands on her skirt and turning the corner into the dining room just in time for the grand finale, hitting the brakes so hard she almost fell face first into Cesar salad.
The younger man was standing now, gathering his things. He was blocking the way back to her table.
“If that’s how you want it, then fine. You can go to hell. And when you die, she’ll sue us, get everything, and your grandson can go to community college.” He was red in the face. She’d never seen someone so angry in The Ivy before. And since she was, in a way, a captive audience, forced to wait while he finished his rant and stormed out, she felt it wouldn’t be out of line to steal a look at the old man taking the brunt of the rage. He seemed surprisingly emotionless.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m going. I’m sorry I came.” The young man checked his cell phone and put it in his pocket. Then took out his wallet and threw two bills, a five and a ten, into the remains of his pasta primavera.
“Well, go then. You’re in this young lady’s way.” She inhaled and held it. The younger man left in a huff. And when he was gone, the aging movie star looked at her square in the face and smiled apologetically.
Her heart popped like a glitter filled balloon. Could he see the shimmers cascading down around her like magical silver snow? She smiled back, and gave him the same half-eye roll Dylan had graced her with earlier. And the Yalupa having beefed up her courage, yet without really thinking, she spoke to him.
“He owes you two dollars,” she said, regretting it immediately.
“What?”
“He left you fifteen. I know for a fact that pasta costs seventeen.”
“He owes me more than that,” said the actor, fishing the bills from their bed of penne and sun-dried tomatoes. She grinned politely, straining empathy, and moved off. She could live with that exchange. It was a good story to tell her friends. She had been witty and kind. And at no point did he try to have her thrown out. It was supposed to be over, but his voice stopped her, pulled her back till her hips were resting against her chair, making her aware of inappropriate parts of her body.
“And the hysterical part is that he drove me here. What kind of bastard leaves an old man stranded?” She felt for him, suddenly. Now that they were chatting, now that he had become a real person, it all seemed okay somehow. Her cover had not been blown. She was simply a fellow member of the human race having a casual encounter with an unfortunate soul.
“Let me ask the hostess to call you a car.”
“No, no. I can call my driver.” A withered hand lightly pet the cell phone sitting on the table beside him. He could sense that this embarrassed her. “Do you always eat alone?”
“I come here to get away,” she confessed, inching slowly back to the safety of her table.
“Here? You’re at The Ivy. People come here to see and be seen. Are you an actress?” But she had turned a frightening shade of crimson. She attempted the eye roll again but she could feel how desperate it must have looked.
“I’m trying. I take a class,” she whispered.
“Classes are for morons. Sit.” He gestured with his fingers as if he was conducting a very tiny orchestra. “Let’s have coffee.” And since it didn’t seem like she was being given a choice, she sat.
“My purse,”
“The waiter can get it. So…”
“Ava.”
“Really? You don’t look like an Ava.” And she didn’t, but no one had ever told her to her face before. “Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Altoona.”
“Ah. Ava from Altoona. I was born in Athens.” He said, stressing all the A’s.
“Georgia. I know.” He seemed to ignore this minor revelation and flagged down a confused Dylan with the subtlest of twitches.
“The lady needs her purse and I need two cups of coffee.”
“Of course. Any dessert, sir?” The actor turned to his new lunch date.
“Ava?”
If it were possible to turn any redder, the look Dylan gave her would have likened her face to the chasse of a fire truck. It was as if he silently called her out. Nice going, Anna Nicole, his eyes accused with a smirk. “Oh, oh no. I’m fine. No dessert.”
With the waiter gone, the actor continued his interrogation.
“So, do you have an agent?”
“Not yet. I’ve only been here six months,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.
“How do you pay the rent? Do you have a boyfriend?” He was so still. His eyes so focused. It was impossible to lie to him.
“No. I, I wait tables.” He pondered this as the coffee arrived, delivered by a disinterested Mexican busboy.
“So you probably make about as much money as that bus boy, yet you lunch at The Ivy.”
“I come here to get away,” she repeated.
“So you said.”
“It’s a hard city when you’re just starting out. I can be someone else here. You must think that’s awfully foolish of me.”
“On the contrary, I find it fascinating.”
The remainder of lunch was, for lack of a better word, lovely. As they sipped their coffee the older actor inquired about nearly every facet of her life. And when the busboy came by to refill their cups, and he passed saying that coffee had stopped agreeing with him years ago, he encouraged her to indulge in a second round, commenting with a flick of his fingers that it would be his pleasure just to watch her drink it.
She never took her coffee black, but decided in this case she would. This woman from her acting class liked her coffee black and for some reason this had impressed Ava. That and the way she played her fingers nervously along the edge of the cup while engaging fully with her eyes. She hung on Ava’s every word but seemed fundamentally distracted, a tortured part of her locked away, inaccessible. It was viciously attractive so she mimicked it here for the benefit of her older actor friend while he carried on about the futility of organized acting classes.
“You may as well join a cult. Quit tomorrow. You’re throwing your money away. If you want to act, go out and act. Don’t pay someone to climb into your head and mess with your instincts.”
She defended Arrow, her acting teacher, by saying that he was simply an encouraging force, who helped his students focus on their goals. “We made a vision board last week--it’s a kind of collage--you take little pictures of all the things you want to realize in your life and stick them together on poster board and--”
But right in the middle of her explanation he picked up his cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“Alex, I’m at The Ivy…My ungrateful first born…Fine.” He put the phone down just as Dylan passed with the check. “Add whatever Ava had to this, will you?”
“Thank you,” she ventured. But things had changed between them. He stood and raised his eyebrows at her in a gesture that translated into the most unenthusiastic your welcome she had ever received. Was it disappointment? Has she offended him? Or was her time, simply, up?
Helpless, she watched him leave. Feeling her eyes well up, she pressed her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Vision board, what was she thinking? Of all the lame, pathetic uninteresting things to say, how sheltered, how positively Altoona of her. Maybe he was right, maybe acting classes were pointless and maybe by needing them she was hopeless. After all, by the time he was her age his career had already peeked, twice.
Down trodden and still too drunk to drive, she had the hostess call her a cab and stepped out into the bright afternoon to wait for it. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, though she seldom smoked during the day, and lit up protecting the flame from the nonexistent breeze with her hand, and then tucked a pin-straight lock of purple hair behind her ear.
“You smoke like Charlotte Rampling,” he said. She turned to see the actor resting against the signature white picket fence. “It’s always a treat to watch a woman move when she thinks no one’s watching.”
Ava put her sunglasses on to hide yet another avalanche of emotion. “Was it something I said?” She took a drag and let it slowly out, the way she guessed Charlotte might.
“No, my dear. I’m an old man. Sometimes I forget myself.” There was an awkward moment of silence, which he kindly broke. “Do you live far?”
“Not very,” she lied. “But I think I’ve had one to many Yalupa’s to risk the drive home. My cab is on its way.” Just as the words were leaving her lips, a black town car pulled up and stopped at the curb in front of them.
“And mine has just arrived. Would you?” He raised his arm ever so slightly and she took it, helping him from his position and towards the town car. The driver, Alex, who seemed only a few years younger then the actor, had made his way around the car and opened the door for them without batting an eye at the tall young woman in the green dress.
“Alex this is Ava. We’re going to be taking her home.”
“Oh, that’s not at all necessary. I really will be fine.” She noticed for the first time that she had been speaking as if she’d just tripped off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Something about being with him antiquated her speech. God, what a poser. Sometimes she thought herself less of an actress and more of a chameleon. Or what was the other one? A lemming.
The car reminded her immediately of the limousine she rode in on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, stale and depressing. She wondered if death started hanging around the old, waiting, bringing its along aura with it. He opened a hidden compartment in the armrest and took out a medium size pillbox, downing the contents with water from a visibly reused water bottle. She thought she might take this opportunity to tell him how much she loved his films, but she didn’t want to seem gushy in front of Alex, who was no doubt wondering who in the hell she was. She decided to listen and be grateful, playing herself off as possibly the child of an old acquaintance.
“How old are you, Ava,” he asked, without looking up.
“I’m twenty-five.” She had in fact, been twenty-nine for a solid two months.
“Well, you look younger. I have a daughter who’s about your age. I had no idea she existed until three weeks ago and now can you guess what she wants?”
Rhetorical?
“Money. She wants money. They all want money. I have two sons. Sons I raised, sons I afforded every possible luxury, toys, cars, the best schools…” He faded off for a moment only to start up again. “They hate me for it. I ruined them. Now one is married to a man and the other is a folk musician. Don’t ever have children, Ava.”
While she enjoyed how open he was being regarding his personal life, she hadn’t failed to notice that neither the actor, nor his driver, had inquired as to where she lived. It had been her plan to have them drop her at her friend Samantha’s place, for Samantha was in development and could actually afford a home worth looking at. Unlike her ghetto building in the heart of K-town, with its peppering of drug addicts and gang bangers. And though she tried with all her grace to find an opening in his monologue, it wasn’t long before the car hit an all to familiar forty-five-degree up slope probably entitled, Doheny, Larabee, Londonderry, Queens, Kings, or possibly Laurel Canyon, snaking its way up towards Mulholland. She couldn’t be sure exactly because to look out the window and away from him while he was so passionately engrossed would have been rude.
“I have been with some of the most beautiful women in the world, you know. Jane, Kim, Ava, not you of course, Ava Gar--” The car took a sharp turn to the right, the inertia sending his frail shoulder into her bare arm. “Pardon me,” he righted himself with the help of her left leg, “mountain roads,” and met her eyes with a sly grin.
“You know, this is going to seem awfully embarrassing,” she said crossing her legs away from him, “but I think we forgot to drop me off.”
“Did we?” He took a sip of water from the bottle. Some of it dripped down his chin but he didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Yes. I think we did.”
“Well, he’s not psychic. He’s a driver but he’s not psychic,” the actor grumbled.
“I’m going to Fairfax and-”
“Well, it’s too late now. I have an urgent appointment with W.C. Crapper.”
In a more recent magazine article on his life, it was alluded to that the actor was known to be somewhat difficult in situations that weren’t going primarily in his way. He was also known to be a bit of a cad when it came to women, throwing tantrums, breaking all manner of furniture. Even one or two instances of domestic violence, though never prosecuted, tarnished his record. Ava wondered if it wasn’t a bit of this she sensed coming through now. She recalled a quote made by one of his co-stars, “He (the actor) could be very ornery at times. If something wasn’t living up to his expectations, he would throw a fit and storm off set only to return an hour later eating a chili-dog and going on about some girl he’d picked up.”
Ava hoped his mood would change soon so they could have a pleasant good bye before he had Alex drive her home, but for now she decided to sit quietly as they weaved their way farther up into the Hollywood Hills.
The car dipped through a tasteful gate and finally came to rest on a curvy driveway shaded by lush overgrowth and wild palm trees. She got out when the door was opened for her, but only to let him out. She intended to get right back in, and felt a twinge of nerves when Alex closed the door behind them. The air reeked of eucalyptus, it made her head spin, that, and the reality of where she was. Someone had pointed out the gate to her once on a tour through the hills, but being there was the stuff of fantasy, and dying with every passing moment.
“Charlie! Buster! Harpo!” The actor moved towards his impressively arched front door an opened it. In a tsunami of fur, three small yappy Pomeranians spilled out and danced around their master’s feet like desperate chorus girls. “Whose daddy’s little babies? Whose daddy’s little babies? You’re daddy’s babies. Yes you are. Yes you are…”
The blush returned to Ava’s cheeks as she searched the area frantically for Alex. She saw the driver, who for some odd reason she had assumed to be the saner of the two, kicking a rock mindlessly toward the three-car garage. As the actor continued his one sided dialogue with his dogs, the driver stopped, picked up the rock and tossed it defiantly into some bushes then disappeared around the back of the house and out of sight. Just as Ava was beginning to digest the reality that she might be stranded forever on the space her two feet occupied, the actor called to her.
“Hurry up girl, you’ll catch your death out there. Blizzard’s a comin’. Do you know how to boil a kettle?” He stood stone faced in the doorway.
“Why, yes. Are we having hot coco…?” But her words trailed off as nature willed him inside; her witty retort was lost to the tailored lawn flicked with playful puddles of diffused sunlight. Somewhere she could hear a water fountain. And since peace and tranquility was alien to her, and since she knew she wasn’t being observed, Ava ran towards the doorway, her heart turning over in her chest like a flipped coin. Out of habit she called it—heads—and pushed opened the door.
He had starred in a Technicolor musical, circa 1948. She owned the original soundtrack on vinyl and would listen to it during hazy afternoons while soaking her waitress weary feet in Epsom salts on her crabgrass veranda. There was a waltz in act two, her favorite. With a glass of sugary iced-tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she would let her head drop gently back against the stucco wall of her 3’ by 5’ patio and narrow her eyes, blocking out the dirty road and the street signs, so only blue sky and palm trees were visible in her sphere. The grand orchestrations transported her to a place, or more of a feeling really, of sublime perfection. Here, she suspected.
In the middle of the hall, wrapped with a grand staircase that seemed to unfurl like ribbon, stood an antique table adorned with disturbingly vibrant cut lilies. Their waxy heads nodded to the music, encouraging her to enter, reassuring. Nothing can harm you here, they seemed to say, in here everything is a waltz. The ceiling was vaulted and flawlessly framed a tasteful chandelier. A stained glass skylight dripped kaleidoscopic colors onto the curved walls, just kissing the tops of mysterious arched doorways that she imagined lead to parlors and morning rooms. But the real beauty of the house was evident to Ava only after she found the nerve to tiptoe past the lush floral arrangement. A pair of French doors, a jar, opened on a sunken living room and followed an expertly crafted architectural line to a row of three more French doors, the middle leading into the garden and the source of the water she had heard; a fountain worthy of Hearst Castle.
As the waltz in her mind was nearing its end, she had a crude thought about how the chandelier alone could probably pay her rent for two whole years, and stopped all together when one of his dogs found her, barking excitedly, scratching her stockings and finally peeing on her shoes.
“Buster?”
“He’s here. I have him.” Ava slipped out of her soggy flats and tried to encourage the dog away from its offending puddle as the actor came slowly into sight from the living room. “He got excited. Where do you keep the paper towels?”
The actor looked at her strangely as the dog continued his metronomic yap.
“Do I know you, Miss?” Her heart flipped again—tails.
“Ava… From the Ivy,” she ventured slowly.
But he grinned that half mouthed grin of his. “I’ve been waiting eighty-two years to use that joke. Towels are in the kitchen but just leave it, that’s what I pay Alex for.”
“Oh, okay. Thank you.”
He noticed her bare feet. “Did Buster have a piddle on your pumps?” The words piddle and pumps made Ava’s face hot.
“He mistook me for a fire hydrant, yes.”
“I have just the thing. Leave it all here and come with me.”
He led her down through the French Doors and into the living room. The furnishings were Fifties modern, yet not without warmth. Long low couches in what had once been rich navy blue, flanked a polished wood coffee table topped with yet another alien flower bouquet, its blooms ostensibly plucked from the Mesozoic Age. Placed with care all along the walls, were sleek Swedish cabinets below hovering works of modern art. Small black and white photographs dotted their surfaces drawing Ava’s eye. How she would love to pour over them, to see him again as a young man. But the actor didn’t give her the chance. Instead he led her out into the garden.
“Oh, how perfectly—intoxicating,” she gasped. Her hands covered her heart one at a time as she gazed on tens of thousands of white roses.
“There used to be order back here. Now it seems they’ve gotten the better of me.”
“They’re all white,” she whispered.
“My second wife was horrifying cunt, but she had a way with flowers.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“You can wash your feet if you like. The water’s quite warm.” The actor sat on the edge of his three-tiered stone fountain with his hands resting softly in his lap. Ava joined him at a distance, and without meeting his gaze reached up under her skirt and pulled off her torn pantyhose.
“Buster owes me new tights,” she grinned and lifted one long leg and then the other over the stone partition into the emerald green water made so by an ornate mosaic tile composition. He watched her legs, slender and youthful; materialize shyly from under the skirt she wore. Her toenails were painted black but he imagined them red.
“May I ask you a question?” she almost mumbled this.
“Is it personal?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” He didn’t smile for it seemed to send the girl into shivers. He wondered what would happen if he touched her?
“Why did you bring me here?” Her hazel eyes watched the surface of the water and her blush returned.
It was endearing, her innocence. It could have been a game but he doubted it. She seemed a perfect lamb, the kind that comes along once a season, if that. This tall, languid girl, playing dress up with herself, dreaming of this moment, of an escape…“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
It had been so long. And the older he got, the less inclined they were to hang around, even for the money. It dawned on him that he could have this blushing girl for free, he immediately regretted being crude with her earlier. But she was unshakeable and detached, a part of her locked away--viciously attractive. The thought gave him a slight rush. He knew to tread carefully. “You got in my car…” He wanted to touch her suddenly, but maintained his control. This, for him, was the sweetest part of the seduction. Is that what this was? “When you could have said something you didn’t…” Her legs kicked nervously at a floating twig causing a strand of brown hair to come loose and curve down meeting her lower lip. “I didn’t bring you here, Ava. You brought yourself. I’m the one who should be asking why.” In a daring move he lifted the stray strand of hair and brushed it away.
She lifted her head, her lips slightly parted. She looked like a child, a gamine. Nothing at all like the usual Hollywood fare, this girl was charming, skittish as a kitten, breakable.
His closeness scared her so he moved away.
“I don’t know why I came. It all happened so quickly and you, well you…”
If he had been thirty younger here is where he would have kissed her. He would have taken her in his arms and kissed her long and deep while she struggled to keep herself from sliding into the fountain. He would have unzipped her dress and run his hand down her thin white back, waiting until he knew he had her fully in his power. Then he would have whispered to her to stand, the water up to her thighs, her dress ruined, floating on the surface of the water like a lily pad. “Strip for me,” he would say, and once she was naked, he would stand back and study her. She did resemble Charlotte Rampling, and the sadness in her eyes held shadows of Louise Brooks. Some women, standing naked in his fountain (and there had been many), smiled and laughed but Ava, this Ava, would not. She would follow him with her pleading eyes. Demurely covering herself. And when he said the words, the words he always said, she would blush and lower herself into the water. She wouldn’t come up immediately, like some, she would float there, eyes opened, like Ophelia tangled in her lily pad dress. Only when her breath was tapped would she come up. Her eyes once again meeting his, he would kiss her and tell her to wait. The waiting game was his weakness. He would return a call, smoke a cigarette, or occasionally leave altogether for a meeting, or lunch at The Ivy. When he returned, sometimes they’d be gone, but not Ava. She would be there where he left her, fingers having turned to prunes. He would help her from the fountain; dry her, on his knees, kissing her legs and stomach and thighs all the while. Then he would lead her to the bedroom and draw the thick curtains. They would make love in the dark, safe from the omniscient California sun and when it was over, he would send her away forever.
“…It’s just, I love your work.” Ava sat staring at the actor, but he seemed detached. He’d gone off again. His eyes were in the fountain, searching, as if he had lost something. She placed three fingers briefly on his knee.
“Yes. Then you’ll want to see Oscar.”
He walked along the edge of the garden, the house on his left, a sea of roses on his right and down a narrow bridge that led to a wing of the house hanging off the hill, open to a hidden valley. Ava followed, her bare feet skirting the occasional rock or thorn, until they came to another French door, this one covered on the inside with long thick curtains. He held them back for her and she entered, as if hypnotized by roses or another one of his slight of finger tricks.
The bedroom was dark, better to hide her panic, and while she searched for the perfect words, ones that would let him down easily, he moved to a small glass cabinet and flipped the light switch illuminating its glorious contents.
“They send you the plaque in the mail. You have to glue it on yourself. As you can see I let my son do it. He was three at the time.” The little piece of gold plated metal bearing his name, the year, and the words Best Actor, was upside down and crooked. But the statue sat on a mirrored base so that when you looked down at the reflection it was upright.
“It’s amazing, really.” Ava’s feet sunk into the soft carpet, trapping her there like quicksand. “Still… I really should leave.”
“But you’ve come so far, Ava.” The actor took a step back hiding him self among the shadows of the dark room. “I know this isn’t what you want, how you want it. But here in the dark, it isn’t so bad. I want so desperately just to touch you.” From the shadows Ava sensed movement. One of his dogs was dozing in a corner. The room smelled heavy and wet, like dead flowers, mold and body odor. “I want to feel my hands on you, my lips, just for a moment, then you can go.”
“I don’t know if I can.” The actor moved around the perimeter of the room and switched off the Oscar light leaving them in darkness.
“You can. And I offer you nothing in return. I’m an old man, Ava. If I had one wish right now it would be to unbind this cloak of years and let it fall to the floor,” his fingers found her neck and traced her spine down to the zipper on her dress. Neither of them breathed as he lowered it all the way to the small of her back, “but I cannot.”
Ava turned, facing him. In the dark room there was still enough light to make out his silhouette. She lost track of the decade, of herself. “How did I get here?”
“You followed me home.”
“You brought me here.”
“You came here.”
She inhaled.
“You wanted this—me. A part of you did.”
“But not this way.”
“Then how?” In the dark he removed his glasses and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Forgive an old fool,” he whispered.
“For what?”
“My delusions.”
Ava slowly raised her hands to the thin straps of her dress and slid them off her shoulders. The dress collapsed to her waist. She took his hands and placed them on her sides just below the ribs.
“You’re forgiven.”
This is how they used to be, alive for him. Not the plastic wind up dolls Alex brought, but tortured, baptized in his fountain, loving him despite themselves. He had been tired at The Ivy, so tired. He felt tired again now, holding her, this lithe girl, in his hands.
“Put me to bed, Ava.” An unexpected hot breeze parted the heavy curtains and a shaft of light fell across her body, withering at his touch. The waltz began in earnest. Glitter filled balloons popped above them. The heat melted the glue so that Oscar could bend down and fix his plaque.
“I’m tired, Ava. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”
He looked younger in the half-light. She had given him thirty years from her rib cage. He held it so softly, his hands not moving. He hadn’t noticed her gift it yet but he would. He would be fifty-two, still young, a prime of sorts. He would nap and when he woke he would know what she had done. His eyes, without their milky film would see her and know.
“Anything else, Miss?”
She would lie with him. Later, his son would find them, or Alex, it changed, but they would keep her secret. They’d have to, and from then on they would all age backwards like Merlin.
This was just another way that it worked out in her mind. Another way she won him. There was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation.
“Coffee? Tea? Amaretto?”
Or maybe he came into The Ivy as an old man and she followed him home. Maybe she waded in his fountain and walked among his roses. And maybe, in the dark of his room she placed his hands gently on her sides and gave him thirty years off her life. It all seemed so real, like you could touch it.
“Anything else, Miss?”
“Just the check, Dylan.”
“You’re not gonna tell me your name this time?”
“Just the check, Dylan,” and with a wry half-smile, she thanked him, paid it, and left The Ivy.

Adria Lang
September, 2008

This is just to say...

2008-05-11T00:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Ira Glass! That was fun!

this is just to say…
I figured out
your password
and changed it for you

now they will wonder
why you haven’t texted
them back

in a day or two you
will enter the name
of my cat and presto
it will be yours again

forgive me
I was full of mischief
your i-phone so
new and enticing

Sublime

2008-04-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

That word is yours now. Even if I never see you again, even if you fall into the ocean or get hit by a speeding tricycle, even if you pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form and this somehow keeps you from contacting me in the future, that word belongs to you. And it won’t be your face that I see in my mind’s eye when the word find me in conversation, or even in passing, or on the wind, or in the bottom of a barrel shot full with holes, I will no more see your face then you (and now I) see a solid passing to a vapor back to a solid when we think of the word. That definition is unimportant. It lacks aesthetics. It isn’t (I don’t think) what you would have me conjure. It is relevant only perhaps within the confines of a splendid magic trick; a dove exploding into a cloud of smoke then appearing alive and well under our table. The explosion is sublime. The dead dove crushed under the magician’s hat is sublime. The blue ribbon of course goes to the live dove, flapping its wings in victory. He will have his turn in the hat tomorrow. I don’t see your face when I hear the word. I recall the backs of my eyelids, for in the face of your brand of sticky surrender I am unable to look. One may tear up, wide-eyed, when faced with beauty, but when that word finds me, I can only blush and wither. Words fail and fate becomes impatient. It is linked, of course, to other words, from the four-letter to the infinite. And presents both a suicidal nihilism and a freedom unfathomable. It makes a fine argument for the plight of the pig. It makes a similar one for the concept of stillness, for resignation, for the vagrant, but these are early thoughts. Then again, can’t the sublime be rendered mundane over time? If the Mona Lisa hung in my bathroom, would I not tire of her face eventually, as you would tire of mine, I of yours? But I don’t think of your face when that word finds me. I think of the chinks in your armor, the little holes that can be penetrated only by fingers, toes, and tongues. I picture rivers of tears behind my eyelids, collected for years, and imagine the pool in which you keep them. Expend, emote, excrete. It’s all bleeding, baby. Drop by drop. Weeping behind closed doors, or alone in the basement, we bask in horror. Swim in it, drink it, love each other for the appreciation of it, and pity the pale world and their pale delusions. From down here in the muck they look like bloated parade floats filled with shit, yet still we (I) fear their scrutiny. For now. It’s a good word. I will tattoo it where you choose or burn it in effigy. I will shout it from the mountaintops or place it in the clay man’s mouth and never speak it again. It is your word. Do with it what you will.

a

Sleep with an Aries

2008-04-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

You sleep soundly in the burgeoning daylight.
The sun streaming in, blinding.
The sound of the busy street below, deafening.
I fester beside you, like a too ripe piece of fruit left behind at the beach.
My head pounding, the sun and noise of morning keeping me awake, alert, aware, of my flaws in the daylight.
Of my imperfect flesh.
Of the distressing lack of darkness and quiet coolness.
Of hideability.
I long to be blindfolded, and when you stir, I whisper for your necktie.
But even with my eyes masked I know the day persists.
And all that is me and you together, asleep, awake, is there to be seen, by me, by you, and by the sun -- your fiery God.
"How do you do it," I ask. "How do you sleep in the Sun?"
So you speak of your travels and sleep caught by the tail.
I picture you dozing under a tree long ago, beside a road.
You, a not so distant cousin of Pan, naked an sprawled in the high grass, sleeping the greedy sleep of the libertine.
My kind reverts to caves, to shells and shadows.
But to you, a child of fire, the daylight is nothing more than a lulling glow when compared to the slashes of red/orange you cut with vigor into the old night's sky.
In reverence of this, I lie with you on a bed like a slab, and duck my throbbing head into the place where your chest meets the mattress.
Then, I kiss you softly and make my way to the living room couch.

Symphony, Chapter 22

2008-04-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

“9th Symphony: Beethoven”

They would meet every weekday morning at half-past eight on the steps of the Conservatory. If either one of them was even a few minutes late the other one would worry. He made her promise never to go to the ghetto again and she agreed because she loved him.
Some days, he would wear HongKew on his face. If the night was particularly hard, or if he had seen something too awful to be repeated, she knew. She also knew not to ask him about it since he hated having to relive it; who would? And though she was sometimes able to piece things together based on his requests for food or medicine to take back with him, she did him the courtesy of not demanding details. What happened in HongKew, remained in HongKew, that was their silent vow.
Weekends were the worst, two days and three whole nights of not knowing, without contact. She would stay locked in the house and wander the rooms like a ghost. She didn’t like to play at home, but sometimes on the weekends and when it was warm enough, she would take her cello to the back of the yard and play as softly as she could just to keep her mind from defaulting to the worst.
On Monday morning, she would go to their spot on the steps and sigh with relief when she saw him making his way down the road.
They lunched together daily on a mattress they had dragged up from the basement and put in what was once her family’s music room. From noon to one every afternoon they would exercise their demons on this little island in the middle of the polished floor. Most days, in the beginning, it was pure passion. But as time went on, their afternoons on the mattress became more varied, more complex. That square of down became a confessional and a boxing ring, a kitchen table and an oasis. It was the one place in the world where they could truly be together and dream of a day when they weren’t watching a clock.
But there was no clock in the music room so they memorized the light. How it began in the middle and crawled its way towards the lower left-hand side of their nest. When LanLan’s left foot felt the warmth of the sun (the right if she were lying on her stomach), they knew it was time to go.
They would put themselves back together and leave the house one by one through the break in the wall at the back of the garden. At the Conservatory BaiLan would practice with her trio and Joshua would instruct his students in counterpoint. When the afternoon lessons were over they would meet on the steps, wish the other a safe and pleasant evening, as was fitting two professionals, and go their separate ways. It was in this manner that they managed to keep their love a secret--at least in their minds--for three and a half long years.
The seasons came and went, some slowly, some in the blink of an eye. Single nights would occasionally out last months in length, if for some reason Joshua were a no show on the steps. This happened a hand full of times for various reasons and would always put BaiLan into a panic. The ghetto was like a rotting piece of fruit fighting for its place on the shelf, with every passing season it became a more and more pungent place to exist.
The first time he failed to make it out, it had to do with the Horowitz girl. She had grown somewhat attached to Joshua who had started training her on the violin to stave off hunger during the long winter nights. Emmie, who was five at the time, had come down with a violent case of stomach flu and cried every time Joshua left her side. This kept him at home for two days.
The next time was Max related. He had gotten himself into trouble again attempting to sneak out of the ghetto and Joshua had to make his case to Kuboto. In the end it was decided that if Joshua could write Kuboto a new piece of patriotic music to play for some visiting German dignitaries, he could have Max back sans only one or two fingers. Joshua talked Kuboto, who liked him, into not only letting Max go, but into sparing his fingers since he was a pianist just like Kuboto and needed them to play. The new stipulation was that Max, who wasn’t Jewish and therefore not repellant to the Nazi ambassadors, be on call to play at any meeting, or event requested of him. It was not the most desirable of positions to be put in, and on the surface Joshua put forth the correct amount of disgust. But privately, he was pleased that Max be put back to work in musical endeavors. It would help to keep him out of trouble. This whole episode, plus the day it took to compose something simple enough for Kuboto to play, would keep him from the steps for three agonizing days.
But that was nothing. The following year kept him in the ghetto close to a third of the time as restrictions were tightening and it wasn’t always that easy to leave. A temperamental guard for example, could ruin an entire week if he felt looked at the wrong way. When Kuboto was hosting the SS, lock downs were put in place to make them seem unmerciful towards their Jewish guests, though Kuboto himself didn’t ever really grasp the difference between the Jews and the Nazi’s.
“They all look the same to me, except the Jewish ones seem smarter,” was his humble opinion.
Along with imposed restrictions, Joshua has created some of his own. He couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of pass-holders guilt. Every morning when he left the ghetto and walked the streets to the Conservatory with its white walls and good smells, he couldn’t help but think of his little makeshift family starving, sweating, or freezing together, squeezed uncomfortably into that small room. Some days he would remain with them just to share their pain, just because he didn’t think it fair that he should get to leave when they had to stay.
“LanLan, you understand?” he would ask, and she would nod sweetly, part of her jealous that she couldn’t join him, that the life he had when he left her on the steps involved others.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said to his neck one rainy afternoon on the mattress, “you go off at night to a tiny room filled with people and I come back to a giant empty house. War makes everything backwards.”
In the winter of 1945, he didn’t show up for work for an entire month. Frau Schmetterling had stopped eating and resigned herself to death. There were updates. He would get to the Conservatory when he could to fill her in, and then, in late March, he came to her with a most bizarre request.
It seemed that Frau Schmetterling was highly concerned regarding the fate of her remains. Though not traditionally approved by the Jewish faith, it had long been her intention that her husband Leonard and herself be physically joined in death, their ashes mingled and scattered together to the four winds while the orchestra played Beethoven. But things in the ghetto didn’t work like that. If you had the misfortune to die while there, you were likely to end up in the Russian Jewish cemetery on Baikal Road, if you could afford it. If you could not, you were simply picked up by a man with a cart for the most nominal of fees and taken away to God-knows-where.
The latter was not a remote possibility as Frau Schmetterling had more then enough money to afford the very best funeral Shanghai had to offer. But no matter what Max and Joshua did to try and set her mind at ease, she still seemed convinced that when she died she would end up on the cart, and for a reason that was all her own, dumped in the river.
“Whatever happens, Maxala, don’t let them put me in the river,” she would tell him at least three times a day. It was the last thing she said to him as he headed off on the chilly morning of her death to play piano for a room full of men who had been indirectly responsible for her husband’s murder. Joshua wasn’t there either. He was out with Herr Horowitz looking for Anton. The only people home were Frau Horowitz and her daughter.
Frau Schmetterling died, not asleep, and not really awake either, staring into the eyes of Emmie Horowitz who had been sitting and waiting with her since dawn. The girl, a soul older than all the inhabitants of the room combined, had a sense about these things and without trying, provided the old woman with a channel out of this world and into the next. To Frau Schmetterling the girl on the bed became transparent, an open window in which she could see images forming.
It was an unintentional slip. In the deepest recesses of her soul, the place where millions of microscopic fists grip into flesh cells, Frau Schmetterling had intended to hold on a bit longer, to wait until what she clung to dissolved between billions of microscopic fingers. But when the girl presented her with the way, she found that she lacked both the strength and the desire to hold on. As she suspected, her body had become rancid, tired, it turned to the consistency of mush. She longed for freedom.
The air was warm and humid there, on that Darjeeling road, beside a ditch, lined with flags of all colors. And approaching, the lead Condor in his leather jacket with polished buttons down the front in two neat rows--Leonard. How magnanimous they had been--man and wife--before the world went wrong, how like angels. Maybe they could go for a walk near the old temple. Or maybe they could just stay on the road for a while and when they got to the end, take the opposite fork to the one they had taken the first time around. The possibilities were endless. He offered a strong hand and she took it.
When she was gone, Emmie called to her mother.
“Is everything alright, dear?”
“She’s went with Leonard,” the girl said. And the band that accompanies a household in mourning fired up as everything accelerated on some levels and slowed on others, as is the way when death comes calling. The main dance was finding a way to have her remains cremated. This was her only wish, it was unilaterally decided that it should be honored.
Cremations were unheard of at the time. The Chinese believing that a soul is never really at peace until it is resting in the ground. So Joshua went to BaiLan. He thought he knew a way to smuggle The Butterfly’s body out of the ghetto. There was a guard who took bribes. If he was willing to allow living people out for the right price, Joshua felt he would have no trouble letting a dead woman through, as dead women tell no tales. His plan was to incinerate her body in the stone pit behind the Bai home. They would gather her ashes, place them with her husbands and have them both interred at the Russian Jewish cemetery. It wasn’t Germany, but at least they would be together. BaiLan, finding it as romantic as it was risky, agreed to the plan and it was set for that Thursday.
Thursday was a heavy burning day and probably the least conspicuous as the skyline was already so choked with smoke it heaved convex like a bloated diaphragm. They both took the day off from the Conservatory and BaiLan spent the morning psychically staving off the rain as she stacked firewood and cleared the wet leaves and branches from the stone pit at the back of the garden. He arrived on schedule pulling a small cart behind him. In a few months he could have sailed her there, she thought as he revealed the small bundle wrapped in its shroud and marked with the Star of David.
She hadn’t seen Frau Schmetterling since the night she spent in the ghetto, and she thought of it then as she helped him move her shell of a body into the pit and began piling up sticks to build the pyre.
“How do you know how to do this?” she asked him as they worked.
“Anton,” he mumbled without meeting her eyes.
And a few moments later, “It’s a shame Max can’t be here.”
But to this he did not reply. He reached under the cart and pulled out a jar of kerosene to pour over the remains and the tin box containing her husband to bear witness. When this was done he took a small book from his pocket and recited a prayer in Hebrew, then he lit the match. BaiLan’s contribution to the flames was a small bundle containing a few banknotes, some fruit and a jade bracelet that Frau Schmetterling used to admire back when they still had the apartment. She placed it and watched as the fire devoured it quickly in green and blood orange bursts.
They sky was gray and it had begun to drizzle through the mist. They discussed playing something by Beethoven but the weather was bad for the instruments and they couldn’t risk drawing more attention to themselves than they already had.
“How long will it take?” BaiLan asked.
“Four or five hours if we keep the fire hot. Of course there will be some bone left, we’ll have to bury it. We’re not professional like the Nazi’s,” he tapped the tin box. “I wonder if any of what is in this box is actually Leonard Schmetterling. Why would they care if they got it right…” and he trailed off.
BaiLan took his hand. “When I’m alone here and all seems lost, I like to imagine that the garden is filled with flowers. That the house is alive with bodies and music, that there is no war, no troubles, and that every day is a party and every night is safe and peaceful.”
“Mein Blume, I had that life. In Berlin, I remember it. And now I’m being punished for it. Time spent in Eden comes with a price.”
“You see the boat half sinking.”
“The glass half empty? Perhaps. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I’ve never cremated anyone before.” He enveloped her in his coat and silently berated himself for what he’d said. It wasn’t her fault, and he was so very fond of her. But he pitied her. What a sad fate to have to compete with a memory, for people, no matter how perfect, are flawed, and memories, no matter how flawed, are perfect.
“How did Hanna die?”
She had wanted to ask him for years. All she knew was what Max had told her that first day in the music room, before his Mandarin was all that it would become--she had been killed by the Nazi’s. But she never heard it from him. She didn’t know the whole story.
“You know the answer to that question.”
He bristled slightly but not enough to dissuade her.
“Not from you. And why does Max feel responsible?”
“He feels—what?” Joshua released her from under his wing and began adding more wood to the fire.
“Responsible. He told me he killed her, why does he think that?”
“I have no idea,” Joshua said, avoiding her eyes. “She was shot, by looters. As was our maid, Helga. You know all this, why would you make me repeat it?”
“I know it, yes, but that’s all I know. You never talk about it, Joshua. You carry it with you. Her soul is at rest, but yours is not. How could you think that’s what she would want?”
He dropped a log, missing his foot by an inch, and turned on her. “At rest? You think her soul is at rest? She was murdered. She was shot in the back of the head, here,” he dug an ashy finger into the soft place just above her hairline, “the bullet tore her face away when it came out the other side. My son suffocated inside her, who knows how long that took. Is that what you want to know? I didn’t even see her buried. To this day I don’t know if it was even done. My last image of her would keep a heartless criminal up at night, so please…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mein Blume…”
“Do you love me?”
“I do.”
“And if Hanna were to come walking through that gate, alive and well…?”
“That’s not a realistic question.”
“If she did, would you go with her?”
“LanLan…”
“Would you go with her?”
He let out a sigh and turned his eyes to the fire. “She’s my wife.”
BaiLan left him to his work. She ate the funeral meal, tofu, as was custom, for Frau Schmetterling alone and when she was finished, made a bowl for Joshua and carried it silently out to him. They didn’t speak. In her childhood room she played her cello without using the bow and watched as the sky grew dark. He would have to return to the ghetto soon. She sat on her cot in the pantry and waited for him. When he came in, his arms and face were gray with ash.
“It’s done. The ashes need time to cool. I’ll collect them tomorrow.”
She couldn’t look at him. “Yes, and then…”
“And then?”
“Joshua, I can’t be with you if you’re still with her.”
He sat down beside her, then got up quickly after leaving a sooty ring on the blanket. “It’s been an emotional few weeks. Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
She shut her eyes against the tears that had been gathering there, but a few managed to slip past the gates and escape down her cheek.
“I love you, Mein Blume,” he touched her face leaving a gray smudge and the ash mixed with her tears like watercolor paint. Their eyes locked and he smiled a sad smile beneath his beard, “and I thank you.”
When he was gone she cried out the day, the war, she cried in envy of one dead woman, and in mourning for another. She cried because she had no choice and no choices. She cried for her love, and then, exhausted, she fell asleep.
It was dark when she woke to the sound of banging. The fire had gone out and the temperature dropped signifying that she’d been asleep for at least a few hours. It took her a minute to register the sound, to place it, for in the haze of sleep it could have been anything from a rusty pipe to a poltergeist. By the time she was on her feet pulling on her robe she was most certain that it was the door. Her mind immediately went to Joshua. She was so sure it was him that she was halfway down the hall before her mind flashed a red warning light of caution. It could have been anyone; the police, soldiers, thieves. No one was supposed to know she was there, no one did, except her parents and Joshua. Max. It could have been Max.
In the dark moonless hallway she misjudged her relationship with the only piece of furniture there, a small table. She stubbed her toe and toppled a vase smashing it to the ground. So much for secrecy she thought. If it was Joshua beyond the door, they could share the irony that he had urged her to put that table and that vase there as a place to showcase some flowers he had brought her. She swore silently in German.
“BaiLan? BaiLan? I can hear you. Open the door it is I, HongWei.”
A few minutes later, BaiLan sat on her cot in the kitchen picking shards of glass out of her foot with a needle, while HongWei and two of his cousins made themselves comfortable. HongHu boiled water for tea and HongYong made a fire.
Her ex-fiancé sat across from her wearing an unfamiliar uniform and a wry little grin. “You don’t look half as bad as I thought you would, LanLan. I was expecting a half-starved kitten.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said and winced as the shard of glass she was trying to remove nestled itself deeper into her foot.
“Allow me?”
“It’s fine. I can do it.”
“Yes, but I can do it without hesitation.”
She extended her bare leg to HongWei and let her foot flop in his lap with none of her former modesty. Never in their old life would she have been so brazen with him. They both thought it. HongWei chalked it up to the war, the poor thing was shell-shocked, but LanLan’s mind went to Joshua, her legs wrapped around his back. She blushed, which seemed to satisfy HongWei. He gripped her foot and removed a folding knife from his belt.
“What’s that for?”
“Keep still.” With a flick of his wrist and a turn of the knife handle, he lifted the shard of glass from her foot and showed it to her, a little ruby on the point of the blade. “See? There it is.”
“Thank you, HongWei.”
“Don’t thank me yet, it looks like these other ones are in deep. This may hurt.”
“Is this why you came? To play doctor with me?”
HongWei regarded her the way a priest sure of his own righteousness regards a lost parishioner.
“No, Bai LanLan. I came to take you away from here. To Hong Kong, to your parents, and to salvation.”
“Salvation? Really?”
“Hold still,” he steadied her foot and lowered the knife to a bleeding cut and the shimmering slice of glass embedded in it. “Your disobedience has gone on long enough. It is time to honor your family, to marry and bare children, to give your life purpose, LanLan. To start thinking not only of yourself, but of others, of your family, of your nation.”
“My nation?” She suppressed a laugh. She could hardly argue with him, she didn’t know where to start.
“Things are changing in China, LanLan. The Germans haven’t got much steam left and when they fall they’re taking Japan with them. Where do you think the bombs will fall? Hong Kong? No. Tokyo? Who cares. But they will fall here. They will fall in Shanghai. I promise you that. So please, don’t hate me. But you must come.”
She stood, her foot free from glass and limped to the cupboard for some iodine and a bandage. Her hair was wild and her robe fell open revealing a thin nightdress.
“I don’t hate you HongWei. I’ve never hated you. It’s just that I don’t love you, and I never will. So please, don’t hate me, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with the man I love, and when this war over we will be together in life or in death.” Her foot turned from black, to red, to yellow as the iodine dripped along its length and spotted the floor.
Would they be together in death? Out of the kitchen window she could see the last embers from the pyre burn off in an orange smolder. She pictured Frau and Herr Schmetterling, young, lost in an eternal embrace. Then she pictured the afterlife with Joshua, he was nowhere to be found. Why? He was with his wife and child. Could HongWei be right? Was all of this selfish as well as foolish? She bit her lip to stop the tears. HongWei approached and closed her robe for her.
“I thought this would be easier.”
“It’s very easy. I’m not going.”
“One day you will apologize for your insolence. We will be married by then and all of this will be a bad memory.”
“Get out of my house, HongWei.” But suddenly things were becoming awfully clear. The cousins began to circle, this wasn’t a persuasion; it was an abduction. BaiLan kicked over a chair with her bad foot and cried out in
pain, but adrenaline fueled, she managed to scurry past them and out in to the frigid night.
“BaiLan!” HongWei was at her heels as she wove barefoot towards the break in the wall. When she dove for it, he grabbed her around the waist and they both fell hard to the dirt. “Hu, Yong, help me,” HongWei called to his cousins.
The three men grabbed BaiLan who screamed, kicked and struggled with all her strength, but she was out numbered. They held her tight and returned her to the house where she was gagged and restrained while the men ate supper in preparation for the long, dangerous trip back to Hong Kong. They were kind enough to clean up the mess in the hall, to pack a few of her things for her, and to make sure the house was orderly when they left it. But they were not kind enough to undo the gag, not kind enough to let her write a letter of explanation to Joshua, not kind enough to include her cello in with her things.
Before they left, HongWei toured the house to make sure all the doors and windows were locked up tight. He saw the mattress in the music room and said this to BaiLan as he carried her to the waiting car, “I have forgiven you every foolish thing you’ve ever done LanLan, and in time, I will even be able to forgive you for what you did with him. But just know, my forgiveness won’t come easy. You must suffer for your salvation.” And then, before he lifted her into the car, “I’ll help you, because, I’ve always loved you.”
The next morning Joshua would arrive on the Conservatory steps, and for the first time in two and a half years, BaiLan would not be waiting for him. He would run to the house, a sickening and all to familiar feeling creeping in his gut, he would get there and find it empty. Locked. Deserted. He would let himself in using the key she made for him and drift through every room for a clue as to where she might have gone. But when he got to her bedroom and saw that her cello was lying on it’s side in the middle of the floor, bow leaning against the wall, he would sink momentarily, crippled by the grip of despair slowly taking hold of his heart.
She was gone so suddenly; all at once he was accosted by memories that seemed to mock him. It’s what you wanted, they seemed to say, a dream girl, a dead wife, a memory. Well, now you have two. But BaiLan would never leave her cello, not on the floor, not like this. Something had happened here. So as calmly as possible, he locked the door, and set his most sober mind to figuring out what: a task that would take him seven years.

My Bikini.

2008-04-02T01:20:00.000-07:00

A poem I wrote for you.

My Bikini.

Some things are impossible to do when one is not mired in a solid state of love. Today I feel mired, welded, the victim of chemical processes involving the recent application of heat. Lava cooling on the side of a mountain or on a doomed crash course with the pacific. I am cooling on the outside. Hardening. But the inside is caramel, fudge, a necessary creamy filling, fuel for my sickly, sticky, adolescent prose. But prose is necessary in matters of mire. Mire is a word that deserves to be rhymed. Dissected. Mocked. Ignored. Spat upon. It keeps the joints oiled. It adorns the sadness I feel standing on the cliff yet again. Prose is my bikini. My sunscreen. My coconut oil. About to dive off again, to fall, to hit, to swim, to tire and tread, to gasp for breath. And it's not all that I dread. It's not all that which keeps me crying to the blue sky and the Sun God. It's the inevitable climb back up to where I am right now after the fall, the slap, the tickle, the submersion, that makes twist and turn. I could fall slowly for you. As if the air were made of marshmallows. I could slide into love with you, over an excruciating period of time. You, who have always been there, smoldering on the periphery. I am equal parts terrified and excited by you. Warm in the center, toes on the edge, a beacon, a leap, oblivion.

A Well Painted Sign

2008-04-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

A poem for Lindsay and all of us who have ever worked retail.
xo.

A Well Painted Sign

In all honesty, it was a job that could have been done just as well, if not better, by a well-painted sign. You picture an ambitious, perky teenager with an IQ of 80 and a trust fund, the like that is prone to cruse this stretch of boulevard, setting down her kiwi and mango topped designer yogurt in exchange for, perhaps, a glitter pen. “Oh my God, I can totally make a sign, that will totally rock. Totally,” the teenager would say. And the teenager would. The sign would read the words that now fell from your lips pushed through a forced smile like rancid meat through a rusty grinder. “Hey you guys, the rack over here is fifty percent off and this one, this other rack, over here, this one, over here, is seventy-five! And hey, we even have more sale stuff inside. Inside. Through the door. Inside!” But the sign wouldn’t bumble. The sign would be concise. Just numbers, like this; 50% OFF, 75% OFF, MORE INSIDE. And the sign would be in glitter rimmed bubble letters which would garner a far more positive reaction than a fake sounding half-assed sales pitch from you. A tired, hung-over, angry sales girl. So you start killing them in your mind. Killing them one by one as they pass, as the shadows of the sun grow longer, as the day passes, as your life passes, and you wonder, you ask yourself that age old question, "Where did I go wrong?" But thoughts like that are too depressing, so you go back to fantasies of killing them with hangers, blinding them with over priced body spray, and strangling them with the skinny legs of designer jeans.

A Single Tale.

2008-04-02T00:37:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure if I wanted to post this one because it's about BDSM. I find it very difficult to write about such things because I feel they always come out cheesy. I tried my best to make this one un-cheesy. If you want a light read, skip to my blog about "Footloose." That one's a laugh riot!

A Single Tale

“Consider this a love letter addressed to a narrow acre along the never ending gamut of pain. The acre that is mine, the acre that comforts me…”
She wrote this on a pink Post-it then spat her gum out in it. There were no right words, and if there were she couldn’t harness them. Not today. It had been another day in the void, ushered in by nightmares lasting too long. Waking up late beside a familiar grunting body, that grew colder and stranger by the day, surveying the mess they had made together, the perfectly crafted rut, then getting into the car for a pointless series of circles around an ugly wasteland of a city resulting in a seventy dollar parking ticket, a headache and a broken spirit. She was depressed. And she was alone at the counter. The bitter coffee twisting her bowels was making her regret having ordered it, having chosen this diner, having moved to LA to begin with. Her mind slipped off into the wonderful, cushiony world of self-pity. She allowed herself to hate things with a teenage intensity. But unlike a teenager who can hate with abandon, her loathing of everything large, small and Los Angeles, was wrapped in a flour tortilla of guilt gifted to her by a Roman Catholic mother and more recently by her Yoga instructor. Both of who, in their own way, preached the virtues of patience, grace and gratefulness in the face of adversity. The universe doesn’t give gifts to whiners. This theory left her striking, then apologizing, like a reluctant dominatrix, at the world. The whole thing on a loop in her mind as the subtext asked the same persistent question, “What the fuck are you going to do?” The loop, the rut, and the closed doors--the doors she couldn’t even see. She was throwing darts in the dark at elusive targets, at promising, lying, flakey, LA targets, which said one thing than did exactly the opposite for no apparent reason. She felt like the universe was trying to tell her something but she didn’t know what. What to do? Well, she quit Yoga for one. She had tried to be one of those girls. Really tried, for a solid week at least, but the heart wants what it wants and the body is nothing more than its vehicle. There are other ways to work out. She wrote:
“It always comes back to this. And it’s funny because I never lose the “O” ring. It stays with me as if it knows I’ll need it, like an ex-boyfriend that refuses to move on. It waits for months, years, it waits because it knows me better than I know myself.”
She let her hand fall to her side and touched the skin behind her left knee. The welt was still raised. She shivered. It was the first time she had felt good all day so she pinched her stocking with two fingers and let it snap against the welt recreating a kind of mini-version of its conception. She thanked the universe for that. She sipped her coffee, determined for some indefinable reason to finish it, and turned the ring around on her finger. It had gotten what it wanted. And to think, only a few months ago it had been sulking in her jewelry box as its owner was tromping around town in a fancy diamond and gold creation, her skin as lovely and welt free as a welt free baby’s.
The problem with the “O” ring was that it had a horrible sense of timing. For one thing, it always started getting really demanding in times of financial and emotional instability. She raised her hand to eye level and let the silver “O” dangle above her palm. Things weren’t all bad. It worried her when she had sudden thoughts like that because it made her feel Bi-polar. She shifted in her seat awakening the sore nerve endings hidden beneath her skirt like a secret. Her secret. There were very few that knew the extent of her perversion, even her ex-fiancé (the body in the bed) didn’t want to know. She resented him for that among other things as a way to place blame away from herself for lying to begin with. She had never crawled over carpet for him, nor could she imagine it. He would think she was performing and performing was bad. Love was supposed to be this great magical thing where you stare into one another’s eyes and fall into a field of daisies before making peg-a into slot-b love like they do in music videos. It was a spontaneous blowjob in the afternoon while she ignores the fact that he’s probably thinking of the last bit of porn he jerked off to. It happened in the morning when, if she loved him, she wouldn’t say anything about his breath. She would climb on top of him and force herself to be turned on, force herself not to focus on the faint smell of sour milk and wonder why she ignored it the first time that they kissed. That was what love was supposed to be.
Well, she had never been in love. All the times she said so she was lying and all the times she felt so, it was nothing more than infatuation, a reoccurring theme to be sure. In her writing it all came down to that. How boring. It’s probably why she had been so sterile lately. Or maybe it was the fact that she had written as much as is possible to write without being read. She felt like a tree purposely uprooting herself in the forest just to see if she could be heard falling, well enough was enough already. She had left behind more carnage than a group of coked up lumberjacks, more than enough to be sifted through without indulgently creating more. She lost her bar job, a tireless labor of self-sabotage that she wasn’t even aware of until it was pointed out to her by her honeycomb of a blonde behemoth boss. Albeit indirectly, thanks to the woman’s inability to string a sentence together that didn’t include the words mini-dress, tummy tuck, or my rich husband who gave me this job I’m horrible at. And--there, somewhere between cursing the heavens, and the blame game, and the apologies, and the hurt, and the feeling of getting older, and the trees senselessly falling to the ground in agonizing pain, her little sliver friend jingles its round metal charm and she knows what her soul needs. Polarization.
She had gotten it. Saturday last. Her fingers went back to the welt. She traced it, sending a spike of heat all the way up into her throat. It evoked images, memories that to write about, would present as tasteless erotica. There was so much more to it. It was a strip tease of emotion. Every strike, every hit, was an emotional garment falling to the ground. She searched for a way to highlight these feelings on her pink Post-its while waiting for her Chicken Cesar Salad without sounding trivial, without giving too much power to the story as a sexual encounter, which it was, and wasn’t. Her former lover would hate any story that came from such an experience, as if she would tell him. She kept it hidden from him by locking the bathroom door while she changed, studying her bruises in private, feeling their warmth even after days. He’d prefer her to stick to her loftier subjects, her New Yorker-able subjects, her stories and plays woven by the lighter side of her psyche. But ironically it was only lightness she had felt that night, lightness and freedom, even abandon. Its only dark side, she could rationalize, was in its hokey veneer and perhaps in its lure. Could one become addicted to pain for clarity’s sake. She hoped so then promptly apologized to the universe for the thought. Note:
“It was the ring that caught his attention. He’d admired it, and to a mind like his it signified a blank billboard of endless promotional possibility. I laughed and though of the friend who had given it to me. Married, bogged down with all the things I’d recently forfeit, I was his little secret and the ring was our tiny key, a key to experience for me, and to voyeurism for him.”
As she tore up the Post-it on which she’d just written, she remembered a winter’s day back in New York when this friend had called her. She was in the shower but thought it safe to call him back and tell him about the snow and how pretty it looked collecting outside her window. A woman answered and she hung up. He didn’t call again for weeks. She wrote a story about an auction and sent it to him. He corrected her spelling and sent it back without a word. Reading it was like getting a blowjob in the afternoon or like hearing a loud crash and finding that a tree has fallen on your car.
Her salad arrived. The waitress asked if she could throw away her ripped up Post-its. Not knowing what to say she asked for more coffee but a breeze picked up from out of nowhere and blew the pink squares, the ones that weren’t stuck to the table, up and onto the floor. The waitress apologized and kneeled to pick them up. She should have helped, but the girl looked so lovely crawling on the dirty floor. Interrupting the moment would have been an affront to one of those rare, random moments of beauty that so seldom present themselves. She watched the girl in slow motion, she was a Vargas print, a living recreation of a fifties pin-up doll. Her mind flashed to Saturday night.
Kneel. That’s how it started.
That’s not how it started. It had started on Christmas Eve when a friend had invited her to go over there. And “there” was funny. “There” was downright comical, like they all are. Everything in that world is funny. What is funnier than a group of suburbanites dressing up in leather and hitting each other on the ass? Not fucking much. But is it funnier than sex? The whole esthetic is beside the point. And even though there was no way in the world she believed that to be true, it didn’t make much of a difference now. He could have been wearing a fucking spacesuit, he wasn’t--which was fortunate, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He had a skill, no, a set of skills that started organizing themselves like playing cards in his brain the moment he saw her ring. Whether or not she found him conventionally attractive was also beside the point. She wouldn’t fuck her massage therapist, or her Yoga teacher. To the layman it’s a bit like that. She would use that in her story. She ate some chicken then wrote:
“I am your instrument. Manipulate me to get the sounds you want. Play me well and I will sing for you.”
She folded the Post-it till it could be folded no more and left it in the sugar canister. The she traced the word Stradivarius in salt granules and crumbs. It’s like that. It’s as sexual as that. No more no less. She tried to conjure images that would back it up, make it clearer, but it began and ended with that single metaphor. How does a violin feel after being played? Light. Awake. Perhaps a bit stretched. It still sounded to sexual. Was she projecting? Maybe. There was simply more to it:
“Kneel. And I did, but it wasn’t a solo effort. He went with me to the floor, pressing his knees against the backs of my knees till they buckled.”
She suspended that moment in thin air, breathing it into her abdomen and letting it go slowly. An ant made his way along the wall toward the sugar holder. Maybe he was one of those reconnaissance ants, she thought. Was he specially trained or had he done something wrong to end up with this detail? She decided to help by moving the canister closer to him. When that didn’t work she scooped him up using the edge of the Post-it and deposited him in the pile of crumbs that still kind of read, Stradivarius. She was God, and God had been merciful. She watched the ant for a while and thought about why it had been taking her so long to get a new job. He hoisted a crumb up onto his back. She still had nothing. On a Post-it she wrote:
“Jane of all trades, master of none. Except my own universe, the one in my mind.”
Then she wrote:
“I am Goddess of the Ants.”
This guy, the one at the place, who had admired her ring, wore shiny shoes with a kind of silver bar across the toe part. Ask a girl in her position the color of his eyes and she may come up empty handed, ask the color and make of his shoes and get a monologue. She was close to them. Her eyes were down, and this man, with these shoes, systematically peeled away the layers of her life as if she was an onion, and he did so without crying. There were times early on where she thought she wouldn’t be able to handle it. He delivered a surprising amount of pain, but her life thus far had left her with a sort of convoluted mantra about what things that don’t kill you have a tendency to do, so she took it with gritted teeth and found herself wanting to go deeper.
“There are many lessons in submission which I have yet to learn. I’m spoiled. I need discipline. But I also need to be the center of attention.”
Like the job thing. Fuck the job thing. There were times, to many to mention when she’d been coasting in the past. A wind always picked up somewhere. Her family, who had been patient, advised her that perhaps now might be a good time to change planes, to give up the coaster for one with an engine. You can still write, they would say. She was even toying with going back to school, maybe becoming a teacher. She shifted her sore thighs and laughed at the prospect. With all that she’d done? There are some things that don’t go away. There are some e-type publications bearing her name that wouldn’t look so hot on a teaching resume. Not to mention photos of her (shock, horror) in books (!) of her in her element, wearing little more than what God gave her, a guilty little ring of silver dangling from her middle finger like an accomplice. But like it was with most things, she had brought it on herself. Laid the tracks for the crazy train, as it were. Add to that an over active Corpus luteum, a Cancer sun and a bad moon rising, and you come out with ten kinds of crazy. So what breaks through? What clarifies, and through what magical mystery means can she hold it together for the tour, for the impending onslaught of emotional self-mutilation?
“I’m not going to use my whips on you.”
That’s what he had said. She quoted him now on yet another Post-it. The polarization had begun. She had been stripped of the outermost layers. Gone was the triviality of day to day, the rut had been annihilated by a stealth rut-buster in the shape of a riding crop, bearing the insecurity layer which, had been burst by well chosen undergarments and the fact that her legs looked eight miles long in heals. Underneath that was her paranoia, whose biggest fear is ultimately, ultimate pain, so off it went without to much trouble, and below paranoia, after slashing through a couple of other hard skins, like pride, ego, and well, more pride, he had finally made it to down to her id, her holy, bare bones id, where all that she was lay quivering against a polished wooden rack. She wanted into the point of the pyramid and he, being a consummate professional, knew by her smiles and her tendency to sing while being flogged, that it would be rude not to take her there. So he went to her. He held her by the hair and asked (even though he didn’t pose it as a question) if he could use his whips.
Earlier that night she had met a soft-spoken Israeli photographer who was in the midst of a project about pain. His subjects would recount to him the most painful experience of their lives as he photographed them. When asked her to take part and she said no. She wrote:
“Yes. Please. Please. Yes.”
She didn’t consider herself to be a person capable of such a project because she didn’t feel as though she had ever felt real pain. She considered herself lucky, innocent, and trusting. She’d met teenagers with more depth. Hell, she’d written teenagers with more depth. Was that what this was, a juvenile safari into faux-suffering? How very sad. Or maybe she just wanted to feel, or maybe she was more closely related to the apathetic youngsters she wrote about, or maybe she was a pain slut.
“I see-saw from self-pity to self-loathing as if it’s my job. But between every see, and every saw, there is a split second of water bubble levelness. It is there where things get done. It is there where I set up my desk.”
Things could be level again. With her id on the rack like whale bones drying in the sun, she searched through tightly shut eyelids for the horizon. It came and went as the single tail kissed her back, her thighs, and the bit in between. He had her turn and face him. He had her open her eyes. The room was red, all its accents black, (as was to be expected.) The lights were not low and sexy, but at the level of a functioning office, garish. Around the room were hysterically clad extras. Somber faced, with hungry eyes, their egos still firmly intact and all the more embarrassed for it. She was sweating, screaming, squirming, singing, this whalebone in the sun. Recalling this, she wrote:
“The snake kept striking over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…” Till she ran out of room on the Post-it.
But it wasn’t enough. If the single tail was the garden snake, then the one he went for next was the cobra, the adder, the python. He held it to her neck. He cut off her laughter with it. He wanted to know what was so funny. “None of this is real,” she told him. “This is real,” he replied, lifting her chin with the body of the tapered snake. He asked her if she was okay before using it one her, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
“This is real,” she wrote.
It had been a long day. She was still pissed about the seventy dollar ticket she had gotten while looking at an apartment in a building there was no way she could afford. She had to be out of her place in two and a half weeks, she was nearly broke, unemployed and single. She was annoyed that she, a New Yorker, had been beaten by Los Angeles this easily, and she was annoyed now that she had run out of Post-its. She paid her bill and though of that night, writing the only important words of the day on the inner lining of her brain.
“I made it home. I hit the bed and was overwhelmed to find that I had been enlightened. Not in a big way. Not in the elusive way that monks and saints are. It was a very human awakening. As my tired, half-drunk, swollen body throbbed above the mattress, I found the following to be true: Nothing matters. The body is only a vehicle. And it’s time to get off the see-saw--time to walk towards the horizon.”
Stocking snap, ring jingle and paper mache in layers on id bones--all of it left the café and went out to the car. It was getting dark in LA, in a few hours she would put the day to rest as if it was a suffering dog, then she would wake-up and do it all again.

Adria Lang
January 2007

Yul's letter from "In Constant Care of Beautiful Monsters."

2008-04-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

This is a bit from my novel, "In Constant Care of Beautiful Monsters."

The main character, Yul, writes letters in his head to his girlfriend known only as My Girl. This one is one of my favorites, the cranky little fucker! Let me know what you think.

MG,

Everyone I've ever loved in my life, I've hated with an equal and opposite intensity. I think about you and how I can smell you all over this car. It smells like your underarms, your under things, day old, wet, coffee grinds that stayed overnight in the percolator. Coffee grinds with a fresh sea scallop nestled on top. That's what you smell like. All of that covered in vanilla bean, and rose hip, and down feathers--that smell, weird and thick, kinda like baby vomit.
Love is confusing. Feeling is confusing. Driving while thinking is confusing. Lights and signs that bring upon certain reactions scare me. Red means stop, but what if I were to forget that? What if, suddenly, I didn't know which pedal made the car go? What if I were to turn the wheel an extra half an inch in the wrong direction for no reason? That's the difference between living and not living. A tiny swerve, a flick of the wrist and it would all be over. It seems like there's such a fine line between driving and all out-chaos. But you, you embrace chaos, or at least you admire it. You're no sociopath, though I bet you fancy yourself to be. You're far too vain to go in for nihilism, but I bet you like the word.
Do that thing you do, on repeat please, the one where you pretend to know everything, the one where you smugly stare at me with volumes of contempt behind your eyes, the one where you pity me for being such a whelp. How sad, Yul is such a moron. And you're right, and it's fine that you think that. It's fine that you think that. It's fine that you think that. I don't care if you ever know me or if you validate me in ways that aren't sexual.
I'm leaving you. Just kidding. I'm leaving you. Got you again. I'm leaving you with your thoughts, the ones you have when you stare at the wall. How do they go? "Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep." I'm sorry. I'm a dick. I guess I think of your mind as a kaleidoscope, all awash with pretty colors and white noise. I appear for a split second, a lone frame in an ever melting, morphing series of sparkly thoughts. For a stitch I am there, blink and you'll miss me. Purple melts into green and green melts into brown before turning into red. That's me. The brown. The formation looks kinda like a spider or a turd with legs. I'm repulsive, good thing I only pop up once and a while.
I know everything about you. Do you know that? Everything. You have told me all your stories eighteen times and I have committed each and every one of them to memory. I know all the details of everything about you worth remembering and using this wealth of information, I have compiled a data base that lets me fill in the times you didn't tell me about with high probability occurrences. I remember your life almost as well as I remember my own. As a matter of fact, I remember your life with more detail and intrigue. Your fifth birthday, for example, when your father hired that pony for your party, I remember that better than you do. My color palette is wider and I'm more interesting than you are. My memory of that day would win an Oscar.
I mean, if you don't want my past, it's okay if I devour yours, right? That I art direct it, blaspheme all over it and make it as Technicolor and grandiose as you wish it was? If pasts don't matter, if you don't want to look at them, if they're too creepy-deepy, then why not let me have yours? I'll make it better. I'll spruce it up for the tabloids. When you remember a hot day one summer, I'll give you steel melting. When you remember your mother's face, I've cast Jessica Lange. When you remember your aunt Maggie the circus performer, I'll remember Lydia the Tattooed Lady. When you remember how Billy down the block touched your heiney, I'll forever recall him fucking you up the ass. Maybe your mother threw you down the stairs once, on purpose and kept your legs in casts for, oh, I don't know, seven years, on and off. How would you like that one in lieu of your musings over summer camps gone by.
Summer camp… I don't have summer camp. I don't want summer camp. I don't want any of your boring-ass memories. Give me horror over monotony any day. And wait one minute, isn't that your game? Little Miss Extreme, little Miss Punk Rock, can't handle a little sad truth? I'll hold you down and make you listen. I'll tell you the new story of your life to you first, as a prologue. You'll be weeping by the time I get to your first birthday.
My little girl, born in France. Oh, the first three days will be soaked in glamour, frankincense and gold were brought to the filthy little she-messiah, or so we will tell it. The tiny little reindeer head, bastard daughter of Serge Gainsborg or Earl Gould, mom didn't know which, (it was Earl) put on a plane back to sunny New Jersey where she would meet with a mind numbing, middle-of-the-road existence, all her promise turning out nothing more than average. An ashy blonde, skinny suburban tike with a mean streak when she doesn't get what she wants. Oh, you'll see yourself for what you really are, my dear, I'll destroy you with the worst of all possible truths. Like a series of bad snapshots, you'll have double chins and your eyes closed in all of them. You'll see yourself the way I see you and won't, like me, be able to love you in spite of it all because you aren't capable of love or compassion. Isn't that right? I'll shine the light on your world without love and make you eat your own reality. I'll make sure you're ugly, and fucked, and not pitied. I'll make you ill on purpose; just to keep you close, just to keep you dependent on me.
The only mercy I'll have on you is that I won't make you scared. I want you to be bratty and indignant when my fate for you is carried out. I want you to fight me at every turn with those little white trash claws of yours. But I can't make you feel fear because I love you too much. I wouldn't wish the fear I felt as a child on anyone, except maybe Top Hat. But fuck Top Hat. He and his kind have no place in either of our memories. No carnie rats will be allowed to taint and tarnish our spoon fed upbringings.
Pasts, nose to nose, you'd both be jealous of my depth. You'd be shamed by my tribulations. Look at yourself in that light, and open your ears as I scream: Poor, fucking, you! You cream puff, you fraud! You want irreverence, you want rebellion, you want a reason to be cheesed off with the world? Limp a mile on my crutch, baby! I know why you don't want to know about my past; it's because part of you suspects that I might be more interesting than you. A lot fucking more interesting. The thought of being outdone by your loser boyfriend, how could I come close to your feather-laden, pristine, self-aggrandized, totally deluded, self-fucking, crappy-fucking image? I could whisper to you in your sleep, I suppose. I could send you subliminal messages in your alphabet soup, or I could hold you, when you let me, and tell you my life story through osmosis. I want so to tear you down and I don't even know why.
But I digress. Oh, my girl, I can't even name you. Setting your name down in type, here in the folds of the pages of a letter I will never write, I can't even say your name. Maybe saying it will prove to me that you exist. It will make you a person rather than the butt of my jokes, the target of my musings, the bull's eye of my love. You aren't real, really. You are an angel, a monster, a devil, a Jabberwocky and a ghost. You are every insecurity I have ever felt, personified and inflated. You are my mother, my father and my warden. Yours is the only air that I can breathe. You are my atmosphere and outside of you, I will surely suffocate. I hate you. I hate everything about you. But that's okay, because I hate myself even more.

"Footloose" The Truth Behind the Dancing (or lack there of...)

2008-04-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to uncover the truth behind our favorite '80's films, I managed to uncover this letter that explains the real story behind the movie "Footloose." In fact, I plan to expose many more '80's films in the coming months. Sure, it's a waste of time, but somebody has to do it. Stay tuned for more stunning revelations. Thank you. Adria Lang.

District Attorney Bledsoe,

My name is Thomas Stahl of Bayson, Oklahoma. Now I know you may be asking yourself if I am indeed the same Thomas Stahl as the one showing up in the papers of late, as I have no doubt the dark events of our little town have reached the publications of Oklahoma City by now. And I am sorry to tell you that yes sir, I am. We are shaken, sir, shaken to the very core over the deaths. That they happened on our property compounds our grief, but it is a grief we share with the town and the county. We are a close knit community, Mr. Bledsoe, thought we aren't technically Beaumont residents--our land is Bayson but the city center is some thirty miles out, which is why Beaumont, a mere three miles from our land, is where we do our shopping and our worshiping, it is where our children go to school. It is a place that we proudly call home and want, above all things, for it to remain that way.
I am a simple man, Mr. Bledsoe. I do not make a habit of writing letters to big city lawyers, but it has come to my attention that your office will most likely be prosecuting the boys and I feel it is my duty as a citizen of the great state of Oklahoma, to tell you my story. Reason being, there has been some debate over the involvement of the girls in the crime, Ariel Moore and Rusty Wannamaker, and if they are to be prosecuted on lesser charges. Well, sir, I can only tell you how things look from my perspective and I tell you, they do not look good.
I suppose it all began back in May when my youngest son Paul had to be committed to The United Methodist Home for the Mentally Ill. Paul is twenty-two and I will be honest with you, sir, no longer playing with a full deck of cards. It's a downright shame, and the doctors think that it may very well be schizophrenia. The one I spoke to at UMH, Dr. Abbott, said that Paul was probably born with it, though it is common for the disease to metastasize (show up) when a person is in their early twenties. He said all it takes is something they call a psychotic break, some kind of trauma or dramatic episode that causes the patient to snap. He compared it to changing gears while driving, which I found no end of ironic being that Paul's one love in life, besides Ariel Moore, is driving his big rig.
Maybe I need to back up here just a little bit for you, Mr. Bledsoe, so you can get a better idea of what happened. When Paul was a senior Beaumont High, he used to go with little Ariel. She was just a freshman at the time. He'd bring her round the house, the two of them necking like they was getting paid top dollar to do it, and I have to admit, it had mother and I a little nervous. With eight children, we had sure seen our share of young love in action, but this Ariel, she was the preacher's daughter and as loose as a clown's pockets. I caught that girl doing things to my boy that would make a roadhouse hooker blush. But what could we do except pray that it would fizzle out? Well, eventually, it did. Ariel took up with her English teacher and Paul was left to lick his wounds.
Now I know what you're thinking, and no, this was not the psychotic break that caused his illness to surface. That didn't come till this past May, but in order to paint the most effective picture of what happened for you, Mr. Bledsoe, I need to stress that Paul's mental state had begin to deteriorate after Ariel moved on. Sure I'd expect the boy to be heartbroken the way any young boy might be after losing his first love, but our Paul was obsessed. She was all he talked about, all he thank about, pining and mooning around the house like some kind of sick dog. Well, he stayed that way for close to three years, until one of his older brothers, Matthew it was, got Paul a job driving a rig to and from Wichita. This seemed to cure the boy. He love that rig like it was hauling a whole cargo load of Ariel Moore's, and for a while, it seemed our boy was finally getting back to his normal self. Till that Sunday afternoon of course, back in May, when everything changed.
Mr. Bledsoe, I'll be honest, I've always been a church going Christian, and I have the utmost respect for those who choose to dedicate their lives to the Word of the Lord, but I find it to be a down right tragedy when a dedication to one's work, be it the good Lord or otherwise, superceded their dedication to the family. Now, not being from Beaumont you might not know of whom I am insinuating, so I'll lay it on the line for you. I am speaking of the Reverend Moore and his hellcat daughter, Ariel.
That girl is no good. If you lived in Beaumont you would have heard the rumors the way the rest of us have. I mean all you have to do is look at her. Six feet tall, cowboy boots as red as the fires of Hell, that blonde hair of hers always in a tussle as if she just emerged from a romp in the bushes—and never, forgive my language, wearing any of the proper undergarments that girls of her age wear to display decency, all that, not to mention the drink, the drugs, and the fact that she has had more fingers in her pie than the County Bake-off. I feel just horrible saying these things, but as this is official business and two boys lives hang in the balance, I know in my heart it would be a crime not to mention them.
So back to that Sunday afternoon, we had all just come from church and Paul was on his way back from a run that due to bad weather, kept him in Wichita over night. He was on his way home to have dinner with his family, when he met with the oddest sight out on Route 9. In the distance, heading straight for him was a gray pick-up truck dragging it out with a white Dodge Dart. And standing between the two cars with one foot balancing on the door of the Dart, and the other on the ledge of the pick-up, was none other than Ariel Moore howling like a she-wolf in heat. Paul was stricken with terror. Both vehicles were heading straight for him, and you may not know this, Mr. Bledsoe, but Route 9 is a narrow two-lane stretch. There is no way on God's green earth that Paul could have done a damn thing to avoid hitting them unless they decided to move, and to hear him tell it, over and over again from his white padded cell, they seemed to have no intention of doing so.
So, you might be saying to yourself, this must have been the event that caused Paul's psychotic break. Well, yes and no. It wasn't until, after pulling on the horn and slamming on the breaks, did he see the face of Ariel, his one time love, barreling towards his grill with a grin as wide as the crescent moon. Seeing her there, a split-second away from meeting her maker against the windshield of his rig, caused the boy to snap.
Ariel bailed out just in time into the pick-up of Chuck Cranston, that poor boy who at the time was the lucky recipient of her charms, and Paul just kept on driving. They found him hyperventilating into a McDonald's bag near the Texas border.
Mr. Bledsoe, you may think that I am bias. After hearing such a story it would not surprise me if you were to say, but Mr. Stahl, those kids were just having a good time, didn't you do crazy things like that when you were young? And to that I would have to say, yes, sir, I suppose I have. Furthermore, it's not Ariel's fault that Paul is funny in the head. You as a lawyer may require further "evidence" of the girl's guilt. Well, sir, allow me to provide.
I can't count how may times my brother, Jim Stahl, encountered that girl raising hell down at the train yard. He's the night watchman there, you see. Ariel and her little group of friends, the Wannamaker girl and them others, made a game of starring down trains and screaming their heads off when one got close enough to spit on. It's like she's trying either kill herself or drive the whole town crazy. Jim would tell Reverend Moore every time he seen her do it. But would the behavior stop? Not likely. I suppose he feels bad to discipline her, what with Bobby's death and all.
That's another thing you may not know about, Mr. Bledsoe. Perhaps you heard of the Crosby Bridge accident? Happened, oh, must be going on two-years ago now. A bunch of kids were drunk and playing chicken out on the bridge. Damn fools, at the last minute both cars bailed out, right over the sides and into the water, no survivors. For a while everybody assumed they had gone over the state line to be with prostitutes or something like that, till they found Bobby Moore doing the front-stroke where the river narrows down Bayson way. You have to pity Reverend Moore for loosing his son. That boy was going places; he was a track star.
After that, it seemed to everyone that a kind of evil had settled over Beaumont. People wanted something done. And instead of passing stricter drunk driving laws, educating kids on the what happens when you line up two motor vehicles and drive them towards each other at high speeds, or just taking away their licenses, the Beaumont City Council decided to confuse the hell out of everybody and make dancing illegal. Well, that was probably the damn stupidest thing I'd ever heard in my whole damn life, and it only made the kids crazier.
For example, after what happened to her brother you think Miss Moore would have developed an aversion to chicken races, but on the contrary, it seems to only have increased her appetite for them. Just this past June, about three weeks before the tragedy, she was seen on the Cranston property throwing her hat up into the air like she was pulling the starting pistol at the Kentucky Derby. But it wasn't horses that took off running that day; it was tractors. My tractor to be precise, my stolen tractor, and one belonging to Burlington Cranston, headed straight for one another in the most grandiose display of stupidity, since Mayor Dooley squandered the town's yearly budget on that god-awful statue of Gene Autry. Luckily my tractor was the victor, but Burlington's took a nosedive into the creek and it took an entire afternoon to fish it out.
In light of all this Tomfoolery I thought, dancing would be a great way to keep these kids out of trouble, so when that city boy, Ren McCormack and his buddy Willard Hewitt came to me and asked to rent out my warehouse for a dance, I was more than happy to oblige. My property is Bayson land and doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of Beaumont law. The boys gave me a deposit, they seemed very polite, and said they would be back to set up the following Friday for the dance on Saturday. I remember thinking to myself, wonderful. A night when these children are together in one room kicking up their heels and not out terrorizing the open road will be a night that I can sleep soundly.
How wrong I was.
Mr. Bledsoe, I wonder if you have ever seen photographs of my warehouse? That's what the papers are calling it, a warehouse. But in all reality it's a functioning mill. It has a red and white silo that I painted myself, as a matter of fact, with my son Paul one hot summer week. We took lemonade breaks and talked about the future. We planned a hunting trip. It was a good memory. You pass that mill if you're approaching Beaumont from the south, everyone comments on it. It makes them feel good. It makes them feel American. And now? It is known as the warehouse where "The Dance of Death" took place. The Dance of Death, Mr. Bledsoe. In the light of the tragedies, the reputation of a mill might not cross the minds of any of the good folks around these parts, and I understand that, but it crosses mine.
Anyway, back to the story. Loads of them showed up to decorate. They brought in more party supplies than I had ever seen in the whole of my life. They filled my silo with glitter, Mr. Bledsoe. Tons and tons of glitter that they planned to have rain down on their heads while they danced the night away. I have to admit I found it somewhat extreme. Where in the world did they get it all, I wanted to know? But I didn't say anything, I needed the money to help pay for Paul's mounting medical bills, so I kept my mouth shut and watched them load out bags of grain and load in bags of glitter, balloons, little fairy lights, dozens of pies and cakes, and enough punch to drown a horse.
On Saturday they all came dressed in their Sunday best and sat around that dance floor like they were attending a funeral. Mother and I found it bizarre that none of them were dancing and feared the inevitable drag race as it seemed to us that maybe these kids had forgotten how to have the kind of fun that didn't involve attempting to kill themselves. That's when we heard the ruckus.
She had shown up with the boy, Ren, and when I made my way out back I found him going at it with the Hewitt boy. They were giving Chuck Cranston and his boys a beating to end all beating. Ariel Moore and Rusty Wannamaker were cheering them on, encouraging the blows that would end the lives of Chuck Cranston and Daniel Abbott. Kill the son of a bitch, she said, and, beat the shit out of him. I heard it with my own ears.
When they went inside, the dance began, all on the inside innocent of the lives that were expiring out on the dusty ground. It is not my opinion that Ren or Willard knew what they had done till they were informed of it, hours later at the station house. When I realized the boys were dead, I called Officer Earlhaus and the circus began. The riots, the tear gas, the coroner, the arrests, and the accidental avalanche of glitter that sent three members of the glee club to the hospital, but frankly, Mr. Bledsoe, I'd rather not relive the details, you can read about them in the paper.
There is one detail that I'd like to include to end my story of woe, the one that prompted me to write this letter to begin with. I can't forget the cold eyes of Ariel Moore as they zipped Chuck Cranston into that body bag, and the shadow of a smile I saw crawl across her pretty face. It was almost as if, in some twisted way, she planned the whole thing.
I feel as if by writing you this letter I have cleared my conscious. I told my story to the local police of course, but in a small town people don't really listen to you if they already have an idea in their head. They thought I was simply trying to get revenge on Miss Moore for what happened to my Paul, but I assure you, Mr. Bledsoe, with my hand to God, that what I told you is the truth and if it comes to it, I am more than willing to testify to my statements in a court of law. Thank you very much for your time, sir, and God bless.

Sincerely,
Mr. Thomas Stahl
Bayson, Oklahoma

My IMDb Page

2008-02-14T03:17:00.000-08:00

Today, while trolling the Los Angeles Central Library for classical CD’s to check out and up load to my iTunes, a pretentious new addiction of mine primarily created to make me feel cultured while I procrastinate, I got a text message from my little brother informing me that I had at some point over the last 72 hours reached a kind of show business milestone. The text read, “You’re on IMDb! My famous sister!” He had typed it correctly, that is, big i, big m, big d, small b. I immediately texted back the words, “I am?” to which I received a resounding, all caps, “YOU ARE!” How very sweet of him. And while I find it slightly odd that my brother Googles me with the frequency of a casual stalker, I was happy enough to get the news. So happy in fact, that I checked out my CD’s without bothering to take the time to go the long way through the DVD section and flash my Schubert and Saint-Saens at the guy renting National Treasure and Season 2 of One Tree Hill. I didn’t need the rush of his shame. I already felt good in a sort of warm, fuzzy, triumphant way.
Now snigger if you will, I am well aware that most people in the business have IMDb pages and that it’s nothing to get all damp in the panties about. But allow me to add that if you enter my name into the Internet Movie Database, you will find the lone credit that got me there under the heading of “writer” and it is for this reason that I am most proud.
You see, I have had the opportunity to be on IMDb before. As an actor. My past is fraught with lost credits. If I spent the time to track down random producers, and harass the e-mail inboxes of former directors and maybe lie, just a little, I could have seen my mug up there years ago, but the victory wouldn’t have been nearly as sweet. In a way it leads me to why I quit acting in the first place--which ironically enough, is the same reason I got fired from my retail job--lack of enthusiasm.
My first unclaimed credit was for a short film called “Being Scott Lochmus.” It was the late 90’s and the concept of making a short comic parody of a successful movie was, while not terribly original, not quite as gag worthy as it would be today. The fact that they shot it on film and had a craft services table complete with doughnuts, Sanka, Lipton teabags and raw sugar cubes made it seem downright professional. My friend Giselle was cast as the lead (the Katherine Keener part) and called to ask me if I wanted to take on the role of “Bored Dominatrix” in one of the scenes. I was put off at first. It wasn’t that I had a problem dressing up in leather and prancing around, in fact, it was and still is a favorite hobby of mine; it was the fact that they were going to get it on film. What if someone saw it? What if I came off sluttish? They might not let me play Luisa in “The Fantasticks” if they found out. Not that I was up for the role of Louisa in “The Fantasticks” or any other role truth be told, but I figured it was only a matter of time and I had a reputation to protect. So I called my mother. She went on a rant about Sal Salerno, my high school drama teacher and the time he made me take my top off in our schools production of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brody.”
“That’s why you get type cast as whores, Adria. Sal ruined you. He let you smoke in that other play too, what’s the one? And that’s why you smoke now. Don’t blame me. I loved you, but that man dressed you like a whore and gave you cigarettes.”
My mother, though a raving lunatic, had kind of a point. I did smoke after doing ensemble work in a production of “Fiorello!” but I can’t remember if it was because the script called for it, or if it was to satiate a bit of the raw torture one feels doing ensemble work in a production of “Fiorello!” For those of you who don’t know it’s the one and only musical ever written for the stout former mayor of NY, Fiorello La Guardia, and his struggles to stamp out vice and corruption while juggling a very un-PC romance with his personal secretary, Maria. I don’t know if I smoked because it was required of me, or if perhaps I lit up out of something more akin to necessity after having to sing and dance in such rousing musical numbers as “Unfair” and “I Love a Cop.”
In the end I decided that I had been over thinking the whole thing, and that I would do it, I would simply wear a lot of make-up and reserve the right to use an assumed name if I felt at all compromised. The big day came and I was instructed to get in line with a bunch of other misfits waiting to be Scott Lochmus while the camera panned the length of us. At one point I was given a line, “Hey what’s the hold up?” and directed to threaten the other actors with my riding crop. After three long hours of this, I was finished and the short was wrapped. I cried into my Sanka for wasting an afternoon and promptly forgot about the whole dirty experience.
For a while the theatre took over my life. I did Shakespeare. I did Jarry. During that time, I also fulfilled my mother’s worst nightmares and became a burlesque dancer. I didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just that I was a very lazy actor. I had a problem getting up before noon and hated going to non-equity auditions because I’d developed an allergy to Aqua Net, and Christians in tap shoes. I began to hate acting. Well, not all acting, I wouldn’t have turned down a spot at the Old Vic, or a shot on Broadway, but the nickel and dime, jazz hands crap made me want to puke. I began to hate actors, too. What a stupid excuse for a career. What a selfish endeavor. I was a showgirl, a vaudevillian, and a caniveaux. Also, I was spoiled, bourgeois, and lazy. I was reading far too much poetry and working on my alcohol tolerance, a genetic gift from my father that I didn’t want to squander in case it was the only one. Once I started dating rock musicians I knew secretly that it was all over. Sure I’d get drunk occasionally and cry while watching a behind the scenes look at “The Producers” on PBS, my confused boyfriends holding back my hair while I puked to the tune of “There’s no Business Like Show Business.” For years I thought I was a failure. So I decided to have some fun. Burlesque was great. Very liberating. Not A GIANT WASTE OF TIME at all… It got me my next film job.
“In Search of Ted Demme” was a great idea. The director, John Walter, got together a bunch of friends of the late Demme and organized a kind of docu-tribute based upon the premise that each of them, from Kevin Spacey, to Joel Silver, to Jerry Bruckheimer and Ellen Degeneres, take Demme’s ashes out for a day to relive some of the “good times” they had with old Ted before he died of a massive cocaine overdose. In John’s script, the “ashes” get sold to a Columbian drug cartel--I mean, they get lost on a drunken night out with Johnny Depp and it’s up to Dennis Leary to find them and put the world to rights. Long story short, he loses them in a strip joint. I was asked to play the bartender in said strip joint, and could I play it as sort of a… you know, a dominatrix type? I guess that’s what Teddy would have wanted.
I didn’t call my mom this time. I was doing a scene with Dennis Leary. An improvised scene that involved real acting and I was the only one of my burlesque friends who could pull it off because I was an actor. I had done Shakespeare and Jarry. My failure was the fault of the cruel fates, and had nothing to do with my failure to work. Dennis Leary was about to eat his heart out.
The morning of the shoot was pure magic. They had a craft services table with fruit and bagels and real coffee, not Sanka, they had Danishes, all kinds, almond and cheese. It was the real deal and I had the speaking role. The shoot went off without a hitch. John was happy with my work and Dennis was kind, introducing himself, shaking my hand and checking out my cleavage in the subtle manner befitting a movie star. We did about three takes and that was it. Dennis went off to verbally kick the shit out of whoever was on the other end of his cell phone and I went home to await my fame and riches.
The film was set to premier at Tribeca. I had cut out the little blurb that the Times published a month or so before the festival and hung it proudly on my fridge. I was inches away from making a tee shirt that read: I’m in a movie with Johnny Depp and you’re not. I was annoying my friends to a superfluous extreme. I was a nightmare--an excited nightmare.
When the day drew near, I decide to ring up John Walter and see if I could get myself a free ticket to the event that was destined to change my life forever.
John sounded kind of deflated when he got on the phone. For a minute I wondered if maybe they edited part of my scene out of the film and felt bad about it. John kind of groaned. “We had to pull the film,” he said. I didn’t understand. What did that mean, pull the film? Was it a technical term involving taffy and Umpa-lumpas? “What do you mean, John?” He groaned again. “I just found out this morning. Amanda hated the cut. She won’t let us show it.”
After a series of embarrassing questions that no doubt made me sound like a slightly slow, first year studio intern, I discovered that “Amanda” was Ted Demme’s widow, that “the cut” was another way of saying “the film,” and that “it’s pulled” means it will never see the light of day and my film career was over, shot in the neck by a grieving widow who for reasons I fully understand but do not accept, didn’t want her husband’s memory soiled by a movie that culminated with his urn being grinded upon by the sweaty breasts and ass cheeks of half-naked burlesque dancers. I was thwarted yet again.
For a while I even toyed with the idea of becoming a dominatrix. The moneys good, and I kept getting cast as them, maybe the world was trying to tell me something. But I couldn’t. The spaced out ramblings of my mother would always win, and no, ma, your baby’s no sex worker. What she is, is a lazy, nocturnal, self-inflated, drinking, smoking, jealous, nostalgic, romantic, prancing show-off, saddled with a healthy amount of self-loathing, brains, and an id so rock hard that you could cut a diamond on it. It took a while, but soon the career path cleared and widened, and as is the way with puzzles, once the pieces start to fit you no longer need the hacksaw. Because I’ll tell ya kids, there is only one career in the whole of the stinking world that encourages, nay, requires you to be all of those horrible things.
I played a dominatrix recently for the third time in my friend Liam’s (a.k.a. Kelly’s) music video. I got to crack a whip and wear a corset. I am credited in that. Adria Lang: Dominatrix. But it’s for the Internet so I don’t think I have to worry about it showing up on my pristine IMDb page, a place where I’m known only as writer.

Adria Lang
December 2007