by Lynn Crosbie
Little Snowfall
A James Franco Fanfic
by
Lynn Crosbie
For Michael Ventola, who is all heart.
My favourite writers? There’s so many. Balzac, Baudelaire, Bankhead, Beckett, Bidart, Brontë, Bukowski, Burroughs … those are just some of the Bs.
— James Franco, Aesthetica, Issue 59/2014
Right after James Franco-Face moved in next door in February (Sunday, the first), I started spending a lot of time at home.
I called the agency and told my repulsive male boss that I had a contagious yeast infection, and he let me e-commute my copy for our big new cigarette client.
Home is a cool condo/loft on Queen West, with vaulted ceilings, a mile of sunlight, and paper-thin walls.
I had seen his face through my peephole when he walked by, hauling a trunk. When he went out to get more boxes from the truck, I watched from the window: James Franco, 127 Hours body: nice. I pushed a hole in the wall between us, and quickly covered it with a 2014 Psy calendar.
Then I waited, with my back to the wall, for him to return, while pulling up pictures on my laptop, not of him but of the girls he had worked or been associated with.
This was going to be a challenge: he seemed to favour fat men and waifish women.
He also had a bit of a temper.
“Who fucking trashed the wall?” I heard him yell, then I shrank as his fingers forced their way through to the slick pages of the calendar then roughly retracted one.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Who am I living beside?”
I could hear everything.
“Someone amazing,” another guy said, turning on the Super Bowl pre-game show and adding, “At least it’s only for two weeks.”
Over the next eight hours, my living room turned into a thundering hotbox.
I was oblivious. I kept anxiously contemplating the words “two weeks.”
He was staying until Valentine’s Day.
And that was more than enough time to make him — probably James Franco — fall in love with me.
That was the plan I came up with, anyway, as I considered his mercurial nature, and deep, sleepy eyes; as I remembered that “I am no more a woman than Jesus Christ was a man.”
I was so stoned that I sent in this copy: “SMOKING IS COOL. ALWAYS HAS BEEN, ALWAYS WILL BE. DEAL WITH IT LSRS.”
The client went bananas, they just loved it.
I was a girl the day I was born. My mother steadfastly insisted on naming me Pixie, after seeing me trying to style my tuft of hair two minutes after I was blanketed and handed to her.
In my teens I was, otherwise, hairless, with the exception of a sheaf of rolling auburn waves. My face, which has become only marginally softer, was always narrow and dominated by my big sapphire-blue eyes and plush, purplish lips. Add a tall, slender body, retroussé nose, arched eyebrows, and makeup applied from my MAC-issue toolbox, and there you have it: at sixteen, my doctor was hesitant to give me estrogen patches and anti-androgens.
I was flat-chested, a source of dismay that I used to hide under my standard outfit: big black sweater, tight glitter-era pants, and artfully distressed Engineer boots. And pearls, of course.
I was flat, past tense: I had my gorgeous breast implants done last year and they look and feel spectacular in the fifty different bras I bought from Frederick’s of Hollywood, ranging from pale beige to raging scarlet.
As to everything south of the border: that’s private.
Let’s just say that I added short skirts to my repertoire, along with the filmy blouses, clingy dresses, stockings, and Louboutin heels.
I loved the shoes so much I dyed my hair fire-red to match.
Pre–Pretty Sure It’s Franco: my only friend was an older trans man named Claude, who moved to Sault Ste. Marie last year.
He was big and plump with a jet-black pompadour, and had given me the Psy calendar because he had strong feelings for the singer, and was convinced that they were “practically identical twins.”
We kept in touch, but I missed meeting up and talking about our transitions, or playing rock, paper, scissors with him on movie nights. When I won, I always picked a James Franco movie. Claude was in love with Sally Field. We didn’t speak for a week when I called Forrest Gump “Satan’s blemish on our immortal souls.”
No one else knew I was transgender, other than my mother, and the odd date.
And since no one ever asked, I stopped thinking about it. I was a girl, full stop.
A traffic-stopping girl. Men hit on me constantly, which I used to love. Then like. Then hate.
“Ooh, you make that pencil [others had remarked on Popsicles, licorice, ice cream cones, and dental floss] look so damn good!” That was my elderly cab driver’s rear-view-mirror assessment of me, as I sat working on a difficult audit.
“Bitch, I’m calling 911!” That was my elderly cab driver’s response to having a sharp pencil driven into the base of his skull.
I went on a bunch of Tinder dates, all of which were horrible.
The last straw, astonishingly, was not the red-faced man who leaned in at the restaurant to whisper, “I just pooped my pants,” but a seriously good-looking guy, my age — lucky twenty-seven — who also worked in advertising, and made me laugh by inventing a reality show called Redneck Rapists.
I was not laughing when he jumped me on the street, pulled me into an alley, and held me down with an arm and a knee.
To be fair, he was actually crying when I responded with a knife slash to his femoral artery.
I called 911 from a pay phone as he bled out, and told them a hog was dying in the Distillery District.
“We don’t come out for livestock, miss.”
“He’s a pig-man. Split the difference,” I said before taking off at a nice clip.
I wore a Beyoncé wig for a few days to be on the safe side, then swore off dating.
In January of this year, I cultivated my crush on James Franco, because of my love affair with Netflix, which I kept on whenever I worked.
There is this one scene in Freaks and Geeks: He is devastated after acting like a dick at a punk club, and realizes he is failing school; failing everything.
He goes to his estranged girlfriend’s place and attaches himself to her like a limpet, and his face, wet with tears, is the Orion Nebula.
His face is that bright and oddly, terribly, beautiful.
I went on to read his books and see his movies, avoiding the Internet, which seemed single-mindedly obsessed with his sexual preferences and uneasily mocked his many talents.
Additionally, there was a story at large about him flirting with a girl that made me irrationally jealous. I found out who she was and sent her a spoof email saying, BACK OFF BITCH, HE’S MINE.
Return address: [email protected], the maximum-security section of the prison.
James Franco calls the girl he loves “a fucking miracle.”
Who is this girl?
He, who has written that he could kill someone, also says that his love is an “angel’s wallop” and is obviously so right for me that I can see God holding a cookie cutter over a sheet of dough, and punching us both out from the same silver heart.
Fourteen days is not a long time. Some days, however, hours would pass in a heartbeat as I idly contemplated, say, the Dionysian curve of his upper lip.
I didn’t see Almost Positive It’s Franco for two days, and I used the time to work in bed, and to snag a new client: Buzz/Killed, a high-octane caffeine drink that allowed you to stay awake, effervescing, for forty-eight hours before falling into a deathlike sleep.
I also signed and sealed ten different Valentine cards, from textural Hallmarks to DIY origami made from silky Japanese paper.
In the end, I grabbed Joan, my childhood bear: a knitted white creature that I had dyed pink and savaged with my desolation.
It had one button eye remaining, and what looked like a fang.
I wrote “From your secret admirer” on a tag, and propped it against his door, feeling a pang. I had just given him something that mattered.
This shit was getting real.
On the evening of the third day, I stood, dressed to the nines, in the hall, waiting there for three hours, key jabbed into my door in a studiously casual pose.
He showed up at midnight holding a huge cactus, wearing dark sunglasses and black everything.
He walked so slowly down the hall, I thought he was moving backwards. I flipped my back-to-red hair and smoothed my Dolce & Gabbana leopard-lined suit.
When he finally appeared within ten feet, I started jiggling the key and cursing under my breath.
“Locked out?” he said, and smiled, blinding me.
“Um.” I was screaming on the inside to talk to him, but all I could do was stare at him, at the fathoms of that smile, and its soft brackets.
“Yes,” I managed to say as my hand — stupid hand! — betrayed me and smoothly turned the key, opening the door.
“There you go,” he said, opening his door.
I just stood there, like someone afraid to jump from a burning building.
He picked up Joan, went inside, and closed the door.
Then he opened it again, and popped his head out.
“It’s snowing a little,” he said. “Big, pretty flakes.”
I remained frozen.
“Not as pretty as you, though,” he said, and retreated, closing the velvety door of 237 with a quiet whoosh.
I ran laps around my coffee table until I collapsed, limp with happiness.
James I Am Like 99% Certain It’s Franco and I saw each other all the time after that day.
“Pixie,” I said, extending my hand. “Pixie Belle.”
“Edward James,” he said, kissing my hand.
It began with my staged run-ins, then expanded into awkward (me, me: he was slick) invitations inside for warm beverages, and, on the fifth day, a date to go swimming in the heated pool upstairs in the complex.
I had blown off work again, and was free to coast on having made critical inroads with the Smith & Wesson people.
We had coffee first and he told me that the condo belonged to his manager, and that he was a writer and visual artist, in Toronto from Los Angeles, installing a top-secret show at MOCCA called Lovesick, based on a recording that he had procured of Taylor Swift reading Troilus and Cressida.
“Why is it top secret?” I asked.
“Well, my artist name is Franco, and they keep insisting that I’m James Franco because we look quite a bit alike and they want the publicity.
“The top-secret part works for both of us.”
I told him I wrote poems, and worked with some old suits and a stable of frenetic, exhausted kids in Liberty Village at the BRAND-O Agency, having answered the following ad:
“Seeking young writer who is super-fresh, youthful, and has a young outlook on the DNA of fresh, mad-young emerging cultural trends and hip youngly-stizzuff.”
I had shown up in a onesie and ballet slippers carrying an MBA, which they — a clutch of thin, enervated men and women in ball caps, shorts, and obscene T-shirts — ignored in favour of my Instagram account, which they called “hilarious and on point.”
Never mind that it consisted exclusively of pictures I posted as a joke; that is, shots of my white doves in tiny costumes papering their nest with abhorrent news stories. They loved it, they loved me, and I left with a stupidly huge salary, my own office, and several new admirers who pelted me with their phone numbers during the interview.
“Make sure to Tweeter that you heart us!” the plasticky CCO said, as Miss Blair-Witch, the exhausted-looking woman from Payroll, shot daggers at me.
“Honey, you’re going to be my best friend here,” I told her, and she growled her assent.
“Edward” loved the story. He told me that he had hit someone with his car once, while wearing a monkey mask.
“She just appeared out of nowhere. I thought it was the shadow of a tree.”
“That’s a James Franco short story,” I said.
“It is?” he said, and suggested that we go swimming. He was already wearing trunks, and an inflated giraffe float around his waist.
As I got my stuff together, he asked how my writing was going.
I told him I had just written “these sitcom list poems, like ‘Fresh Prince Will/Homes, to Bel-Air/Carlton-dance/Joseph Marcell.’”
“That’s cool,” he said, smiling at me.
“Well, it pays the bills,” I said as we got into the elevator and pressed P.
Things heated up when he jumped into the pool really fast and belly-flopped.
I had strolled out of the changing room in a pink thong bikini, hibiscus-printed wrap, and high-heeled flip-flops.
“Note to self,” I thought. “James Franco-Eyes has the wood.”
“And I know how to use it,” he said, swimming leisurely in place.
“Baby Boy just read my mind,” another mental note I filed before diving in, and swimming laps at his side as gracefully as a shark.
Later, I made blender drinks, sat in my living room, and he told me about this writer, Charlie Bankhead.
He told me the guy was an old recluse, whom no one knew much about. He showed me an image search on his iPad: a page of pictures of the guy in a suit, hat, and wing tips, looking miserable at different events.
“Oh, that Cronenberg movie Skin,” I said. “Isn’t that based on one of his books?”
Franco-as-Ginsberg became animated: “Yes, the script is from his novella Velvet Is Her Skin.
It’s about a twisted killer named Jerry Androcles, who falls in love with an ER nurse after he gets hospitalized for a head injury.
“He gets conked while bashing in someone’s face.
“This nurse knows he’s a criminal but that’s it.
“And she’s so gentle and kind to him, he feels something profound for the first time.
“He writes her poems for most of the book, and then —”
“Spoiler alerts,” I said, and he looked mildly disappointed that I was possibly stupid.
“Anyway, I tried to get him to blurb Directing Herbert White, but he said no. That I was careless and stupid, or something. Everyone else loved it, but the sad thing is that he’s all I can think about.”
I spilled Banana Daiquiri everywhere at that moment, splashing myself, and making him instantly solicitous, all thoughts of his ineptitude and literary crush vanished.
“Here we go, presh,” he said, peeling off his shirt and mopping me with it.
He meant “precious,” which I liked so much I embroidered the word onto a white pillow I left by his door the next morning.
What u think? I texted.
Conflicted, he wrote. LOTR, breastices. You.
Burn it immediately, I typed back, and was relieved to smell it scorching a few minutes later.
After burning the pillow, Edward came to my door and asked (I just gave in and called him that, or Teddy) if he could come over and watch a movie.
I asked him which one.
“One that I’m making,” he said, which sounded stressful, but his shirt was open and he was Green Goblin buff, his sweats hanging intriguingly low on his sharp hip bones.
I told him I’d change and to come back in an hour.
I vacuumed and cleaned everything to a sparkle, did my makeup, pulled my hair up into a loose, sexy mess, and changed into a white tank and old jeans, something I know personally looks sweet on girls.
He never showed.
I didn’t have his number, so I pulled up a chair to Psy and listened
to him fucking another woman.
Or maybe it was a gerbil, from the sound of t
he maddened squeaks.
At some point, I got up, scrubbed my face, put on a Walmart fuzz-robe, and, after finding the Christian Network on TV, blared Full House while desolately googling “James Franco.”
He banged on my door just as Kimmy Gibbler started playing bagpipes, and as I learned that James Franco’s middle name was Edward — how did I miss that? — and that his life and artwork were such heavy meta, it was impossible to tell where he began and his persona ended.
I sighed. This is why I liked him. He was a specimen, obviously. But it was that quality, of being open and abject, that I shared with him. And he always seemed to be having the most fun in the world, while giving zero fucks about what anyone thought they knew about him. I wanted a big bite of his joy. He was also an Aries, a distinguished analyst of the Peloponnesian War, and the former leader of a teen crime ring.
I read this last part on a blog called OMFG I Want to Rape James Franco!
I went to the door, left the chain on, and peered out.
He looked sad. Big deal. I started to close the door.
Then he said, “Let me in,” so roughly that I did.
I ran off to the bedroom and slapped the makeup and hairpins on again, then joined him as he stood, wringing his hands, by the door.
“Okay, so you heard me and Devon,” he said.
“That’s all right. You heard Uncle Jesse yelling, so I suppose we’re equal.”
“Nothing happened,” he said, and I laughed.
“Watch,” he said, and clicked on a small black remote, which projected a series of images on my wall.
A lean blond babe with a suitcase. Ties and belts.
Edward lashed to a bed while the blonde pleasured herself with items from his fridge, did a snowball of cocaine, and finally passed out.
Edward chewing through the last of the ties.
Running to the camera with his hand outstretched.
“I know her,” I said. She was a young, once very famous actress whose last, disastrous, movie was a slasher comedy about an axe murderer’s absurd spa day.
Edward ran his hand through his hair, then extended it.
“Get over here,” I said, and we didn’t make it to the bed.
We didn’t even make it past the open door, which is where Devon found us.
She was dressed in one of his shirts and holding a bottle of tequila.