The shot list is too huge to absorb, and yet I absorb it, morsel by morsel. Brain shooting in Every-Cam, and gobbling as much as I can.
A trio of teenagers walks up to me, unnoticing. And one of them says, “Patrick Stewart is the best Captain Kirk. No doubt.” Am thrilled when they all agree.
Think Christ, what an absurd universe.
These jokes just write themselves.
Back in my eyes, just beyond the Royal Tavern, a courtyard opens up to the right. And from the corner of my soul/lens/vision, I spot a space ship, a racecar, an elephant and a pony. All vintage buck-for-a-quarter arcade rides for six-year-olds and younger, lacquer and plastic a-glisten in the suddenly painful sun poking out from a hole in the clouds above.
I take the right, wander down an alley-like promenade past dozens and dozens of rides, only to find it lined with room upon room packed with goofy games. Tracing the history of squandered time, in all of its funnest forms.
I was born in 1957, and can clearly remember the pinball machines of my 60s youth. How modern they seemed, next to the swear-to-God little-wooden-guys-running-around-a-baseball-diamond-if-I-hit-the-metal-ball-right-with-the-flipper entertainments I tried to wrangle at the age of six.
But here they all are, next to archaic Guess Your Weight and Test Your Strength devices that date back to the dawn of nickel slots. I’m guessing from the 1920s on.
When I hit the room jam-packed with Pac-Man and Asteroid, I am smack-dab absorbed by my own twentysomething milieu, with all the signature bells and whistles.
So when I see my 55-year-old self peering back like a ghost on Ms. PacMan’s glass, I halt for a second. Trying to reconcile who I was with the reflection before me, like a color transparency in a high school biology textbook forty years in the past.
The reflection nails me. Throws me a wink.
And leaves me helplessly stuck inside the glass.
“You want a movie?” my no-longer-my-face says. “You wanna tell my story? I’m all yours. Have at it. GOOD LUCK!”
And with that, my body is gone, dancing out of my view, back toward the main drag without me.
Absent of body, I am a lens stuck on sticks, a tripod-bound static shot completely at the mercy of hands I no longer possess. Ms. PacMan races through the maze of my new insides, chased by faces with only one thing on their minds.
I want out of this maze.
The only way out is in.
I thrust myself out of the glass, into the circuitry, and through: coming out the other side of the device, and hurtling sub-atomically through air that feels like freedom and looks like a Steadicam running full speed. Weaving between toys and pedestrians alike, in one single moving shot that chases my happily rollicking body as it ambles down Manitou Ave.
I hit the stone wall of a corner t-shirt shop, find my consciousness plowing through the brick and mortar with no physical resistance whatsoever. It’s like swimming through water without the need to stroke, paddle, or kick. Like I’m the tip of a laser beam.
I emerge in the shop’s storefront window, catching up with my possessed bag of skin. It turns, sees me in its own reflection, and gives me a big thumbs up as it moves closer.
“WOOO HOOO!” it exclaims. “How’d you like that?”
I return the thumbs up.
“Now we’re talkin’,” it says.
And I am back in my own body.
“Try the European Café,” mouths my reflection on the storefront window. “Right behind you. Do the Skillet Special, with two eggs, sautéed onions, mushrooms, peppers, and cheese on a bed of exquisitely seasoned olive oil home fries to die for. I’m not kidding.”
“I love you,” I say.
“Love you back,” says the town.
And let me just point out: that fucking breakfast is superb.
9.
In summation, as I pack my bag and prepare to drive away:
Movies are creatures, with lives of their own. Just like everything else that is waiting to be born. If the right elements all manage to somehow come together, they happen.
If not, they were only dreams.
It’s checkout time at the Pike’s Peak Inn. I fly back to Los Angeles in a little less than three hours. Time enough to hug my dad, tell him I love him, schedule when I’ll be back.
His 90th birthday is coming up fast. An astonishing run, for one little life.
Time is funny like that.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. And plans, at the least, are amplified best intentions.
I was a dream once. A dream of a boy my mother and father made happen. Who that boy might turn out to be, they had no idea. They just did it, then tried as hard as they knew how to make that little zygote wind up being somehow worthwhile.
Something they could love, and be proud of.
Something they were glad they did.
That’s certainly how I feel about my own amazing daughters. And how I feel, right now, about this film about to be born.
I am dreaming a movie. What it is, I don’t know. But I have sampled its ingredients, and tasted its essence. Can feel the puzzle box curtain unfurl.
Am inside that invisible man, who is running from something, and has wound up here. Where he will certainly be found. By what, I don’t know.
Let’s call it God without the beard and throne. The Fount of All Creation. The Source of All Secrets.
Whatever you wanna call it, I have found my Twin Peaks. A place of charm and mystery, light and dark, height and depth ringed by infinite breadth.
Not bad for a one-night stand.
I couldn’t be happier with this tiny little room if I’d spent the whole night fucking inside it.
“See you soon,” I say, pantheistically blowing it a kiss.
And close the door, for the time being.
As the universe unfurls.
A LOVE SONG TO FRANK BOOTH
EDWARD MORRIS
This is a memory. I’m not really here. Everything is okay now. He’s been gone for a long time, the happy ending now wound up rightly, tweeting artifice and shitting sequels in the yard. But in another way, I never left the hot, bacteriological zoo smell of this closet where I hide, second rooster in the henhouse now beholding the swiping claws of a great basilisk serpent, the cold, flat gray affect of his eyes. Dead man’s eyes. Like mine now.
From the closet door, I watch the boogeyman come unglued in that little room that still smells like our love, our sweat, the one random rope of cock-snot hanging strategically on the lampshade like a snail in ectoplasm where no one is looking on the film, the film that is the space between the two latticed slats as Kronos comes home. I smell the sweet nitrous oxide somehow, too, from that rig he made, that hateful little cup he puffs . . . and puffs . . . to blow down the house and everything around it. Laughing gas never made Frank laugh. He does that on his own.
Langorous, rapturous ecstasy on her badly painted mannequin face, overbite fully exposed, as Booth kneels at the darkest altar of my heartbreak, and we all turn the corner into a side of Woodburn Fucking Oregon where we were all along, all along, in here with the rest of the termites that squitter and chew and shit shellack across every bite mark in this hollow log. I should have known he’d be a biter. Into his mouth, she shoves the corner of her Lewinsky dress, as the veins pound on his forehead, and the eyes forget to stare her into stone, or me, or anyone. He is somewhere else now, a home he thinks he has. This bubble is home, this world of split-second violence. Frank’s World is home everywhere he goes.
This is a memory: The point where he comes utterly unglued. Where the half-closed knuckles tap the Blue Lady’s head back with just enough force to make her full lower lip gush blood, and she moans and I can smell that smell, that smell, the side of her neck I was just kissing not ten minutes before the cockatrice blew in the front door.
The Blue Lady moans, and I can smell her sweat change. I couldn’t play that change upon the instrument which is her, my hands not skilled enough in t
he Satanic art of giving people what they really want. Taking what I really want. But I can hear my own bestial roar, far down in the blood-dimmed caverns of my bronchial tubes, back in the sinuses behind my eyes. Back in the beating, bleeding, bleating meat, the blood and lipstick I can already taste from his chewed flashlight-kisses across my mouth after I got one good lick in and socked him in the jaw.
None of this movie really happened. They already buried me in a ravine after Frank got done. In pieces. In lipstick. In Love.
IN MEMORIAM: DENNIS HOPPER: 5/17/1936-5/29/2010
LET’S HIT THE FUCKIN ROAD.
GIRL FROM IOWA
ZACK WENTZ
There was a beautiful girl from Iowa, and also a beautiful boy. They could have been brother and sister, but they weren’t. They were supposed to be in love.
People saw them together everywhere, and always had. Down by the creek, playing in the mud, under the bleachers, looking for change and other lost things, hiding together in the washing machine at the laundromat. They were seemingly inseparable, and when it came time for them to go off to college nobody even thought of trying to send them to different schools, because doing that seemed unthinkably cruel. They were too beautiful together. Only those envious of their combined beauty would have considered it, but there was nobody like that in the small town in Iowa where they were from. At least nobody that was worthy of attention.
At the college they attended, their beauty was amplified. So much that it actually became apparent to the girl and the boy. Shit, we’re beautiful, they cooed together one evening, drunk, staring at a bright slice of moon off the back porch of some dingy house where a party was being held, seemingly in their honor.
But, of course, it was not to last. Fellow students began appealing to them individually, seeking them out in private, arranging rendezvous under various academic pretences, and inevitably one of them ended up fucking one of those other people. It happened to be the girl.
The boy was, understandably, distraught, and the fact that he hadn’t been the first to commit this indiscretion seemed to diminish his beauty. The girl shone more brightly now, even to him. He had to appeal to her, for the first time, beg her to rejoin him and try to go back to what they once shared. We cannot go back, the girl said, and smiled. Beautifully.
She enjoyed the fresh kinds of attentions she received, in her new solo capacity, and indulged in them with almost manic zeal. Her promiscuity became as unrivalled as her beauty, and it soon seemed that almost no one on the campus, faculty included, or even the natives dwelling in the small town surrounding the college, had not tasted her.
It was at the beginning of her second semester when a local rabbit that had grown humanlike enough to casually escape from the laboratory in the science building began following the girl. The rabbit was around three foot ten, and it watched her from under bushes, behind trees, around corners. Surprisingly she didn’t notice the rabbit. It was one of the few things she hadn’t had sex with.
Also, at around this time, she noticed a large mole sprouting at the top of her right breast. Nothing to do with science classes. Nothing to do with anything. Daily the mole grew, first becoming the size a chocolate chip, then a button, a quarter, and then, finally, a nipple. The third nipple stared at her from the top of her right breast, and she was filled with terror. Dear God, she said, I am cursed. I am going to die.
The rabbit watched her watching her new nipple one evening from where he was hiding beneath her bed, and then he watched her get up, clothe herself, and leave her dorm room. The rabbit pursued her to the stables at the edge of the campus, saw her enter, and emerge several minutes later astride a large horse with her arms bound, Christ-like, to a white, plastic pole stretched behind her neck across the top of her shoulders. The horse trotted off with the girl in the direction of the woods, so the rabbit followed.
After a couple days of woods they came to desert, the girl still oblivious to the rabbit’s presence, or anything else. And after a few days of desert the horse, which was now close to death, was lucky enough to spot a small patch of grass growing around a deep puddle of water at the base of a tremendous, black tree, and went to it. Thank God, the horse thought, and ate and drank heartily. The rabbit was just about to sneak up next to the horse and join it in its meal, but was stopped by a deep, menacing voice: What the hell is going on down there?
The rabbit looked up into the tree and saw, sprawled together along its thick branches, a cowboy and a werewolf. The pair came climbing down, and the rabbit shivered with fear. The werewolf had a good four feet on him, at least. What are you doing here? the werewolf asked. I followed her, the rabbit said, and indicated the girl on the horse with his trembling whiskers. The werewolf and the cowboy pulled the girl, who seemed scarcely conscious, off the horse and set her down on the dirt. Beautiful, the werewolf said. Yes, said the rabbit. You should see her with her clothes off. Oh really, said the werewolf? And he and the cowboy quickly busied themselves with removing the girl’s clothing, eventually having to remove the pole to which her arms were bound to get the job done.
Now they all lived in the tree, except for the horse, which the werewolf and the cowboy ended up eating. The werewolf and the cowboy took turns fucking the girl throughout the days and nights of the following month, never seeming to tire of her, but becoming increasingly intolerant of one another. The rabbit watched from a far branch, trying not to attract too much attention. The girl seemed blank, alternately taken by the werewolf and the cowboy, the cowboy and the werewolf, unaware of the difference.
One evening the rabbit awoke to the sounds of a scuffle. It was the werewolf and the cowboy. You’ve already fucked her two times more than me today, growled the werewolf, and clawed the cowboy across the face, knocking him to the ground. The cowboy took out his gun and shot the werewolf in the chest, and the werewolf fell on top of him, apparently dead. Silver bullets, the rabbit thought, and watched the cowboy struggle under the weight of the gigantic werewolf for a few minutes, saw him become still, and then heard snoring. Now’s my chance, thought the rabbit, and went to the girl. Come on, the rabbit said. We must escape. The girl stared at the rabbit, down at her third nipple, which was staring at her, and blinked. Shit, the rabbit said, and took the girl by the hand and began leading her across the desert toward where he thought the college might still be.
For three days and three nights the rabbit led the girl, sleeping an hour here and an hour there when he felt it was safe. The girl did not seem to care. You’re still very beautiful, the rabbit said, and squeezed her hand. The girl looked at the rabbit, seemingly through him, and said nothing.
Another evening the rabbit awoke to the sound of a gun being cocked. Oh no, thought the rabbit. He looked up into the hole in the barrel of the gun, which was attached to the arm of the cowboy and pointed at his face. The other arm of the cowboy was attached to a rope, and at the end of that rope was the girl. The rabbit swallowed, and the cowboy shot him in the eye that was closest to the hole in the end of the barrel of the gun.
The cowboy did not take the girl back to the tree, but led her vaguely in the direction he thought the rabbit had been leading her. Every few hours he stopped to fuck her, never removing the rope from her neck, seldom even removing his own pants entirely to perform the ritual.
Finally they came to the woods on the outskirts of the college town. The cowboy had never seen so many trees, and had difficulty selecting one to climb and sleep in. He tried several, dragging the girl up after him, until he settled on one that reminded him the most of the great, black tree in the desert, the one he had lived in with the werewolf. The cowboy gave the girl a good fucking up in the tree, then secured her leash to the branch beneath them and fell asleep, a bit of a smile sneaking across his face.
The cowboy awoke to a mighty trembling in the tree, and he pulled out his gun, afraid something might be attacking. He saw that the girl was no longer next to him, but that the rope was still tethered to where he had tied it the night befor
e. The cowboy followed the rope with his hands, saw where it had been wrapped around the center of the thick branch several times, looked down and saw the girl squirming and quivering at the end of it below him, but still a good several feet off the ground. The cowboy aimed at the rope to sever it with a bullet and release the girl, fired, saw a piece of something dark burst from the side of the girl’s skull, and then the girl going still.
The cowboy shimmied down the tree, looked up at the girl hanging there, and then began moving through the woods in the direction they had been traveling before they had climbed the tree to sleep.
The woods grew denser, disorienting the cowboy, but he continued, without sleeping, without eating, without anything. After another day and night of traveling the trees began to thin, then gave way to a vast field, green and flat, the grass cut in a short, even way. The cowboy bent down to eat some of the grass, then spit it out, and began walking across it.
At the edge of the field the cowboy came to the stables. He looked in, saw the horses sleeping, and moved on.
The cowboy had never seen buildings. He had never seen sidewalks. He had never seen brick. He moved along in the dark, staring at these things as they appeared, afraid to stop, afraid to keep moving. He had a horrible feeling that these buildings were alive, and when they woke up they would devour him. His fingers reflexively gripped the handle of his pistol, but he knew it couldn’t do anything to these buildings, to all of this stuff. It was useless. As useless as turning around and running to get back to the desert he had come from. He could never return. Not after he had seen all of this. Not after this nightmare.
One morning, a bit less than a month after the beautiful girl from Iowa had disappeared from the campus, the beautiful boy from Iowa was stumbling back to his dorm from an evening spent in the above-store apartment of an older woman he had taken to sleeping with. He was still drunk, and the buildings seemed to dance over him. Shit, the boy said, I think I’m going to puke, and as the boy said this he tripped over something and fell to the sidewalk, scraping the palms of his hands on its surface.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 11