by James Franco
If the complaint against me is that I didn’t sign an autograph, then that is another gross misunderstanding. I sign autographs for anyone! I never refuse, unless I am being rushed into a premiere. I would have been happy to have signed ten for her. She never asked! She put a card with a bunch of celebrities’ signatures in front of me and asked me to identify them! If that was my cue to offer my own signature, then I didn’t catch it. Maybe I didn’t feel worthy to sign next to Warren Beatty or Russell Crowe. I never presume that anyone wants my autograph. If that is what she wanted, and you saw that she was too scared to ask, then you could have easily spoken up. For the record, I am always willing to sign autographs for any friends. I think I even signed stuff for charity drives for their theater in the past!
You said that it was my responsibility to talk to you about the dinner if I was feeling uncomfortable about it. I am not sure about that. I think it was your plan, and you were the one that had expectations. I am an adult now; if you want me to behave like an adult at your partner’s house, then tell me what the situation is. Don’t just drag me along and expect me to behave in a certain way. And frankly, I hate dinners. I just don’t like having them, especially with strangers. Believe me, I get asked all the time, but I don’t like to go, even with people that I am interested in. But I would be willing to go for you, if you told me it was important. You said you tried to talk to me in the bookstore, but you didn’t ask me about the dinner, you asked me what I was reading lately. Regardless, I will go to you in the future and try to discuss anything that sounds uncomfortable to me.
As far as your work, I am happy to help you in any way that I can. I don’t know much about what you are doing, but I am very interested and would love to hear more about it. I am proud of you for winning that award, and the relief work you do sounds amazing. If I can help by being a good guest at your partner’s house, then I am happy to do so, but it would make me feel more comfortable to know that there were no expectations of me. I socialize better that way.
Another issue arose before I left. You said that we don’t talk. I am sorry for that. I would love to talk to you more. I said that I didn’t like to talk to you about books because you never liked the books I was reading back in high school. And now when I do, I still feel like I am a kid talking to an adult. It feels like I’m trying to communicate something that won’t be entirely understood, or would be looked down upon, so I don’t try. Maybe that is all due to my insecure projections. It probably is. Before we had our heated discussion, when I was driving to the house, I was thinking about how you and I didn’t talk enough, and how I would love to spend more time with you. I am willing to get over my childhood insecurities, because I really would like to talk to you more.
As far as you “willing to play the fool,” I don’t know what that meant. I never want you to feel like a fool. It sounds like you have felt that way in the past. If that has anything to do with how I treat you, or anything to do with my behavior, please tell me and I will amend the situation as best as I can. I never want to embarrass you.
—The Actor
(I think this next one is from his girlfriend. -Ty)
1/1/xx—1:30 a.m.
hi big bear
I don’t know if anything i say is helpful, but i just wanted to say a couple things that i’m thinking about all this. i hope i can be helpful. I’m so sorry he said those things to you. i would have stormed out too, those are really hurtful comments he made, and i think very immature. they were inappropriate. he shouldn’t be talking to you like you are a little boy.
but i also think that maybe this is a good thing. it seems like maybe this was less about this one event and more about your guys relationship, built up things between you and your dad. i think that you have said a number of times that you don’t have a lot of respect for him, and you have good reasons (i’m not criticizing those feelings of yours). i think on some level he probably feels that. so he has probably been harboring hurt feelings toward you. maybe this is what you guys needed to get through some of the stuff between you.
i think you can use this situation to your advantage and be the bigger person. you might in some ways have to be the father figure, you know? show him how you want things to be. the fact is, you did go into the evening angry because you felt (again, with good reason) manipulated and uninformed. he could and should have said to you up front that this was an important dinner for him, and could everyone be on their best behavior. i think there’s a lot of miscommunication on both ends. and now is a good opportunity to maybe be more open and honest with him about how this relationship is for you and how you want it to be different.
i think it would be a mistake to ignore this and let it stew. it’s so much better to have this on the surface than brewing underneath, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
Mark read the emails and read them again. What could he do now? Obviously there was strife between The Actor and his father, but the emails didn’t prove that The Actor murdered his father. He was certain that the sketchbook contained answers. He would have a serious talk with Cent in the morning and tell her that she must hand over the sketchbook. He would apologize for being jealous and immature, but there were bigger issues involved now.
At her small apartment in West Hollywood, Cent spent the night transcribing the reversed writing from the sketchbooks. The writing told a frightening, albeit somewhat inscrutable story. It seemed to be a confession of murder, but it was unclear. Cent was aware of the shooting of The Actor’s father and The Actor’s possible guilt in the affair, and she knew that the Spider-Man Journals (as she now called them) could implicate him in the crime.
It was strange, but she felt an affinity with The Actor, even though she had never met him. She was ten years younger than him, and she had grown up watching his movies. The Actor had been her first Hollywood crush. The damaged sensitivity she saw in his movie roles made her ache, because she felt sensitive and damaged too. She also knew from interviews that The Actor painted in his free time. She loved to paint too, not that she thought she was any good.
Although the journals spoke about murder, they also had an endearing sensitivity, and she found herself siding with The Actor against his father. It was all so weird. She knew that she was possibly dealing with the life and death of real people, but it also felt like it was all a movie.
Cent made a decision. She would help The Actor and fuse herself with The Actor at the same time.
She cut out the pictures from the journal and began to make a collage. She loved to make collages. In addition, she painted over much of the reverse writing, to obscure the incriminating sections. In the end she had five large pictures.
At 1 a.m., she called her costar Zack and asked him to come over to look at the pictures. He came, and despite his earlier criticism of the sketches, he admired the new pictures. He thought they were cool.
Cent talked to him about Marc and how she knew she shouldn’t be with him, but that she was always looking for a father figure because her own father had abandoned her and her family. She talked about how her brother Butch was suffering from the lack of a father.
Zach seemed to understand. He said nice things, and when he kissed her, it was sweet and romantic, just like he did in their scenes in the movie. Zach wasn’t as deep as The Actor, but he looked a little like him.
They made love that night.
On a small piece of paper that she kept under her mattress she had written down what was in the journals, painstakingly reversing The Actor’s backward scrawl:
I don’t know what I’m writing, or even how to write, but I thought I should put a few things down, just so the record is clear from my side. The death of a father is a significant event in most people’s lives, albeit of varying degrees depending on the history between offspring and parent. The murder of a father is an even more poignant event, which can be inflated to exponential degrees, depending on the identity of the executioner. Patricide is the ultimate expression of a son’s maturation, whe
ther it is realized physically or not. I recall from my high school English class that Oedipus stabbed himself in the eyes after realizing the identity of his murder victim. Well, that, and the fact that he was screwing his mother. I have not slept with my mother (the closest I got was a proposal of marriage when I was eight) and I have not stabbed out my eyes, and I am still uncertain of my guilt.
A few things are clear: 1) My father is dead. 2) He died on Christmas morning. 3) There is a bullet hole in the front widow of my parents’ home.
I am still piecing this story together, so please forgive the mystery; I assure you it is unintentional. And please forgive any sloppiness in the craft of the story itself, I have never written anything like this before. Although I can boast of a lifelong love of literature, an affinity that developed in the midst of a neglected childhood. This neglect is not introduced here to elicit any pity; it is just a fact that my early reading was not encouraged by my father. He was too busy working on a business plans for his big Silicon Valley company to care about my discovery of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, or Raskolnikov, or Hamsun’s Hunger.
I can recall one conversation when I was twelve:
“What are you reading there?”
“The Stranger.”
“That existential shit is crap. You should be worried about science. Those French writers are full of shit. It will get you nowhere but murder.”
Maybe so, Dad, maybe so.
To my father, my heroes were all nuts writing meaningless words in a void. So I spent my childhood in books and found new fathers.
When I went to school, I got into acting. As an actor, I got to play many roles. I got to kill fifty fathers. Every thug I killed in every cheap crime drama I acted in was my father. I shot him and I shot him.
If I killed him, then I am a criminal, but only because it took place off screen. If I didn’t kill him in life, didn’t I kill him anyway? I killed him in my mind and I killed him on screen. He’s dead to me. My emotions tell me that I’ve killed him. But then again, when I “act,” I use real emotions.
Hard to tell where the acting ends and life begins. They don’t always say action or cut.
I can see the Christmas tree flashing its red, blue, green, and yellow in its corner by the window. I just can’t decide if it was a Christmas tree from my memories of childhood, or from last weekend. I guess the fact that I saw myself in the window, floating like a phantom over the bent figure of my father, says that I was standing outside.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my editor, Ed Park. He saw this book in its earliest form, when it was still rough and unified only in my mind. Thank you for your belief and for your help structuring the manuscript. I know that this book has its present form and life because of you.
Thank you to Amazon for interest in such a book.
Thank you to the teachers: David Shields, Dean Bakopoulos, Amy Hempel, Robert Boswell, Rob Cohen, Gary Shteyngart, Ben Marcus, Ed Park, Darcey Steinke, Victor LaValle, Stacey D’Erasmo, James Wood, Jonathan Lethem, Stephen Dobyns, Michael Cunningham, Mona Simpson, Ian R. Wilson, Peter Turchi, Kevin McIlvoy, C. J, Hribal, Jay Anania, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark McGurl, Kathleen McHugh, Eliot Michaelson, A. R. Braunmuller, Amy Hungerford, and Robert Carnegie.
Thank you to Frank Bidart, my ideal reader and my ideal friend.
Thank you to Richard Abate. It’s great to have a smart agent.
Thank you to all the actors who have filled my life and work. You are my people, and we speak a common tongue.
About the Author
© Terry Richardson
James Franco is an actor, director, author, and visual artist. His first book, Palo Alto, was published in 2010.