Russ put his broom up and leaned on it, his face, back, chest all doused with sweat. "They don’t pay us enough for this shit," he said.
"The view is good, we’re getting a tan, a workout," Woody said. Woody was handsome, jaw hard as poured concrete, but spoke with the cretinous lisp of a mad scientist’s hunchbacked assistant.
For a week they had been on top of the Adams Tower, a dormitory that could be seen from miles around alongside its twin, Morris, both 15 stories tall. The wind blew hard up there, but the sun bouncing off the tar was so hot that it pretty much negated any refreshment it might have brought. In high school Russ had been pudgy and pale, but his three summers with Kyber Roofing had pounded and baked his flesh into sturdier shape. He hated the work, and told himself he was going to quit all the time, but after drunkenly charging through a red light at 3 am and subsequently flirting his way to an OMVI and a suspended license, he didn’t have much choice but to keep at it, as Woody, his roommate and bestfriend since they met at 6th grade wrestling camp, could drive him to work.
“Jesus Christ, what time is it?” Russ said.
“It’s almost five.”
The radio played country music in the background. Russ looked out at the city, the football stadium, the campus, the rivers, the freeway, downtown. He could see for miles. He had spent so much time on the roofs that he had almost forgotten the danger of falling. He remembered seeing those pictures from the 20s and 30s of guys in newsboy caps and overalls eating their lunches on thin steel beams, high above the faint grey mist of a city, as casually as if they were sitting on a park bench. He used to think those guys were crazy, and though he’d never worked on a skyscraper, mostly because they didn’t build skyscrapers in Columbus, if they paid him, he probably would’ve. You only fall if you’re a dumbass.
Russ didn’t do much of anything as the last fifteen minutes of his shift dripped away. At five o’clock he and Woody took the regular elevator down, at the chance they might see some co-eds, whereas the other guys took the service elevator. There were no girls on the elevator, and they got in Woody’s pick-up and flipped the air-conditioner to full and it chilled them like a wonderful arctic blast. They lived in one of those apartment complexes where people are filed away into little rooms furnished with beer pong tables and cinder block shelves. To them it was a kind of paradise though. They were living alone for the first time in their lives, making money, with little responsibility to anyone but themselves. The amenities were great; A lake, too muddy and shallow to swim in, belonging to the ducks, with a rather limp fountain gurgling in the center, but good for fishing; a pool with a waterfall and built-in concrete bar stools; a small gym, and what was advertised as a movie theatre but was actually just a a small room with a couch, a few folding chairs and a projection TV with an image of a basketball game burned into the screen. They got home, cracked a couple beers and headed to the pool, where one of their neighbors, a carpenter named Bobby, was sitting at the concrete bar. Bobby had a hunch in his back, and could no longer rotate his neck, but rather turned his whole body to focus on whoever was speaking. He nodded from his chest and seemed to have a different injured-on-the-job story every night.
“I fell down a set of stairs on this site over by Ravenwood, tripped over a bucket of nails, fell 13 concrete steps to the basement floor. Cement. Fucked my spine all up. They had to take 3 vertebrae out of my lumbar, fused a couple together in my neck. They gave me a shitload of oxycotin and vicodin though, so I feel fucking great.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink while you were taking that stuff,” Russ said, commenting on Bobby’s margarita.
“Shit, I don’t know. Half the stuff Doctor’s say you gotta figure is bullshit.” Bobby said. Russ and Woody shared a laugh. “If you want any I’ll sell’em to you, 20 bucks a pop. Tell your friends. I got hundreds of the little beauties.”
“I’ll take some,” Woody said.
“Come on by the place. I’ll hook you up,” Bobby said.
“Hell yeah,” Woody said.
“Cost fifty grand for the surgery, course my medical shit’s all covered so I don’t have to worry about that. I can’t hardly bend anymore, except from the waist, but I get compensation out the ass. I just sit around high as a motherfucker watchin’ Speed channel all day, cashing checks. Beats the shit outta working for a living.”
Russ laughed and shook his head.
***
On the last day of work on the tower, after they’d packed everything into the truck and everyone else had left, Russ asked Woody to take a picture of him with his camera phone on the roof in front of the football stadium. He stood near the three foot wall that rimmed the roof.
“You gotta get closer to the edge,” Woody said, looking at the screen. “I can’t get you and the field from this far back.”
“I’m standing two feet from the edge, dickhead,” Russ said.
“More like two yards,” Woody squinted and maneuvered the camera around different heights and angles, trying to frame Russ. “You’re gonna have to sit on the edge or something.”
“Just hold the camera higher,” Russ said, “Point it down.”
“I’d have to be ten feet tall,” Woody said. He got an empty gray bucket, placed it upside down and stood on it. “Since you’re such a pussy and won’t go near the edge.”
“I don’t care about the edge. The edge doesn’t bother me, it’s just that you don’t know how to take a fucking picture,” Russ laughed.
“Bullshit, I took Photography all four years in high school,” Woody clicked a few pictures. “Who are you, Johnny fuckin’ Kodak?”
“Johnny Kodak? Who the fuck is Johnny Kodak?”
“Shut up. I couldn’t think of anybody famous who takes pictures.”
“I took some pretty famous pictures with your mom.”
Woody lost his balance and the bucket teetered a bit.
“Don’t fall there buddy,” Russ said.
“I’m not gonna fall,” Woody hopped down from the bucket and held the phone so they could both look through the pictures. The sun was too bright so Russ took the phone and shielded the screen with his hand.
“Dude, your fucking thumb is blocking out half the picture.”
Woody laughed and looked at the phone. “Sorry dude.”
Russ held the camera at arm’s length and took a picture of himself. “Now I’m gonna look all emo taking my own picture.”
“Cause you are emo. You’re a pussy who wouldn’t go near the edge.”
Russ faked like he was going to punch Woody and Woody flinched and laughed. “I’ll bet you 500 bucks right now I’ll hang down over the side,” Russ said off-handedly as he cycled through the pictures.
“Deal.”
“Bullshit,” Russ pulled a can of chewing tobacco from his pocket and stuffed a load into his mouth.
“500 bucks. Right now. Do it.”
“You got 500 bucks on you?”
“I’ll go to the ATM.”
Russ stroked his chin, considering the bet. He spit a thread of juice. “I don’t know. I want to see the money first.”
“Dude, it’s me. I live with you. What am I gonna do, not pay you?”
Russ wasn’t afraid. He trusted his own strength. He was smiling, tantalized by the idea.
“I’ll tell you what, you climb over the edge, hang there for 30 seconds, I’ll pay your share of the rent this month,” Woody said. “And the utilities. That’s more than 500 bucks.”
Russ examined the roof, figuring the logistical aspects: what he’d grasp onto, how he’d pull himself up, where he’d put his feet. “I feel like we should get a video camera or something.”
“I’ve got one on my phone.”
“What if Ronnie comes back up and finds my ass hanging over the roof.”
“Ronnie’s not gonna bring his fatass back up here. We already took everything down. He’s probably in the drive-through at McDonald’s by now. If he comes up, we’ll just say you tripped.”
Russ chewed his tobacco slowly. “Would you do it?”
“Fuck yeah I’d do it. Piece of cake. Easiest 500 bucks you’ll ever make.”
“You gonna pull me up if I start to slip?”
“Fuck no dude. You’re on your own,” Woody said. “Of course I got you. I won’t pay you the full 500, but I got you.”
“How much if you pull me up?”
Woody considered it. "None."
"None?"
"It's an all or nothing deal, bro."
Russ hocked his wad of chewing tobacco over the side. He watched it twist and fall, its path bending until it hit the ground in the gravel near a bank of air-conditioners with blades whirling. “30 seconds?”
“I’ll count.”
“All right,” Russ said. He clapped his hands together, breaking from the stillness of his consideration.
“All right?” Woody said, surprised at the answer.
“Let’s do it,” Russ said. “Shake on it.” They shook hands. Woody snapped his phone open and clicked the camera on. Russ stepped one foot over the wall, clasping it between his ankles. He knelt down, hugged the wall and gently let his legs down, one at a time. He was hanging from the edge.
“Count Motherfucker,” he said.
Woody began to count, “One-one thousand, two-one thousand...”
Russ’ face, normally a tomato-red, grew to the purple of an eggplant as the numbers got higher. He could feel the breeze against his legs. His steel-toed workboots dragged at his feet, but he didn’t have to strain to keep himself up. He felt the sweat on his forearms slide from the rim like butter on a hot pan, his grip slipping. He clamped his fingers harder against the gritty stucco wall.
“...Twenty-one thousand, twenty-one-one thousand...”
Russ scraped his boots against the side of the tower, pushing himself back up, as if he were getting out of a pool.
“Twenty-nine-one thousand, Thirty-one thousand.”
Russ threw a leg over the wall and rolled onto the tacky black roof.
“You motherfucker,” Woody said.
Russ laughed and huffed in great breaths of air, rolling back and forth in ecstacy. He stood up and pumped his fist, held his arms over his head victoriously.
“I can’t believe you did that. You’re crazy, dude.”
“You said you’d do it!”
“No fuckin’ way! You fall you’re a dead man.”
“Did you get the video?”
“Yeah dude,” Russ sidled around to look at the screen and they watched the video, “Holy-shit”ing” and “Dude”-ing and spinning around as if they’d just won the Super Bowl.
“You gotta put that on facebook,” Russ said. “You better pay up.”
“Of course I’m gonna pay.”
“Beer’s on me tonight.”
“Damn right beer’s on you.”
They walked towards the door to the stairs, the sun still flaming in the sky.
“Shit,” Russ said, “I’da done it for free if you’da asked me.”
22 June 2009
17 June 2009
These Songs
These songs have potholes
in their cheeks. These songs do not
wear capri pants. These songs
say what they can in
Japanese. These songs do not
bend like the horizon. These songs
are half-starved and delirious,
imagining cake, stomachs
bloating like the universe.
These songs are the amalgamated
pieces of every invisible
sound you’ve ever caught
with your ears, butterflies
in a net, legions fluttering
in formation.
They are not even songs.
They are the combination
to a safe holding
your own heart.
in their cheeks. These songs do not
wear capri pants. These songs
say what they can in
Japanese. These songs do not
bend like the horizon. These songs
are half-starved and delirious,
imagining cake, stomachs
bloating like the universe.
These songs are the amalgamated
pieces of every invisible
sound you’ve ever caught
with your ears, butterflies
in a net, legions fluttering
in formation.
They are not even songs.
They are the combination
to a safe holding
your own heart.
05 June 2009
Perfume
He found a blond wisp of hair near his pillow, unmistakably her length and twine, slightly curled, like a line of cursive. He pulled it taut and smelled it, but the lonely strand no longer carried the fragrance. He had been thinking of her often recently, how she used to lay her head on his shoulder and he’d put his nose in her hair like a bouquet, but he couldn't quite remember what she smelled like. Shampoo, certainly, but what kind? Summer storm? Tangerine Dream? Lilac Wine?
On an August day he was riding his bike near her house and a warm wind was blowing and all at once the scent floated down like music. The flowers in the trees smelled exactly of her hair. He stopped pedaling and put his nose up and drew in deep, rapid breaths, one on top of another, trying to possess the smell. He rode in circles beneath the trees, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, but it eluded him, and soon drifted away like a current of warm water in a cold lake. He pedaled off.
On an August day he was riding his bike near her house and a warm wind was blowing and all at once the scent floated down like music. The flowers in the trees smelled exactly of her hair. He stopped pedaling and put his nose up and drew in deep, rapid breaths, one on top of another, trying to possess the smell. He rode in circles beneath the trees, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, but it eluded him, and soon drifted away like a current of warm water in a cold lake. He pedaled off.
04 June 2009
Skin
A skinhead handed Henry a beer. When you’re alone, other loners find you, and they are often alone because they’re fucking weird and the Lower East Side of New York City has the most professional weirdoes on the planet.
“Mickey Skin,” he said. He ran his hand over his scalp, then held his fist in Henry’s face, knuckles tattooed “SKIN.”
Henry nodded, feigning appreciation. “Henry,” he said. They shook.
“Hank,” Skin said, “This is a cool joint, but there’s too many fags.”
Henry usually smiled and nodded with most of the sentiments offered in a conversation, whether he agreed with them or not, simply out of convenience, but he did not smile or nod at this. He stalled, wanting neither to concur, nor to rile up the short, muscular skinhead. Henry figured his Doc Martin’s had probably kicked their share of shit.
“This music’s gay,” Skin said. The bar was called Mix-Tape and the jukebox was loaded with garage rock and new wave. Hip, but not excessively so for the Lower East Side.
“I like it,” Henry shrugged, quietly rebelling against Skin’s prejudice. He wanted to escape but figured since the guy had bought him a beer he owed him a few minutes of conversation. He didn’t really have anyone else to talk to either, and part of the reason for being in New York was to experience new things. Conversing with a skinhead was certainly new to Henry.
“I’m going to this party in BK,” Skin said, “Wanna come?”
“BK? Brooklyn? I’m supposed to meet some friends here in a bit,” Henry said. A lie. He had no friends in this place.
Skin rolled his eyes. He was wearing a yellow backpack with a cell phone slung between the straps. He whipped the phone open and held it away from his face like a tape recorder. “Yo, where you at?” There was no reply. “”Fuckin’ thing.”
“Why don’t you text them?” Henry said, pressing mime buttons with his thumb.
“I don’t know how to do that shit,” Skin holstered the phone.
The two men stood there, out of things to talk about. Henry sipped his beer to camouflage the silence. Two black girls passed and stood at the bar.
Skin nudged Henry and mumbled. “Why don’t you get on that?” Shyness and desire hid behind his mask of aggression.
Henry was surprised at his choice of women. “Me? I never know what to say.”
“Yeah, me neither man. That’s always my problem,” Skin said. The conversation sprung into momentum.
“You just gotta go talk to them. The more you stand around thinking about it, the more nervous you’re gonna get. You just gotta turn off your brain and go.”
“So do it.”
“I'm not the one who likes them," Henry said.
"That's why you should go. Set me up."
Henry sipped his beer. A guy with dark hair splayed on his scalp like a banana peel started talking to Skin.
Henry was suddenly struck with paranoia that Skin had put something in his drink; some kind of drug or poison. He pretended to sip it while he looked around the bar, then he slipped into the bathroom and dumped it down the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror while he peed, his face lazy with drink. He went back into the bar and saw Skin pretending to punch the banana-haired man in slow motion. Henry thought he should try to find an exit out the back so he wouldn’t have to walk past Skin on his way out. He sifted through the pages of the jukebox, stalling for time, and decided, finally, that the bouncer, a large black man, would probably take his side if Skin attacked him, so he headed out the front door. He checked over his shoulder a couple of times as he went down the street, but Mickey Skin wasn’t following him.
“Mickey Skin,” he said. He ran his hand over his scalp, then held his fist in Henry’s face, knuckles tattooed “SKIN.”
Henry nodded, feigning appreciation. “Henry,” he said. They shook.
“Hank,” Skin said, “This is a cool joint, but there’s too many fags.”
Henry usually smiled and nodded with most of the sentiments offered in a conversation, whether he agreed with them or not, simply out of convenience, but he did not smile or nod at this. He stalled, wanting neither to concur, nor to rile up the short, muscular skinhead. Henry figured his Doc Martin’s had probably kicked their share of shit.
“This music’s gay,” Skin said. The bar was called Mix-Tape and the jukebox was loaded with garage rock and new wave. Hip, but not excessively so for the Lower East Side.
“I like it,” Henry shrugged, quietly rebelling against Skin’s prejudice. He wanted to escape but figured since the guy had bought him a beer he owed him a few minutes of conversation. He didn’t really have anyone else to talk to either, and part of the reason for being in New York was to experience new things. Conversing with a skinhead was certainly new to Henry.
“I’m going to this party in BK,” Skin said, “Wanna come?”
“BK? Brooklyn? I’m supposed to meet some friends here in a bit,” Henry said. A lie. He had no friends in this place.
Skin rolled his eyes. He was wearing a yellow backpack with a cell phone slung between the straps. He whipped the phone open and held it away from his face like a tape recorder. “Yo, where you at?” There was no reply. “”Fuckin’ thing.”
“Why don’t you text them?” Henry said, pressing mime buttons with his thumb.
“I don’t know how to do that shit,” Skin holstered the phone.
The two men stood there, out of things to talk about. Henry sipped his beer to camouflage the silence. Two black girls passed and stood at the bar.
Skin nudged Henry and mumbled. “Why don’t you get on that?” Shyness and desire hid behind his mask of aggression.
Henry was surprised at his choice of women. “Me? I never know what to say.”
“Yeah, me neither man. That’s always my problem,” Skin said. The conversation sprung into momentum.
“You just gotta go talk to them. The more you stand around thinking about it, the more nervous you’re gonna get. You just gotta turn off your brain and go.”
“So do it.”
“I'm not the one who likes them," Henry said.
"That's why you should go. Set me up."
Henry sipped his beer. A guy with dark hair splayed on his scalp like a banana peel started talking to Skin.
Henry was suddenly struck with paranoia that Skin had put something in his drink; some kind of drug or poison. He pretended to sip it while he looked around the bar, then he slipped into the bathroom and dumped it down the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror while he peed, his face lazy with drink. He went back into the bar and saw Skin pretending to punch the banana-haired man in slow motion. Henry thought he should try to find an exit out the back so he wouldn’t have to walk past Skin on his way out. He sifted through the pages of the jukebox, stalling for time, and decided, finally, that the bouncer, a large black man, would probably take his side if Skin attacked him, so he headed out the front door. He checked over his shoulder a couple of times as he went down the street, but Mickey Skin wasn’t following him.
28 April 2009
27 April 2009
The Girlwatcher
This is a short video, followed by the story which it was based on.
I’m in love with this girl. She doesn’t really like me. I mean, she thinks I’m nice and everything, she’s cordial, and I would like to believe that someday, if I played my cards absolutely impeccably, she would let me quietly hump her in my own pathetic little way, but I know that she doesn’t lie in bed at night with the sheets all snaked and clinched between her knees and ache for me like I do for her. I do open mic every Wednesday at the coffee house where she works. There’s usually a bunch of people there but I’m sure that even though I’m wearing sunglasses cause I’m nervous she has to know I’m singing directly to her. I have conversations with her whenever I can invite the courage, conversations that swelter in my body all week like lava, conversations where my words erupt and spill over.
She started working at the coffee shop after my ex and I had broken up, so I don’t think she would have made the connection. My ex is a vindictive bitch. She’s bisexual, which was nice when we were together, got a little menage action every once in a while, but it’s not nice anymore. I only mention it because I’m out the other day and I see her walking down the street hand in hand with this new girl that I’m in love with, the coffee shop girl.
I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I sort of started following them a little bit, on the other side of the street about 50, 100 yards back. I know that sounds creepy, but it was harmless. It’s not like I'm OJ, like I wanted to kill anybody or anything. It hurt my feelings to see them together. I can’t help that I’m in love. I’m a jealous guy, I’ll admit that, but what’s wrong with caring about somebody? People always make you feel bad for caring. It’s bullshit.
I tried to be sneaky at first, pressing my back to the brick walls and peeking around and springing to the next doorway or crevice between buildings, but I stopped giving a shit. I didn’t care if anyone noticed me in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk looking through binoculars (I like to go birdwatching in the park every once in a while). I watched them swinging their linked hands back and forth. They would stop and press their faces up to the window of a boutique and then go in and I would go into the store across the street and watch through the front window and they would come out licking ice cream cones or carrying a little trinket they had bought. I didn’t pretend to be reading a magazine in the convenience store or to be looking at the leather masks and ball gags in the sex shop. More than one proprietor forced me out of his store. Homeless people came up on the street and asked me for change, asked me what I was looking at. I ignored them too. I couldn’t see anything but the two girls I had most recently been in love with.
We ended up at my ex’s apartment on the third floor of a bulding where I lived with her for ten months. We used to wake up in the morning and spread the curtains and make love right in the bay window overlooking the trees. We broke up two months before the lease was up. It was a bad break up. I fooled around with this bartender chick and the ex threw all my stuff out into the street just like in the movies.
I jumped in the dumpster in the alley across the way and watched as my ex and the coffee house chick walked up the steps to the porch with the swing in the back. I could smell the rust and beer and rotten food as I watched my ex-pin the new girl up against the wall with a kiss. What I began to feel I had never felt before, this rage like a hot stove. I felt like I could have swung a whale by its tail up through the goddamn panoramic third floor fuckin’ bay window. I felt like I could’ve drilled through a mountain like John Henry. I felt like I could’ve brought down the columns of the world and busted through the sky with my fist as it tumbled down on top of everything. The ex took the new girl by the hand and they went inside.
I started humming the mantra my Tai Chi teacher taught me. I climbed up into a tree to see into her window but it was Springtime and there were too many leaves. I swung down from a branch and dropped to the sidewalk. I circled the building but at no angle could I see into the apartment. I went up to the porch and waited for a few minutes to see if one of my old neighbors would come out, or maybe Yanni the Super, but no one came out. I'd had to climb up the fire escape a few times when I forgot my key, but it was a real bitch and I only did it after I'd tried everything else. As I sat there, I began to get the idea that maybe they wanted me to come after them. Women don't want timid guys. They want cavemen. They want guys to drag them by their hair into the cave and have their way with them. All I had to do was climb the fire escape and go right in the window, which I could see from the street was open (we had an air conditioner but the ex would never let me turn it on. Too expensive). The girls would be shocked at first and try to cover their nakedness, but then they’d see how right it was. We’d all fall in love, the new girl with me, me with the new girl, the ex and me, me and the ex, the ex and the new girl, the new girl and the ex. When something is meant to be, you can’t fight it and the three of us were meant to be; We were meant to be a triumvirate of passion, a trifecta of lust, the holy trinity of sex.
I jumped up and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. This was always the hardest part; catching the ladder probably eight or ten feet off the ground like a basketball rim and pulling all of your weight up with your arms, legs thrashing like a hanged man’s. Though I go to the dojo twice a week it was a pain in the ass pulling myself up that ladder. I braced my forearms against the bars below my hands for leverage and lifted my foot so high to get it on the ladder that I nearly ripped open my sack. I pushed my self up by my foot and after placing my other foot on the ladder it was easy to climb up onto the first platform of the escape. I rubbed my forearms, which throbbed as if they were about split like wishbones, and waited for minute to catch my breath before I quietly went up the mesh iron steps.
When I got to the third floor I paused against the wall next to the open window. I watched, through the thin curtain flowing in the window, my ex take off the coffee shop girl’s tank top. They were not five feet away from me and I could hear their breath, their lips sucking at each other and parting with a pluck and plunging back together again. I was enjoying the show and didn’t want to interrupt too soon, and I knelt down so my face would be level with theirs. I felt almost like I was a part of it. It was weird, my heart was being broken and pieced back together all at once. I really believed that I could love them both, that they would both love me. I wouldn’t be jealous of my ex. If she were some douche bag getting with the coffee shop girl I might want to shatter his face with a sledgehammer, but the new girl had somehow rekindled my love for my ex. She would heal over our pain like a splint over a broken bone, and we would fuse together stronger than we were before.
I put my leg through the window and set it down quietly on the hardwood floor beside the bed. I ducked beneath the window frame and snuck through. I lifted my other leg and, as I was putting it through I accidentally knocked out the wooden slate that was holding the window up and it dropped down on my shin.
The two girls jumped apart. My ex’s face tightened savagely.
“Charles?” she said, “What the fuck?”
I clambered to pry my leg out from the window. I realized that the new girl probably didn’t know what was going on and I might be able to save face with her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought this was the fourth floor. Terribly sorry.”
I freed my leg and went out the window as my ex bitched me out. I climbed up the fire escape to the fourth floor and my ex poked her head out and yelled up at me.
“Jesus Christ, Charles. You’re a fucking creep,” she said. “Come down from there.”
I knocked on the window of the fourth floor apartment, hoping that they might let me in, but no one answered.
“I’m calling the cops,” the ex said and disappeared back into the apartment. I meekly climbed down the ladder back to the third floor and, seeing that my ex was on the phone and the coffee house girl was on the bed, I thought I might have time to explain things and peeked my head in the window.
“Window’s locked,” I said, indicating “my” apartment upstairs. “Hey, you work at the Midnight Cafe, don’t you?”
She nodded. My ex saw that I was talking to her and threw a blue high heeled shoe at me. I blocked it with my elbow and offered a quick apology to the new girl.
“Hey look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything. I live upstairs.” The ex slammed the phone down and came after me. I ducked out the window and the ex yelled things at me as I scurried down the fire escape and down the alley behind the house.
The best thing I ever heard about love my 8 year old brother told me. “Mary likes me,” he said. “How do you know that?” I asked. “She laughs at me and when I look at her she smiles,” he said. Now, I know that that’s one hundred percent true, but it never really works out that way for me.
I’m in love with this girl. She doesn’t really like me. I mean, she thinks I’m nice and everything, she’s cordial, and I would like to believe that someday, if I played my cards absolutely impeccably, she would let me quietly hump her in my own pathetic little way, but I know that she doesn’t lie in bed at night with the sheets all snaked and clinched between her knees and ache for me like I do for her. I do open mic every Wednesday at the coffee house where she works. There’s usually a bunch of people there but I’m sure that even though I’m wearing sunglasses cause I’m nervous she has to know I’m singing directly to her. I have conversations with her whenever I can invite the courage, conversations that swelter in my body all week like lava, conversations where my words erupt and spill over.
She started working at the coffee shop after my ex and I had broken up, so I don’t think she would have made the connection. My ex is a vindictive bitch. She’s bisexual, which was nice when we were together, got a little menage action every once in a while, but it’s not nice anymore. I only mention it because I’m out the other day and I see her walking down the street hand in hand with this new girl that I’m in love with, the coffee shop girl.
I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I sort of started following them a little bit, on the other side of the street about 50, 100 yards back. I know that sounds creepy, but it was harmless. It’s not like I'm OJ, like I wanted to kill anybody or anything. It hurt my feelings to see them together. I can’t help that I’m in love. I’m a jealous guy, I’ll admit that, but what’s wrong with caring about somebody? People always make you feel bad for caring. It’s bullshit.
I tried to be sneaky at first, pressing my back to the brick walls and peeking around and springing to the next doorway or crevice between buildings, but I stopped giving a shit. I didn’t care if anyone noticed me in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk looking through binoculars (I like to go birdwatching in the park every once in a while). I watched them swinging their linked hands back and forth. They would stop and press their faces up to the window of a boutique and then go in and I would go into the store across the street and watch through the front window and they would come out licking ice cream cones or carrying a little trinket they had bought. I didn’t pretend to be reading a magazine in the convenience store or to be looking at the leather masks and ball gags in the sex shop. More than one proprietor forced me out of his store. Homeless people came up on the street and asked me for change, asked me what I was looking at. I ignored them too. I couldn’t see anything but the two girls I had most recently been in love with.
We ended up at my ex’s apartment on the third floor of a bulding where I lived with her for ten months. We used to wake up in the morning and spread the curtains and make love right in the bay window overlooking the trees. We broke up two months before the lease was up. It was a bad break up. I fooled around with this bartender chick and the ex threw all my stuff out into the street just like in the movies.
I jumped in the dumpster in the alley across the way and watched as my ex and the coffee house chick walked up the steps to the porch with the swing in the back. I could smell the rust and beer and rotten food as I watched my ex-pin the new girl up against the wall with a kiss. What I began to feel I had never felt before, this rage like a hot stove. I felt like I could have swung a whale by its tail up through the goddamn panoramic third floor fuckin’ bay window. I felt like I could’ve drilled through a mountain like John Henry. I felt like I could’ve brought down the columns of the world and busted through the sky with my fist as it tumbled down on top of everything. The ex took the new girl by the hand and they went inside.
I started humming the mantra my Tai Chi teacher taught me. I climbed up into a tree to see into her window but it was Springtime and there were too many leaves. I swung down from a branch and dropped to the sidewalk. I circled the building but at no angle could I see into the apartment. I went up to the porch and waited for a few minutes to see if one of my old neighbors would come out, or maybe Yanni the Super, but no one came out. I'd had to climb up the fire escape a few times when I forgot my key, but it was a real bitch and I only did it after I'd tried everything else. As I sat there, I began to get the idea that maybe they wanted me to come after them. Women don't want timid guys. They want cavemen. They want guys to drag them by their hair into the cave and have their way with them. All I had to do was climb the fire escape and go right in the window, which I could see from the street was open (we had an air conditioner but the ex would never let me turn it on. Too expensive). The girls would be shocked at first and try to cover their nakedness, but then they’d see how right it was. We’d all fall in love, the new girl with me, me with the new girl, the ex and me, me and the ex, the ex and the new girl, the new girl and the ex. When something is meant to be, you can’t fight it and the three of us were meant to be; We were meant to be a triumvirate of passion, a trifecta of lust, the holy trinity of sex.
I jumped up and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. This was always the hardest part; catching the ladder probably eight or ten feet off the ground like a basketball rim and pulling all of your weight up with your arms, legs thrashing like a hanged man’s. Though I go to the dojo twice a week it was a pain in the ass pulling myself up that ladder. I braced my forearms against the bars below my hands for leverage and lifted my foot so high to get it on the ladder that I nearly ripped open my sack. I pushed my self up by my foot and after placing my other foot on the ladder it was easy to climb up onto the first platform of the escape. I rubbed my forearms, which throbbed as if they were about split like wishbones, and waited for minute to catch my breath before I quietly went up the mesh iron steps.
When I got to the third floor I paused against the wall next to the open window. I watched, through the thin curtain flowing in the window, my ex take off the coffee shop girl’s tank top. They were not five feet away from me and I could hear their breath, their lips sucking at each other and parting with a pluck and plunging back together again. I was enjoying the show and didn’t want to interrupt too soon, and I knelt down so my face would be level with theirs. I felt almost like I was a part of it. It was weird, my heart was being broken and pieced back together all at once. I really believed that I could love them both, that they would both love me. I wouldn’t be jealous of my ex. If she were some douche bag getting with the coffee shop girl I might want to shatter his face with a sledgehammer, but the new girl had somehow rekindled my love for my ex. She would heal over our pain like a splint over a broken bone, and we would fuse together stronger than we were before.
I put my leg through the window and set it down quietly on the hardwood floor beside the bed. I ducked beneath the window frame and snuck through. I lifted my other leg and, as I was putting it through I accidentally knocked out the wooden slate that was holding the window up and it dropped down on my shin.
The two girls jumped apart. My ex’s face tightened savagely.
“Charles?” she said, “What the fuck?”
I clambered to pry my leg out from the window. I realized that the new girl probably didn’t know what was going on and I might be able to save face with her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought this was the fourth floor. Terribly sorry.”
I freed my leg and went out the window as my ex bitched me out. I climbed up the fire escape to the fourth floor and my ex poked her head out and yelled up at me.
“Jesus Christ, Charles. You’re a fucking creep,” she said. “Come down from there.”
I knocked on the window of the fourth floor apartment, hoping that they might let me in, but no one answered.
“I’m calling the cops,” the ex said and disappeared back into the apartment. I meekly climbed down the ladder back to the third floor and, seeing that my ex was on the phone and the coffee house girl was on the bed, I thought I might have time to explain things and peeked my head in the window.
“Window’s locked,” I said, indicating “my” apartment upstairs. “Hey, you work at the Midnight Cafe, don’t you?”
She nodded. My ex saw that I was talking to her and threw a blue high heeled shoe at me. I blocked it with my elbow and offered a quick apology to the new girl.
“Hey look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything. I live upstairs.” The ex slammed the phone down and came after me. I ducked out the window and the ex yelled things at me as I scurried down the fire escape and down the alley behind the house.
The best thing I ever heard about love my 8 year old brother told me. “Mary likes me,” he said. “How do you know that?” I asked. “She laughs at me and when I look at her she smiles,” he said. Now, I know that that’s one hundred percent true, but it never really works out that way for me.
Some Thoughts on Making Movies From an Amateur
"Julia"
I've made a number of short films and videos as a kind of apprenticeship. I've heard a from the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino that their first movies were bad, and how they wouldn't want anyone to see them now. I figured that if their first movies were bad, then mine probably would be too, so I might as well just make them and get them out of the way.
I wrote dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pages of scripts in high school classes. My friend Chip and I wrote a Vietnam War movie featuring Prometheus, the man who stole fire from the Gods. I saw "The 400 Blows" and wrote a semi-autobiographical New Wave coming of age drama. I didn't have a good video camera or a computer, so I never really made a movie until I was 19 years old (save the improvised, unfinished "The Magic Baseball" which I've yet to upload to youtube). After I saw the movie "Adaptation" I got the book "Story" by Robert McKee. Later I read David Mamet's "On Directing Film" and "The 3 Uses of the Knife" and took screenwriting classes, and I feel these books shaped my writing in a very kind of sitcom-y style, which I have only recently figured out how to escape.
McKee recommends planning your story out on note cards before attempting to write your screenplay. Each scene gets a note card and you write the beats on it. I would argue that it is nearly impossible to write this way (at least for me). It's like asking a river to flow in reverse. It causes you to think too rationally. It introduces the critical impulse before the creative has had a chance to express itself. Joseph Campbell speaks of how Pegasus, or poetry, was born out of Medusa's severed head. One must remove the critical agent, the "head", before one's creativity can take off. How can one write if one is sitting around thinking of little bits of information to put on note cards? It is only after one dives into a situation, a scene, after one's hand is moving freely, writing, that the intricacies, the details, the life comes into a scene. You travel into the layers of a thing. If you sit around thinking, and not writing, you remain on the surface. I would advise a screenwriter to visualize everything, to see the movie in your head and write what is seen and not worry about three act structure or story beats or any of that. It is a natural human tendency to structure things dramatically. The most satisfying course a basketball game can take is to have one's home team suffer early on and have to make a comeback which climaxes with a three-pointer made "at the buzzer." A story, if you work at it hard enough, will find it's structure as water finds it's level. Part of the problem with movies today is that we have internalized the form as audience members so completely, and that writers obey it so slavishly, that it has become predictable. After the premise, the conflict has been set up by the end of the first act (ten to fifteen pages, or minutes, in), the movie rarely spirals out of it's own constructed ethos into the unpredictable. The hero is guaranteed to have a third act break were he or she loses everything, only to surge against the antagonist at the end and either acheive their goal or be denied. The writer should be following the story where it wants to take him, he shouldn't be forcing the story to take the course of some prefabricated structure or form. A movie should unfurl like a flower, rooted in one place, but free to grow wherever the sun leads it.
Writing is a voyage into the unknown, and if one has the guts to throw oneself off the cliff without note cards stories have a way of solving themselves. The seemingly invented, inconsequential details of the thing lead to the resolution. The way things are written now, every detail must add up to the sum of the film, must lead in some way to the climax. Movies are slim, efficient emotional machines calculated to evoke a particular emotional reaction from the viewer. Hollywood achieves this with great success every few years. Think of how you felt at the end of "The Usual Suspects." The machine of that film was so finely calibrated that it triggered the surprise, the thrill in all of us. Many Hollywood movies are aiming at this kind of reaction. This is not the only way to make a movie, however. Jimmy Stewart told a story of how, late in his career, a man came up to him on a film set somewhere in the country, Colorado or someplace, and asked him, "You Stewart?" He said Yeah. The guy said, "You read a poem in a movie once. That was good." The man didn't remember the story, the context, only the scene, the moment, but that is enough. Movies should be curious. The dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" has little to do with the plot, but it is a joyous, memorable sequence. Movies should be concerned with creating these kind of moments and images. Movies needn't be roller coasters where every rail and board, where every line of dialogue and shot is building, building, building towards the climax. They should be works of art encompassing the totality of man's existence, great and small. They should be paintings, poems, songs, novels, plays, operas all rolled into one. They should have a little fat on their bones.
The tough thing about movies is expressing things only through pictures and dialogue. Too many people think writing dialogue is writing movies. It isn't. It's writing radio plays. It's writing sitcoms. People end up writing 12 characters that all speak in the same "witty", "urbane" voice. It's verbal ping pong. This is why so many sitcoms have cute eight year old girls who talk like middle aged comedy writers. Writers are crafting situations and peopling them with faceless vessels for their own jokes. It isn't even just sitcoms. Aaron Sorkin is an example of a well-respected writer who's characters are essentially mouthpieces for one voice. The characters parry and joust, swipe at each other as they walk down hallways. The walks give the illusion of movement, of action, but nothing is really happening. In order to escape this, a writer must not create from a place where two characters are speaking to each other in the darkness. He must instead imagine in vibrant life the totality of a situation, as if he were writing a novel and record that. Nabokov said something about how he never thinks in words, he thinks in images. He just uses words to communicate the images to others. This is what a screenwriter must do, communicate the image to the director, actors, the artisans on the set.
Advice from one who has read McKee, Mamet, taken screenwriting classes: Don't read these books. Don't read any books. The only way to learn how to make movies is to make movies. Solve the problems on a one to one basis. Do not try to follow any rules. Every film has a number of difficulties that will arise, and you must face each of these as they come. They are what making a film is about. If you don't like arguing with an actor over a line reading, if you don't like filming outside in freezing temperatures, if you don't like waiting around while they set up lights for 3 hours, don't make films. Go do something easy, something predictable, like work in an office.
Mamet says that there is no such thing as character, only action, lines on a page, but this is a very dangerous thing for a writer or filmmaker to hear. Of course, plays and movies, the dramatic arts, are about action, but if one writes or acts believing "There is no such thing as character," one will have a tough time creating anything specific or original. People, characters handle situations differently. An elephant walks differently from a mouse. Zorro would handle the kidnapping of his daughter differently than Uncle Buck might. The characters must be specific, unique. If Hamlet were nothing but a plot line, a neutral, blank entity's desire and obstacles, there would be nothing of interest in it. Hamlet is what makes Hamlet intersting. Just because a character has a "goal", an "objective" doesn't mean we're going to care if he or she achieves it. The objective is only interesting insofar as we can relate to it, as we can sympathize or respect the character who is after it. We wouldn't care one way or the other if John McClane saved those imaginary people in Nakatomi Tower if he were just some regular guy, but John McClane is funny and badass and that's why we want to see Hans Gruber eat it. John McClane is an interesting character and a good guy and this is why we want him to be able to make it home for Christmas. If John McClane had no individuality, if he weren't a smartass, if he weren't a character, we wouldn't give two shits if he lived or died. "The Big Lebowski" is a movie where, essentially, the plot is laughable, yet it is endlessly watchable due to the hilarious eccentricities of the characters.
One of the things that is frustrating about making films is that, the way things are done nowadays, you have to make a film three times. Once, when you imagine and write it, again when you shoot it, and finally when you edit it. A fully realized and carefully planned screenplay is like a grocery list. You set out for the store to gather specific ingredients which later you will put into the pot and stir and cook into a film. The mechanization of the process, the equipment that Hollywood has taught us is "required": trucks full of lights, set pieces, costumes etc. bring the creative process to a crawl, and allow little room for interference or the spirit of invention. Any kind of unpredictability on a set leads to problems. Orson Welles said a director is one who "presides over accidents." Francis Ford Coppola said a director is "Ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself." And yet most films try to fortify themselves against the unpredictable, against accident, the unforseen. If it rains, if a certain prop or costume can't be obtained, the whole scene could be ruined. I would much rather make a film with vague notions, where the story arises during the process like an island from a mist. I would rather start out with a treatment, an outline, improvise the shooting, and craft the story in the editing, and this is what I'm doing with the film I'm making right now, a story about a Greek gypsy living in New York. It's also sort of what I did with my short "Julia" (seen above), which is on Youtube, a video I did for my Gothic literature class, and probably the best thing I've yet done.
Anyway, you can check out my shorts here. They're pretty mediocre overall, but there are some fairly beautiful images here and there. I am fine with this, because I've figured out how to work, and I will make better films in the future.
I've made a number of short films and videos as a kind of apprenticeship. I've heard a from the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino that their first movies were bad, and how they wouldn't want anyone to see them now. I figured that if their first movies were bad, then mine probably would be too, so I might as well just make them and get them out of the way.
I wrote dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pages of scripts in high school classes. My friend Chip and I wrote a Vietnam War movie featuring Prometheus, the man who stole fire from the Gods. I saw "The 400 Blows" and wrote a semi-autobiographical New Wave coming of age drama. I didn't have a good video camera or a computer, so I never really made a movie until I was 19 years old (save the improvised, unfinished "The Magic Baseball" which I've yet to upload to youtube). After I saw the movie "Adaptation" I got the book "Story" by Robert McKee. Later I read David Mamet's "On Directing Film" and "The 3 Uses of the Knife" and took screenwriting classes, and I feel these books shaped my writing in a very kind of sitcom-y style, which I have only recently figured out how to escape.
McKee recommends planning your story out on note cards before attempting to write your screenplay. Each scene gets a note card and you write the beats on it. I would argue that it is nearly impossible to write this way (at least for me). It's like asking a river to flow in reverse. It causes you to think too rationally. It introduces the critical impulse before the creative has had a chance to express itself. Joseph Campbell speaks of how Pegasus, or poetry, was born out of Medusa's severed head. One must remove the critical agent, the "head", before one's creativity can take off. How can one write if one is sitting around thinking of little bits of information to put on note cards? It is only after one dives into a situation, a scene, after one's hand is moving freely, writing, that the intricacies, the details, the life comes into a scene. You travel into the layers of a thing. If you sit around thinking, and not writing, you remain on the surface. I would advise a screenwriter to visualize everything, to see the movie in your head and write what is seen and not worry about three act structure or story beats or any of that. It is a natural human tendency to structure things dramatically. The most satisfying course a basketball game can take is to have one's home team suffer early on and have to make a comeback which climaxes with a three-pointer made "at the buzzer." A story, if you work at it hard enough, will find it's structure as water finds it's level. Part of the problem with movies today is that we have internalized the form as audience members so completely, and that writers obey it so slavishly, that it has become predictable. After the premise, the conflict has been set up by the end of the first act (ten to fifteen pages, or minutes, in), the movie rarely spirals out of it's own constructed ethos into the unpredictable. The hero is guaranteed to have a third act break were he or she loses everything, only to surge against the antagonist at the end and either acheive their goal or be denied. The writer should be following the story where it wants to take him, he shouldn't be forcing the story to take the course of some prefabricated structure or form. A movie should unfurl like a flower, rooted in one place, but free to grow wherever the sun leads it.
Writing is a voyage into the unknown, and if one has the guts to throw oneself off the cliff without note cards stories have a way of solving themselves. The seemingly invented, inconsequential details of the thing lead to the resolution. The way things are written now, every detail must add up to the sum of the film, must lead in some way to the climax. Movies are slim, efficient emotional machines calculated to evoke a particular emotional reaction from the viewer. Hollywood achieves this with great success every few years. Think of how you felt at the end of "The Usual Suspects." The machine of that film was so finely calibrated that it triggered the surprise, the thrill in all of us. Many Hollywood movies are aiming at this kind of reaction. This is not the only way to make a movie, however. Jimmy Stewart told a story of how, late in his career, a man came up to him on a film set somewhere in the country, Colorado or someplace, and asked him, "You Stewart?" He said Yeah. The guy said, "You read a poem in a movie once. That was good." The man didn't remember the story, the context, only the scene, the moment, but that is enough. Movies should be curious. The dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" has little to do with the plot, but it is a joyous, memorable sequence. Movies should be concerned with creating these kind of moments and images. Movies needn't be roller coasters where every rail and board, where every line of dialogue and shot is building, building, building towards the climax. They should be works of art encompassing the totality of man's existence, great and small. They should be paintings, poems, songs, novels, plays, operas all rolled into one. They should have a little fat on their bones.
The tough thing about movies is expressing things only through pictures and dialogue. Too many people think writing dialogue is writing movies. It isn't. It's writing radio plays. It's writing sitcoms. People end up writing 12 characters that all speak in the same "witty", "urbane" voice. It's verbal ping pong. This is why so many sitcoms have cute eight year old girls who talk like middle aged comedy writers. Writers are crafting situations and peopling them with faceless vessels for their own jokes. It isn't even just sitcoms. Aaron Sorkin is an example of a well-respected writer who's characters are essentially mouthpieces for one voice. The characters parry and joust, swipe at each other as they walk down hallways. The walks give the illusion of movement, of action, but nothing is really happening. In order to escape this, a writer must not create from a place where two characters are speaking to each other in the darkness. He must instead imagine in vibrant life the totality of a situation, as if he were writing a novel and record that. Nabokov said something about how he never thinks in words, he thinks in images. He just uses words to communicate the images to others. This is what a screenwriter must do, communicate the image to the director, actors, the artisans on the set.
Advice from one who has read McKee, Mamet, taken screenwriting classes: Don't read these books. Don't read any books. The only way to learn how to make movies is to make movies. Solve the problems on a one to one basis. Do not try to follow any rules. Every film has a number of difficulties that will arise, and you must face each of these as they come. They are what making a film is about. If you don't like arguing with an actor over a line reading, if you don't like filming outside in freezing temperatures, if you don't like waiting around while they set up lights for 3 hours, don't make films. Go do something easy, something predictable, like work in an office.
Mamet says that there is no such thing as character, only action, lines on a page, but this is a very dangerous thing for a writer or filmmaker to hear. Of course, plays and movies, the dramatic arts, are about action, but if one writes or acts believing "There is no such thing as character," one will have a tough time creating anything specific or original. People, characters handle situations differently. An elephant walks differently from a mouse. Zorro would handle the kidnapping of his daughter differently than Uncle Buck might. The characters must be specific, unique. If Hamlet were nothing but a plot line, a neutral, blank entity's desire and obstacles, there would be nothing of interest in it. Hamlet is what makes Hamlet intersting. Just because a character has a "goal", an "objective" doesn't mean we're going to care if he or she achieves it. The objective is only interesting insofar as we can relate to it, as we can sympathize or respect the character who is after it. We wouldn't care one way or the other if John McClane saved those imaginary people in Nakatomi Tower if he were just some regular guy, but John McClane is funny and badass and that's why we want to see Hans Gruber eat it. John McClane is an interesting character and a good guy and this is why we want him to be able to make it home for Christmas. If John McClane had no individuality, if he weren't a smartass, if he weren't a character, we wouldn't give two shits if he lived or died. "The Big Lebowski" is a movie where, essentially, the plot is laughable, yet it is endlessly watchable due to the hilarious eccentricities of the characters.
One of the things that is frustrating about making films is that, the way things are done nowadays, you have to make a film three times. Once, when you imagine and write it, again when you shoot it, and finally when you edit it. A fully realized and carefully planned screenplay is like a grocery list. You set out for the store to gather specific ingredients which later you will put into the pot and stir and cook into a film. The mechanization of the process, the equipment that Hollywood has taught us is "required": trucks full of lights, set pieces, costumes etc. bring the creative process to a crawl, and allow little room for interference or the spirit of invention. Any kind of unpredictability on a set leads to problems. Orson Welles said a director is one who "presides over accidents." Francis Ford Coppola said a director is "Ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself." And yet most films try to fortify themselves against the unpredictable, against accident, the unforseen. If it rains, if a certain prop or costume can't be obtained, the whole scene could be ruined. I would much rather make a film with vague notions, where the story arises during the process like an island from a mist. I would rather start out with a treatment, an outline, improvise the shooting, and craft the story in the editing, and this is what I'm doing with the film I'm making right now, a story about a Greek gypsy living in New York. It's also sort of what I did with my short "Julia" (seen above), which is on Youtube, a video I did for my Gothic literature class, and probably the best thing I've yet done.
Anyway, you can check out my shorts here. They're pretty mediocre overall, but there are some fairly beautiful images here and there. I am fine with this, because I've figured out how to work, and I will make better films in the future.
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