Women, Weed and Weather
First off, I'm sorry.
This wasn't supposed to be like this.
I tried really fucking hard to write a simple god-damn love story, and
it kept turning into a crazy science fiction adventure involving orangutans and
James Franco for some reason.
Mostly, I think I wanted to explain how I ended up staring
at a wall the color of file folders, sitting on a borrowed chair, sleeping on a
borrowed bed, fucking a stripper I've known since she was eight years old. It all had to do with the screenplay I
couldn't finish about a life I thought it would be pretty kick-ass to
live.
Maybe if I had finished it, she
and I would be together and I would never had woken up in a crack house,
bleeding from the knee and with the growing sense that I was about to get shot.
But, we aren't, and I did, and since I no longer know what
the hell is going to happen, this story is going to get told the way it wants
to be told. Apparently, that involves a
lot of digression and more than a little magical realism.
Speaking of which, I was always impressed by the blurbs my
erstwhile agent had secured for the screen version of the script I hadn't
finished.
"Taut, the plot ripples like a whip while [his]
dialogue snaps in the background, a brazen rapport built effortlessly by the
power of the words."
"You leave the building thinking you just got
face-fucked by Sasha Grey wearing a steel dildo, but, damn if it wasn't the
best sex you've ever had."
"When [Alan Tudyk] read the script, he called me and
told me I needed to find room for it sight unseen. When Wash tells you it's Whedonesque, you
fucking believe him, so I did. What were you asking about again?"
"A steel dildo is just mean, I wouldn't do that. But I would watch this movie again, and
again, and again. If you know what I
mean. It's supposed to sound
sexual. Keep that in."
"I'll never trust anyone from a state with less than
five letters in the name. I learned the
hard way once, with a girl from Indiana.
That's what she told me, anyway, but it turned out she was from
Ohio. Which isn't the same at all. Not at all.
So when I received my review copy, I threw it away. But I thought I would talk to you about the
movie anyway. It just needs more,
explosions. Yeah. Explosions.
And fewer characters from Iowa."
The most interesting thing about any of the supposedly
non-fabricated quotes is that absolutely no one had seen the movie; no one
could have seen the movie since it had not only not been shot, it hadn't even
been written.
I was living in some southern state when I first got a call
from the person who pretends to be my agent, more to the West Coast than the
East Coast, with a lot of sand. The call
started off rather boring, a brief overview of the residual checks I would not
be receiving from either of my published anthology contributions that were no
longer in print. Then, as the sound of
desperation in my agent's voice hit a fever pitch, he suddenly announced that a
new studio was accepting spec scripts with payment for reading.
The only trick, he assured me, was that I had to write a
romance comedy designed for an ensemble cast mailing it in for a giant
paycheck. And I had three months to
write it. I got off the phone with him
and headed into the living room to find my girlfriend. She lay back on the couch, looking sexy in
that librarian sort of way, but also in the slutty club girl way, too. I could tell she had no interest in having
sex at the moment, which made her devilish display even more infernal.
"You forgot to buy toilet paper, didn't you?" she
said. It wasn't much of a question.
"Yes?" I asked back. "No? Is there a right
answer to this question, or is this a wife beating thing?"
I eventually used that line in the screenplay. One of the characters, a closeted lawyer with
body odor, asks someone when they stopped, and it's funny for some reason that
I can't remember any more.
"Are you going to go get some?" she folded her
legs under her thighs and sat up, looking for all the world like a
peacock.
I was already prepared for this question. "No," I said. "I just got a
contract to write a spec script for a new movie. I have to start."
"You have to start writing, before you buy toilet
paper? What if you have to use the bathroom?" she huffed at me.
I pout right back at her, a strangely effective strategy
that usually causes her to break down laughing and pointing and to take
pictures with her phone to post on Facebook later. In this case, though, she
apparently really needed to piss, because she stormed out of the apartment
without pants on, right into our neighbor's living room.
-----
It’s a paradox. I
can’t help it. You’re not supposed to
acknowledge it. Like the t-rex in Jurassic
Park, if you don’t move then it won’t get you.
Never mind that that didn’t make sense to me back then. Eventually I broke down and started running. Most towns have at least five bars, and I’m
talking about really small towns even.
No post office, but five bars run by five guys who all drink at each
other’s place on the nights that they let their one employee tend the
joint. I bring it up because if you play
it right, you can usually get one free drink at any small bar. Even some of the bigger ones as long as you
don’t smell too bad or look too dangerous.
And there’s always a short stack of quarters near the pool table. If you practice enough, you can tell a story
and get ten bucks for gas. That gets me
almost seventy miles in my car. Seventy miles
is a lot further than you think. Like I
said, there’s always at least five bars.
Paradox is a good word.
I don’t know how many people know what it means, but most of them are
willing to nod their head and loan you a buck.
Don’t waste time on beer, either.
Straight hard liquor. You get
maybe five drinks a night, so no sense wasting time or free booze on
watered-down cat piss. Don’t ask for
top-shelf, take what they pour you. You
don’t want to look or sound like a bum, just a guy whose ATM card isn’t working
and who didn’t remember to get cash at the bank on Friday.
I keep a picture of me and an old girlfriend in my
wallet. The one of the two of us with
her kid. Poor bastard has died at least
a hundred times, been sick a few times less.
Sometimes he runs away from home twice a week, even if he looks three in
the picture.
I was lucky enough to be born with one of those ageless
faces. I keep an i.d. that I scratched
the fourth digit off. Looks like it’s
been through the wash a few times.
Whatever reason, Arizona driver’s licenses don’t expire until ten years
after I assume I’ll be dead. The first
three numbers are one, nine, and eight.
I could be thirty-one or twenty-two, makes no difference, it’s all
legal. I look the same in the picture
with the little guy.
I don’t lie to people.
This is paradox. If it seems to
you that my life is kind of a lie, you’ll know what I mean. When I tell a story, it’s always more or less
true. Maybe it’s not a true story about
me, but it happened to someone who told it to me. Think about it, when you tell a story about
yourself you never say something like “First of all, this happened to me.” You just start talking and hope someone is
listening. So that’s how I do it.
A girl I met outside of Albuquerque told me I was some kind
of harmless. There are a lot of people
that aren’t. I was staying at an
apartment once. Some people get the
impression I don’t like to be anywhere for long. But if someone lets you, you do it. The place was one of those big complexes. A hundred, maybe a thousand apartments boxed
up like jail cells. The place was even
nice enough to provide black iron bars.
Staying in a place like that makes you wonder if prisons protect us or
if maybe the guys on the inside have the right idea.
