24- The Certainty of Connection

         Laird sat in the Empire Diner in Manhattan, across from Julie.  He was drinking coffee.  Hers was a vanilla shake.  She also had a plate of French fries.  Her fingernails had been painted black, and the circles under her eyes were darker, deeper.  Her eyes had the sunken, drowning quality of a skull, but still…she was lovely.  She wore an old black sweater, with holes around the collar, and holes at the wrist, through which she’d stuck her thumbs.

            There were a few people in the diner, but they sat at the counter, reading papers, drinking coffee, in the middle of their own lives.  But the waitresses left Laird and Julie alone, and nobody looked at them.  They occupied their own corner of the building, and it might well have been a sovereign state.  She laughed out loud.

            “What people don’t even realize is that…just how important the movies are, you know?

            “Yeah.”

            “I mean, think about it.  People don’t read.”

            Laird sipped his coffee.  “I read.”

            “Yeah,” she said, “but people don’t read.  We have the lowest literacy rate in the western world.  Did you know that?”
            He told her that he did.

            “Film is the new conversation, man.  I mean, haven’t you ever just…watched a movie and had it…I don’t know….penetrate you?”

            Laird’s thoughts drifted to Coney Island, to Nathan’s hot dogs, and the Cyclone, and to a middle aged man in his tight white underwear talking about his son’s basketball career.

            “I don’t know.”

            She lit herself a cigarette, and asked if he wanted one.  He said that he did, but she ignored him, puffing away, nervous, chain smoking, attacking the smoke as if it would be her last.  A cloud was forming around her.

            “What the fuck else are we supposed to do?” she asked.  “I mean what’s left?  What’s left that our parents didn’t ruin?”

            Laird’s thoughts drifted to white rooms and white jackets, and pens and clipboards, and he suddenly felt like he was being watched. He felt that cold he felt as a child that night when there was light pin-pick tipped to the edge of his nose. He took a deep breath and shut out the thoughts, twinging in his chair for a second without Julie noticing as he pulled himself back into the reality of the moment.

            “They ruined music, you know?  I mean, Paul McCartney went from the Beatles to Wings, and Steve Miller put out ‘Abracadabra.’”  She took a long drag from her cigarette, and she sipped her milkshake.  “It’s just…it’s like the sixties, you know?”

            That headache was starting to come back, and he bit down on his tongue, hoping to make it stop.  She dipped a wad of cold French fries into the milkshake, and she crammed them into her mouth, and she talked with her mouth full.

            “It’s such fucking bullshit,” she said.

            “They made such a big deal about the whole thing, and then it was them who sold the whole thing out.  I mean, they talked about changing things, and instead…what?  Okay, fine…civil rights, but what about the Cultural Revolution?  What about stopping the war?  I mean they let Nixon off the hook.  When Ford pardoned Nixon, there should have been riots in the streets, and fucking cars overturned and burning…”

            “And…” Laird interrupted her, “…this has to do with movies…how?”

            She glared at him, and took a long, thoughtful swallow, and another handful of cold French fries.  “Jesus, are you listening?  I mean, are you listening when I talk?  I’m trying to tell you.  The revolution was over, and the last revolution was film, baby, the last revolution.”

            Laird said that he agreed, and she ignored him.

            “Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas before he was a fuckin’ asshole…fucking DePalma!”

            “DePalma,” he said, agreeing.

            “That’s why I want to make movies, you know?”

            Laird’s head was aching.

            “That’s why I think that movies can change the world.”

            A voice, somewhere, The Gateway.

            A frying pan, a blender, the motor to a drive-around lawnmower.

            “The Conversation, you know?  I mean, the whole movie turns on…”

            Pinochet in Chile, Castro in Cuba, Stalin, Hitler, Milosevic, William McKinley, Hughie Long, and Ming the Merciless.  Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, F.W. Murnau, Francis Copolla, David Mamet, and Gordon Fucking Parks.  Laird closed his eyes, and everything was connected by thin, white lines.  Coastal California, and coastal fucking Spain.  Kennedy and Lincoln.  Des Moines and Baghdad.  The Mississippi River, and Red River, with John Wayne, and Joan Mother-Fucking Rivers…every…little…thing was…connected…somewhere.

            That was all that he could be certain of. He knew, in the pit of his gut that from “experience” it was connected. And not in some new age-y bullshitty way. He knew there was a real fabric. A real design. He had proof now from his memories as a child. But even with proof came confusion. Because just because he remembered the moment, didn’t necessarily mean he knew the truth of it.

            She’d been talking.  She stopped.

            “Are you even listening to me?”

            Laird nodded.  “DePalma,” he said.

            She looked him over, and he looked her over.  She sat there in a mid-thigh skirt, one leg folded over the other at the knee, sitting sideways in their booth.  Her long, supple legs sheathed in torn fishnets, with little flashes of her shoulders, and belly showing through the torn sweater.  She looked him over, and she licked her lips.

            She took a long breath of cigarette smoke, and she said, “Let’s go back to my place.  Your place is a dump.”

            The Gateway, it said.

            As he looked at her, he couldn’t help but feel that this was part of it, that she was part of it.  That maybe she knew…that maybe she knew some of the answers that he needed.  That maybe she understood what the Aurora Project was.

He smiled at her, and he said, “Okay.  Let’s go back to your place.  My place…is a dump.”

Connections.  She licked her lips, and he ran his hands over his dirty face.  Everything is a connection.