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.

23- Fanning The Edge At Mach 5

            I was startled. There it was. Change. Point blank change. I stared harder. And the light drew closer. The skin around my eyes was burning up, and I took another hit of cheap vodka. But I never broke my gaze.

Closer the light came and around it a flutter illuminated brilliance circling it like a nexus. Entwined rings of yellow and gold, and moving closer to me as I kept my eyes open. My heart racing. This “change” now moving closer as it’s aura became not dimmer, but tighter and more precise until it was about two inches from my face, just outside the reach of my nose, in perfect view.

Then it touched me. I dropped the bottle of Vodka as it landed on the tip of my nose. A pressure on my skin, I winced as if expecting it to be hot. But it wasn’t. It was cold. Not like ice, but like air, a light cold pin prick of cold air.  Air, like the kind the optometrist blows into your eye upon examination.  And it sat there for a moment until it’s illumination became dimmer, until it’s light became a collected even aura, a glow within a shell. Glinting outward, from within, like bio-luminescence. And as the light gave way, I focused my gaze hard, but blurry, staring at the tip of my nose, trying to make out the body within the light. Trying to find detail- to give detail to this…this bug. That’s all I could think of. Like a firefly, on the tip of my nose, just out of reach of my sight, blurred by my eyes struggling to see my face and the tip of my nose. I felt my arms and legs fill with radiating “pins-and-needles” and I couldn’t move. Not out of fear, but out of control. Control by the touch of this… blurry little bug.

The cigarette dangling from my mouth met the bottle of Vodka at the base of my feet. And that pins-and-needles tingling sensation became stronger, as if electrifying me, and the smell, the smell was pungent, like o-zone, like the smell of a room filled with electronics, like a Radioshack in a strip mall.

Paralyzed, I was paralyzed. There was no struggling though this, there was no will of motion. It was complete and utter frozen lack of self-control searing through my little body, and the more I thought about moving my arms or legs, the harder it became. Until thoughts simply emptied out of my mind in exact completeness, as if de-fragging my motor-skill set one by one. Until, I was neatly organized as nothing but a blank.

My mind was total placid calm. I was a file cabinet, organized neatly, thoughtless blank page by blank page. I was an unrecorded VHS tape. I was clean muslin stretched and unframed, I was undeveloped Polaroid film, I was unburned and sterile and circular and glinting fresh out of the spindle. Blank and waiting to receive information.

But I could hear my heart beat, I could feel the gear switch, the panic gear set in, fast hard beats; invigorating full fast beats. Strong thumps of reassurance as I stood frozen with my eyes crossed down to my nose.

It was small, ladybug in size, and it just sat there, as if returning my stare. It didn’t move.

And then it happened.

It made connection.

It was information pushing in to my mind with a rush of symbols and lines, and diagrams and numbers on pages whirring past as if you’d depressed your thumb across the bottom edge of a hand drawn flip-book and whipped every image past me fanning the edge at Mach 5. The rush was intense and jarring, as if you’d hit your funny bone, except that ping of sensation was in my mind potent and true.  A “Cortext-ual” tuned fork, sharing the vibration of my mind- encoding me. This thing was filling my thoughts in a way that a sponge takes on water, instant after squeeze and engorged.

White lines on blue paper.

It was knowledge fast and locked into my mind in huge amounts, some understood, some not, but it was there, and it was very real, and it was happening to me- A kid, some little shithead punk fucking kid who steals his dead-beat whore mother’s cigarettes and Vodka, and knows exactly jack shit, about absolutely nothing.

Until now, as one end of the memories dip to black and fade down, the beginning of the memories circle back up again in to a clarifying light..

And the trace to the start is revealed, as the tail of the tale winds back around, and the importance of anything unknown in any puzzle always beckons a beginning- it's white lines on blue paper and an understanding of what it all means.

And as my senses came back, and that little bug of light was gone. I felt full, but dreading the walk home, to my dirty mother and the apartment, and that VCR and Kevin. And I shut myself off. I picked up the bottle, took the last swig of Vodka that circled the indented edge inside the base of the bottle, a fast swig, a wake up shot, and a quick light of a smoke. And I walked in to the dark. Each step I took, was farther in to the process of shutting down, each step, I was more and more distant from that little bug of light until I was at my doorstep. And I stood there for a moment. Until I had a galvanized forget-fullness all of the whole night. I opened the door and there was my mother on the couch, sitting half naked, stoned and bleary eyed and angry.

"Did you steal my fucking bottle of Vodka...and my last pack of cigarettes you little shit?"

She didn't ask where I was, or how I was doing...too stoned to care, too stoned to notice I smelled like Vodka and cigarettes she was looking for.

"Well do you know where they fuck they are?" she said, turning her hand down to her crotch and scratching, waiting for me to reply.

"I forgot," I said, as I walked away.

22- Solid Gold Video

            There used to be a video store down 149^th, just a few blocks from home called Solid Gold Video.  Kevin and I, as kids, used to walk down there on rainy afternoons, trudging through ankle-deep gutter puddles with two dollars in each of our pockets, and we’d always rent the same two movies.

            Always.

            The first was “Tron.”

            “Tron” was one of those movies that nobody would watch today.  Jeff Bridges inside a computer playing video games as a kind of computer world Jesus trying to liberate all of the programs in the sector.  It was silly.  It was neon tubing and black light and early, clumsy digital effects.  It was Disney, for Christ’s sake.  But it transfixed us.  It was fun, and uncomplicated, and we rented it all the time.  The second movie was “Troll.”

            “Troll” was about a sinister little troll, who takes over a California apartment building.  He begins this by taking over the body of a little blonde girl and over time turning each apartment into a remnant of his own magical world and the residents, one by one, into dwarves, elves, and whatever else.  The only person who seemed to notice all of this was the girl’s teenaged brother named (and today this is funny) Harry Potter.  Kevin and I would watch, him gleefully, as flesh melted, burst or transformed into sticky, muck-slicked creature flesh and yuppie neighbors turned into Tolkien-ish animals.

            Kevin loved this movie especially, but he never liked the ending.  I didn’t dig it as much as he did.  One afternoon, Kevin and I were maybe…nine, we sat, watching the boy hero on the run, and Kevin, rapt, on the edge of the couch with his toes digging into the carpet, screamed, angry when the troll was killed and my mother came downstairs, half-dressed, a cigarette between her teeth, and smelling like gin and whichever guy she had over, and she asked, “What?  What?  What the fuck are you boys screaming about?”

            “Nothing,” I said.

            Kevin said, serious, “The movie.”  My mother pulled the cig out of her mouth and blew a smoke ring and waited for something more.  “The ending,” he said.  “I never like it.”

            Mom smoked her cigarette and said, “Fucking kids,” and she headed back upstairs.  Dad was at work, and she gave me money to split with Kevin to keep it quiet whenever she had a guy over.  I didn’t like dad enough to care.

            “Kevin,” I said, “if you don’t like the ending, then why do we keep renting the movie?”

            “I keep waiting for a different ending.”

            I said, “It’s a movie.  It doesn’t change.”

            “Everything changes,” he said.  “Stare at something long enough and it always changes.”  Upstairs, I could hear my mother going through her routine, the thumping of the headboard, the screaming and the moaning and the sound of a man’s rough hand slapping against her ass.  I didn’t really understand that part of being an adult, but I kind of did.

            “It never has before,” I said.  “I don’t even know why we keep watch…”

            “Because what if it happens the next time,” he said, almost shouting.  We sat for a few minutes and listened to upstairs.  She was calling his name, but she never said the same name more than twice consecutively.  Sometimes the man upstairs was Johnny, and sometimes he was Marcos.  I didn’t ever hear her screaming Dad’s name.

            “What if it’s the next one,” Kevin said, quiet.

            He picked up the remote and he hit rewind and waited for the movie to restart.  Outside, the sky thundered and poured rain all over New York and Kevin said, “The Next time is going to be different.”

            Even as young as I was, I had been fascinated with Kevin’s undying need to try to change something that was forever locked into it’s sameness. His stubborn unwillingness to accept the fact that the movie was the movie and his anger that the final product never changed was evident each time he frustratingly pressed the rewind button on the VCR. The plot was the plot from point A to point B. The movie wasn’t going to change just because he WANTED it to, and it didn’t matter how hard he mashed his finger against the button sending the movie back, once it went forward, it was always going to the same outcome. The troll was never going to get what he wanted. He was going to meet his demise at the end and the credits would roll on and our heroes would be happy.

            “Everything changes,” he said.  “Stare at something long enough and it always changes.”  And in my little mind I thought about that. I rationalized it as best I could in my childish mind, maybe you can? So as Kevin sat on the couch, and with a sour puss watched the end of the movie and had to relive the fact, yet again that the ending wasn’t going to be any different. I walked away into the kitchen and stared at the ceiling, listened to the sound of my mother, and this man, a stranger, upstairs embroiled in coitus. And I hoped for change. I longed for it with adult intensity.

             So I left.

I left the house, Kevin, my mother and whatever bag of shit she had up there.

And I walked.

The words were seared into my little soul:  “Stare at something long enough and it always changes.”  

I was sat in the bleachers, at a little league field near the highway.  Kevin and I had played in the Ozone Park Little League at this place, before it became too expensive for us to buy the Jersies and my mother stopped coming to the games- but mostly because my mother never showed up anymore. The games were played all over the neighborhood, at different fields.  The good fields were down by the Aqueduct, down by the League’s home office.  All of the other fields were public parks, and they had public park problems.  Cigarette butts under the bleachers, holes in the chain link fencing, big chunks of sod ripped out of the field where you could run, and catch your ankle or your knee in a buckle.

            I sat in the bleachers, smoking cheap cigarettes I had stolen from my mother, and sipping from a hip-sized bottle of Vodka I also stolen. Little kid me, the tiny smoking alchy.    

            I took a sip of the Vodka, I hated it and I took quiet stock of the things that I knew.  I knew I didn’t want to be at home. I knew Kevin was still mashing his finger into the VCR, and I knew my mother would never love me. And I knew I wanted change. And if you stare at something long enough, it’s always changes.

            A puff off the cigarette.          

I took another drink.

            I looked at the sky, the ceiling, dark, with a million pin prick stars poked into it, and I followed the blanket of stars to where the sky met the trees. A bright flood light just beyond my reach caught my attention.

If you stare at something long enough, it always changes.

So I started to stare. I held my gaze, eyes open until they burned from the inside out.  But I didn’t blink…I didn’t stop looking. I held my stare with pure intent and curled nose, and teeth gritting. 

And the light moved.