There was a girl in my 10th grade study hall who was pretty, popular, and undeniably nuts. She had spectacularly poofy glam rock hair that was naturally blood red, freckles from head to toe, always wore whitewashed jeans, a belt and a tucked in t-shirt, and you could always count on the fact that every time she opened her mouth, she was about to tell you a lie, only the type of lies that she would tell weren’t quick and malicious, they were these long, drawn out, elaborate fabrications pulled right out of a Headbanger’s Ball video. They were mostly stories about drinking, drugs and sex, but she also liked to weave in a bit of supernatural activity to reverify many of the long established local legends about alien hotspots and haunted cemeteries. I sat with her because, well, she was popular somehow and I wasn’t. I was fat, I was a geek, and I wanted an in with the in crowd, but after a few weeks of listening to reel upon reel of these detailed, but not terribly vivid, tales of orgies, hickies, joints and beer, I came to understand why the other popular kids only seemed to socialize with her in the hall.
Eventually we went through some sort of lockdown in study hall and we were all forbidden to talking to one another, which was fine, really–it was kind of nice to remember that my schoolwork actually did interest me a lot more than having to maintain eye contact with this kooky chick throughout her non-stop stories, but the mandatory quiet time didn’t exactly silence her. Day 1 of mandatory silence and she brought out this giant red notebook, college ruled, brand new, and she just started writing and writing and writing and writing–didn’t waive hi, didn’t attempt to get my attention, didn’t even stop long enough to look around the room to see what anyone else was doing. She just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote . . . And I never saw a word of it. Just before that year was up, she gave me a folded note that was no more than a paragraph long that very neatly summed up all of the stories she had been telling me: “I miscarried. Bobby is going into the army and I am going to go to embalming school in Toledo to become a funeral director.”
Had she started with that line, I think I would have been hooked from the beginning, but let me tell you, I didn’t get any of this as she was telling me the story. Her stories were just one big, horrific blur with no beginning, climatic happenings would give you a right hook out of nowhere, leaving this audience of one stunned with no time in between punches to make sense of any of it. She must have told me at least 4 or 5 times per hour that she was raped or beaten by her boyfriend or stepfather or her uncle’s neighbor’s grandfather’s farmhand while she was out drunk, milking cows. She must have miscarried at least as many times as the Duggar’s have had kids.
And sometimes, right as I’m about to hit the keys, I think of her, and I freeze. I write a line or two and I choke. I write a line or two, then let the backspace key eat the words back up again like Pacman gobbling power pellets.
There was another girl that I was kind of sort of friends with who was pretty, intelligent, thin as a rail and far, far more crazy than my table buddy from study hall, and for good reasons. Her parents lived in this strange hillside junkyard, coincidently, not far from the haunted cemetery my study hall girl always blabbered about. This girl was always picked on in school even as far back as elementary school because her family was so incredibly poor. They lived in a tarpaper house overrun with inbred cats with malformed limbs and old, sick, incontinent dogs. Her room had posters of Alice Cooper hanging wherever there was drywall enough to tape them to, wherever there weren’t fist-holes through the walls or foil-backed insulation bulging out of the sides. She had a metal-framed spring-cot for a bed and a lamp with a bare light bulb sitting in the middle of the floor. I went there with a friend of mine a couple of times as just a silent tag along, and this girl too was into telling big stories . . . Mostly about going to Columbus with a cousin or a boyfriend we’d never heard of to see Alice Cooper. She at least smiled when she was lying. At least her expression changed as she sweetly relived sneaking backstage at a concert that never happened, treating Alice like an old boyfriend, describing to us in graphic detail the romps they would have. Of course, this made for great driving conversation between me and my other friend as we headed back home from her place. All we had to do was look at each other and one of us would start rattling off some bit of her story in a crazy voice, and we‘d laugh all the way home, sometimes sitting in the car laughing so hard we couldn‘t leave the car because every muscle in our bodies hurt.
But one time–and I do mean, this one single time– we went to her home and she had this notebook. This notebook was full of drawings that were gory and sexy and absolutely flawless in execution. There were no do-over lines, no erased guides, no eraser marks or blot-outs. The friend I always went there with was an artist. She and I had had a comic strip that we wrote just for us while we were in Junior high. She took up the notebook and studied these pictures, and you could see in her face this kind of far-away look wash over her, a mixture of awe and jealousy, of possibilities and shame. This notebook also had a lot of poetry–poetry that sounded more like lyrics taken from a King Diamond album–and a few short stories that I had the chance to read over while the other two girls talked.
By this time I was a Sophomore in college, getting ready to decide once and for all on my major, already encouraged by the faculty to enter the English Literature program, already writing my own short stories and the beginnings of what would be my first novel, and reading over these short stories, I was dumbstruck. Her short stories were astoundingly descriptive with a subtle yet pervasive mood, short horror stories no less creepy and unsettling than a tale composed by HP Lovecraft. I remember asking her about them, and she just kind of shrugged it off–they didn’t matter, the drawings didn‘t matter. She was going to be a rockstar’s girlfriend for life. The only other thing she would consider doing career-wise was to be a tattoo artist, but according to my other friend, she never made it out of the junkyard.
And sometimes, when I put my hands to the keys, I stop and think about the time I’ve spent, the time I’ve stolen, hammering away at something I have a hard time sharing with other people. I look around my own rented, broke-down townhouse, housework undone, mountains of laundry piling up, food all over the floor that the baby has thrown from his highchair, dirty dishes in the sink, a sea of papers spilling and crashing every time I go to find something I’ve lost, I think about how much junk I share my life with and I wonder if I’m ever going to make it out, or if I‘m using my writing as an out.
My writing’s been suffering a little bit lately because I feel I’m just going through the motions. I’m writing words but they don’t’ feel like they have very much dimension. I’m typically very dutiful to my dream of becoming an author, and spend at least an hour or two each day trying to rework the book I’ve already written. I’m pleased that I’ve made it to twenty pages (of 250) so far, but I do get into that funk that asks, What’s the point? What’s writing ever done for me, really?
I’ve been reading about this new movie by Lars Von Trier and let me tell you something right off the bat: I really don’t like Lars Von Trier. I don’t really consider myself a film critic or a cinema geek, but I’ve seen a lot of truly poetic, artistic films and I know how they feel, I know how they look, and I know that even if they don’t always make immediate sense, great films have a presence that touches you and stays with you a long, long time, just like a good book. If you’ve never seen a film by Andrei Tarkovski, now is a good time to get a subscription to Netflix (because that’s the only way you’ll ever get a hold of one of his films without shelling out boucou bucks for an import) and just load up on the stuff that he’s created. It’s best to view his last film and work your way back, because otherwise, the earlier films really won’t make any sense whatsoever. The first Tarkovsky film I ever saw was “The Mirror” . . . and I HATED IT ! It was long, boring, made absolutely no sense–didn’t have a plot, didn’t have characters really, didn’t even have but maybe 7 or 8 scant lines of dialogue, in Russian, scattered over almost 3 hours of film! But the trick was that we kept talking about it, and talking about it and talking about it, and it seemed to me like the very fact that it was filmed in the Soviet Union, in the 70’s, during a time where Russia might as well have been Mars to people living in the United States, I felt more and more humbled that the images conveyed, the mood they presented, the aesthetic quality of it, COULD mean something to me, a person raised in Appalacia, whose friends live in tar paper homes or use rap and miscarriage as forms of entertainment.
I bring up Lars Von Trier because “Anti Christ” was released this week in the United States, and if you haven’t heard anything about the film, I want you to pick a time sometime either today or tomorrow while it’s fresh in your mind and look it up on Wikipedia, ‘cause you’ve already made it this far in yet another one of my long, rambling blogs–I don’t need to insult your intelligence by giving yet another sloppy rehash of the plot. When I first read that wikipedia entry, I laughed. I laughed out loud, literally, because it’s astounding to me that anyone would a) agree to fund a script like this to the tune of 11 million, and b) because it’s just so typically and painfully Lars Von Trier that it just seems like someone is paying him (we, the movie audiences are paying him) to stay stuck on himself, to stay in this same place straddling porn and commercial-ness, with art really not being that much a factor into the equation. If you read the wikipedia article carefully enough, you’ll find that this script was supposed to be heavily inspired by “The Mirror” and he does, in fact, dedicate the film to Tarkovsky. I’ve seen Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, and in both of those films, you can feel Von Trier’s presence, and a an almost assumed air of greatness, but he always does just something, usually a big something, to cheapen the film so badly that it almost stumbles over itself to get to Cannes. I like to think of his as a Kmart-level Tarkovsky–the cinematography is there, the themes are there, but the plot, or the quick disentigration of the plot, cheapens it to a point that you know you’re always going to finish a Von Trier film rolling your eyes or feeling like you want to vomit.
But I have to thank Von Trier for at least giving me some food for thought this last week or so. I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of storyteller I am. I’ve been thinking about what, ultimately, is the point, of telling these stories? I guess in my mind Writing is impetuous to making money, a way for me to get further away from the junkyard, to travel to the places in the world that are more or less as distant as Mars to me, to really embrace art and make evident those themes, those souls that I see in life that it feels like other people–not everybody but just other people–are sorely lacking in their lives. But how is that any different than the armchair quarterbacks that are my age, weigh 300 lbs and still think they’ve got a crack at the NFL? Is there something else that I can do with my life that’s going to help me get to Russia, or the Pyramids, or to Norway, or to Sweeden so I can kick Lars Von Trier in the ass, tell him to get over himself, and stop sabotaging his own films just to get ticket sales off of cheap thrills?
My Father’s side of the family is absolutely chock-full of natural story tellers. When I was just a little kid, just about every single weekend no matter if it were spring or summer or fall or winter, my uncles–all 6 of ‘em–would get in their trucks and plow them up this deep trenched, muddy backroad to Uncle Carson’s house and gather around this firepit that someone had made out of a dump truck’s wheel well. They’d sit around and tell stories about my grandfather getting into fights in ever y port while he was in the navy, about my Uncle Art’s exploits as a wealthy Michiganer working for GM, about my Grandmother’s gambling habits and how she gambled away my father’s crib when he was just a baby, of how my Grandfather had swindled just about everyone in southern ohio playin’ poker, on how my Dad had swindled just about everyone in southern ohio playin’ pool. And I found, as I got older, when I’m together with my friends, that’s all I really want to do is tell stories . . . Remember that time we went to Kathy’s and her mom mixed cat food with her hands on this big cookie sheet on the kitchen table for all them messed up cats?
I have two books in my boy’s room by Paul and Jean d’Aullaire that I had as a kid, and every time I walk by I have to fight the impulse to stop and read and remember what it was like to spend so many long hours just reading and rereading the same stories. In Thor and Odin and Zeus and Mecury I saw my uncles, my friends the dryads in the trees I spent many long hours hiking with amongst in the woods. I absolutely hear my voice in those words when I finally do get the time in between all this outside pollution of having to take care of adult things to sit down and write.
To write–it is incredibly important to me that it comes out the way that I see it play every day in my head because if it doesn’t, then some element of the girl in study hall, the girl in the junkyard, will present itself to my potential publishers because they get this, in their everyday work pollution. They probably have traveled the world, seen the things that are just cartoonish concepts in my head, and are asking, where is the art? Show me the art! Show me why yours, of all voices, deserves a chance to survive?
I’m not writing Hemmingway, I’m not writing Chekov, I’m not even writing Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele, but somewhere in this world, the people who don’t even have a fire to sit around and bullshit with other people with, will at least be able to bullshit about my book, if to no one else, at least in their heads. Von Trier, I haven’t even seen your movie, but it’s been great fodder for face book friends and certainly a great way to pass the time, looking for movie reviews on my blackberry.
Chaos Reigns!
