The child, an empty notebook – fill in the lines. The writing left difficult to decipher. What’s legible is devastating.
My script was flipped early on. It didn’t change Who I Am, but it changed every action. Thereby inexorably altering my trajectory.
Attend improv class. Effect twofold: excitement, lament. Same as aftermath of dinner convo with G.
Doubt ability to access performer. He lives in a cave in the middle of my body. ‘Improv’ entails accessing and exposing inner child. ‘Acting’ entails accessing and exposing scarred adult.
To say nothing of beaucoup body issues. Facial, in particular – so many imperfections.
Government, Feminism, Facebook, medical and technological breakthroughs mean shit to those of us in the ghetto. We are unaffected by the outside world, impervious to change.
A Libertine Black Lesbian could be voted president, an airport shuttling folks to Mars can open across the street, Japanese can be declared our national language, it would not matter – there’d still be piss in the elevators, baby brothers and sisters smoking weed or crack in stairwells, ‘mano upstairs would still hit his baby mama, and there’d still be at least one bimonthly murder, cop cars and meat wagon lined up on the sidewalk. Same as it ever was.
The ghetto is Everbleak.
She wasn’t mine but that didn’t matter. I kept lifting her, hugging her, kissing her. She would kiss me on the nose or the cheek or the lips and they were always slobbery ones. She was so light and I remember thinking I shouldn’t be picking her up so much. I wanted to make her smile. When she did, it made me smile. She smiled a lot. I wondered it if was bad for her developmentally that I love her so much. She ran down the hallway (patpatpatpatpat) and I noted what I was feeling (joy, elation). She had curly red hair and I woke up feeling like a different man. Unscarred, unafraid. Still sad.
There are a half dozen lives I should have been living all this time. None of them here.
If a dick doc or god or the fates told me I would never be able to make films, I would kill myself. And if those fuckers collectively told me I couldn’t raise a child, would I feel the same?
Complex PTSD. You’re laying down, reading Elmore Leonard – first book you’ve been able to get more than twenty pages into in two years. A click, a shuffle – something settles somewhere in the apartment, behind your head.
Someone’s inside. In a closet. Behind the shower curtain. Outline of a man, filled in black. You sense the sneer. See the knife.
Instinctively – it’s all instinctive, see – instinctively, you stop breathing. Curse yourself for refusing to keep a knife with you at all times.
You’ll fight, but it won’t be a match for his sheer malevolence. He’ll play with you. He’ll make you choke.
For someone else’s life, you’d take him out. For your own, you will acquiesce.
They used to call you Batman. With affection, little knowing their accuracy (i.e. you, a decade ago, lunatic vigilante). Turns out you’re an Elm Street kid. A Grudge child. But so too, you guess, was Batman. And this, too, is your cave.
June, sundown. It hits you – you live in terror.
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