xi. names in neon

Justin looks to me expecting an answer. I look Heather in the eyes, the girl shivering in the stranger's bathtub. The bubbles that were there to cover her have mostly dispersed into a thin film she works with hands to pull in close to her chest. I can't tell you a damn thing about this look she gives me. I don't know if she's excited or afraid or both. I just know that whatever I say back to Justin will be wrong, that this moment is too fucked up, too far gone, and the three of us have let it get out of control.

“We can do it either way,” I say, not really saying anything at all.

He tells her to stand up out of the tub, and she does. She's eighteen and beautiful and naked and dripping. The cameras love her which is why we love her. That will be our pathetic excuse when we got caught up in the fantasy of the moment. I only try and look at her through the viewfinder. I feel ashamed, I'm burning frightened and I hate that my dick is hard. I'm twenty-two. I have a girlfriend who doesn't know what I'm doing far from home, back home, on the coast of Small Wood.

...

Living vicariously through my best friend. I don't have a life until he brings me into his. He's twenty, bleached his hair blond, dates a twenty-nine year old actress. He knows she cheats on him with her costars, but until she leaves him for the sensible obvious reasons, he flies blind, loving it. He doesn't sleep. He taught me how to do this without resorting to speed or caffeine or supplemental stimulant. When we are together, quietly discussing something away from raucous, we begin by breathing deep and repeating a coda, a familiar chord. “Inhale light, exhale exhaustion.” Themes and variations thereof, a cliche for every occasion. We do it by the force of sheer will alone. Shooting, editing, writing and planning three days a week straight. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, switching off and resting eyes for maybe an hour, two max. The other four days we both have jobs and I, school to return to, to blink, emerge back into, mental patients released to the outside world.

He has many nicknames. Among them LoBlo and JKL said “Jekyll” signifying the three letters used to advance frames in the AVID software editing suite we chore master. He works at I/O, arguably the best west coast ad agency. They are Nike. He charmed his way in, a high school graduate nobody translated: no practical experience. He cut a tape together with some personal highlights of his short life in front of the camera. The video opens with a custom-made eighteenth birthday present neon sign being born out of darkness, his name flickering and glowing, “Justin J. Lo”, cursive, blue.

That whole advertising mentality I can't fathom. The too hipsters. The comfortable distance they create for themselves away from the rest of reality. The see themselves as those who sell dreams to primates. They don't associate with the common man, they move in packs of carbon copies of themselves, wearing black, always considerate of how they feel.

Justin is not like them, he's their mascot. The young kinetic human being they all wish they might have been. He bleeds electric. At their weekly meetings he's the DJ at the mic working their reptile blood into a lather. He gets them to hoot and holler and dance and go to strip clubs and celebrate existence. He tapes inspirational messages that play on closed circuit monitors in that beautiful steel and wood and glass edifice, non-cubicles seemingly hovering in space. He lives too hard and burns far too fast, and he tells me I bring him back down to reality, as if that's a good thing.

I look like a logger. I missed growing up of that grunge era and must reference this iconic Pacific-Northwest. Torn jeans, corduroy, flannel wear, long greasy hair and full beard. I am the emotional anchor, the overstimulated octopus brain behind his rabbit beating heart.

We are So So Cool, the name we give ourselves to stand out from all the rest. We say it like Japanese tourists, thumbs up excited, so very self-aware. We have a mission statement and it is said in defiance. We are two young people, two old souls. He hits the streets, I craft websites, he prints t-shirts and stickers that I design.

We network and schmooze. We hit the clubs and bars looking for fresh faces and eager minds to join us for a fleeting moment. We capture impressions with Polaroid cameras, leave behind hyper real post-it notes, tattoo sharpie marker bare flesh for a week or two. We talk emerging musical acts out of their art so that we might 'collaborate', incorporate them and further this collision into being with our incredible persistence, they become the soundtrack of our lives. We want to share our vision, our vision that we can't agree on, that changes from moment to moment. But we feel it with all of our being, we know it. We dream the dream together and somehow find the time to parent our love child of the mind.

This is where we are before the horrible truth of reality hits and we dreamers come crashing down.

...

We're working on a film called House of Glass. I brag now about how we accomplish so much with so little. Our massive set, sound stage and backdrop is a brand new up-scale condominium in Vancouver, Washington. We somehow talked the owners into letting us shoot our movie in several of the empty demo units, fully furnished and glossy like a magazine spread. It is trendy and urban hip. There is a Starbucks in the lobby, across from it an art gallery. It is too perfect a locale and we consider ourselves blessed karmic fortunates.

This is all so amazing because the fictional House of Glass is a post-modern art commune, a hive where all the rooms are wired for sound and video, and all the tenants can see what exactly their neighbors are doing at a moment's notice by turning on the television or computer. I wrote the script because I recognized the crazy voyeur exhibitionist in my young self and I got a very real thrill writing it. Justin responded as much if not more so. He is obsessed with making this a reality. He encouraged me to write into a mirror, digging ever deeper, discovering so much more than the surface sensational we were selling it as.

I was mainly interested in the peculiar sorts of people who would gather in such an environment. The jump off point of historical reference, this was written and is constantly rewritten at the dawning of reality television. We started shooting days after 9/11 with the jets in the skies, their sonic booms etched audibly into our tape. This is about that, we delude ourselves. This is fresh and topical and deranged. Also mean and ugly and too much, yes. But we go forward because people respond to the concept on some basic level. They want to see what we will do with this, where we could possibly go.

Where it falls apart, because it was bound to from the beginning. I blame my bloated script. At one time it was upwards of 300 pages. Six hours of material. We thought about doing as a mini-series, like The Kingdom, the Lars Von Triers DV show. Release it to DVD, that exciting new format. Or sell it off the Internet, there's gold in them thar hills. There is too much to it to keep straight. Too many characters, too many archetypes clashing and coming alive, representing conflicting aspects of Boheme being. The two main foils, Haydon and bass, order and chaos. The logical documentary filmmaker locked in a battle of wills against the passionate entropic musician. House of Glass, their playground, a place too small for boys to share willingly.

All the players are young and beautiful and talented.

And they are. The webpage for the House of Glass is already up, the interlinked web pages of all the fictional characters an on-going meta-exercise that takes weeks out of my life. I write as all the characters in the House of Glass forum. We've been casting cool people off the streets, as themselves, as extras, filling in the negative space that sucks at me. They photograph themselves, improv their existence. House of Glass is entirely beyond our control now.

It certainly doesn't help that as of this very moment, the (spoiler) written finale is a musical number filled with such choice moments as our fresh out of high school sexual suicide diva masturbating with a pen camera while all the characters watch and come together as one uber-art-organism thanks to the magical black man powers of bass. I mean goddamn. We're going for broke here, we're letting it all hang out and fall where it may.

Somehow all the people associated look at us and think we know what we're doing.

...

There are moments you never forget. When the book we walk through comes to a new chapter and the words that begin this great transition hover vibrato in the air.

Everything changed when we saw the film. I hesitate to even call it that. I lead you gently into that night.

I was in town, the start of the movie making weekend that would last a hollow eternity. It was a Friday afternoon and there was nothing for Justin and I to do except socialize and reacquaint. We wandered streets in the early evening, window drop shopping independent record stores, trailblazing Powells book store, being observed out in the open laughing and celebrating early that rush of impending weekend freedom. Rubbing it in eager curious noses that looked up from lack of passion duties.

She found me, the young woman with dreadlocked hair all the colors of fruity pebbles. Practically assaulted me in the street, thought she knew me from somewhere, called me by a stranger's name which I remember to be Bran. She was certain I was him and grew all the more empirical the longer we spoke between concrete limbo. She thought I was fucking with her and went back and forth between upset and excited. I showed her my driver's license to which she said, I'll be damned, and changed her tune, suddenly now wanting to hang with us, asked if we had a problem with that. She kept looking at me, eying me, squinting effectively unnervingly. Justin, to stop the honking, embraced the girl completely, her name April. She lurched over and included me in the hugging tight. I was big and awkward, consciously scouting for my implied doppleganger to appear out of nowhere. The three of us in the road, just like that.

She took us by hand and led us through alleys we'd never considered, but understand she was not an alley person. I don't want to give the impression that she was from the street, that she knew the lingo, because she was entirely like us and we were all tourists. She used four dollar words because she was a student and they felt good on her tongue. Pierced not once but twice. We shared this new world together for a day the way strangers do when they familiarize themselves with comfortable otherness. She wanted to know all about us, all about our movie, because she loved movies. In fact, she explains in bold, she got an invite to an invitation only movie screening that very evening and this she kept repeating.

Important, this invite only invite. She pulled it out of her purse at some point, written in fancy cursive across one side, invitation only. On the other side was an address, a gallery space she told us her friend once used, but had since reverted vacant. She tried and failed to explain the significance, it was all a web of people, names we couldn't place.

We continued our wandering. Unimportant save for details, fleeting. We had pizza dinner and bought disposable cameras which we emptied, pow pow pow, in a pigeon occupied park plaza. The winged squatters refusing to budge, unafraid of us, we'd run at them and they'd stare us down, the whole flock would just flutter and bustle in place, watching as we were the ones who trembled.

We showed up early, there was already a line at the door. These people were individuals. I empathize because they were fascinating to look at and to overhear speaking to one another. I wanted to know their stories. They were cool and different and they all hummed at that same special frequency. It has taken this long to realize that Justin and I and April, we all hummed at that same frequency as well. We belonged there, with them, at that moment. But even then, I knew This was important in that Richard Dreyfuss mashed potatoes mountain way.

People nervously fondled their invite only invites. A colic youth moved to the front and unlocked the glass doors. Kick stopped them open and disappeared into dark, leaving us to watch as lights appeared non-sequentially in relative distance. We saw a waiting area, which we slowly filed into. Brushing against one another. April holding onto our arms tight, wedged tiny down there. The floor was unswept, meaning dust was kicked up and footprints emerged, diverged leading every which way.

There was a table with refreshments set up along one wall. A trashcan filled with ice and cans of beer. This became the uncomfortable transition period. We were forced to wait. This energy is vital. The uncomfortable dread, the questions we asked of one another, ourselves, why are we here exactly. The line of thought continues like this and continues to build, the answers must be coming. I remember a strange young woman in the corner, dressed in a ratty dress. Ratty like a doll dress, used up by too much play, too treasured to discard. She had that raggedy ann look, languid limp from so much existence. She was telling a story when I wandered up to her. Justin and April at different corners with different circles, we formed an imaginary triangle, circles within circles.She spoke of a boy she gave a ride to in her car.

He was a normal looking kid, about nine or ten. Then he started talking. He sounded funny. Like he should be medicated. (She speaks very slow, affects some truly queer accents and enunciations) He talks about twigs. Sticks. For minutes, that's all he talks about. About having sticks inside. Having scarecrow stick limbs. That's when he pulls out a pistol. Only it's missing a barrel. It's just a handle and chamber. He assures me it can still shoot. He's already shot somebody with it. He shows it to me. I'm driving. I'm terrified. I keep driving and he keeps talking. He talks for maybe an hour. Then he puts the gun in my lap, leaves it there, his hand still on it. Tells me to let him out at the gas station. He leaves the gun on my lap and walks out into the night.

This was when she produced the gun without a barrel and showed it to us. Said she knows it still shoots because she's shot somebody with it. Some people laughed at this. You know the kind of laugh.

There was that frenzied moment where the crowd out of sight reacts and moves, and you are suddenly aware that the time has come. A physical change comes over the assembly, and we are blood cells now. We slow and flow. There is a back room, dimly lit, larger than expected. We moved into it.

Oh wow. I saw an island of leather executive swivel chairs, maybe eighty in total. Pilot chairs that swallow up a man like me. April squeed and pulled us into the middle somewhere. People unsure what to make of this. She was more open to the possibility, the play of it all.

So we're sitting in these chairs, rocking and spinning like tops. They were securely bolted down, but we managed to bounce all over the place, locked in place. This was rad. You had to be there. There was some original music playing, beautiful noise. The sounds you make by accident hitting objects together. Arranged just so.

The house lights flicker. We approach the curtain call. The doors close. Tremendous excitement. We are locked in a large room, each wall taller than normal. White. People realize something is about to happen. Perhaps a light show, a slide show. What happens is darkness. People are quiet and loud at the same time.

There are four projectors that must be on the other side of the walls. I don't know how they do it. Each wall has a moving image on it. Sound comes from each of the four walls. It is cinema on four screens, all at once. I can see one whole image in my periphery at any one time. The edges of the flanking two screens bleed over. The sound is everywhere. It starts like this.

A helicopter shot through graphic desert landscape. A van is always at the edge of the screen, moving closer as the shot spins and orients itself. The van is dust-covered, a relic from the sixties, seventies, hard to place. It is a patchwork of all vans.

We are giddy, we notice that the images are all different, complimentary. Each of the four screens has a different, beautiful angle. I am a cinephile, I don't know how they did this. It seems to all be happening at the same time. There is light music, like bouncing around an eight-track, tinny, wheezy.

I have to relate this as it is relative to me. I could only see so much of this. This is what I saw.

It overwhelms us. The shot(s) seamlessly transition inside the van, each shot settles on a particular character inhabiting this van fully. The shots linger, letting us spin and consider each of them. Driving is a deranged looking character played by John Goodman. Yes. There are big name actors in this thing we are seeing. It is shocking to us. In the passenger seat is an unknown young actor, male, somewhat Hispanic looking, beautiful at fourteen-fifteen. In the middle seat is John Cusack. Yes. He looks like I've never seen him. At the end of his rope. A gaunt creepy drifter, copious patchy facial hair. Behind him is a young woman, another unknown. (Note: I've never seen these unknown actors again anywhere else, so for that they remain unknowns.) She is an enigma. Neither beautiful nor ugly. Maybe about twenty-three, twenty-four. She is looking intently at the back of John Cusack's head, like she just wants to reach up and touch it.

The cameras slowly begin to pull back out again. I catch a road sign outside the car that announces “Ticonderoga”. Apparently on other screens, people saw different signs. The one I was watching was the main one (?), the John Goodman one. I say this because he was the driver. The John Cusack one said “Promontory Point”. These are our jumping off points for later discussion afterwards. I can't remember the others, I think one may have been “Durango”. I am dizzy by this point. It may have just been a few minutes, and I'm just spinning all over the place.

There are no credits. As the camera pulls back out of the van, each film transitions to how each character began their respective day. I can't begin to describe the artistry, the craft of the thing. There were four narrative films playing in concert. The setting was indeterminate. Late seventies, early eighties. A small town in the middle of godforsake. I spun, watched as John Goodman went through a Samuel Beckett inspired existence, suffering the torments of a hateful and indifferent family. Absurd, cruel and cutting. But shockingly funny. It was played as carefully observant, the tackiness of this man's suffering, the lengths he went through to get through a day, until he could take no more and began his ascent-descent.

I want to reveal so much. But I can't. I shouldn't say anything at all. I just have to talk about this.

The girl's story was full of graphic sex, which made for some interesting viewing scenarios. There was a whole portion of the audience who'd take casual peeks over at her screen and titter. And those like April who'd get caught up and not look away. I was somewhere in between. I reflect that my viewing experience was completely natural and right for me. My eyes fell where only they could have. Did I want to see more, of course. But that is life.

Digression, her story was this. She was in the middle of preparations to leave town to be with her dying mother. She just gets word when it opens that her mom is in the hospital, and she probably wouldn't come out. The girl, never called by name (none of the characters are) is living with her boyfriend in complete and total squalor. A dingy one-room pit of human decay. No amenities. Just a nightmarish mattress where they fed off each other like sexual emotional vampires. For the first twenty minutes or so, while she packs and gets ready, he is insecure and forceful, afraid and knowing she'll never come back. He gets her undressed and sits on the floor and makes her masturbate for him because he's never seen her do it before and wants to see it before she goes and most probably never comes back. And she does, for him, maybe for herself. Closure.

I'll say nothing of the John Cusack character. I can't.

The young teenager though. He's nuts. He has no home, he moves from house to house, living with other kids his age, for a day, two at most. He's a sort of ghost, a Peter Pan, playful and arrogant and youthful wise. An older sibling of a friend gives him some acid, presumably to attempt to molest him, and the kid goes off on this amazing trip. We see it from his point of view. It's like a beautiful painting. Time stops and slows and there are moments of forced interest. The only reason it works and doesn't fall flat on its face is because of the content. The kid imagines himself and the beautiful young seventies-eighties Michael Jackson as best friends, getting into all sorts of magical mischief. I can't give enough credit to how well this sequence worked. It could have been an utter farce, given the dubious stature of the pop idol. But this was a time capsule, a character piece of the young man, the potential. Michael Jackson was beauty and wonderment and the strong guiding hand. He was what was right in the world, the glamour of the age. This played straight, played perfect.

You're probably thinking, how could this have worked. Well know that, by all accounts, it worked. Somehow, they edited the four films tight. Each was a stand-alone film. But they played in tandem. Imagine that. There were moments of cacophony and crossover and revelation. The soundtrack was pure creation. The music was timeless unidentifiable rock and twang. The sound effects and dialogue and pacing were done just so as to subtly lead the viewer from moment to moment. Each audience member responded to different cues and charted their own course through the narrative.

When it was over, and it kept going on, god bless it, we filed out, stunned, afraid to leave our seats, our cockpits. The film was over and we were changed. There was applause. For minutes. They kept both the theater and lobby open after for few hours. People grabbed drinks. Some people got drunk and found their way back into the seats. Spinning aimlessly. I was tempted to join them. Justin and April and I had far off looks in our eyes. We'd be playing scenes over in our heads, sharing moments, realizing each of us had different pieces of the puzzle, we could only just grasp at. Talk like this continued. After they shut us out, we found ourselves and others wandering the streets, finding places to gather and discuss. We had little information to go on. What the hell just happened to us. It was wondrous, it was phenomenal. Was it film or art or bigger than both, certainly bigger than us. Realize there was tremendous craftsmanship. When you talk about great films, this was four great films, and it came out of nowhere. Who made it. Why. And more questions emerged as that night gave way. It affected us. Parts of it felt like certain filmmakers had their hands on it. One person mentioned Matthew Barney. Could one mind have been behind that? It felt like both a yes and a no. It was big, too big. As a lover of life, it was far too much. It was madness, the potential to drift and lose oneself in recursive thought.

There is no way for me to conclude my telling of my experience with the film. If it was a film. It changed us. It humbled us. Tempered our passion somewhat. Inspired us, but tore us apart. April drifted off around dusk. We were on the edge of the Columbia River. She wanted to crash at a nearby friend's house, she invited us to join her. But we were in our own heads by then. We would remain there for weeks.
...

So Justin gives me a call up out of the blue. We'd drifted back into our respective lives away from the movie. We'd agreed by not agreeing to shutter the film, re-evaluate what we were doing in hopes of making it better. I was going through another round of re-writes. Justin fired a bunch of the actors and was trying to recast. He was not willing to compromise his vision, and it was a set-back but I admired the decision. In particular, he wanted to cast a girl he knew from back home in Small Wood. A non-actor, achingly beautiful. He adored her, but she was always with someone. So he used her in music videos and advertisements and couldn't let go. She was perfect for the part of Penny. I had to agree. Even with her lack of experience, she was sublime. She liked the script, was uncomfortable with aspects, but recognized there was no way around them and agreed to be our Penny.

Justin shot scenes with Heather, bringing her up on days I couldn't be there to shoot with her. It was obvious what he was doing, but I didn't say anything. I sorted of wanted the distance from the project at that point. I saw all of the flaws and none of the beauty. We had become polarized. Him, in love with life. Me, withdrawn from it. I wanted to switch places, I wanted to equalize. But it was necessary, it was life correcting the imbalance, bringing us back down.

And then he called. He was in Small Wood and needed me on the coast to shoot a scene with Heather. The big scene with her and he couldn't do it by himself, was afraid to do it by himself. So I drove the many miles to the coast. It was beautiful that time of year. The roads ever twisting revealing deep forest and valley. Sunlight dotting through the thickness of it all. I drove with the window down and the radio blaring, it crackling in and out of reception.

I met them both at Justin's parent's house. We drove from there to a clothing store where we picked out lingerie for Heather to wear in scene. The middle-aged woman garment attendant gave serious pause to two young men helping this young woman pick out and model barely theres. She didn't say anything with her mouth.

From there we went to a photographer friend's home-studio overlooking the coast. He was on a shoot in Washington state and gave us access to his place. We set-up in the bathroom. Lighting kits were unfurled and cameras set-up on tripods. It was Justin and me and her. This was to be done minimal, for her comfort.

The problem came after the scene was shot. After the sweat was wiped from our brows and we just stood there and shook nervously. It all felt wrong. Justin and I couldn't talk about this until Heather took leave of our company. There was too much silence in that car before we dropped her off.

By that evening, I was back home and quiet and moody. Justin called me up and told me that Heather was furious, that Heather's boyfriend was furious. She wanted the tapes in her hand and she wanted to destroy them. The boyfriend wanted to beat the fucking shit out of Justin. He was afraid to leave his parent's house.

I did not know how this happened. Justin was hysterical. I drove back to the coast and took him for a ride. We did damage control. We were hopeful about the state of the film, we could recast once again. But by now Heather was on all our posters and what a great image that was, of her nakedness just covered, holding that giant shard of broken mirror. We had to fix what was right with her. She was hurt and vulnerable right now. And whether we could admit it or not, we did it to her. We could have done things differently. Maybe if she saw the tapes, she'd come to a different conclusion. I kept driving and Justin kept talking. We talked it to death. We replayed the moment over and over, each time it was different. Sometimes we were right, sometimes she was. We loved ourselves, hated ourselves. We drove and did not stop.