Happy in the Dark

(An excerpt from "My Life in Movies," a work-in-progress)

I take my seat in the mostly empty theater. Outside, it is a bright windy day, but I am happy to have had the brightness and wind eclipsed when I walked through the doors of the movie-house. There is something perversely satisfying about the disappearance of the daybright world, particularly when it is a movie-house or bar that is responsible for the hijacking.

This is my third visit to the movie-house this week. The movie-house, located in the Mission District, San Francisco, is one of those classic movie-houses on the verge of becoming an endangered species. There is no stadium seating in this theater, no obnoxiously amped sound system, no franchise-tendered popcorn shrimp or breaded chicken strips available at the concession stand.

The screen, like the theater itself, is of modest dimensions. The concession booth offerings, modest as well: a half-dozen different candies, popcorn served with real butter, soft drinks, coffee and tea. When I entered the movie-house I ordered a coffee and small popcorn with extra butter. The young man behind the counter served me and said—Enjoy your movie—and I could tell he really meant it. The young man struck me as a movie buff who was absolutely thrilled to be working a concession booth at a classic movie-house.

Young man, you are snug inside your dream, stay there as long as you can—I wanted to say to the young man, but only said thanks and went into the theater.

It is a Tuesday and I should be out looking for a job. That’s the reason I am here, in San Francisco. My wife and three-year-old daughter are presently living with my wife’s mother in Baton Rouge, waiting for me to find a job, then send for them, so we can start our new life in San Francisco. Until I found a job, one that would support all three of us, our new life, together, would be on hold.

I am staying with friends, who live five blocks away from the movie-house. I have been in San Francisco three weeks, and the first week I looked for a job with determination and enthusiasm, and by the second week my determination and enthusiasm had waned, or rather had been redirected to other areas of interest: mostly bars, and the classic movie-house.

When I talked to my wife on the phone to report my progress, I made sure to omit the frequency of my visits to the bars and the movie-house. Mt wife had lived in San Francisco once before, as had I, and she said: San Francisco can be a tough place to find work. I had her sympathy, for a while anyway, which was good.

On this day, the movie showing was Prozac Nation. Christina Ricci was playing the pill-addicted, suicide-fringed writer, Elizabeth Wurtzel. I hadn’t read the book, but I enjoyed the photo of Wurtzel on the cover. She reminded me of a lost waif, , a Sylvia Plath pin-up girl, and this photo of hers had inspired a number of fantasies, always set off by the line—I want to fuck Elizabeth Wurtzel—as if the green-light cue voiced from off-stage. The sad girls, the ones with the gummy insides and rainy mirrors always got to me. This may or may not have been Elizabeth Wurtzel, but the fantasy surrogate I had spawned from the “idea” of Elizabeth Wurtzel was the one with whom I conducted my shadow-play affair.

The lights in the theater go down. I notice that the young man from the concession booth has taken a seat in the back row. I am tempted to ask him if he’s read Prozac Nation, and what he thought of the cover photo of Elizabeth Wurtzel, but the urge flits past and I remain seated, munching my popcorn.

The movie begins, and with it arrives my temporary pardon from the daybright reality outside the movie-house.

I’ll look for work as soon as I leave the movie-house, I think, then remember it will be happy hour at Jelly Roll’s, the bar across the street, when the movie lets out.

Tomorrow. I’ll definitely look for work tomorrow.

No Runway Required

crapshooting among the stars,
the supermodel impressed her peers
and public-at-large
when, suddenly,
out of runway
to strut upon,
she began
walking on air,
solidly,

a minor miracle
of resourcefulness,

for without a runway
to support all-she-was,
her steps
would have fallen
without an echo,
nor applause—
and then what?

The Double-Crosser

One day, while lost on a trail
in deep, dark woods, I met my Double
and his cross, and they were heading back
to the place
from where I had come.

Where are you going, I asked him,

and he shook his head, then thrust out his cross,
which I was reluctant to take,
but he stuck it in my face,
so I took it and walked on,
with my Double
following closely
behind.

Knocking on Silence

Writing often feels like knocking on silence. Like, I’m at some mysterious stranger’s door and it is raining outside and I am wet and rumpled (inside and out), hoping the door will open and I will be let in.
Knock-knock.
No answer.
Knock-knock-knock.
Still no answer.
Knockknockknockknockknock.
Great sense of urgency and desperation.
And so no-answer stings just a little bit more. That is, the more you want in, the more no-response stings.
A little bit of ache, a little bit of longing. What can you do?
First off, you can stop knocking, you damn fool.
Who’s that, where’s that voice coming from?
No answer.
Goddamn, the entire tiny universe you seem to be trapped in is loaded with silence. It is a timeless place of hard knocks and no-responses.
What kind of place is this? Is this the tower, the tenement, the universe you’ve created?
And so I ask myself a lot of questions myself and I write. I knock on silence, religiously.
Silence is my big brother—my big and sometimes overbearing and monstrously invisible brother.
Come on silence, let’s sing together. Let’s dream our little dreams under a big black dome of an umbrella, and listen to the rainfall repeat-pelting its nylon skin.
Let us recount:
Something precious, something borrowed, something blue, something lost, something true.

There has been so much knocking on silence,
it has become the ultimate knock-knock joke.

Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Writer.
Writer why?
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Writer.
Writer why?

And on and on, endless repetitions and ribbons of silence.
Like razors.
Like boils.
Like blisters.

Like the means by which mercy tries and tries, and fails, to relieve itself
of dreaming.

Pink Sweater

Skinny on faith and far-fetched of heart, he petted the dog, realizing that the leash around the dog's neck made it as if he were touching her, the owner.

She was lonely. He could tell. He was always good at sniffing out people's loneliness.

The more affectionately he petted the dog, the more the woman felt touched, needed.

I can't believe there's a dog between us--an overpuffed cloud of a wall wearing a ridiculous pink sweater. Is this what human connection has come to?

He had to laugh, though he didn't.

ancient chinese love song

if i were
an ancient chinese poet
carting a rain-flooded wheelbarrow
or rowing a boat
across a wind-tunneled lake—
things would be different

i would be ancient
and chinese
and would eat
heart-shaped poems
and the poems i wrote
about my sorrow
and my longing
would make my sorrow
and my longing
into something different
than what they are now

something greater

and i would be different
from what
or who I am now
i would be ancient
and chinese
i would be a special kind of river
singing myself to sleep
every night

i would be
the moon
dreaming of darkest mists
to lose myself
and my shine in

i would be ancient
and chinese
and so full of poems
i’d pop
leaving behind only
a pair of floating lips
with a sad easy smile
so as to show the world
just how much poet
the air can hold

Cadillacs in Heaven

He’d be there, day after day, all summer long: Old Man Red in his baggy trousers, and short-sleeved button-down shirts, seated on his beach chair stationed on the top of his stoop.
The brown-banded, beige fisherman hat that he wore would be pulled down low, half-screening his eyes, and his bushy white moustache looked like a small animal presided over by the stand-out feature on his face: his bulbous, pastry-puff of a nose.
We, the boys of summer, would be in the street playing wiffle-ball. We had spray-painted bases and foul lines, and every year, as part of our opening day ritual, we would re-do the bases and foul-lines. We’d buy our wiffle-balls and plastic yellow bats at the pharmacy around the corner.
The plastic white wiffle-balls came in black-and-orange boxes and the image of a famous pitcher would always appear on the box (back in those days: Jim Palmer, Nolan Ryan, Mike Scott).
The wiffle-balls had slits cut in a circular pattern around the top half of the ball, and we would execute all kinds of curveballs, sliders and splitters, by shifting our arm angles, with vigorous plasticity, and applying various grips. When it came to the bats, we would cut a hole in the top of them, then stuff the hollowed-out insides of the bat with newspaper, adding density. Then we would cover our bats from top to bottom in black electric tape, giving them a menacing look.
Old Man Red was a “regular” at our games, and was extremely vocal. He would heckle us in his gravelly, good-natured tone, often shouting through cupped hands: Come on, you bum, you want me to get up there and show you how it’s done, or, Are you a pitcher or a belly-itcher … you a batter or a back-scratcher?
Yet Red’s most famous line, the one which he said at least once a game: You hit a home run and I’ll buy you a Cadillac.
We never knew which one of us he was going to say it to, nor when he was going to say it. And if you did hit a home run in that at-bat, which only happened several times over the years, and asked for the Cadillac, Red would say something like—Forget the Cadillac, you hit two home runs, I’ll buy you a limo!
When Old Man Red passed, there was a silence to the games that was noticeable. Season after season, there was something about counting on that never-to-be-fulfilled-promise of winning a Cadillac from Red that added extra zip and crackle to our games.
One game, when I swatted three H.R.’s in three successive at-bats, Andy said: Red would’ve got you an airplane, Pips.
I smiled, rounding the bases.