"Do we really live in the world that Bloodstone haunts? If so, then he isn't the real monster in the story – our own mediocrity is, our silence and exile from ourselves. Forget the cunning." She also quoted the artist Robert Henri. "Low art is just telling things; as, There is the night. High art gives the feeling of night. . . . Here is an emotional landscape. It is like something thought, something remembered." In fact, "Something Thought, Something Remembered" was the title of her essay, which, with its faint reference to Proust, added even more prestige.
Years after I saw the film for the first time, I heard Spalding Gray do one of his monologues. In the middle of it, Gray said something that was also part of the essence of Midnight: "One of my brother's biggest fears was the basement of our house. When our parents would go away he'd turn out the lights and crawl on his belly from the bedroom down the front stairs, then down the basement stairs, and with his eyes closed he would feel the basement walls, every crack, feeling his way around the entire room until he either died or didn't die."
Somehow Phil Strayhorn had created a story that made his audience face their own basement fears with all the lights off and no weapon handy.
When Phil was a boy, his father used to tell him and his sister "bedtime stories." Not a nice man, Mr. Strayhorn probably thought of it as a good way of making up to two children he neither liked nor helped. According to his son, the stories were long and good but too often unnecessarily frightening or sad.
"He'd scare the shit out of us and make us cry. Then the bastard'd put his arm around us and say, 'It's okay, it's okay. Daddy's here! Daddy'll protect you.' He wanted both our fear and our love. That's not fair, man."
If you have seen Midnight Too, you're familiar with this scene. Only in the movie, Daddy is Bloodstone in disguise, and what happens to the children isn't okay. Phil and his parents stopped speaking after it came out. But he said too bad; they didn't like the story because the parts about them were true.
M.T. was three times as successful at the box office (and video counter) as its predecessor. As a result, Phil and Matthew Portland formed Fast Forward Productions and started looking around for other properties to develop.
One of the funnier results of the first film was the surprising popularity of Matthew Portland, actor. He received so much fan mail for his portrayal of Paul Eddoes, town mayor and professional dumbo, that he and his new partner decided to keep Paul around for the second and third parts of the series. Matthew was thrilled.
That third part was Midnight Always Comes, but by the time they got to the end of filming, Phil was calling it "Midnight Never Leaves." He was tired of Bloodstone, tired of gore, tired of signing autographs because he was a beloved mass murderer,
"I don't want to go off-off Broadway to do King Lear, Weber, but it would be nice to act in something other than a bloodbath for once."
I was shooting Wonderful then and asked if he'd like to play the small role of the transvestite, Lily Reynard. He quickly said yes and was damned good in it.
Not long afterward, the earthquake came and Phil saved my life. If he hadn't pulled me out of the restaurant as soon as the tremors began, I'm sure I would have been crushed with the others when the roof fell in with one big, horrifying whump!
Tired and empty and still shaken by the sound of that roof, I left for Europe as soon as I finished Wonderful. I wanted out of California and was already half sure I wanted out of my life there. Europe was the green light at the end of my dock. I was convinced being there would at least give me some perspective.
I didn't hear much from Phil in my year overseas, except for a few postcards saying vague things like he was looking into possibilities.
When I came back he showed me The Circus on Fire. A fifteen-minute video he'd been commissioned to make by the rock group Vitamin D, the film is a beauty, a small Joseph Cornell box of wonder and deceit. You can watch it five times in a row and hope for a sixth. In many ways it's the best thing he ever did, but the thugs in the group thought it was too heavy and said no. They'd expected Bloodstone to make them a video like Midnight. What they got instead was some weird thing with almost no music and puppets speaking ancient maps.
Without a word he put it in a drawer and went back to work on Midnight Kills. When I asked how he felt about that, he said working on the video had given him a superb idea for a new film. After playing Bloodstone again, he'd have enough money to finance the whole project himself. What was this new idea? He wouldn't say. That was a good sign.
About this time two very different things happened to him. The first was meeting Sasha, the second were the killings in Florida.
Many newspapers tried to call them "The Bloodstone Murders," but luckily the nickname didn't stick. A seventeen-year-old lunatic in Sarasota saw Midnight too many times. Then, while babysitting one night, he killed his little brother and sister the same way Bloodstone got two people in the film.
4
The dead glow. I still don't know why, but they do. There is much love, warmth, and companionship here . . . all the good things, plus we have – or rather we are – this soft light. It is not so different, but you can't help smiling in the beginning when you look and see you have a lot in common with fireflies.
Those children Weber spoke of are here. They are quiet and sweet, and I try hard to be their friend.
I must, because it is my fault they're here. I didn't believe that when I was alive, but now I understand. That is part of the process. You are taught to understand.
There is a life review, of course, but it was so much more interesting than I had ever imagined. For one thing, they show you how and where your life really happened. Things you didn't experience or weren't ever aware of, but which dyed the fabric of your life its final color.
I was shown the night my parents slept together and conceived me (my father came so quickly, Mother patted his back and fell immediately asleep).
Unknown pieces of the real pain, surprise, and love that lived inside the walls of our growing-up house, our younger hearts: my parents', my sister's, mine.
I have seen it all now: Jeffrey Vincent murdering his little brother and sister, Sasha finding my body on the patio, even the death of Weber's mother.
I was permitted to show him that, although they say they've rarely done that before: allowed someone to see any part of their complete truth while still alive. It is an essential part of the job of living to alone find what we can of these ruins within and translate their hieroglyphics. The archaeology of the heart is the only important study.
For instance, there is a photograph of me (among others) on Weber's dresser in New York. I am in his comfortable old leather chair, hands in lap, one leg crossed over the other. My face is its usual expressionless thin spade with hair on top. On the floor next to the chair are four of those Bloodstone masks that were once popular. I'd brought them to Weber that day as a joke.
I am sitting there looking very self-satisfied in my Anderson & Shepard sport jacket, a silk ascot wrapped in a pompously correct knot around my throat. On the floor are those identical silver faces, strewn at random.