And Mieze closes one curtain after another and dresses for work, her night shift at the hospital, or was it the nursing home, and the meat on the table with her teeth marks, and the glass on the table with her lip marks.
Gods of the Plague #2
And Mieze says she was on this hike with a friend of hers, this guy named Tommy, who was really into German film, and who was always making these elaborate and contradictory and paradoxical arguments about why Herzog was better than Fassbinder, except for early Fassbinder, who, he claimed, no one could touch, no one could outdo, like the scene from Gods of the Plague where the male criminal is killed in a botched holdup and the female characters stand around his grave like Furies that have been momentarily appeased. And Mieze says she would remind Tommy about how the last thing you remember from the film is the woman who will one day become Maria Braun standing in the cemetery in her beautiful slightly sleazy coat looking into the distance as if looking into the future characters she will one day play. And Mieze says one day while talking about these things, among others, they were hiking through the woods in northwestern Tennessee, and it started to rain, so they ran under a rock near a creek, and as they were sitting there watching the lightning and listening to the thunder they started kissing each other though they had never kissed in the past, it was like they had wandered into another film, had moved from being in a lightweight teenage drama into a soft porn film with multiple scenes in the woods, and soon he was inside of her and her legs were wrapped around his hips, he did not wear a condom and she had not asked him to wear one, though looking back, Mieze says, she doesn’t know why, and can only attribute his not wearing a condom and her not asking him to wear one to a stupid youthful belief in spontaneity, though he did pull out when he came, Mieze says, and afterwards they held each other and listened to the rain pour through the tree branches above them, and then they slowly and gingerly, Mieze says, pulled their underwear and jeans back up and without a word about what had happened started to discuss the prequel to Fassbinder’s Gods of the Plague, a film Mieze thought was entitled Love is Colder than Death, though she might have been wrong, and maybe the title was different, maybe love was colder than something else entirely, and Mieze and Tommy both admitted it was a film neither of them had seen, though they intended to in the near or distant future.
Dream of the Varying Pork Cloud
She wept over the dream that sounded like cars crashing in the sky.
He felt troubled by the dream where faces melted towards mouths that never closed.
She wore black in the salt dream.
He wore pink to the pork dream.
She walked through the dream located on a beach with extinct sand.
He screamed in a dream that ended without him.
She called her dreams obscene names.
He could tell his dreams apart from the way they breathed in his hands.
Mice were a problem of the spirit, rats a problem of the mind.
Tigers presented their meat foliage and panthers their shadow foliage.
Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #1
I met Franz in Memphis in late December at a café. It had white tables and white ceiling fans. It had blue walls. It had bright windows. It had a crimson sofa. It had another crimson sofa.
I met Franz in late December. He on the crimson sofa. Myself on a white chair. And a nearby blue wall. A bright window nearby. He had just gotten in from Los Angeles. Sometimes in Los Angeles he had no place of his own and slept on other people’s couches. Sometimes, especially after working on a film, he had quite a bit of money. But he made a point of spending it before he could save it.
The crimson sofa with overstuffed and threadbare armrests and with feet carved to look like talons holding balls. The blue walls bare. The ceiling fans spinning. A warm December day.
He told me he was helping out on this low-budget film in Tucson back around Halloween, he told me it was a great city but they were filming in this cramped little apartment in a bad neighborhood, meth dealers were always on the corner trying to look like they were just hanging out, sometimes helicopters circled at night, when you came in from a party say around two or so you prayed you wouldn’t get shot or held up, but the desert he said, the desert.
Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #2
Franz told me that afternoon at the cafe that he would talk to Mieze on his cell phone every night around this time in his life, this time in Tucson he was currently telling me about, he said they’d start speaking to one another in very civil tones but then it was like some cloud would pass over either him or her and one of them would say something cruel and unforgivable, and then the other person would say something cruel and unforgivable just to keep things balanced, and an argument would ensue, lots of insults and yelling, very personal and private insults and plenty of ugly hoarse yelling, but then right before hanging up they would apologize or at least smooth things over enough so that it’d be clear they would talk again the next night, him under the desert sky, and her under whatever the sky looked like in Baltimore, where she had moved in with her aunt and was working on a novel, a story that would tell us about the childhood of Norman Bates, a story from the mother’s point of view.
The bright window of that café. The crimson sofa in that café. And the other crimson sofa.
Franz told me that afternoon at the café that the movie he worked on was a remake of a Fassbinder film, he couldn’t remember which one, except it wasn’t quite a remake, it simply had some basic ideas from Fassbinder it was playing with, like this woman who sells porn from a wicker basket, that was one, and they did real porn shots which he had never done before, which felt strange filming, this guy and girl in their early twenties, they didn’t fuck but he used a large plastic dick on her then she turned it around and put it up his ass, he never knew if they were a couple in real life or just a couple for the film, then at the party after filming they tried to give him the dick and he said no that was all right but they insisted so he stuck it in his bag and flew off to Los Angeles the next day.
Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #3
That afternoon in the café Franz told me money, money, money, that’s all he can think about these days. He on the crimson sofa. Myself in the white chair.
He told me money was like trying to catch a butterfly with your bare hands. Or worse. With your mouth while your hands were tied behind your back.
He told me if he had enough money he could make movies that would make Arthur Penn look like shit and Hitchcock look like an idiot, not that he didn’t love Penn and Hitchcock.
The blue walls in the café appeared particularly vivid because of the bright windows.
Franz told me that afternoon in the café that one night in Tucson there was this party, him and a bunch of other people on the roof of a house drinking, the stars as big as the ones in that Van Gogh painting, starry starry night or whatever it’s called, big fucking stars, stars you’d expect to see at the end of the world, and this one guy, one of the script writers, he was really into Nietzsche and had this elaborate knife collection, Japanese knives with chiseled handles, German knives with ornate and curving blades, and this guy he came up to Franz during this rooftop party and started to say how he could throw Franz off the roof just like that, and he snapped his fingers, and then he said how there was nothing Franz could do about it, but it was his choice the guy said, his choice not to throw Franz off the roof, and he had chosen not to, so Franz didn’t have to worry he said, at least not tonight, at least not right now.