Sante Sangre was on the TV. There was a futon in the middle of the room and a smell I couldn't place. The images on the screen had a young man carving a tattoo into his chest of a giant eagle. He screamed openly. The backdrop was a movable circus, somewhere in a foreign land. By the title of the movie, I imagined it to be Bogota, Columbia, but I can't say why. It might have been Brett told me that was where it took place. I looked at Brett, who was next to me, but he didn't see me, not in the way I wanted him to.
It's good for you to be seeing this. It's glorious film-making. Look at the mime, he said.
The mime was dancing the last I remember. She started out young and made it to her twenties. Frozen in celluloid. Never to get older. She died in the film or maybe she lived and everybody else died. It was Christmas. We had food, but it wasn't Christmas food. It was from Mrs. Gooch's, which was the old Whole Foods. Brett and I were dressed up as if this were some kind of party. Only no one was there except for us. We had bought a tree and decorated it with lights. I never kissed Brett. Not even when I was too drunk to see. He smelled like he was dying. A mixture of too much smoke and too little clean blood. Later, much much later, I found out the smell was meth or crack. Not the smell in the place we lived, but the smell emanating from his pores. At the time I was too young to know what a relationship was. I grew up in a manner, where I just thought it was fighting and then ignoring each other or trying to tear the psyche apart. I had been lonely. I had prayed for a boyfriend. If there is a God and I'm not saying there is, He/She/It sent me Brett. Brett hated me though. This wasn't the great loves that I read about. In turns I became too skinny or too tired to do anything about whatever this was. In other words, all I thought about was leaving, only I couldn't.
We played house that night. Reading Basketball Diaries out loud. Listening to The Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop. It was my education, because I had grown up on punk rock and John Steinbeck, Brett took it upon himself to find something to teach me every day about the things that inspired him. Today's lesson was in film-making. I didn't want to watch. It was grotesque. The boy cut off the arms of his mother and then put his arms where her arms should have been, and then did some kind of performance art wherein he was the puppeteer and she was the puppet. Only it was reversed, psychologically speaking. She was the one speaking. Singing, performing. She controlled him. It was also incestuous. He would prop her up and make whatever it was she was doing happen. But, she was the power. He was the weakling. In the movie the female mime is in a tutu, it seems she might be the only one who isn't crazy, except when you really stared at her face you couldn't be sure. I kept thinking she would save the boy. The boy was now a man, but they had been doing this, living at the circus since they were children. It was a metaphor for my life. It wasn't my own anymore. I couldn't tell who was crazy and I was keeping secrets from myself so that I wouldn't know what was happening to me. When I say the boy cut the arms off his mother, what I really think happened in the movie, is his mother was raped and the rapists stole her arms. That was it. It's so hard to piece it together. The boy saw it happen and then they made an act, that was like the act she had done before only now, it was the boy who "played" her arms. Sorry to be so confusing. Memories don't always reveal themselves with complete accuracy.
I had friends before this thing I was in with Brett. I called them and left messages. Brett came home every day and erased all the messages from my answering machine. During the two years that sometimes I remember as shorter and sometimes longer, I thought I had no friends. No one ever called me back. Not my own mother. Not my sister. Not anyone. Later, I found out they had called. They were worried. I was in trouble in a way I can't even articulate now, so many years away from it. I was the puppet or he was. It was changeable and confusing. Every day a new disaster. But, today was Christmas. I bought him something: a first edition of a very obscure book, I can't remember even now. It wasn't what he wanted, but he pretended to like it. He got me a jacket. It wasn't the one I wanted either. Promises were broken. We looked with disappointment at our presents. At our humanity. At some point we drank everything we had and then Brett looked at me and said:
Let's get out of here.
So, we went to the Red Lion, where he knew a bartender who took care of us. We didn't talk to each other. I was so grateful to have a pretty girl next to me to talk to. At some point she burst out crying and said her boyfriend left her. I looked at Brett, who was studying us for clues to what we were planning, but I was too tired to hide it. I hugged the girl and Brett jumped off his barstool and down the stairs. We asked for another way out of there. The bartender showed us we could get out through the back fence. We did that and made our way up somebody else's brick walkway to make our escape. If we made it to Glendale Blvd. he would find us, so we kept close to the houses and made our way to Riverside and at Riverside we somehow got to BigFoot Lodge. I can't remember the way we did it, just that we did. BigFoot Lodge had some band. We were kids again. She was beautiful and represented freedom. She had some pills that we took. We were free just for the night, free to do whatever. We drank and laughed and became friends with a bond so deep even the simpleness of life couldn't break it. Eventually some guys drove us home. She lived in the Hollywood Hills with someone she hated. I lived where there were gunshots every night. It didn't matter. We were the same. Her name is lost with most of the things I lost those years. I held on to what was unimportant and lost everything that mattered. I never saw her again.
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