The Thirty-Eighth Post

What should a mother do when her infant dies? Should she have another? While the script The Maestro and I are writing sits on the back burner, I continue to work on other things, starting new projects, attempting new genres. Because I won’t get rich writing by not writing.

Even now, new memories still appear, come together. Now reframed, re-contextualized. Seeming even more twisted than when they happened; Lynchian, Cronenbergian, velvet nightmares— My mother, flaunting her body around the house when it was just me, in my early teens, and her. Wearing braless tanks and pantiless shorts. Sitting, legs spread in the eat, and I’m seeing her bush peak out from underneath. Feeling embarrassed when a friend saw the same thing. Seeing her put a drink down in front of my older cousin and watching him watch her tank come down and expose her hanging tits. On vacation in Hawaii, mortified as she made no effort to be discreet as she asked our private tour guide what turned him on. I was all of 12 or 13 when these things happened. Ah, so that’s why she makes my skin crawl so much today – she always, always has. That’s why she doesn’t respect any of my boundaries – she’s no clue about them.

And then a crushing moment, experienced in the living room of our home, when my father came back from overseas, wanted to be alone while I wanted to hang around with him, and he said to me, “You know, when you’re around a lot, it doesn’t please me; your presence becomes cheap. If you want me to enjoy your company, show yourself less.”

And there’s me, hanging on the words, waiting for the punchline as usual, the wink, the twinkle in the eye to suggest playful sarcasm, irony, a joke, anything, and finding just his stone-faced displeasure, disengagement, and realizing he meant it I went to my room and looked in the mirror and thought I must be heinous, ugly, a terrible disappointment for my father to feel that way about me because all my friends’ fathers seemed to enjoy hanging out with their sons.

“He said it, he actually used the word ‘cheap’?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“C-h-e-a-p.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s so sickening.”

Silence from me.

“What did you do after that? Was that when you started to hurt yourself?”

“Not till about a year after.”

“How did you feel about yourself?”

“Ugly. Unloved, unlovable. Unliked.”

“All children do that. They find a way, even if it’s a terrible way, to validate what their parents say, so they believe it. All children.”

More silence.

“Do you find yourself feeling some of these things today in your life?”

“Of course. I know they’re lies, and I know they’re not true, but there they are, I feel them all the same.”

“Yeah. Because the truth is there’s a lot to like.”

Silence.

“I know that’s probably hard to hear at this moment.”

“Yeah. It is.”

My hand, gripping the phone tight. The tears falling.

I listen to her write down notes.

*

Stella, one of my best friends, also a writer, digs the idea I’ve just run by her.

“It’s commercial whoring,” I tell her. “Very nearly hack work. We’re blatantly taking a classic template for a movie like that and filling in the blanks. But I think if you fill them up with good conflicts, nobody–and by ‘nobody’ I mean a producer or creative executive–is going to give a shit. They’ll like that it came out of a mold. They all want the same thing ‘only different’. They won’t even fucking buy it otherwise!”

“Hey it sounds good to me. I’d like to write something that’ll sell, too.”

“And this thing can pay for our other things. The other pet projects that take a long time to finish. We should probably always be writing one thing that can pay for all the other things.”

“Yep.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Right on.”

And so we have a logline. Here’s the logline for “Pretty Woman”: A rich businessman falls in love with the prostitute he hires for a week.

You have no idea how hard it is to make a logline work like that. It’s so simple, but sometimes it’s harder than writing the scenes themselves.

The Thirty-Seventh Post

Everyone’s out of town. Birnbaum, in Eastern Europe for 12 weeks. Maestro, in China for 8. I got tired of kicking the rewrite around without a real sense of direction, and getting the sense that I was the only one interested in continuing to write, I decided to start another screenplay, with a really dear friend who’ll be my writing partner. It’s something I’m getting more comfortable doing – putting my brain together with someone else’s and see what bastard children we create that I ordinarily wouldn’t on my own. These attempts are all commercial in nature and have nothing to do with the kind of writing I’ve aspired to as a W/writer, but really so they can pay for it.

I’ve a lot to say about my relationship with my mother, and it’s nothing I probably haven’t said already on this blog, so instead of a rant, I’ll sum it all up by saying she makes it easier and easier to disconnect myself from her. I’m tired of parenting her, being her surrogate husband, and I really fucking hate it when she acts like she’s my child. My narcissistic, disingenuously stupid, self-made victim child. Who calls all of this “love and concern”. My father and mother have made me hate hearing the words “I love you”. That’s when I freak. That’s when I cringe. That’s when I feel dirty, in real need of a thorough cleaning. That’s when I want to run. Though I try to put up with, and receive it, because it might be good for me. Or something like that. I don’t know, I’ve got a headache.

The bills are piling up and it’s getting hard to pay them all. Another reason for my commercial aspirations. Oof. I used to put up with being broke a lot better in my 20s. When you’re 34, the feeling of loserishness can creep in. I shake it off by going to the gym. Though my trainer’s gone AWOL. Exhausting myself. Steam emanating.

But, all is not amiss. Silas, the kid I tutored, won the fucking laptop in the writing contest sponsored by the shelter. I handed it to him in the library near the apartment his mom just moved them into and he was the envy of every kid there. And it’s been a few months since I’ve seen him but his mother rang last week to tell me that in the time since, he’d written a novel that was now being published in hardcover, nationwide. I was agog, filled with pride, terribly moved for them. This’ll help pay for school, college, clothes. And by the time he’s an adult he’ll have had a lifetime of writing and publishing experience. It’s insane. Insanely good. I wish I didn’t have a headache – this shouldn’t sound so subdued.

If I don’t make it and this kid does, honestly, it’d be alright.