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.