Portrait II

These "portraits" are composed in the mornings, typically in a pre-caffeinated state. They are fictional representations of the people I share the subway with.

Thousands of worm hairs inch their way from the infected yarmulke. Beady eyes of a man once named Todd hastily scan a newspaper. He packed chicken salad with pickles on pumpernickel bread. He reads conspiracy theories in the back pages of the Weekly World News. He was born into a family of nine in the Bronx. He has been to the zoo a number of times that he has forgotten. His gold rimmed glasses were an exorbitant indulgence the likes of which he has not and likely will not repeat again. He has read of the prodigal son so he knows better. He feels guilty for not believing with all of his being. It isn’t even that he has doubts. Doubts would be a good sign; a sign of deep care being tested. What he feels is more like what an involuntary actor feels who is reading lines with his relative who is trying out for a part. He scans and taps. Gnosticism is not his enemy. The real estate pages with images of false idols are much more his speed. His mother is a generator; his brothers all engineers.

Portrait I

Wind whipped man with kimchi hair drags three rolling suitcases of disappointed color through Pacific Heights. He scream whispers “Fuck you”; “You piece of shit”. He chants. He prays. He marches away form downtown. This morning he waited in line at a casting call he read about in the SF Guardian. The ad called for a man of thirty to forty; caucasian; urban. He thought acting jobs would abound in San Francisco. He left the free clinic at eight this morning to find a line around the block. He stood with the healthy, with the handsome, with the trained, with the hungry. He stood with the last shred of chemical dignity to be turned away while still in line by a cattle rancher, herding the tasty. The five percent failure rate is subterranean. He scoops through concrete with his hands. Families crack crackers on Boxing Day. He curses the digital age.

Shell Armor at the Park

Shell Armor at the Park

It stinks out by the bathrooms in the park. There is shade from the trees that swings over the day’s passing. There is a water dish and a food bowl that ring loud from barking dogs. The building sinks across a hill. That smell rises from minerals in the earth. There is a tunnel from the core to the bathroom. She shows me the mess on her dress. She says it is dirt on her dress. She watches as the others run rampant. She watches the exits. She is with us every day.

The armies stomp over the soft sand. We hide beneath wooden structures and throw stones at them. They hang us from the bars. Tie our shoes together and throw them up. We are the armed rebellion.
There is shadow speak in the bathroom. Expired hand grenades and gravity smell. Sand under my fingernails stuffed into my finger veins. The men’s bathroom is a hive inside, I am sure. The queen of the insects gives birth in a stall. The bathroom by the hill, where no grown go.
I feel the welling belly balloon. Squirming legs and sideways glances. I ask her about the location of the bathroom. She looks like kneecaps.
“Non, non, non, en Francais!”
I cannot dig into her tunnel. I am no hacker of codes. They don’t speak the language of home. Pins and needles swarm my pants. I dig through the sugar hills. The ones that are kept secret from the bees of the stink hive. I dig under the surveillance of the park. Dogs fight at the tunnel’s mouth. They bark and snap about the metal water bowl. They are tied up. I sneak past them. I set myself flush to the trees and the wall so that their snaps don’t get me. I put my thumb and finger in an L shape. Pow. The swarming in my pants can feel the life of the hive and this only excites it more.
Inside the bathroom goes drip drop. Broken tiles like grandma’s teeth. The darkness moves. Man inside, I can hear him. Two fat man sneakers. Untied. Shoelaces mop the floor. Swish. No kneecaps. Severed from ankles down. Swinging stall door now pushing out the darkness so it falls onto the floor. I hear the bugs in my ears and in the mirrors.
‘Can you help me?’
‘Let’s go for a nice ride.’
Now we’re in the car cruising through the far beyond and non-existence and all that in between, he says. He drives faster than dad and the bottle on the ground says Mad Dog 20/20. The seat is sticky. I feel like my mouth is filling up with clay so that it stays open forever, maybe even breaking my jaw and the bugs are flying everywhere. So fast. Clay fills me up and I erupt slowly. He doesn’t seem to notice.
I remember movies we watched in science class about beetles with pig-iron shells for armor. They scuttled through the earth, snapping limbs and carrying back trophies to their tunnels. Sometimes the ugly beetles made mammals bleed and it made me feel sick like the back sections of comic books. In the videos we also learned that bees stung even though it killed them when their stingers came out and their organs fell out of their stinger holes.
I can’t even breathe. His wants bounce off the moon to me, making a triangle. We both know about the moon from pictures but not from the feel of moon dust under our feet. It’s how you know cockroaches will taste bad even before you break their backs with your teeth. We don’t know each other but we know that tastes bad and we know we both know it.
His hands have tiny little wounds like the holes stars make in the sky. He pats me on the head. I’m scared his hand meat will fall out like the bees. The green sticker on the windshield says Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I wonder if they wonder where I am at the park. Maybe I shouldn’t have mounted the rebellion. Maybe she wonders. Maybe she tells.
I squirm away but the seat belt is tight. He gives me an indian rug burn. We are on the highway towards granny’s house. She has blackberry bushes. They have thorns.  
We’ve pulled over so he can talk on the phone and so I can hear my parents crying. I don’t get to talk to them for very long even though I want to. Their voices are tape recordings of ancient history. Imaginary. He tells me that it’s time for us to wait. He asks me about where I live. He asks me if I know how to bait a hook. He tells me his dad used to bait hooks with worms. I feel like I’m leaning out the ledge of a window looking down on palm trees for fun. He shows me his worms.
He offers me barbecue in a styrofoam box that is molten candy corn. The barbecue is painful crunchy grains building up in my back teeth. I remember finding deer skulls with ground down molars in the hills and in the empty cabins at granny’s house. Eating in the car. This is how revolutionaries eat. Restaurants are under surveillance. I tell him about the revolution. I let him know I am not to be messed with. He laughs and talks about “I Ran”. I say “Ee- Rohn” to try to fix his pronunciation without making him feel bad for being poor. Mom always said you have to get along with poor people even if they act bad. It’s not their fault. She says you have to do it for the ones that don’t act bad because they really deserve it and so you have to give them all a chance. He says angels with broken wings move like horses. Poor people usually believe in God. I went to black church once on Martin Luther King day with mom.
Armies of dead mosquitoes like carbuncles on the windshield. The blood of the machine is mercury. Liquid at room temperature. I am not scared for my body, just my life. The DJ on the radio chants.
We’re going fast. It’s scary. I close my eyes. They creep behind us in rows. Arms extended. Fingers cocked. Pow. His skull opens up like the spout on a milk carton and falls forward. His feelers quiver and lilt. They come in numbers and tear him away from the flypaper seat. His clothes and skin peel off. His back is amber wet scabs. Polyps on his back like brussel sprout stalks. Reverse transcriptase. The compression bangs came late, after the blood fell. The dark armor horses on two legs marching, keeping one leg on the ground at all times. I fall into them. At least I wish. What I really know is that this isn’t going to happen.
He asks me if I want a stick of gum. It is Doublemint. That is not my favorite gum but I take it because gum is gum. He asks why revolt? The only way to break out of four walled room is through tunnels. Tunnels are held up by secrets. Revolution is on the side of secrets. He says if he were rich he would not revolt. I ask him if he steps on spiders. He says yes. There is plunging silence. He says he will stop.
I think why me but I ask instead why not let me go to the bathroom. He says I can go. We stop at Denny’s. Denny’s bathroom is for customers only. We get Grand Slams. His fingernails are dwarves. The sleepy eyes of the slow. He asks me about my friends and do I have them and I tell him about the armed revolution. I tell him about choosing stones and pine cones and about being hung by my ankles from the bars. He talks about Pinochet. My parents don’t let me drink wine. I tell him about her. He says he used to clean up messes with dirt too. I tell him he would make a good spy.
He asks me what dad does for a living. I say he works at the office. He asks what he does. I say he works hard. He asks me if my mom works. I tell him she plays the cello. He asks do you want some advice? He says never trust a woman. He says you can’t win. I say what do you mean win? He says women are smarter than men and they will always trick you. I say how do you know that if women are smarter? He says to not be a smart ass. I ask him why he cares so much about my parents. I thought only kids cared about parents I say. He says I am a twerp and I’d better watch it.
The sound of eating pancakes is sucking face. His phone buzzes on the table and he presses a button. Buzzes and he silences it. I wonder who’s calling him. I wonder if he has scary friends. Do you have a gun? I ask him. Why does it matter? he says. I guess he means that he can keep me here with him whether he has a gun or not.

I make sure to put butter on each one of the pancakes in the stack. Mom and dad would never let me get a stack this big. It feels good to take bite after bite after bite. I tell him about this man I know of who didn’t even go to college and ended up working at a gas station. He says that’s just how things work out sometimes. I ask him where he went to college. He says he went to The Moon University. I tell him that doesn’t exist and where did he really go. He says it sure does and he’s hurt that I haven’t heard of it. I say oh yeah, maybe I have. I ask him what he studied. He says The Moon University specializes in extraterrestrial archaeology, in other words digging up alien bones. I ask him what aliens are like. He tells me there are different species. He says that one species is composed primarily of silicon in the way that we are composed of mostly carbon. This is possible because silicon has four free electrons and that makes it a perfect building block. These aliens look like computers made out of rock. They are terribly cruel but move terribly slowly. They live in giant stone zig-zagging temples. I say he must be very smart. I say I did not think he was smart before I learned about the Moon University. I ask him if it is hard to get into The Moon University. He says yes but he thinks I could do it.

I tell him my parents would never take me to Denny’s. He looks out at the parking lot again. I say they don’t let me eat junk food. He says what is junk food. I say Denny’s. He says oh.

I ask him if he has a girlfriend. He says no. I ask him if he ever had a girlfriend. He says yeah. I ask him if he ever got married. He says no. I ask him if he kissed his girlfriend even though they weren’t married. He says yeah. I tell him about how she kissed me at the park. We were squatting under the slide, where the sand is always wet right below the surface. He laughs and says that’s good. I say really? He says yeah. He is handsome. He knows about girls and girls like him.

I yawn real big with reaching teeth and he asks me if I’m tired. I tell him yeah and that I want to go home. He says, yeah, well, OK, I can go home if I want to but there’s still the fact that he hasn’t told me what he knows about the aliens and that he knows a whole lot more and it would be a shame for such a smart kid as me to miss out on this educational opportunity. I rest my head hard on my palm and peel and pull at my cheek to stretch the boredom out. He laughs and says yeah, stupid idea, kids don’t like school. He asks me if I want to come back to his place and watch The Price is Right. He has all the classic episodes with Bob Barker he says. I don’t know what The Price is Right is I say. He says it’s a great game show-

I want to go home I say. He grabs me by the collar and tells me in a pressed voice that I can’t go home.

The waitress who comes up and asks us how everything is going looks like she was born in a petri dish. The spots on her skin are a dead giveaway. He says we’re fine and calls me his son and I say he’s not my dad and she looks worried. He drops wet money on the table and picks me up and we walk out fast. We are outside and he puts me down in the car and asks me what I want to do. I tell him please don’t hurt me. He says hurt you? What do you mean? I thought we were having fun? I tell him that I am scared. I am in no way having fun. He says I am crazy to be scared. I ask him why my parents were crying on the phone. He says he didn’t mean for that to happen. I ask him why he took me into his car. He starts crying. He says he took me with him to get my parents to pay, but that was before he realized what a great dude I was. He says that if he had known that before he would have never wanted to scare me and since I was such a great dude he was sure that my parents couldn’t be so bad and he would never have wanted to make them cry. I ask him to take me home. He says that it would be really sad if we never got to see each other again because I am such a great dude. I say we can see each other again but I want to go home. He tells me that if he takes me home we will never see each other again.

I tell him you can’t make people be friends with you if they don’t want to. He says he is a hard person to get to know because people are usually scared of him when they first see him. He says he is a really valuable person and a kind person and he has a lot to offer in the friend department but people are too entrenched in their beliefs to get to know that. I tell him he doesn’t have the right to say that. I tell him all people are equally good. I tell him he doesn’t have the right to force people to know him because they might as well know somebody else. Especially if he hurts people to get them to know him.

Back at home they’re looking for my demon cargo. They ask me questions about him and am I hurt. Chup-chup they stuff the revolution. They want to disarm secrets. They gave up on secrets and now are jealous of the guardians. Ants choke the white lace tablecloth. I will never tell them. I want to be imprisoned for my beliefs. Tomorrow I will find shell armor at the park.

Thoughts on The Master

The lopsided friendship in The Master exhibits both the dependency and intimacy of a love affair without overt sexuality. A destitute outcast and a charismatic cult leader have the fortune to find each other in a world that would not have them. The film makes no analysis of the pathology of cult members. It is content to point towards the complexities of the self that we cannot resist trying to understand, but which defy our capacities to explain. But this film is more than a meditation on a strange bond between outcasts. On another level, Paul Thomas Anderson invites the viewer to see the relationship between Master and student, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), as a metaphor for a struggle within one man. Their connection is aptly described by Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium, which says that lovers are two halves of one complete being. The film’s richness comes in large part from the subtext of sparring half-men, eager to become whole.

Freddie is always near crumbling under the weight of mental anguish. He is a man child in an adult world. If he were born wealthy in 2012, he would be diagnosed and precisely medicated. In the world of the film, he is like an urge with no voice to speak it. He seeks relief from his psychic alienation in the dissociative effects of imbibing torpedo fuel and aftershave. This is not enough to calm his carnal desires. His childish expressions of lust turn vicious when proper adults find him unnerving and weird. In his most successful moments, of which there are many, Joaquin Phoenix is a shadow. Lancaster Dodd on the other hand, attempts to exorcise demons through a convoluted self help system reminiscent of twelve step. His arcane beliefs are a palliative for inner turmoil. It is no accident that Dodd and Freddie bond over their taste for Freddie’s concoctions. Their struggles are intertwined. Their pains have familial roots. One can imagine a younger Dodd constructing his dogma in an attempt to transcend the struggles he faced as a younger man; the kind of struggles that Freddie faces. Many dissatisfied members of Alcoholics Anonymous have described it as a cult.

Visually, watching The Master is like eating an icing-heavy piece of cake. The burning colors of 70 mm celluloid render an impression of hidden metaphysical secrets in nature. From the waves of the pacific to the shapeless desert, the world on screen seethes with life. The shots of Freddie Quell in the crow’s nest of a battleship, gazing over the kodachrome waves evoke The Mast-Head chapter in Moby Dick, where Ishmael experiences a pantheistic communion with the sea. The painting of the scenery transcends mise en scene and exhibits a tumult that resonates with the psychological anguish of the characters. The world of The Master is beyond natural, reflecting Dodd and Freddie’s discomfort with their humanity.

While the actors are enchanting in their invocation of suffering, the world around them evokes a deeper level of mystery. There are scenes in the film that seamlessly transition from portraying the world to the interiority of the mind. The torture that Freddie betrays in his twisted smile and the pathology of Lancaster Dodd’s overcompensating bombast are made manifest. A party at Lancaster Dodd’s house turns surreal in an instant. All the women in the room, young and old, buxom and lithe are suddenly naked. They all swoon over the protean entertainer, Dodd, who moves throughout the rooms enchanting them with his song. Dodd’s imagination of a room full of naked women, worshipping him, becomes reality. His thoughts take over the images we see on the screen.

The blurring divide between characters and their environment invites a further, thematic blurring between the two main characters. The prohibition, which says “You can never know my pain” is overturned. Near the end of the film we see Freddie and Dodd part ways. Before they do, Dodd sings a song to Freddie, much like he did at the party. This scene is so strange it begs the question- Is this scene really a wishful dream of Freddie’s? The surreal moments in the film dissolve the boundaries of subjectivity, both between the protagonists and their world and between each other.

Perhaps Freddie is a wanderer not because his psychosis precludes empathetic communion with others, but because he is not a man at all. Perhaps Freddie is a ghost, doomed to haunt the earth. Take the initial meeting of Freddie and Lancaster Dodd. Freddie, in a drunken delirium stumbles aboard a ship that carries a party through the San Francisco bay. In an amnesiac cut, Freddie awakens and is introduced to the master. It is as if Freddie has awakened into a dream. Freddie is seeing a vision of the man he thinks he should be. He wants to shed his damned skin and become Dodd through a strict rehabilitation process. Or perhaps it is all really Dodd’s dream. His subconscious facilitating the communion between him and his daemon. In Freddie, Dodd sees the problem in himself to be worked on. In Dodd, Freddie sees a way to be a real man.

The film ends on an elegiac note. Freddie, having been excommunicated from Dodd’s group, is in bed with a woman. He is unable to lose himself in the pleasure that he has desperately groped for throughout the film. He laughs nervously, while recounting principles he learned from Dodd. He has failed to transcend himself. He can merely ape the noises of his fallen ideal. In the end, that was to be expected. The best thinking of a sick mind led Freddie to the Master.