Literally Speaking

My father insisted on undertaking the entirety of the project, as he is apt to do if ever a household project comes up. Unfortunately, he isn’t terribly experienced or, even, talented, when it comes to such things as rounding edges and handling glue. I commend his desire to prove himself in the handyman arena, but at the time, I wished that he wasn’t practicing on my little bathroom. It was to be my sanctuary. My temple of (undiscovered) beauty. The globs of glue left untrimmed, the crooked drawers, and the uncovered sheetrock killed the vibe. As an effort to prevent any more damages than necessary, I took to shadowing my father while he worked. He gave me little jobs to make me feel useful. I watched his movements hawk-like for any carelessness or discrepancy.

When my time came to prevent error however, I somehow found it difficult. I suddenly understood why he was allowed free reign over the house from basement to dome. (Actually, we didn’t have a dome. There was a skylight in the attic though, and I’m sure if it went faulty, my father would by right up there, attempting to re-seam the glass.) He had a king-like air, very intimidating, that allowed for no questions in his practice. I watched him measure one wall, noting that he’d missed the ugly lip of the tub, which I was sure we’d want covered along with the rest of the wall. Shouldn’t I say something? Shouldn’t I say, “Re-measure so that the marble will cover that little fold of metal?” Instead, I made excuses for his oversight: “He’s measuring so sure and confidently. He must have meant to miss the lip. Maybe he knows something that I don’t. Maybe I just won’t say anything.”

When the marble came in and it was an inch short, I learned two things: 1) I should never second-guess my gut and 2) My father is not all-knowing. I began to notice how easily he’d forget, make a mistake, lose his temper. I fought every day to mold myself into his opposite. Our relationship during my teenage years were strained, and at times, explosive. Sometimes he would frighten me so badly, that every atom in my body would shake. It took every bit of will power I possessed to stand my ground and reply calmly, serenely (as I imagined Roald Dahl’s Matilda, my childhood heroine, would):

“You forgot that for five years of your life you ate your cold cereal with water before mom started bringing soy milk home, so forgive me if I don’t take you seriously. A woman isn’t a creature bred to obey. I am allowed to disagree with you. You’re going to have to learn how to take it without yelling and straining our relationship further.”

That was the spirit of any particular answer anyway. The arguments are too numerous to recall clearly. After each episode, I would go for a long walk, sometimes to the other end of town until my blood stopped boiling and my heart returned to my chest. Sometimes I would visit my grandmother, but more often, I would just walk and walk feverishly.

One evening my freshman year in high school, we had an argument to end all arguments (although it didn’t.). I found myself wishing that he would just haul out and knock me to the floor so I wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. At it’s climax, all I could manage was, “You’re wrong,” before I left the house as quickly as I could.

I started running. A drag shut couldn’t slow me down. The town flew by in a flash and I found myself in the desert. I bounded over the brush and cacti like a rabbit. Dust caught every footfall and the sky had reddish-brown streaks above the mountains; like blood spreading and curling in shallow water. I found a dirt road and ran a good five miles before I stopped. I wasn’t angry. The old, furious adrenaline had left me a good two miles back.

I actually felt powerful. I ran home. It was dark when I got there.

He was about to ask where I’ve been. I could see him opening his mouth to say the words. He didn’t say them. My skin was emitting enough heat to make the mirrors and windows sweat. I was glistening like a marathon runner. I sent him a glance that said many things, but louder than the rest: “Don’t ever fucking underestimate me again.”

I knew two things that day. 1) I would never shake in his presence again. 2) I am stronger than I thought.

I mentioned before that my childhood was focused around the VHS. Sure, there were moments of picking daisies and dancing to records and making chocolate chip cookies, but the majority my afternoons were spent on my stomach in front of a wooden box (an electronic miracle) watching classics and Bringing Up Baby. “The classics,” as my aunt termed them when she asked what my favorite movies were at age nine (whereafter she drew my mother aside and suggested buying me something more relevent to today’s world like Jumanji or Tarzan), also included a Shirley Temple film. My tolerance for Shirley wore thin as I aged, but one movie that I always enjoyed was Poor Little Rich Girl. You see, there is this song about spinach that is champion of a) confusing format, chorus and direction b) combination of blues, pop, gospel and shit c) dance number at the end. I haven’t watched that movie for at least ten years, but that song popped into my head yesterday when I was peppering my spinach.

The package of spinach I was eating claimed only four vitamins and minerals on the back, but I am convinced it was lying. Why would children be so violently against spinach if there are only four vitamins and minerals?

The song was something that would come up inconvieniantly whenever my mom served spinach, and one day, when she was trying to get me to do my spelling homework. (We’re getting to the meat of the post.) Julia, a bystander in the row, (really, a bystander to EVERY DAMN THING that ever happened worth remembering in the years before high school) randomly sang out: “Because it had every vitamin from ‘A’ toooooo ‘Z’! You’ve gotta eat your spinach baaabeey.”

I realized then and there that the healthiest thing you can do for your mind is stuff it with letters. I started writing as a way to pass the time, and perhaps, copy my heroines on the screen that happened to write. My younger sisters and I began a newspaper, not as exciting as the Pickwick Society, that escalated to several juvinile and botched novels. We rarely finished what we began, and our competitive natures sometimes backfired when we forgot the passwords protecting our latest literary endevor.

I moved on, as adement as ever about producing a masterpiece, but my sisters really moved on. As in: “I don’t find this to be my life’s purpose or, uh, fun anymore.” So Julia is playing the violin, and Jessica is acting. Our bookish fantasylands faded to pure silliness (what I wouldn’t do right now to provide you a copy of our “BEANIE TIMES”), leaving our unfinished novels on that dinosaur computer, abandoned like toys outgrown or a doll in the attic.

I moved on, to a city historically hungry and brutal to authors, to produce a masterpiece. It seems that my earlier love for the movies and my love for letters meshed, as it has done for many, and titled my destiny as “Playwright” or “Screenwriter” or “Person who writes dialogue and visuals like an instruction manual, hoping that it will play as beautifully as a novel once set in motion” or “Person who will end up living in a cardboard box.”

I still live gorging myself with “A” to “Z”. Job would interject here that I am chronically healthy and derseve the title of some multi-grain cereal, but that isn’t what I mean at all. I mean that that crazy song came back to me at a very interesting time. I wasn’t just eating spinach, I was singing “Philosphia” and thinking of my next essay. For all I know, Shirley Temple is up there hitting random people over the head with heavenly tap shoes and renditions of “When I’m With You.” But dare I say that I’ve become a law of the letter? That everything from my childhood (no matter how far I run from it) on will infilter everything I say?

Well I said it. Someone has said it before though… I believe it went something like, “You are what you eat.”

The first time I met him, he asked me, “If you were trapped on a desert island and you could only have five books, what would they be?”

He compromised and upped the list to ten after I hemmed and hawed about his question. I took it very seriously. I was sixteen, and I was taking any question that defined myself very seriously. Now, I can’t remember most of the books I listed. Seven out of ten but completely escape me, but the book to remember for the purpose of this memoir is Gone With the Wind because he remembered. To know him better later, his memory is nothing to brag about, and this was a considerable feat.

Granted, I was wrestling tinsel and a Christmas tree at the time, which can’t be an easy image to erase, and Madonna was crooning, “Santa Baby” when I nodded and said, “Well, I very well couldn’t live without Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind.” So. There’s that.

Two years later around my eighteenth birthday, we had lugged a projector, my laptop, several chairs, my younger sister, acquaintances and their booze, and a white sheet to a barn overlooking the town. The barn was a rusty, ancient ordeal that had housed steam trunks and heirloom Bibles, corsets and old love letters from former residences of the property. That night it was a theater. He tacked the sheet over its rattling sides and spent half a bottle of Heineken trying to distance the projector perfectly.

He remembered Gone With the Wind. He may possibly remember still every book I said, even though I can’t anymore. I felt superior at that screening, invite only, as Tara’s fields swept across the barn and Twelve Oaks glimmered on the sheet. He told me silly facts he had gleaned from documentaries and old Hollywood memoirs about Gone With the Wind’s filming whenever he felt I would appreciate it (such as: burning Atlanta was actually the old King Kong set, the pillars at Twelve oaks were painted facades and that Vivien Leigh had reported at one point in her life that Clark Gable wore dentures and that she dreaded kissing scenes in the movie because his breath stunk) and kept silent when the moment warranted.

Not a week later, he was cleaning (read: innocently pilfering) through the garage of one recently-retired high school librarian. Books and old musical scores overran parking space: a gold mine of forgotten masterpieces and tin quarters.

“The heavens opened,” he was saying later, “And angels were singing,” and he handed me the screenplay, complete with directors’ notes and critique from the producers. I couldn’t believe his luck… no: I couldn’t believe mine. I studied that screenplay with more ferocity than my college application, and concluded that (having just re-re-re-read the book recently), the screenplay was the best adaption from novel to cinema I had ever read.

Granted, I hadn’t read a great many screenplays before. The ones I had were unobtrusive short films that managed to squeak their way to some film noir screenings in northern California. Screenplays about dysfunctional families with inner beauty and loyalty or coming-of-age rants that were loaded with inventive ways to smoke pot and pitiful wet dreams. Gone With the Wind was grand. America’s War and Peace. Sometimes I would stop reading and just laugh, happy that such literature existed.

When Mystery Man asked us, “What is your favorite screenplay and why?” I knew my answer immediately. Unfortunately, my reasoning is more sentimental than technical. I could say something along the lines of, “Reading it makes me happy,” and wouldn’t have much to vouch for its superiority other than that.

But isn’t that enough?

I needn’t tell you of Gone With the Wind’s numerous awards. I needn’t tell you that, after taking inflation into account, Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time. This is a valid masterpiece. This screenplay inspired me to write for film, or most of all, just write.

Now I remember a girl with dark hair and green eyes, looking at the stars and the roof of an apocalyptic barn, breathing pine and Merlot while a man and his beer leaned over to admit, “You know, back when I was eighteen, I had a funny obsession for Gone With the Wind too.”

and so romantically inclined, that many of a Shakespearean stereotype is true. Wherefore art though Romeo?

So I watched Amelie last night. Amelie and Nino can put me in a rather joyful and flighty mood, but I ache when I wake up the next morning to strap on my hardhat. Especially now, young and alone, such a story makes my oft-admired independence seem murderous. But as I am alive and writing, I must be doing something right.

Apologies. The damage has been done. This post is about love. No, this post is about eternal love. Romantic love. Hollywood and fiction.

In third grade I would lay awake nights thinking of a boy who, in those days, sat in the desk behind mine. I couldn’t tell you our relationship beyond my daydreams (which would frequetly involve a cataclismic earthquake and rescue mission), whether we spoke on a day-to-day basis or looked at each other in the face every once in awhile. The fondest memories I have of him now are entirely fictional, but I remain convinced that had a catagory-9 quake split our third-grade classroom in two, caving in the ceiling and cutting he and I from everyone else’s vision, he would have held my hand.

Third-grade love was a magical time for me. Really, love was magic. Fairies and talking deer and kisses that caused fireworks. Starring in a Disney movie.

After that I wised up by reading some Judy Blume and growing some breasts. Thereafter love was work. Sex education didn’t throw me off as much as the discovery that there really aren’t any fireworks involved in kissing. The awe of love’s physicality diminsished and instead came a longing for a real steamy mental connection. High school daydreams were less erotic than my third grade ones, with who-ever Charming and I having an insightful, intellectual conversation and looking deep into each other’s eyes.

As you can imagine, in high school I was a total nerd. All intellectual and shit.

Good news: I’m still a total nerd! But as reality has increased in its eroticism, daydreams have ceased. All but my lustful longings for dark chocolate that is. Love has become this complex question of timing: Is love good enough for me? Am I good enough for love? And that bastard didn’t clip his fingernails… ouch.

More good news: love isn’t required for physical romps! It certainly heightens the experience though, and truthfully, I’ve concluded that physicality without the mentality is a waste of my time and that I’m better off staying at home writing blog posts.

So who is that good looking devil in bed with me? Why, that would be my laptop. Your words please.