#92: Fiend Without a Face

(originally published Nov. 17, 2011)

My father once told me about a Vietnamese folk-tale monster: the ma lai nuốt ruột. We were on Federal Boulevard, in the strip mall of Vietnamese restaurants and grocery stores. My mother was shopping, as she did most weekends, stocking up on nước mắm and hoisin sauce and other thick, tarry substances that smelled of decay and sweet rot.

While she shopped, I spent my time in the Asian video rental store a few doors down. Most of what they stocked were Hong Kong soap operas, these multi-volume sets that people rented by the pound. I lingered at the horror movies, a single shelf. I remember clearly The Gates of Hell. On the back of the video case, an inset still of a pickaxe coming perilously close to a woman’s head; another with a corpse, its flesh sloughing off like oatmeal. I wanted to watch this movie so bad. I had come under the spell of ‘art-horror,’ which Noel Carroll describes, in The Philosophy of Horror, as a necessary feeling of threat “compounded by revulsion, nausea and disgust.”

One day, the owners of the store taped up a poster of a creature I’d never seen before. On the poster, a woman’s severed head floated about a hollow body, entrails oozing down like candle drippings, and the large intestine dragging on the ground, glistening. My father told me, “That’s a ma lai nuốt ruột.” The ma lai nuốt ruột (roughly, to “hybrid-ghost gut swallower”) is a Vietnamese version of an vampire (in Thai, the krasue; in Malaysian, the penanggalan). But it consists of only the head and intestinal tract. The digestive system given malevolent life. It sucks away the victim’s blood with its bladed tongue, and the dead person will rise to become another ma lai nuốt ruột. To kill it, you had to destroy the rest of its body before sunrise.

On the poster, it was a latex head, of course, held up by wires. The viscera were coated in glycerin, rather than lymph. But, I felt that strange combination of fascination and disgust. The creature was real in a way that I knew that it was not real. Carroll explains, “Saying we are art-horrified by Dracula means we are horrified by the thought of Dracula where the thought of such a possible being does not commit us to a belief in his existence.”

In Fiend Without a Face, the creatures that stalk the American-Canadian border are invisible. They’re the materialization of thoughts; ideas that have been given form outside of the mind. “Mental vampires,” one character calls them. When they become visible, they appear as brains perambulating on their ganglia, similar to the ma lai nuốt ruột, but not exact. We are horrified at our own thoughts.

I’ve never been able to track down the film from the poster. It could be Witch with the Flying Head or Mystics in Bali. But in some ways, I don’t want to find it. I prefer having it out there, wandering, invisible, a thought detached the mind that spawned it. It’s eating my brain, even now.

#91: The Blob

(originally published Nov. 12, 2011)

Thomas Aquinas says that gluttony “denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire.” It is that desire, “inordinate through leaving the order of reason,” that constitutes the sin. He classifies the appetite twofold: 1) the unconscious appetite, naturalis, which refers to hunger and thirst, and to which considerations of virtue and vice are irrelevant; and 2) the “sensitive appetite,” animalis, which requires the knowledge of what is pleasant and useful. It is in the concuspience of the latter that gluttony exists.

At first glance, The Blob appears to be a creature of pure naturalis, consuming “in accord with its nature, without any knowledge of the reason why such a thing is appetible.” Indeed, as Aquinas argues, if The Blob exceeds “in quantity of food, not from desire of food, but through deeming it necessary to him, this pertains not to gluttony, but to some kind of inexperience.”

But, according to Bruce Kawin, The Blob represents the growing consumerism of 1950s America—consuming for the sake of consuming. Americans’ “complacent desire to stuff themselves with goods and good times had shown itself to be a monster,” says Kawin. If this is the case, then The Blob fulfills Aquinas’ requirements for gluttony: “when a man knowingly exceeds the measure in eating, from a desire for the pleasures of the palate.” The farmer’s hand would have been enough, but it ate the whole farmer; the nurse would have been enough, but it ate the doctor too; the projectionist would have been enough, but it swamped the theater itself; one diner would have been enough, but it engulfed the entire diner whole. Dayenu.

At the Golden Castle diner, where I sometimes have late-night meals, the neon signs reflect off the surface of the glass. It feels as if we’re being smothered in raspberry preserves. The waitresses move with desultory good cheer and, in the moments in between customers, discuss what may lie outside of the diner. Bills to pay. Disappointed families. The sadness that night brings. All the things that eat you alive.

My order arrives: a French dip, which comes with a side of fries and a condiment cup of coleslaw. The roast beef is smothered in Provolone, which looks like melted plastic bag. I release a red splotch of ketchup adjacent to my fries, trying, as much as possible, not to let it touch the fries themselves. Nonetheless, it seeps towards them, maybe from the tilt of the plate, maybe of its own accord.

At the end of my meal, very little remains. A few burnt tips of French fries like fingernail clippings. A shallow pool of au jus with a flotilla of coagulated oil, which I sop with a piece of bread. I slouch in my booth, like I’m sinking into the vinyl. I’ve always trusted my metabolism to keep my waistline in check, but lately, I’m not so sure. The skin on my stomach stretches taut, and I imagine it eating more, eating endlessly. The blob waits to consume us all.

The waitress asks if I want a refill. Of course I do.

#90: Kwaidan

(originally published Oct. 21, 2011)

In his preface to the 1904 Tauchnitz edition of Kwaidan, Lafcadio Hearn explains that most of the stories he retells are taken from old Japanese manuscripts. Some may have had Chinese origins, he suggests, but “the Japanese story-teller, in any case, has so re-coloured and reshaped his borrowing as to naturalise it.”

The unnamed author of the introduction writes: “The Japanese… have possessed no national and universally recognized figures as Turgenieff or Tolstoy. They need an interpreter. It may be doubted whether any oriental race has ever had an interpreter gifted with more perfect insight and sympathy than Lafcadio Hearn has brought to the translation of Japan into terms of our occidental speech.”

Oh, we lucky, lucky Orientals.

*

In fourth grade, my teacher assigned the class to write a Halloween story. I used my brother’s computer, a heat-spewing bludgeon with a black-and-cyan monitor. After seven pages, however, the cursor froze at the edge of the screen, forcing me to go back and wrap up my story quicker. The next day, I discovered that my classmates’ stories hardly went up to two pages. My teacher flipped through my dot-matrixed creation warily.

For me, ghost stories were second nature. I’d read the anthologies in my elementary school library—100 Great Ghost Stories; Tales of the Supernatural—the page edges brown and warped from moist fingertips. I’d come across, time and again, the same Victorian and Edwardian writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman, Walter de le Mare, Algernon Blackwood. (Lafcadio Hearn must surely have been among them.) I absorbed the stories, ingested the prose until the word ‘eldritch’ became part of my every day speech.

And yet, my story read like a collection of horror movie clichés: full moon; someone impaled on a television antenna; tame gore; someone falling into an open grave. I wonder now: what had happened to those eminent Victorians?

*

The final segment of Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, “In a Cup of Tea,” comes not from Hearn’s Kwaidan, but instead from Kottō: Being Japanese Curios. In introducing his story, Hearn relies on classic Gothic imagery (“Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing?”) before starting his narrative.  But the story itself is incomplete: Hearn ends the fragment with an ellipsis. “I am able to imagine several possible endings;” he writes, “but none of them would satisfy an Occidental imagination. I prefer to let the reader attempt to decide for himself the probable consequence of swallowing a Soul.” Kobayashi, for his part, ends his film by showing the story-writer himself, trapped in a cistern of water, as if to suggest that this is the answer: one becomes what one consumes.

Did Lafcadio Hearn disappear into a cup of green tea for swallowing the Japanese soul?

Will I disappear into a pot of orange pekoe?

I am able to imagine several possible endings, but none of them would satisfy an Occidental imagination.

#89: Sisters

(originally published Oct. 13, 2011)

This is my sister’s first Halloween with her older brother. She’s heard of trick-or-treating, of course, perhaps from some of the other children at Fort Chaffee, but that first October after they had arrived at the National Guard base was too confusing. Many of the other refugee families came with nothing, so there’s nothing to give out, and this is not home, this former POW camp. Who goes door-to-door in a barracks?

No, her first Halloween is in Carbondale, where the family’s sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. Lee, live. The Lees are elderly, religious, and that Sunday, when the family trots off to church on Sunday, she leans against her father, who has closed his eyes in a good approximation of prayer, and naps.

The end of October air is brisk. The Lees’ church provided them with some cool weather clothing, but no costumes, and so she wears her everyday clothes. She feels conspicuous. She is nine; her brother is twelve.

The sun has disappeared under the horizon, but orange light still suffuses the sky like fire. Jack o’lanterns exude the odor of pumpkin from jagged mouths. Her brother rings the doorbell, and they hold out their plastic grocery bags.

“Trick or treat,” he says, and she echoes it a moment afterwards.

Puzzled, the homeowner reaches for the candy bowl. He speaks very slowly, as if they can’t understand.

“Halloween is tomorrow,” the man says.

Her brother whispers to her in Vietnamese: I’ve got it covered.

“It’s a school night,” he says.

*

This is my sister’s first Halloween with her younger brother. He’s heard of trick-or-treating, of course, since he’s spent most of his life in America, and now that they’ve moved to Aurora, Colorado, Vietnam seems further away than ever. This is the suburbs; they have their own furniture (not new, but new-ish), and even their parents know to turn off the lights to discourage people from coming to the door.

She’s long outgrown trick-or-treating, but her little brother seems excited by the promise of free candy. Each year, Halloween grows larger and larger; Vu Lan and Tết Trung Thu seem distant, like days that appear on the calendar, but nowhere else. Tonight, she will take him door-to-door.

Snow starts to fall; the first snow of the season. Her brother has refused to wear the plastic frock that came with his Smurf costume; he only wears the mask, but he complains that it makes it difficult to breathe.

“You don’t have to wear it all the time,” she says. She is fourteen; he is five.

He has started to make friends with other kids on the street; she has her friends at school. Her other brother is looking at the School of Mines. Next year, he will not need her to accompany him. She tells him to use a pillowcase, and not one of those tiny baskets the other children use. “You can fit more candy in.”

He looks at her for tips on sugar acquisition.

“I used to trick-or-treat the day before Halloween,” she says. “Then again on Halloween. Twice the candy!”

#88: Ivan The Terrible, Parts I & II

(originally published Oct. 4, 2011)

Part I

In 1996, while I was at Johns Hopkins University, a student I knew committed murder. He shot another student—once in the head, then once in the chest—before surrendering himself. This happened on campus. At the time, I worked as an editor for the school paper, the News-Letter. Someone rushed into the office—it was the middle of Wednesday evening, and we were laying out the paper—and announced the news, and our editor-in-chief started shouting, “What happened?  What’s going on?”

Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I seeks to explain, perhaps, how a person becomes ruthless. Ivan, at first, doesn’t seem so terrible. Ivan is horrified when the Tartars shoot down the captives Ivan has strung up on the battlements than surrender them to “the uncircumsized ones.”

Eisenstein suggests three things that may have prompted the change:

Ivan is beset on all sides by sinister profiles, all German Expressionistic shadows and angles. When Ivan, nearly dead from illness, asks the boyars to pledge allegiance to his son, they turn away, one by one, and this betrayal is almost too much to bear. The illness itself may have affected his brain. Or perhaps it was the death of love—his wife, Anastasia, poisoned by politicking boyars, though, historically, her actual cause of death is unknown.

We may never know what drives someone over the edge.

Part II

In the months after the shooting at Hopkins, psychologists diagnosed the killer with numerous personality disorders. In going through the emails of the two young men, the police found an odd, quasi-Victorian formality to them: “We once again revealed and expressed ourselves to deeper levels and found profound joy in our bond.” It was strongly hinted, but never proven, that the two had had some sort of sexual contact. Months before the murder, the killer sent a message to his victim: “I’ve cried out for your assistance, presence and help…. You know I’m a private person, very much an introvert, and when finally I wish to talk, to be silenced by one’s friend really hurts.” And, on the day of the killing, he wrote in his journal, “This was a violation of me, my rights, and my dignity. But I was embarrassed and kind of humiliated and afraid, and I didn’t want to destroy a good friendship over some act [in] which he overstepped his bounds.”

Ivan the Terrible, Part II sees Ivan succumbing to loneliness. His movements are arch; he extends and cranes his neck like a bird, pecking at crumbs. He draws his oprichniks close—his iron band—but they only aid his spiral into paranoia, isolation, summary executions. Stalin, upon screening the film, summoned Eisenstein. “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel,” Stalin told him. “You can depict him as a cruel man, but you have to show why he had to be cruel.”

Eisenstein died of a heart attack before he could complete the trilogy.

I wonder if the answers are in that third film: how a man becomes cruel, how he becomes a killer.

Part III

#87: Alexander Nevsky

(originally published Sept. 21, 2011)

Today marks the end of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. I remember when Bill Clinton issued the directive. I had just started college and attending meetings of the gay student organization. DADT, at the time, was a terribly disappointing compromise, though, in retrospect, necessary. Clinton’s promise to repeal the ban altogether would never have passed, given the hostile climate in Congress and from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I came to know two gay ROTC members: a short, curly-haired lesbian from Georgia, Noel, and Patrick, a good-looking blonde. They took pride in their service but knew the possibly consequences if they were ever discovered. I imagine them marching in uniform the way I’ve seen ROTC students practice their formations on campus nowadays. I never knew what become of Noel—she transferred to another school—and Patrick hinted that his military career would continue after graduation. In The Best American Short Stories 2006, Tobias Wolff’s story, “Awaiting Orders,” deals with DADT. In it, an army sergeant hesitates calling his boyfriend a ‘partner.’ His fears of discovery and blackmail overcome his desire to reach out to the sister of a deployed soldier. I wonder if this is what life was like for Noel and Patrick. The need to hide.

The end of the policy came with little fanfare, which was what the military had wanted. Just another day in the war machine. In the media, however, there’s been a small flurry of stories: a Navy lieutenant who wed his partner at the stroke of midnight in Vermont to mark the end of the ban; soldiers coming out to their comrades, superiors and families; remembrances of soldiers who could not.

The damage has already been done, though.

Late in Alexander Nevsky, the scene that follows the kinetic battle on the iced-over Lake Chudskoye slows the film to plaintive pace. Prokofiev’s score takes an operatic note. Eisenstein scholar David Bordwell calls the music a “threnody.” Wounded and dying soldiers, German and Russian alike, lie heaped upon the ice, and Eisenstein tracks across them diagonally. One lifts his head momentarily before crumpling face-down. On the ice, torches appear, carried by women who peer into the faces of the fallen. One man rises long enough to say, “Maria.” As the women move from body to body, another soldier says, “Izaslavna.” Another:  “Anastasia.” “Sister.” Wives, family members, all of their beloved: their last breaths. On the field of battle, a mother collapses on a body lying in the snow.

All the years the ban was in effect—how many gay soldiers weren’t able to speak the name of their beloved, even at death? Who carried torches for them? Who was allowed to mourn them? This was the real tragedy of the policy: silence. Even in grief.

Sgt. Leonard Matlovich, the first gay servicemember to fight the ban, had this inscribed on his tombstone: “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

#86: (Eisenstein: The Sound Years)

(originally published Sept. 13, 2011)

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, says Roger Ebert, is “one of the fundamental landmarks of cinema.” Its centerpiece, the massacre on the Odessa Steps, “has been quoted so many times in other films that it’s likely many viewers will have seen the parody before they see the original.” I’ve been thinking about landmarks lately: something seen so often that it almost becomes invisible. For instance, sound film has been de rigueur for almost 100 years now, but what was it was like for audiences who saw The Jazz Singer for the first time? According to Scott Eyman, after Jolson’s songs, the crowd applauded wildly, and when he and Eugenie Besserer exchanged their dialogue, “the audience became hysterical.” They hooted after Jolson uttered his famous line: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.”

Back in Colorado, Matthew used to chide me whenever I admitted to getting lost: “All you have to do is look around. The mountains are always to the west.” And I’d look, and sure enough, there were mountains, their bottom halves swathed in the infamous Denver ‘brown cloud.’ So, on those rare occasions—no more than twice a week—when I got lost, I located the mountains. The jagged peaks, the zipper separating the country. I’d never done much mountaineering, but other people I knew racked up Fourteeners like mosquito bites. I found found the mountains and thought: Now, where was I going again?

The radio has been full of stories about 9/11, about the Twin Towers as a landmark. Not as historical or architectural landmark, but a geographical one. Anywhere on the island, people said, you knew where south was. For me, I’d never been to the Twin Towers. I’d never ridden all the way to the Windows on the World, and I never got the chance to see the city spread below me. From there, I think, I could have memorized the whole of Manhattan.

So yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, after a late dinner in the West Village, I stepped into the humid night, when rain had not yet fallen, but everyone had an umbrella, just in case, and for a moment, I couldn’t remember which way I had come. I hadn’t come to attend any of the memorials; instead, the whole city had become a remembrance: ribbons tied to chain-link fences, candles and stuffed animals, notes written to complete strangers. And if that wasn’t enough: in Penn Station, soldiers with automatic weapons slung low on their shoulders, German Shepherds sniffing around. Chalkboard signs outside of bars advertised NYPD and FDNY—ASK INSIDE FOR SPECIALS, and, at John’s Pizzeria, a group of men in crisp dress uniforms queued for their slices.

I looked around and saw a bright light in the sky, cutting the low, grey clouds over the skyline into radiant slices. That must be south, I imagined. That must be the Tribute in Light. A new landmark, 88 searchlights aimed into the sky, a landmark of what was no longer there. And with that, I re-oriented myself.

#85: Pygmalion

(originally published Sept. 4, 2011)

My parents are visiting from Colorado. For dinner tonight, we ate a rotisserie chicken, and my Dad systematically stripped the chicken carcass of every last vestige of meat and sinew. He used with his fingers, gouging out the secret protein tucked between the ribs or clinging to the sharp stump of neckbone. He scraped the bones with his teeth to remove the tendons and fasciae. He ate noisily, having reached the age where he no longer cares about niceties when eating at home.

Matthew didn’t blink an eye. This is the same Matthew who, when we first started dating, had to look away when I ate fried chicken, as I had a habit of chewing the ligament between the drumstick and the thighbone. When I saw him shudder, I knew that he’d heard me crunching away.

“It’s just not something I’m used to,” he said.

I have had meals with Matthew’s father, who eats quickly and voraciously (like fathers everywhere, I think). Matthew has picked up very few of his own father’s mannerisms and habits. Where do we learn proper table manners? If not our parents, then who teaches us how  to hold a fork, which topics are appropriate for discussion during dinner, or how to sit up straight?

When my father spoke about the modern method of making nước mắm (caramel coloring, salt, water, mysterious chemicals), I didn’t correct his pronunciation of anchovy. An-ko-vy, he said, and I imagined Leslie Howard, pointing his finger, saying, “No!  Do it again, again, again,” and my father, stubborn in way Matthew suggests I have inherited, refusing to say it correctly, just to spite Professor Higgins. It’s not the child’s place to teach his parents what is proper.

Instead, my father has taught me the proper way to dismantle a lobster, how to slip a washer between the nut and oil pan when changing a car’s oil, how to tie a necktie. Etiquette and proper manners; leave that for someone else.

After dinner, the conversation turned to the subject of living wills. Mom told the story of an acquaintance of hers, whose mother has Alzheimer’s and a feeding tube. The daughter, she said, quit her job and moved her mother into their house, where, everyday, she makes meals for her. She stews and blends; she boils and strains. And it all goes into the feeding tube.

“I think that’s cruel,” my father said.

Sometimes, my mother said, when her feeding tube clogs, the daughter will clear it by sucking the obstruction clear. My mother made a horrified face.

“If I have to live like that,” she said, “you can just give me Ensure or something like that.” But, I wondered, would this be cruel, as my father had said? Whose wishes should I follow?

We sat quietly at the dinner table for a few moments, eating little squares of lemongrass chocolate. “Let’s change the subject,” my father said.

#84: Good Morning

(originally published June 21, 2011)

Television Sets of the Dinh Household

1980-1985; living room

Saturday mornings, here’s where I worship. I keep the volume low and move 10 inches from the screen so that I can hear what’s happening on The Mighty Orbots. My parents have warned me not to sit so close, that I’ll ruin my eyesight, but if I’m very quiet and don’t wake them, who’s to know? I realize that The Mighty Orbots are a variation of the “robots-that-are-something-else” genre, that most other kids at school prefer Transformers, and that I have thrown in my lot with the more numerous (and more affordable) Gobots, but there is so much to want, and if I can get closer to the screen, maybe I can have them all.

1985-present; my mother’s bedroom

Perched on the corner of my mother’s waterbed, I watched what my mother wanted to watch. This mostly involved Dynasty, which we picked up right during the Moldavian Massacre. With each subsequent season finale (hotel fire! Alexis driving off a bridge! Krystle missing!), my mother and I scoured issues of Star and the National Enquirer to figure out who survived and who didn’t. We even tuned into The Colbys, the spin-off, right to the bitter end when Fallon was abducted by aliens. At 10, we watched the nightly news, followed by re-runs of M*A*S*H* at 10:35. Sometimes I stayed up the extra half-hour for Nightline, but usually by that time, my mother was already asleep.

1987-present; the basement

My father, because of his snoring, had been banished to the basement years before, and, there, he erected his home theater. He bought a huge set for the time, speakers trailing silvery wires, and two VCRs for direct tape-to-tape duplication. Everywhere we went offered rentals: strip-mall storefronts; Blockbuster Videos; a Vietnamese shop specializing in Chinese serial melodramas. Even our local King Soopers had a small cordoned-off section of videotapes. My father laminated his membership cards, and once a week, he’d flip through them, deciding which to visit that evening. “It’s best to see movies big,” he said, proud of his set-up. True; but at the time all I wanted to see was The Mutilator.

2000-present; the kitchen

One character in Good Morning mentions how small talk is a social lubricant, how it keeps the wheels of society turning smoothly. This may be true amongst strangers and neighbors, but what about with your spouse, to whom you may feel as though you’ve said everything? Since their retirement, my mother monopolizes the phone line in her room, chatting with friends, and my father retreats to the basement where he mans a DVD duplication service for his friends. But, in the afternoon, they convene before the small TV on the dining table to watch various afternoon judge shows, Wheel of Fortune during dinner, and Dancing with the Stars in the evening. They debate the merits of so-and-so’s pasodoble. They discuss whose judicial sensibilities the most admire (Judge Judy, yes; Judge Greg Brown, no). And when they eat, instead of silence, they test their knowledge of American idioms, shouting out answers, trying to solve the puzzle before Vanna turns over the next letter.

#83: The Harder They Come

(originally published June 5, 2011)

A car salesman gave Matthew and me an exegesis on the origins of ska. Ska, he said, originated in Jamaica in the 1960s. This original wave of ska gave rise to rocksteady and, later, reggae. From reggae, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, by cutting and looping master tapes, developed dub.  The second wave of ska, also known as the Two Tone Revolution, came in the late 70s in the UK, and blended punk elements into ska. Dancing to ska was known as skanking. The third wave emerged in the US, during the 1980s and 90s. In Philadelphia, he said, there’s an annual Ska Blowout, which takes place at the Trocadero. Do you skank? I asked him. No, he said.  Matthew listened quietly. All he wanted was a checkerboard front license plate for his new car, and I had said, Someone’s going to think you’re a rude boy.

*

The Harder They Come suggests that two things keep the poor in Jamaica from breaking out in open rebellion: music and ganja. In one scene, people pick through the refuse at the dump, triumphantly holding up a carton of eggs; then, in another, they dance at a club, losing themselves amongst the rhythm. Still later, they smoke spliffs the size of a baby’s arm. But these trades are controlled by the police and the military, and when the police cut access to them, the tide turns against Ivan, singer-turned-criminal, the film’s hero.

*

In Amsterdam, I was five miles into a 20-mile bike ride when I got a flat and had to walk my bike back to the rental station. Tired, frustrated, I decided to go to a coffee shop later that evening. There, I was presented with an extensive menu. Each item had an accompanying picture, the buds and leaves in infinite variations of green, from silver-tipped and sage-like to a dark, dusky green. I couldn’t decide: harsh, grassy, smooth, velvety, graceful. What was this, a wine bar? Not to mention, I was giggly: this was my first time! I decided on a brownie with whipped cream, whereupon Matthew had half, because, after all, it still was a brownie. We both fell asleep soon afterwards.

*

In a recent visit to Colorado, I noticed neon-green crosses advertising the dispensaries that had sprouted up across the state. Then I remembered: Oh, it’s medicinal now. Our close friends, H. & J., have a grower’s license and grow a small crop in their yard. J. didn’t sell but kept it for home use. The trick, she told us, was to continually prune so that buds emerge. Many people claim that cannabis elevates your consciousness, but I wonder: does it sharpen the mind or blunt it? Whom does it benefit in its structure of money and power? Does it foment revolution or mollify it? J. gave Matthew and me a Mason jar of homegrown—all-natural, organic—and a metal pipe with which to smoke it. I hid it in my parents’ house, behind some books, like a teenager, rebellious and wicked, as if this were really something to get excited about.

#82: Hamlet

(originally published May 18, 2011)

Act I, Scene V:  Elsinore.  A platform before the castle.

I used to insist that my house was haunted. Once, while going into the basement, I swore I saw a blue figure walk from wall-to-wall, passing through them as if they were open doors. It was a tall gentleman, wearing a top hat and Victorian clothing. He seemed in an awful hurry.

Granted, at the time, I read as many books on supernatural phenomena as I could. Well-worn books with black-and-white photographs of famous monsters: Patterson’s shot of Bigfoot, Surgeon’s shot of Nessie.  And ghosts—so many pictures of ghosts! Perhaps they were just double-exposures and fissures in the emulsion, but to me, they may have well have been rips in the mortal veil. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

My brother played a trick on me. He knew I had this fascination with ghosts, so he waited until I was headed down to the basement. And there, at the bottom of the stairs, he had draped a bedsheet over himself, with holes cut out for eyes. It was the cheapest, most generic ghost you could imagine, and yet, when I saw him, he yelled, “Boo!” and I screamed and ran back upstairs. I later learned from my sister that our mother was mighty angry that he had ruined a perfectly good sheet.

Act I, Scene II:  A room of state in the castle.

The basement is now my father’s domain. My mother banished him there ages ago, because no one could sleep once he started snoring. We lived directly under the flight path of Stapleton Airport, so we should have been used to the noise, but even a floor away from the rest of the family, we heard his nighttime rumble crawling through the air vents, his restless spirit taking revenge on the rest of us.

But he prefers it down there. He has his computer and his home theater. He reads in his waterbed or blasts his Vietnamese pop music through the surround sound until my mother complains that it’s rattling the upstairs windows. He also runs a one-man Vietnamese media service, burning compilation CDs for his friends or ripping movies borrowed from the library into his own library. He makes custom covers for them, has them stacked nicely by the fireplace. He even rips movies from my collection.

But, Dad, I tell him, I own them. You don’t need another copy.

Just in case, he says. Just in case.

In case of what? I wonder. He’s in his mid-70s now, and I worry that the stairs bother him. He gets cortisone shots in his back for a fused disc, my mother reports, but now his knees have been acting up. But, you must know, your father lost a father; that father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound in filial obligation for some term to do obsequious sorrow. I know the time will come—perhaps soon—when he can no longer live in the basement with the ghosts.

#81: Variety Lights

(originally published May 9, 2011)

Carla del Poggio’s eyes widen when the curtains open in Variety Lights. It’s one of the oldest stories in showbiz, yes? The dewy ingénue clawing her way to the top. But who hasn’t harbored the dream of being a star, of making it big, even if it’s that brief moment while watching You Can’t Do That on Television: I can do that. I can say ‘I don’t know’ and get a bucket of slime poured onto my head.

*

Every year, for their final project, the high school seniors in the theater mounted a one-act play. My final year, I was invited to play the Valet in No Exit. I was never a full-on thespian—rather, I was someone who ate lunch in the theater room because my friends were in theater. Still, I thought, Why not? I put on a dark suit, white-powdered my face and drew black tarry streaks under my eyes, and memorized my lines. There are two theories of acting: that one can find one’s self in every character, or that one can find every character within one’s self. For me, it was neither; the character I played was simply myself, speaking the lines the way I would have said them normally: Silly questions, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Where’s the torture-chamber? That’s the first thing they ask, all of them.

*

At brunch recently in New York, my friend and I ogled our waiter: he wore dark-rimmed glasses and had his hair in ringlets. He seemed like a graduate student, studying something liberal artsy. English, for example. Or classics. We had arrived in the bright-morning crush, and he graciously acceded to our useless requests. More coffee? A bit of honey, please? Maybe he sensed us watching, the way a passer-by is dimly aware of being watched by window-side restaurant patrons. But he left work before we finished our meal, carrying a Strand Books-branded messenger bag. This cemented our conjectures further. We asked the other server, a spunky blonde, what she knew of him. “Oh, he’s an actor,” she said. We asked our server what she did. “Well,” she said, “I’m in acting too.”

*

A student told me that, for a summer job, he was auditioning for Sea World. I didn’t know one had to audition for Sea World. Yes, he said. Since I don’t have any animal training, I can’t work with the animals. But they have other shows and performances. Does one even notice other humans at Sea World? Who can compete with a school of dolphins, a killer whale? I wish I’d known what I wanted to do with my life earlier, he told me. He was a biochemical engineering major. I didn’t discover acting until high school. I wanted to tell him that I had had the exact opposite experience. If I had asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ and he answered, ‘I don’t know,’ no slime would have fallen from the sky. Acting is a calling as much as anything else, but know this, my young friend: there will always be starry-eyed dreamers, and there will always be broken bulbs on Broadway.

#80: The Element of Crime

(originally published Apr. 19, 2011)

Yesterday: Rain, great torrents of it, the sky filled with clouds overwhelming the atmosphere. How many shades of gray are there?—gunmetal, battleship, grease. In the light spectrum, the combination of two complementary colors produces gray. Daytime becomes indistinguishable from evening and evening from night. Gray is the wide swath of the achromatic color scale between white and black, existing in a line, rather than on a wheel. Gray has no opposite, and gray is its own opposite. Rain flashes gray as it falls sideways, kamikazes exploding on your skin, in your hair, on your clothes. Sidewalk and pavement alike seem to float away. In the street, puddles take on secret, unplumbable depths. Cars prowl, waiting to drench unsuspecting pedestrians.  ymbolically, gray is associated with reliability, modesty, dignity, conservatism, old age, and practicality. The British prefer to spell it ‘grey,’  but that’s because the British themselves are reliable, dignified and conservative. In other words, gray.

Today: Sunshine, with a chill breeze easily warded off by a light jacket. On the New Jersey Transit train to New York, a crowd of rowdy sports fans, walking up and down the aisle, looking for a large segment of open seats. They wore baggy t-shirts, and as they moved, they produced a polyester shimmer: blue, with red and white stripes. On their backs, the last names of people who were not them. When I emerged from Penn Station, I heard the chant: “Let’s go, Rangers, let’s go!” in the cadence previously reserved for the Yankees. The area around Madison Square Garden was paved with fans, all dressed in blue, with hints of red. They call themselves “blueshirts,” after the Rangers earned the name “The Broadway Blueshirts” in the 1920s. Ten years later in Ireland, the members of The National Guard (also known as the Blueshirts) began greeting each other with Roman straight-arm salutes and limited its membership only to the Irish who professed Christian faith.

Tomorrow: The world will be seen through a color that brings to mind urine or jaundice, darker than yellow, not quite orange. Lars Von Trier achieves his palette for The Element of Crime by using sodium lights, the same lights found in truck stop parking lots or supermarkets. Occasionally, a burst of blue appears, but not of the skies or of sweet water: the blue of broken machinery, of televised propaganda. Filmed in ochre light, everything in the film appears sallow and craven, dreamlike and decayed. In Color, Victoria Finlay traces ochre pigment to Australia, where, a decade ago, it was a heavily-traded commodity and even further back, 40,000 years back, to when the Aboriginals used it in their drawings. British anthropogist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown identified a common character amongst many of the tribes spanning the continent: the snake Kurreah, known elsewhere as Takkan, Wawi, Numereji, Yeutta, Borlung, Wanamangura, or Ngalyod—the serpent of a thousand names. This snake, they believed, had shaped the land, given places names, and distributed water into gullies and channels. This was the snake who moved through water and sky both, revealing itself as a rainbow—the serpent delivering color to the world.

#79: W. C. Fields—Six Short Films

(originally published Apr. 9, 2011)

Pool Sharks

The University of Houston’s reading series invited heavy-hitters from around the world. In my three years alone: Seamus Heaney, Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, amongst others. After the readings, wealthy donors living in the River Oaks neighborhood would host receptions for the biggest names at their houses. A satellite image of River Oaks Boulevard shows one palatial mansion after another, each with a chlorine-blue outcropping, a de rigueur private pool.

The Golf Specialist

River Oaks Boulevard ends in a loop in front of the River Oaks Country Club. It boasts 18 holes of golf across 6,868 yards of Bermuda grass. Players are expected to repair divots and marks on the greens. Soft spikes only. A marshal enforces tee times. A guardhouse along River Oaks Boulevard keeps wayward graduate students from getting too close. From our old, rickety cars, we saw the white colonnades and trimmed hedges and knew that we’d gone too far.

The Dentist

Marion Barthelme, Donald Barthelme’s widow, also hosted parties at her house, in the West University area. Her house, in comparison, seemed more modest than the ones in River Oaks, even though she had remarried to the former CEO of Tyco International. Marion, not surprisingly, was much more involved with the University of Houston’s creative writing program. After her receptions, for instance, she pulled out a stack of newly-bought Tupperware containers. For leftovers, she told us. I know how you writers get hungry. None of us were shy about claiming one. For days afterwards: cold lamb brochettes, chunks of unidentified French cheese, beggar’s purses. Our teeth remembered how it felt to eat.

The Fatal Glass of Beer

At these receptions, booze flowed freely. We sat on her sofa and looked around her house, scrutinizing the signatures on the artwork lining her walls. She had Picasso pencil sketches along the stairwell. One late night, red-rimmed wine glasses and empty beer bottles occupying every flat surface, one student pointed out the de Kooning in the living room, and another student, clearly blitzed, said, “Yeah, that. That’s just a decorative de Kooning.”

The Pharmacist

In the display case separating the dining room from the living room, Marion had a small, wooden box with antique pharmacist’s bottles—clear, small ones used to hold powders and tinctures and ointments. These, however, were filled with marbles and sand and sea glass and pinfeathers. I wanted to shake them, just to hear the sound the objects inside made. “Bad idea,” someone said. “I’m pretty sure that’s a Cornell box.”

The Barber Shop

I learned recently that Marion Barthelme died from cancer. She lived not far from the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and I wonder what treatments she had sought. I wonder if her hair had fallen out. That’s a stereotype, of course—Susan Sontag would have my hide for that—but there’s no other way to think of Marion than with her brown hair, packing away hors d’oeuvres, and we graduate students lining up, grateful, as always, for her generosity.

#78: The Bank Dick

(originally published Mar. 24, 2011)

In 1922, a gang of robbers hijacked a Federal Reserve Bank truck outside the Denver Mint, making off with $200,000 in five-dollar bills. One security guard was killed. One of the robbers, Nicholas “Chaw Jimmie” Trainor, deflected a shotgun round with his jaw and later died. But none of the other six robbers was fingered for the robbery, though it’s believed that they were all eventually imprisoned for other crimes (like James “Oklahoma Jack” Clark) or killed in other circumstances.

Catchy as those nicknames are, however, no criminals come close to “Repulsive Rogan” or “Filthy McNasty,” the robbers in The Bank Dick.

The Denver Mint was a near-yearly elementary school pilgrimage, all the students trundling downtown with a brown-bag lunch in hand to learn about how pennies are pressed. Not me, though. My mother worked downtown, and I had lunch with her. When someone asked where she worked, all I knew was that it was at a bank. Later, I learned it was the Federal Reserve Bank, which sounded more important.

But what she did specifically, I still don’t know. She was a clerk, verifying checks, I think; her exact job description was unclear. All I knew was that she supplied my brief philatelist phase with stamps from around the world: a green Jamaica with a worker in a sugar cane field; red triangular Indonesias; all manner of foreign rulers, smiling grimly.

After the tour, I met my mother for lunch. The inside of the Federal Reserve seemed lacquered in gold, with severe 70s architectural flourishes that reminded me of dentist-office mobiles. The cafeteria was on the second-floor and overlooked 16th Street before it had become a pedestrian mall. Over the years, I watched the construction of the Tabor Center, the free shuttles puttering down the road, the opening of endless souvenir shops and the Rock Bottom Brewery across the street. My mother’s co-workers commented how much I had grown since my last visit: Tita, a Filipina and my mother’s best friend there. Peter, who self-published poetry.

Security was loose those days. I signed in and clipped a visitor’s badge to my chest. My father could pull into the parking lot by announcing that he had come to pick up his wife, and as we drove out, my mother waved to the unseen guard behind the blackened window on Arapahoe Street—Egbert Sousè himself, perhaps. At one Christmas party, the managers handed out baggies of shredded currency.

Over time, the Federal Reserve’s defenses grew more elaborate, more necessary. Concrete barriers. High walls topped with sharpened bars. This was long before the Oklahoma City bombing.

But, by then, I had also outgrown spending afternoons with my mother.

The world honors the daring, the thieves. No one remembers the functionaries, the Og Oggiblys who keep the world in working order. Tita retired a few years before my mother. Peter gave my mother a copy of his book for a retirement gift. The stamps that my mother had ripped off envelopes so that I could steam away their backings and press dry between paper towels—those have been collected, mounted, forgotten.

#77: And God Created Woman

(originally published Feb. 26, 2011)

For Christmas one year, my sister bought my mother a copy of Brigette Bardot’s biography, Initiales B.B. In French, no less. I sort of knew that my mother was a Bardot fan, the way I sort of know her birthday and sort of know about her life before we moved to the United States.

What I know for sure about my mother: she keeps all the books we gave her on the headboard of her waterbed; she likes Sidney Sheldon novels; she watches adaptations of Sidney Sheldon novels on the same television where, every evening, we watched the news and, on Wednesday nights, Dynasty, and, once a year, the Miss Universe pageant.

When I was young, I scoured the TV Guide, looking for her favorite movie. I found it once—the listing so small it was an inky smudge—showing in the wee hours, and I was so excited I wanted to stay up and watch it with her. But I fell asleep during a commercial, around the point where the heroine falls off a mountain during a ski race, breaks her back, and is paralyzed from the shoulders down.

Years later, of course, I realized the movie my mother liked was The Other Side of Midnight and not The Other Side of the Mountain. But she watched with me anyway.

I don’t know if my mother saw And God Created Women. She would have been about 24 when it was released. She still lived in Vietnam then—or she could have been at Southern Illinois University, I’m not sure which. What I know of Vietnamese history of that time includes: 1) the French being driven out of Vietnam; 2) the Geneva Accords splitting the country in half; and 3) the mass exodus of Northerners fleeing southward, bringing phở with them.

Had my mother already met my father by then? I don’t know. In the dining room back home (Aurora, Colorado, not Vietnam), there’s a black-and-white photograph of my mother. She wears a white áo dài, like a schoolgirl’s. Her face is tilted down towards the left, and the soft light picks out a luminous feature. Her nose. Her cheekbone. She’s possibly as young as Bardot herself when she starred in And God Created Women. Director and then-husband Roger Vadim writes of Bardot: “She comes from another dimension…. That’s down to her presence, which comes from outer space somewhere.”

My mother calls regularly, and I return them irregularly. She calls with news, with gossip, or just to talk. Her voice reverses time: here we are watching Alexis and Krystal getting into another catfight. Miss Venezuela wins again? But the conversation now veers towards different topics: her weakening knees, the regimen of capsules and multivitamins that she dutifully splits with a plastic pill-cutter. As she speaks, I imagine her sitting up in bed, phone extension in hand, leaning against all the books I’ve bought her: intergenerational Asian mother-daughter sagas, Vietnamese novels in translation, poetry—the unread stories in our lives.

#76: Brief Encounter

(originally published Feb. 18, 2011)

Washington, D.C.: You were a regular at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble, where I worked. You favored the second-floor café, past the political science section frequented by the grumpy and bow-tied George Will. You must have noticed my staring, my rushing downstairs to take your special order, my clearing of magazines around your table. So when you brought your girlfriend in, I knew that was for me too. I saw you in the Metro, standing like a foraging crane, as the train pulled in with a pneumatic sigh, and you got on.

Washington, D.C.: I met you at JR’s running the ‘bachelor auction’ for the Whitman-Walker clinic. I was covering the event for the Washington Blade. I swear you winked even before I interviewed you. During the auction, I caught you shill bidding, trying (and failing) to raise porn star Ty Fox’s price above $20. We met afterwards and made out. In Brief Encounter, Laura Jesson imagines herself in Paris, in Venice, on tropical shores with her newfound beau. I asked my editor if there’d be a conflict of interest dating you, but the answer was moot when I learned, later, that you were moving to L.A.

Chicago: I was helping my friend June move into her apartment on the outskirts of Boys Town. I was walking down Halstead, or to Halstead, or back from Halstead, I can’t remember, and the L rattled overhead like an angry prayer. As I passed, we made eye contact. I counted my steps—two, three—and, in the time-honored tradition, turned my head to see you looking back as well. I continued walking. I looked back again, and you looked back too. Watching you, I nearly ran into lamp posts, off the curb, into traffic. But we kept walking forward into our respective futures, all the while looking back. At the end of Brief Encounter, Laura’s near-abandoned husband says, “Whatever your dream was, it wasn’t a very happy one, was it?”

Denver: Barnes & Noble again. You came in slightly frazzled, and I radioed for my co-worker to check you out. She signaled her approval, and I went up and asked, Can I help you find anything, and you said, No, I can find what I’m looking for myself, and, though rebuffed, I offered future help, should you need it. But I kept an eye on you from around corners, over rows of bookcases. I ran into you again standing in the main aisle. What do you know about this? you asked, holding a book on comparative genocide. I faked an answer, even though I’d looked through that book at a different Barnes & Noble, in a different city. You gave me the upper left corner of a check, where your name and number were printed, as a down payment on the future. We still see each other occasionally—as you wake me in the morning, as we drive to work, a nighttime nudge—and each meeting stitches our worlds closer together, like the individual threads holding a button in place.

#75: Chasing Amy

(originally published Feb. 15, 2011)

Part of me will always be an adolescent boy. The part that stands in stores, reading comic books until the proprietor yells, “Hey, this isn’t a library!” The part that giggles at dick and fart jokes. The part that sees the future as a vast, undisturbed plain at the end of Wheeling St. in suburban Aurora, long before the encroachment of warehouses and office parks. The part that holds desire like a switchblade—awkwardly, blindly, secretly.

This is the part, too, that enjoys Kevin Smith movies. At the comics convention that opens Chasing Amy, one grizzled vendor wears a ‘Fuck Marvel Comics’ t-shirt.

Marvel Comics once had a contest where readers could send in samples of their own work. One could compete in the penciling, inking, coloring, lettering or writing categories, and the winners of each would collaborate on an issue of Spider-Man.

I wasn’t familiar enough with the Spider-Man storylines to attempt writing, but lettering I thought I could do. It requires a steady hand, a ruler, a knack for identifying empty spaces in the frames where language and thought can take shape. Having only one of the three, I didn’t enter.

Besides, I had already tried making comics. In middle school, my friend Josh C. and I created a three-panel comic strip called “Froggy.” But since I was inept at drawing, Froggy was nothing more than a three-toed, ambulatory lingam. We did a traditional three-panel strip, commonly known as ‘the funnies’: set-up, build, punchline. And, being middle-schoolers, we moved quickly from existential crises regarding the inability to catch flies to dick and fart jokes.

Holden and Banky, the comic-creating duo of Chasing Amy, eventually separate, in part, because of Banky’s submerged feelings for Holden. “Some doors should never be opened,” Banky says.

Josh and I were separated by the military’s propensity to ship away families to new bases. He used to regaled me with stories of coming across his mother’s boyfriend, post flagrante delicto, walking around with his boner, howling “A-roo-ha-hoo!”

Really?

Yep, he said.

We had swim class together, and there weren’t enough stalls in the locker room to accommodate all the bashfulness. Once, as we showered, Tim S. zipped in and mooned us, but more often, a line of damp boys formed a queue in front of the only stall in the bathroom.

Josh wielded his unabashed sexuality like a matador’s cape. As I waited on the bench for the stall to open, trunks clinging and reeking of chlorine, he whipped off his shorts and slipped into his underwear. Maybe he noticed me looking. He asked, “Aren’t you changing? Ashamed of your manhood?”

Well, yes and no. Our bodies were still sprouting in unforeseen ways (some more than others). We were no longer boys, but we couldn’t claim the mantle of men—not so long as we kept subsuming and covering our desires with bluster and indifference.

Josh knocked on the stall: “Ready yet?” But I wasn’t yet ready to open that door.

#74: Vagabond

(originally published Feb. 2, 2011)

As I write, there’s a piece of luggage on the floor of the study, semi-unpacked. It should have been fully unpacked a week ago, but since then, it’s become a piece of furniture: the cats play around it, sleep in it, make themselves comfortable in its presence. Matthew looks at it pityingly. He knows the more he mentions it, the more it becomes a permanent fixture. Better to let the clothes get coated in cat fur. That’ll teach him.

I’ve lived out of suitcases for weeks before. Cardboard boxes, months.

I have a reason, this time, for not unpacking. Soon, I will make a 2-hour drive to Washington, D.C., for the three-day Associated Writing Programs conference (sort of like the Modern Language Association conference but with 200% less despair and 200% more alcohol). The sweaters stay put, as do the thick socks and other pieces of clothing designed to keep me warm.

A winter storm makes inexorable progress across the midsection of the United States, like a roll of unwanted flab. It will soon suffocate the East Coast. About 2 miles from our home, there’s a car buried to its windows in snow, victim of the previous storm. A baby mammoth, separated from the herd, caught in ice.

Vagabond opens with a shot of a girl in a ditch, frozen to death. When the police lift her into a body bag, her legs stay rigid. They look as if they might snap off.

I’m neither worried about ice on the roads nor about my ability to maneuver through a skid. I am worried about what I should have in the car but don’t: flares, thermal blanket, reflective orange signs—things in case I end up in a ditch. I could probably build a small shelter out of the clothes packed (or intended for packing) for the trip.

You could read my reluctance to unpack (ever!) as an indication that no place feels like home. At any moment, I may have to uproot myself and settle someplace new. Why, therefore, invest the energy to put away belongings when you might have to gather them up again?

You could also read the exact opposite: this place where I’ve dropped my luggage—home—is where I feel comfortable enough to leave things in disarray, knowing that they’ll always be there (or, at least, until Matthew’s frustration reaches post-mettlesome levels).

(It could also be that I’m lazy. Don’t ask Matthew what he thinks.)

Someone close to me once told me he had spent a short time homeless. Only a week or so. It was during the summertime so he could sleep on park benches without fear of hypothermia. I wonder if this has affected his idea of ‘home.’  When he moves into a place, he immediately makes it his: art on the walls, pictures on every horizontal surface, everything in place, everything in order. It makes him feel safe, I think. Content.

Mona, the titular Vagabond, carries her home—a thin red cloth tent—on her back. It makes her feel similarly safe.

And then the cold closes in.

#73: Cléo from 5 to 7

(originally published Jan. 28, 2011)

In the early 1980s, Madonna optioned American remake rights for Cleo from 5 to 7, and on a French television program years later, Agnès Varda compliments her, describing her as “a natural-born actress” and a “genius at adaptation.” But the remake never happened.

If it had, Josh would have seen it. Josh, my best friend, worshiped everything Madonna. I enjoyed her music but was tepid on her films, whereas Josh owned all her albums and had seen all her movies—even surefire duds Shanghai Surprise and Body of Evidence. When Badlands played its heroic 45-minute marathon of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” Josh danced the entire duration, raising his arms Peron-style during the chorus.

The remake fell through, Madonna says, because Varda wanted to maintain a loose, improvisational style, but the studio demanded a script before they would fund the film. Madonna says to Varda, “I should have done it the way you wanted to do it.”

For the two years I lived in D.C., Josh and I were inseparable. He drove a powder-blue Crown Victoria, which he referred to as “the hoopty.” We lived frugally and wildly, filling up on $1 Whopper Jrs. before wreaking mayhem at Soho Coffee, or Georgetown, or LBJ Park. Freedom was a parachute, and the real world approached slowly, a dream growing moment by moment.

***

Josh and I had an ancillary friend, Nicky, who preferred the spelling “Nikki” because he that’s the way a star would have it. ‘Nikki,’ short and chubby, with curly, dirty blonde hair, liked thin Lycra shirts that, when worn, stretched and became sheer. I never heard him perform, but he always talked about working with this producer or that producer, and Josh and I humored him, equal parts teasing and exasperation.

At the turning point of Cleo from 5 to 7, Cleo sings “Cry of Love” in the presence of her composer and lyricist. They appreciate her emotivity while attributing her tantrums and tears to her diva complex, never understanding the deeper currents and fears running beneath. They might as well roll their eyes: Women!

One warm evening, the Josh, Nicky and I were walking up 17th on our way to Cobalt, which had an Thursday night 80s dance party. On the street was a fortune teller at a fold-out table. Come on, they cajoled, get your palm read  I relented. For $5, the woman told me: You work with computers. Something with science or math. I thought: You’re only saying that because 1) I’m Asian and 2) because I don’t buy your bullshit.

Cleo from 5 to 7 starts with color footage of Cleo getting a tarot card reading. Varda explains that the color indicates fiction: trying to predict the future is fiction. The black-and-white? That’s reality. That’s now.

A few years later, Josh sent me a CD. We’d begun our long separation and estrangement—our lives now in black and white. I don’t know where he lives today. He included a note: “You are one of the lucky people in the world to own this rarity!” It was Nikki’s demo CD, a splash of past color for lives going forward in real-time.