Notes for the Script I’d Write for Lynch

“Golden rose, the color of the dream I had…
It’s only a dream
I’d love to tell somebody about this dream…”

-Jimi Hendrix

I. They say to live as if you’re traveling—
It’s worth sticking around just to see what happens.

II. Toward Dionysus grease hair and worst fear, toward the miracle.
Hitchhiker’s murder. A scalp in the pool. Fast-food car. Same pants every day.
Our splintered protagonist.
Another word: murk (& its confidence).
Cinema returns us to anima:
Motel room sex, vacuum cleaner watching like a dog.
Her skin had the red of the shower water,
the blue cold of pipes and the silver of the screen.
The perfect poet’s luck, like a rattlesnake tamed.

The poets in Los Angeles must
wear boots, their hair like Gogol’s, matted by cheap chlorine, rolling flint with thumbs
to breathe tobacco’s crystals through stiffness.

Notebook aphorisms like:
“Drink from the L.A. River, you grow a tail. The ocean, the intra-uterine salt, no harm there.”

The similes in film stay subconscious, dampening the lens & your heart
in the seats.
I want to make some of them conscious:
“My father is like a dead raven.”

For the film:
“The Poet’s L.A.,” muscle-red & runny:
L.A. of diner eggs and morning beer
L.A. of long hair that doesn’t itch
L.A. of a woman’s breath caught in a handkerchief, waxy cherry
L.A. of stoplights blinking in closed eyes, salsa colors,
trying to sleep with sunspots:
hot breath of the DVD player projecting flashes of Naomi Watts’ psychotic breasts—pulsating the elastic plump
of her panties like a cartoon heart thumping a shirt.

III. At 12 or so Lynch became an Eagle Scout.
I told Mom, “Do you think I have time for that kind of thing right now?”

It’s rare now these days I’m not wired in the jaw,
In yoga they tell me I have rigid ankles.
In yoga I keep my thoughts.
I fist around their salts like I’m breaking a horse.
My plump exhaust-smell “fuck you.”

I’ll leave home someday w/ a palm of wedding rings
to melt down, playground woodchips in my shoes & a water bottle of wine
siphoned from grandpa.
Leave the rooms where the obsidian taste of hairspray stung
the eyes & tongue w/ flush. That L.A. of nude colored bras in suburbs
w/in folds of dove-wing blouses in church, the one-breath high of beauty products
during hugs, the smell of marriage—
Crystalline mothers walking toward me
like sculptures being made. They’d only let me slip away
out of kindness, I suppose.

IV. 21st Century skin: air-conditioned. The wind on the body after the pool.
The buildings decades too old, bondo split open
like eggplant, the color of an angry man’s face.
I drive up Vermont, looking in on storefront iglesia
dug outta the wall by bullhorns, I see cheap pilates
& the Guevara/Hendrix murals “Hate Free Community”—

A little about me: Before I die
I will see Nashville, Austin, N.Y.
& their hieroglyphs, hospitality, foolhardy mania,
thick drainage of every town.

V. Coffee-stained books piled three neat stacks
by the heat vent, your bed dragged & shoved into the closet space,
clothes dipping into the fucking like willows.
“Never heard a man speak like this man before,” you allow to the blender, getting him another warm Blue Moon from the weak fridge.
Your roommate’s cocaine & highball dress slides up her hips when she stands—
“It’s just like a bathing suit, big deal.”
He crosses wind-gray 5 p.m. intersections with the ambulances, hand inside jacket
like warming a pistol w/ his nerves.

VI. Country song I’d write if it rhymed:
“A man came at me with haywire.
I didn’t kill him but I turned him red.
I see him when I press my thumb down on my eyelid in the sun.
The same way a night blacked out is a dream.”

VII.                        The supermarket parking lot,
hard black lava w/ boot imprints, snags of plastic bags tumbleweeded across the dog city.
Buying meat and malt liquor. A lament, this is, for the unpressed. For the insides of televisions.
For a hungover squint in nighttime
making out the glitter of people. Snake charm for blue souls,
the bruises of miracles waiting—another night, another journal,
another set of meals. Talcum torsos.
Igneous needs, aquiline shame.
For days, “Little Wing” plays for headache’s bent tones
& its piles of grating metal keys.
If this weren’t California we’d have a howling moon, that’s what it’d be called you know,
the moon-tongue freeway, azure deaths.
L.A.’s trapped snow rushing the ears like the speed of light, deafening heaven, brain
in dull white, the sky a crunched ice cube wormed.
A young black woman pulls me close at the party, purple beneath her skirt.
“You’re a good dancer.” I don’t believe her. I’m no dull, dumb snake or sad fag.
You know what I mean. You know how that kind of nighttime feels.

VIII. In another unquenched December night
with the chipping white doors closed
on me in my bedroom,
dead mists of the celluloid swerves
my body’s made from floor to bed half-man
for five years,
sloppy on my winter couch
I watched “Mulholland Dr.” with my boots tied together and slung over the pillow like ice skates.

IX. My favorite colors: red, iron gray, silver, L.A. nighttime smog-black
w/ crackling hue, dark blood sunset orange, sour purple, housing project brick & brown,
static, rust.

My favorite Lynch line: “No I want you to fuck it—Shit yes, pour the fucking beer!”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
I’m thinking maybe a family flick at this point, a family of muses:
The Dad a Frank Booth, the Mom his mother,
the baby the Elephant Man, Lynch smoking
his scentless cigarettes w/ palmade face & I could play
the suburban beatnik eldest son stealing everyone’s pills.

X. Rose City—autistic laughter,
syrupy smiles, big noses, no good bars.

I dedicate this to my future wife—
Bonnet, learned & glistening, the woman
we all want—
Dear, this is my journal,
don’t ask anyone else
about my home.

And David—
Try to find something to do with this. All thanks. All apologies.

______________________________

On the theme of Secret Life

Parking Lot Oil Puddles with Jim Morrison

They talk an alky ramble. Dance

on tables—I’m on my knees,
the patchwork of my jeans grinds
to a bitter white dust in the dirt mix,
hardwood ground.
Highway taillights to
hamburgers. Green signs, wind, rock
& roll music—Giving lookers the finger. Telling the men
on the corner to fuck their mothers.
“Hey you! Short-shorts! Fuck your mother!”
Orange juice, Goldfish, red candle, the used body
of the blender with pink shredded strawberries.
My fingers cringing your waistband
like a grave’s fingers. My fingers turning to bones
where they’re wrapped. Your pants falling to the floor.
Apartment bedroom doors with codes like safes that beep
when you know them. The black oaks and magnolias sway
from where I sit like people speaking in tongues. Ashen Sister Ruth
giving up her vows to stalk the jungle, chest heaving
in a red dress, red lipstick, red ringlets, looking out of breath
for Mr. Dean, whose balls hang down the hair
coming from his shorts, my grandmother’s age as an actor.
Slime ring of a day-old beer can on the table. Used blue razors
rattling the closet ledge,
syringes jammed with hair. Her hand during sleep
paints my belly red.
Her blood pillows. Her mother’s loose-hanging leopard
thong she shows on the couch. Her ass through the string glowing toward
the bathroom like two pieces of toast.
Empty water bottles. My girlfriends sucking
the metals from their thumbs.

______________________

Author Biography

Michael Juliani is a poet/writer from Pasadena, California currently living in South Los Angeles as a journalism student at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He’s a columnist for Neon Tommy. His work has appeared at Thought Catalog and as a guest to The Faster Times. Reach him at juliani@usc.edu. Connect with him at michaeljuliani.wordpress.com.

Watercolor, "Turtles," by Renee Reynolds, on the theme of beasts

A Man Called G.

Based on a story that was inspired by a true one

It continues to baffle G., the turns that life can take. He had graduated from a top US MBA program and moved to Shanghai for a high-salaried management position.

Career and life remained lucrative, and so in China, he too remained. By twenty-eight he’d bought a penthouse and by thirty he’d married his Chinese language instructor.

Promotions, bonuses and travel were frequent. There was a mistress in Wenzhou, and then one in Chengdu, and then there were the occasional xiao jie-flecked business weekends.

One day he went to the doctor because he wasn’t feeling well. Nothing conclusive but he was ordered to rest. The hiatus from the office and time home revealed what a shambles his marriage had become.

The divorce got nasty and then it got expensive. Quite fortunately, he’d had his fingers in a big fat Shanghai pie before this domestic unraveling started, and his cut of it came through just in time to help him jump ship all the faster. From then on, he disputed nothing and the ‘I do’ became an ‘I don’t’ just like that.

Back to work he went — a bachelor once again with the spirit of business as usual.

Shortly thereafter, a batch of high-grade lanolin landed in Hamburg to be spread across Europe via various cosmetics by multiple high-profile brands; the shipping end of that lucrative pie that G. had since spent his cut of. Turns out, it was tainted. So toxic that it caused copious cases of blistering rashes; pie in the face.

The probe linked G.’s company to the scandal. His team had overseen the deal between the German-based buyer and the Chinese manufacturer. Bribery, forgery, buck-passing…all standard practice until exposed; rotten pie in the face.

The press would need a monster to behead as soon as possible.

The company offered G. double severance plus a non-taxed informal sum as compensation to be that monster. He agreed.

Time in prison or have the face of his severed head published anywhere G. was spared of. But, his name and career as he’d built them, would henceforth be sunk: his passport was stamped ‘Criminal’ and he’d need to be on the next plane to the US, unavoidable conditions of the secret ‘reprieve’.

Urgings from his mother to stay in the US were followed by a series of job offers from various family members. None would keep him. Four months in the basement of his brother’s Chicago home later, he returned to Shanghai with a new identity. By the end of the following year, G. along with two former colleagues had started their own Quality Assurance operation. Slowly, he rebuilt his life one client at a time. Then he got the lump.

Where his hair ended and his cervical spine began; a tiny nodule of mystery on the back of his neck swelled. It could have been a bug bite, a skin irritation, a small cyst, maybe. It was not.

The first doctor found nothing in the biopsy and sent him home with antifungal cream. A few days later, it was a patch of leathery skin with a small crack at the apex of the lump. He went to see a dermatologist. Another lotion. Before application, G. read the tiny print on the metal tube: “…aloe, vitamin E, arnica, lanolin. Made in the USA.”

One week later, the crack was a scab but the pain in the neck had grown worse. ‘The ache is deep now, in the bone,’ he said. The dermatologist recommended an orthopedic specialist.

Again, nothing conclusive. G. was sent home with painkillers, more lotions, and the card of a therapist specializing in mysophobia (aka germophobia), hypochondria, and other related psychoses common among laowai.

In the therapist’s waiting room, G. read about turtles in last month’s issue of Natural Wonders.

Dr. Lane Fairwell, tells NW how studying turtles has provided new pieces of the evolutionary puzzle.  

“Avoidance,” Fairwell explained, “is the most common form of defense in reptiles. With turtles, however, the development of the neck enabled them to turn toward the origin of their fears, thus expanding memory and awareness, changing the pattern of all life-forms to follow.” 

G. imagined a turtle waiting to tell a fish about his problems. Then he tucked the magazine under his arm and went for a massage, opting instead for a regimen of hard work, painkillers, whiskey and one-night stands. He was pretty content with this executive decision until a morning somewhere in the third week. He woke flat on his back with unbearable pain and a neck stiff as a board. He reached back with searching fingers to find a tooth-sized thing poking out from the bottom of his skull.

He dropped a handful of painkillers in like peanuts, sucked them down with a swig of whiskey and waited. Once the pain subsided, he pried himself up slowly and with the mirror of a left-behind make-up case, examined his neck in the bathroom. “What the devil…?” It had broken the skin and grown in an upward curve — a tiny, pale-brown horn.

Internet investigations offered a cornucopia of plausible culprits: a bone growth, cancer, soul possession, meningitis, a witches curse, a nightmare or an incredible hallucination…

Again, nothing conclusive.

The pill and whiskey consumption grew almost as fast as the horn. A madness followed; mania. G. surged with an energy that turned him into a dynamo in his three favorite activities: work, sex and ping pong. Satisfied women and a newfound exhilaration greeted him each morning. And business had never been better – rain money it did.

Within a year, the sharp tip of the horn was in-line with the crown of his head. He was like a rhino walking backward. The best tailor in Shanghai fashioned him with fine shirts and suits, each collar with a giant buttonhole. Photographers and journalists came calling. City Holiday, This is Shanghai, Time In…all the local rags wanted a piece of him; pie redefined.

G.’d reached local celebritydom and the top of his game — but it got lonely up there. For the first time, he suddenly wanted his old life back. He considered going back to the US — at the very least, for a visit, to be with mom and the fam.

He had an X-ray just to see. And then he asked about it just to know…could it…could he have it…can it be…removed?

The doctor pinned up the X-ray but G. could already smell the answer, see it too. His spine was fused with it; one could say, it was the top of it, the biggest part of it. Removal would kill him. Second and third opinions said the same.

G. visited family anyway but the description was not enough to prepare them. He had downplayed it. Sure, moments of familial history would be revisited, aspects of the G. they all knew and loved would surface here and there, but this new appendage he wielded with a foreign beastly gait, no one, not even his own mother, could come to accept. Not ever.

G. returned to Shanghai crushed. After swallowing and snorting a plethora of drugs delivered by displaced citizens from nations in upheaval, G. teetered out of his window with nothing, really, to live for. He held out his arm, dropped the bottle of whiskey and decided to follow it.

Headfirst, down, down, down he went, toward the bottom, toward the concrete, toward the blackness of pain’s end.

The weight of the horn pulled him faster into Earth’s core, pushing everything back. G. became a bullet, cutting through the night air as a space-diver falls across galaxies. His head would have crushed upon the pavement if not for the flagpole jetting out of the building; a massive red flag flapping at the end of it.

The horn hooked the pole and swung G. back up into his own window.

With mouth agape and limbs loose as cooked noodles, he slumped there in his box and rested on his horn.

Author Biography

Renée Reynolds grew up in Chicago and Los Angeles. She writes short fiction and paints long pictures. When the voices come, she transcribes as much as possible in case its important but it usually results in a first-person narrative. There are regulars and ones who seem to be just passing through. She is currently writing a novella based on the life of an American business man  in Shanghai.   She works as a freelance writer and has lived in Shanghai since 2007. This is the first time she has written about herself in the third-person.