All those tapes are just movies.įour days ago, it was the first place I went. Ifs as if a Mayberry filter’s been applied to footage of my hometown, and that’s what I’m seeing projected on the car’s windows instead of actual passing scenery What happened here? I drive past Dads shop and the familiar neon Video Realm sign, darkened now for good. Gone are the slouching junkie kids, and the shambling homeless drones with filth clouds in tow The sidewalks are even and unbroken. I don’t see a single obese form straddling a scooter puffing Pall Malls. The parking lot is free of young mothers with too many screaming babies clinging to them. Gone are the discount notices for Mountain Dew by the case. I drive past the grocery store, marquee promising a sale on organic juice. Aren’t places supposed to be worse in reality than memory? Isn’t it the real world that comes up short, not time-tinted recollection? Other than that, though, things look shockingly great around here. Stained-glass windows shattered by vandals. Past the old white church, abandoned and covered in peeling paint. Behaving like one of the characters in my own trashy films instead of doing what I know I should: Get the hell out of here. Life imitates camp, so maybe my stuff’s more realistic than the critics say I mean, just look at me. But in real life people in crisis often behave like bad actors. If this were a movie-not one of mine of course, a good one-such a display would never fly, ids too operatic. He looked so painfully earnest, so awesomely dramatic. I start to laugh as I drive away, leaving Fred behind. “Did he, Davie?” Fred’s smile is gone, his face too close to the window “Did he keep… everything?” And your old man, well, he never did throw nothing away did he?”
“Going through their things can be real hard. “Need any help up at the house?” he asks, words coming a full second after his lips cease to move. The soundtrack for this scene is out of synch. His eyes don’t match up with his smile, words don’t match his lips. His face is doing a strange twitchy thing, movements all herky-jerky like a movie watched in fast forward. I roll it down a crack, but just a crack. He smiles and raps again on the window, insistent. If this were a movie Fred would be played by Brian Cox circa Super Troopers. Fred-hardware store swami, bestower of king-size Crunch bars at Halloween-leans over me with an enormous CinemaScope smile. The ragged staticky lines do their awful dance and I pull over into the gas station lot, jamming my fingers back into my eyes until I begin to cry.Ī knock on the window makes me jump. Money down, sustenance acquired, I go back outside into the dishwater-gray afternoon, into my dad’s rattly Buick, down the only real road in this dead-end western Pennsylvania town I thought I’d escaped half a lifetime ago. But I’ve been away from the house too long already. two at best, baby Back home, I’ve kicked hotter than you out of bed for snoring, for hogging the blankets. I want to tell the pizza princess that I’m not nuts, that she’s not so hot. I’ve seen her before, and not just in the bar.įor a second, even though it’s stupid and doesn’t matter, I want to defend myself. Things are normal again, and I realize I know this girl. I desperately shove my fingers into my eyes until pain stars flare up and drive away the other stuff, blink hard. I know how I look, enacting this, our daily routine, in the same wrinkled clothes again. She was nicer to me yesterday, even nicer when I first came in four days ago. If this were a movie she’d be played by Lori Petty, circa a few very hard years after Free Willy. The girl behind the bar pushes my pizza and a sixer of sweaty beers forward, a look of disgust on her small-town pretty face. The world stretches and distorts like in a mirror in a funhouse that’s no fun at all. Flickering Dusk Of The Video God by Luciano MaeanoĪ fresh burst of white noise roars through my head and jittery tracking lines wiggle and squirm through my vision again, even worse this time.
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