theMystery.doc
Page 28
SWASHBUCKLER!!!!
(PARTY PETE—For Craig)
PHOTO OF MATT IN FISH ‘N CHIP SHOP WRITING IN THIS NOTEBOOK WITH SERIOUS FACE ABOUT THE ABOVE
MATT WITH A POLICEMAN OUTSIDE FISH ‘N CHIP MATT’S EATING HIS CHIPS (HAPPY) POLICEMAN’S TALKING ABOUT CRIME IN THE STATES. HE WISHED US A HAPPY HOLIDAY. 9:25 pm SOHO
Ange is smiling below yellow JUICYFRUIT shirt hanging in window w/chips (“Move right, down a little, now left…right…OK!”)
Matt and Ange in front off The Palace Theatre below LES MISERABLES sign, taken by friendly Asian family.
Jesus after too much acid with his friend. His shirt is off because he’d worked up an alcohol sweat coming off of his mat to nearly but not quite hit Matt.
A crowd waiting to buy pastries and cakes 9:40 CHINACITY
Canadian girls with matching hats making way through Leicester Square.
FLASHING LIGHTS FROM EMPIRE THE OLD ROSE SELLER WALKING STICK CROWDS WALKING PAST LOOKING BLURRED HE’S IN FOCUS JUST STARING WITH VACANT LOOK ON HIS FACE (LONG WHITE BEARD & WHITE HAIR)
Black man braiding girl’s hair into one thin, long twine, cardboard square to her head with holes in it.
COUNCIL TURN UP TO STOP STREET SELLERS THEN ALL PACK UP (PHOTO OF A GUY WITH LONG HAIR PACKING HIS STUFF UP LOOKING STRAIGHT AT ME WITH WORRIED LOOK ON HIS FACE) ANGE LEICESTER SQUARE 9:55 pm
Black hand on white paper. An outlined face. Shaded mouth shaded eyes pale face
TOURIST SHOT OF MATT IN FRONT OF HORSE STATUE NEAR PICCADILLY BRASSERIE HE HAD SUCH A TOURIST “HURRY UP & TAKE THE PICTURE” LOOK ON HIS FACE. ONE TO SEND HOME TO MA & PA BY ANGE
Matt & Ange in front of Picadilly lights taken by three very tan Americans with annoying Jackal voices.
PHOTO OF LIGHTS ‘FOSTERS’ BLUE, ‘TDK’ GREEN, ‘SANYO’ WHITE ANG.
PHOTO OF A GIRL TAKING A PHOTO, PICCADILLY CIRCUS
KANSAS
http://www.filmsite.org/plac.html
The film begins with superimposed titles on an opening long shot of a highway with a hitchhiker—a poor, uneducated, quiet, aimless but ambitious and aspiring young man, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift). He is thumbing his way to the home of his rich Uncle Charles Eastman (Herbert Heyes), who owns a bathing-suit manufacturing factory—advertised in a billboard sign of a reclining, dark-haired bathing beauty on the beach: “It’s an Eastman.” A shiny sports car with a beautiful socialite at the wheel drives past. She flirtatiously honks, and then continues zooming by in her convertible—symbolic of the world of the privileged passing him by. The two images of luxury, pleasure, freedom and leisure (on the billboard and in the fancy automobile) already fill George’s mind and he hungers and craves everything the females and their lifestyles represent.
I lived in a narrow rundown old house on the north side of the river, on a street of narrow rundown old houses, all sharing walls as they do in that part of the world, with, at times, seventeen other people, all travelers, most of them from Australia, a few from South Africa and New Zealand. Me. And one Brit, a little neo-Nazi skinhead, a friend of the owner of the place. He sold coke for this friend, and lived for free in a room upstairs decorated with Nazi tapestries with his pregnant girlfriend, a woman in her early forties, ancient. He was in his late twenties, I think—though he seemed ancient himself—and once every few days we’d hear him up there beating her, shouting all sorts of names at her, things crashing, falling, breaking, and the sound of her screaming; but there was never anything that we could do. I, myself, was not in the proper shape to intervene—I’d just sit there watching TV, drinking cider from a glass; the ceiling shook when she’d hit the floor. Angie tried once. She said, I just can’t sit here and listen to this anymore. She got off the couch, went upstairs, knocked on the door, and when he flung it open, eyes blazing, she said:
—Now mate, you just can’t be hitting her now that she’s pregnant. Come down and have a smoke with us…
The Nazi—I forget his name—was small in stature, but mighty in deed. I’d heard stories of him beating Pakistanis with bottles and pipes; blacks with bats and straight razors; queers with curling irons—the truth is I really don’t remember—I find myself supplying false information to keep the story moving along. But I remember the veins that stuck out of his forehead, and the flames tattooed down his arms, which licked at his skull-ringed fingers. Swastikas dyed into his neck and chest. He’d walk around with his shirt off to remind us. I was scared shitless of him, but the two of them stayed out of sight most nights, and the truth is for some reason he liked me, and when he was cooking in the upstairs kitchen and I would walk in, he would always make me up a plate.
The prime feature of the house was the creaking carpeted stairway, straight on as you walked in the front door. It led up to five floors. On the ground floor were two bedrooms and the kitchen, the floor of which was down to dirt in spots. Bedrooms on the next level, then the TV room and bathroom on the next, then more bedrooms, then another bathroom and kitchen. From there you climbed a ladder into an attic filled with cots. This is where I had slept at the beginning, on a cot with deadly springs, beneath a skylight and the choked, foul, tumid London summer sky. Before long, I would move down into Angie’s room on the ground floor, the best room in the house, where two curtained French doors, now painted shut, had once, in an earlier age, opened onto what must have been a garden.
Now littered with trash and leaves, and a few condoms dropped from the TV room window above.
Ange was twenty-five at the time, which would have made her 6 years older than me. She was from Oz, and worked at a car dealership answering the phones. I’d found a job through a temp agency at an insurance company, doing data entry. This was London, and in those days most of the populace hadn’t touched a computer, so if you could type you’d find a job in a second. The office I worked in was in a newly purchased annex in a riverside warehouse park near Angel tube station, and there were only six of us yet in the entire building. The year was 1996. There were four other guys working there: one, Ian, a resident of the house (at home we called him Superlonghaired Ian), a slight, soft-spoken, malodorous fellow from Auckland, New Zealand, with a long blond ponytail; a black man from the West Indies with an upper-crust accent; and two college boys. We were led by a kindhearted middle-aged woman with a friendly fat face, and thick northern accent. Her name was
Carol.
I had only one shirt appropriate for a professional work environment, and I wore it every single day I worked that job, for six months—a white button-down dress shirt, along with a pair of baggy green corduroys. A tie was required, and I’d found one at a thrift store. I didn’t know how to tie it, so Angie tied it for me the morning of the second day that I had known her, telling me: I’m sorta the mother of the house, mate. Each day when I got home, I’d loosen the knot, put up my collar, and slip the tie back over my head. And the next morning, simply slip it back on again. I still have the tie. It was lost for many years, but I found it recently, buried in a box. Gray with red and black bands. I haven’t worn it in eight years, but the knot has never been untied since the first time it was tied. Why don’t I pull it on over my head right now—maybe it’ll trigger a memory.
The woman behind the desk looks up at me and says, Oh! I didn’t see you there…have you been waiting long? I say, It’s OK, I don’t have an appointment. I am only here to wait. I pick up a magazine, mostly ads for different styled pain killers, one that makes you smile no matter what, this one I see is for housewifes, and on the next page you can work a jackhammer all day and it’s not a problem. I turn the magazine over to see what I am reading and it says, Journal of Painful Ills, from this last November, and a man with a white beard on the cover. The woman behind the desk has started filing her nails down. I feel strange and am thinking o
f laughing, and seep out a squeal, high like hee-hheeh! and roll my eyes up and back down again with an uncomfortable smile that feels warm and spiny all the same. The woman has seen me and thinks it’s a bit strange, but I watch as her eyes unfocus in the same way mine do, and she blinks too often looking for a clear image.
I swung and sent her reeling———In a dark room—I’d torn off all my clothes but my underwear, I was pulling at my hair, scratching at my face—STOP IT! she said, STOP IT!—and writhing on the bed; possessed. Sobbing, hyperventilating, curled up in a ball, moaning and wheezing in strange tongues. I couldn’t handle the pain anymore, and I was breaking down yet again—it had been inevitable—but this time there was someone in the room with me, trying to calm me down, let me run my fingers through your hair, put your head in my lap, let me blow in your ear, but when I looked into her face, her hair was fire, and her eyes glowed red, and she said—I AM THE MOTHER OF LIFE! (I cried: Get away from me!) I AM THE LIGHT! (Get away!) I kicked at her, but she returned each time, swelling larger and larger and larger, and I kept getting smaller—THERE IS NO WAY THROUGH THIS DARK LAND BUT THROUGH ME! —FUCK YOU! I screamed and swung and
She slipped the tie through the loop, tightened it around my neck, smoothed it down my chest, and said
—Didn’t your father ever teach you to tie a tie?
—I guess knot.
—There, she said, pulling it tight, patting my chest. All done. Now you look smart.
—I feel like a fool.
—You look good in a tie, mate. It suits you.
As guests enjoy the catered, formal party at the mansion surrounded by glamorous wealth, George knows no one and immediately feels out of place as a poor boy with no innate gifts. Dressed inappropriately in a dark suit instead of black tie, he takes refuge away from the other guests by himself at the pool table. There, the radiant and stunning Angela in a strapless white gown discovers the skinny newcomer, in one of the film’s most memorable sequences. When they first meet and share a conversation all alone together, she is intrigued by his expert pool playing and tries to draw him out:
Angela:
Tonight after work, we’ll all have a smoke, then go to the Nobody Inn up the street and have a pint. To celebrate your first day on the job, and your living here. Whaddya say? I’m sorta the activities director of the house.
I’m engaged, she said. I have a fiancé back home in Australia. But I don’t want to be with him. He’s a motorcycle enthusiast. He races them as well. He’s quite famous. We used to be mods. We used to ride our mopeds around Sydney, every sunny day, and every day was a sunny day back then. I had a ’68 Vespa, red with mirrors down each side, eight or ten or twelve on each side! My father’s rich, he has a chalet in Switzerland. He spends his days fucking underage Thai prostitutes. He has cancer of the prick. My mother is dead. She hung herself below a waterfall on a beautiful summer’s day. If my fiancé ever calls, tell him I’m not in. He probably won’t though. After our last convo I think he’s probably got the picture. How about you?
You have a girlie back home?
[photo of kansas]
I had planned on coming to Europe with a girl named Shelly—wait, not Shelly. Shiela? No, that wasn’t it—I don’t remember her name. I’d met her in a forestry class I was taking at the University. She was a few years older than me. She was very petite, and she looked like a particular singer I was smitten with. I didn’t like the singer’s voice, or her songs, but I liked the way she looked in her videos. Shelly was a hippie, and she lived with her boyfriend in a hippie house on the Olympic Peninsula. She took three buses and a ferry to school, and then home again, traveling six hours each day. She had a good attitude, very positive. Her glass was always more than half full. She was always smiling, and the world to her was open and beautiful, and everyone in it was beautiful too, and I liked this quality in her, and I tried to make her believe that I felt the same way about things too, that I was well-adjusted, that I was nice, that I was peaceful, that I loved the world, that I didn’t hate everyone and everything in it, and certainly didn’t fantasize about murdering the people whose cars I retrieved for them at the Cherry Street Garage, cutting off their heads, putting them on pikes, and so forth. She dropped out of school soon after I met her, but we would hang out together whenever she was in the city. We went to the farmers’ market, and I bought us both braided leather bracelets, and tied hers on, and she smiled and said she loved it! We smoked pot in a park and talked about how fun it would be to go to Europe together and travel around, she said we should do it!—she was very spontaneous—and before I really knew it I had quit school and spent four months working extra hours at hotels and parking lots saving up money, a dollar tip at a time. We bought our tickets, and I envisioned that an ocean away from that boyfriend of hers, with whom she seemed more and more disenchanted all the time, she would be mine. In fact my whole reason for going was to get her alone. But two weeks before our plane was to leave she called and left a message, quite spontaneously, saying she and her boyfriend were going to buy a boat and sail the seas, so she couldn’t make it to London with me after all. What was I supposed to do then? I’d quit school, given notice at my jobs, moved out of my apartment and was living with my parents to save money.
—Well, I had a girlfriend back home. We were going to come together, but I had to break up with her.
—Why’d you break up?
—You know how it is. She wanted me to commit, and I just couldn’t do that.
—Well, I’m glad she didn’t come. Because you seem like a nice bloke. And she’d be jealous that we’re here now, all alone, sharing this joint.
—Yeah. Plus, I’ll be able to finish my book without her bugging me all the time.
—You’re a writer?
—Yeah.
—Have you ever been published?
—Not yet. But I will be.
—What are you writing?
—A novel. It’s in those two yellow notebooks I keep with me at all times. It’s going to be the biggest thing in the world.
—Cool, mate! Congratulations! And what do we call it?
�
�
THE POLLUTIONIST