Directing Herbert White

by James Franco

  My retainer flew from my mouth,

  And I let it lie on the side of the road.

  My buckteeth flung themselves from my mouth,

  My ears shot from my head like handles

  And my nose was a blob.

  Tom, will you go out tonight?

  Age fifteen,

  In the back of her car,

  I tried it, just because—Sharon.

  Because boys get with girls, right?

  Even ones like Medusa.

  Age sixteen,

  I found I had the love life of the octopus,

  Groping and grappling,

  And after, slunk sideways back to my home.

  I would go out tonight,

  But I think I’ll pass.

  Just because.

  Age fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,

  Erica was with Sterling

  All those years,

  And I was on the sideline.

  •

  We all grow older.

  But they won’t.

  Erica won’t and Sterling won’t.

  Sterling, please.

  At home,

  Nineteen-ninety-three,

  There are songs on my stereo that tell me big things,

  And I have a religion about myself.

  Kurt Cobain tells me

  Where I’m going.

  Sterling, there is this life

  And there are afterlives,

  And I’ll see you in one of those.

  2. Reel around the Fountain

  In the parking lot,

  In the ’stang,

  After school,

  Before his practice,

  They kissed, hard.

  Lips to lips,

  Sharp teeth to sheep teeth.

  A ritual.

  Everyday, from then on,

  I would watch

  From across the lot,

  One practice,

  Then another.

  I’d sit at the top of the bleachers,

  Trying to sink into the wood.

  Watching Speedos and listening to faggot jokes.

  •

  I have dreams of water.

  I have dreams of fire.

  I dream of blood.

  I am all of these things.

  I will never marry.

  3. Hand in Glove

  No other love is like this,

  This special-special,

  Because it’s us.

  When I see your chest crest above

  The level of the pool,

  It is Christ splashing through the blue

  With a yellow ball

  Here to save me.

  And when I see you drive in your Mustang—

  Arched behind the wheel,

  Ray Bans,

  Blond—

  It’s sexy Satan.

  Graduation day,

  I’ll be gone.

  And you,

  You never knew me.

  I’ll keep a room

  For you

  In my mind.

  There is a table, a chair

  And a candle

  That burns forever.

  4. William, It Was Really Nothing

  It rains.

  Sterling,

  It was only your whole life.

  In this town,

  You were king.

  How could something like Erica

  Capture you?

  You are a force

  And so am I.

  Can’t you see that thinking is nothing?

  That school is nothing?

  That family is nothing?

  That girls are nothing?

  I have some advice for you—

  I am the center of all,

  I am the core,

  And all the movements you ever made

  Were made to fit this poem.

  5. How Soon Is Now?

  I am my father’s son,

  Shy and vulgar,

  And the heir of shit.

  You say I do it all wrong.

  I fill my days

  With video games of love

  And television shows.

  Nineteen-ninety-five

  Was a bad year.

  You were everything—

  I wiped you clean

  With alcohol.

  Now

  I stand alone.

  Something is going to happen.

  Things will change.

  I’ve erased the past,

  I’m ready for the future.

  For a future of me,

  Without the need for you.

  It’s gonna happen

  Now.

  But when?

  V.

  31

  It was birthday thirty-one,

  I was in Suffolk, Virginia, directing

  A short film called Herbert White.

  We stayed at the Hilton Gardens,

  The only hotel in town,

  The rest are motels, rented monthly.

  There are no restaurants, but plenty of strip malls,

  Prefabricated houses and little swamps;

  People sit in their cars in gas-station lots

  And eat and smoke.

  This is eating out in Suffolk.

  The actor that fucks a goat in my film

  Was home-schooled because his parents didn’t

  Want him to be subjected to drugs, guns and violence.

  “And blacks,” I think.

  Indian River, the school is called.

  Ramone is his name, a handsome, dumb-faced kid.

  There were baby goats; they ran around their pen on stiff, stumpy legs.

  •

  I’ve had good and bad birthdays.

  And boy do they make me think

  About when I was younger,

  When I had no friends and my mom drove me to school

  Because I lost my license drunk-driving, and we wouldn’t talk,

  We would listen to Blonde on Blonde

  Every morning, and life was like moving through something

  Thick and gray that had no purpose.

  And now I see that everything has had as much purpose

  As I give it, or at least it can all make its way

  Into my poem and become something else,

  And in that way all that shit, and all those bad birthdays,

  And the good ones are markers in an anniversary line—

  And they carry less and less of their original pain,

  And become emptier, just markers really, building blocks,

  To be turned into constructions and fucked with.

  They Called You Sean De Niro

  On Fast Times at Ridgemont High

  They called you Sean De Niro

  Because of your dedication.

  An actor as engrossed in his role

  As De Niro was in LaMotta;

  You were Jeff Spicoli:

  Surfer, stoner, prophet.

  You were smart enough to know

  Not to give too much:

  That ordering pizza

  In class was the move

  That would last.

  Spicoli (in his dream) won

  Surf contests, and had babes

  On his arms, and was asked:

  “A lot of people expected

  Maybe Mark ‘Cutback’ Davis

  Or Bob ‘Jungle Death’ Gerrard

  Would take the honors

  This year,” and you said,

  “Those dudes a
re fags.”

  And decades later,

  When he introduced you

  For your nomination for Milk,

  The real De Niro, now your friend,

  Said he couldn’t believe you

  Had been cast in all those

  Straight roles, because

  In Milk you were such

  A fine homo.

  When you and I kissed on Castro Street,

  It was for a full minute.

  Your face scratched like my father’s.

  Fake

  There is a fake version of me

  And he’s the one that writes

  These poems.

  He has an attitude and swagger

  That I don’t have.

  But on the page, this fake me

  Is the me that speaks.

  And this fake me is louder

  Than the real me, and he

  Is the one that everyone knows.

  He’s become the real me

  Because everyone treats me

  Like I’m the fake me.

  River

  Hello, James, it’s River.

  Where do you think I’m calling from?

  Deep in hell, deep in the Florida wilderness?

  Deep in the cement bowels of LA,

  Beneath the neon, and the signs?

  It’s me, River, calling you

  From the underworld.

  I died at age 23,

  Ten years before your age now.

  James, you’re the Jesus age.

  You think you know me?

  I tried to be something good,

  Something that spoke to people,

  I was pushed into acting, but I loved music,

  You’re in acting because you chose it.

  Pick up the phone, James, it’s River,

  I’m calling to say it’s over.

  You know that moony feeling,

  Like the air is gone, because there is no

  More of a life? I’ve left just a little,

  I know you want more, James,

  But I left only a little.

  And what time

  Do we have for others

  Anyway?

  I’ve been gone for decades,

  I’ve been forgotten.

  I spent my two decades

  Focused

  On work and family.

  You’re all over the place, James.

  I was a River that flowed straight

  And pure; you’re like a king

  That orders one thing,

  And then orders the opposite thing.

  Hello

  I am writing to you because there are so many words

  That don’t have form, and when I put them on paper,

  They have a little form, but then I worry that it’s not the right form

  And then I know that my thinking is not clear.

  But but but, the years go by, and decisions are made,

  Like wind blowing leaves down a backlit tunnel,

  Just words going round, and the form is ridiculous,

  And now I think I need a little red in here, okay,

  Look at the hood of her Stanford sweatshirt, the girl

  I’m in love with, a fucking miracle,

  A rippling blue miracle breaking on the surface of the lake,

  After I’ve dropped my lucky penny through.

  Hello down there.

  Hello up there.

  Hart Crane’s Tomb

  The guy that could fuck sailors

  And throw a punch,

  And whose life was so bound up

  In his poetry that when he said to the Brooklyn Bridge

  “A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

  Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,”

  He meant himself.

  A circle on the surface of the ocean,

  For a second,

  And then the bottom of the sea.

  Sal Mineo

  I directed a film about the actor Sal Mineo.

  Many people in the new generation

  Might not know who he was,

  Because he’s been dead since ’76.

  My film focuses on his last day alive,

  Because he lived his whole life in his last day:

  He talked to his lover Sid on the phone,

  About plans for the future;

  He went to the gym;

  He invited people, including Liz Taylor and Paul Newman

  And Nick Ray to the opening of his new play,

  P.S. Your Cat Is Dead;

  And he went to rehearsal

  With Keir Dullea of 2001 fame, and Milton Katselas,

  The future guru of the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

  In P.S. Sal played a bisexual burglar

  That gets caught burgling an apartment.

  Later that night, after rehearsal,

  Sal was actually stabbed

  By a real burglar

  In front of his apartment,

  On Holloway Drive.

  Stabbed near his heart,

  In the heart of Hollywood.

  For a year they didn’t capture his killer.

  So the tabloids said he was killed for drugs,

  Or because he was gay:

  A GAY LOVE TRIANGLE KILLING.

  But it was none of those things,

  None of those things.

  •

  Don’t worry, famous people;

  Three and a half decades

  Aren’t the limit of fame.

  Sal fell out of favor long before he was killed.

  He came out.

  He got older.

  He did bad films.

  He couldn’t find work.

  He did cocaine.

  A down-and-out actor randomly killed.

  I made the film,

  It’s called Sal,

  Because I wanted to tell about a life

  That had lost its life,

  And I wanted to tell it with love.

  When My Father Died

  I was about to shoot the last scene of the night:

  A scene in the Dark Woods,

  Opposite a screaming tree

  With a mouth and eyes like a jack-o’-lantern.

  I was in the chair getting makeup checks,

  When my manager called;

  My mother was following my father’s ambulance,

  She had been writing in the back of the house

  And she had heard him gasp

  In my old room,

  His new office,

  And that was about all.

  Me, a buffoon in cake-thick makeup,

  The Wonderful Wizard,

  With a set full of people ready for the next shot.

  I walked the long halls of the long stage,

  And down the Yellow Brick Road,

  Where the director, Sam, was waiting.

  It was hard to grasp his words,

  Like scooping gold fish from a tank

  With a broken net

  At the kindergarten fair.

  Plenty of refrains in my head,

  Should I be working?

  Should I be racing to the airport?

  And they played and played.

  I went through the motions of the scene.

  We wrapped,

  And I got in the car, my driver

  Drove me out of the lot

  And turned right toward Woodward.

  A block away from the studio,

  My manager called again.

  It was ove
r.

  The hanging traffic lights did their work:

  Yellow to red as I listened to the cell phone—

  My father’s spirit was released,

  As a green light releases an SUV.

  VI.

  Film Sonnet 1

  The beginning is my favorite part:

  All the boys pretend to get romantic

  And talk in high voices and blow kisses

  At the stuffy teacher’s back as he recites

  Poetry. The boys flutter and croon.

  Then we find out our young hero has

  A cheating mother and a weak father,

  And he runs away. After all of his

  Trouble-making, Antoine Doinel ends

  Up at the beach, staring at the ocean

  And then staring at us. He’s not bad,

  He’s just lost. The title was always confusing:

  400 Blows? Is that porn, S & M?

  No, in French it means “to raise hell.”

  Film Sonnet 2

  Marcello is fatigued. A passive-aggressive genius,

  A man wrapped in himself: art, mistress, and wife.

  He goes to the spa, why? At the spa, people in white

  Walk about the plaza, there is a fountain, everyone is rich.

  It is something about the water, just the right combination

  Of minerals to cure. But no one seems to get healthier,

  And no one seems very sick. A conclave to the enclave,

  The rich and the sick, Europe’s guilty sexual conscience

  Spilled out. And this movie is just that, but for one man:

  Fellini’s getting old, inspiration dries up, but here,

  This despair is nice because it is the sorrow of an artist.

  An important artist has important despair, and everything

  He does can go on the screen: sex, religion, fear.

  A confession of pain and proclivities.

  Film Sonnet 3

  He walks mindlessly, maniacally

  Across the desert, like a Sam Shepard man,

  A man who has been down to Mexico to die

  Of a broken heart but didn’t die,

  So he comes back to Texas, and then to Los Angeles,

  Because all the cowboys retired to the movies.

  Now they don’t even make Westerns anymore.

  Paris, Texas, the name of the place

  Where he bought some land, like a slice of Paradise,

  But only in his mind. The real place

  Is just a deserted plain in the middle of nowhere,

  And his wife is working in a peepshow palace,