by James Franco
That didn’t explain things for me, but I didn’t ask any more questions. The Alabama woman went back to arrange things and we waited. I looked at the wall and tried to think about nothing. Blondie and Casey chatted a bit about acting schools and mutual friends, and smiled politely.
I thought about knives crossing my veins. I was nothing, I was resigned to it. I was just an empty organism using resources until I died. Their little chat buzzing in my ears made me think about mass murder, and I tried my hardest to concentrate on a photograph of a little brown barn in an idyllic snowy landscape.
Then Alabama came back and we all walked down the hall past a bunch of orderlies and nurses and into a community room full of broken toys and painting supplies and stench. We stood in silence, and a minute later they brought the kids in. Misshapen heads and broken bodies with limbs too long or short, walleyed, all hobbling like goblins.
I saw the blond fucker, Christopher, light up like it was a real treat to see such distorted kids.
Alabama directed us toward the kids. She introduced me to a little Asian girl named Kim. I sat down in a children’s chair, my knees up at my chin. Kim stood beside me. She couldn’t speak. Her mouth was pulled back on one side exposing stubby, jagged teeth stained by plaque. In the pulled-back corner of her mouth, there was white-yellow crust and it was in the inside of her eyes and her eyelashes too. And her face was wet from the constant drool that she would smear about with the back of her hand over her cheeks and eyes. There were large wet spots on her My Little Pony T-shirt.
I sat there and she gripped my forearm with both hands and twisted and regripped and twisted and did it again. She was pretty strong. Then she held my wrist to her face. At first I didn’t know what she was doing, but she kept doing it. She liked to feel the blood pumping against her face. A few times she tried to pull my shirt up so that she could get at my heart, but Alabama or the nurses would stop her. Then she started drawing on her arms with the markers and then my arms and then my shirt. They didn’t make her stop doing that.
I spent an hour like that and that was it. When I drove away, it felt good. Driving back down Sunset, Silver Lake looked better. The McDonald’s arches were a glowing symbol, and I took its meaning like sunlight into my smiling face as I drove by.
When I got home I watched L’avventura. It was the third time I had tried. This time I finally got into it and it paid off. I liked how guilty and empty everyone was. At 1 a.m. I walked down Sunset to Hyde to see what was there. The usual was there. I sat in a booth with some people I knew. We sat and looked at each other and didn’t say anything good. I drank a few things and looked around the place. I couldn’t work up the energy to meet anyone new. Then I thought a little about the Asian girl, Kim, and the power was still there.
I liked that day.
A week later I went back to Faith & Victory Church and met Miles. He had been at school the time before. He went to a regular high school with nonretards. Miles was different from all the others at Faith & Victory because he wasn’t retarded; he was just damaged. He was one year old when his mom died and his father and stepmother started torturing him. Eventually they were caught and went to prison for a year, and Miles was left with an amorphous hole in a chinless sack-head. His teeth were sporadic and jutted outward. When he spoke, saliva sputtered and ran at the sides, slicking the neck folds beneath, which pumped when he spoke.
When they had stirred Miles’s face into mush, they had also fed him insecticides to make him shut up. His stomach was ripped apart and he needed special medical care. He only ate mush food and special shakes.
Miles’s uncle had a hard time paying bills. He said he couldn’t pay for the private attention Miles would need if he lived at home, so that’s why Miles was at the hospital. Miles thought he was going back home someday, as soon as his uncle got it together. But Miles had been at Faith & Victory for the past ten years.
That second day at Faith & Victory, Miles came right up to me. His mouth was scary, but I followed instructions and didn’t get disturbed. But I kept staring.
“I’m Miles. I rule this place.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “You must be proud.”
“No, it’s boring. But sometimes I fuck the nurses.”
“Oh yeah? You think those nurses are pretty?” The nurses were not pretty. They were mostly short and wide.
“I think they are ugly, except for Maria and Angela. They’re hot. And I fuck them both all the time. Doggy style!”
“They’re not bad. Good work,” I said. Even Maria and Angela were not that pretty, but.
A single hair was growing out of the corroded surface below his bottom lip, pubic and violating. No human would ever kiss those lips.
“I’m going to fuck Casey next,” he said. I looked around. Casey, the blond actress, was on the other side of the community room working with Kim. Kim had her head against Casey’s chest, listening to her heart. Casey was laughing, a rare thing for her.
“Good luck,” I said to Miles. “That would be great.”
“I’m gonna get in there,” he said. “Actresses love me.”
“Yeah? That would be pretty great. What’s your trick?”
“It’s easy,” he said. “I pretend to be all helpless, and then when they treat me like a little baby, I make my move.”
“Easy as that, huh?”
“Yeah, easy as that,” he said, and he was smiling, but his mouth didn’t really smile. It just went up at the sides, and showed all his bad teeth framed by the broken flesh of his lips.
I started going to Faith & Victory once a week, usually on Thursday afternoons because that was when Casey went. I know I was there to help the kids, and that is what made me feel better, but I also liked being around Casey. She really was hot still, even though she was hotter back when she was eighteen, when she was doing all the vampire films.
One day I said, “I loved you as a vampire.”
She turned from the coloring book she was working on with a boy whose head was larger than his whole desiccated body. For five full seconds she looked at me with those heavy-lidded eyes. She looked like a vampire right then. Then she said, “We’re here for the kids.”
Right, we were there for the kids. Casey turned back to the coloring book, where the big-headed boy was drawing a mess. There were clouds of scribbles all over the page. Nothing stayed between the lines of Spider-man’s face.
I noticed the blond fucker, Christopher, looking over at me like he had been listening. I caught his eye and he turned back to his retard. It looked like he was laughing but I couldn’t tell because he was talking to his kid.
He looked up again, smiling like he was such a nice guy. “How are you, Mike?”
“Oh, I’m fine, Christopher,” I said, smiling back. I put on a phony German accent. “Dah, dah, everything ez goot.” He made a face like I made no sense because he didn’t have an accent, but he knew what was up. Casey looked up at me and then at Christopher, and they both started laughing.
“Okay, Mike, whatever you say,” Christopher said, still laughing. Then he looked back to his retard, some kid that couldn’t speak with long arms that draped like vines.
Christopher had started showing up on Thursdays as well. I’m sure it was because of Casey. He was an actor too. He wasn’t as successful, but he liked to talk as if he was. If someone got him going, he could talk about acting all day.
Most Thursdays I would arrive around 3 p.m., when Miles was getting back from school.
“How was school?”
“Fine.”
“Any fuckers pick on you?”
“Yeah.”
“What did they call you?”
“‘Asshole face.’”
“Fuck those guys.”
“Yeah fuck them.” He liked saying “fuck.”
“What do you want to do about them?”
“I want to kill them?”
“Okay, I’ll fucking help,” I said.
Then we started working on a fi
lm project. It was just a little kid project, but it was fun for both of us. Miles wanted to be a director when he grew up, so we decided to make a movie.
The movie was called Murder Hospital. It was all Miles’s idea. He wanted me to play this murderer that was loose in the hospital killing all the retarded patients, and nurses and doctors. We pretended that Casey was the head nurse and Christopher was the head doctor. The climax of the movie would be when I tried to kill Casey and Christopher. Miles was the detective that was trying to solve the crimes. The story was that he would follow the clues of my murder trail and then stop me just in time before I killed Casey.
We started filming with a little video camera that I had. The great thing about the camera was that it was small and had a really long zoom, so we could film people from across the room without them knowing. We would huddle together in the corner and giggle as I filmed Casey’s face and Miles watched on the LCD flip screen. Then we would film Christopher working with his kids. This would all be establishment stuff in the movie, the “doctor” and “nurse” at work before the murders started happening.
We got a lot of good material one day when Christopher was working with Kim. He was talking to her and she was gripping his arm. Then she started pulling his hand under her shirt.
“No, don’t do that, Kim, no, no.”
Kim was grunting and crying like she was upset, but there were no nurses around to help Christopher. Then Kim put her head against his chest and was holding tight around his neck. Christopher was pushing her off and she grunted louder and squealed and started trying to bite him. Miles and I were recording it all in our corner. We had to control ourselves because we were laughing so hard.
“Kim,” Christopher said. “Kim, please get off my neck. Kim!” He was trying to say it in a nice tone but it was obvious that he was getting upset, and her grip was strong so he was having a really hard time getting her off. She grunted and slobbered and bit him.
“Goddammit!” Christopher yelled. And Miles and I almost fell over, but I controlled myself because I wanted to get it all on camera. When I watched the tape back later a lot of the material was jiggly because of all the laughing. Then Miles was laughing out loud and I put my hand over his mouth. It felt hard and craggy and wet.
Finally, two nurses came in and ran over and helped Christopher get away from Kim. He was still trying to be composed and dashing and pretend that he was a nice guy but I could tell he was embarrassed, especially because Casey was there. Then it got really bad because Kim started punching herself really hard in the face and the nurses were trying to restrain her, but Kim was actually really strong, and when the nurse would grab her she would bite the nurse. So Christopher tried to help again and he ended up ripping Kim’s shirt down the front so that her nipple was showing. The nurses yelled at Christopher to get away. It looked like Christopher was going to cry. In the end, two more orderlies came in and carried Kim out, grunting and thrashing, flat young chest exposed for all to see.
After they left the room with Kim, Christopher walked out. I think he really was crying.
Casey turned to us. “You two idiots can stop laughing in the corner. There is nothing funny going on.” I filmed her saying that too, which was good because it was real, even if it didn’t fit into the movie.
It was a good day of movie making.
On other days, after we got a lot of stuff on Casey and Christopher and some of the nurses, we started going into the rooms where the kids were bedridden and we started filming them. We would film the kids from my POV, as if it was the POV of the murderer. I would creep the camera through the door and slowly walk up on the beds and then over the kids, who would look up with large dumb cow eyes. Then I would push the camera down toward them as if the murderer was getting really close. None of them cried, they just lay there like dumb ugly things.
Then one day, around Halloween, I bought a fake rubber knife from a costume shop. We did some more of the murder scenes, and I had Miles work the camera so he could record me as the murderer. We took one of the lab coats from the doctors’ lounge, and we turned my murderer character into a murdering doctor.
No one really knew what we were doing in our little movie, but everyone kept telling me, “We’ve never seen Miles so happy. I don’t know what you’re doing with him, but it’s really working.”
Our new thing was that Miles would go into one of the rooms where there were a couple of bedridden kids. Miles would face the door with the camera and whisper “action,” and then I would come in with the lab coat on and the collar turned up, very arch, acting like I was sneaky. I was a real vaudeville villain. Looking back at the tapes, I saw that I was a horrible actor, but there was also something really scary about the whole thing. I suppose because the retards we were pretending to kill weren’t acting, they were just being themselves: retarded. And they were so helpless. We could have really killed them if we wanted to.
After I swung into the room, I would whip out the rubber knife and hold it above my head as I descended on the latest victim. I would stand over the kid and Miles would get closer to me with the camera. Then I would let out a cackle like I was a madman and really enjoyed killing. Sometimes Miles would laugh during this part, because he was enjoying it so much—probably not the killing part of it so much as the satisfaction of capturing his vision. Then I would bring the knife down really fast toward the kid’s face, like I was hacking him, like in Psycho. I would come really close. One time one of them did start crying, loud, but he couldn’t cry properly so it came out blubbery and wet, like a seal’s bark. Miles and I ran before anyone came in. Miles had left the camera on when we ran out and when I watched the footage later it was just a blurry hallway and feet. I could hear us both laughing like little girls as we ran.
We filmed one scene with Miles as the detective. I brought him one of my suit jackets and a Sherlock Holmes hat with bills in the front and the back, and I even brought him a fake pipe. But the hat couldn’t hide Miles’s face and as soon as I handed him the pipe I realized what a stupid idea it was. Miles couldn’t close his lips all the way, and he couldn’t hold the stem in his ragged teeth. I took the pipe back and said pipes were for idiots and he didn’t need one. Then we filmed some simple stuff, just him walking down the hall looking for clues. Immediately after, he insisted on rewinding the tape in the camera and looking at what we shot. He looked like he normally looked: busted. But it was worse, because it was on camera, so it was emphasized. When I was with him normally I could almost forget all the fucked up stuff about his face, but when it was on camera there was no fooling anyone.
Miles said, “I think the detective is stupid.”
We didn’t film him anymore. We decided we didn’t need the detective character. So then Murder Hospital was all about me. It was a story about the murderer and his victims after that; there was no detective anymore.
So the murderer never gets caught.
Thomas let me go to his house in the hills to edit the stuff on his computer. I’d digitize the tapes and edit them on Final Cut. It was pretty easy once he showed me the basics. The film was terrible. Shaky shots of me acting like a psychotic moron and retarded kids stuck inside their stymied brains, confined to their beds, rolling their animal eyes. But it was frightening because of all that. Because of the retards, and because I was set free in that place. Set free by Miles, the kid that wasn’t retarded, but was put in that place because someone had tried to actually murder him. I watched his one scene as the detective over and over. The poor asshole face walking down the hall “looking for clues” about the murders. But he was looking in all the wrong places; the clues were all over his face.
We filmed a ton of stuff, and we almost had a whole movie. But then we needed the climax, the scene where I killed Casey and Christopher. We had stuff of them working with the kids, but to do the killing scenes we would need their cooperation.
“I don’t want to be any part of whatever you sickos are filming,” Casey said.
“But it’s for Miles, it’s not for me.”
“Bullshit. I know what you two are doing. Sick shit. Everyone is so happy because they think you’re helping him, but you’re not, you’re just making it worse. You’re feeding into whatever is dark inside him.”
“We’re just making a movie. What’s wrong with that? He wants to be a director.”
Then she spoke to me in a quiet steady voice, like she was trying to penetrate something, “Mike, you’re a moron. You don’t know what you’re doing. I know that you think you’re doing good, but you aren’t. If you hurt Miles or anyone else here, I am going to make sure that you get hurt.” Then she walked away.
Casey wasn’t going to be in our movie. Her movie about the princess had just come out in theaters, and it had bombed. I actually liked it, but I was in the minority. Her little lecture probably had more to do with the princess movie bombing than with Miles’s film. Plus, she was just a moody person. Thomas, my actor friend, had fucked her a few times a couple years before and said she was very needy and emotional, and if he wasn’t around when she needed him then she would have a fit.
Miles was very disappointed that we couldn’t get her for Murder Hospital. I felt even worse because I didn’t want to ask Christopher to be in it. I would have rather murdered him for real than ask him for help. Miles and I couldn’t finish our movie. All we had were the murders of the retards.
I stopped going to Faith & Victory Church for a while.
In December I went to Vegas three times, on three consecutive weekends. The first two times were with Thomas. After Thomas had cleaned up, he had started trying to do things, productive things. One of these things was learning to fly planes.
“You should really try it, Mike, it’s great. I got this great guy, he trained Tom Cruise out at Santa Monica.”
He said all this like I was an actor on a TV show and could afford lessons. Really, I had no job, and was scraping by on what my parents and grandmother sent me each month.
To get his pilot’s license, Thomas had to do a series of tests. One of them was a cross-country trip with his flight instructor. Which meant he had to fly somewhere two hours away. The instructor, Skip, had the bright idea that they fly to Vegas at 11 p.m. when there was no air traffic. Then they could hang out in Vegas for a bit and then fly back at 3 or 4 in the morning. Thomas invited me along.
