Dora: A Headcase

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Then my ass vibrates. At first I just let it … I mean, who cares, right? I’m stuck here at least until Mrs. K. gets her big beautiful whore ass back. But then I go ahead and look.

  Holy shit.

  Holy, motherfucking, shit. I know that number.

  Though no one but a couple of sugar dosed cretins sees it, I click my heels together. I salute the empty air. “Herr Doktor!” I go.

  In my head I mean.

  Fuck. He can’t hear me.

  “Hello,” I hear him say. “Ida? Are you there? I very much need to speak with you. Is this Ida?”

  I look around the room for something to make noise with. Just the evil midgets. I stare at the phone. I put it back to my ear and breath as hard as I can as loud as I can. Fuck. I sound like a prank caller – but it’s all I’ve got.

  “Ida?” Sig says. His voice all small and electronic. I scan the room. THE SPOON. I snatch the spoon out from the grip of the boy creature. I tap the spoon on the iPhone in a little rhythm – twinkle twinkle little star. What? It’s the first thing that occurred to me. I pause, and wait, and hold my breath.

  “ Tap once if this is Ida,” Sig says. I told you he was smart.

  I tap once.

  “Tap twice if you can meet me tomorrow at 4:00. Your regular time. It is imperative that we meet. I think … I think you know why.”

  I think about it.

  “Shall I take your silence as a ‘no?’” Sig responds.

  I tap twice. So hard it cracks the plastic on the front of the iPhone.

  “Until then,” Sig says.

  I look at Mrs. K.’s creatures. Their faces are blotchy. Sugar high kicking in. Pretty soon they’ll rock n roll. In my ear is the voice of the man whose dick I just filmed being drained. In my mouth is the spoon used in a previous murder attempt on a Tetra fish. I suck it. Tastes like fish. Or girl.

  17.

  THE BASIC METHODOLOGY FOR EDITING VIDEO AND audio is to highlight the clip and drag it onto the timeline. My studio is in a corner of my bedroom where I built a false wall made from two-by-fours and old record album covers. Mostly I used a staple gun to build the false wall. You don’t need a darkroom to edit video or audio, but it’s cooler to work in the dark. I don’t know why that is. When I’m in there though, there is no trespassing. Once my dad tried to come in there and I missed his thigh by inches with the staple gun. In my studio, everything is MINE.

  You can use the above method for as many clips as you want. If you want to trim your clips, you select a clip and double-click it. In the Viewer Window, you have Play Controls. You can press play, scrub frame by frame, you can click the jog wheel and move shit around. You can drag and drop clips, trim them, close gaps between clips, add effects like fade-ins and fade-outs and cross-fades and crap. Those are the basic ways for editing clips on a timeline in Final Cut Pro.

  The in and out points on your timeline are crucial.

  In between feeding Mrs. K.’s evil midgets sugar cubes and sticks of butter, I compile the Sig footage. If all goes well they’ll be shitting their pants by the time Mrs. Prima Donna K. gets back and I can get the fuck outta here down the fire escape. My plan is to have a rough cut of the film ready by tonight – I’ve arranged for a small group of trusted brilliant scruffy teens to meet up with me and the posse. At the Fremont troll statue under the north end of the Aurora Bridge. Midnight. I need an audience test – a preview sneak peek – to see if I’m on the right track. All serious filmmakers do it.

  The girl gremlin lets out a long gurgly fart that I can hear all the way from the living room. She babbles, “Poo poo in the potty?” Right on schedule. Shouldn’t be long now.

  I’m concerned about the narrative arc of the film. I decided not to go chronologically … yeah, I know, that’s gonna throw some viewers off, but it seemed like the most obvious choice, so I abandoned it immediately. Besides, who wants to watch a movie of a middle-aged man scoring a boner and then needing medical attention? I’m a professional. I went with kind of a more Maya Deren approach – more surrealism than realism. More symbolic. More like how dreams are.

  Maya Deren’s real name was Eleanora Derenkowsky. Ukrainian. Her father was a psychiatrist who worked at the State Institute for the Feeble Minded in NYC. Her mother was an artist. Lucky duck. She was a leading avant garde filmmaker. Well except that she was next to invisible because she was a woman. Of course I learned this from Marlene, who showed me Meditation on Violence when I was fourteen.

  “Experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.” Yep, Maya Deren said that. I dig it. She also said: “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” Fuck yeah.

  So for example, in my film, there are slow motion shots of the Sigster’s wang getting bigger and bigger in between repeated images of him drinking tea. Or petting the spines of his books in his bookcase. Faster and faster. Sip tea sip tea WANG. Pet books pet books sip tea WANG. Like that. I’m thinking of laying down some speeded up Vivaldi.

  I magnified the bit where the scalpel actually cuts into Sig’s dong footage. At first hard to tell what you are seeing. Gradually as I pull the view back you understand what you are looking at. When his dong shoots blood – I use time-lapse. You’ve seen time-lapse photography. Cloudscapes and celestial motion. Plants growing and flowers opening. Fruit or road kill rotting. The evolution of a construction project. People in a city. Or, the enormous dong of Sig shooting blood across the room. I set a background behind it of – what else? Cuckoo clocks and cuckoos cuckooing their heads off.

  But I don’t want it to be the kind of film you have to be super high on acid to understand. Or the kind of art you have to read books about to get. I don’t want it to draw the Seattle nerd wanna be art boys with plaid shirts and odd coifs. I’m no Gus Van Sant.

  No, it’s not a movie about some crusted old guy who gets a boner.

  Sig and his sausage? He’s just a man-symbol. It’s a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we’re stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.

  And how girls are virtually invisible. How that will be in the movie is me splicing in shots of Billie Holiday. Heidi. Nico. Maya Deren. You get the picture.

  Technically I haven’t laid down the sound yet. But I’ve got buttloads of cool shit to work with. Sometimes I think the sound is more important than the images. Like giving the images … I don’t know, life.

  The boy creature in the living room yells “BOOOOOMER.” I smell shit.

  I burn a copy of the video footage for transport. I’m thinking he’s crapped himself.

  I hear the return of Mrs. K. to the condo.

  I hear her say “Oh!” And call out, “Ida!” And “Ida?” And “What on earth? What is all this butter?”

  That’s my cue. I gather up my stuff and head out the fire escape toward the posse and the troll statue. I blow a kiss in the direction of Mrs. K. and her two steaming little piles of shit.

  Babysitter my ass.

  18.

  ANY SUCCESSFUL FILMMAKER TESTS A ROUGH CUT TO gauge the interaction between the art and the audience. I wouldn’t say I let that reaction prescribe what I do next, but I do like to get a sense of it – in case I want to further fuck with their comfort levels or expectations. Art is a verb.

  I stage a showing at midnight underneath the Fremont bridge near the troll. I project it straight onto the cement wall. At midnight. Gathered are a gaggle of punksters and hipsters and young rebel hoodlums. It’s like a black skinny jeans and Emo haircut convention. It smells like pot and vodka and clove cigarettes – like someone exploded a cinnamon molotov cocktail. Little Teena sets down a cooler full of Guinness. Ave Maria passes out Percocet, Obsidian helps me get the sound levels right.

  The CTA Digital LTPP Projector with iPhone cable is a portable solution for displaying movies up to eighty-six inches in size. It supports digital files from
its SD card reader. It can run for short amounts of time on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It’s beyond awesome.

  When everyone has a spot to sit in the dirt or lean on a rock or tree or car, I start her up. For some reason I’ve always liked the dumb black and white old school numbers on a target intro of five. Four. Three. Two. One. Beep. Makes it feel real.

  The first image is so bright everyone shields their eyes briefly. Like a white explosion. It’s because the film opens with a field of snow. Mounds of it. As you are trying to figure out more about the setting, the camera pulls back and a gritty electronic soundscape kicks in and the more the camera pulls back the more you realize you are looking at snow, not snow. Booger sugar on a mahogany table.

  There are many reasons I chose that as the opening image. But the main reason is this: I see my man Sig’s cocaine use as symbolic of both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, what the fuck is a doctor doing hopping up on blow and then pretending to “heal” people? And why does the pharmaceutical industrial complex and its army of bourgeois users get a get out of jail free card while we fill up prisons with uneducated poor folks?

  On the other hand, name your top five favorite musicians of all time. Or artists. Or scientists. Now name their vices.

  Uh huh. What would culture be without drugs? I’ll tell you what. Sad sack of shit is what. It’s just a paradox.

  So the visual metaphor of blow is important as an opening metaphor.

  The next few image sequences are a quickly moving collage of Siggy popping in and out of his office mixed with speeded up downtown bum scenes, stock footage of experimental monkeys with electrodes in their heads and needles in their guts, extreme close ups of cigars or cuckoo clocks with mangled birds or black leather, a big hand tapping a pencil on a desk, nuclear explosions and Hiroshima burned up folks, that type deal. Bitchin’ soundscape and music. Then the collage sort of breaks apart into abstract fragments sort of like a broken mirror, until the fragments become two buffalos fucking. Zoom in on the male buffalo humping away – its eyes rolling back.

  Cue the Wagner.

  Cut to Siggy losing his shit in his office. Cut to his big dong taking over the story. All of it in slow motion.

  By the time he’s launching himself into the cab he looks monstrous. I love how slow motion close-ups do that. I’ve got his voice slowed down too, so all the tourettezing out sounds like … Demons. It’s just creepy as shit.

  Then I go back to an overwhelming whiteness – only this time it’s institutional – and as things come into focus you see you are in a hospital. From there, well I guess you know what from there. Sig and his wang shooting blood scene right at the Wagner crescendo. Only I also splice in little shots of gigantic zoomed in women’s breasts, twats, and asses. So devouring and huge they could swallow a human head. Like Godzilla-sized tits and vag. Like anti-porn. I get a standing ovation.

  I bow and chuckle and shake my head. That little stuffed monkey cam? Golden.

  When it’s all over we mull about and drink all the beer up and laugh and shoot the shit. People drift over my way one, two, three at a time and give me ideas and reactions. Most of them are media savvy and, well I don’t know if you know this, but we’re all of us film experts without ever having had to receive special educations. It’s the dominant reality of our lives. The moving image. We were born with it. It’s our generation’s lexicon. You are already behind.

  At about two a.m., me, Ave Maria, Little Teena and Obsidian decide to go out. I pocket the SD card with the film on it and stow the mini projector in the trunk of Ave Maria’s mom’s Jag. Everyone has a fake I.D. thanks to Little Teena. If you must know, we’ve had them since we were fourteen. He just revises them as we age. It’s not as fun passing as it used to be though now because, well, we look older. We look adultish. It’s kind of a drag. We make our way to Rebar.

  The first thing I notice once we’re inside is that Ave Maria has shaved off her eyebrows. I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t see it over at the troll but now it’s plain as day. I lean over and point to her eyebrows and tilt my head in question. She smells like candy. The music pounds up through my heels and shins and knees from the floor.

  She spins around and shouts inexplicably at the top of her lungs, “Look at my bitchin’ brow bone!” For a moment she looks like a punk neanderthal. She smiles big as a candy apple headed girl ape and twirls away.

  I sip on a vodka and grapefruit and people watch. Just a sea of dancing bodies. Colors shooting from lights all over the room. Hair. Just sweat and synthetic clothing and cool shoes. Then I close my eyes. I let the bass thud thought out of my skull. I let the music remember me as a body. I let a rhythm release me from a self. Pretty soon I’m dancing and rubbing and grinding with other bodies all around me. Only there’s no me. I laugh and jump up and down and dance. Manic. Good manic. Wouldn’t that be something? To get to be a not me all the time? I catch glimpses of the posse or we dance together and then separate.

  There is no other I than them.

  When I’m sopping wet I decide to rehydrate. I take off my Velvet Underground T-shirt and stuff it partly into my back jeans pocket. I’m glad I wore my black Lycra bra and not my little red push-up because the little red push-up sometimes exposes a nip when I wish it wouldn’t. I stomp back over to the bar. While I’m waiting for my drink, I see something out of the corner of my eye. Like a glint of silver. I look to my left, and there’s a hot looking older dude sitting at a little table with two people my age – one male, one female. The male looks feminine and the female looks butch. The attractive older dude smiles at me. I smile at him. He’s way good looking. Kind of in that David Bowie way. The dude never ages, you know? Makes my mouth water. This guy’s like that. It’s hard not to look at him.

  In fact, it’s like he’s got a tractor beam. He’s locked on. I feel magnetically pulled over to the table. The boy who looks like a girl parts his chin length bangs and smiles. The girl who looks like a boy crosses her bare arms and her biceps bulge and she smiles. The hot older dude nods his head yes. Before I know it I’m stomping straight up to them.

  I can smell patchouli, but I’ve no idea which one of them is wearing it. Patchouli has this weird way of making me drowsy and yes-y. Like cat nip.

  The attractive older dude says, “Won’t you join us?”

  The boygirl and the girlboy’s heads bob in agreement. They slide over on their shared red vinyl booth seat and make a spot for me. I don’t know why, but it seems like I fit in there.

  I flash them a peace sign and sit down and sip my drink.

  “I’m Otto,” the boygirl goes.

  “I’m Sabina,” the girlboy goes.

  I smile. I sip my drink. I rummage around in my Dora purse and pull out my purple sharpie and write on my drink napkin – wait – who am I again? Oh yeah. I write DORA. They all smile and nod. I look at attractive older dude. That’s when it dawns on me. I’ve SEEN him before. At the restaurant. He’s the guy who made Siggy faint dead away on the floor. UR JUNG I write under my DORA on the drink napkin. I hold it up at him.

  “Have we met?” he says – smiling pretty much like a Cheshire cat.

  I shake my head no and smile.

  “Let’s get it on,” the girlboy yells, meaning let’s dance, so we do, all four of us move like a single organism out to the pulsing larger organism that is people dancing.

  The dude can dance.

  I don’t mean like a dude his age. I mean like a dancer. Like a real dancer. Like a dancer on stage. He moves like water. He embodies the bass of the music. He looks like desire. He’s fucking mesmerizing. His hips do things not even hip-hoppers achieve. He’s fast – he’s slow – he’s barely moving. His shoulders lose their bone structure. And he does this head shoulder chest hips thing that kind of makes you want to take your clothes off really fast. The smell of Patchouli and sweat and really great shampoo dizzy me. His hair, it’s perfect. He slips his arm around the boygirl he releases he slides his hands onto the girlb
oy’s hips releases he bump grinds me from behind with his hands locked around my abdomen I rock my head back he slips a pill into my mouth I close my eyes I don’t care what it is it is good. Then the girlboy is behind me and up against me and the boygirl is in front of me pressing in until I’m a Dora sandwich and I hope it lasts a really, really long time. I’m creaming my jeans and my nips? Hard as ball bearings. I close my eyes. I feel someone tugging the belt loop of my skinny jeans and I let myself be led by the hip and spun and held close it smells like rain.

  Obsidian.

  We are more or less entwined, muscular and wet, moving in and out of each other inside sound and light. She is laughing. She throws her head back and her sheet of black hair cuts the air and the obsidian around her neck, I lick it, I suck it, I taste the salt of her. If I could choose when to die, I’d choose this moment, a little death inside the wordless bliss of her body.

  Hours later, spent, baptized by sweat, I step outside for a cig.

  Attractive older dude is standing with one foot against the building, finishing a joint. He looks over at me, smiles, offers me a toke. I hold my cig up indicating I’m good. He nods and exhales the maryjane way. I light up. Inhale. We both stare at the night sky. Seattle’s glow blots out the array of stars, but we both know they are up there. Life is good.

  Then a fucking rat walks right in front of us, pauses to look up with its nasty little marble eyes and its shitty ass rodent tail, and scurries away.

  I jump back a bit and my face twists all up. I mean gross.

  “Au contraire,” Jung says, reading my mind. “Animal totems are primordial symbols of the collective unconscious.” He sucks his fatty and holds his breath, then continues. “Think of the aborigines, the Celts, the Egyptians, Chinese and Native American cultures… ” He points the joint down to the ground. “Our friend the rat? The rat totem indicates a pronounced drive for success. An almost uncanny ability to adapt. A cunningness … and the ability to defend oneself aggressively when necessary. Perhaps you need only to adjust your state of mind to see the rat’s relation to you.”