i.
{ INT. BROWN CARPETED LIVING ROOM BARE EXCEPT FOR TWO COLOR TV/VCR COMBINATION UNITS MOUNTED ON CINDERBLOCKS - DAY }
back then waking up your son to walk him downstairs, to the vacant unit, to watch the roosters duel was like a family thing you did. you demonstrated how to spray cologne for him, tuck his shirt in, shine boots, appear impervious to gore. to learn to think that he respects above all else a face off. color value vs. color value of a scarf tied to your lance or feather plucked by ripples of a lady through 240 horizontal scan lines. Sally vs. Jessy. 700 Club MTV. young, restless, bold or beautiful. or MORTON DOWNEY JR’s canine teeth and demon tongue extracting marrow from his Habsburg-jawboned freak serpent host body MAC TONIGHT. you can only have one of the above cultures. or you can have another culture but this one comes preinstalled. the carpet desert’s double window teaches itself history this way. the mute and hungry settlements outside appear to pulse, glimmer, human love obscuring helicopter light. inside us still’s a syndicate of hometowns laid adjacent to the factory premises and work camps to reeducate through labor all of this sweet recollection linked by rumored tunnel: one smug groove underneath the skin, too hoary, underloved and powered down to abdicate. please don’t disturb this groove. let it fill your abscesses as fog cascades from the machine in all the discos of the dead. that’s tomorrow and that is it for us
0:03
today and we will leave you with a I
0:06
can’t do it we’ll do it live okay we’ll
0:12
do it live fuck it we’ll do it live I’ll dial it
0:15
in and we’ll do it live fuckin’ thing
0:19
sucks [five, four, three] that’s tomorrow and that
0:26
is it for us today I’m Bill O’Reilly
0:28
thanks again for watching we’ll leave
0:30
you with Sting and a cut off his new
0:32
album take it away
0:36
OSCILLATION, FATAL GRINDING OF MACHINERY, ORCHESTRAL STABS
ii.
{ INT. A DOWNTOWN SHOP DURING BUSINESS HOURS, EMPTY OF CUSTOMERS - DAY }
it isn’t clear what type of merchandise this store specializes in: there’s simply no cohesion to the products offered up for sale. austerely displayed are wares like ration buckets, Giorgio perfume, fishing rods, massagers, video rewinders, a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard, one of each item set out on acrylic shelves latched to aisle walls, as in a catalog showroom. you’re eyeballed then ignored by the proprietor, CONSTANTIN THE WET, fifty-five, with stripes of hair glued by sweat sideways across. CONSTANTIN monitors a many-columned wall of televisions stacked three high and here the chatter of satellite and cable political news feeds is recorded onto videotapes. he pitches the cassettes, which are never labeled, in the shambolic cabin of his Bronco at the close of each day.
iii.
{ INT. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY #001 MAGAZINE DATED FEBRUARY 16, 1990 - DAY }
on the cover: K.D. Lang photographed by Lena Bertucci and Neneh Cherry photographed by Andrew Catlin/LFI. You will find in the debut issue of EW a preview of the midseason replacement tv lineup and in it there’s a photo of the cast of Nasty Boys, a new police drama. the nasty boys are Las Vegas narcotics officers. their black police windbreakers, black police ballcaps and defiant mugging actor faces could not have been born outside the echo of NWA’s ‘‘Fuck the Police.’’ also in this issue: a review of Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. the review and the portrait of Berryman span almost the entire two pages of the centerfold and you could place your bookmark here, at this end time refusal to settle a perplexity no money man can win. my love.
iv.
{ EXT. THE BURN BARREL, YOU KNOW, THE BURN BARREL, OUT BACK. YOU DON’T HAVE ONE? WHAT ABOUT A 55 GALLON OIL DRUM OR A HUMAN SIZED TRUCK TOOLBOX WHICH YOU’RE NOT TO OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES? NOT THAT YOU COULD BRING YOURSELF TO - NIGHT }
fire streams up into new wood from the dying. scent it leaves is sugar. see? your life’s alright you’re carrying a cake box through the intersection. your life’s alright you’re making heart hands at an electronic music festival contrived by private equity dweebs on a twopenny-halfpenny-grade space colony. the maker of the spaceship’s trying to poison us before we can get sucked through loose-screwed panels or before we can grow up and go to work for them and maybe blow a whistle on em. much hair being held for ease of vomiting: a flash onset of gastrointestinal complaint, shigellosis I heard it was, over the loudspeaker, spread either through tainted food or sexual contact. heart hands. I find the rituals grotesque but I’m a child in these airless corridors, these barricaded roads. I don’t know where my next meal will come from, and all that, but I know that I must pay for it by means of a leveraged buyout. what are all the fundamental truths again and do you still believe in them because these are the names of my case workers at the juvenile court-contracted call center that sentenced me, then shuttled me to this: Edgar Chayce, Cashier and Manateigh.
v.
{ EXT. A CORNER STOREFRONT WHERE THEY SELL TOBACCO AND A MAGAZINE FOR EVERY INTEREST, UNDERWATER - DAY }
god made me thus: a love so animal it takes my wind out, has to be expelled. useless and invisible, my love burns up over the upper atmosphere. disappearing cuneiform hallucinated in the wake of a creator gone and into other schemes. love underemployed. love laundering money in a summer camp for evil despots’ kids. 6 AM’s a heart hands drill. 7 AM counterprotest chanting at police to fire on the flip-flop-costumed drone. my love she’s like some blue orb glowing up to end our shit from underneath the sea, a light in whom you’ll soon believe.
vi.
{ EXT. CLOUDS COME SMOTHER - MORNING }
last thing you remember you were programming a beat last night, or started one when you were high, you fell asleep doing that, at your desk, and when you came to in the cold slobber of day it was there, formed fully, an entrancing four minutes of song and you thought how funny would it be to upload this free content to Spotify and release it under the artist name Michael Jackson Jr. so you search it. someone did that already.
you had the idea that the best way to get an idea of who Richard Lewis was would be to watch other comics impersonations of him. because you couldn’t really remember. what’s the point of being a man inside a tucked in shirt and hair combed anyway. what’s the point Jerry Seinfeld.
the scientific method was a ploy to dispossess the land mapping continuous infinite values to a diminished set of discrete finite values. now, on the Concerning Mortality Rate of Influencers’ Children...
vii.
{ EXT. PATENT LEATHER PANTS FLAGGING FROM A TELEPHONE WIRE, CITY RESIDENTIAL BLOCK - NIGHT }
LAUNDROMAT MORGANA
(pulling up to CRISPIN-TODD THE KID, who is passionately typing on his laptop under the street light)
CRISPIN! we need to get in the car!DAD needs a ride home!
CRISPIN-TODD
do we have to leave right now?MORGANA
if we expect to find him we do. what, you have something better to do?CRISPIN-TODD
(gestures at the computer)
I don’t know.MORGANA
what are you typing?CRISPIN-TODD
(did not anticipate explaining, at a loss)
I’m... making a... ranking of the albums the Commodores put out after Lionel Richie left.MORGANA
when he went solo?CRISPIN-TODD
yeah.MORGANA
and they put out music after ‘‘Night Shift?’’CRISPIN-TODD
a decent amount. but they had all these personnel changes. to some of their fans they weren’t the Commodores any more. I think their fans wanted more ‘‘Night Shifts.’’ where is DAD?MORGANA
he’s stuck at the Underworld.CRISPIN-TODD
the barbecue place?MORGANA
no. it’s not that anymore. it’s a rage room. with the flag that has a tree on it that says AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN.CRISPIN-TODD
(nods)
MORGANA
I just remember the smiling. they seemed so happy in that video to be making music with each other.CRISPIN-TODD
the camaraderie’s infectious, but Ronald LaPread who had played the bass since they started the band would leave them right after this. my favorite part of the video is when they’re sitting around the table putting on their make up. I like it because it’s not a joke. it’s just a real part of their lives, as performers, like the way a mime troupe would have to suit up or whatever. they’re totally at home with one another. I think that ‘‘Night Shift’’ becoming a hit must have been such a surprise and a fuck you to Lionel Richie and it just must have made it seem like anything was possible for them. to be written off and come back. to have a dream and it comes true. and then you lose it but you dream yourself right back.MORGANA
(shaking head and smiling, bittersweetly)
when I was small I dreamed of having my own phone and my own money and ordering up a giant hero sandwich all for myself that I don’t have to share with no one and now that I’m old, and I’m a mother, I mean, I could do that every day if I wanted to but shoot I’ve maybe done it once. hey. since when do you say fuck you in front of your mother?CRISPIN-TODD
(ignoring MORGANA, talking to himself)
they get so nasty about Lionel Richie in the Commodores forum...viii.
{ EXT. CITY GARBAGE DUMP - NIGHT. }
two cops are called to reciprocate an old favor, to retrieve a pair of victims from a city trash dump before the light of day. the men responsible for the deaths of these bodies are sergeants from an army base near town. the sergeants were advised by a friendly contact on the police force to bring the bodies to a particular waste processing facility, but in their haste the sergeants misunderstood this instruction and utilized the public dump. the policemen were informed that their cargo would be easy to find but on arriving they don’t know what to look for: everywhere, bodies are underfoot. it’s now nearly 5 AM, the sun will soon be up, workers will arrive. the missing bodies belong to a boy and his mother, whom the pair of sergeants mistook for drug couriers they had meant to rob.
ix.
{ EXT. A NEON SIGN DISPLAYS TWO CURSIVE WORDS IN ALTERNATING RED AND GREEN FLASHES: ‘‘SEQUELISM,’’ ‘‘FLESHLESSNESS’’ - BEFORE DAWN }
the caretaker who keeps
a bedroom here yet
doesn’t owe you her genuine life—
that’s your baby son.
you die & he delivers to your widow
a sympathy card autographed but otherwise unread
by him. alone, she lets diffuse
the fist that balls up
in her spine.
& peels out the sentiment in cursive from
its envelope: a negative mind will never give you a positive
life, it says.
shake yr aspergillum at her cackling,
the fugitive rite.
sprinkle on some unearned grace.
streaming through the streets & kissing soldiers
on a day
we haven’t won.
x.
{ EXT. CITY PLAZA - DUSK }
what comes up through our eyes is massaged memory, a sunset uncorrupted in the coelacanth night, fountains agitated by the lazerswords of little motherfuckers on the plaza of the court. nothing impure along the signal chain of that wax lip colored dusk.