todd of tacoma

Dark when I wake up again. When it was becoming light out early, back in the spring (end of winter, early spring) I began already to look forward to this time of year. To write in darkness in the morning. To read by lamplight at night.

August

When I lived in Montana, I skipped a lot of work this time of year and lost jobs because of it. It’s because this time of year I like waking up and staying right where I am. I like to open my eyes while still dreaming and rest on the edge of the world, like I’m reaching the edge of a pool and coming out of the water to hook my crossed arms on the pool’s lip and just catch my breath.

The weather’s better, mornings cooler if you’re lucky, a spritz of rain if you’re especially lucky. For some reason, usually because I had to, I was always waking up in strangers’ houses in August. Sleeping with them at their houses. That’s what I liked best. Sure, the with them I liked, but mostly the at theirs.

F lived downtown. Remember F? She was kind of a perpetual stranger to me. She had an apartment downtown with rooftop access, a design I grew up thinking was New York only, not Bozeman, Montana. It was about fifty steps from where I’d usually close the bars at night. She left her door unlocked and didn’t mind me crawling in at whatever hour and didn’t mind leaving me there to languish (so she assumed) in the morning hours in her sheets and near her food and things, which was bizarre, bizarre that she left me there, because I’ve only met a handful of people more clean and fastidious.

Lumiere

Every morning I woke up at F’s was a new morning. You could spike her apartment like a stage set and set everything exactly as it was the day before and the day before, and she practically did, and it still felt new and mysterious. Like a stranger had let me in.

But there were sometimes new things.

One morning there were three DVDs on her countertop in Netflix sleeves, in a napkin holder by her mail, probably there so she wouldn’t forget to watch them or to mail them. Two sleeves were crumpled like pillowcases and must have been everywhere and one was pristine. Lolita, The Breakfast Club, and The Idiots. The aesthete, the dilettante, and the connoisseur. I recognized the last one as a Dogme 95 film I hadn’t yet seen, and still haven’t seen, from what I understand about a group of artists or students who pretend to be idiots in public and eventually all the time.

F’s rooftop access window was open now and kind of blowing inward and it reminded me that I usually wanted a cigarette this time of day. So, I parted the curtain and went through the window. On my way through I knocked some kind of trinket onto the rooftop’s rubber membrane and I looked down to see Lumiere from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He was swaying to one side with his candle arms out like he’s going to hug you and his eyes closed like he’s singing and his lips pursed and his eyebrows comically, lovingly high. It had to be from her dad. She had talked a couple times about seeing Beauty and the Beast on Broadway a few times with her dad, who was a traveling welder who also sold pot, and that Beauty and the Beast was the only real significant thing she’d ever done with him. It was a whole ordeal because he was afraid to fly, so they road-tripped from Montana to New York and were gone for two weeks.

The diners, the campgrounds, gas stations, rest stops, landmarks, motels. You don’t meet a ton of people when you drive–but the people you meet, the stories they tell. I told her to write a screenplay about that. Every film student daydreams about a road movie. You could do it by Dogme 95 rules, I said. It would be really cheap. Dogme 95 rules include shooting handheld on location, no sets, no filters, no extra lighting, location sound only, that means music, too.

The sound aspect was most significant to me, I had decided, especially the music, the little contrivances to inject music into scenes to create a sneaky score, playing just the right song and pretending it’s location sound and also making music of location sound. I was told The Idiots had a band marching around in one scene. Dancer in the Dark broke free from Dogme 95 but it grew out of it and the sounds of the warehouse that metamorphosed into Bjork’s musical numbers was surely inspired by Dogme 95 discipline. F’s road trip with Dad would have had an easy time with location sound, as long as they burned the right CDs and recorded the right tapes and were silent to the sound of the road.

I lit my cigarette and rubbed Lumiere’s wax drips and his weird contours. It felt strange to hold an adult’s bibelot that was once a child’s toy and that hadn’t been played with in a decade. It hadn’t changed except for its colors fading, but the little girl who once held it had grown an adult’s body and was now at work. I was in some grotesque denouement. But I suppose you’re allowed to have cherished toys when you’re a twenty-six-year-old teenager, like myself and F and almost everyone I knew. I exhaled and looked for even one single cloud in the sky. It hadn’t rained in weeks and the air smelled like a bloody nose.

Your smoke’s blowing in my window, someone said.

What? I said, fully knowing what, and who. Everyone has that one neighbor who’s like the parent in the other room.

You’re smoking in my apartment! the neighbor said again.

It’s okay, I’m quitting, I said.

What! he now said and then paused, maybe thinking. I’m eating breakfast!

And a pan made a loud clang.

I knew I was being rude, but I didn’t want to make a big show of it, so I went to stub my cigarette out quietly and discreetly at the building’s brick facade and I dropped it out of sight onto the sidewalk, and as I was watching it fall I saw Lumiere right beside it, falling at the same rate, incidentally, until a breeze took the butt away but not Lumiere, who hit the ground and shattered.

I didn’t hear it shatter, though, so it was at first hard to make sense of what happened.

Hazard of location sound.

I knew this was going to wreck my entire morning and probably the next week, so I snapped out of paralysis and did everything I could to avoid adding images to my repertoire of guilt and looked away. I looked up and away at the sky and away from the body and backed away from the ledge. I thought I heard someone on the ground say where did that come from? but I couldn’t be sure that that wasn’t in my head. I cupped my hands over my ears, regardless. I couldn’t bear to hear my head or anyone else’s. No daggers of the mind, thank you.

I crawled back through F’s window and was so flustered I tried to pull the curtain over me like a jacket, but then I remembered I wasn’t wearing a jacket last night. I had no things, really, other than keys and chapstick, so I was quick to leave and while I was descending the staircase hallway to the sidewalk I made up my mind to turn left, away from the crime scene, so I wouldn’t have to bear witness to yet more proof of what I’d done, but when I got to the final landing someone must have moved the shards of Lumiere inside because I stepped on what felt like chicken bones, and they crunched like when you kill something. But I didn’t look down.

Work

It was still cool in the shade and in the alleys and early enough I could go to work, but I couldn’t possibly. I drove the pass to Livingston and filled my car up with gas and drove back. Netflix had a two DVD at a time continuous rotation deal I was aware of. I decided that when I got a more permanent residence I’d sign up. I wanted to watch Inland Empire, I think, or Mulholland Drive. One of those. Or both in one week.

I’m always doing that. Knowing what I want and deciding it’s for later.

Instead of saying sorry to F, I never spoke to her again. She didn’t text me or call me about any of this or anything else and that kind of broke my heart, actually.