Virginia is for Lovers

September 2009

Hope rushed in with the wind. The sun was up an inch and already baking smells out of the land. The air smelled like trees, not grass. Autumn was on the way. My best friend, Jackson Greenly, rode shotgun, and he was inebriated. Empty, dented, black cans of alcoholic energy drinks rattled around the floorboards of my Chevy Beretta. Jackson stuck an arm out the open window and made waves through the rushing air with his hand. He looked at me, toasted our youth with one of those black cans of embalming fluid, alcohol, and asparagus pee, then grinned and gulped the drink. A red cap bearing the face of Sesame Street’s Elmo tilted on his head at a jaunty, delinquent angle, and a little silver ring that won him automatic favor with girls and suspicion or hatred from senior citizens glinted from the left side of his lower lip. His T-shirt was spray-painted with an esoteric quote. His style always hinted at a rich, libertine psyche.

Jackson was thin, hairy, and dead serious about painting, baseball, ghosts and little else. Things sometimes always pissed him off and always sometimes made him cover his mouth, shut his eyes tightly, and laugh as if he were observing a very obvious and severe irony. I had known him since middle school and could attest that those traits had been part of his demeanor at least since then. Really, I suspected that Jackson was one of those people who sort of remembers their own birth—opening their eyes for the first time, only to realize that it is not their eyes at all, but the tunnel out, and then a pair of hands wrenching them into blinding light, lopping off their feeding tube, and turning them toward a highly un-Oedipal angle of their mother, which even at that tender age is enough to make one wonder forever if existence itself is crazy. Jackson thought it was, and life provided plenty of evidence to support his position.

In high school, Jackson had attended a friend’s house party, lain naked on a pile of dirty laundry with a fully clothed girl, and the two of them had heard something heavy and metallic drag across the floor the level above them, though nobody was up there. This experience indefinitely opened his eyes round and wild and, his hand to God, he had never tried to do it on top of someone else’s dirty laundry since, while drunk. His eyes grew even wider and wilder in college when a ghost haunted the room he shared with me. Once, the spirit turned the deadbolt as he was making a peanut butter sandwich.

Jackson had a geographic tongue and two flexible hands that played a slow keyboard waltz in the air when he explained things and tensed into ardent bony balls when he spoke of painting, baseball and ghosts. He was an artist. He had just started graduate school at American University, going for an MFA. In less than two months, fine art tuition had driven him to the brink of insanity. He had recently decided to make a painting that could shoot a person in the head, especially his professor.

Jackson had the idea for this painting before his next-door neighbor shot his daughter, son, dog, wife and himself in the head with a shotgun.

People often mistook Jackson and me for brothers, assuming he was the painter who played semi-pro baseball and wore girls’ jeans because they fit him better and I was the slightly shorter, stockier one, who had muscular thighs and rashes. My eyes were milder. Jackson talked with his hands. We were both twenty-two. As friends, we had honed a common vernacular together. People often pointed at us with both hands and accused us of speaking in the same voice.

We were not shy or afraid—countless times we had walked the dark, abandoned halls at the Henryton Sanatorium—but we were about to do something that neither of us had ever done before, and somewhere south of the Potomac River, the dividing line between Maryland and Virginia, we both got cold feet. As luck would have it, the Potomac is also the dividing line between where alcohol can and cannot be sold in convenience stores, so I had pulled off at a Seven-Eleven and bought those alcoholic energy drinks that Jackson was using to make his feet warm again.

I punched the breaks for a red light. Jackson put the drink between his thighs and whipped out the Flip Ultra HD camcorder that I had regrettably left in his charge and aimed it into the back seat.

“Todd.  Red light challenge,” he shouted.  “Name six presidents.”

Todd Schroeder had been quiet for most of the ride.  He struggled to answer.

“Clinton…Bush…the other Bush—‘W’ I mean…Obama…Washington…and…”

“Come on!”

“…Labrador?” he guessed.

Todd had just turned twenty. He was Jackson’s lifelong friend and had even been his brother for a couple years. He liked death metal and science. He could not read, so he always carried books around to lend the opposite impression. He put the books on his till at Food Lion so people would start conversations about them. He usually looked at his books while watching television and, therefore, confused his sources from time to time and was wont to say things like: “I was reading a book about black holes the other day. Did you realize that every mammal over seven pounds takes the same amount of time to pee out all its pee? About twenty-one seconds.” His hair was long and greasy—the wind from the windows was plastering it across his face now. His eyes were brown glass, clear as the air he breathed. He had a rotten premolar and an enormous, putatively inbred family. Todd had the day off from Food Lion.

Ranks of stop lights strung the last few miles to our destination and, as we seemed to stop for each one of them, I learned, through Jackson’s gameshow interrogation that I had joined in on, that Todd knew very little of state capitals, Kevin Bacon films, Walker Texas Ranger characters, and the original Power Rangers.

“Ask me about the Kuiper belt,” Todd said.

“Ask me about the Kuiper belt!” Jackson mimicked in a nerdy, lisping voice.

“C’mon, ask me about Hohmann transfer orbits or quasars.”

“Todd, there are roughly fifty states,” Jackson continued heartlessly, “some of which have certain names. Name nineteen states that end with the letter B.”

“Oh, that’s too easy,” Todd said, “but I don’t know a single thing about the four gas giant Jovian planets. Why don’t you ask me about those?”

Jackson seized with laughter. His thighs locked together and collapsed the drink can. A red geyser spurted into his lap and he covered his mouth and laughed until he coughed, and coughed until he dry heaved. I flashed him eyes of papal rebuke.

“Oh, shut up,” he coughed. “It’s just Todd. I’ll feel bad about it later.”

We parked off University Avenue.  I took the camera from Jackson and stuffed it in my pocket. I popped the trunk, took out the backpack and laptop bag and slung them on. I picked up three framed posters and cradled them under one arm.  Todd carried the tripod, the other camera and the packaged privacy walls for the portable ten-by-ten-foot canopy that Jackson hauled out and dragged with murmured gripes.

We emerged from the parking lot onto a busy sidewalk where young people trickled in and out of brick restaurants, bookstores and shops. Windows were shaded orange and navy. We crossed University Avenue and took a brick path toward the heart of campus. We walked between a brick wall and a white colonnade of the Tuscan order. I led the way through a bright arched opening out of the arcade and into the sun. Jackson hissed vampirically.

To our left bulged The Rotunda, the domed structure iconic of the University of Virginia. Two students reading on the wide front steps threw long, accordion-crimped shadows. Before us stretched The Lawn, a grand terraced pitch flanked on both sides by long and low pavilions. I had a five-hour reservation for a bit of green at the distal end, where it emptied onto a sidewalk. When we arrived there, we realized we shared the reservation with several campus clubs.

Todd and I began setting up the canopy while Jackson swaggered over to the Crab Soccer Club reps to ask if there was a bathroom anywhere on the 1,700-acre campus. Three girls sat behind a cheap plastic table piled high with crab soccer tee-shirts. They all pointed to a nearby building. Jackson saluted. “You should all go try out for my friend’s movie,” he told them.

“Movie?” I heard one of the girls say. “What movie?”

I unlatched the legs of the tripod. They fell into place. I stuck the tripod into the ground like a flag and screwed a Flip camcorder on top. It felt nice. It was the very last of the innumerable, menial, aggravating little chores that had long separated me from my ambitions. I never expected them to end. It had been a long summer. I walked over to talk with the girls, smiling with some confidential embarrassment.

“That’s right,” I said. “Movie tryouts. What do you say?”

I snapped my fingers on both hands and pointed at the girls with inquiring pistol fingers.

The Fourth Whale

It had been a long summer. A stagnant, hot, boring treadmill. I had waited it out in my underwear, on top of sheets, starfish formation. The eternity of listlessness and despair lasted as long as the NFL training camps. Television went fully digital early that June. Jackson and I watched Michael Jackson’s memorial through an analog converter box. Everything was clearer.

We tossed the baseball at the American Legion field near Jackson’s home. Jackson was a string bean with a bazooka arm. I was a fireplug with a pool noodle. I threw beautiful batting practice, though. We did our best thinking in the cage, where Jackson played the Anvil Chorus with his alloy bat, and I stood behind an L screen picking balls from a dirty white bucket, lobbing them fat and delicious over the plate.

“I’m going to grad school,” Jackson said late June. Ping!

“Yeah?”

“American University accepted me. I’m going.” Ping! “To make the perfect painting.”

“Does a perfect painting exist? I mean, is there only one?”

“I think so.” Ping! “I believe everything kind of has a core, y’know?” 

“What would it look like?”

“I don’t know. How can I know?” Ping!

“We’ve been educated. Technically, we were already educated.”

“I know I know. It really is almost too sacking tragic to bear. I need to really learn now.”

The Legion was always grilling for a cause—for veterans, bingo, baseball, the dead. Banquets were prepared in the belly of a great black barbeque with pig nose, ears and tail welded on. A flue, ostensibly the protracted rectum of the giant cyborg hog, was ever emitting an oily blue smoke. Jackson and I went to the cage to hit baseballs, but inevitably, in the summertime, that blue smoke slipped by and turned us into gourmands, made us hungry. In the batting cage beside that barbeque, it hit home that there would always be something to want. That element of life’s basal jinx was becoming clearer. We saw the futility of all that wanting and tried to squish our many obsessions into just one great thing. That’s what we would do with ourselves! Just one great thing! Jackson would make the perfect painting, and I, by July, wanted to make a movie. Everything else could be greased and burned.

Life is a beach. Dreams are beached whales. Three big fat ones I had pulled from the sea of opportunity during my life and dragged up my beach. All three died, rotted, and now they’re bones: funny bones. The whales were called Naked Daddy Squirrel, Professional Football Player, and Doctor.

Now there was a real Moby Dick out in the near water, breaching and slamming its fluke: a movie! A Hollywood movie! Funny, how at twenty-two you can look back and understand why your fourth-grade teacher awarded you with an Oscar printed on thin copy paper on the last day of school before summer break. Of course, she did. Take out all the sleeping, eating, schoolwork, studying, dentist visits, car registrations, hangovers, chickenpox and television, and life makes a lot more sense.

The movie had to be funny but figuring out the plot was impossible. The creative muse is a reformed demon who refuses to possess. My first weeks’ brainstorming sessions produced graphite scratchings cognate to the yield off a diet of dried prunes and apricots:

“Hairy, horny ogres press themselves upon campers in a Wisconsin wood,” I wrote, then circled, on a notepad. Terrifying, in hindsight. Below, on the same page, written darkly, and underlined three times, was a logline with even more potential:

“One-legged, zero-armed suicide bomber who cannot, for the life of him, fulfill his holy mission, gets one last try…and blows his cock off!!!”

In screenwriting, as in lovemaking or carpentry, it is the nature of beginnings—when passion is highest and experience lowest—to be coarse and sometimes smutty. But after a brief infatuation with mangling my protagonist’s genitalia at every straight and turn, I got hold of myself. It only took a few weeks.

I decided on a straightforward plot, a garden-variety bildungsroman that I could bauble with curses, heart, nudity, and a moral. Life is the process of complicating something simple, and so is a movie. My script would detail the struggle of three friends coming of age after university. I called it Quarter Life Crisis. The main character wanted to be a doctor.     

For inspiration, Jackson and I went to the Henryton Sanatorium often that summer. The place was abandoned in the eighties. We had been visiting since college. We could not get tired of it. Police kept vigilant watch at the main entrance, so we used to arrive after midnight, park in a gravel lot inside Patapsco State Park, and then walk back through dense woods on railroad tracks—Jackson wielding his alloy bat for ghost/hobo/druggy protection—until we arrived at the clearing where eighteen overgrown buildings, whitewashed in chalk and slaked lime, with half the windows busted out, hove into view. In the moonlight, they glowed. I will never, never forget the way my guts squirmed the first time I saw the place, like snakes nosing for the exit of a burlap sack.

In college, Jackson and I had collected the old yellow patient files strewn about the floor in the administration building and carried them back to our dorm room. We papered the walls. Now Jackson was an artist, so we took shutters, cabinet doors, and even a bicycle frame. Jackson would use the latter to construct a man-powered flipbook apparatus. He would knock them dead in grad school, he swore.

The police caught us on the way back from Henryton that summer, on the odd night that Todd tagged along. When we saw the flashing lights bumping down the railroad tracks, Jackson and I split. We scrooched down in the brush beside the tracks. Todd stayed on the rails.

“Todd, c’mon! Get down!” we hissed. He did not move.

The policeman dismounted his car with a Maglite. He asked for Todd’s driver’s license. Todd did not drive. He had no identification on him. He also could not remember his address or home phone number. In fairness to him, those changed often. 

“I forget it,” Todd said, not even squinting in the car’s spotlight. “It’s right on the tip of my brain. I wish my cat was here. He could tell you. Cats can read people’s minds. The other day I was reading in my dad’s motorcycle magazine that cats can tell ahead of time if you’re going to die soon. It’s true too. I had a friend,” he continued, as the officer radioed for backup, “whose dad had epilepsy. The guy had a really mean cat—”

“Young man,” the officer interrupted, “what are you doing alone in the woods in the middle of the night?”

“Meanest cat in the world,” Todd said. “Orange. It was like a little tiger.”

“Oh sack,” Jackson whispered beside me. Sack, his surrogate F word, was a negotiated compromise with his mother, and it spoke volumes of his character to abide by the deal in a crunch like that.

“But sure enough,” Todd continued, “this mean cat suddenly got real nice—cuddly, lay in the guy’s lap all day—just two days before he had the big seizure that killed him. Can you believe it? It read the guy’s mind and heard him planning to have that seizure!”

Another police cruiser came bumping down the railroad tracks. Todd’s smile did not diminish. That he could palpably imagine the sun one day burning up all its hydrogen, expanding, boiling Earth’s oceans, and then consuming the whole planet helped with his composure during police interrogations.

Jackson could not take it. He whispered a miserable oath and stood up in the brush. I stood up beside him.

“Don’t move!” cried the startled officers, swinging Maglites on us. “Drop the baseball bat! And hands up! Don’t move and put your hands up! Do you know this man?”

“Yes,” Jackson said. “He used to be my brother.”

Jackson’s family adopted Todd before his senior year of high school. Todd’s parents had to move again, out of the school district, and in order to avoid changing schools for his final year, Todd had to be residing with a legal guardian inside the district. The adoption was good for everyone. Todd got a diploma. His mother got rid of him. Jackson’s mom got a replacement son—as Jackson had just gone to college with me—and Jackson’s father got someone new to insult. Saintly mother, pride-poaching father, and a stable education; the best people are built like the best biceps, destroyed and then fortified with routine.

After graduation, Todd decided to become his mother’s son again.

That summer at Henryton, Jackson and I got trespassing tickets. Todd got nothing. The officer confiscated Jackson’s bat, but that did not stop us from going to the cage. We broke the handle off a broom, filled our pockets with pennies and marbles and went to the Legion for hand-eye practice. The L screen was useless for stopping the tiny objects. Comebackers were seeds, bruised instantly. When the fields were mowed, legionnaires were treated to war flashbacks, as marbles and pennies ejected from tractor mowing decks and went whizzing over the parking lot like bullets over Saigon.

Jackson swung very hard in the cage. In games, he did not. He just held the head of the bat straight out over the plate like he was frying eggs and plonked singles over the shortstop’s head, then jogged down to first and laughed into his hand. It really was too funny—that the baseball was rubbed with silt from a secret, South Jersey tributary of the Delaware River, that the bull on the mound had been practicing since he was three, that DiMaggio and Ted Williams had played this same game, and that the fans seated on blankets had come to witness a bona fide athletic contest. So much build-up. With every bloop single, Jackson felt like he killed Goliath with a crouton. 

In August, I helped move Jackson into his studio at American University, at the end of a long hallway of many white block rooms in the Katzen Arts Building. While exploring the rafters above his space, Jackson found an enormous red-brown portrait of a young bearded man. The medium was human blood. It was the work of the former studio inmate. It forced Jackson to wonder if this MFA was a terrible mistake.

In their cells, other first-year students seemed to ponder the same thing. Still, they unpacked and began arting: a stocky, bespectacled girl did arcane bible verse calligraphy. Emotive portraits took shape in other studios. A blank man, wide of ass and fashionable of shoe, painted horses.

Jackson did monsters. If you can picture the long-bodied, loose-fleshed creatures in a Dr. Seuss story entitled Green Eggs and Heroine, then you are on the right track. We carried a few paintings from his rattly Sunfire to his studio and leaned them against the walls. The most recent piece showed a grey-blue gargoyle eating its own heart, which was ripped from a hole in its chest and still attached by two blue cords and some pink strands. Jackson had given the beast a thought bubble:

“It is bitter. Bitter. But I like it. Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.”

That was part of a Stephen Crane poem. Jackson believed it helped the painting. But it did not perfect it.

My movie script was finished by then and I was preoccupied with figuring out how I could sell it to Hollywood for a personally metamorphic amount of cash. Move to LA? Climb the ladder? Wait for a big break? No. They flush dreams in The City of Angels and they bidet themselves with tears. What to do? The answer came to me when I was shirtless and painted green.

“HERE WE GO, JACK!” I screamed from a grassy hill behind the backstop at his men’s league game. It was a day of hot garage air, not epiphany weather.

“JACK, DON’T SWING! IF HE THROWS THE BALL AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF TIMES, A HOME RUN HAS TO HIT ITSELF!” Todd was there with me.

“SWING! HIT A TOUCHDOWN! DUNK IT!”

Jackson smiled from the batter’s box. His cap sat catawampus on top of his head. He sucked his lip ring and assessed his bat for a moment, tapped it like a syringe, pointed it over the shortstop’s head, then settled into a slow-rocking stance. The pitcher heaved the ball. Jackson poked his bat out, let the ball run into the barrel—Ping!—and the ricochet flopped into the shallow outfield like an obese pigeon.

“GOOOOOAAAAALLLLLL!!!” I screamed.

“WHY DID YOU SWING?”

Jackson jogged down to first, giggling. “He threw it as—hehehe—as hard as he could!” I heard him say into his fist as he stood on the bag. Opposing teams despised Jackson and his fan base.

“WIN THE OLYMPICS! WHACK THAT BIRDIE! BEAT GERMANY! HIT THAT GODDAMN SHUTTLECOCK SO FAR THAT THE MARTIANS FIND IT AND GAIN VALUABLE INSIGHT INTO OUR CULTURE AND PASTTIMES!”

“MARTIANS DON’T EXIST! MARS’ ATMOSPHERE HAS BEEN STRIPPED OFF BY THE SOLAR WIND! TRUST ME, I READ IT IN BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS!”

Jackson set me up for the great idea. He hit three more singles that day, ugly floating things that missed the shortstop’s glove by margins so thin they seemed to make the shortstop regret all post hoc causes—that between-innings cigarette, the pre-game weenie, not stretching during the seventh-inning stretch. He stomped on his glove and yelled “Shyet! Shyet! Shyet!”

This man’s wife sat not far from me on a blanket, eating potato salad from a portable trough with a plastic spoon. Her hair was streaked blue and spouted off the top of her head as if from a blowhole. Each of Jackson’s singles made her whisper curses ever the louder, till I caught one: “That hairy little shit is magic with that bat,” she said to herself.

The woman was my unlikely messenger. I had my epiphany. Instantly, I knew what magic was and how to cast spells. I knew how to make my movie.

Magic is working so hard and so long at something useless that the resulting skill seems paranormal. A spell is cast when you make someone believe that you are too normal to have practiced something so stupid for so long.

If only the shortstop’s wife could have been there with Jackson and me throughout the summer. If she could have sat—perhaps while having some more butterfly tattoos added to the lepidopterarium theme of her lower back—and watched as Jackson smacked coins with a broom handle for hours, hours, days, then every trace of the magical, every touch of the runic, would have been stripped from Jackson’s bloop singles. They would have been expected. 

Jackson liked his singles to seem magical, but I wanted the success of my movie to be expected. I wanted people to see my work. 

I did not intend to make the movie myself. The key would be to only pretend to make a movie, but pretend so hard and earnestly that enough people would come to believe it.

Participation is the only way to truly garner interest. I would host tryouts on college campuses, as young people were both the largest target audience and the easiest to persuade. I would film everything. The incipient social networks, which, at the time, I was only using to ruin my good Slavic name, would run the video documentaries. People would vote on parts, a la American Idol.

I would speak to film societies, writing groups and drama clubs at campuses across the country. I would interview in the local papers. I would cultivate a deranged expression, make people believe that I would even give my body to be burned for this remote, ridiculous goal. “That boy who folds the bath towels at Khol’s,” people would say, “he’s got that ‘it’ factor. It’s written all over his face. He’s going places, and I want in.”

I would set about casting a Hollywood movie that nobody in Hollywood had ever heard of, and the sheer amount of work, the sheer amount of human involvement, would draw its own conclusion. Eventually, someone in Hollywood would have to take notice and offer me a deal.

Really, I did not expect it to be difficult. I had a hunch, a good one, that to even whisper the words “movie tryouts” on a college campus would bring people in like dying whales to beaches.