I’m spooked listening to my breath, thinking that it might be somebody else ready to tear me apart. I turn my phone around, and there’s nothing there. I’m stupid enough to think that this might be real. A child, still a child.
I’m driving the winding road at the bottom of the city, thinking it’s the next left and never getting there, searching for whatever and it always being ahead. I’m lost. Maybe worse.
I’m on the phone. No one’s answering. I limp across the street. The door won’t open. There’s a siren and then another. I vanish into the dark and walk and walk. The anger comes first and then the fear. I work myself up and get back to the anger. I want that sense of control as the bear chews off my face.
My girlfriend saw her ex across the room and was insistent about talking to him alone. I could hear everything they were saying, and then I couldn’t. She was gone when I looked over again.
“She had to sort something out with him.” That was the waitress, a once lovely woman with too much mascara. “I hope you have a healthy relationship.”
“The lies of love and how this millennia-old myth has kept civilization barely afloat.” I finished both drinks and ordered again.
There was a graffitied phone booth in between the bathrooms, and the phone actually worked. She didn’t answer. But my mother did. She was disappointed in me and wanted to know where I was. Things just got worse from there.
The island where I was born has untold manifestations in my head. It is tiny and vast, empty and overbuilt, extensions from every building, every building gone, the path across hills and prairies, leading to a barren rocky point that never was.
I’ve circumnavigated the island many times, down from a steep ridge, the water choked with ice, a canoe at the ready. I need to go back for a paddle and watch everyone leave. There’s a menagerie of animals in the water, fish and seal, cats and birds, and a miniature sheep that fits in my pocket. Half asleep, I do the breast stroke to the bottom.
A message from my realtor comes through; someone wants to buy the island. I’ve already left. That’s what I text. I don’t intend to return. I get a question mark back and reply with a meme of the sheep in my pocket.
I thought it was funny at first, this guy mimicking my every move. He was one of those fake plant people that popped out of nowhere and he got the nervous laugh.
I smiled as I walked away, but he wouldn’t stop, imitating my every step and gesture, every facial expression, always staring back. I wanted him to stop. I told him that. And he said it right back.
“No, I mean it.”
“No, I mean it.”
“I’m not fucking Pee Wee Herman.”
That drew a gasp, especially when he repeated that.
I pushed him, which he did back, and came after me. And so I punched him good and made him hurt. I was the villain and accepted that happily.
The Sacred Whore is a dark comic thriller that digs into the chronic ills of our spastically contradictory world. We care. But we don’t. What better way to address that malaise than through shootouts, car chases and furiously sexy women?
Sean Baker’s magnificent Tangerine, his first film to focus on sex workers
It begins with a tractor-trailer trip across the country during which one of the sex workers, Corinne, assaults a would-be rapist, altering the direction of their journey. Some of the women – led by Ave and Dorothy – decide upon an outrageous plan to kidnap a college basketball team at the Final Four Tournament and demand primetime coverage to air their views on the moral destitution in America.
Others, led by Corinne, Chantal and Savannah, leave for Las Vegas where they confront JP, the queen-pin in charge of the sex trafficking network. The original group, now named The New World Brigade, dress up as cheerleaders and successfully hijack the college team bus. In Las Vegas, after maiming JP and executing her security team, Corinne is badly wounded by a police counter attack.
Chantal and Savannah find themselves in a hostage-taking situation and reach out to The New World Brigade, hoping to obtain leverage. After tense negotiations with the authorities, The New World Brigade returns with the team to the arena where each of the women post video statements on the travails of sex work. Chantal kidnaps a FBI agent, leading to a car chase in which she and Savannah are both killed. Stunned by this tragic turn of events, Ave delivers an emotional speech on live television, the final scene revealing Corinne opening her eyes to watch the broadcast from her hospital bed.
The Sacred Whore empowers and celebrates sex workers as complex individuals, rather than the tropes and cartoonish figures we have become accustomed to seeing. Outrageous truth drives the spectacle.
The pink pickup truck was just ahead, a car and then the truck. I saw it when we turned, better to the left. It got further ahead, and I tried to keep up. What was that voice yelling in my head? Was it a workman on the street? A bad childhood memory?
The pickup glowed in the evening light, like an artificial starfish, the driver waving her arms back and forth in a steady beat. No, that was a dog’s tail. The dog jumped into the front seat. I picked out our family dog when I was a kid. “Not afraid of that one!” That’s what I said.
I needed to see the driver. I knew it was someone I should know. I changed lanes and then back again. I met a beautiful girl in my Feminist Film Theory class. She had heard stories about me and she still liked me. She said that laughing. I really thought it would work out.
The truck caught the light, and I couldn’t keep up. I remembered missing the bus. Shadows glided past as I navigated the curbs. I couldn’t find my phone and then couldn’t get it to work. I thought about that familiar frustration as I watched her go.
I dreamed of being an adult when I was a kid. Then I would no longer have to put up with the nonsense of being bullied and ignored. I dreamed of being in the world of sense and fair play. Yes, I know. I couldn’t have been wronger.
Dreaming of getting out of the cage
Everyone struggles with the fact that we’re like every other living thing. We aren’t noble. We aren’t wise. We aspire to have more so that we can have more. We consume energy and expel waste, nothing more. I mean, forget Trump and all of the childish horror that he and his cronies spin. The misinformation and anger is everywhere; it’s in my workplace, my family and dreams.
Camus and company offered us a path out: have a cigarette and accept the dire situation. But we can’t. We need our emperor to have clothes, the confetti canons to spout, the scribe to get one more quote. Listen to me! Please listen to me! But we can’t. Our feed is calling.
Listening to Jafar Panahi speak about his filmIt Was Just An Accident made me think about my life, the things that I do, the things that I say I’ll do, my half-baked words and actions, the things that make me the regrettable quagmire of contradictions that I am.
I know one thing and one thing only: time passes. No matter the tastes and pains, the magic and nothingness-eses, that’s what it does. It passes.
I’m on the side of a narrow, cold channel. The lighthouse is in the distance. I take off my boots and socks and make my way across the kelp and rocks, expecting to fall, my body to wash out with the tide, found in the years to come, a human interest story on the northeast tip of Sanday Island in the Orkneys.
It is not as difficult as I imagine and brush the sand off my feet as I examine the small bird skull. The path winds beside a fallow field. The nettles are thick. I look back, wondering if the tide is already rising and I will be stuck here for the night. The lighthouse is fenced in and fully automated.
I return along the coast and am dive-bombed by oystercatchers. They screech and shit, and I scream back and throw rocks. They terrify me.
The tide rises, and I walk in the knee-deep water. There is an ancient tomb at the side of the road, but it has been covered over. Sheep stare back, their bodies oddly sheered and painted blue. I want to write, but I don’t know what about. Something true and real. Something fantastic and simple. Something about what I was doing here. Can oystercatchers be trained? And who will play me?
I’ve always wanted to get my life organized, Then I’d know what I’m doing now, Maybe tomorrow too. It would also help compensate my past disorganization. What is that saying again? “If I’d only been organized, what my life could have been!” No, that’s not it, but it’ll have to do.
Truth be told, I am an organized person. My space is neat and my pens are in a row. I have an agenda, and I love to make lists. I’ve got things under control. Even if I don’t. What it is is that I’m organized in my disorganization.
My thinking is that being too organized is worse. You’re left staring into the abyss of “what now?” With everything sorted and labelled, boxed and stacked, pruned and jarred, all the plans and people in your life ordered, there’s only the plans for the plot and stone. And that’s just stupid. Better to have never bothered at all.
The ephemeral is the thing, the magic and tingling, the joy of stepping out and seeing what’s next. And so, yes, to the organization, but only to the point where the moments are furrowed so that things may happen, knowing there’s a drawer full of clean underwear for the morrow.
I was not of age, a year or so too young, and I had found a secret lonely lovely place, the corner of a bar on Yonge Street below Dundas, The Hard Rock before The Hard Rock was The Hard Rock, dark and empty, the street outside like that too, a Blue Diamond stubbie on a Blue Jays cardboard coaster, one other person here, the bartender, an old guy, probably in his 40s, in this magic lonely lovely place.
I was thinking about why I hated teachers, how they liked to yell and assert their bullshit because they could, the bully of bullies. “If you don’t listen, I will kill you.” It was supposed to be funny. It wasn’t. She had assigned a 300-word piece of verisimilitude, as much detail as possible conveying a thing or moment. I had chosen a tea kettle boiling, the click of the switch, the bubbling and steam, the anticipation. She said that I should try again. “You haven’t quite captured it, have you?”
It was my first rejection of many to come. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now. I’m not getting it apparently. “It just isn’t the project for me right now.” I think about, imagining the world on hold, back in the dark lonely lovely place, an old guy in his 40s, slumped at the end of the bar, and have another drink.
