Brad Pitt is the biggest movie star on the planet. But, while waiting for the movie’s release, I began to ask myself, “What is a Brad Pitt movie?”
I knew to expect the usual guilt brought on by jealousy, admiration, and basic inadequacy.
But after light investigation I came to a very flimsy conclusion: A Brad Pitt movie is never about his character, but rather about other characters reacting to his stasis, his perfection and his flat out otherworldliness.

(See: Hopkins in Meet Joe Black, the elder brother in A River Runs Through It, the entire family in Legends Of The Fall, Statham in Snatch, the team in Oceans, the entire sane world in Twelve Monkeys, Norton in Fight Club, Redford in Spy Game, Ford in Devil’s Own, his friends and the court in Sleepers, Robert Ford and crew in The Assassination of Jesse James By That Coward Robert Ford, and most definitely in the case of Cate Blanchett’s character withering in his glow throughout Benjamin Button.)
Often, the stories in his films are even told in the first person perspectives of those dealing with him. We watch as they evolve, adapt, and grow in order to comprehend him, to abide in his shadow. They tell us about him.

He has come among us. He is the new version, the knower, the seer. He need not develop for he has long sense arrived at stillness, at godhood.

(Allow me to characterize the similar character of his characters. Expect contradictions, mix-n-matches, and extreme stretches.)

1. The Man God. I’m talking here about the roles without quirk where he is calmly serious, coolly radiant. I’m talking about Achilles, Joe Black, the sexier brother in Legends of the Fall, the better brother in A River Runs Through It, Ben Button, and Jesse James. In these he is the true man from other. He tastes our vodka, caviar, our peanut butter and he deems it good. As Death he cocks his beautiful head and considers Anthony’s petty pain. He is Norton’s perfect man who strides far beyond any attainable manhood. If only Robert Ford, the river brother and Aiden Quinn could live up to him. If only Agamemnon had an army of Achilles.  If only we the audience, along with his co-characters and co-stars could tilt our heads down when esteeming him. His perfections drive his co-characters mad, vengeful or old. They cannot predict him, depend on him or leave him. They writhe in efforts to summit, but he, the mountain, shakes them with a smirk.

2. The Knower. These are the roles where he waits for others/us to catch up with him. He knows what will happen, he has a plan, he sees the future, but he can’t share. He is slightly annoyed that it is taking us so long to see what he can see. He doesn’t need to develop; he’s waiting and watching our growth. He blinks slowly while we compute. He suppresses a smile when we fail to grasp the point. He gives his co-characters, the everyman vessels like Damon’s Linus, Statham’s Turkish and Cate’s sad ager the most patriarchal sink-or-swim advice either through word or example. He understands the counsel from his antecedent’s Ford and Redford, but is sad to know they are outdated and things are on his terms now. Think: Fight Club, Sleepers, Devil’s Own, Spy Game, Ocean’s, Snatch, Ben Butt and Kalifornia.

3. That Fun, Scary, Crazy Guy. In between playing gods and perfects Pitt will get in there with an ensemble (only) and play it fast and loose. He’ll become caricatures of unpredictable lunatics that might just be able to see what we/co-character’s can’t. (What a fool sees as lunacy may indeed be the actions of the enlightened.) He has a disregard for the trappings of regular thought and he remains static despite his kinetic mode. Think: Twelve Monkeys, Fight Club, Snatch, Kalifornia and even Burn After Reading, to a degree. Duchovny, Norton, Willis and Statham all shake their collective head at his unreadable insanity. But in the end he was right, or at least true to his detached path.

4. The Young Man. Nearly twenty years ago Brad Pitt was born in a hotel room on top of Geena Davis. Here was the gleaming youth, the daunting Adonis. Pitt still uses this brighter, simpler persona, and when he does we get the closest thing to a man with flaws. He’ll share top billing with a lady of comparable star power and he’ll play that charming, petulant young man who’s used to getting his way. He needs to grow up a bit, but he’s never forced to do so. We forgive him and love him. He grins when caught, and pouts when his plans fail. He whines and begs or he simply doesn’t care. Either way he remains forcefully static. The women (or partners) realize they kinda love his bullheadedness and he is allowed to continue in his way as long as he smiles. See: The Mexican, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Ocean’s, Johnny Suede, everything, life.

Whatever the mode, his bad times are beyond us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves in the lofty struggles. Achilles contemplates the best option of immortality, Rusty may have bought the wrong hotel, and Benjamin just has a great fucking time. Will Tyler Durden change the world? How should we even care? We relate more to Ford’s confusion as to what answers Jesse sought in beheading that snake. Until the end we find ourselves lost along side his angry friends in Sleepers. And in Legends of the Fall when Pitt totally looses it, he does so on such a huge scale that we, and his mesmerized family, stand back and watch the giant converse with God.

This all must be, somehow, intentional. I’m not saying that he needs to wallow in tears, look ugly or smear ca-ca on himself. I’m not saying he needs to portray a person who hurts people in ugly ways, gets lost in unromantic ways, forgets crucial things or plans a failure. I’m just saying he hasn’t. His characters never have looked bad, and therefore, neither has he.
So, I’m wondering what this all has a chance to mean when the world’s largest star only portrays men who are better than his co-stars.

It feels right that I’ve just been saying him, conflating the actor with his on-screen persona (yes, singular). Even when he plays himself, the joke is not out of context. Think Full Frontal, Confession of a Dangerous Mind. Brad is Brad and it is funny to see Brad coyly smirking, eyelash batting, enjoying himself as a self.

Which leads me to ask, can we watch a film and really believe the star is the character? Can we keep the star apart from the role? There is often mentioned a difference between stars and actors. But are we expecting something impossible from the entire process of watching people in movies? Even the best emotional chameleons are part of a lie. Films are not mirrors held up to reality, of course. They are but flawed, incomplete variations of the mirror. What we are witness to is merely the reality of the effort.

Even watching the great D-Day Lewis involves the experience of considering his process. There is no state of true belief, no pure, transported catharsis of temporal illusion. We cannot truly believe a role is a human, or that they may reflect a tenth of real existence. And no one does.

So what then does it mean to see the world’s perception of the actual Pitt played out in cinematic analog over and over? Does it mean that the casting just works, or does it mean that we need him to keep being our better? Sure, we love to watch heroes accomplish unreasonable feats, but are we watching him as hero or hero as him?

In our own personal realities, away form celebrity, we single out those that get labeled the hero, the one, the alpha, the object, the leader, the cool, the desired, the beauty. It is easy to imagine Pitt’s friends starting their memoirs with “I found out who I was by comparing myself to Brad.”
But is this easy for me to imagine due to what I know of Pitt or of his roles? I believe his roles reflect the position that we have given him in the real world. And I believe there must be some conscious effort to maintain that effect, either by us, by him or both.

So, what does it mean when we say he is better, or perfect? Are we filling in the blanks, just as we do when we watch the fragments of partial reality in films?  We figure out that a character in a film must have traveled overnight even when we are not shown this happening. We don’t ask ourselves how or by what mode of transport.
Is it possible that we are also filling in the blanks of perfect’s definition with equally undefined qualities?
I think so; I think we are happy to have him above us and we allow for imperfect definitions in terms of comparison. Strange necessity.

When his age finally starts to show I can imagine him playing cool elders in the vein of his predecessors Redford and Newman. But what if he does something in his real life to put us off? What if he starts to suck? What if he plays a guy who totally sucks? What if he fattens like Brando? What happens when he dies for real? Who’s next?

Of course, there are roles that break my theory. He plays stupid so well: Johnny Suede, Burn After Reading, Twelve Monkeys, True Romance, Seven.

And Pitt is great. I love to see him up there. In the few moments when he was his unaltered, regular self in Ben Button I felt something very strange and real. I can’t exactly talk about the feeling, but it works. And I guess that’s the point. I believe he is a god. I believe he is better than me. I believe he, and his roles, are great. I want to see him glow, and I don’t know why.

No, this is the story of a seaside utopia, a story of a compound so small that it can be summed up with a 3D model the size of a card table. This Sea World is perfectly contained. Never do the inhabitants bow to an outside authority. When there is a death, a crisis or an attack by two jawses they handle it themselves. No cops. They have all they need. There’s a roadhouse bar, an apartment complex, restaurants, and a coroner’s morgue right there on the premises.

This is a perfect society where urban cowboys flirt with aerobics instructors and people return to work hung over, half naked in bummer shorts. The men run, jump and play in their perfectly fitting pants, sneakers and shirts. They jet ski just because it’s faster. They feed the dog on the counter. They skip the conditioner in the shower because there’s usually a lady to look at in there.

Yes, the focus of this tale is the uncanny time of perfect harmony, of economy, youth, water and beer; a nowhere past when rainbows didn’t mean anything and every motherfucker swam and laughed.

Twenty-somethings are the reluctant specialists here. They are the semi-professionals who need to relax a little after a day at their fun fucking jobs. These are the party people who drink but never fatten, who smoke without stinking and who smile while they kiss. These are they with feathers for hair, sex in their blood and shorts that don’t fuck around with being short. (No matter what Mrs. Garret says. You’ll see.)

These hyperboreans work to entertain the kids that look like shit (as they should) and the sparkling new adults all dressed in sun drenched hyper color. (For all we know the spectators live in the Sea World too. We never see them arrive. We never see them leave. They may, like Jack Torrance, have always been there.)

This is a worker’s paradise, a celebration of happy adulthood where underwater welders, dolphin trainers, hospitality ladies and professional leaners all lean and loaf while examining a blade of grass. This is the politicians speak to when promising the impossible. This is the place that can grow priceless corral reef in a few weeks.

This was back when people could have a hit water-ski program. Everyone would come to see the ripple skippers and the wavin’ girls. What could be cooler than seeing the ramping human pyramid? Why not have country waitresses perched on the shoulders of mustached grins?

“I gotta see that shit. Did you hear what they got at Sea World? They got one of those live action fake hillbilly fights and a pig-worshipping kind of dance number. I heard the pig is great, a real break out performance. And the hillbillies end up scrappin’ in a mud hole! Oh, I’m taking Tammy. It’s on.”

So, this is what is at stake, what is at risk: Utopia. Ageless awesomeness. Work and play combined. They have it all, but they’ve had it all for a while. And the people’s boredom dooms their peace.

Complacency.

Peace breeds wandering eyes.

Guys watch TV through the feathers of their girl’s hair while making out.

Dreams become barbarous.

Women ache for their men to fight just so there might be something real on the line.

People act like people everywhere are playing “Stand Off” but actually only they themselves play “Stand Off.” People are caught jacking off to maps of Europe.

People are ordering telescopes.

Trips are considered.

Here in our bucolic, sleepy little Sea World the domestic intimacy has sadly peaked with estimating the severity of other couple’s problems.

Now, A long-term relationship is like a pool in your back yard. Before you get it installed all you want to do is swim. You and your friends go to the public pool, you make a day of it, you drink and laugh. It’s special. You think that you’d love to have something this special for yourself, in your home. You could use it all the time, anytime! It would be all yours; you wouldn’t have to share it. So you get a pool in your back yard and the next thing you know you’re two months into the summer and you’ve only been in it once. You don’t know why you even clean it; no one gets in it anymore. Maybe you can invite people over to share it, just to spice it up? Maybe you can put a jaws in there, or at least a jaws hunter? Yeah. A sexy, dangerous, British jaws hunter? One day you find yourself standing at the fence with a towel, scoping out the public pool and someone asks, “Hey, what are you doing here? Don’t you have one of these at home?”
Monogamy is a two person Utopia: complacency the downfall for both.

Louis

(Louis Gosset Jr. as “Calvin Bouchard”. You know when you see an actor billed as a specified character in quotes that the actor is about to go into acting hyper-drive. Scenery will be chewed, the top will be vaulted and new limits of dramatic surplus will be defined.)
This is a magical time. A time when a man can rise up and build himself a Sea World.

A time when a man can build an undersea Truman Show with waving skeletons, seaside hoe downs and goddamn dolphins.

This man, Louis, commands the whites. He is flanked in whiteness. We know he is the boss when an untrimmed Playboy Bunny chauffeurs him away from a party in his cute little cherry wood speedboat. (Who’s the boss will be black in a moment, stick around.)

He gives the whites their free drinks and their special dinner. He gives them exactly what he knows they want, even the version of himself that he enjoys to put on: the happy minister, the leader of the flock, the man who punctuates with his whole body.

Opening day has Louis just a-goin’ around keeping it tight, and drinkin’ white zin. And on this special day he wears a suit made entirely out of white people. He is clearly a man with a “no questions” dry cleaner.

He tells the newspapers that “No jaws is going to bust up my Sea World.” Fast forward to the future, Louis, and we’ll see you yelling, “Oh no! A jaws is busting up my Sea World!” But, No. Not now. Now you are all, “Ain’t no jabber jaws gunna come up in my Sea World, twinkletoein’ around on his back fin. I brought up this Sea World, and only I can take it down.” Oh, how right you are, Louis.

He looks over a model recreation of his Utopia with Quaid and some other guy. The three talk about something so boring it’s possible to forget that soon a few jawses will fuck the place to bits. Opening day just seems to lack the punch. If only there were something fresh, exciting, mean and awful. If only…
Louis commands from below in the undersea flight tower.

In the flight tower White Girl and Nephew assist Louis. They struggle to not shake their heads and glare when he speaks into his mic. (Watch White Girl. Nothing can keep down her defiant head shaking, not even the actress within. These two seem to know that in the future he will be munched and she will be saved only for her memory of special codes.)
Louis has an eye everywhere. He has cameras trained on vents, on locks, on shoes. His cameras are so ubiquitous that at one point young Quaid converses with the air and Louis, in the form of the night, replies.

Louis has built a pressurized hamster tube network in an effort to dazzle the spectators with a reworking of the same two ingredients as always: sea and world. He’s designed the tubes to clinch their door-muscles at the first sign of danger. (When this occurs the people will be trapped, as well as a few McConaugheys. Look for them.)

He is the control, the order, and the power: it’s all Louis. He maintains the peace, and he decides when to entertain the danger. He predicts accurately that audiences’ attentions will wane away from the dolphins, the dancers and the rainbows. He starts looking for fun in the dangerous, in the evil, in the death. (He didn’t even recognize his building of an underwater glass house and inviting kids into it as signs of his own dangerlust.)

When there is discussion about maintaining a great white in captivity he grins at the thought of how well he maintains whites. “Can we keep the jaws? Oh, can we keep him, daddy?” Louis sees the angle, and nods.

And it’s not just Louis. His white people are swimming at night in the ocean. Night-fishers flaunt their poaching of miracle corral right in the face of Nix. Ms. McFly tempts the younger, eyebrow-less Brody into the black until they are waste-deep in a nothingscape attempting love in the whispering wake.

Yes, they all think they are just buying a stairway to heaven but before they know it here comes crunch-and-munch making celery noises out of them all. But not yet. No, still the night and the water are safe little ass tightening excitements. The night, the blackness, the water, the bar -it’s never enough. Soon it’s the submarine, the harpoon and the grenade. Sounds pretty cool, but before you fucking know it you are miscalculating the slow motion of death’s trajectory as it skips over crucial sections of time. You find yourself magically transported onto death’s bounding mattress of a tongue. In death you hold the grenade and only your living arm and dead face remain in this dimension.

Young Quaid’s Ice Queen

She thinks she is the dolphin whisperer, but in reality dolphins talk to anyone holding a fish.

She has the kind of irritable bitchiness that a man can’t help being drawn to, like a masseuse is drawn to Stephen Hawking. Like, “I got to smooth that out, that which seems unsmoothable.”

Even when she’s being sweet you know she’s just trying to let the medicine work.

Of course she must flirt with the dangerous alpha male of the homosexual, British duo of jaws slayers.

“British? Check. Hogwarts sweatshirt? Check. Cockney, overprotective, henchman? Check?”

When invited to fuck the Brit she makes no mention of her boyfriend, Quaid. She keeps it open. Keeps it possible. She has that duel action flirty insult. (In a way, it is the perfect combination, right guys?)

Later she goes on her hundredth really boring submarine tour with Quaid. The little sub was designed by no one, but instead came about by a combination of dares and excess parts. (As a child I dreamed of owning it. Now I dream only of when I could dream of owning it.)

After the slowest dolphin get away ever recorded, the Ice Queen and Quaid barely escape an errant lil’ jaws. When they scramble upon the deck they land on top of each other and the film must cut away or else be hit with an x rating. The proximity to death finally warms her tepid veins and they bounce on one another in moves that are surely pre-coitus.

Of course, later, we’ll see her inventing communions with a drugged, rubber shark. Oh, how she pretends to have a bond with her clubbed little danger. We all know her type: “No, really. I understand pit bulls.” You know, the kind of girl who at a party squats too close to the fire, is warned, but stays there because no one can tell her what to do. “I smell burning hair.”

Watch, No matter how many times she kisses the young Quaid he, along with us, is never certain of her love. Her only lifeline is getting in the thick of the danger. She barks orders at the dolphins, acting like a mother with birthing remorse. She is so bored.
In the roadhouse she’s over there breathing into her bottle, a million miles from Quaid despite their huggy kissy pantomime. “If only I could kill, or watch killing. If only some real shit were on the line, not just some fucking diva dolphins and my boyfriend’s Venezuela trip.”

When the fan is invisible under all the shit, she can’t just let the boys handle it. She must jump in the black with them.
Quaid himself loves to smoke, loves to get his jeans wet and loves to leap out or off a moving vehicle. He’s the stud on this ranch. If some British jaws slayer shows up wearing only an open hoody without a t-shirt, well shit, he can too. Fuck, that’s how he always rolls. Open hooded sweatshirt over a naked torso? Fucking of course. Makes the cig taste better. (Watch for this moment. I couldn’t believe my eyes.)

THE JAWS IS UPON US.

After exactly one hour the mother of death attacks the utopian society. The Sea World itself is the object of her fury, not the people. She has a plan. She wrecks around, hitting inanimate objects, knocking out their cable, destroying property and avoiding many obvious opportunities to eat scads of flailing legs. She is hell bent on destroying the ordered, perfect world by causing maximum amounts of minimum damage. She chooses nose butts for glass and metal, dorsal displays for boys and girls. She is like a cat that is dropped in a take full of mice but only attacks the tank. No one dies, no one is eaten and the puffs of underwater blood seem to only be the result of scrapes against broken wood.

Oh, but do note the combination of fear and joy on the mice’s faces. The danger is delicious. The severity of the situation, the meaningfulness of each moment is relished completely. “LIFE OR DEATH! HERO OR LOSER! SAVIOUR OR THE SAVED! MARTYR OR SUPER MARTYR!”

No one wants it to end.
(Note Quaid taking advantage of the crisis to wreck all manor of vehicle with negligent dismounts.)

Sadly, the only true casualty is the libido of Mrs. Mcfly. After this she’ll never want to fuck in the water again. And that was the only way she could get off.
When everyone is out of the water, one jaws is dead and the other jaws is contained, no outside help is called. No cops. The press is shooed away and our rag tag band of delighted fuckers come up with the dumbest plan imaginable.

How they move through space

Now, all jawses love to creep silent. All jawses, even the lil’ ones on TV, move like fake jawses. They glide with fixed, hateful smiles. They are propelled by a flick of the tail made twenty minutes ago. They are like orbiting space shuttles, “Spsss. Float. Float. Spsss.” They are masks of frozen irritation, gracefully traversing unmeasured space. Death’s mouth is stopped, still and unreal at the tip of a lost rocket.

Death’s trolling mouth collects stars. The stars are like schools of sea-monkeys tumbling into the hatch. A shark moves like this. A shark is the hovering extinguisher. A shark eats the light. They have no idea how slow or fast they are going until they crash fast into a boat or into an underground terminal. Then right away they start the head wiggle and mouth smack or they slowly fall out of the crash hole, never ceasing the smacking.
True, it is easy to see a jaws as a phallus, yet I’ll go further and say it is a vagina as well. It is both and it is death. It will ram you, but you will enter it, and when you do you die. The cycle is complete! (In this way a jaws is like a musket: you ram your load into it, sure. But you point the barrel at a body and fire that load into that body and death may be the result.)

Discovery Channel

To see a jaws jump out of the water on the smart cable TV shows… to see a jaws get tricked like a pet dog… to see a jaws get that fake seal in his teeth… I feel embarrassed. It’s like I’ve seen Churchill leap soapy, naked and frenzied out of his bath in order to snatch at what he thought was a piece of mutton on the ceiling. It’s embarrassing to trick the mighty.

In slow-mo, aerial flops, the jaws attacks in a ferocious way, but he has a nerf in his mouth and we know it and we laugh. Imagine Churchill giving the order to firebomb a nerf Berlin.
Setting up a controlled act of ferocity… it feels weird, it makes the monster silly, it makes us in control… and that is the folly of the Jaws 3 people. They mistake containment for control.

You feel in charge of death and before you know it… you are the nerf. Your Sea World is getting busted up by a jaws and your decision to spend your welding funding on more and more skiers seems pretty misguided.

(I mean what good is the world’s largest skiing human pyramid if your jaws-gate is being welded by an out of work circus strongman?)
We bring it on ourselves when we play with danger. Keep your husbands! Play board games! Swim in the pool! Train the Shamoo! Please! Don’t look for excitement in violence, war, danger, infidelity, jawses, the British… whatever!

Back to it

We think we hear it roar. We think it growls. But that is just the sound of our blood screeching to a halt. That is the crash of our life against the face of death. That thudding collection of throaty wumps is just our shit hitting our brainpan.
The sublime vista is from the underwater control room window. The jaws has indeed broken all natural laws of space and time by just hovering in a-reality. It is advancing towards us, but isn’t. It is 3D and 2D at the same time. It destroys all just by being in the all. It is angry, focused, crazed, yet inert, silent, a toy unmoving. We are the young Quaid, The Ice Queen and Louis. The death dream has come true for us. Our Freudian death drive, our destrudo has over-reached. The demon has come and reality is in its wake. We move as tortured sleepers and our roars are silent, our eyes without lids. In a final assault on our childish theory of utopia the jaws turns the wall between life and death into shattered rock candy. We are submerged in our destiny of chaos. Our star is snuffed.
The only voice disinterested and perturbed by death’s dance is young Quaid’s. He has seen it before. He is one who was shot when a baby and who murdered as a child. He came to us as the cool one. A knower. A Klaatu. He has seen, he has said, but no one heard.

The only hope handed out from this movie is young Quaid and his Ice Queen dealing with their overstepped curiosity. Even Quaid must admit that there is something new to be learned from these events. He’s learned that complacency is only a problem for the willfully complacent. He now knows, and even more so does his Ice Queen, that love and peace are worth the boring times. “Fuck it, let’s stay together, let’s pack up the dolphins and teach them Spanish. Let’s go to Venezuela. Lets stay together and never again allow the possible destruction of our tenuous, boring peace!”

They denounce their recent excitements and they sentence death to death in a rose bloom Hiroshima that issues its thorn strip dentures toward us as if to say that this death was indeed overestimated. Its time-bending power was only enfeebled dementia of brittle old age.
And in the end, when getting back to the garden, the man and woman are flanked by the man and woman dolphin. The movie indulges in the categorical impulse to call one part of life over and frozen, before deeming the next moment the next chapter.

Dear, friend.

When I was a teenager I was allowed to shower with the blind girls. I was responsible for shaving them and keeping soap out of their eyes.

Right now Brooklyn has 400 of my kids in it. You can know you’re my kid if you aren’t a pig fucker.

If you are my kid you want the rockets and the blacks and the bang-bang nights.

Here is a list of well-known women I knew to have had nipple pubis:

1. Gina Davis.
2. Shelly Winters.
3. Fred Astaire.

One day Johnny Depp flew over my house. He was naked and he was peeing and I yelled up at him, “You’re just like me! HA HA!”

I got on the internet one day and I found a picture of myself with a cock in my mouth. Some people were like,

“Why’d you suck a cock?”

And I was all like, “I didn’t know what to order until I spent a day in a kitchen.”

If I were God here are the changes I would change:

1. Movies would quit being made.
2. Women would be really a lot bigger.
3. Time would quit fucking me like a pig.

Anytime I sit down to eat I unzip my pants, just in case there’s a person under the table who might not have fingers.

Yeah, I hung out with the blacks. One night, I took every black person out for a ride on my motorcycle. I bought bottle rockets for every black person and we went to see that movie with Johnny Depp where he flies over houses and pisses on America. We all laughed and shot the rockets at the screen.

I have had every j available.

1. B.J.
2. H.J.
3. V.J.
4. A.J.
5. Arm.J.
6. Knee.J.
7. Hair.J.
8. Lid.J.
9. Shit.J.
10. Dog.J.
11. Man.J.
12. Deadthing J.
13. Spaghetti J.

I love Native Americans. One day when I was a teenager,

After toweling off the girls, I met an Indian tribe outside of Chicago. I fell in love with a native girl named “Ten White Devils.” Her dad showed me that humans can never get clean and I quit the blind-girl-washing job.

One day I suspected that a monster was watching me when I slept. At dark I sprinkled the yard with sandwiches laced with roofies. And I ate those sandwiches. The monster was caught!

I told Katherine Hepburn that she had dick skin all over her body, that her skin was the texture of a man’s penis.

She nodded in her way that could also be saying no.

And one time I was talking to that motherfucker Cary Grant.

He was squinting at me, trying to act like he couldn’t understand me, squinting, peering out of his two fudge-cutters. So I said, “Cary, do you know what I mean?”

And he said, “I do if you are trying to say that you want to get all the black people in America to watch a movie with you. But that really couldn’t happen, Marlon.”

Well, I guess I showed him.

When the reaper showed himself to me I heard wind. And my hair went crazy. And I fluttered my eyes. At first I felt like the universe was expanding a close up, but in fact, it was me who was pulling way back.