Note to Self

She woke up in the mornings already exhausted by the possibilities. And, of course, the question arose of whether it was depression or merely situational. Leslie didn’t think it was depression. Leslie’s own postpartum depression had been serious, life-threatening. She knew all about the drugs and the research, the ins and outs of serotonin uptake, the interaction effects of different kinds of therapy, and she’d discussed all these things with Anna. Admittedly, Anna was kind of into the idea of it being depression. Then none of it would be her fault. She remembered something about her gap insurance covering mental health, and, of course, there would be the reassuring routine of regular appointments someplace uptown, which would get her out of the house. But gap insurance probably covered only a few months of sessions. Plus the medicine made you fat, didn’t it? It destroyed your sex drive. One was faced with a miserable choice between sad, sexed up, and thin or fat, sexless, and happy. Of course, Anna was already fat, definitely sexless, and probably sad. But taking the drugs would rob her of hope. They would slap a cruel ceiling on her Aspirational Future. If she could never be thin, and would always be sexless, how could she ever be happy? It was a thicket of catch-22 situations. But if the two hours she had spent in the future, working on late bloomers, had taught her anything, it was that living in hope is a beautiful thing. There was no better feeling. In fact, the feeling was even better than the doing, because when she stopped to think about it, Anna had to admit she didn’t much like to write. Ergo the unwritten thesis. And the thought of writing an entire book, ass-to-chair, day after day, sounded lonely. Worse than lonely, actually. It sounded fucking miserable. But being on the cusp of writing a book—or, better still, having already written a book—was something else. She’d gotten such a charge picturing herself telling Leslie, changing her Facebook status, moderating her lively new blog on LateBloomers.com as she crowdsourced suggestions for Late Bloomers, Volume II …

Without quite realizing it, Anna was surfing. She had sorted the Amazon comments for Stråtchuk’s Late Bloomers so that the one-star reviews came up first, and a link in one of those comments had led her to another website about late bloomers, which was called Kurinji, after (the header announced) a rare Indian shrub that takes up to twelve years to bloom. Now Anna started reading the home page Q&A with Paul Gilman, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, who, at age forty-six(!), had become an impresario of the microcinema scene before going on to bigger and better things. Anna read through his bio and—no surprise—learned that the first forty-five years of Gilman’s life had been noticeably devoid of promise: a ho-hum upbringing in the exurbs of Kansas City (he didn’t even bother to clarify which one), a so-so college career, a drift from one forgettable white-collar job to another, an unsurprising failure to start a family. Now Gilman had a house in Brentwood. He had recently married a young actress (they’d met during his fellowship at Cannes) and was expecting twins.

K: You are known for your improvisational style.

GILMAN: I never use scripts. A script only imposes moral constraints on the actor. What I’m interested in is the uninhibited id. I take the actors and put them in a box. Then it’s up to them to break out of the box. Sometimes literally.

K: Up until recently, you didn’t exactly work with actors in the technical sense.

GILMAN: Right. Nonprofessionals.

K: How did you find them?

GILMAN: Craigslist. I would put up an ad for actors, no experience needed. I didn’t care about age or size or race. I didn’t ask for headshots. This was back when I still lived in Kansas City. It’s not like Los Angeles, where you put something like that out and—

K: Everyone’s straight from the Formica factory.

GILMAN (laughs): Right. These were real people. Actuaries. Teachers. Cooks. Whatever. People who needed the extra cash. I paid fifty a session. Sometimes I’d go to their house. Sometimes I’d tell them to meet me somewhere. The pay phone in front of the Cash America pawn. Or the loading dock behind the rug warehouse downtown. I’d drive over with my camera and see them waiting for me on the street. Then I’d drive around the block a couple of times, figuring out how they’d fit into the scene. After that, I’d make up a story on the spot.

K: Both Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop have this really visceral, really frenetic quality. How did you edit those movies?

GILMAN: I edited all of my films in-camera.

K: Just record, then stop?

GILMAN: Exactly. Stop or pause. It is what it is. And since I’d never met the actors before, anything could happen. My one rule is that while I’m shooting, I won’t talk. This one woman I hired, she worked at the hospital and came to meet me straight from work, still in her scrubs. I told her, “Here’s the story: you’re an EMT and you just responded to a call about a car accident that involved your husband. His back was broken in two places. He sustained internal injuries and the doctors have no idea whether he’s going to live. You leave the hospital. You’re on your way back to your car and you can’t remember where you left it. You’re lost in the parking lot”—we were in a parking lot—“and you call your mother on your cell to tell her what happened. Action!”

K: This sounds like Clean Rite Meltdown.

GILMAN: It ended up that way—

K: Spoiler alert.

GILMAN (laughs): Right. The woman wouldn’t do the scene. She wouldn’t do any of it. She just started screaming at me that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Her face right up in the camera, calling me every kind of name. Went on about how she knew “the scam I was running” and her boyfriend had my license plate number, blah blah. Amazing stuff. The whole movie turned out to be just that one continuous shot of her face—

K: Clean Rite showed at Sundance?

GILMAN: It did. It’s in MoMA’s permanent collection now.

K: You’ve certainly come a long way. Can you say something about working with Johnny Depp?

GILMAN: Johnny is just an amazingly brilliant guy. Amazingly brilliant.

K: Any last words for aspiring filmmakers?

GILMAN: Get a camera. Let the rest take care of itself.

When Anna finished reading, she noticed it was dark. It was dark and now she was hungry. She got herself a bag of rice cakes and a tub of salsa and went back to the computer, where she searched Gilman on IMDb, and read the Variety reviews for Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop and Clean Rite Meltdown. When the rice cakes were gone, Anna switched to vegetable chips (baked, not fried) and googled Gilman’s wife for no reason. And when her roommate, Brie, came home from kickball practice, it was well after six and Anna’s food was turning into fat. She was watching Can’t They Always Make More? on YouTube and still hadn’t turned the lights on.

“Hey,” Brie said. She threw her cleats in the corner, setting off a small dirt-clod explosion. “Can you believe all I had for dinner was a glass of Merlot?”

“Good practice?” Anna said.

“Gotta poop.”

“The postkickball poop!” Anna said, laughing nervously as though this were a perfectly normal thing for her to say. Something one of Brie’s much-younger friends might say.

“Uh-huh,” Brie said, breezing past Anna on her way to the bathroom.

Anna hit pause, got up, and turned the lights on. She threw away the plastic bag from the rice cakes and wiped the salsa ring on the table. She checked inside the bag of veggie chips. How many had she eaten? From the hallway, she could hear a flush and the sound of running water. Then Brie was back, wiping her hands on the butt of her shorts.

“What are you watching?” Brie said, head already in the refrigerator.

“This movie, Can’t They Always Make More?”

“I didn’t know you were into Gilman.”

“I love Gilman,” Anna found herself saying, unsure of whether she really loved Gilman or whether she was just happy to have something to talk about with Brie.

“You know that one, Rurik at the Drive-In?”

“Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop?”

“Yeah. Totally craptastic!”

“I know, right?” Anna said uncertainly. She always had trouble getting a read on Brie. Even when she wanted to kiss her ass, she could never predict where exactly Brie’s ass was going to be. It’s like she was always running around the room, lips at ass level, chasing after her. Maybe it was just the fact that Brie was still young enough to make declarative statements. She could still put periods, even exclamation marks, at the end of a sentence, whereas Anna had already changed her mind so many times about so many things it was all question marks and ellipses for her from here on in.

“But in a good way,” Brie said, reaching into the refrigerator for a cold quesadilla. “I love how he’s not afraid to just, like, let his movies be bad, you know?”

“It’s a style,” Anna said, pushing the bag of chips toward Brie.

“I love that one with the candy hearts. Oh, wait. I think I’m thinking of the girl.” She dipped the edge of the stiff quesadilla into Anna’s salsa. “You know, the other one? Who makes the movies on her cell phone?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They all hang out together,” Brie said. “God, what’s their name?”

Anna didn’t know.

“Shit. I feel like I just read about them on Daily Intel the other day. This is going to kill me,” Brie said. “I should text Rishi.” Brie went over to her bag and started unzipping various pockets.

“I just love the way, with his movies, it just is what it is, you know?” Anna said, feeling like she was finally finding her groove in this conversation. “He just lets things happen.”

But Brie wasn’t listening. “Shit,” she said, zipping and unzipping. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“Did you bring a jacket?” Anna said, standing up.

“Shit.” Brie was pulling things out of her bag, throwing them on the floor.

Anna made an effort to look concerned. “Should I check the bathroom?” she said.

“No. Fuck. It’s either on the bus or back at the park.”

“You’ll find it …,” Anna said, hoping she wouldn’t have to offer to go back to McCarren Park with Brie to hunt around in the dark grass for her cell phone.

“I can’t believe this,” Brie said, shaking her bag empty over the floor. Crumbs, bobby pins, pennies, receipts, pen caps, one of those inexplicable plastic Japanese toys with a head that was all teeth, a chewed-off thumbnail. Chinese fortunes—too many to count—drifted down like parade streamers.

“I’ll be back,” Brie said, standing up. She grabbed her wallet from the pile on the floor. “Can you stick this back in the fridge for me?” She nodded at the half-eaten quesadilla she’d set down on the couch.

Anna took the quesadilla, opening the door for Brie.

“If Rishi calls the landline, tell him what happened,” said Brie. Before the door eased shut behind her, she passed a reflexive hand over the light switch, leaving Anna in the dark once more.

3

Anna felt her way back across the room toward the laptop glow. She yanked the cord out of the wall, letting it drag behind her as she made her way down the hall. Even though Brie was gone, Anna still made sure the bedroom door was closed before pulling off her pants. She slid her bra out from under her T-shirt and dropped it on the pile on the floor. The bra didn’t have far to fall; the pile was almost as high as the bureau. Taking care of the pile was “on the list,” though the list itself was a kind of bureau-high pile, wasn’t it? Anna lay down on top of the comforter, pulled the laptop onto her bare thighs, and finger-typed Gilman into Hulu. Of course, Clean Rite Meltdown came up first, followed by Rurik and the film she’d just seen. But here was another one she hadn’t watched yet, Age of Consent.

Anna clicked on the title. And as the movie loaded, she wondered how Gilman made any money when everything was always free, right here, on the Internet. How did anyone make any money on the Internet when even Anna had never clicked on a banner ad in her life? Except that one time, for the free pair of Uggs. And in return for filling out some endless form about her customer preferences, what did she get? Nothing but aggressive, filter-eluding spam—not the kind worth collecting—for mortgage refinancing and “authentic quality pharmaceuticals.” Never again, she thought, and hit play.

There were no credits. No theme music. A black screen with the title faded in and faded out too fast. Then there was a man, sitting on a bed, with a paper bag over his head. The man had on khaki shorts and a bright blue T-shirt. The words Sun Microsystems stretched across the roll of fat in his lap in huge white letters. Daylight struggled against the shades, which were pulled all the way down. A lamp with a crooked shade tossed a warped football of light across the wall. The room reminded Anna of one of those shabby motor inns where you drive right up to the door and all the windows face the parking lot. Other than the lamp, the only decorations were the radiator and a potted ivy on the windowsill that may have been plastic.

“This is where I keep my collection,” the man said. Two eye-holes had been punched into the bag, also a slit for the mouth, through which wet lips and a swatch of mustache were visible. “Under the bed.” He bent down, felt around, and pulled out a large plastic bag.

“Does it matter which one we start with? No? OK, so this one is Penthouse Forum,” he began, taking out a magazine and laying it on the bedspread. “It’s, like, just letters about celebrity fantasies and shit like that. It’s not that interesting, actually. It’s kind of a joke. Look at this. Every letter always starts out with the same horseshit line. ‘I never thought these letters were real, until I decided to write one myself,’” the man mimicked in a low, husky voice, then laughed from inside the bag. “Almost like parodies of letters, you know? And the celebrities are … where is it …” The man started flipping through the magazine. “Yeah, man, check this one out,” he held up a page and the camera zoomed in on a photo of Andie MacDowell wearing a red dress, smiling hard. “Who’s gonna jerk off to some has-been MILF that’s not even showing her vah jay jay, right? Who’s gonna jerk off to Andie MacDowell? Would you, man?” he snorted. “I think I saw this same photo later, too, in a Campari ad. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. If I’m already horny almost anything will work. It’s like I’m just looking for that final, uh, you know, push.” The man put the magazine back in the bag. “So that’s Forum. But they have ads for these nine-hundred numbers, too,” he said. “Sometimes I use those. OK, next.” The man reached in and grabbed a bunch more magazines. “So then I got some of these multipacks. Why? Because they’re cheaper. They’re, like, old issues of things that’re combined into different groupings. Like, ‘butts’ or ‘dildos’ or whatever. And I have a thing for, you know, the young ones. I mean, you can’t sell any images of girls under eighteen, but these girls are total jail-bait, I bet. I like this one.” He held up the cover of a magazine with a young girl whose mouth had the permanently doughnuted look of a blow-up doll. “L’age légal.” The man began turning the pages, this time slowly and deliberately, and the camera moved in close. There were pictures of hairless girls, wearing an inch of lipstick, their lingerie pulled to one side so their tits could pop out. Page after page, they kept moving their panties aside and looking perpetually shocked at the discovery of their own business. It was kind of amazing. Anna couldn’t help but think, I mean, don’t they get bored? It could be, like, their eighteenth shoot of the day and they still have to be all, Whoa! What’s this …? Well, hello! Look who’s here? Unbelievable. I would make the crappiest porn star ever, Anna thought, as she shifted the laptop, which was now burning the tops of her thighs, to the pillow next to her head.

“I’ll be your tampon any day,” the man said to a cherubic blonde who happened to be going down on another blonde, who was busy plunging a dildo into a brunette whose entire face had been swallowed in the gutter of the two-page spread. He flipped through the rest of the magazine quickly, until it was done, then tossed it aside.

“Purely Anal,” the man announced, shaking his head with what might have been delight. His head made a loud rustling sound inside the bag.

“This one’s kind of embarrassing. See this lady?” The man flipped the page. There was a picture of a disembodied white cock squirting onto the face of a black woman. “She’s always wearing sunglasses. See? Every picture.” The man turned the page and there was the same lady, giving a blow job, indeed wearing the same sunglasses. “It’s kind of cool, though. Almost a cult thing. This is a good one, actually, this issue. I think this is the one that, uh, deserves a reading.” The man hesitated. He stuck one of his hands up the bag to scratch his face, then reached down and readjusted himself. “Now I’m supposed to read this, right?” He stood up on the bed. For a second the camera zoomed in on his athletic socks, which had blue and white stripes at the top, then tilted queasily upward. The man was shifting uncertainly from foot to foot on top of the bed, his head close to the low ceiling, holding L’age légal away from his face at arm’s length with one hand.

“Halt!” he bellowed suddenly, in a labored Shakespearean baritone. “In this enseamed Greyhound station bathroom? But it is so dirty here, dear lass! Nay? Perchance, you cannot wait? My hot throbbing cock is bursting its seams and your loins cannot withstand it! Kneel then, by the porcelain throne yonder, as my hands caress your rock-hard nipples, as you take me unto yourself and my hot foaming jizz rushes like a cresting wave over your fair brow. Forsooth, your knees be raw, but thou art fucking me like a crazy bitch, a deeper and harder banging I hath ne’er imagined. Thy pussy, so wet, so fucking wet and—” The man, overcome with laughter, sat back down and bounced awkwardly a few times on the bed.

“Sorry, man. I couldn’t help it. I know I promised, but the writing in these things is pretty ridic, you know? Porn mags aren’t really about the writing. Sometimes I’ll be reading and, like, notice that I’m going along, correcting the grammar in my head? I’ll be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Psht.” He crossed his legs and went back to flipping through L’age légal. “Anyway, the other weird thing about this magazine? It totally isn’t purely anal. Look. Blow job. Fucking. Head. Head. Three-way.” The man kept flipping. “Anal. Only now we get to anal. The whole thing’s supposed to be anal and there’s, like, barely any butt action at all! But I kind of like the weirdness of it, like they’re tricking you into thinking it’s all anal. Even though,” he added, sotto voce, “I am really into anal sex.

“God, we have a lot to get through, man. This is a lot.” He paused, pulling another handful of porn out of the bag. “This bag is totally gonna rip soon, too. Want to know something weird? I bet my mom knows I have this stuff. She cleans in here. She must have found them by now. When my brother still lived at home, he kept his pornos under the bed, too. He’s the one who showed me. I could move them, I guess. Hide them better. But I like to be able to just reach under the bed, you know? It’s all about the easy access. And, OK, this is gonna sound really fucked up, but sometimes? Sometimes I think about my mom finding this stuff as I’m jerking off. Like, I picture my mom finding it and it gets me off that she pictures me getting off or something. Isn’t that fucking sick? You should bleep that out, dude. I can’t even believe I told you that. OK, but here are two more: Tight and Young and Tight. Young and Tight sounds like it would be good, right? But I actually like Tight better. It’s pretty disgusting.” He opened up an issue of Tight and flipped through it in silent contemplation. “I haven’t actually bought porn for a couple months, so these are all getting kinda stale. I mean, it’s not like I’ve squeezed everything I can out of every picture or anything. But I definitely could use another hit, you know? Whoa—I love this one. Check this out, man.” He held the magazine out to the camera, reading the title out loud. “‘The fragile beauty of young anal lesbians.’” He shook his head laughing again. “Hilarious.”

Then the man stood up but the camera stayed where it was and Anna could see only his midriff, his khaki shorts, and a roll of fat.

“Hey, do you want some cheese?” a voice asked from above. Then the midriff walked off camera and there was just the bed, the pile of porn, a lonely tentacle of ivy snaking down the wall. The sun hacked at the edges of the shades. The camera jumped to the ceiling, then cut out with a stab of static.

The scene reopened with the man’s ass backlit by the refrigerator. Asslit, Anna couldn’t help but think. He emerged holding a wedge of cheese on a plate, then made his way over to the sink to grab a cutting board. As the man rummaged in a drawer, the camera drifted around the room until it settled on a milk crate of empty beer bottles in the corner. The milk crate was set on top of another milk crate, also full of empties.

“Hey, you want some of this, man?” The camera swung back to the man, who was holding out a piece of cheese stuck to the flat end of a knife. “It’s Emmentaler. Good shit, seriously. I got it at the farmers’ market fresh. These two guys have, like, some kind of artisanal cheese farm out in Ashby and they truck it in on the weekends. Try it, man. It’s straight outta the sheep or whatever.” He waved the knife in front of the camera again. “Come on, man. It’s been all day, you must be hungry. At least have a glass of water or something …? OK, right. I forgot your whole thing.” The man snorted. “Who’s gonna watch this movie anyways? Me and cheese and butt fucking. Not exactly Avatar, man. You gonna have this in 3-D, too? Charge like sixteen bucks?” The man stuck the cheese into his mouth hole and chewed. “That’s not a bad name, by the way. Me and Cheese and Butt Fucking. You should remember that.”

He started walking back to his room and the camera followed.

“I was thinking of getting one of those pictures of the black lady in the sunglasses custom framed,” the man called over his shoulder. “With, like, a backing and glass and a really, really nice wood frame? Just as a joke. That’s only for when I get my own place, though,” he added. “Not while I’m still living here.”

Back in his room, he sat down on the bed and crossed his legs. “Back to work, right? OK. This one’s just, like, a catalog. They have a lot of ads for, you know, toys and videos. The place I go is basically a video store, by the way. Sugar’s. I remember going in there for the first time. It’s actually not far from here. You probably drove past it. Right after that Sunoco station at the exit? I was kind of scared. I walked in, looked around, and was like—whoa, these people are gross. Every time I go in, I’m thinking to myself, I’m definitely the least gross guy in here.” The man paused for a moment. “I almost got a toy for Kylie. But that was right before things got weird with us. We had butt sex once. Well, kind of …” The man trailed off. “Anyway, if you want to see that other stuff, it’s up in the closet. I’ve got some vintage, too, where it’s not all girls with Barbie doll parts—”

Then the camera suddenly swung to the door. A voice was calling from just outside.

“Snickers just left skid marks on the kitchen floor again,” a little girl yelled. “You better clean it before Mom gets home.”

“You clean it,” the guy barked from inside the bag. Then, to the camera, “Fucking cat.”