TEABAG COWBOYS LIKE IT HOT. (MAY BE)
Good cinema is not to be deeply tasted or understood, when you enjoy it.
You’ll actually get it later, like all the best things do. When from down, from inside of the pool, that fragment resurfaces, that detail you did not notice then, and suddenly you realize what it means. But not at first sight. You were not capable to grab it. You were not ready, for Drugstore cowboy. Nobody was. Sure wasn’t the director, and certainly could not know Matt Dillon, (he is chubby now , he looks like jelly, but at the time he was such a hot gorgeous badass, wasnt’ he?)
So there’s this breeakpoint, close to the end: Dillon’ s mind is blowing, he is superstitious, paranoid, always stoned like a zucchini. He runs days robbing pharmacies, escaping cops, he does not get laid and drags himself along shitty hours. A terrible, awful life, he’s spendind hidin’ pills and dead bodies of peoples stoned like him (a little bit more than him, indeed) under the queen size beds of those filthy motel which the route sixty something is littered with .
So stressful,uh?
And he has got a wife, unbelievable. Kinda Bonnie , of Bonnie and Clyde. She’s very cool, stylish, thin. And you hate her from the beginning, because you know that, somehow, she is evil, even if you did not grasp why.
But then, finally, you will understand it , when Matt says: ‘please, stop. I’m done. Let’s quit’
And in that moment, the slender, hot silly woman says not one, but two things that are mere insanity. She asks ‘ why?’
Why?
C’mon ..Why !? (Because you’re living in deep hell, idiot of a junkie, that’s why!) To top it off, she adds: I love you, but I will never stop, do not ask me.
And in that moment you wish that Matt could have been so smart to answer: ‘Because sooner or later you’ll stop doing everything, sweetheart. You’ll stop breathin, smiling, shittin, being. You’ll stop from carrying around that your painfully delicious butt . You’ll stop and you will be full of worms, darling. Spiraling creatures who will flock as housewives to a sell-off, in your dry mouth with no teeth. ‘
But Matt’s understandable lack of readiness deprives us of such a detailed, brilliant answer, and so she leaves, happily, to have drugs in peace just in order to make worms future job a little bit easier.
So now Matt is free from chains of love, and he tries to clean up. He gets a job in the factory.
And here’s the scene, the fragment, finally: it is a rainy afternoon inside a putrid industrial city, when even the concrete seems to be rot. He has found a shabby studio, properly as the room of a junkie should be. And he is sitting at the window, looking down into the street, down the drops on the glass, and in the meantime he’s having a teacup.
Not a whiskey or a joint. A tea.
Alone.
He immerses the teabag with a careless movement, yo-yo like, two, three times in the mug, that huge mug that makes so American Dream,more than of any stars- and -striped-and-eagled stuff you can ever see.
Here, the movement is perfect. That slow up and down, without haste, tells you that he will overcome, that this boring normal life fits him. That the cowboy likes it. Screw the bolts? Amazing, or.. well, let’ say: it’s fine.
A short moment of relief, but now you feel sadness soaring so fast, because you know that it’s now , just now that something is going to happen.
Matt falls and probably dies, you know the game, and you’re sorry because you wanted his salvation, you wanted so hard. And especially he wanted too. You got it from the tea.
Today this scene came back upwards like raisin up by a forklift. Because it is an afternoon of dew, and I’ve got tea . And because I’m addicted. And the sweet insipid taste of the tea is the same of the time that i shall live, the only one I have. A time without adrenaline, with no travel, no parties, no lovers, no television studios. And no Facebook,too.
All stuff that you are thinking is not so bad as the drugs. And you’re wrong. Because the drugs are so many, but drug addicts are all the same. Liars and depressed. They are all like me.
