Meandering through the American Dream
Notes for an unfinished screenplay
I guess I’m gonna open with John. I mean, that other John — the one I’ve got speaking from the podium, his authority amplified. He’s a four-star general so we gotta listen whether or not he’s wagging a finger at us. The signal disperses lazily in the heat, the air heavy with smoke, which slowly drifts into the fallout shelter where I’m scribbling like mad, wondering why they didn’t stock up on earplugs.
I mean, the noise is deafening, there’s no escaping the frenzied planetary cacophony, a crazed barking dog chasing after the motorcade, looping the king’s primal screams or bad dreams ‘round and ‘round the biosphere. The invisible audience looks on. They don’t count. ‘Cause like who cares if they’re corporate tools, housekeeping in fifty shades of brown, or shape-shifting orchestra musicians that relish tuning their instruments far more than getting with the program.
Yeah, who cares. Scene 1, DAY or NIGHT, gonna be CGI for the most part. John’s no longer a soldier, having obtained his four stars through an antisocial media campaign click clicking away to boost his star rating. In other words (there are always other words), he’s a former general or a MAGA-star, or just a fucking suit — a white guy in a black suit whom we gotta take at his word when he says, “I’m not a racist,” and be empathic, like totally get it why he’s incensed at how an uppity black woman with a shrill voice questions him while wrapping herself in blazing-hot red white and blue.
You gotta give it to John, he knows how to align his wrath with the dignity of the megaphone. Women are a LONG SHOT — corpses jolting and bumping downstream from the clearcut woods, a slight shadow passing over his master race facade as he focuses his rage on them that decline to suck his dick.
Any volunteers in the audience? There’s always someone, except today’s volunteer is kinda annoying, unzipping John’s pants behind the podium with an editorial gripe. “Hey, this suit ain’t exactly black,” and I, crinkling my nose at the stage directions, go, “Seriously? You wanna nitpick at that? So it’s not black, so what?” This ain’t a tux affair and John ain’t a funeral director, though like generals in general he’s been responsible for umpteen untimely funerals, many for faceless young people of limited means, those that get sacrificed to the gods of war behind the smoke screen, ‘cause war is money and money is king. And just like the king it’s a made-up thing— money, that is —kinda like crime fiction told in numbers. Yeah, I know you hate math (don’t we all), feel free to get up and move, or slide over to that other seat. It’s a free country —
Which is another name for America. Whatever John says when I get around to deciding on the damn dialogue, he says in America. Not that there are other countries to say things in. I mean, other than fake news, fake scribbles and quibbles, the after effects of insomnia or Hiroshima, news media pundits salivating over salacious closeups of America — preferably curvy and undulating on a pristine seaside resort before a category-five hurricane turns the beachfront hotels into giant sandboxes, appropriates roofs and uprooted trees for kites, and crisscrosses the terrain with downed power lines. Bzzz, don’t touch, sparks are flying over the mangled road, anything that’s not a soggy mess is going to burst into flames, or burst into song, love love love, all you need is love. Oh shoot, that’s from another place, ain’t it? Can’t be right. Love is American — branded, patented, copyrighted, trademarked — the whole shebang as she bangs bangs bangs on the door, that rickety old door that threatens to fall head first into the house.
Hey, I was watching that lovely sunset over the ocean, this mushroom cloud is blocking the view, the shockwave pushing everything inland, including the photoshoot of the greatest country on earth which is working its way to be made great again. Human error, systems failure, cyber hack — what the heck — the blame game ain’t helping against this fierce tailwind. The executive jet stalls over a nondescript location in flyover America, the trapdoor opens and drops John’s podium in slow motion, plonking it in the middle of some tiny, deplorable backyard. Hard to say how far we need to be from Dr. Strangelove’s a(ntiquated) bomb — the jury is still out on that, and if it votes to convict, I’ll have no reason to finish this tale. You’ll have no reason to read it. There will be no reason of any kind and no more talk.
While there is still talk, I expect John to speak loftily of flyover America, his kinsfolk and formative years suffused with nostalgia and tears, blood and soil and gun rights — whatever it takes to be ready any time the moment is right — never mind that the topsoil’s all gone, never mind that his pitch is not even true. This location is nothing like an east coast yard, no gray dunes along the misty shore, no sprawling salt-spray rugosas and wild bayberries, which owing to the latest sea level rise are but a dream of when we used to be great again. What we have here — the location of the plonked podium — are withered straggly weeds, an orphaned, cracked vinyl Chevy seat butting against scuffed sidings, junk of the manufacturing kind (plastic bags, crushed beer cans, rusty digging tools) littering the drought-stricken earth down to the crumbling shed in the back corner — the kind of backyard where great generations, John and John Jr. and John III, would bury women and children, female and all, as John would recall, with shrill uppity voices that grate on the steely nerves.
The backyard is attached to a single-dwelling home — a must if it’s gonna qualify for the American dream, assuming also a white picket fence or something that might have looked like that before it peeled off and rotted and got replaced by a chainlink fence. A bit maddening, I’d say, being called upon every few lines to decide among different types of walls and barriers and boundaries in order to provide a sense of place, which is also the most important thing to a character named John. Nah, it’s not about the landscape of his childhood, nor the layering of coast and heartland, not even about the whereabouts of generic heroes that self-sacrifice (like a self-cleaning oven with much hot air). It’s just a normal place with watchtowers and barbed-wire, with armed guards and border patrol, where it literally doesn’t pay to consider borders fiction, a made-up thing. I think it is. But don’t take my word for it. Ask around — ask the wind and the pollen and the butterflies. Or just slide into the cooling pool up to your nostrils, quit worrying about the raging firestorm and learn to love the soot as it slowly descends like black snow upon the hellish terrain —
I ‘fess, like Dr. Strangelove (you cute Nazi you), I don’t know how I arrived at this backyard seeing how it’s fenced on all sides to keep out the refugees roving among the tumbleweeds down the desolate, windblown street. Or maybe it’s just about keeping out the neighbor’s rabid dog. Either way, I’d have to walk through the house to get to the backyard without having set a foot inside. I can go as far as the weathered porch, reach for the front door handle, then abruptly stumble out back through a warped screen door nearly off its hinges.
In REVERSE ANGLE (if I turn around, which I don’t), the screen door opens to a narrow kitchen where a nasty woman cackles shrilly and freely and motions at the feast she’s been able to throw together without a single knife to her name, which is too strange to pronounce or to spell. She ain’t got a scalpel either. Like all witches, she has a medical degree but no license to practice, having obtained said degree in a foreign land across the sea which, as we’ve already established at FADE IN, does not exist.
In later scenes the front door will open to a small living room with low ceilings and grubby carpeting bearing an eclectic collection of stains from years of John sharpening his knives and polishing his gun. I ignore the warm blood on the floor spreading out from the kitchen doorway and turn my attention to the crooked staircase leading upstairs, the kind of staircase that would creak something awful under the weight of any character, let alone a witch, for whom it’s out of character to carry a breakfast tray upstairs to treat John on his birthday or father’s day.
Yep, true to his fake bio John claims for himself the mantle of family man, which means that he’s allowed to beat up his wife, bully the kids, kick the dog, rape the housekeeping staff, grab the pussies at his office and have a hearty laugh with the cops on those rare occasions they’re duly dispatched.
Not his problem that the staircase ain’t safe. There’s a missing step or a trick question, which the nasty witch would have to know to avoid stepping into that hole, foot and all, depending on whether she’s whole or in body parts. I count on you to know that folks come in all shapes and sizes when I get stuck thinking only about their brains and forget to describe their appearance which nonetheless is bound to have a lasting effect on the mind. It clearly ain’t helping being brown with a big scar across the lip from being in the wrong place (or the wrong side of the border) at the wrong time, when that time is always wrong. Sort of like how race is fiction, a made-up thing. And if I turned these characters inside out, they’d all look alike, the skin being as they say skin deep, right? Okay, okay, never mind. I get it. You can’t base your casting decisions on that, it’s business, the courts ruled in your favor, so —
A gaping hole halfway up the stairs can be a good thing if you’re worried about an indigent foreign presence skulking around in the middle of the night. Between nuclear arsenal and intractable insomnia, you don’t want the borders of the fake countries of the world closing in after the continents dump the oceans and drift back together, fault lines chafing and grinding and riding each other, all kissy kissy, just your everyday apocalyptic pretzeled love scene.
Whatever you’re hoping to find out, it’s always a good idea to watch your step when you go upstairs. Of the two tiny bedrooms, one is wallpapered with fading patterns of adorable Nazis (or some other harmless, kiddie-proof design), and the skeletons in the closet look on impassively at the heap of fresh kill splayed out on the bed. It’s a jumble of battle fatigues, shades of brown turning gray in the dim light, bloody wounds in mauve, flies buzzing, laying maggots, CSI inspecting IDs. What we’ve got here are drug traffickers, radical extremists, black motorists — bad hombres all around, no need to cut them into body parts, they can be buried whole in the front yard.
Ain’t that stench something? Not that we have odor-recording technology but there’s a bathroom down the hall if you need to puke. An American dream is bound to be equipped with the full array of indoor plumbing, something we can agree upon as divided we stand upon the chipped floor tiles, wiping our hands on the erstwhile white smudged towel dangling from the door handle on account of the towel rack having been ripped off the wall at one end, where there’s a sad gash of ragged cement. And just like the graying towel, the tub’s no longer white, nor the toilet bowl or the sink, which my brown character has no plans to scrub clean. And she ain’t got the skills to fix that maddening drip drip drip that slowly flushes my sanity down the drain.
It’s not a pretty sight, but you can’t expect a lone female character to fix everything, especially that she’s devoid of knives and certifiably poverty stricken, or in other words (there are always other words) beat up by poverty, which isn’t a fictional problem, even for fictional characters, although it may well be the end result of some other made-up thing. I don’t mean heaven or that old white dude in the sky, just hell on earth waxing poetic over jobs-jobs-jobs, soul-crushing jobs, brought to you by the purveyors of smoke and mirrors that call all the shots. If that don’t sound right, well, I dunno what I can tell ya. Listen —
The symphony orchestra inside the house is screaming so loud, the scuffed back wall and fogged windows (from years of smoke-filled rooms) are shaking, maybe awed by the heroic, heat-packing reverberation reaching across town, where a young man named Johann inexplicably finds himself in a drunkard get-together with a couple of inebriated old farts. They are well-heeled friends of Dr. Strangelove, who landed on these shores in the aftermath of some unfortunate military miscalculation (some categories of refugees are always welcome, says our smiling emoji). Is Johann too young to relate? Downing several drinks in quick succession, he rises, slams his glass on the table and says, “Wagner is full of shit.” No idea if he’s slamming the composition, the composer or their biggest fan, but as his audience plays dead (they should be by now), he stomps out, leaving history to fold upon itself and honor another dick.
Or it’s a flashback from a bygone era, before the 24-hour news cycle rendered all countries (with or without nuclear stockpiles) a fictional configuration and inspired democratically elected kings to invest their vast stores of loot and taxation in military bases overseas (whether or not “overseas” exist). A king in a democracy needn’t worry about the guillotine in the public square or about reluctant warriors that don’t hear the war drums so good ‘cause of the ringing in their ears. Not that my hearing is any better or I wouldn’t spend so many sleepless nights agonizing over how to fit this gigantic orchestra inside a tiny house.
I gotta step outside now and stand in the heat as a few male characters named John drift in. Those called Juan or Yuhna — or Johann for that matter — are told to go home. We’re not having nicknames either. Jackie, for one, makes me think of Jacqueline, a minor female character, maybe in pink, maybe in black & white, maybe holding her husband, a bullet in his head. A former first lady, the widow of a prez named Jack. Which, dammit, is also a nickname for John. That’s just not gonna work out. I can sort of imagine Jack in a box, maybe Jack of all trades, but for the life of me I can’t see for this scenario Jack in a suit. Gotta be a lumberjack, or that Jack that hits the road and don’t come back no more no more no more no more —
I don’t know if he does what he’s told. I do know that after telling him to hit the road, the voice-over artist leaps into her wildest American dream flying over the border wall with arms spread wide, embracing the universe, filled with love love love on the way up, before the sun melts her wings and she plummets to earth, splattering on the sunbaked hardpan. A drop of ink from some strongman’s calligraphic pen. Granted, no executive orders were written in stone since as far back as the ten commandments, so I’m not gonna ask ya, yeah — you over there in the unlit back corner — do you know what the fuck I’m talking about? It’s possible like the winds swooping down in the middle of the night, that fiction is one thing that ain’t a made-up thing. You know that —
John cannot be Jack, even if Casting insists that’s who this backyard belongs to, even if Wardrobe hands him a lumberjack plaid, even if Production screams at the Art Department that there’s no budget for INT. HOUSE — DAY, much less INT. HOUSE — NIGHT. Let the construction crew bang together a porch and a facade, have the scenic artists age the vinyl and the wood, spray the windows with smoky tint, and voila, you got EXT. PORCH — DAY for Jack to go up the steps, close-up on his hand over the door knob, then cut, bang together the back wall with windows and a ratty screen door for EXT. BACKYARD — DAY, where Jack staggers out as the backyard becomes a stage, the house a backdrop, extras playing couch potatoes on that junkyard car seat… The orchestra added in Post.
I can move through space same way I move through the minds of the characters, which is to say, from any and all angles, all sides as well as aerial and below ground, which John didn’t think about when he dug up the backyard. Nor did he factor the sandstorms which would sift and shift the terrain and heave the buried things up to the surface. Who (the fuck) told Props to have skeletons on hand? The ground is so sterile and dry, the bodies and any silent screams may well be mummified.
Hey, you know how they pump freezing air into skyscrapers in midsummer America to make it easy on men in wool suits? I get the sentiment if not the uniform, and yet, I gotta ask, what’s with the ties? Something to have on hand so you’re ready any time the moment is right to noose your female companion? Or is it just that John needs a tie pointing to his dick to distract us from the fact that he’s wielding an assault rifle or a switchblade or a baton, or whatever it takes to drive the point home (Ms. Point to you) and rape her on the way.
For the moment, though, he’s all flushed and flustered from the unbearable heat, made worse by the movie lights and no air-conditioning in the backyard. His only recourse is to step out of his clothes down to his boxer shorts, leaving the tie to caress the gray hairs on his flabby chest.
He’s still expected to suck it up like a true general and follow instructions from the east coast. Alas, as he leans into the mic over the podium, before he gets to open his mouth, a hand pokes out of the ground and grabs his ankle or maybe his dick. Oh shoot, this wasn’t in the script. John loses his cool — screaming, stumbling, managing to trip and smack the back of his head on some rock. We wait for him to regain his cool, or in other words (there are always other words), good luck with that. He’s lying back stunned, looking up at the flawless blue as the neighbor’s dog fills the air with ferocious barks, banging himself repeatedly against the fence over which John has previously draped his expensive attire. Dogs have free will, and this one really reaches for the sky, yanks the suit down and drags it ‘round and ‘round in the neighbor’s dustbowl of a yard.
John scrambles up with as much grace as his arthritic limbs allow holding on to the podium as a couple of extras upload videos of whatever this was. Whoa, the uppity black woman in red white and blue that questioned him back east is seated among the extras, grimacing. Who the fuck invited her? Wasn’t she supposed to be buried with the other body parts? Wasn’t it her hand grabbing him from below? And what’s with these sickly extras kneeling in the dust? A minute ago it was a group of healthy looking bikers proudly wearing their tats.
I was looking forward to John’s speech, his message of unity, the kind of crap I knew would finally put me to sleep, but John could care less about my insomnia, he just wants outta here. He wants his limo to whisk him away to one of those public buildings banning the public, where he’ll find refuge in the frigid air with a change of clothes, a stiff drink in hand and a pretty brown gal from housekeeping to admire his dick.
REVERSE ANGLE, housekeeping’s POV: John is reclining on a plush bed (satin sheets, or maybe coal), same pose Michelangelo bestowed on Adam being created, waiting to be born fully grown, bypassing the pesky uterus. INSERT a shot of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — Adam’s reaching for the hand that feeds him, which belongs to a creepy old man in a semitransparent asylum gown wrapping his arm around a woman young enough to be his grandchild. I don’t know about the cherubic kids around them in that airborne shell. Are they born yet? What will they be when they grow up? Deported? Molested? Under water? Contortionists in the biggest reality show on earth?
No idea how this should end, gonna outsource the job to John Wayne. He’s someone who wouldn’t need pharmaceuticals to be ready any time the moment is right, nor would he need inducement to round up the attack dogs, order the national security team into the pews, and conduct an awesome symphony with nuclear warheads crisscrossing the biosphere. Yippikayay, baby, there’s your glorious blinding flash on the horizon, your blockbuster category-fifty shockwave, twerking it with radioactive ash storms. We’re riding the bomb all the way as fictional forms blow up, all the characters vaporize (including the dog), and down in the pit, deep in the bunker, the orchestra is in the throes of the biggest crescendo the world has ever seen.
Scrap that. I’d rather roll out the red carpet for slimy aliens from outer space. Yep, I’m gonna do that.
