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Slides |
I slid open the closet door, the left side, and that damn Tigger bag I kept hidden fell off the top shelf and struck me on the forehead and the zipper ripped apart and spilled the goddamn slides all over my fucking floor, the slides I kept, the ones you submitted with your EPK, the ones you wanted back, along with your portfolio, your CDs, your DVDs, the ones everyone else saw you in, that I wouldn’t watch, because I didn’t need to, the promos and the pornos you hid from me when I was in your apartment on the wrong side of the 101; and when they taped us for the documentary, on the beach, you in black shorts, everything black, all the time, even in the sun (and there was always sun), my hand-embroidered hippie shirt billowed, the white cloth fluttered across your white arm, we were that close, even then, and you handed them to me like hundreds of little square gifts encased in protective sheets of plastic for my approval, like a child, pushing them into my hands, index finger lingering on my palm, like a man, hoping I’d get you signed, and now they were all scattered on the carpet and slipped into crevasses behind my dresser and hiding between the folded sheets, sunk into the toes of my socks and burrowed amongst my underwear, all those damn slides, white rectangles filled with processed film, tungsten lighting, blue and orange gels, and you, in all of them, for me.
And the pictures, the one on the beach where I painted you, you in your goddamn headshot shot, watercolors bled into burnt sienna, and the 35mm of you and me, the negative, turned positive, you in the Harley jacket, the cracked sunglasses, the I Love Cocaine T-shirt, and me, in a silk sundress, snaked through your legs, white cotton underwear unknowingly shown, shame, and the frame toppled down onto the hardwood floor in your coffin-sized bedroom next to the red bathroom with a busted lightbulb, and the mattress pulled away from both, out onto the floor in the living room because I was claustrophobic and couldn’t breathe, with the fan, not oscillating, angled on me, always on my naked body, a sheen of sweat from the heavy Hollywood air and the smog from the freeway, and you, the next day, in black and white newspaper pixels, suspended by six ropes threaded through the hooks attached to the piercings through the tattoos in your back, my blood extracted for your ink, while the cameras rolled and the reporters volleyed microphones like nets catching your words, and you meditated through the pain, pushed through the publicity.
I thought I had thrown that bag in the fire we built out back in the alley that day when you were gone and the fumes from the exterminator were still lingering around making us sick, but the weather was cold, dropped below fifty, so we bundled up in sweatshirts, and wool socks, and tied scarves around our necks, and stayed in and smoked cigarettes and did shots of vodka with wedges of lemons on the kitchen counter, and played Buena Vista Social Club over and over, tangoed on the carpet across skeletal remains of silverfish and termites waiting to be vacuumed with the sparse black ashes from some, but apparently not all, of the tiny little frames of you that melted in the fire and floated inside through the holes in the screen door.
copyright 2007
LeAnne
Kline |
