So much more
Than Harold and Kumar.
Then I played Scott Smith,
Harvey Milk’s lover.
I’m still surprised
By the response
To that character.
The secret there:
Minimalism.
The film is called Milk,
Not Smith,
And that’s how I played it:
A supporting lover,
Thus, as a supporting actor
To support Sean
Whom I love so much.
In Howl I played Ginsberg,
And I was all alone.
My scenes were speeches
Given to an unseen interviewer
Like Shirley Clark’s
Portrait of Jason.
All I did was get down Allen’s
Cadence by listening to him
Read “Howl,” over and over,
All the versions
Over the course of forty years,
So many recordings.
He wrote the poem
And then the poem wrote him.
In 127 Hours I knew
The key would be show don’t tell,
Because the character just does.
I knew the audience
Would have an experience
Because I wouldn’t be telling
Them how I feel, I’d be feeling.
And when the character does talk,
He does it to his little video camera;
I look right into the lens,
Ostensibly talking to my family and friends,
But I’m looking right at the audience,
So it’s like a Shakespearean aside,
Without breaking the fourth wall.
And I talk about my feelings
In the most intimate way.
It’s like I’m talking to the people
In the theater, as if they’re all my friends,
And I’m telling them
Everything there is to know
About me.
Seventh Grade
A new school with cement all around
With wires that you can’t see but feel,
And there are faces that break in at you,
And fill you with such pressure.
And you run away but the faces are always there,
Huge black ones that you never saw before.
On guys that are like grown men
That have dicks so big they could kill you.
But your dad says not to worry
Because if someone picks on you
You can handle anyone at that school, he says,
But he hasn’t seen some of these guys
Because he himself wouldn’t be able to handle them.
Jamal and Shaka and Ramone and Reuben,
They are different kinds of people than you have ever known.
The halls are full of these people and talk about pussy and guns
And a girl named Yvon that sucked Shaka’s dick.
You try to picture it, and swallow that image whole, because it is new too,
But that world is unwieldy and can hurt you.
Instead, you have a bunch of mice at home
That had started as two, but they fucked,
Then there were twenty little pink mice in the cage.
It smelled, and you sprayed it with Right Guard.
You separated the dad from the mom, so that it wouldn’t happen again
But then the mom’s belly got big again with more pink things
Because one of the babies fucked her.
Think of that son,
Half her size, with barely any hair,
Riding her from behind,
Not knowing why,
But doing it because he was the strongest of the litter.
James Dean on Havenhurst
After I dropped out of UCLA
I lived on Havenhurst in Sherman Oaks,
A couple years after the earthquake rocked it
And brought the rent down.
I worked at McDonald’s to pay the rent.
I stayed in a two-bedroom with two Scotts.
I slept on the couch and they had the rooms.
One Scott was from Michigan
And one was from LA.
We were all actors.
We did scenes in class:
Desire under the Elms,
The Dreamer Examines His Pillow,
True West.
One Scott went crazy,
The big one, who was an ex-Mr. Universe,
And before he went back to Grand Rapids for good,
He would lock himself in his little room
And watch four movies over and over:
East of Eden, Lust for Life,
Taxi Driver, A Place in the Sun.
A crazy boy, van Gogh,
And two murderers. It was funny
To think about the sensitive guy
That was under that Mr. Universe shell.
And scary.
The other Scott gave up too.
But he was more of a rich kid,
So, I think he did okay.
I lived there alone for at least a year.
I had so much room to stretch out,
But I didn’t know what to do with it.
I put a blow-up mattress in the big bedroom
And piled my books in the dining room.
At the end of my stay
I was cast as James Dean.
I isolated myself, smoked two packs a day,
Sat on the air mattress and watched
All the Dean films, over and over:
East of Eden,
Rebel Without a Cause,
Giant.
And all the TV shows,
When he was young and goofy.
He too had dropped out of UCLA.
We were the same person.
Except, he couldn’t stop being Dean,
And I could.
Fifth Grade
It was an annual field trip, for which Mrs. Yount was famous,
That and that she didn’t take bullshit.
And that she had cancer, and that she was black,
And that she said often, “Shut your mouth, child,” if you said something stupid.
On the ship trip, everyone was part of a different crew:
The rigging, or the bosun, or the fishing, or the deckhand.
We spent weeks preparing for our night on the ship,
What an amazing trip it would be.
I learned how to tie some knots,
I learned “starboard,” “portside,” “stern” and “bow,”
And the “capstan” and “galley” and “below deck” and all that stuff.
But what I really thought about was the coming night,
Everyone sleeping below deck, in hammocks:
If I could just sneak over to Amy Kush in the dark,
Then everything would be okay.
But her dad was Colonel Kush, a chaperone on the trip,
And what would I do if I did make it to that hammock unobserved
And lay down with her amidst all those other hammocks,
Low slung with bodies, like scrotums, no, like bells ready to clang.
And in the old days, back in 1850, what did all those sailors do,
Out on the sea for months and years?
There must be books on it.
And also many books that were never written,
Think of all the stuff that could have been written in a
ll those books
About what happened on all those ships.
And well, shit, we were just kids,
And just docked in the harbor, for just one night.
Splash Mountain
New Orleans Square is my favorite part of Disneyland.
I spent two New Year’s Eves on one of the balconies there
Watching the Mickey Mouse fireworks, sad,
And searching for something good.
Tom Sawyer Island used to be across the way
And now the Swiss Family Robinson Tree is gone.
When I was young
My dad bought us guns
From the pirate shop.
When we were older
We fingered girls in the Haunted House,
And went down Splash Mountain.
We went through Pirates of the Caribbean:
Pirates raping pigs and women, raiding
And ribaldry, men tortured, and gold taken.
Treasure and rape. And the boat floats so
Gently down the way. I want to get out and sit with the old
Man on the cabin porch.
My Place
I have a bucket on wheels and a mop, and sprays
For windows, toilets and desks.
Children write things in all places.
Fuck you Ronny. For a good time call.
I’m supposed to wipe off all the graffiti,
Especially swastikas and racial slurs.
There is a hallway outside the math building
Full of faded brown lockers
Caged in with wire fencing.
Halfway down this hall
Is a door, and inside there, my place.
There is learning happening around me all day.
Or voices. An orange frieze above the buildings,
Soon gray and then purple when the school lights turn on.
I can sit in my room all night if I wish.
There is an industrial sink and a chair
And I have papers and notes and receipts.
And a single bare bulb on a chain, so I can see.
Each morning I wash my hands and face
But it does no good.
When kids miss the toilet, I’m the one that cleans.
When it’s clogged, I put my snake in there and clear it.
There is a faculty bathroom in the office building
—Called the Tower Building—
The one-unit bathroom is for staff only,
But students sneak in there and do it.
In my place there is complete privacy.
Not many are aware of it.
I keep the door closed.
I don’t even look at the girls anymore. I love movies.
I watch them on my little portable.
When the kids are gone the school is a different place.
A shadow place. I’m a shadow.
Utah
In Utah I have a driver named Jason. I drink
The sour black coffee he buys every morning
When we head to the old furniture warehouse
Called GRANIT FURNITURE. On the tan brick
Façade, above the square portals where the big
Trucks used to line their backsides and birth
New couches, the lettering angular and squat:
The G like a spaceship escape pod; the R-A-N
Missing. Inside, an exact replica of a real
Canyon in Moab, where I work daily, screaming,
Covered in corn-syrup blood and glycerin sweat.
Jason is large, like an eggplant. He’s quiet.
He’s just the driver and he drives. He doesn’t
Listen to music or talk. Two months in, the movie moves
To Moab, four hours away, where Jason
Drives me, through sugar-dusted mountains,
Following the white box of a Fritos truck, its red
And yellow logo leading us through snow, winding
Snakewise like a hypnotist’s icon. On my phone
I make videos that look like 60s home videos,
With static lines and scratches, bars rolling down
The screen: sky, snow, Jason, Fritos. On the other
Side of the mountain is desert emptiness, the sunset
Dipping and exploding on the horizon for twenty minutes.
Then in Moab, it’s dark. It’s Marlboro Country.
Second Grade
Mrs. D. was Mrs. Donnelly and I
Know that that means nothing to you
But to me it is a round woman
With a white bob and sharp nose
Like poultry parts.
And she was strict.
I fell in love for the first time,
Jenny Brown.
Adam Cohn loved her too.
One day we dissected fish,
And I thought of Adam when I took out the
Little guts and lay them on the tray like pebbles.
The smart kids could read whole books already.
They read Charlotte’s Web and
The spider died.
But I couldn’t read it yet.
I was still on the basics
Of sentences.
Jenny came over,
Our mothers were friends
And when the mothers left the room
We kissed.
Another time Jenny came over,
And I propped open the bathroom window,
And watched as she crouched
Girl-like on the toilet.
Jenny’s father died when she was still little.
And soon after, Mrs. D. died,
Like the spider.
I’m a sensitive pig, rooting in shit.
Lindsay
Do you think I’ve created this?
This dragon girl, lion girl,
Hollywood hellion, terror of Sunset Boulevard,
Minor in the clubs, Chateau Demon?
Do you think this is me?
Lindsay,
Say it.
Say it, like you have ownership.
It’s not my name anymore,
It’s yours as much as mine.
So go ahead, say it.
Lind-say,
Go ahead you bookworm punk
Blogger faggot, go ahead you
Thuggish paparazzi scumbag
With your tattoos and your
Unwashed ass—
You couldn’t get a girl
If your life depended on it.
Does me in your blog
Make me yours?
Do your pictures capture me?
There is someone
That I have a strange
Relationship to
That is called Lindsay,
They say she is me.
She’s this strange actress
That was very
Successful as a child,
People even said
She was talented.
And then she did a sweet
Teen thing called Mean Girls,
And then she did a lot of other things
That got her a lot of money
And a lot of fame.
And yes, she really was a mean girl.
But that fame raped me.
And I raped it, if you know what I’m saying.
How many young things selling movies and wares
And music and tabloids fucked the kind of men I fucked?
I was 17, 18, 19.
And everyone knew it,
But they let me in their clubs,
They let me have their drugs,
They stuck their dicks in me,
And now there is not much left of me.
What do I fear?
Itsy bitsy Lindsay.
And?
One night—the year
When all was right—
Before things got bad,
I was in New York
For the premiere of a film
I did with Robert Altman
And Meryl Streep,
After the movie I took James Franco
And Meryl’s two young daughters to the club
Du jour, Bungalow 8
In the Meatpacking District.
It was my place.
All my friends were there,
School friends, my mother
Looking her slutty best, bodyguards and Greeks.
We had our own table
In the corner, our own bottle.
I took two OxyContins
And things got bad.
The DJ was this bearded dude
Named Paul,
I remember requesting
Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,”
I remember sitting back down,
And I remember trying to speak up,
To talk to that cute boy
In a red gingham shirt, James.
My words rolled around
And got sticky
And didn’t come out.
My friend from school
Kept talking to him,
Trying to be cute,
But she was only there because of me,
I told Barry, my bodyguard,
To take her away from our table.
And he banished her.
I took James back to the bathroom.
“You know why Amy put mirrors
All around in here?”
“Why?”
“So that you can watch yourself fuck.”
He didn’t fuck me, that shit.
And what was he doing there anyway?
On my night. My night with Meryl,
My night when everything was right,
When I got everything I wanted.
Almost.
I fucked one of the Greeks instead,
A big schnozed, big dicked,
Drunk motherfucker.
We did it in the bath.
That was the best night of my life.
IV.
The Best of the Smiths
Side B
1. This Charming Man
I’m Tom, age twelve,
On my bicycle,
I’d fly over the bike bridge to the school.