Every time a DVD player breaks, we have a panic. How to watch the stack of movies I, Hef and Kid have scavenge several times a week from the Mid-Manhattan and Brooklyn Central libraries? Without our movies, what have we got? A bunch of homeless guys with no more than a bag of clothes, some food stamps and dollar store toiletries each between us. There’s only so much shit-talking and communal daydreaming (typically about which beautiful celebrity we would treat to multiple orgasms) one can do in the downtime, the hours between 5pm and lights out. And we can’t bring women in here. And we keep forgetting to buy a cheap chess board. And the streets of East New York are no place to find non-lethal distraction. Gunfights every night.
I downplay my advantage, my notebook. The fellas don’t know I’m a writer, nor that I have no criminal or substance abuse history. Nobody pries. It’s understood that we’re all here because we fucked up in one way or another. But it’s the DVD player that helps me sort of love these guys. What comes out of that machine is real to them. And when it isn’t real, it gets ejected and tossed aside. That’s how I live, too. My film critic and filmmaker friends who tell me that movies can’t cut, kill or save lives… man, listen.
While I’m sitting on my bunk reading Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, Hef is yelling at a green ogre. Shrek, upon finding out that his wife Fiona is expecting their first child, broods and finally blurts out, “But how could this happen!” Hef throws up his hands: “What you mean, ‘how’? You stuck your dick in her!”
“Why, God, why?” cries a 19th century Donald Sutherland in the midst of a relentless terror campaign by vengeful poltergeists. They’ve groped his daughter and torn up his country home. Kid answers, “Don’t bother God with that shit! Why you think? That’s what you get for having slaves, running the Indians off their land….” He turns to me. “If I was there, one of them slaves in the background looking scared, I’d tell him the same.” “Yeah, right,” I say. Sutherland recaptures our attention, sobbing, appealing to the Lord on bended knee: “I’ve done more good than harm!” Kid: “How you figure? Man, go ‘head with that bullshit.” I said, “Ya goddamn right.”
Susan Sontag wouldn’t know what to do with us. No such thing as camp down here, unless you mean tents and canteens and shit. What’d she know anyway? In Notes on Camp, a condescending tastemaker’s primer from 1964, she dissed both Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Sherwood Anderson’s lovely old book, Winesburg, Ohio. She didn’t know shit.
Diva, the sole gay guy on our floor (as best I can detect), is trying to kill himself with food. He’s a chubby black church boy from down South who phones his mama and grandmama daily. He’s survived a stroke or two. We all harass him for the pile of fast food, cupcakes and deep fried delicacies he shovels into his mouth at half-hour intervals. Kid, a dope fiend clean six months now, says to Diva, “You die, I’ma rob you, take everything out your pockets and sell your shit. That’s my word.” Diva never reacts. Whenever we all joke loudly about his imminent death, he just chews serenely on his pork rinds or whatever, staring out at nothing with a tiny smirk. “My heart is failing me,” he once said, casually, when I asked about his latest trip to the emergency room.
One morning he sets up an ironing board while I watch the first act of The Thin Red Line. Shit. The first hour of Malick’s war flick always messes me up; last thing I need is for Diva, arguably the toughest and least sentimental among us, to see me dabbing at tears. Luckily, he puts most of his attention on keeping his synthetic sweats from melting under the steam. And then Army deserter Jim Caviezel (bka Bloody Jesus) stares down cynical officer Sean Penn in the hold of a ship. Caviezel’s been caught frolicking with Pacific island natives in some kind of paradise on earth. Now he’s in deep shit with the brass, but Penn wants to help him with a bit of worldly advice: “There ain’t no world but this one.” Silence. The roar of the ship. Caviezel says, “You’re wrong, there, Top.” Diva looks up fast. Caviezel is on the screen, looking like sweet Jesus. “I’ve seen another world.” I can never describe the expression on Caviezel’s unreal features at that moment, nor why it puts me under as much stress as it does his character.
I loooked over at Diva. He was staring at the TV, holding the iron in the air like a statue of a man ironing. From that moment on he was locked in, and he didn’t blink.
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