15

Over the bunches and the twiddles and twaddles of the years that followed, there weren’t any time jumps nor did I ever again see Jane. But she was out there somewhere: I would get these picture postcards from places like East Angola and Sri Lanka with these crazy, funny oddball messages on them like, “Don’t expect to find Des Moines in Eritrea” and “Nothing is sharper than a sullen Ubangi’s pout,” although sometimes the cards came with pointed reminders like, “Don’t stop praying!” and “Keep going to confession and communion!” as well as “Right is so freaking much better than wrong!” They always seemed to come at a time when I was faced with some moral decision. There is an off chance I’d actually glimpsed Jane once. Just maybe. I’ve never been sure. I was still living in Los Angeles and writing movie scripts when one day on the set of Pimp My Bloody Toga—which according to the Stench Films press release was to be “an intense and shocking reexamination of historical events in ancient Rome”—we were shooting an exterior with the usual cast of thousands grumbling about why they weren’t being given “stunt pay” when their health was so at risk from chariot dust and Arabian horse manure fumes, when I got into a row with the director, Reggie Flame, freshly hot off his monster hit, Illegible, a film about Caligula’s palsied calligrapher. It seems the brand-new “thing” among feature film directors was to shoot an expository scene in a men’s room with at least one member of the cast shown standing at a urinal. This was somehow supposed to make the scene feel “real,” as if the audience didn’t know they were watching a movie and not a live sumo-wrestling match. The vogue had started almost two years before with only one actor wizzing and always with his back to the camera; but when that setup got old, the shot escalated to a tighter angle and more to the side, not the actor’s back, so you could see the “set dressing” flowing down the urinal wall, this progression, and the shot itself, to be seen one day in retrospect as the start of the “slippery slope” for movie restroom scenes, for when even the closer side angle shot became a movie cliché, another director upped the ante to two actors wizzing at once, while yet another drove the bidding up to three and a virtual pissage à trois that for a time no one imagined could ever be surpassed for its sheer bravado and joie de uncouth until someone thought of showing an actress wizzing, and then, driven by some primal and apparently irresistible force of nature, soon after came the shot with the leading actress wiping, the expectation being nothing could be more real than that, and never mind that the shot had not the slightest thing to do with either the character or the plot. And so now while the lighting for the following setup was under way, Flame asked for my help with an improvised scene in which Julius Caesar, while entering the Roman senate on the Ides of March, turns his head to stare with bemused disbelief at twenty-two vestal virgins, extras, squatting and wizzing on the senate floor, which is all the distraction he needed, Flame told me, for Brutus and the other conspirators to smite Caesar with their daggers. He wanted me to give the vestal virgins some dialogue that would serve to keep Caesar staring at them until at least the third knife was driven into his chest. “Maybe bitching about the lack of respect they get,” Flame suggested. “New taxes. Fees. Maybe that. Only keep it historically in context.” Well, I argued against this to the point of much redness in the face and angry shouting in which the word “Brux” made several key and dramatic appearances until finally Flame backed down, and it was then as I was walking away from the encounter that I heard a female extra in the crowd scene outside the Roman senate shouting, “Way to go, writer! Stand up for your beliefs like you do for your pension plan.” I turned and saw the shouter. Standing at the front of the teeming throng, she had her arms raised up and was giving me two thumbs-up, but then she turned and disappeared into the vast and madding crowd. I didn’t try searching for her. It would have been stupidly hopeless, though on the other hand I guess you had to think a little bit about the red lettered slogan on the front of this T-shirt that she was wearing. How it made it past Wardrobe and the Second A.D. I have no clue. It said,

LIFE IS HARD BUT THEN YOU DIE

It was the “but” instead of “and” that got me thinking.

The Barney Google mask could have just been a joke.

As I said, there’d been no more time jumps. None. But as I sit here typing, my memory of everything after high school still has that distancing texture about it, like a story being told secondhand, or maybe even a third. After graduation from St. Stephen’s, I somehow got into Regis, an all-scholarship Jesuit high school in Manhattan. Boy, the power of prayers! Maybe not even mine. Beginning in junior year, the Regis “Jebbies” gave us a smattering of scholastic philosophy to buttress our faith, which for me at that time was really more a deep hope—you know, courses in logic and things like a “properly stated” principle of causality, namely “Every finite effect demands an equal and proportionate cause.” This so you could answer the village atheists at science-oriented Stuyvesant High and their jibes of, “Well, okay, then, so what caused God?” with your coolly delivered ecumenical reply, “You dumb shits! God isn’t finite, not a ‘thing’! God is infinite!” This knowledge didn’t come easy, as I had to suffer frequent humiliations when the Jesuit who taught the course would repeatedly cross out my name at the top of the essays I handed in and replace it with the name of some infamous heretic. Much later in life, perhaps even more useful than these “arguments from reason” that a benign and staggering intelligence had something to do with the creation of the universe, was the time I heard the wonderfully talented standup comedian Richard Pryor say on stage with both medical accuracy and from a legendary personal experience, “You know, when you’re on fire your skin goes to sleep.”

Figure it out.