AS I PLEASE VI: STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EDITION

As I write this, a thunderstorm rumbles outside my windows. I will let my thoughts follow the sound.

I know that there are many here in the East who view thunderstorms as annoyances, inconveniences, or just flat-out pains in the ass. If you own a dog, for example, a bad thunderstorm will drive them into a state of panic. Likewise, if you live in certain areas, such a storm almost invariably knocks out the power, if only for a minute or two. And of course if you're driving, or just planted a garden, or were eating al fresco, the arrival of the storm will throw a proverbial monkey wrench in your plans. But I for one am grateful to have them again. In the thirteen years I lived in on the West Coast, I heard thunder exactly twice, and on neither occasion did it happen to rain. The thunderstorm as I understand it simply does not exist there.

Returning to the East after such an interval, I was struck by the many small differences between this part of the country and that one. The sky there is bluer, the clouds whiter, and the horizon much larger. The natural vegetation, such of it as exists, is of the desert variety -- cacti, succulents, palm trees. The air is always dry, and the sunlight much more powerful. In the early evenings, the sun turns white as it sets, and casts an appropriately whitish haze over the palms and the buildings. This haze is probably caused by pollution, but it is highly atmospheric and quite beautiful, rather like the filter-laden cinematography of a Tony Scott film.

I never met Tony Scott. I never met his more famous brother Ridley, either, but I worked for him, albeit in a curiously roundabout way. For some months, I labored long and hard doing post-post production on Prometheus. My job was to review every frame of B-roll footage shot on that movie, which amounted to several thousands of hours. (For the uninitiated, "B-Roll footage" is defined by Wikipedia thusly: "In film and television production, B-roll is supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot.") I watched the footage and labeled it. When I was done, I was re-hired and asked to re-watch all of it, except this time, I was asked to look out for anything which might be useful in a "Making Of" documentary and then to mark it and dump it into Final Cut Pro. Since much of what I watched was actors like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pierce and Michael Fassbender muttering things on hot mikes that they never, ever intended for anyone else on this planet to hear, I was often greatly amused and sometimes mildly shocked by what I heard. Over time, I grew to know them intimately without ever meeting them. I became, in a sense, both their confessor and their stalker, their psychiatrist and their peeping tom. When they argued, when they joked, when they made plans to have a drink after work, when they gossiped about other actors, I heard it all. It was like this with the entire cast, the crew, and yes, "Rids" himself -- that's what his friends call Ridley Scott, and in a sense I am his friend even if he isn't mine.

Sometimes I think about the knowledge I have of all these people, and the weird, one-way sense of intimacy I have with them, and the old Van Halen song "I'll Wait" comes into my head.

You've got me captured I'm under your spell
I guess I'll never learn
I have your picture yes I know it well
Another page is turned
Are you for real, it's so hard to tell
From just a magazine
Yeah, you just smile and the picture sells
Look what that does to me
I'll wait 'til your love comes down
I'm coming straight for your heart
No way you can stop me now
As fine as you are
I wrote a letter and told her these words
That meant a lot to me
I never sent it, she wouldn't have heard
Her eyes don't follow me
And while she watches I can never be free
Such good photography!

This is the classic obsessed-fan song, written before the internet even existed and made stalking people so much easier than it was in 1984. There is a sadness to it, a sense of hopelessness ("I never sent it/she wouldn't have heard/her eyes don't follow me") but also a faint but discernible sense of menace. The subject feels imprisoned by his own love, which of course is not love but obsession; at the same time he feels empowered by it, entitled by it. He's coming for her, this woman of his fantasies, and she cannot stop him. Fucking brilliant. But David Lee Roth has never had an equal when it comes to lyrical wordplay. I do believe that in high school, I would have sold my soul to see him sing with Van Halen, but alas, Sammy Hagar was at the helm, and remained there for many, many years. However, while I am not patient, I am persistent, and in 2015, I finally got my high school wish, and saw the re-united band, with Wolfgang Van Halen in place of Michael Anthony, rock the Hollywood Bowl for the finale of their North American tour. A friend of mine at the show said he'd seen Van Halen play seventeen times over the years, and never heard Eddie play better than he did that night in his own backyard. I say "backyard" because Eddie & and the boys were really from Pasadena.

Now, that same friend once drove me to Pasadena on Halloween Night. We had just seen the classic 1978 horror movie on a revival run at the AMC in Burbank, and he desired to show me all of its shooting locations. Halloween was set in a fictional Illinois town, but shot mostly in Pasadena. Thus it was that I ended up standing, bathed in the glow of a full moon, in front of the notorious Meyers House, which is now an insurance office but looks exactly the same today as it did in '78, right down to the interior. I am not easily spooked anymore, but when I went around the side of the house and peered through the window, just like Michael does at his sister in the film's opening, and saw that the interior looked just about the same as it had IN the damned film, I was overtaken with a case of the creeps. I guess you never entirely recover from the things that scare you as a child. But as another friend of mine pointed out to me years ago, exactly what scares you falls into one of two general camps.

The first type of horror, he posited, is based on things which can actually happen in the real world. Fatal Attraction, Jaws, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, The Shining, Alien, The Vanishing, When A Stranger Calls, Halloween, and even A Nightmare on Elm Street are all movies which play on our natural, animal fear of being stalked and hunted and killed. The second type of horror is based on things which cannot happen in real life, but which play on our superstitions and perhaps more intangible dread, not of death per se, but of what may wait after it: The Exorcist, The Ring, The Changeling, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Omen, Hellraiser, Insidious, The Conjuring, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Candyman, The Blair Witch Project, etc., etc. It was my friend's contention that people tended to be frightened of one general scenario or the other: either the lunatic in the woods, or the ghost story. I myself fall into the former category. The lunatic with the axe, who attacks without warning and for no discernible reason, is much more frightening to me than the ideal of demons or ghosts.

Having said that, I once lived in a haunted house. Many years before it had been a funeral home, and various fittings for the crematory remained in its vast basement. It was a huge, cavernous old beast of a property, so large the landlord subdivided it into no less than five apartments, each with multiple tenants. We referred to it as "The Church" because a cross made from railroad ties had been fixed to its upper story. I was warned before moving in that it was frequented by ghosts, but shrugged the stories off as nonsense. Then, one night in the middle of a terrific blizzard, I had the most curious experience. On that particular weekend I was alone in the place, my two roomates being away, and The Church not being in the best neighborhood, I made sure to lock the main door, which opened into an alley, and then to lock my hallway door and finally, to double-lock the door which opened directly onto the sidewalk. I also placed a large Special Forces knife by my bedside, and went to sleep. Some hours later I woke to a fantastical scene: the street door was ajar, and the ice-cold air pouring in through the crack was meeting with the raw heat of the radiator to create billowing, smoky clouds of pure white. Sitting up in bed and grasping for my knife, I saw also that the hook which secured the inner door was no longer snugly in its eye bolt but jittering almost nervously against the door. I jumped down, knife in hand, and flung the street door open. In front of me was an absolutely pristine vista of pure snow, probably ten inches deep. Not one footprint marked that pure, unbroken surface. What's more, I knew that even the landlord could not unlock the deadbolt of my door from the outside, as it was blind-headed. The only explanation was that someone, perhaps a pranking roomate, had opened it: but my interior door had also been locked, which would have made that impossible. I replaced and relocked the street door and then went through the apartment, checking everything for an intruder, and arrived finally in the kitchen. Here was the only other door, and it was still locked. It opened into a kind of wooden vestibule, a mud room of sorts, albeit one without an outer door. I entered the mud room and before me lay more deep, utterly pristine snow. No one had come this way, either, not even a cat.

Relocking everything, and keeping my knife ready, I eventually went back to bed, wondering that the hell had just happened. I had no explanation then, and I don't have one now, either, except that a ghost may have been involved. The spirit haunting the place was reputed to be mischievious, and he certainly had his fun with me that cold and snowy night.

In those days we heard sirens all the time, and I'm hearing some now, as the thunderstorm's violent, lightning-struck fury eases to a gentle rain. It's curious how memory works that way, connecting past and future in a kind of circuit. A few minutes ago I was sitting here, a middle-aged man with my shirt off, writing away in 97 degree temperatures that only broke when the storm did; and yet in my mind, it was freezing cold, that special kind of sharp, bracing cold you get during a heavy snowfall when the wind is steady, and I was a half-naked 20 year-old college kid clutching a knife and looking for a ghost. Interestingly, the distance between where I sit now and where I stood then is, according to my computer, exactly one mile. One mile, but half a lifetime. I did not know it then, but I had already written three stories which eventually ended up in my short-story collection Devils You Know: "The Action," "Shadows and Glory" and "Roadtrip." At the time only one had been published, and I was still struggling hard with my own nature. Even as a drunken 20 year-old college student with failing grades and a permanent erection, I knew that anything which distracted me from my true calling was a waste of time, and worse than that, self-destructive. This knowledge poisoned all of my pleasures, but it did not prevent me from seeking them. And for many years to come I was to wage a merciless war with myself, a war that could not have a winner but only degrees of loser, before I finally acknowledged what those close to me had known for years: I was a writer. However I labeled myself, whatever job I might possess at the time, I was a writer first and foremost and that was where my destiny lay. But destiny is a curious thing. Everyone has one, but few of us embrace it, and there is no compulsion to do so. There is not even a penalty which one can conventionally measure for refusing. Nor is there a visible reward for accepting the obvious, not even something as ill-defined as "happiness." Because embracing one's destiny does not necessarily make one happy: it simply solves a puzzle. It quiets down an argument. It signs a treaty that ends a stupid war and encourages the former combatants to plant gardenias in the muzzles of their cannons while they share a pint of beer. That's all it does. There's no parade, no bag of gold. You just get to do the thing you're supposed to be doing, that you were put on this earth to do. That's all. And that should be enough. Sometimes, it even is.

The storm is now over, as is this rambling exercise in discursion. I offer it merely as an example of how my own consciousness, a writer's consciousness, moves from subject to subject within his own mind, occasionally forming a coherent, narrative circle but just as often cracking away like a badly planned fireworks show. Or a summer thunderstorm. The trick, I suppose, is to get from it whatever you can.