Roland Rogers Isn't Dead Yet

by Samantha Allen

I’ve knocked on a thousand doors before, but this one is different. This one belongs to the most famous man in America: Roland Rogers, an actor worth half a billion dollars, star of the biggest franchise of the last decade, and owner of Malibu’s biggest eyesore, a jutting trapezoid of glass and concrete clinging to the cliffside.

Sarabeth’s,

“Adam, Roland Rogers wants you to write his memoir.”

A career is a vexing thing to revitalize.

What Richie didn’t understand is that food is the most meaningful relationship many people have in their lives. From birth to death, the one thing we all do is eat, the only purely enjoyable ritual in an otherwise grim world.

chyrons,

I used to look for signs in my dreams. I thought the Holy Ghost was speaking to me through them, telling me what to do, guiding me to make decisions that, in hindsight, were completely inconsequential, like which tie I should wear or what time I should go to bed. At my most devout, that was the beautiful promise of Mormonism: that God wanted to talk to me. Directly. Personally. About even the little things. And that was the curse, too: even the little things seemed like they were of eternal importance. It was paralyzing to search for so much meaning in minutiae.

Now, I realize that dreams are just clearinghouses for unspent feelings. That whatever anxiety I didn’t manage to feel during the day just needed somewhere to go,

Not all my films have been winners. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies, it’s that sometimes people just need a place to sit for two hours and get outside their heads. Cinema can be high art, but it doesn’t have to be. Adults need bedtime stories, too.

“Not everything you write has to be important,” I tell him. “You don’t always need some overarching reason. A story can just be two people learning things about themselves.

My Dinner with Andre was about best friends talking over quail. Lost in Translation was about two lonely souls doing karaoke in Tokyo. Not everything has to have huge stakes.”

The Church churned out so much language. There were four books of scripture, three hours of Sunday meetings, two annual conferences, and one prophet all spewing thousands of words at us nonstop, but distilled, the mantra was simple: Obey. Pay your tithing. Don’t stray. Their words were weapons meant to hem us in. And it worked. The leaders didn’t need to keep kompromat on the members to stop us from leaving; all they had to do was keep talking.

I realized, eventually, that I wasn’t done with words so much as I had come to fear their force. They had shaped my reality. They taught me to hate the most essential parts of myself, to silence a beating heart. But I wasn’t going to heal that damage by staying silent. I wasn’t going to help anyone else get out. So, I started speaking, and I started writing.

Newton’s cradle

You can’t get a contact high from charisma, but that hasn’t stopped millions from trying. It explains Mormonism in the early days. It explains Taylor Swift.

I type: “I don’t know about beauty and goodness, but you’ll be in every word I write, Roland Rogers. Until we meet again.”

I realized I didn’t have to be the same person for the rest of my life. That I hope everyone lives long enough to change.

The dead spoke, I listened, and I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering how and why we were allowed to love each other across that divide.

I keep trying to write normal books and they keep turning out weird.

In the future, I would like to acknowledge a new, more pragmatic group of friends who convinces me to stop writing semiliterary cross-genre fiction that uses ghosts and cryptids as vehicles for my existential crises.

This book is dedicated to Leila Campoli, my agent at Stonesong,

Samantha Allen is the author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, among other books.