Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

I choose the latter. But not because I’m any kind of savior. Frankly I feel a tinge of guilt — here little guy, here you go back into your idiotic fake water prison with plastic plants and colored rocks and oh! A creepy miniature scuba dude! I’ll be in Vienna!

The door to my father’s bedroom down the hall opens.

I can hear her before I see her. The happy opera laugh. Then it’s that mythic mane of deep red hair and lips to match and ta-tas all up high and bouncing under a hunter green sweater. Then I get an extra treat. Boompappy. She turns and bends over to pick up a pearl drop earring from the carpet. Her ass fills the hall and blurs out all the surrounding setting. Thank you Francis Bacon for that beautiful ass shot. I bite the inside of my own cheek as punishment.

I should hate this woman.

Slut.

Ho.

Adulterer.

Homewrecker.

Instead I want to go make a series of T-shirts with each of those words on them and graphic drawings of her stripped naked. What? How should I know why?

I really do need to get some professional help.

Except I clusterfucked that one up myself.

Mrs. K. walks down the hall toward me. She passes right by her own children like they are furniture. Bigger and bigger she gets. Like in a movie close-up. My head itches. I’m actually growing hair. Then she’s right in front of me. She smells like Hypnose. Made by Lancôme. Paris. A captivating fragrance for a charming woman with an intriguing attitude. It’s the same stuff Marlene wears. Goddamn it.

What I want to say is, “Um, this is pretty uncomfortable. Can I go stay with my friends for a while?” What I’m afraid I’ll say is “Can I lift up your skirt and maybe sink my teeth into your big white ass? Just a little?” But I got no voice. So I stand there like an idiot with my hands dangling from my arms like big useless spoons. My mouth hanging open. I try to close it casually.

Mrs. K. brushes a lock of hair away from her cheek and says, “Ida, be a dear, will you, and watch the children while I go get your father some medicine?”

No shit.

I look over at the creatures. Now I’m a babysitter? I wonder briefly what it would be like to sit on ‘em till they pass out.

But it doesn’t end there. As she’s walking out the door?

“Oh, and Mr. K. will be by later to take you and the children out for dinner. Isn’t that nice?”

The door to my own home closes behind her. I feel a low rage boiling up from my ribcage. I stare down the hall to where my father is needing his peace and quiet. Peace and quiet? Is that what he needs? Really. Is that what he gave us? I look at the two kid lumps I’ve been left to command. I steer them toward the kitchen, where I literally give them a bowl of sugar cubes. They smack their evil demon midget gums and laugh. Their eyes immediately get shiny. I shake my head up and down and smile. Good, isn’t it. Have another.

Then my ass vibrates. At first I just let it … I mean, who cares, right? I’m stuck here at least until Mrs. K. gets her big beautiful whore ass back. But then I go ahead and look.

Holy shit.

Holy, motherfucking, shit. I know that number.

Though no one but a couple of sugar dosed cretins sees it, I click my heels together. I salute the empty air. “Herr Doktor!” I go.

In my head I mean.

Fuck. He can’t hear me.

“Hello,” I hear him say. “Ida? Are you there? I very much need to speak with you. Is this Ida?”

I look around the room for something to make noise with. Just the evil midgets. I stare at the phone. I put it back to my ear and breath as hard as I can as loud as I can. Fuck. I sound like a prank caller — but it’s all I’ve got.

“Ida?” Sig says. His voice all small and electronic. I scan the room. THE SPOON. I snatch the spoon out from the grip of the boy creature. I tap the spoon on the iPhone in a little rhythm — twinkle twinkle little star. What? It’s the first thing that occurred to me. I pause, and wait, and hold my breath.

“ Tap once if this is Ida,” Sig says. I told you he was smart.

I tap once.

“Tap twice if you can meet me tomorrow at 4:00. Your regular time. It is imperative that we meet. I think … I think you know why.”

I think about it.

“Shall I take your silence as a ‘no?’” Sig responds.

I tap twice. So hard it cracks the plastic on the front of the iPhone.

“Until then,” Sig says.

I look at Mrs. K.’s creatures. Their faces are blotchy. Sugar high kicking in. Pretty soon they’ll rock n roll. In my ear is the voice of the man whose dick I just filmed being drained. In my mouth is the spoon used in a previous murder attempt on a Tetra fish. I suck it. Tastes like fish. Or girl.

THE BASIC METHODOLOGY FOR EDITING VIDEO AND audio is to highlight the clip and drag it onto the timeline. My studio is in a corner of my bedroom where I built a false wall made from two-by-fours and old record album covers. Mostly I used a staple gun to build the false wall. You don’t need a darkroom to edit video or audio, but it’s cooler to work in the dark. I don’t know why that is. When I’m in there though, there is no trespassing. Once my dad tried to come in there and I missed his thigh by inches with the staple gun. In my studio, everything is MINE.

You can use the above method for as many clips as you want. If you want to trim your clips, you select a clip and double-click it. In the Viewer Window, you have Play Controls. You can press play, scrub frame by frame, you can click the jog wheel and move shit around. You can drag and drop clips, trim them, close gaps between clips, add effects like fade-ins and fade-outs and cross-fades and crap. Those are the basic ways for editing clips on a timeline in Final Cut Pro.

The in and out points on your timeline are crucial.

In between feeding Mrs. K.’s evil midgets sugar cubes and sticks of butter, I compile the Sig footage. If all goes well they’ll be shitting their pants by the time Mrs. Prima Donna K. gets back and I can get the fuck outta here down the fire escape. My plan is to have a rough cut of the film ready by tonight — I’ve arranged for a small group of trusted brilliant scruffy teens to meet up with me and the posse. At the Fremont troll statue under the north end of the Aurora Bridge. Midnight. I need an audience test — a preview sneak peek — to see if I’m on the right track. All serious filmmakers do it.

The girl gremlin lets out a long gurgly fart that I can hear all the way from the living room. She babbles, “Poo poo in the potty?” Right on schedule. Shouldn’t be long now.

I’m concerned about the narrative arc of the film. I decided not to go chronologically … yeah, I know, that’s gonna throw some viewers off, but it seemed like the most obvious choice, so I abandoned it immediately. Besides, who wants to watch a movie of a middle-aged man scoring a boner and then needing medical attention? I’m a professional. I went with kind of a more Maya Deren approach — more surrealism than realism. More symbolic. More like how dreams are.

Maya Deren’s real name was Eleanora Derenkowsky. Ukrainian. Her father was a psychiatrist who worked at the State Institute for the Feeble Minded in NYC. Her mother was an artist. Lucky duck. She was a leading avant garde filmmaker. Well except that she was next to invisible because she was a woman. Of course I learned this from Marlene, who showed me Meditation on Violence when I was fourteen.

“Experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.” Yep, Maya Deren said that. I dig it. She also said: “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” Fuck yeah.

So for example, in my film, there are slow motion shots of the Sigster’s wang getting bigger and bigger in between repeated images of him drinking tea. Or petting the spines of his books in his bookcase. Faster and faster. Sip tea sip tea WANG. Pet books pet books sip tea WANG. Like that. I’m thinking of laying down some speeded up Vivaldi.