James Pate - The Fassbinder Diaries

The bright window of that café. The crimson sofa in that café. And the other crimson sofa.

Franz told me that afternoon at the café that the movie he worked on was a remake of a Fassbinder film, he couldn’t remember which one, except it wasn’t quite a remake, it simply had some basic ideas from Fassbinder it was playing with, like this woman who sells porn from a wicker basket, that was one, and they did real porn shots which he had never done before, which felt strange filming, this guy and girl in their early twenties, they didn’t fuck but he used a large plastic dick on her then she turned it around and put it up his ass, he never knew if they were a couple in real life or just a couple for the film, then at the party after filming they tried to give him the dick and he said no that was all right but they insisted so he stuck it in his bag and flew off to Los Angeles the next day.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #3

That afternoon in the café Franz told me money, money, money, that’s all he can think about these days. He on the crimson sofa. Myself in the white chair.

He told me money was like trying to catch a butterfly with your bare hands. Or worse. With your mouth while your hands were tied behind your back.

He told me if he had enough money he could make movies that would make Arthur Penn look like shit and Hitchcock look like an idiot, not that he didn’t love Penn and Hitchcock.

The blue walls in the café appeared particularly vivid because of the bright windows.

Franz told me that afternoon in the café that one night in Tucson there was this party, him and a bunch of other people on the roof of a house drinking, the stars as big as the ones in that Van Gogh painting, starry starry night or whatever it’s called, big fucking stars, stars you’d expect to see at the end of the world, and this one guy, one of the script writers, he was really into Nietzsche and had this elaborate knife collection, Japanese knives with chiseled handles, German knives with ornate and curving blades, and this guy he came up to Franz during this rooftop party and started to say how he could throw Franz off the roof just like that, and he snapped his fingers, and then he said how there was nothing Franz could do about it, but it was his choice the guy said, his choice not to throw Franz off the roof, and he had chosen not to, so Franz didn’t have to worry he said, at least not tonight, at least not right now.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #4

Franz said that afternoon at the café that after being robbed last year he never carried money on him, he only used his credit card, but because he was always moving around it was hard to keep up with the statements, it was always a race between one address and the next.

He said Freud thought money was shit: and Marx did too but in a different way.

He said shit was a thing, and he didn’t think of money as a thing.

He said money was this ghost, this phantom, who chased him from one place to the next.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #5

I ran into Mieze a few months later, she and Franz had finally broken up, I ran into her outside a theater in Chicago, it was cold out, the snow and the night sky made the street look like it was in a black-and-white film, and when I brought up Franz she simply said that jerk, I don’t miss him one bit, and she lit up another cigarette.

She said he was helpless, she said he was a forty-three year old who didn’t even have an apartment or house of his own, she said he was taking all these pills his quack Los Angles shrink had prescribed for him, they made his eyes have this empty look like the eyes of Norman Bates in the last scene of Psycho, the one with the fly on his hand.

She said she had been in Baltimore when he’d been in Tucson and she’d been in Memphis during quite a bit of the time he’d been in Miami.

She said her novel was almost finished but she hadn’t come up with just the right ending and she was watching a lot of Fassbinder films, that’s all she seemed to do these days, work at her crappy job and watch Fassbinder films, because he was great with endings, like the one where the house explodes killing off the two main characters or the one where Petra von Kant’s slave calmly leaves Petra von Kant after a moment of kindness. She said who understood the tyranny of kindness better than Fassbinder.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #6

Mieze told me that night outside the Chicago theater that she at least had an apartment of her own, she had at least gotten that far in her life if nothing else, at her sister’s place it’d always be so awkward every time she brought a guy over, some of them being pretty sleazy, some of them looking like they’d staggered out from a car wreck, their faces full of blankness and bewilderment and meanness.

She said she liked Baltimore better than Tucson though she liked the weather better in Tucson and in fact maybe the best city of all, for her at least, would be a Baltimore that was located in the desert, a Baltimore that stood under a desert night sky.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #7

Mieze told me that night outside the Chicago theater that she never slept with Franz in Tucson because they’d never been in that city at the same time but she had slept with him in Baltimore, three maybe four times, and they’d fucked countless times in Miami which was weird since neither one of them ever lived there.

She said when she finished the first chapter of the novel she walked around Baltimore all night listening to really hard fast jazz, what she liked to call Frenzy Screech Magic Music, music that sounded like it would have been written for the funeral of Antonin Artaud or Charles Baudelaire had this type of jazz existed in their day, but it hadn’t of course which somehow in her mind made the music only better, as if she could hear this music that even an Artaud and Baudelaire would not have been able to imagine, not even in the delirium of their deathbeds, that’s always part of the arrogance of being born later she said, the arrogance and the stupidity, and she walked and walked through the chilly dark night past drug deals and lone guys that whistled at her, she was afraid, really afraid at different points, but she kept on, she kept thinking how if she did live through this night she would remember it very clearly afterwards, it would be like a scene in a film that replays over and over in our dreams.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #9

She said her next novel would be about Freud from a pervert’s point of view.

She said she would write it on postcards in different parts of the country and then mail those postcards to her mother’s address in Memphis and the order of the novel would be based on the order in which she found the postcards in the bowl where her mother kept the mail.

Pastoral Footnotes #1

The hairy shadow vibrated in the embrace of the sticky shadow.

The pink pebbles could well have been the upper half of the face.

The weather, they said, was shit.

The scene, they insisted, was shit.

The budget, they speculated, was fucked.

The script, they realized, was bankrupt.

The characters, they commented, were hazy.

Their bodies, they saw, were oily and skeletal.

Their eyes, they suspected, never closed.

The teeth encircled by billowing purple air.

Pastoral Footnotes #2

We came upon the face later.

It was a spring morning, the grass glittering with dew.