There are nights in a relationship when you come as close as you're ever going to get to another person. It usually begins with a few doses of wonderfully all-out sex, but then it blossoms into something much more profound and transcendent. You start by doing things to each other physically you'd only fantasized before. Then, when it's calm again, you start telling secrets about yourself or your life you never thought would come out. Weber called them "Holy Nights," which is an apt description. To him, there are few times in our adult life when we are "simply " honest. It is either unnecessary or detrimental to tell the truth in our everyday life, so we don't.
That is one of the reasons religion suffers so in our century: To really find God, you must be honest. To be honest you must begin by looking clearly at yourself, but that's too distressing. So we learn to worship material things instead, because not only are they attainable but how we attain them doesn't require virtue or virtuous behavior, as some higher goals do. We don't want goodness, we want a Mercedes. Who needs a relationship when you can have all the fun of one without making any of the commitments? In the end, even AIDS is the perfect consumer's disease: It comes from either bad sex or bad needles. None of this "wrath of God" stuff in our time. Plagues are for the Dark Ages.
I'm rambling. But why are we so honest on Holy Nights? Because we're so close to death then. That night Sasha and I discussed death. We spoke of how we imagined it to be (we were wrong), how we imagined we'd die (I was wrong), of how we wanted to be buried. We spoke as if the other would be there at our end to see to these last wishes. After that we made love again, because talk of death always makes you feel more fragile and hungry.
Look, I can say this: Death is the minimum. The minimum of anything. In those hours when you're so dose to another person, you go from being two to almost one. The minimum. Love is death: the death of the individual, the death of distance, the death of time. The delightful thing about holding a girl's hand is after a while you forget which is yours. You forget there are two instead of one big one. Death. It is not a morbid thing.
Let me tell you one more story. When I was twelve, my friend Geoff Pierson and I were down at the river in our town, fooling around. We'd smoked all the cigarettes we had and gotten bored enough to be in the middle of a stone-throwing contest. It was a hot July day, and the only sounds around were a lawn mower somewhere off in a far distance and the ker-plunk of our stones hitting the water. He threw one. I threw one farther. He threw one farther. I threw one that hit something.
Slowly, languorously, the thing turned and became an elbow, a crooked elbow sticking like an inverted V out of the water. It stayed there a few seconds and then, just as languorously (as if tired), turned back over into the water.
I told Geoff to go call the cops while I leapt wildly into the water, like a dog jumping off a boat. Nothing more had surfaced there, but where that elbow had appeared was so burned into my consciousness I didn't need any landmarks to find the place again. Thirty feet out, I saw something light, something dark, something large in front of me. There was the elbow just under the surface! Taking it, I started swimming with one hand back to shore. It took a long time and the thing in my hand was hard and cold. I didn't look back until I could put my feet on the bottom and pull it in to shore.
It was a woman. She was almost naked. Only bra and underpants. Both were white, and I could see her dark nipples and pubic hair through the thin material. The body was frozen in rigor mortis – one hand cupped under a breast (thus the crooked elbow), the other held rigidly against her side. Her face was completely covered with what looked like mucus. After pulling her up onto the grass, I bent down and tried to wipe some of the scum from her face. It all came off in one big shiny piece.
I didn't know her but even in death she was very good-looking, her body especially. What else is a twelve-year-old to think? There it all was in one living dream in front of me – sex (I'd never seen the real thing before), death, honor, excitement Who she was isn't important nor is how she got there. The point of this is to tell you how disappointed I was when Geoff came back and I began to hear the wail of a police siren. For one of the only times in my entire life, I had everything I wanted in front of me. Everything I knew, wanted – was – had reached consummation here. In a few minutes (I can still hear Geoff Pierson's sneakers running hard across the grass toward me) life would take it – take her – back into its hands and I would be only me again; twelve, confused, hot, thrilled.
If possible, freeze that moment in your mind. Freeze the look of greed and desire on my face. For the only time in my life, I knew the greatest secret of all – the dead love you.
We'd been on the set of Burn the Gay Nuns! for only an hour before I'd had enough and went for some coffee. If Strayhorn had been alive, what we were doing would have been a good subject for his Esquire column. The people on the set of the film were named Larry and Rich, Lorna and Debbie. They were professionals and went about their jobs with brisk efficiency. When Debbie was about to have her clothes (and head) ripped off by a samurai-sword-wielding priest (recently back from the dead), she stood patiently for minutes in her underwear while two chatty women sewed a rip-away habit around her scrumptious figure. Phil's article could have been about a day in the life of the filming of a Grade D horror/sex film. Or an interview with "star" Douglas Mann, who walked around with his second head under his arm, eating one gooey French cruller after another.
Since films like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street became such smashes, people have been trying to make similar low-rent slash-and-gore junk that sells like potato chips to the crowd that fucks at the drive-in or rents four films a day at the video store.
The motion pictures I'd made were certainly not calm affairs (especially the last one), but looking at the script for Burn the Gay Nuns! made me feel like I'd done The Pinky Linky Show.
A few nights before on television, we'd watched a program about the popularity of horror movies. They began by showing stomachable clips from the most popular video in the United States at the time. Titled Faces of Death, it was a badly put together feature-length documentary of people actually dying in front of a camera: suicides jumping out windows, a man being eaten by an alligator (his dropped camera took it all in), firing squad, electric chair. An out-and-out snuff film you could rent for – bucks most anywhere.
Later in the program, a twelve-year-old girl who had just seen something called I Spit on Your Grave was asked why she watched things like that. She beamed and said, "I love all the blood!" That was really her answer. When I was a kid, seeing The Tingler with Vincent Price had given me big nightmares for months.
Speaking of Finky Linky, his arrival on the set caused a happy furor. Actors with melted eyeballs like lava running down their faces or hatchets buried in their backs came up for autographs or only to say hello.
Wyatt was Finky's charming, wacko self and, as a big favor to the director, even did a five-second cameo appearance in the inevitable "walking dead" scene.
What were we doing there? My excuse was it happened to be the only horror film being made in Los Angeles at the time. I hadn't directed a movie in over two years. If my next work was going to be horror – Phil and Pinsleepe's wish fulfilled – I wanted to see what these guys did. Wyatt said he was along because he'd always wanted to see how shit was made.
What I'd seen in our hour on the set was disappointing. They were using a new, more sophisticated camera from Austria, but other than that the scene was a thoroughly familiar one. It reminded me of why I'd left this life.