Diane Ladd, Faye, those photos of the two of them …
That final photo, how they just cling to each other, two women, one young, one old, clinging to each other in a photo like that …
Diane, Faye, a backlit window, two women clinging, it’s right up among the greatest photos ever …
Diane, Faye, how they crouch within a circle of light that seems to expand then slowly turn as you try to make sense of it, that embrace, those arms encircling and also repelling, a radiance by now almost blinding, it can’t touch them …
Faye stares past Diane Ladd, Diane Ladd stares past Faye …
If only Diane Ladd would look up a fraction of an inch, or Faye down, their eyes would meet, but their eyes can never meet, they burn with the same spell …
Brady and Curtis, Gardner and Riis, this photo surpassed them all as world-historical art …
It’s why they had to be destroyed …
The studio and Polanski, even Jack, they all agreed, eliminate them, do so at all costs, they’d only make the movie ridiculou1JHD0R0X
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Chinatown was a fine movie, the best that year, but by no means a great movie, and the photos would undo it, tug a thread and it’d fall to pieces, a cheap joke …
Faye and Diane Ladd didn’t want the photos destroyed, but who listens to Faye or Diane Ladd …
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studio men came, confiscated photos, negatives, men in dark suits with earpieces, Mom and Dad let them right in, pointed out for them the likeliest hiding places, under the hate-puckered eye of our housemaid, Hattie …
My sister, my Condi, watched from her window, fourth floor, as her great work burned, then hurled her camera by the strap, she hurled it out and down …
It landed bang in the barrel where the photos burned, damn good shot, sparks flared up …
After that, we would both move on, me and Condi, though not yet …
Condi had thrown out her camera, she hadn’t moved to Harlowton …
I’d decided on public service, I hadn’t entered public service …
Our parents still alive, Mom and Dad, who’d scooped us up …
In another year it would be public service for me, for Condi, Harlowton, our parents dead, but for now we were suspended between our old lives and what was coming, we hadn’t yet broken through, I told Donny as he unpacked my suitcases …
The old life, it wasn’t over …
And yet it was …
My sister hurled her camera into the burning barrel in the macadamized driveway, and the old life was over, I told Donny as he unpacked my suitcases, Hume Horan and Clay McManaway scouring the Green Zone for boots.
It’s all these little nods going person to person, these smiles, these — pardon my language — these pert little shit-eating grins. The tension in those smiles, something almost giddy. When the news came, they still had us out in the hallway — us that would be fuchsias and them that would be yellows and greens — the news came, traveling one to the next, and as it did so a magnificent buzzing happiness swelled in that dim, mahoganied corridor. It was like November all over again, but this time out of a clear blue sky. If just one of us had started to applaud, we all would have joined in — I’m sure of that. I think we were afraid to break the spell. You see, we were all children in that moment. We had been grown-ups mustered for a grown-up event in a venerable midtown hotel, then the news came and we were children standing under an open sky in the summertime, blue light falling all around us.
It was only when they started the sorting process and the lines solidified that the grins got tighter. And then I understood — the flip side of ourDXGPP8JSQRK SNWTGP 1OM J272OX F-
our childish joy. Or theirs, I should say, because it was no longer mine.
We’d known, to put it simply, that this news would not be taken well by our opponents — that it would seriously piss them off-—and that, more than anything else, is what had made us giddy.
Hasn’t it been clear for some time now? That their unhappiness is our greatest treasure, just as ours is theirs?
We had known, on some level, that this was not an honor that had been earned. We had known that the Swedes understood the same. And that right now, half a world away, the Swedes — those demented and mischievous Swedes — were grinning along with us under the same sky of giddy blue.
Eight years, Reagan gets zilch, you breeze in and they’re handing them out at the coat check.
What, we wondered, would the crazies do with this?
Could you imagine how ape the crazies would go with it?
Every day the crazies look at you, and the crazies go ape, but has there ever been one to make the crazies go as ape as the one we just caught wind of?
And all of this was delicious.
But as security rifled handbags and patted down and wanded, the knowledge was turning around on us — on them—and it was no longer joyful. Lists were chec1XXTP MI1 TXCH 6IAD/F XM OMKTP=O
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wristbanded. Yellows and greens sent one way, the main hall, and fuchsias the other, for the backstage VIP, which is — if you’ll permit a sidebar — less than ideal for one in my situation, as you can see. If only I’d let them know I was coming, they said, they’d have made arrangements. But I didn’t mind. They parked me up on this rampless landing, and it was the ideal spot to take it in. Now that I was no longer a part of the happiness, I could see with great precision what those smiles were being subjected to, the degree of torsion exerted behind each one.
Because where we are childish, our opponents are much more childish. And while we are gentle children, with at worst an insult book or peashooter in our back pockets, they are dangerous children, with sticks and stones and bike chains.
I listened to the sounds of the urban choir through the stage door behind me, and I watched you work the room — watched not from the mighty berth of my Rodem Universal, but from this nursing home reject they put me in — and that I did mind a bit, though I understood their logic.
They want to keep you safe.
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I watched you move from person to person with that wonderful way of yours, that bearing that’s regal yet so calm and relaxed, just short of folksy, and I watched all of them wait their turn, these wealthy people and power brokers, several dozen fuchsias smiling and strutting between tureens and chafing dishes, filling their plates, waiting their turn or carrying themselves in the afterglow, strutting and pecking like storks.
One after the next, they all shook your hand.
They’re almost frozen now — it’s changed as we’ve been talking. Have they all lost their appetites? Did they already eat their fill?
It’s just you and me up here shaking, me in this chair with this face — this grotesquely damaged face — and you bending slightly, a tall, slim, and handsome man, and I’m so afraid that they won’t be able to help themselves.
I’m afraid that they will turn their stork faces up at us at and laugh.
This meeting, which I had so long deferred, holds a terror for me — central to that terror the very fact of the repeated deferrals. All those days I showed up at the high school or VFW or municipal park and left again without shaking your hand. Without even once watching the speech.