Toward the end of the bottle, Kris and I were sitting on towels, cross-legged like little girls, facing each other and holding hands.
"K baby, what would have happened if I never found you."
"No, I found you," she smiles.
"I don't think I ever had a girlfriend like you, my whole life growing up."
"Me either."
"And we went through a war together..I mean we went through a warlike experience and, you know, that bonds us together for life."
"Right, right. And if one of us dies the other one has to go to the other one's parents and say nice things about the dead one and reassure her parents that she lived a good life."
"Don't say that."
"Why not? Are you planning on dying?"
"Planning on dying. I guess I'm not planning it."
"Good, then let me have my death fantasy. It's part of how I enjoy being here with you now."
"By fast-forwarding to one of our deaths."
"Exactly. Keeping death in the side of your mind helps, like, helps us appreciate the present moment. Don't you find?"
"I don't find that exactly but I know what you mean."
"Anyway I'm going to tell your parents that you were brilliant and on a whole different playing field than the rest of your family and they never even had the context to appreciate you—"
"They'll never listen. And my dad is dead."
"Well I'll tie your mom to a chair and make her listen. I'll show her your movie and when she doesn't get it I'll give her a Lauren-style lecture on film history and explain to her where your film fits into the big picture and if she still doesn't understand it I'll whip her with a feather."
"Enough Jameson for you."
"Lauren, you're a gem."
She massages my fingers.
"That feels good."
"And it's not a lesbian thing," K says.
"I never said it was a lesbian thing. It just..feels good."
"Good, now relax. I'm going to do your back."
I get on my pool chair and Kristi kneels above me, working my shoulders, my neck. Somewhere around the third vertebrae from the base of my spine, I cry. It's silent at first, then affects my breathing, and Kristi knows.
"You need a release."
I feel her hands work my bones and I nod, my face pressed into the plastic straps of the chair. My tears fall through to the concrete. They make a puddle.
Kristen works my back harder.
I let myself sniffle, not hiding from her.
"You've got a whole movie worth of stress built up in these bones, old woman. You need to let that shit out, so go ahead and cry—I won't tell anyone. Most people get sick after their first movie—most directors. I'm amazed you didn't get sick."
I laugh through tears.
"Just let it go," Kristi says. "Let it go."
And I do: I cry and Kristi works loose the fluids trapped in my muscles and tells me I hold my stress in my back and that some people hold it in their necks or hands but I hold mine in my lower back and she's going to release it for me.
And I think of animals grooming each other: cats licking each other's faces clean asking nothing in return. They just do it because they're of the same species and they have each other's back. Like if I don't give Kristi a massage in return, it's no big deal. She's just doing this for the common good. Or: because she loves me, which is hard to accept. My own mom doesn't love me like that, and yet this girl from the OC—who is more adult than I am—does.
Maybe I came to LA to make a movie.
Maybe I came to make a friend.
I doubt I would have survived if I hadn't made both.
Perhaps that's too corny for you. But I think I'd like to keep high style in my art and let my life be corny, simple, straight up. Imagine if all of life was like a movie. It wouldn't be that great. Ole Jeffy asked me why people watch movies. When I said I didn't know he said it was so they could have a meaningful emotional experience. That life was basically chaos and misshapen forms, while movies were structured and chiseled and made to create a meaningful emotional experience in a two-hour package. I don't know if I agree with that. I think it's technically true but you have to know by now that movies are an illusion, that right outside the frame is its own kind of chaos: wires running everywhere, dust, lights so bright you have to say, "Watch your eyes!" before you turn one on. Movies are just the front side of the tapestry. Behind it is a mass of thread that doesn't look like anything at all.
Life is chaos. That is true. But, looking back, you can add meaning to it. You can take a series of events and weave them together, interpret them, to make a story in your mind. Meaning is ascribed. A thing might have a nature without an observer, but for it to have meaning you need to be there thinking about it and making that meaning up.
The same thing happens in a movie. You cut together pictures that don't (in some absolute sense) have anything to do with each other. The story exists in your mind—that's the only place it exists. It's not in the script, it's not on a hard drive. It's only in your mind. If you played a random sequence of images for someone, they would make a story in their mind. We're basically a species with this special ability for filling in the gaps, for making sense out of a world and a life that, at core, makes no sense at all.