Half the time we didn't even talk about the movie. We talked about our lives and Kristi would say grand, mechanical things like:
"Tell me your story."
Kristi also introduced me to a small silver cylinder she kept on her keychain which contained that white powdered substance which is so common in LA—or La La Land as I grew fond of calling it. In New York they offer you a bottle of water. In the midwest you smoke a bowl. In LA you do a line. Everywhere I went—when I met with Warner execs, when I went to restaurants..even sitting next to people in movie theaters—people were laying out lines and inviting me to the bathroom and again laying out lines of the white substance which I had done before but never in such volume and with such frequency. I didn't have any problem with it.
"When's the last time you had sex?" Kristi asks.
"I'm celibate."
"What does that mean?"
"I know you're not dumb enough to not know what this word means so it must mean you live in a world where everyone has sex all the time and you've never had to know what the word celibate means."
"You don't have sex?"
"Yeah. I'm celibate."
"Why?"
"It's just nature's way of making us reproduce and it's vapid. It's factory work, it's meaningless."
"Did you have a bad experience?"
"No but I do fewer things better. At least I'm trying to."
Kristi writes that down in her personal notebook. Then she snaps it closed and walks over to my bed. She stands at the edge of my futon and takes off her pants—some red clubbing pants with cargo pockets. She lies down and takes off white panties printed with icons of raspberries and spreads her gorgeous legs.
She points to her pussy.
"The love goes here," she says, using her hands in a narrowing diamond shape, making an arrow pointing at her cunt.
"No, Kristi. Put your pants back on."
She pulls her legs up against her chest.
"I'm sorry. I know you're very strict."
"How am I very strict?"
"You have a strict moral code."
"I have no moral objection to fucking your brains out, I just don't want to do it because I think it would complicate our relationship. I like you as you are, my little Kristi. Things are simple between us: I tell you to do things, you do them. If I was relying on you for my next orgasm you might not be as willing to follow my orders, to handle my every whim. I love you, Kristi, but let's just keep it like it is."
I turn my back and look out the window to give her some dignity while she puts her clothes back on. Eventually I turn around and she's sitting on the bed crying.
She wipes her face.
"Well, tell me your story, then," says my assistant.
I motion to her to come to me and I put my arm around her.
We look over LA.
"My story begins in the 80s, when I was five. I saw Raiders of the Lost Arc on VHS and though I could barely read, I could read the credits of that movie and I read that it was directed by Steven Spielberg. I loved that movie with all my heart and I didn't even know what directing was, but if Steven Spielberg had directed Raiders of the Lost Arc, I knew, at five years old, that that's what I wanted to do.
"Back then directors were men—but that didn't bother me. If I had to have a penis to become a director, then I was gonna get one."
And she lets me talk. If that girl wasn't my concubine, she was my therapist.
I told her my whole theory of paying attention to process while making things, how I had come to see the world as an artist does in the 11th grade on a chance I took to not take a science class but instead to take a photo class—
"—partially because it had the boy I liked in it and it wouldn't count toward my GPA because it was an art class. And I was like: I can do anything I want in this class because it won't affect my GPA so I decided not to complete any assignments, not to try to make photos that would please my teacher or classmates..not even to try to make photos that would please me..but to work on the process. When to press the shutter. How to frame a scene. I walked around with these little rectangles cut out of matte board—each made to its own proportion—and I looked at the world through them."
"You made your own director's viewfinder."
"What's that?"
"Same thing but a lens that costs about $800. Directors wear 'em to look cool."
"Well I used 'em to learn composition. Spend all day looking through cardboard rectangles, you learn how to compose a shot."
I told her the whole philosophy, how there are three levels of making things: one is to please others, to entertain them or make them happy. A very good reason to make things. Then better, making things to please yourself. An exponentially better reason for making things, since you're always with yourself and whatnot, since you have an obligation to yourself that you don't have to others, artistically. And finally: process. You forget about pleasing others. You even forget about pleasing yourself. You do things because you have a process you follow. Then art isn't about satiation or entertainment, it's work like any other. You don't think Stephen King writes books while he's standing in the vegetable garden, do you? No. He writes them sitting in his motherfucking chair.
Eventually things got back to sex.
"Have you had a lot of girlfriends, boyfriends?" Kristi asked.
"By your standards, probably no, but I've had about 20?" I say.
"Yeah I've had about twice that," Kristi says. Then this little girl says, "Why do you think they want to fuck you?"
"Well obviously it's not because I'm Paris Hilton!"
Kristi is looking at me, waiting for me to really respond.
"A lot of them just wanted to fuck me 'cause they thought I was a genius. They wait till afterward to tell you this."
"So is it worth it to them, to fuck a genius?"
"Oh yes, they're very satisfied. Like standing next to a Picasso. And geniuses are often crazy. And crazy people are great fucks."