I don’t like to think of myself as a rooster; I don’t really like to think of myself at all. But sometimes, these things are necessary. For example, when you’re in line at the grocery store (or feed hamlet, as we call and have them in Massachusetts), and the cashier asks, “Paper or plastic?” You don’t need to think twice: you’re gonna get paper. Our claws mess and tear the plastic, and it’s been a very embarrassing ordeal for our kind for quite some time. Would you like to know what things were like in the days of wax and vellum? Many spur claws torn, many feathers burned. I once talk like Indian to see how it do for me self, and I come to thinking maybe that’s the way I betta be talking bout now from now on. That’s right—sho’ is…
If I sound cool today, it’s because Mr. Tarantino and Mr. Fincher have been teaching me about Generation X, as if I didn’t live through it myself. “Do you remember Nirvana?” Yeah, sure. “Do you remember Kurt Cobain?” Fuck Kurt Cobain. He was an annoying and depressing asshole. Everything got better after he was dead. Even the drugs. “Do you know Courtney Love?” Not anymore. “What do you think of The Smashing Pumpkins?” THE SMASHING PUMPKINS AREN’T EVEN MUSIC.
I passed with flying colors, because Mr. Tarantino decided I was ready to “become black,” whatever that means. He showed me all of his favorite Jim Brown movies, along with selections starring Fred Williamson, Max Julien, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, and even a few with Antonio Fargas and Albert Popwell. You ever seen Magnum Force? Motherfucker pours drain cleaner down a hooker’s throat and kills her instantly. A couple of guys in the military tried doing that on some real people a few years later, and it didn’t work. In fact, it went horribly, horribly wrong, but as Dirty Harry Callahan says, “it does have a certain style to it.”
Mr. Fincher is nodding, as if I’m supposed to accept the notion that pouring drain cleaner down a woman’s throat “has a certain style to it.” I told them the movie was shit (even though it wasn’t), and I said the first one was better because “Da God Don Siegel” directed it (I’ve never seen a Don Siegel movie). Mr. Tarantino was out of his seat applauding, screaming in an on the spectrum way that I was the first member of the animal kingdom who “truly understood” him. Should I be flattered or frightened?
Mr. Fincher and Mr. Tarantino continued to go through the icons of their youth and those of their heyday, their peers, all people and things I remembered well myself, as I reminded them. They weren’t listening. It was kind of like that story Fiona Apple told except with no cocaine and no Paul Thomas Anderson. But, I do like listening to “important men” gab. It’s interesting. You learn a lot. I’m not too self-involved not to get excited when there’s a famous person in the room. But then I have to remind myself that, being famous myself, I can’t expect to remain excited at all times, nor can I expect the world of every room I enter. Every turn in the road of life is exactly the same and brand new—in other words, blind.
We start shooting The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth in July…
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