Invisible Monsters Remix

This is the big hammy way Brandy has played her whole life. The Brandy Alexander nonstop continuous live action theater, but less and less live by the moment.

Just for a little stage business, I take Brandy’s hand in mine. This is a nice gesture, but then I’m freaked by the whole threat of blood-borne pathogens, and then, boom, the ceiling in the dining room crashes down, and sparks and embers rush out at us from the dining room doorway.

“Even if you can’t love me, then tell me my life,” Brandy says. “A girl can’t die without her life flashing before her eyes.”

Pretty much nobody is getting their emotional needs met.

It’s then the fire eats down the stairway carpet to Evie’s bare ass, and Evie screams to her feet and pounds down the stairs in her burned-up white high heels. Naked and hairless, wearing wire and ashes, Evie Cottrell runs out the front door to a larger audience, her wedding guests, the silver and crystal and the arriving fire trucks. This is the world we live in. Conditions change and we mutate.

So of course this’ll be all about Brandy, hosted by me, with guest appearances by Evelyn Cottrell and the deadly AIDS virus. Brandy, Brandy, Brandy. Poor sad Brandy on her back, Brandy touches the hole pouring her life out onto the marble floor and says, “Please. Tell me my life. Tell me how we got here.”

So me, I’m here eating smoke just to document this Brandy Alexander moment.

Give me attention.

Flash.

Give me adoration.

Flash.

Give me a break.

Flash.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter One

Chapter 42

here you’re supposed to be is some big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, with cameramen and actors and stuffed mushrooms all over the church. This is the summer of 2007, and a film based on my fourth book, Choke, is being shot on location here. In a side chapel a few steps away, Kelly Macdonald’s character is seducing Sam Rockwell’s. Plotwise, her goal is to conceive a fetus in order to puree its unborn brain and use that neural tissue to cure the dementia of Anjelica Huston’s character. All of that sacrifice is being offered to preserve the memories of one person …In real life, Kelly tells me she’s been away from home, filming projects in the United States, and hasn’t seen her husband in months. This big push is so they can get somewhat ahead, so Kelly can stay at home, she hopes, and have a real baby.

The hospital sequences are being shot in an abandoned asylum, the former Essex County Mental Hospital, a complex of thirty-five buildings covering a hundred acres. A ghost town. “Our own back lot,” says the film’s director, Clark Gregg. There are buildings to serve as police stations …buildings that look like private homes …all of them scheduled to be demolished in another month. The landscaping is overgrown, with white-tailed deer wandering the waist-high grass. Rabbits graze in this Arcadian setting, and, at dusk, fireflies hover as winking lights. Left behind are a century of hospital beds and dirty sheets, and the shabby jigsaw puzzles are beyond number.

In Hollywood jargon, everyone has warned Clark that Choke was “very E.D.” By this, they don’t mean “erectile dysfunction.” A comedy about food and death and sex? They mean that the film’s success will be very “execution dependent.” By execution, they mean how it’s told, not how it’s killed.

Jump to midnight in this mental hospital. Anjelica Huston walks toward me down a long hospital corridor, her cheeks smeared with a mask of chocolate pudding, her eyes locked on mine. “You,” she says, pointing at her face, “you did this to me!” We stand and talk while the crew sets up another shot. She tells me a strange, funny story about her father, John Huston, speaking to her a few days after his death. I won’t spoil it or steal it by retelling that story here. Kelly Macdonald talks about learning a Texas accent a few weeks ago for a film called No Country for Old Men. Before that she was working on a project in Chicago. Sam Rockwell talks about his next film, to be shot in England, about a man who lives alone on the moon.

A maze of underground tunnels connect the basements of the different hospital buildings, concrete utility tunnels, branched and dripping, lined with steam pipes. Between setups, crew members wander by flashlight through these, sending back camera-phone snapshots of butchered dogs sacrificed on subterranean altars by Satanists no longer in evidence. After a few days of shooting, everyone has a spooky story about being touched or pinched by invisible hands. This was a high-security loony bin. Meaning, if you walk through the wrong door it will lock behind you, trapping you in a deserted ward or wing with no exit. Steel bars block the windows. The walls are red brick, and your only hope is that someone might hear you screaming among the soiled mattresses and bedpans. A caterer circulates constantly, handing everyone hot fudge sundaes.

Here in this madhouse, it’s getting harder and harder to tell apart reality and make-believe. This essay I’m constantly writing and revising in my mind, I call it “A Catered Nightmare.” I write it, but it keeps crumbling under the weight of too many quirky details. A better writer, a smarter writer, would be able to find the Unified Field Theory that would tie together all of these facts. For example, someone brilliant, like Joy Williams. David Foster Wallace could nail the big lesson that’s being demonstrated, but all I can do is watch and take notes. I’m sitting on the shaggy asylum lawn eating a hamburger with my editor, Gerry Howard, while fireflies twinkle around us. The catering company is passing smoked salmon en croute garnished with sprigs of fennel. An assistant director steps up to ask if we’ll move our picnic to another spot because we’re in Sam Rockwell’s eye line during a very emotional speech. Before Sam, Heath Ledger was cast as the male lead. Before Ledger, Ryan Gosling had been cast.

Jump to New York City, to a sex shop in the West Village where I’m buying their entire stock of latex anal stimulation beads. Every movie shoot needs a wrap gift, and Clark Gregg’s original thought was to give everyone custom-made chrome Ben Wa balls, highly polished and engraved with the film’s title and the dates of principal photography, but that gesture would’ve cost half the production budget. Instead, I’ve gone with Gregg’s assistant to every sex toy shop in Manhattan. Two men buying every string of butt beads in every store …in New York that doesn’t raise an eyebrow. In the West Village shop, a middle-aged female clerk warns us, “The ones with the white cotton string are sold strictly as a novelty. You use those one time, and you’ll never get that string white again.” After that, we go to the Chelsea Kmart to buy a child’s car seat. Our car filled with sex toys and a baby seat, we go to collect Jennifer Grey, Clark Gregg’s wife, at her father, Joel Grey’s home. We’re at Starbucks and Jennifer Grey spills her vanilla latte, and I’m honestly thrilled to help clean up the mess and fetch her another. She’s that lovely and charming, but she doesn’t look like Jennifer Grey. The more of this I recount, the more I feel as if I’m on an analyst’s couch recounting the absurdities and coded symbols of a dream. William T. Vollmann would be able to decipher the hidden patterns. David Foster Wallace could decode the deeper profound message. But it’s all I can do to kneel down on the Starbucks floor and sop up vanilla latte with a paper napkin. Starstruck, I ask Sam to autograph my butt beads and he inscribes them, O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek! Sam’s character in the film suffocates himself, hoping someone will come to his rescue. I’m so stupid that I thought he made up what he wrote.

A wandering makeup artist leaves a voice mail on my phone saying, “I’m locked behind the door of a room down a hallway in the basement of a building …” She says, “Don’t ask me where. I don’t know where. Just come get me out!” A passing caterer offers me mushroom pate baked in shells of herb-infused puff pastry.

Jump to the interior of a commercial jetliner cabin. This is a rented film set assembled in the gymnasium of the abandoned mental hospital. The cabin is filled with extras, everyone wearing headsets and directed to look engrossed in a nonexistent film supposedly being shown outside the frame of the shot. A thunderstorm shakes the building, and air traffic into Newark has been rerouted to roar low and directly overhead. Surrounding the bright oasis of set lights, the gymnasium is dark and crowded with a milling party of entertainers and investors. This celebrity audience watches the “audience” of extras who stare intently into space. The caterers pass hors d’oeuvres. Sam Rockwell wears a red satin dressing gown, more like a prizefighter’s robe, over a black mini-Speedo