So Nick Carraway, on the opening page of The Great Gatsby, says something in the realm of I was an intimate with the deep, ineluctable griefs of a gallery of shadow men, wild and lashing in their natures.
And, as the girl in Godard's Breathless quotes, and was later quoted in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, from Faulkner (this is the spirit of the thing): Between grief on earth and the howling void, I'll take the trials of this life, for grief and toil are what put the uprightness in the ape's bent back, and it is the green that pushes through the stems of garden saps, and grows the buds into open flowers.
Mercutio (Romeo's Right-Hand Man):
I see Queen Mab, good Queen Mab, I do, I do. Do you?
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In a shape smaller than a seed of salt
On the pricked pinky of a deacon in winter.
She be drawn with a team of little motes, dust
In the moon's yellow light, over men's noses as they sleep;
Her wagon spokes be made of spiderous legs,
And her whip no thicker than a fiber of black widow's netting.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
This is she! With guilt and gratitude I claim her
As my amanuensis and wingman, sneaky Queen Mab.
When I think of all the virgins I've taken
The clouds crack and bacon flashes, smells of bacon;
When I think of all the plays ever written I realize
There is nothing more expressive than a thigh being bitten.
To the wemen: I'm the daddy longlegs in the turned-on light,
Surprised in the night, and long-stepping back to my tiled corner,
My spindly Dali-legs gingerly stepping; my vampire boner
Wet from thirsting, and a drippy tap left behind. Dream, dream,
Evil Queen Mab: weaver and spirit of the night. Me, too.
There was that Christmas morning (at age ten? eleven?) when I received that magic gray box with the flip-up flap where the cartridges would go, and the red-and-white bubble lettering on the side: Nintendo. That epiphanic morning, day, year, when, along with the matte-gray cartridge of Super Mario Bros.—the classic that I was already familiar with in the arcade version from long hours at Round Table Pizza, the one in the mini-mall with the comic book store where I bought Samurai Cat; the Lucky's that as teenagers we would eventually buy our egging eggs from; and the donut shop, Bob's Donuts, where, once, before class, when I was in seventh grade, early in the morn, I got a bear claw, and tried my first jelly-filled with my stoner girlfriend, Jen, in her cropped leather jacket, accompanied by her tall friend Corine in a black trench, and white makeup . . . Corine, a nonvirgin at the age of thirteen, and Patrick, the boy who took so much acid one night he started to see his friends as Lego constructions, and tried to pull them apart (he never recovered, and wandered the Palo Alto of our youth in a half-smiling daze while his brother became the second most prolific local tagger behind ORFN, MORG: connecting the M to the O to the G with an overcrossing loop, and then the R to the G with a sharp link from the R's extended foot up to the top of the G, with a sharp angle that sat like a hat above the curve of that letter's capital shape, the signature cute and violent at the same time, like all good graffiti, the appealing shapes of the practiced artist combined with the violent, and off-putting, in-your-face gesture of illegal defacement/public display)—I also received a shiny golden cartridge that would change my life. For, you see, it was The Legend of Zelda, the first (or almost first) of the great roaming adventure games that have now expanded into everything from Grand Theft Auto to World of Warcraft.
After years, years of games as a youth, the years of hiding and dreaming; and then years of fucking up as a teen, stumbling and falling, more hiding, hiding from the dreams; and then years of training as a twenty-sumptin' at acting school, the years of striving for the dream; and then after that, more years of school, schooling in the other areas—the writing, the directing, the art, the poetry—I had achieved success. I was an actor, and an artist, and a writer, and a teacher; I directed my own movies and wrote poetry, and I could also help others do their things, because see, I was then the one with knowledge and experience, and I could give it away. I was the teacher-artist and teaching was my art as much as any of the other arts.
You spend your youth dreaming, your young adulthood striving. You spend your prime on your best work, and use your maturity for giving back to the next crop of youth. And that is the way of the artist; that is the way of contentment. I give you the key to artistic happiness.
At Round Table, usually during a soccer team pizza party, after a season of little boys in bright polyester uniforms (the Purple Scorpions, the Green Dragons, the Blue Blobs, etc.), we could be hyper and free and race around the pizza parlor and drink soda and eat cheese-and-pepperoni pizza—never ham and pineapple, gross—and watch the older boys—the guys who seemed like professional gamers, they played so well—maneuver Mario past the man eating flowers, hop on mushroom men, descend into pipes with the whoob, whoob, whoob sound effect, race through underground dungeons, shoot fireballs, swim, and collect coins. A side-scrawling adventure of awesomeness that I was happy to just watch and not control because whenever I did pop my quarter in, my three lives would be quickly taken—taken by fall, taken by plant, taken by goon, taken by dragon. Fireballs.
But at home, on my own television, with the Nintendo home version of the game, my brother by my side, I could practice and practice the moves of Mario and his brother, Luigi, that greener, leaner, more mysterious avatar, much like my brother was to my more awkward, out-front, older, thicker Mario (by thick, I mean slightly husky, like a bear, rather than a sleek mink), so that the patterns of play became embedded in our hands and minds: reflexes and physical memories; buttons matched to actions on the screen; levels learned and traversed as if they were as real as the landscapes of the cul-de-sac outside the window of our living room where we played and played. We learned.
But then there was Zelda.
I was driven on the desert-couched freeway, in the late evening, this being decades after Mario and Zelda, toward a horizon where black sky met the headlight-dappled asphalt, sky and earth sewn together by the red, yellow, and white lights of Mobil gas stations, and McDonald's arches, and the Arby's Stetson, to the art school, CalArts, to watch a collage of Tennessee Williams one-acts from the class I had taught that semester. The one-acts were Tenn's youthful precursors to The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, where young dreamers (prototypes of Blanche and Laura) faced death and destruction in a world full of Stanley Kowalskis. Those Stanleys: engines of brute destruction—although my favorite of the one-acts, Moony's Kid Don't Cry, combined the physicality of Stanley (Moony is a lumberjack) with the sensitivity of Blanche (he dreams of working up in the north, under the stars), the same combination of poetry and sexuality that Brando brought to the role of Stanley, throwing off the whole production of Streetcar because the brute became more sensitive than the sensitive fading flower, Blanche.
Anyway, we, me and this girl, this actress type, pulled off the freeway two exits before the exit for the school, and crept into the wide and hilly parking lot of an exercise center left over from the '80s, the Jane Fonda's Workout era, with powder blue, and pink neon, and flaking brown paint. From our spot, far as possible from the building, the line of ellipticals inside were small weaponlike things in the warm yellow tungsten glow, every fourth one taken by a tiny moving being, going and going, and going nowhere.
She, blond and whatever, blew me in her car as the headlights from the cars on the road beyond raked across her neck and back.
And across my Demon eyes.
After, she poured a square of Mentos gum into her hand from a plastic bottle that clearly said Mentos Gum. As we pulled out of the gym lot, I took the bottle and poured a few squares into my own hand. She said nothing as I popped them into my mouth. But once they were in my mouth, I noticed some pieces that were smaller and thinner than the anticipated squares of gum. Not expecting anything other than gum in a gum container, and not being warned, I thought they were just smaller pieces of Mentos, or some sort of flavor enhancers. I asked the actress what the smaller pieces were as I chewed them. She laughed and said, "Oh, those are my Xanax."
It sounded as if she were joking, and when I told her I'd just swallowed a couple, she perked up.
"Oh, shit. That actually was Xanax. How many did you take?"
"I don't know, two or three. What does Xanax do?"
"Oh, shit. Well, it calms me when I get anxiety."
"OK... "
"You'll be fine. I'm little; I take little doses. You're bigger than me—you'll just get relaxed."
"Why the fuck did you put your Xanax in your gum bottle?"
"I don't know. Because my dog was going through my purse and I didn't want him to eat my Xanax. It could kill him."
"Then why didn't you warn me?"
"I don't know. I didn't think you would eat Xanax, like a two-year-old—just eat anything that you put in your mouth."
"I didn't expect Xanax to be in a gum bottle! Why would I expect anything other than gum to be in there?"
"I don't know!"
"It doesn't mean I'm a two-year-old if I eat gum-shaped things from a fucking gum bottle!"
"Okay! Don't get mad at me! It makes me anxious!"
By the time we got to the show, I was feeling drowsy; my arms hung heavy and my speech was slowed.
The Legend of Zelda was something that our father played with my brother and I, and it was special. A land of codes and puzzles; a land of items—magic swords, bows and arrows, shields, magic cloaks, compasses, boomerangs. That first night, Christmas night, my father played the game long into the night and we found him the next morning in front of the television, having discovered the first piece of the Triforce by pushing a square block from the correct angle. Cue the discovery sound effect: a magical, slightly dull crescendo of electronic chimes—doo-da-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
Princess Zelda was named by one of the game's Japanese designers after F. Scott's wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, because he liked the sound of the name. My father, who once stayed up all night playing Zelda, just as he had stayed late at his Silicon Valley jobs playing Colossal Cave Adventure and finding his way through the maze of little twisting passages, was also the one who gave me a copy of The Great Gatsby when I was about fifteen. In the book, on the opening page, Nick recounts some advice his father gave him; I later rewrote this scene for my own purposes. Here is a snippet from the unpublished grad school piece I wrote, then called, after Fitz's early title, "Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires":
When I was young and sensitive, when I was called Shrimp instead of The Actor, my father told me something.'Whenever you feel like you're special,' he said, 'just think that you're but not that great. Actually, you're not that smart at all.'
Ha—I wrote that before his death so he's cast as the harsh father, not the loving one he became at the end, and certainly not the spiritual other his image is in death.
At the show I had to give an introductory speech. It was an out-of-body experience—I could see myself acting the fool, like my first drunk. On the inside was the little guy, the conscious little pilot, aware that the body was failing, but not able to do anything about it; my speech sounded slow and slurred. We wanted to use multimedia, cameras, projectors... the power of live performance matched with projections... the aura of live actors mixed with the cinematic close-up... Then I told the audience I had been drugged. They gasped. I was walked backstage to the control booth. The last thing I remember from the night, before the Xanax pulled me under, is a line from the first of the one-acts, Moony's Kid Don't Cry: something about how Moony's father made him a hobbyhorse and sang him "Ride a Cock-horse to Danbury Cross," the song that Nicholson and his buddy sing with the girls in their underwear in Five Easy Pieces—the movie where Nicholson breaks down at the end talking to his father about how Nicholson has let him down, except that his father is now mute and probably deaf, sitting in a wheelchair. That's all I heard, Ride a cock-horse.
I spent hours and days playing Zelda, and would continue to do so if it meant I could bring my father back. It was dreamtime then, time spent in game-play, the no-time of being in a game world and controlling an avatar. I was sucked into it like a Xanax dream.
I am there now. Where are you, father? Teleported to another realm?
"Xyzzx."
***
James Franco is an actor, director, screenwriter, producer, teacher, author and visual artist. His writing has been published in Esquire, Vanity Fair, N+1, the Wall Street Journal, and McSweeney's. Recently his book Palo Alto was made into a feature film of the same title, based on some of the book's short stories. His latest book, Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures, and Poems, is out now.
Excerpted from Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures, and Poems by James Franco, published by Insight Editions. Copyright © 2014 James Franco
To learn more about Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures, and Poems, click here.
