Here’s an irony for you:  the first time I ever watched The Breakfast Club, it was with my mother.  I had missed the film in the theatre, thinking it to be yet another piece of flotsam and jetsam drifting along the youth-movie scene of 1985, running alongside films such as Sixteen Candles, which was made back-to-back with TBC by the same guy, and, really now . . . what sort of life-changing art could be made by such “hucksters” anyhow, right?    I, myself, was in the teen-angst period of a very wild and unconventional upbringing—almost nothing like what I would soon see depicted by any of the five kids in that movie.   I say ALMOST, because The Breakfast Club would soon blow my mind as one of the most important and empathic films ever made about schoolkids . . . but we’ll get there in a minute.

Picture this:  in 1986, I lived a life of rock and roll excess with my father.  I had a band that played in smoky nightclubs.  I smoked dope and did drugs at all hours, took care of myself while his band was on the road . . . and my father even resorted that winter to hacking up the back porch for firewood when the bill money went up his nose.  And high school?  I was there for one year before switching to a correspondence course made famous by the Jacksons and the Osmonds.  My rock and roll parents did that for me because public school was a big joke to all of us and I wasn’t learning a damn thing—plus this way I could rock out at all hours and get schoolwork done on my own fucking time.  This plunged me head-first into a very adult world.  Very far from teenyboppers with bubblegum lips and the pointless trudging from class to class, seeing it all and absorbing nothing.  Truth be told, the three years I spent in JUNIOR high school were really my salad days as a student, during which I attended The Gregory Lincoln “Fine Arts Academy,” which was a disorganized playground for excitable early-teen “prodigies” in its first couple of years, located in one of the worst barrio neighborhoods of downtown Houston (I was the star of the drama department, apropos no?)  

But this wasn’t like the “real world” so many others have gone through.  Nether here, nor in my one and only year of “authentic” high school, had I experienced the cliquish us-versus-them aspect of the whole thing.  I ran with the stoners and the burnouts as a “freshman,” and we were all mixed in like pigs at Lamar High with pretty much everyone else.  As far as I could ascertain, the hotties who wore polo shirts also had punk hair.  Not a jock to be seen.  And it was all bullshit.  Boring, pointless, even redundant.  Nobody paid attention in class.  Everyone ditched to get high on the track.  We even had a poor English teacher from Haiti who could barely speak the language, and we all sat in the back and watched the spectacle like it was the Howdy Doody Show or something.  One thing was certain:  here, we were all cogs in a wheel.  Nobody paid attention to anybody, except for the two or three “dudes” you actually bothered to make friends with.  The machine was just too big, too well-greased.  There were too many of us.  Back in the 8^th grade I had been well-liked because the place had been unorganized, loosely structured, easy to take over.   So I guess, in a way, I HAD experienced the cliques.  I just hadn’t known it.

Until I saw The Breakfast Club.

This was in the summer of 1986.  My mother, who had divorced my father before I was old enough to remember anything, had decided to “save me from myself” and move back to ..Texas.. from ....Arkansas...., providing “much-needed maternal perspective.”  Funny thing is, I had to hear about her real reasons from moving back second-hand, from other people—she never confided in me about the loneliness she had felt in ....Fayetteville.... after I had left her to live with my father.  She never confided in me about her dead-end job or the horrors she felt I would be consumed by if allowed to run exclusively with my father for much longer.  She was living in ..Beaumont.. with her mother, looking for a job somewhere close to ....Houston....—a town she hated and would never even drive through if there was any way she could avoid it.   I always found it very telling about my mother’s uncompromising attitude that she moved back to Texas to save me from myself and yet refused to live in the same city with me—it was part of the reason I left her in the first place.  Separated from my father for so many years over a thousand miles had taken its toll on our relationship.  By the time I finally left her, we were hardly speaking to one another.  And what was my mother’s idea of a better life?

Well . . . she was just as bad as my father, really.  She just knew how to get a “real” job and was “trained” for it.  (Several years later, she eventually became a piss-test technician at a hospital in Galveston, the hospital that eventually was responsible for ending her life.)  But she drank a lot and smoked incredible amounts of home-grown pot—and this was Arkansas pot.  Before the ridiculous term “kind bud” was coined, they just called it “skunk weed” . . . and this was the SHIT.  My brain was pickled on that stuff for years after my mother’s arrival in Texas.  She grew it in her chicken coops “back home.”

As bizarre and even horrifying as some of this might sound to a few of you, it was a very revealing and fascinating time of self-discovery for me, mostly.  I was transplanted from high school into the “real” world.  My band stomped ass all over town.  We got in crazy adventures and I would spend weekends in Beaumont with my mom, getting high and doing math assignments.  We saw a lotta movies during this time . . . and one of them was The Breakfast Club.  I can’t even remember how we came to the decision to rent it.  It was a very lonely period for both of us.  I was a child in an adult world—forget about having a steady girlfriend, I was 15-year-old jailbait.  (Imagine being an adult vampire in the body of a child and you start to get the idea.)  She was cut loose and living with her mom.  We hung out with each other at my Grandma’s house when I came to town.  Nether of us really knew anyone in that little shithole.  Beaumont is where old people go to die of cancer.  It was me and mom and Mary Jane.  And Grandma, of course.  That was good.  I got to see her a lot during that time, and it was weird because mom and I would always have to sneak around her to get high and drunk.  There was a girl in the neighborhood I liked.  She was my age and cute and had red hair.  She would always smile really big and swoon “you’re such a nice boy” when I would walk her to the door of grandma’s house after hanging out.  I never kissed her.  Not sure why.  She reminds me now of my last girlfriend.  She reminded me then of Molly Ringwald a little.

I didn’t know the names Molly Ringwald or Anthony Michael Hall from Adam.   Mom twisted up a fattie and we sat down in the west wing of grandma’s house with a rolled up towel under the door to watch TBC.  Judd who?  And that Emilio guy?  Why did he look so much like Martin Sheen—wasn't he in Repo Man?   And, hey . . . that song!  It was still all over the radio that year.  The band that did it—Simple something?—were constantly bitching on MTV about how they couldn’t throw off the shadow of The Breakfast Club.  (Ungrateful fucks.)  I would come to know later that the theme song and almost all the score for that film was produced and performed by Keith Fosley, who had been responsible for “the new sound” that shaped Billy Idol’s entire career.  I loved Whiplash Smile and Rebel Yell, even as an “old school” cat trained under my 1960s father in an alterno-retro blues club scene.  (I rebelled against the old school with my “misguided” love of Motley Crue, too—which still holds, too fast for love, to this day.)  I was also a pretty big fan of David Bowie . . . and from the instant his quote from “Changes”  appeared at the start of the film, I was captivated:

“And these children that you spit on

 As they try to change their worlds

 Are immune to your consultation

 They’re quite aware of what they’re going through . . .”

And then the screen shattered like a mirror blasted to bits in the unforgiving blowback of a childhood tantrum . . . or maybe the end of an old life, revealing a new one . . .

The movie put me in a hammerlock and never let go.  It was funny, giddy, silly, even juvenile . . . and it was also one of the best films I had ever seen.  Within a deceptively-simple, skillfully-constructed puzzlebox, it contained insight into the teenage human condition in a way which no film ever had before—and here was the thing:  it spoke to ME.  Mister “alternate reality.”  Mister sixteen-going-on-forty-one.  These themes, these plights, these people . . . they were all from the same world, the same reality. And there was a little bit of me in each character.  In Andy, the Jock, I saw my relationship with my mom, the expectation lain at my feet and my failure to meet them.  In Claire, the prom queen, I felt the pain of being a part of something you have no control over and do not want.  In Brian, the Brain, I saw Just Me, filled with talent and ambition that went far beyond anything around me, and isolated by my own “genius” to the point of obsession and even madness.  In Allison, the Basket Case, I saw the intense loneliness of belonging nowhere, owing allegiance to nothing, spiraling down and down and happy in your misery, so happy you cry every day.  And in Bender, the Criminal . . . well, I saw everything else in me.  And in so many other people I knew.  I was stunned into damn-near speechless silence.  How could these people comprehend and explain the common denominators of our lives so well through such an uncertain and oft-compromised form of entertainment like this?  Even Fast Times At Ridgemont High—another “deconstruction” of the “youth movie model” which bobbed to the surface of my tormented 13-year old awareness a few years earlier as an incredibly cynical and unforgiving slap in the face—had not hit the mark with such honesty.  In fact, TBC worked because it was all the things that Fast Times was not.  It was accessible.  It was funny.  But it was also real in its unreality.  And it had a brilliant hook that reminded me of so many moments in my own life as a kid, and then later—when I would wake up to find myself in a roomful of strangers and allow myself to feel the kind of honesty one can only access when he has nothing to lose.

It’s called Survival Charisma.  That’s what I call it anyway.  You’ve been there, I bet.  You’ll talk to some strangers on a bus, in a movie lobby, or even at a defensive driving or self-help seminar . . . and you may even tell them EVERYTHING . . . and why is that?  Because you know you’ll probably never see any of those people ever again.  You make these people your friends for just a few moments and then you move on.  You survived in that moment.  You were charismatic for just enough time to get it all out.  And you listened to THEM, too.  Or did you?  I did this more times than I can count as an only child of bitterly divorced parents—because, before Junior High, I never attended the same grade school twice.  Disposable friends.  Hello and goodbye.  You hope your stories stay with that person whose name you’ll never remember a day or a week or a year later, but it doesn’t matter.   Maybe you hope they’ll forget, too.

But what if those five people you were in that room with saw you the next day and talked to you?  What if they had really listened to what you said and were moved by it and wanted to be your friend?  What would you say?  What would you do?  Would you walk on by?

Who knew these secrets?  What lonely, tortured, insane, talented person could possibly know?

The Man’s name was John Hughes.

Like Michael Jackson, he defined the eighties.

After The Breakfast Club, I watched every damn thing I could see with his name on it.  And even the really silly stuff—such as Sixteen Candles, which John held open contempt for at the time because if its more cartoony quality compared to the reality of TBC, the film he’d really invested the lifeblood of his creative spirit in—contained a certain sensitivity and transcendent optimism that could only belong to the same man. Who could forget the music, the happiness, the dumbass jokes and the warm, familiar, everyday-on-HBO comfort of Sixteen Candles?  Even the bad guys were redeemed in the end.  Making these films was not easy for John.  He’d struggled to push TBC through and had compromised Sixteen Candles to the point of its ultimate silliness in the trade off.  Most every film he was involved in as a writer—and there were a ..LOT..—ended up taken from him and rewritten by insecure actors and overbearing directors.  (I would learn this lesson the hard way myself in my professional career.)  This led him from Pretty In Pink to Some Kind Of Wonderful.   And to Weird Science and the other classics . . . and then his own empire with the Home Alone films.

And then out of Hollywood, with his kids in tow, so that they wouldn’t grow up in a town of such compromised ideals.

Few are so lucky in this life that they get to even think about making such choices.  Few have given entire generations so many hours—in fact, lifetimes—of joy and insight into their own lives and escapism in the grandest gee-whiz tradition.  Only ONE MAN was able to sum up the Condition Of Youth in THE most important pop culture teen movie of the 1980s.  In fact, John Hughes may have been more important to the eighties than damn-near everyone working in that decade.  He defined the age.  He spoke to us.  The children who were spit on as they tried to change their worlds.  Who were quite aware of what they were going through.

Does it say something sad . . . something very sad . . . about the current, neo-fascist state of the world we live in that one of our great orators left the business he was in because it was evil?  Because it was poisoning his children?

Umm . . . yeah.  It does.

This has been a sad summer.  When Michael Jackson died, I was stunned.  But wasn’t his death inevitable?  Hadn’t he gone down a bad road a long time ago?  He was a man crying out to done with, I think—he might have even been a monster, we’ll probably never know the truth.  I think we were prepared for him to go, in a way.  Not that anyone would have really been ready to hear that the Peter Pan of the eighties, who re-defined generations himself in many different disguises, was gone forever.  But this is also a time in which we watch heroes like Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker degenerate into lifeless caricatures, sold up the river by their own creators.  We see beloved comic book heroes whose four-color stories are intelligent and complex, dumbed down and made into action movie no-brainers like X-MEN and WOLVERINE and THE INCREDIBLE HULK. And perhaps worst of all, the remakes.  It’s like somebody somewhere sold the eighties to the highest bidder.  And those awesome works of art that defined our lives—I mean the lives of MY GENERATION—are casually re-created without half the style, vision or spirit, as if the originals are hundred-year old fossils that no longer inspire anyone.  Forget art.  In fact, forget even popular art.  Show me the money.  We’ve speed-evolved into a sort of anti-culture that doesn’t really exist.  We make new friends on virtual neighborhood websites like this one.  We text message our old friends in the middle of real conversations.   It’s all about the newfangled futuristic techno age, run by cynical, oh-so-cool twenty something go-getters who think it’s hipper than hell to shit on the past and on anybody who dares honor it.  This may seem cynical in itself to some of you . . . but when I look around and see how few heroes are still left, and how many others have left us forever . . . I realize that there WAS a time when human interaction counted for something.  A time when we talked to each other in a room.  When we bore our souls, face to face, and not on Facebook.   It’s never been easy to challenge the status quo in any time—the age of contention is always the most current, if you ask the guy living in it—but these days are really starting to scare me.  Badly.

No, I didn’t cry when Michael Jackson died.   But I’m crying now.   For the oceans of time I have left behind.  For the ages that are lost.  For the future, which seems bought and paid for . . . and so very unhappy without things like The Breakfast Club.  For John.  Who understood us.  Who may have understood everything. 

But remember . . . The Breakfast Club never forgets its own.  We will never forget.  I will never forget.

Don’t you forget.

STEPHEN

Read this.  It is amazing:

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

I called my buddy Tim today to talk some business stuff, and the second his voice hit the phone I could tell there was something amiss.  He wasted no breath telling me that his wife’s brother was killed in a motorcycle accident a few days ago.  Those of you who know me well enough to know that I can completely empathize with such a sudden, senseless tragedy also know that when it hits this close to home, it hits even harder.  I never knew Stevhan.  I’ve never really even met Missy.  But I know Tim quite well---he’s become one of my great friends this past year during the making of SHOCK FESTIVAL---and I have to tellya, this is a tragedy that brings real tears to my eyes and makes my heart heavy.  To Tim and to Missy, my best love and condolences.  To Stevhan, my best Jedi wishes.  Because you are not really gone . . . so long as we remember you.  And remember you, we shall.

Stevhan Gobble was a great human being, a rock and roller, and the face of John Constantine in the bargain.  The Tim to which I refer is indeed Tim Bradstreet, and it a testament to the man’s sense of family that Stevhan was the model for his classic HELLBLAZER covers.  Those among you who are HB fans or Tim fans, head over to the memorial page at Facebook and pay your respects:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/album.php?aid=2022376&id=1005663335&ref=mf

It means a lot to Missy and Tim.

As for me . . . I’m lighting a candle tonight, so that the legend and the memory never dies.  You have joined with the Force, Stevhan, and will always be with us.

STEPHEN

Mother’s day again . . . and always something there to remind me.  The new STAR TREK flick is something really grand, ingenious and entertaining . . . but the surprise, as I mourn and celebrate my mom, is that the central theme of the film revolves around losing one’s family, and seeing your mother perish right before your horrified eyes.  Then, later, you lose your mind as everyone around you backs away slowly, your enemies conspire, and your girlfriend has no idea what to do for you.  This is Spock's character arc in the film---and it blows me away that the film is so insightful.  One of the most amazing scenes is when Kirk is forced to needle Spock about the loss of his mom until the anger that even a pure Vulcan must feel in the face of losing everything boils to the surface and emerges as something primal, something raw, something that destroys even the most noble of us.  I am sharing this with all of you on Mother’s Day, after seeing the film again in honor of my dear, lost LeAnne, who was taken from me suddenly, without warning, on the eve of my greatest achievement as a professional artist.  She will never see the film I made.  She will never see the books I’ve written.  She will never see the paintings I’ve painted.  And even now, four years later, it is the passion that stirs my Vulcan blood like nothing else I have ever known.  I’m no Trekkie or Trekker or whatever the hell those nimrods call themselves, but when something cosmic and ironic like this happens---something deeply profound that speaks directly to me and to all of you out there who share a similar dispair---it’s enough to make you believe in something like God for a few seconds.

It’s also enough to make you believe in something better.  Something good.  Something that exists to bind our souls in the darkest hours, and in the moment of greatest triumph.

Happy Mother’s Day, all.

This is the first one I’ve had in four years that I didn’t feel like crying through.

And that’s important.

May the Force be with you.

STEPHEN

An old friend of mine died three days ago.  I was only made aware of it tonight.  His name was Rocky Hill.  He was an amazing blues guitarist and an incredible, bizarre, fascinating person.  He also happens to be the brother of DUSTY Hill---yeah, THAT Dusty Hill, bass guitarist of ZZ TOP.  See, I grew up in Texas. Lyle Lovett and Al Rienert (director of FOR ALL MANKIND and writer of APOLLO 13) used to crash on my dad’s couches.  My dad was a blues cat in the seventies and eighties and knew EVERYONE.  My MOM use to sell weed to The Fabulous Thunderbirds.  Rocky was this incredible, gifted, audacious motherfucker who could take a guitar in his hand and make you weep.  With the blues.  He was that good.  He had been pretty much shafted in his early career and was playing the nightclub scene in Houston when I was a kid, alongside my dad, who was often his bass player or second guitarist.  I was just an eight-year old child living through a bizarre upbringing at the time . . . Luciana Williams, before she became famous, used to be my babysitter . . .we lived in Houston, Texas.  By the way am 39, not 27 . . .

. . .  but back to Rocky.  He was (is) Dusty’s brother.  There are many rumors and speculations as to what really happened to his career when ZZ TOP finally took off in the 80s, and I know the real answers behind all of them . . . but will not bring that here, because what is important now is the MAN, and . . . for me . . .  THE MAN is this memory I have about him . . .

 . . . I remember, in 1982, when I was 12 years old, our documentary filmmaker friend Paul Yeager, who worked a lot for Public Television Network, was doing a documentary entitled “Something Of Of Nothing,” an interesting thing about an a “crazy redneck” out in the woods making art . . . and he wanted Rocky to come and do the score for it.  So Paul called on my dad.  He did this because my dad is gentle and nice and good and also was quite “plugged into the scene” back then, and was imamate with Rocky in so many ways that so many people could never imagine.  And Paul said “I want Rocky to compose my score” . . . or something like that.  And so, what ended up happening was that my dad called up Rocky on a lazy Sunday, and he said “hey let’s go jam.” And so they did.  Rocky showed up at this television studio, where Paul was finishing his documentary . . . and there was this piecemeal “living room” set constructed on the soundstage---three walls made to look like shelves of books, easy-chairs,  coffee tables, wherever---and Rocky broke out his steel guitar, my father joined him with his bass, and they just laid down some INCREDIBLE blues music, just off the tops of their heads, just improvising, acting on instinct, doing whatever . . . and it was fucking incredible.  I just sat there---this naive little 12 year old kid, who had seen so much before and would go on to see so much else again---and I watched these guys just JAM.  In a “living room” on a studio floor that had been made previously for a talk show or something.  I remember thinking at the time that it was a “synthetic living room jam.”  Of course, I had seen MANY living room jams before.  Real living room jams.  But this one was totally unique.  Not because it wasn’t a real living room . . .

. . . but because Rocky came in there with spirit and energy and SOUL, and layed it the FUCK DOWN.  It was incredible.  He controlled the session.  One word shouted could change the entire vibe.  One glance over at my father would create something beyond anything else in the last five minutes.  It’s something I will never in a billion years forget.  That amazing man just put his head into the blues and stared off into space and he made it HAPPEN.

He made it happen.

Now . . . he is gone.

This is my best memory of you, Rocky.  Leading that “synthetic living room jam.”  All the years in the clubs, all the bad shit you had to deal with . . . all the fortunes won and lost . . . it doesn’t matter now.  I remember you for what you really were.  A master musician.  An amazing, raging, difficult, beautiful, awesome personality . . . I remember how kind you were to me . . .

 . . . and I love you.

Goodbye, Rocky.

And my condolences to you, too, Dusty.

My heart is with you both.

STEPHEN

I forgot my mom’s birthday last week.  I woke up yesterday and suddenly it hit me.  And I cried nearly all day, not just because I’m a bad son, but because she’s dead.  Nobody really understands this kind of pain unless it happens to them—and some people don’t even allow themselves to understand, even if it does happen to them.  Maybe I should be more like them.  Maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much.  Maybe.

            It’s really a bottomless thing, when you lose your mom and then forget her birthday four years later, when you realize you’re so wrapped up in your own personal bullshit—that you’re in so much pain from so many other things—that you’ve unwittingly turned your back on The Thing Which Is Most Important.  Ask my friend Joe.  Ask my friend Noah.  They’ll tell you about how it never goes away.  They’ll tell you about watching your sister die slowly.  They’ll tell you about crying real tears over your father’s grave with Jumpin’ Jack Flash blaring over the stereo, because that’s what he would have wanted.  They’ll tell you all of it.

            My mom was killed four years ago.

            That’s all you need to know.

            And I forgot her birthday.

            Yesterday I was in so much pain I couldn’t see straight.  I couldn’t function.  So I decided not to function.  I decided to purchase a large amount of vodka and pulverize my brain until I couldn’t feel anything anymore.  Hey, it’s what Americans do, right?

            There are two liquor stores pretty much equidistant from my house.  One is on the main drag of Guadalupe, a major hot spot of Austin, where the collage is located and all the kids hang out.  There’s Toy Joy, a cool hippie kids store with lotza cool junk for adults, too.  Amy’s Ice Cream, a cool hippie ice cream shop where I used to work a billion years ago.  Vulcan video, a cool hippie . . . okay, you get the idea.  I wanted to walk in that direction because I thought the lights and the noise and the company of other people might be comforting, even if they were total strangers.  Continental Liquors is a good walk, but its right across the street from Vulcan and Toy Joy.  Maybe I’d drop in at Vulcan.  Some of my friends still work there.  My car is illegal right now, so driving is kinda out of the question these days.

            My walk was, at first, uneventful.  I tried to put my mind in other, less dark places.  I daydreamed about a movie I always wanted to make as a child called THE UNDERGROUND TOXIC WASTE MUTANTS.  But that just ended up reminding me of my mom again.  I was on the main drag now, the late afternoon traffic a roar like a beast, all around me.  It was the only sound in the world.  I was coming closer to an intersecting side street called 33^rd, where I spent the first two years of my life living with mom after she divorced my father.  It was a big hippie house with a garden in back.  It was bulldozed years ago and turned into an apartment building.  The only thing left to remind me of those two years is an ancient, decorative clock right there on the corner.  It’s been there for forty years.  It’s all that’s left of my childhood.  All that’s left of Her.

            I was starting to cry again.

            But then . . .

            She was short and waifish, bright blonde hair.  Though she was hiding her face, I could tell she was very young, very pretty.  She could have been just sixteen.  But good looks and height can fool you sometimes. She was certainly one of the kids from the college.  She wore nothing but an oversized white T-shirt and was soaked in water, no shoes on.  She had no purse, no backpack, no anything.  She was cut loose and drifting.  She almost bumped into me as we came to the intersection together.  I was dazed for a moment, snapped out of my self-pity trance, tried to get my bearings on what was going on—I couldn’t quite tell yet, because I hadn’t seen her face all that clearly, but there was a live-wire of intensity crackling before me.  Something really bad had just happened to this girl. 

I looked over and saw that a very slick 4x4 pickup trick was cruising alongside the girl and two very rich looking jock types were smiling and laughing as they rolled up the window.  Then they turned onto Guadalupe and took off.  Were they leaving her there, all wet?  Was one of them her boyfriend?  A fight?  I was still dazed.

            She crossed the intersecting street and I caught up with her in the parking lot of Thundercloud Subs, just as she was about to make a try through traffic to get to the other side of the Drag.  It was then that I realized she was crying.  I mean, really, really crying.  Shivering.  Shaking.  Shattered. I hadn’t noticed before because her back had been to me, and she was hiding her face mostly in the collar of her soaked oversized shirt.  In that moment, I wanted to help her as I’ve wanted to help no one else in my life.   Less than a block from where I first became a child.  This poor, broken little girl.

            “Are you okay?”

            I didn’t expect her to answer, and it was a dumb question, but who knows what anyone is supposed to say in situations like this.  She only cried into her shirt.

            “Did somebody hurt you?”

            That got a response I didn’t expect.  She turned to me and nodded her head yes.  In that moment I could tell she wanted to be helped, as she had never wanted to be helped in her life.

            “Can I do something?  Should I call the police?”

            She shook her head no.

            I sized her up quickly, looking for bruises, blood, any signs of damage.  There were none at all.  She could have been raped.  She was so tiny that those two jocks in the truck could have easily held her down without leaving many marks, depending on what kind of a fight she put up.  Then I noticed she was only partially soaked in water.  The soak stopped just above her waist.  Yet her feet and legs were dripping wet. She was wearing nothing but panties under the shirt.  Had someone dumped a cooler on her?  Was I seeing too much here?  She might’ve just been a bratty child at the ass end of a terrible fight with her friends.  Everyone gets real emotional when the world ends in little pieces.  Everyone becomes the center of everything.  No matter how bad or how not bad it gets.  Were all brats who want to be paid attention to.

            “I want to help you.  Let me help you.”

            She didn’t reply.  She looked out at the busy street of Guadalupe, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw herself in front of a bus that was roaring along in traffic.  Her bare, wet feet were just a half-inch from the tarmac.

            “Hey, be careful!”

            She would have been crushed instantly.  I had a mental image of watching her frail little body disintegrate in a spray of angel dust, like a piñata bursting in Heaven.

            “Come out of the street, okay?  Please.  Come over and talk to me.”

            Reluctantly, she backed away and took a couple of steps towards me. She never said a word.  She only cried.

            I pointed toward the Thundercloud Subs, which has a patio with tables and chairs.

            “Let’s go over there and sit down. I want to know what’s wrong, okay?  Everyone will see us talking.  You’ll be safe, okay?”

            She shook her head no.

            I took a mental picture of myself:  my usual, short, bespectacled, bearded bohemian dude.  Certainly not the picture of a pervo or anything, so I tried again:

            “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you.  I want to help you.  I think you need to sit down.  I’ll buy you a soda.”

            She shook her head no.

            “If somebody hurt you, you need to tell someone about it.  If you need some money to get somewhere, I’ll try to help.  You don’t even know my name.  We’ll keep it that way.  I won’t ask yours.  Please.  Let me help.”

            Then my heart sunk.  I suddenly felt as if the eyes of a million angry frat slobs and jealous boyfriends were on me.  What the fuck was I getting myself into here?  At any minute that 4x4 could pull up again and my face would be pulverized by a tire iron.  Hey, that’s what Americans do, right?

            But, through my sudden panic, I still said to her:

            “Please let me help you.”

            The traffic around us was a roar like a beast.  It was the only other sound between us.

            She stood there and looked at me, crying, for a very long time.

            She was a very, very beautiful girl.

            Her face was shattered, but she was still a very beautiful girl.

            I turned away from her and walked on, looking back a lot.  I suspected every single man and woman I passed in my walk of doing something awful to her.  One of them was an older guy with a small cooler under his arm.  Did he soak her?  Did he rape her?  The 4x4 passed along a side street once, directly in front of me.  I looked back and saw her, still standing there.  And I smiled.

            “Take care of yourself.”

            Two blocks away, I bought my bottle of vodka as quickly as I could, and I walked home exactly the way I had come.  I was hoping she’d still be there. But of course she was gone.  I’ll never know her name.  I’ll never hear her voice.  I’ll never know what really happened to her.  A part of me will hate myself forever for leaving her behind me, for not trying harder.  A part of me will rejoice forever for having met her, in her darkest hour.  I hope that wherever she went, it wasn’t into that 4x4.  I hope it was into the arms of her friends or her mother and father.  I hope she has a wonderful, charmed life, because she deserves it.  We all deserve it.  Don’t we?

            I drank myself sick until I passed out at six in the morning.  I slept it off until five in the afternoon.  Then I got up and wrote all this down.

            Happy birthday, mom.

For
Her

I just got to see one of my oldest, bestest buddies, T. Lynn Mikeska in her “big screen debut” tonight at the South By Southwest film fest.  It’s a cute, funny indie comedy “thriller” in which she co-stars with Heather Graham!  I could not be more proud of our little Lynn, who has come through so much to be here . . . and the film is made by real rebels, whom she is lucky to know and collaborate with.  Shot on a wing and a prayer, written and produced by a smart gal named Suzanne Weinert and directed by a great, talented guy named John Inwood, who have both paid some SERIOUS dues in the film world, EXTERMINATORS is great looking and light enough to be family entertainment . . . and just hard enough to be “subversive," whatever the hell that means.  It's a "chick flick" with a little BITE, you know?  I laughed a lot.  Lynn is my hero!   I liked the part where some asswipe in a bar tries to grab her ass . . . then one of our "heroes" avenges her by setting the guy ON FIRE when nobody's looking.  Not sure when this movie is ever gonna be seen officially in a theater or on a DVD shelf  . . . (ahh, the privileges of SXSW---even if you don’t have a fucking badge to get into these screenings) . . . but it’s pretty damn good . . . and made in Austin, too.  Which is also very cool.

We are all following our dreams . . . and it’s nights like tonight that make me feel ALL our dreams are right in our hands NOW.  My friend, Lynn, you rock!

STEPHEN