Steven Hunley
08-12-2013, 04:50 PM
Five Slides Scanned
by Steven Hunley
I’m taking five slides to be scanned. Wanna put ‘em on Facebook and all. Gotta digitalize the suckers. They’ll give me unquestionable cache. I need cache. So I’m on the bus to Torrance.
A Samoan grandfather sits near the front. He’s got two metallic purple helium balloons three feet across, caught between his legs, that say Happy Birthday Princess, shaped like pointed stars. He’s got a dark face, coconut brown eyes and white pearly teeth, and enough aplomb to handle two metallic purple gift bags with twine handles that read Happy Birthday to You in polka-dots.
Pedestaled on the next seat is a chocolate girl with hair somewhere between coil springs of a Ram-tough truck and a delicate ball-point pen. She tucks those unruly springs under a red, yellow and green knit hat. A white head-phone cord is draped across her Nefertiti neck like Matilde’s pearl necklace draped by Maupassant.
The first slide is pretty old. Hell, all the slides are pretty old. This one is of me crouched down on a rock. I’m wearing blue jeans and my hair is almost to my shoulders. Oh Jeez, look at that. It’s a wonder I didn’t get busted sooner. Way beneath me, and I mean over a thousand feet below, is Machu Picchu. I mean how many pictures have you seen like that? Everyone stays near the ruins themselves, taking pictures of the llamas calmly grazing on the grass. Not me, I went for the gusto. That’s one of my problems; I always go for the gusto, and it always gets me in trouble.
So me and this dude decide that Huayna Picchu, that peak that overlooks the ruins, will have the view. We got time and we got the energy, since we were chewing wads of coca all day. Think we know what we’re doing. Think we’re Goddam Incas. Figure we can get a good shot of the ruins, as we put to each other, while pointing upward into the mist,
“From up there.”
It looks a bit like a climb so I leave Kristina back at the hotel. Onward and upward we tramp. Sometimes there’s a wire strung between iron pegs set in the rock. Sometimes the footholds are only eight inch slots in the rock face and it’s been raining all day and they’re slippery. Sometimes the wire you hold onto is broke and one end is attached to Shakespeare’s thin air. Only problem is we can’t see the ruins from half-way up. The trail winds around and now we’re on the wrong side of the mountain. All we can see is the Urubamba stained with red soil snaking its way through the valley on its way to the Amazon. By the time we get to the top it’s two hours later. We take each other’s picture and by the time we get back down its four hours later than that.
Kristina is sitting at one of those outdoor tables near the hotel. Her eyes are full of tears. Figured I was lost on the mountain and all. As bad as I feel I also feel wanted, and that warms my heart, needy bastard that I am. I’m as needy today as I was back when I was twenty-three. That’s me, Old Mister Needy of Long Beach, formerly Young Mister Needy of San Diego.
Various people in various attitudes concentrate on their electronic devices while others look out the windows. Indescribable commercial buildings glide past like rectangular glass ducks on a cement pond. Didn’t the Beverly Hillbillies have a cement pond? I should go to Beverly Hills and find out.
The second slide is of Mahmood. He’s brindle as can be and he’s sitting on the corner of Landis Street and Texas Street in north park. It’s his late-afternoon walk around the block, and the sunlight is very gold-toned. He was the most magnificent Afghan I’d ever known outside of Surib Khan and Gunga Din. And one thing I might relay to you dog owners, Afghans have a sense of humor. They don’t do tricks. But if you’ve got a sense of humor they’re the dog for you. He’s sitting beside yellowest fire plug you’ve ever seen, and he’s smiling.
I knew The Mood well. He’s content. I was at the time too. I got a house, I got a Triumph GT6MK3 parked on the curb. I listen to the Who and I got blue eyes. I got the woman and I got the bag. In other words, I’m living the sleaze and enjoying it. Mahmood is skinny and has long hair. I’m skinny and have long hair. He was a sight hound, I was a sight hound. We both showed great regard for the beauty of the other sex of our same species. Me human, him doggie. I would say human-style, but what you guessed would follow would only stir your puerile interests, since good readers are good at making predictions.
Everybody will befriend me on Facebook. I’ll post the picture next week. I wanna be famous like everybody else and live forever on Facebook reruns. I wanna be god-damn archived. I want the entire world of Facebook to be my friend on Facebook. Say it three time and you own it.
Facebook Facebook Facebook. Now I own Facebook. Say it too; we’ll both be part-owners. Facebook today, Twitter tomorrow, that’s my plan.
The street is so pot-holed in Gardena my handwriting resembles Somerset Maugham’s or Alan Silitoe’s when they suffered with malaria, or a kindergartener that only knows how to scribble.
Handsome college student get on outside school and plops down ceremoniously on the front seat, reclining like a coal Adonis. A Mexican lady with a red baseball cap has a scarf around her lower face like the Frito Bandito, and keeps her stash of chips in a pink backpack with peace signs printed all over it.
Blue Line Station. People get on, people get off, or the other way around, if they don’t want to make trouble. Next door, the Crystal Casino is badly deteriorated on the side that faces the sun; one half of the façade is missing. Maybe gambling doesn’t pay as much as it used to, or the face of the casino can’t face the light of day.
A tall athletic black girl with golden braids get on wearing Adidas tennis, and Adidas socks an Adidas shirt and an Adidas backpack. She so tall and stately we’ll call the Goddess Adidas. OMG her custom phone cover is showing that distinctive curve too.
A fire engine wizzes by with screaming red lights and flashing alarms on and off. A red-haired woman stalls the driver while looking for change in her purse while balancing it on her knee.
The third slide is of the trio from Mozambique. They’re getting ready to leave. The room is in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, it’s bare, with the exception of a light bulb hanging on a wire and three mattresses on the floor. The two guys are skinny as Popsicle sticks but the girl, well the girl; the girl is pure Portuguese poetry. Short curly hair and well endowed. She’s wearing a tight t-shirt with Snoopy on top of his doghouse. I’ve never seen Charles Schultz’s creations more endearing. They came up with the plane fare by selling an elephant’s tusk they ‘borrowed’ from an uncle that ran a game preserve and went straight to Brazil, afraid of being drafted in the army and forced to fight rebels. Now they were hoofing it to Peru and then up the coast. They had an anaconda skin for sale, rolled up like a sleeping bag. But they couldn’t get rid of it, either because there were plenty of snake skins in the Amazon already, or because some idiot dyed it red.
The kid across from me has an abbreviated beard and sunglasses, a black shirt with THE EVIL DEAD printed on the front and a black backpack. The shirt front also has a yellow-headed guy, what’s his name? No, no, not the Flintstones. No, no, not the Jetsons. DUH! The Simpsons. What’s his name? No, not Bart. What the hell? HOMER, that’s it, Homer Simpson.
Now approaching west one hundred and ninetieth street. LA is too big. We got too many people and too many streets. I knew when we moved up here we were in trouble. Our address was 15319 South White Street. I noticed the second we moved in the address had too many numbers. My wife picked out the place because it was nearer her connections. Google it if you don’t believe me. Do the map thing where they show you where all the murders have been committed. Compton has aspirations, it’s growing! Yes it is! It wants to be King of the Drug and Thug World.
Sketcher’s Footwear Outlet. Herbalife. Shell station. Pedestrian crossing. Bicycles. Traffic.
A couple gets on at the college. His hair is punked and he’s wearing a Levi’s vest, a navy-blue shirt with a yellow bow tie. His book bag is pinned with a thousand round signs that say things, none of which you can read from here. His tennies are blue-jean color with electric yellow laces. This guy badly needs attention. His girlfriend is wearing light purple Vans, light purple fingernails and a smile. They’re both laughing and touching their noses and looking at their phones as if it was an amusing third person in their intimate conversation. Maybe it is.
When she finally put her phone back into her black-knitted purse she holds her hands awkwardly as if she doesn’t know what to do with her thumbs.
One seat back from her looks like Nichole, my daughter. She’s astute, nothing gets by her. She must be a good girl. Nichole is a good girl and looks just like her. Therefore I must judge good girls on looks, not deeds, and certainly not what’s going on in their heads. Especially when they hold their cell-phones between their hands delicately, and rest them on their laps like gilt-edged books of common prayer bound in red Moroccan leather. Makes them seem demure. Met a girl on line once, had the same pose, all demure-like.
Boy was I mistaken. She was totally untamed. So much for appearance versus reality.
Ah, the Easter-island shot from seventy-four is the next to the last shot. It’s the five Maoi’s just below Hangaroa. Because one statue is still toppled over, Kristina is standing on the base; the body lays face-down in the grass just beside it. The statues are brown, grey, and black, made of volcanic amalgam. The grass is green, and the sky, extreme island azure. I haven’t seen this slide in years. That was one of the points of the trip, to allow us some time away from everything to try to get back together, away from the hangers-on and our past indiscretions. For five statues you’ve got the picture everybody and his brother has. I have them in the frame, but nearest element to the lens is her, a classic California girl of twenty-seven. Her mother was Greek and her father was Polish.
So you have a woman posing defiantly, with classic Greek features and blond hair. She’s the north and the south, the yin and the yang. She knows the other Moais are impressive, yet she stands next to them as their equal. She has on a brilliant scarf to accent her hair and a bright multi-colored top. She’s confident and used to the camera. All the other statues face inland while she gazes out to sea with her back to them. Like one of Thomas Hardy’s tragic women, she’s defies tradition. I would have never guessed she’d be gone in less than a month, victim of a dramatic accident ending in self-cremation.
I’d gained twenty-eight years before my heart broke down. No way to turn back now.
Twenty seven years her flame lasted, she didn’t even make thirty. Her brilliant blond hair and her smile were always the brightest things in my picture. Slides get old, digital files get misplaced, forgotten, lost, but memory never fades, not mine anyway.
You know it’s funny. You have a person, a living entity that smells and feels, laughs and cries, lives and breathes, and snuggles up next to you on cold winter nights. Then one day they’re gone and you’re left grasping a faded photograph with an Egyptian house-of-the-dead chill to look forward to. Heaven better be good, mighty good to my way of thinking, with all the trouble we have getting to it.
Off gets the Goddess Adidas.
Toothache extraction 49$. RR Crossing. Salvadorian food. Car Wash. Mobil station. Jack in the Box. Ochoa’s Tires and Wheels. C&S Donuts.
Then, somewhere between one hundred and fortieth and one hundred and forty-fifth I have what they call in literature class, an epiphany.
I occurs to me that I no longer have the fashionable dog. I occurs to me I no longer have the house, the bag, or the woman. The GT6 mk3 is somewhere in San Diego torn to pieces for parts. I’m riding the bus. It occurs to me I’m on the bottom rung of the ladder again.
I have a moment of despondence and despair somewhere between 145th street and 150th street. It passes like a cloud shadow over the bus, plunging my psyche into hopeless oblivion. It’s time to take an accurate stock of myself. Where are the bean-counters when you need them?
Nowhere, it turns out, because they’re not needed. I get that impression on 151st.
I figure the dog was a good friend, and I’ll miss him like crazy. Then I figure the house is history too. The drugs I don’t miss, in fact there’s not one on the list that can tempt me for the simple reason I’ve already done them all and am familiar with all of their tricks. Then I was green and now I’m ripe. The woman however is another matter. No one can replace her and no one ever will. It’s a case of a first love not being replaceable. But that’s ancient history too. Women, each being unique, are precious and therefore irreplaceable.
But it is still possible to strive and connect. Someone articulate and loving, someone with a kind soul, someone with a heart that’s tailored true. That’s in my future, that woman is out there just a heart-beat away. She’s the one the slides are for; she’s the one who’s accessible on the internet. The slides are only the glittering dangling bait, the attention getter, while I am the catch. Me, the most interesting man on the planet, is the catch. If you think it’s the man on TV who drinks Dos Equis you’re mistaken. I taught him everything he knows.
Besides, I still listen to the Who and I’m still behind blue eyes.
The last slide was the easiest to notice because it wasn’t a slide at all, it was a negative. It was a single figure, a Bird-man or Tangata Manu. And this was the sharpest hook of all. You take something everyone is familiar with and show it to them in a different way. You make the familiar not just unfamiliar, but exotic. I’d seen Easter Island in the mid-seventies. It’s so remote and impoverished the statues or Maois are not lit at night. They just didn’t have the facilities.
But I wanted a night shot, and decided to light one myself. I put the camera on a tripod one night, aimed at the lone statue. It’s the only one with the traditional red-head piece on top, the way they all used to look before the islanders toppled them over to break their mana or magic.
I don’t have a lot of equipment and there are no klieg lights to be found. No that that would matter, since there’s no electricity either. You open the lens and paint with light, lighting on side with one burst of flash, and then run to the other side and give it two bursts of light for portrait modeling. Believe it or not, some are women statues but this one is a man. The effect is almost hypnotic. And why not, it’s all part of the elaborate plan.
Steven needs a vacation. Steven needs to get out of Dodge. He needs to get an assistant and do a big project. Do I mean on La Isla de Pascua, Easter Island? No, not big enough, not grand enough, not conceptual enough. The original Idiot Boy wants to light Machu Picchu at night.
Figures it will make him famous. Figures it will be as controversial as all get-out. Decides that after this picture hits the internet, people will say it’s been Photo-shopped. I mean, there’s the ruins and the stonework and it’s in crazy colors. How can that be? No way on earth it was taken that way.
Yes way.
They don’t know me. I’m the most interesting man on the face of the globe. In this one act I solve all my problems. I get money, notoriety, and a woman all in one fell swoop, whatever a fell swoop is. I get a new woman because she’s the new assistant. I need one to help me do the Inca walls, they’re long! We can color them any combination we want by tinting the flash with colored gels. Will the colors overlap and produce mixed colors? Maybe. I have to test it out Stateside first. Will the girl in Lawrence Torn Up regret she kicked him to the curb? You bettcha, because living well is the best revenge outside of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Do I get to write a best-seller “How I did it” book and have it hit the top of the charts?
Oh, please do.
In fact, when I look back on these words I come to the conclusion I already started.
Approaching Artesia and Paramount. Stop Requested. Please leave by the rear exit.
It’s time to get off and deliver the goods. They said on the phone they’d be done in ten days.
There’s a cliché I could use, but you know how I feel about clichés. Use them if humanly possible.
I can’t wait.
©Steven Hunley 2013
http://youtu.be/MmDBvrON5-A Behind Blue Eyes
by Steven Hunley
I’m taking five slides to be scanned. Wanna put ‘em on Facebook and all. Gotta digitalize the suckers. They’ll give me unquestionable cache. I need cache. So I’m on the bus to Torrance.
A Samoan grandfather sits near the front. He’s got two metallic purple helium balloons three feet across, caught between his legs, that say Happy Birthday Princess, shaped like pointed stars. He’s got a dark face, coconut brown eyes and white pearly teeth, and enough aplomb to handle two metallic purple gift bags with twine handles that read Happy Birthday to You in polka-dots.
Pedestaled on the next seat is a chocolate girl with hair somewhere between coil springs of a Ram-tough truck and a delicate ball-point pen. She tucks those unruly springs under a red, yellow and green knit hat. A white head-phone cord is draped across her Nefertiti neck like Matilde’s pearl necklace draped by Maupassant.
The first slide is pretty old. Hell, all the slides are pretty old. This one is of me crouched down on a rock. I’m wearing blue jeans and my hair is almost to my shoulders. Oh Jeez, look at that. It’s a wonder I didn’t get busted sooner. Way beneath me, and I mean over a thousand feet below, is Machu Picchu. I mean how many pictures have you seen like that? Everyone stays near the ruins themselves, taking pictures of the llamas calmly grazing on the grass. Not me, I went for the gusto. That’s one of my problems; I always go for the gusto, and it always gets me in trouble.
So me and this dude decide that Huayna Picchu, that peak that overlooks the ruins, will have the view. We got time and we got the energy, since we were chewing wads of coca all day. Think we know what we’re doing. Think we’re Goddam Incas. Figure we can get a good shot of the ruins, as we put to each other, while pointing upward into the mist,
“From up there.”
It looks a bit like a climb so I leave Kristina back at the hotel. Onward and upward we tramp. Sometimes there’s a wire strung between iron pegs set in the rock. Sometimes the footholds are only eight inch slots in the rock face and it’s been raining all day and they’re slippery. Sometimes the wire you hold onto is broke and one end is attached to Shakespeare’s thin air. Only problem is we can’t see the ruins from half-way up. The trail winds around and now we’re on the wrong side of the mountain. All we can see is the Urubamba stained with red soil snaking its way through the valley on its way to the Amazon. By the time we get to the top it’s two hours later. We take each other’s picture and by the time we get back down its four hours later than that.
Kristina is sitting at one of those outdoor tables near the hotel. Her eyes are full of tears. Figured I was lost on the mountain and all. As bad as I feel I also feel wanted, and that warms my heart, needy bastard that I am. I’m as needy today as I was back when I was twenty-three. That’s me, Old Mister Needy of Long Beach, formerly Young Mister Needy of San Diego.
Various people in various attitudes concentrate on their electronic devices while others look out the windows. Indescribable commercial buildings glide past like rectangular glass ducks on a cement pond. Didn’t the Beverly Hillbillies have a cement pond? I should go to Beverly Hills and find out.
The second slide is of Mahmood. He’s brindle as can be and he’s sitting on the corner of Landis Street and Texas Street in north park. It’s his late-afternoon walk around the block, and the sunlight is very gold-toned. He was the most magnificent Afghan I’d ever known outside of Surib Khan and Gunga Din. And one thing I might relay to you dog owners, Afghans have a sense of humor. They don’t do tricks. But if you’ve got a sense of humor they’re the dog for you. He’s sitting beside yellowest fire plug you’ve ever seen, and he’s smiling.
I knew The Mood well. He’s content. I was at the time too. I got a house, I got a Triumph GT6MK3 parked on the curb. I listen to the Who and I got blue eyes. I got the woman and I got the bag. In other words, I’m living the sleaze and enjoying it. Mahmood is skinny and has long hair. I’m skinny and have long hair. He was a sight hound, I was a sight hound. We both showed great regard for the beauty of the other sex of our same species. Me human, him doggie. I would say human-style, but what you guessed would follow would only stir your puerile interests, since good readers are good at making predictions.
Everybody will befriend me on Facebook. I’ll post the picture next week. I wanna be famous like everybody else and live forever on Facebook reruns. I wanna be god-damn archived. I want the entire world of Facebook to be my friend on Facebook. Say it three time and you own it.
Facebook Facebook Facebook. Now I own Facebook. Say it too; we’ll both be part-owners. Facebook today, Twitter tomorrow, that’s my plan.
The street is so pot-holed in Gardena my handwriting resembles Somerset Maugham’s or Alan Silitoe’s when they suffered with malaria, or a kindergartener that only knows how to scribble.
Handsome college student get on outside school and plops down ceremoniously on the front seat, reclining like a coal Adonis. A Mexican lady with a red baseball cap has a scarf around her lower face like the Frito Bandito, and keeps her stash of chips in a pink backpack with peace signs printed all over it.
Blue Line Station. People get on, people get off, or the other way around, if they don’t want to make trouble. Next door, the Crystal Casino is badly deteriorated on the side that faces the sun; one half of the façade is missing. Maybe gambling doesn’t pay as much as it used to, or the face of the casino can’t face the light of day.
A tall athletic black girl with golden braids get on wearing Adidas tennis, and Adidas socks an Adidas shirt and an Adidas backpack. She so tall and stately we’ll call the Goddess Adidas. OMG her custom phone cover is showing that distinctive curve too.
A fire engine wizzes by with screaming red lights and flashing alarms on and off. A red-haired woman stalls the driver while looking for change in her purse while balancing it on her knee.
The third slide is of the trio from Mozambique. They’re getting ready to leave. The room is in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, it’s bare, with the exception of a light bulb hanging on a wire and three mattresses on the floor. The two guys are skinny as Popsicle sticks but the girl, well the girl; the girl is pure Portuguese poetry. Short curly hair and well endowed. She’s wearing a tight t-shirt with Snoopy on top of his doghouse. I’ve never seen Charles Schultz’s creations more endearing. They came up with the plane fare by selling an elephant’s tusk they ‘borrowed’ from an uncle that ran a game preserve and went straight to Brazil, afraid of being drafted in the army and forced to fight rebels. Now they were hoofing it to Peru and then up the coast. They had an anaconda skin for sale, rolled up like a sleeping bag. But they couldn’t get rid of it, either because there were plenty of snake skins in the Amazon already, or because some idiot dyed it red.
The kid across from me has an abbreviated beard and sunglasses, a black shirt with THE EVIL DEAD printed on the front and a black backpack. The shirt front also has a yellow-headed guy, what’s his name? No, no, not the Flintstones. No, no, not the Jetsons. DUH! The Simpsons. What’s his name? No, not Bart. What the hell? HOMER, that’s it, Homer Simpson.
Now approaching west one hundred and ninetieth street. LA is too big. We got too many people and too many streets. I knew when we moved up here we were in trouble. Our address was 15319 South White Street. I noticed the second we moved in the address had too many numbers. My wife picked out the place because it was nearer her connections. Google it if you don’t believe me. Do the map thing where they show you where all the murders have been committed. Compton has aspirations, it’s growing! Yes it is! It wants to be King of the Drug and Thug World.
Sketcher’s Footwear Outlet. Herbalife. Shell station. Pedestrian crossing. Bicycles. Traffic.
A couple gets on at the college. His hair is punked and he’s wearing a Levi’s vest, a navy-blue shirt with a yellow bow tie. His book bag is pinned with a thousand round signs that say things, none of which you can read from here. His tennies are blue-jean color with electric yellow laces. This guy badly needs attention. His girlfriend is wearing light purple Vans, light purple fingernails and a smile. They’re both laughing and touching their noses and looking at their phones as if it was an amusing third person in their intimate conversation. Maybe it is.
When she finally put her phone back into her black-knitted purse she holds her hands awkwardly as if she doesn’t know what to do with her thumbs.
One seat back from her looks like Nichole, my daughter. She’s astute, nothing gets by her. She must be a good girl. Nichole is a good girl and looks just like her. Therefore I must judge good girls on looks, not deeds, and certainly not what’s going on in their heads. Especially when they hold their cell-phones between their hands delicately, and rest them on their laps like gilt-edged books of common prayer bound in red Moroccan leather. Makes them seem demure. Met a girl on line once, had the same pose, all demure-like.
Boy was I mistaken. She was totally untamed. So much for appearance versus reality.
Ah, the Easter-island shot from seventy-four is the next to the last shot. It’s the five Maoi’s just below Hangaroa. Because one statue is still toppled over, Kristina is standing on the base; the body lays face-down in the grass just beside it. The statues are brown, grey, and black, made of volcanic amalgam. The grass is green, and the sky, extreme island azure. I haven’t seen this slide in years. That was one of the points of the trip, to allow us some time away from everything to try to get back together, away from the hangers-on and our past indiscretions. For five statues you’ve got the picture everybody and his brother has. I have them in the frame, but nearest element to the lens is her, a classic California girl of twenty-seven. Her mother was Greek and her father was Polish.
So you have a woman posing defiantly, with classic Greek features and blond hair. She’s the north and the south, the yin and the yang. She knows the other Moais are impressive, yet she stands next to them as their equal. She has on a brilliant scarf to accent her hair and a bright multi-colored top. She’s confident and used to the camera. All the other statues face inland while she gazes out to sea with her back to them. Like one of Thomas Hardy’s tragic women, she’s defies tradition. I would have never guessed she’d be gone in less than a month, victim of a dramatic accident ending in self-cremation.
I’d gained twenty-eight years before my heart broke down. No way to turn back now.
Twenty seven years her flame lasted, she didn’t even make thirty. Her brilliant blond hair and her smile were always the brightest things in my picture. Slides get old, digital files get misplaced, forgotten, lost, but memory never fades, not mine anyway.
You know it’s funny. You have a person, a living entity that smells and feels, laughs and cries, lives and breathes, and snuggles up next to you on cold winter nights. Then one day they’re gone and you’re left grasping a faded photograph with an Egyptian house-of-the-dead chill to look forward to. Heaven better be good, mighty good to my way of thinking, with all the trouble we have getting to it.
Off gets the Goddess Adidas.
Toothache extraction 49$. RR Crossing. Salvadorian food. Car Wash. Mobil station. Jack in the Box. Ochoa’s Tires and Wheels. C&S Donuts.
Then, somewhere between one hundred and fortieth and one hundred and forty-fifth I have what they call in literature class, an epiphany.
I occurs to me that I no longer have the fashionable dog. I occurs to me I no longer have the house, the bag, or the woman. The GT6 mk3 is somewhere in San Diego torn to pieces for parts. I’m riding the bus. It occurs to me I’m on the bottom rung of the ladder again.
I have a moment of despondence and despair somewhere between 145th street and 150th street. It passes like a cloud shadow over the bus, plunging my psyche into hopeless oblivion. It’s time to take an accurate stock of myself. Where are the bean-counters when you need them?
Nowhere, it turns out, because they’re not needed. I get that impression on 151st.
I figure the dog was a good friend, and I’ll miss him like crazy. Then I figure the house is history too. The drugs I don’t miss, in fact there’s not one on the list that can tempt me for the simple reason I’ve already done them all and am familiar with all of their tricks. Then I was green and now I’m ripe. The woman however is another matter. No one can replace her and no one ever will. It’s a case of a first love not being replaceable. But that’s ancient history too. Women, each being unique, are precious and therefore irreplaceable.
But it is still possible to strive and connect. Someone articulate and loving, someone with a kind soul, someone with a heart that’s tailored true. That’s in my future, that woman is out there just a heart-beat away. She’s the one the slides are for; she’s the one who’s accessible on the internet. The slides are only the glittering dangling bait, the attention getter, while I am the catch. Me, the most interesting man on the planet, is the catch. If you think it’s the man on TV who drinks Dos Equis you’re mistaken. I taught him everything he knows.
Besides, I still listen to the Who and I’m still behind blue eyes.
The last slide was the easiest to notice because it wasn’t a slide at all, it was a negative. It was a single figure, a Bird-man or Tangata Manu. And this was the sharpest hook of all. You take something everyone is familiar with and show it to them in a different way. You make the familiar not just unfamiliar, but exotic. I’d seen Easter Island in the mid-seventies. It’s so remote and impoverished the statues or Maois are not lit at night. They just didn’t have the facilities.
But I wanted a night shot, and decided to light one myself. I put the camera on a tripod one night, aimed at the lone statue. It’s the only one with the traditional red-head piece on top, the way they all used to look before the islanders toppled them over to break their mana or magic.
I don’t have a lot of equipment and there are no klieg lights to be found. No that that would matter, since there’s no electricity either. You open the lens and paint with light, lighting on side with one burst of flash, and then run to the other side and give it two bursts of light for portrait modeling. Believe it or not, some are women statues but this one is a man. The effect is almost hypnotic. And why not, it’s all part of the elaborate plan.
Steven needs a vacation. Steven needs to get out of Dodge. He needs to get an assistant and do a big project. Do I mean on La Isla de Pascua, Easter Island? No, not big enough, not grand enough, not conceptual enough. The original Idiot Boy wants to light Machu Picchu at night.
Figures it will make him famous. Figures it will be as controversial as all get-out. Decides that after this picture hits the internet, people will say it’s been Photo-shopped. I mean, there’s the ruins and the stonework and it’s in crazy colors. How can that be? No way on earth it was taken that way.
Yes way.
They don’t know me. I’m the most interesting man on the face of the globe. In this one act I solve all my problems. I get money, notoriety, and a woman all in one fell swoop, whatever a fell swoop is. I get a new woman because she’s the new assistant. I need one to help me do the Inca walls, they’re long! We can color them any combination we want by tinting the flash with colored gels. Will the colors overlap and produce mixed colors? Maybe. I have to test it out Stateside first. Will the girl in Lawrence Torn Up regret she kicked him to the curb? You bettcha, because living well is the best revenge outside of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Do I get to write a best-seller “How I did it” book and have it hit the top of the charts?
Oh, please do.
In fact, when I look back on these words I come to the conclusion I already started.
Approaching Artesia and Paramount. Stop Requested. Please leave by the rear exit.
It’s time to get off and deliver the goods. They said on the phone they’d be done in ten days.
There’s a cliché I could use, but you know how I feel about clichés. Use them if humanly possible.
I can’t wait.
©Steven Hunley 2013
http://youtu.be/MmDBvrON5-A Behind Blue Eyes