Prologue

As the camera ran out of tape I knew this was finally an end, a conclusion. It was over. Yet somehow I didn’t feel the gravity I thought would suck at my soul. There was no fanfare, no champagne corks popping, no award ceremony. Where was the congratulatory montage before the end credits? It was merely a mastubatory ejaculation in the dark and the loneliness and guilt soon crept in.

What had I become and what had I done to get here? This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This Faustian nightmare. This cold turkey syndrome. I popped another Xanax to numb the pain. My eyes bloodshot from the sleepless nights worrying about structure. I could no longer focus. Where was my DoP to put it all in perspective?

Flashback and rewind.

It all started on a December evening back in 1975. My father sped through the streets of our small rural town with my perspiring mother in the backseat of their Ford Capri.

The journey was the result of a nine month gestation of teenage love gone wrong. A period of playing at adulthood. My father believed his own insecurities because the rationality of life that had been given by his mother was illiterate to say the least. He had devised his life on a ‘Littlest Hobo’ re-run and could face no more.

As I grew in my mother’s womb, he was busy penetrating others. But before the divorce, there was the birth.

They parked the car and rushed the gurney through the brown coloured hallways of the hospital. A lightening storm started to rage outside and strobe the ensuing action. The delivery room resembled a scene from an early James Whale classic. The electricity failed inside while the electricity outside raged and dampened the embers of my father’s cigarettes.

As he inhaled, my mother exhaled as contractions intensified and I was born unto this world. All was complete. My father finally had his family to walk out on. Anything sooner would have been too easy. Not enough guilt for his Catholic sensibilities. My story would not be complete without a lack of a father figure, the whole has to have the sum of it’s parts and it was a part of plot development, ‘background’ to coin a phrase.

All my elemental early memories form easily, these are my home movies. My uncle, who looked like Richard Dreyfuss circa Jaws, gave me an old 8mm wind-up film camera. I never got any film for it, I don’t think it actually worked. I just made films in my head in the playground. I was the director of my own childish fantasies and I gained friendship on these terms. Even children want the limelight and I was there to exploit them.

I whirred the camera as they performed. Never told them there was no film, never told them they weren’t being exposed to raw negative. I was editing in my brain, truly non-linear. I never knew it would lead to this, never knew I could debase myself so far.

So, back to the timecode, where are we at? Where am I at? Watching all these images from my life fly passed me. When did I sell out and go for commodity over beauty? It hasn’t always been this way. How did I arrive at this self-fulfilling prophesy?

I know it was always there, these childhood reflections show this. This all started so innocently, so innocuous. Am I to blame?

All these questions have to be answered, if only I could storyboard the events and look at them clearly. I never needed these tools though and that’s why this all happened. All I can do is accept defeat, it’s over, they finally cornered me and got my pound of flesh. That’s all they wanted, these vultures. My 15 minutes is gone. They’ve extracted the goods and I’m left to decay.

It was a woman that did this to me, the oldest cliché in the book, how formulaic...

To Be Continued......