American Spaces & Places
Badlands (1973), Natural Born Killers (1994), The Motel Life (2006), Motel Chronicles (1982), Honey Boy (2019)
(Ed Note: I did 2 drafts of this one. You tell me which one ya like better, or just read one!)
DRAFT #1
Badlands (1973)
Holly Sargis: He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I'd stopped even paying attention to him. Instead I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of mouth where nobody could read them.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Mickey: You always dress like that? Or you just…waiting for me?
Mallory: Why would I dress like this for somebody I don't know?
Mickey: Maybe something inside you told you to. You know? Like fate. You believe in fate, Mallory?
Mallory: Maybe
Mickey: You don’t look happy. You wanna go for a ride? Talk about it?
Mallory: …
In Natural Born Killers (1994), those two in the above photograph (Mickey & Mallory, Woody Harrelson & Juliette Lewis) kill this diner waitress in the below b&w still from the film:
Motel Chronicles & The Motel Life (2006)
O-Lan Jones, who was the longterm wife and partner of…Sam Shepard, from 1969 to 1984. Motel Chronicles was published by City Lights, the publishing arm of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, in 1982. So it would have been written as their marriage was disintegrating, though there is one “poem” (or “noem,” I suppose) dedicated to O-Lan, complete with a photograph of her sitting on a washer with her long legs on display, feet resting on an ironing board. The “noem” goes like this:
I've about seen all the nose jobs capped teeth and silly-cone tits I can handle
I'm heading back to my natural woman
11/23/81 Los Angeles, Ca.
All entries are dated and placed like that, showing Shepard’s nomadic & restless wanderings between 1979 & 1982. Most of the entries are from places in Texas and California, with some in Los Angeles (probably because Shepard was there to watch or maybe supervise the making of his movie) and one is from as far north as Seattle where Sam comments on “the stink of gold tequila through the morning skin.”
I think the success of Shepard’s 1984 film (well, he wrote it, Wim Wenders directed it, Ry Cooder provided the spare, bluesy soundtrack) Paris, Texas (1984), which won the coveted Palme D’or, probably helped boost sales.
Below is a scene from Paris, Texas, where Walt is driving Travis to Los Angeles, after finding him. Travis has been gone for four years. He wandered out of the desert with amnesia, no memory of where he had been or what he had done. His son, Hunter, eight years old, has been staying with Walt, and therefore considers Walt, not Travis, his father. Anyway, Travis asks if they can stop off in Paris while they’re still in Texas and Walt goes: “It’s a little out of the way, Trav” before his brother explains he means Paris, Texas.
Travis Henderson: Daddy always had a joke about it.
Walt Henderson: What was the joke?
Travis Henderson: He - he would introduce Mom as the girl he met in Paris. Then, he'd wait - eh - before he said Texas, till everybody thought that - he'd meant - he would wait before he said Texas till everybody thought - after everybody thought he was talking about Paris, France. He always laughed real hard about it.
This is a typical American exchange. In America it’s important to puncture pretentiousness as quickly as possible. This explains most American humour save for the popularity of the TV show Frasier, which is positively soaked in pretentiousness.
Person A: Some lives just go in one big fuckin’ circle. The motel life in particular.
Have you read it?
Person B: Read what?
Person A: The Motel Life.
Person B: Nah. I live it. Why would I wanna read about it?
Person A: Perspective. Sometimes you’re too close to something to see it. Like an ant camped out on a car tire. Once that car starts movin’, all that ant can think of is, and I’m quotin here: “huh?”
The Motel Life is about two brothers. The younger of them accidentally commits a grave accident while the other is sleeping. The first line of dialog comes from the younger brother. The older is still in bed.
“My life,” he sobbed. “I’ve ruined it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Apparently there’s a movie starring Stephen Dorff & Emile Hirsch, but I haven’t heard much of it. Like the Jesus’ Son adaptation, I doubt it’s very good, though Ebert gave it 3.5 stars…I think that’s out of 5, not 10.
It’s a novel in the Steinbeck tradition, especially Of Mice and Men & Cannery Row, where guys try to do well but just keep fucking up. What I wanna know is this: Are motels cheaper in Nevada? Cuz here in Toronto they’re $100 a night. You might as well rent dammit.
In Hope, BC, after disembarking from a ride I’d hitched at about midnight, I asked the local motel lady for a room for $30 because I only had $50 left.
“Sure” was all she said.
So I raced across the street to.a Sunoco to get the money. I think I bought Corn Nuts so the lady wouldn’t see that I had two twenties). got my room key, and “exalted in a private evening” as Kerouac put it in The Dharma Bums.
My plan was to catch up on sleep but the place had cable so I ended up watching 2 or 3 episodes of The Sopranos and had to be woken up by a knock at the door. Pfff. So much for sleep. I climbed the hill to the highway and was in New Westminster by that afternoon, downtown by that night, where the rudest girl I have ever met in my life refused me entry to The Cambie, a hostel.
I was sitting outside on my guitar case when Phil Cotman, a man who looms large in my life, grinning came over & played me some of his hobo strums, plus a lovely cover of “Pancho & Lefty.” I was immediately taken, right from the first stanzas:
Living on the road my friend was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you were your skin like iron and your breath's as hard as kerosene
You weren't your mama's only boy but her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye and sank into your dreams
Phil & I became best friends & busked for about a month, every day making just enough for a bit of food and Pacific Pilsner. It was heavenly. Phil’s dream was to open a rehearsal space called Guitar Town. He also wanted, very badly, to record his songs.
I had a friend in Victoria, my sister’s now ex-friend Michelle, who had a 4-track tape recorder, so we went to Vancouver Island for a few days and recorded Phil’s songs, plus a few I collaborated on (“Benjamin” and “One by One”). You can hear those songs here:
That’s Phil in the middle and a drummer, all-around-utility player named Conrad on the far right, standing in Michelle’s driveway. We called our lil trip The Solomons & our album was Guitar Town.
Honey Boy (2018)
In a scene where his abusive father James comes home unexpectedly early and catches these two in the motel room (they’ve only been cuddling), he asks the girl (in the credits as “Shy Girl”) “Did you fuck my son?” to which she defiantly replies “You fuck your son,” which both references James’ status as a sex offender and how he is completely ruining his boy with his selfish behaviour.
Honey Boy is all about having a father who doesn’t want you. At one point the child actor Otis, who is essentially his Dad James’s boss, hits on the real problem between them:
James : How do you think it feels to have my son paying me? How do you think that feels?
Otis: [sadly] You wouldn't be here if I didn't pay you.
Later on there’s a scene where the Dad says “I’m growing son,” and Otis replies “I know, I can see it.” “Fuck you, you can see it. I’m growing weed. Out by the side of the freeway.” “What if they catch you?” “I’m gonna cover the whole freeway. Hey, I’m your father. Trust me.”
When they visit the grow site, the father James goes “didn’t I tell you I was gonna make you a treehouse? Well, here we go…” and he smokes his son a joint, getting him high for the first time. I guess that’s what he meant? Treehouses are up in the air…getting high makes you feel…high? Up in the air?
It's supposed to be a nice scene but it just feels wrong. It just does.
I love that line.
“Carved into
Like all the rest”
This is the edition I used to have, ordered it from City Lights Bookstore to a franchise bookshop in Brampton, ON, about a year or so after getting On the Road.
This is the last “poem,” or let’s call it an entry, in the book. It’s the first, & only, to take a look outside America, however briefly:
Double Roses
She says
Like in England
Like back in England
And she leans way back
Her nostrils flare
Her eyes close
The Rose sails her home
Ain’t that a beauty? Especially that verb “sails” instead of “flies” or “takes.” Boats have a very particular rhythm, plus their slow, giving her time to remember whatever it is she’s remembering.
That’s a beauty. Check out Motel Chronicles, whenever you can. It’s rare as hell, so you’ll probably have to order it (FUCK that Bezos motherfucker), but ce la vie.
From a story about 3 boys who take their bicycles through a tunnelled section of the Los Angeles aqua duct, first trying to scare each other with various screams until stopping because the screams are “truly terrifying,” to a kid who has been told he sleepwalks & so tries to do so awake, to experience it, but gets caught, to men in motels, alone, not gathering their thoughts on mortality but simply trying to make it through. The day, the day, the year, their lives. It’s a masterwork.
Draft #2
American Spaces & Places: Badlands (1973), Natural Born Killers (1994), The Motel Life (2006), Motel Chronicles (1982), Honey Boy (2019)
Holly Sargis: He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I'd stopped even paying attention to him. Instead I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of mouth where nobody could read them.
Mickey: You always dress like that? Or you just…waiting for me?
Mallory: Why would I dress like this for somebody I don't know?
Mickey: Maybe something inside you told you to. You know? Like fate. You believe in fate, Mallory?
Mallory: Maybe
Mickey: You don’t look happy. You wanna go for a ride? Talk about it?
Mallory: …
In Natural Born Killers (1994), those two in the above photograph (Mickey & Mallory, Woody Harrelson & Juliette Lewis) kill this diner waitress in the below b&w still from the film:
O-Lan Jones, who was the longterm wife and partner of…Sam Shepard, from 1969 to 1984. Motel Chronicles was published by City Lights, the publishing arm of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, in 1982. So it would have been written as their marriage was disintegrating, though there is one “poem” (or “noem,” I suppose) dedicated to O-Lan, complete with a photograph of her sitting on a washer with her long legs on display, feet resting on an ironing board. The “noem” goes like this:
I've about seen all the nose jobs capped teeth and silly-cone tits I can handle
I'm heading back to my natural woman
11/23/81 Los Angeles, Ca.
All entires are dated and placed like that, showing Shepard’s nomadic & restless wanderings between 1979 & 1982. Most of the entries are from places in Texas and California, with some in Los Angeles (probably because Shepard was there to watch or maybe supervise the making of his movie) and one is from as far north as Seattle where Sam comments on “the stink of gold tequila through the morning skin.”
I think the success of Shepard’s 1984 film (well, he wrote it, Wim Wenders directed it, Ry Cooder provided the spare, bluesy soundtrack) Paris, Texas (1984), which won the coveted Palme D’or, probably helped boost sales.
Below is a scene from Paris, Texas, where Walt is driving Travis to Los Angeles, after finding him. Travis has been gone for four years. He wandered out of the desert with amnesia, no memory of where he had been or what he had done. His son, Hunter, eight years old, has been staying with Walt, and therefore considers Walt, not Travis, his father. Anyway, Travis asks if they can stop off in Paris while they’re still in Texas and Walt goes: “It’s a little out of the way, Trav” before his brother explains he means Paris, Texas.
Travis Henderson: Daddy always had a joke about it.
Walt Henderson: What was the joke?
Travis Henderson: He - he would introduce Mom as the girl he met in Paris. Then, he'd wait - eh - before he said Texas, till everybody thought that - he'd meant - he would wait before he said Texas till everybody thought - after everybody thought he was talking about Paris, France. He always laughed real hard about it.
This is a typical American exchange. In America it’s important to puncture pretentiousness as quickly as possible. This explains most American humour save for the popularity of the TV show Frasier, which is positively soaked in pretentiousness.
Person A: Some lives just go in one big fuckin’ circle. The motel life in particular.
Have you read it?
Person B: Read what?
Person A: The Motel Life.
Person B: Nah. I live it. Why would I wanna read about it?
Person A: Perspective. Sometimes you’re too close to something to see it. Like an ant camped out on a car tire. Once that car starts movin’, all that ant can think of is, and I’m quotin here: “huh?”
In a scene where his abusive father James comes home unexpectedly early and catches these two in the motel room (they’ve only been cuddling), he asks the girl (in the credits as “Shy Girl”) “Did you fuck my son?” to which she defiantly replies “You fuck your son,” which both references James’ status as a sex offender and how he is completely ruining his boy with his selfish behaviour.
Honey Boy is all about having a father who doesn’t want you. At one point the child actor Otis, who is essentially his Dad James’s boss, hits on the real problem between them:
James : How do you think it feels to have my son paying me? How do you think that feels?
Otis: [sadly] You wouldn't be here if I didn't pay you.
Later on there’s a scene where the Dad says “I’m growing son,” and Otis replies “I know, I can see it.” “Fuck you, you can see it. I’m growing weed. Out by the side of the freeway.” “What if they catch you?” “I’m gonna cover the whole freeway. Hey, I’m your father. Trust me.”
When they visit the grow site, the father James goes “didn’t I tell you I was gonna make you a treehouse? Well, here we go…” and he smokes his son a joint, getting him high for the first time. I guess that’s what he meant? Treehouses are up in the air…getting high makes you feel…high? Up in the air?
It's supposed to be a nice scene but it just feels wrong. Reminded me of The Glass Castle, a deeply moving memoir by Jeanette Walls, where she recounts her deeply dysfunctional yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father’s attempts toward redemption when she asks him to stop drinking. The father takes the request seriously, tying himself to his bed to go through the 5-6 day hell of delirium tremens that all alcoholics must go through. It can save their lives. But, depending on how far advanced the alcoholism is, going cold-turkey can be fatal.
But her Dad’s pull through. & Jeanette writes of being so proud of him and his newfound sobriety. “He’s tried this same thing before,” her older sister warns Jeanette. “I never lasts.” Around the kids he becomes a different Dad entirely. Almost shy, even.
Like the father in Honey Boy promising his son a tree house and it turns out to be a fuckin’ joint. Walls father in The Glass Castle, an intricate structure full of support beams, turrets, a moat, & who knows what all else. These are North Stars for the impoverished.
Walls’ Dad makes it a whole 3 months before somebody calls the Walls residence, asking them to come pick up the man of the house, who is passed out on the floor of the local bar room. With the help of a 300lb lumberjack, Jeanette & the man get him home and into bed.
Jeanette’s older sister has the sensitivity not to say “I told you so,” though Jeanette does observe a flippancy to the way she is turning the pages to her magazine. The tree house. The glass castle. They are destinations, projects that need to be started, then worked one, then finished. And who wants their childhood, or their dreams, to be finished? We want to live them, not end them.
I recall being blown away by a passage from Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano in which he writes something like, and I’m paraphrasing here:
“Cold turkey? He’d tried that before. A seedy motel room for a week and a small case of beer each day, no liquor, no tequila, no mezcal. Just slugs of warm beer to keep him alive.”
Poor Consul Geoffrey Firmin, wandering the streets of Quauhnahuac, bottle always in hand, a familiar figure just like Hemingway is his Cuba days,. But by the time of the events that start he novel, which is chapter two. the Consul hasn’t seem Yvonne for a year and his alcoholism is so advanced he can’t lean over to put on his own socks. (The novel really explains why, which bothered me. I figure if you got drunk and made an S shape in bed, you could reach down and flap on some socks. But Lowry drank longer that I ever did, and therefore I cannot take issue with his description of latter-day alcoholism.
Malcom Lowry was such an alcoholic that a 12-pack wasn’t enough to stave off the delirium tremens, which, like benzo withdrawal, can be fatal.
If you’re going to read the book, which is about Mexican spaces & places, I highly recommend getting the Penguin Modern Classics version, the one with the introduction by Michael Schmidt. It looks like this:
“How do steal from Hell it’s terror?” Schmidt asks in the introduction. “By anticipating it here on Earth? In Geoffrey Firmin case, by going out and finding them the goblins and providing them with pitchforks.”
Firmin’s Glass Castle, his treehouse is his ex-wife Yvonne who he lost a year before the events of the novel proper. And when Yvonne seems the shape the Consul is in, muttering to himself at a bar a 6am, where some ball was held for some body, who cares who, & Firmin, who has been drinking day & night for a year, is able to stand from his barstool and utter the words “Good God!”
*SPOILER ALERT FOR UNDER THE VOLCANO. DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW IMPORTANT PLOT DETAILS BEFORE READING THE BOOK YOURSELF*
Ironic words has Firmin for Yvonne considering the infernal nature of the novel. Michael Schmidt was chosen by Penguin to write to introduction because he’d grown up in Cuernavaca, the city where the Consul lives, drinks, writes, & dies.
The final paragraph of Schmidt’s introduction is, I think, as beautiful and lonely and lovely as parts of the book Lowry somehow managed to complete:
“It is a book for readers who need to know less than Lowry wanted to tell them (‘the four characters intended, in one of the books meanings, to be aspects of the same man;’ or ‘the humour is a kind of bridge between the naturalistic and the transcendental and then back to the naturalistic again.’); who accepts the fact that symbols will change their valency in changing contexts, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon; and who realize that every object, every leaf and horseman, whore and spy was real in the world where Lowry walked and drank and was alone, and in which he invested Geoffrey Firmin, his angels and demons, his fading family and friends.”
According to Volcano: An Inquiry into the Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976), which you can watch it for free on the National Film Boards of Canada’s website, Lowry wrote his own epitaph. The fact that his own epitaph does not appear on his gravestone, as Lowry wished it to be, is seen as some as proof that she killed him, by others that the epigraph was a joke and no serious writer would want that on his gravestone.
Lowry’s jokey epitaph was as follows:
Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery,
whose prose was flowery, and often glowery.
He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele.
This is cute, but I think it does him a disservice. According to the documentary Volcano, one Japanese reviewer wrote that Under the Volcano “belonged to the centuries,” such was it power.
Here lies Malcolm Lowry.
His work belongs to the centuries.