NOTHING NICER THAN SUCKING DOWN A LITTLE COUGH SYRUP on a Saturday afternoon. Stones me like nothing I know, that blue bourbon. Codeine comes from Opium comes from Vietnam, some. Sometimes wish they'd take me in the army just to get my hands on that poppy. Shit.
Why I came to and see this one nobody but the devil can explain--and someone's got some explaining to do! It seems curious enough at first: a good title like Bad Day at Black Rock and the marquee says starring my favorite renegade, his last role before he bought the farm. Second run--due to the bitch from Bryn Mawr getting an Oscar out of it last year--and therefore affordable for a matinee when nothing is on at the club.
College girl of the upper crust brings home her boyfriend: guess what!? He's a knee-grow! Seems easy enough: get him the HELL out of there, preferably with a little pain to make the point, and hook her up with some letter-sweater stud her own color. But my man Spence doesn't lift a finger, just grumbles a little and becomes practically indifferent by the end. His last fucking picture! A tragic part. All so claustrophobic: one set, and myself set down in front with a pot of popcorn like I'm the silent fifth guest at dinner or something. At the bottom, I crack buttery duds like biting bullets in that darkened theater.
Admittedly I'm a little stoned in that codeine drone, which nails me to my seat and makes the whole process of witnessing on-screen miscegenation more arduous than formerly believed tolerable. I squirmed less during Night of the Living Dead--which in its own way had some strange stuff going on between a darky and the dame. But in that one everybody was punished in the end.
So stoned. Is that white at his neck? Maybe it's a modern Jolson in blackface, and the whole role's a farce . . . nope: it's the real thing. You can tell by the lips. Brother with a French name--I think it's the kid from Blackboard Jungle, gone to college!--oddly persuasive; neat teeth flashing. Everything going in and out of focus and I feel like I'm being hypnotized by his weird rap, nothing the matter with cross-breeding--figure that! I bolt from the front row and throw the bucket at the screen. The manager, a ticket-ripper in a monkey suit, gets in my way and simpers, "I apologize for the projection, sir!" I don't know if it's his first mistake today, but I bet it's his biggest. BOOM! One shot and he's on the sticky floor squirming, pant cuffs up ridiculously over his skinny, gartered legs. Fucking fairy.
HOW CAN YOU SHOW THIS SHIT? THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE OUR WOMEN AWAY! I leave blinking into the day wishing Spencer Tracy--I think the town was Tracy, too . . . strange--were around to punch out. That's how they'll do their uprising, if you ask me. Not through Black Power and Panthers and in military formation--that's all just decoy. But by segregation, and magazines, and the equal rights people in Hollywood: invasion of the body snatchers is what it is. An allegory for the modern age. Except they don't look just like us: they're black!
I'm pretty stoned.