May 21, 2007

Polaroid...

I woke this morning with a tumor in the side of my head. It was a pinching feeling, and built. Enough so that as I pushed my pointer and middle fingers into its mass, it would shift and evade my pressure in a coordinated and collected movement. I had just changed my number to a 323 after two years and began to get this worried feeling about no one knowing my new number and that life had been good.

And then it subsided.



I’m living in a new apartment on Kings Road in West Hollywood. It’s a long one bedroom, like a giant shoebox. I’ve got a pool on the roof with a sauna, UG parking and a deck that’ll house a fire pit once I stop dropping 800’s to fix my car. I turned the living room into a theater with a grotesque & beautiful 100-inch screen. I have a bedroom with a desk where productions such as this occur. It’s nice. Maybe a bar eventually, another couch, an Audi, who knows. Everything is working to fall itself into place.

Then there’s this picture. I don’t know what to do with it. I carried a Polaroid that pranced with me as I pranced through the kingdoms of Europe…living proof of a fool mad with love. The fool was me. The polaroid was of a lady and I, wrapped up as I distanced and snapped camera with long arms and stretching fingers. I used it to mark the books I read and as a savior in moments of terrible loneliness, as a reminder of the possibilities that lie on far ends of a perilous journey. In every one of the countries and cities I traveled, to me that picture leapt.

So then…



I was walking La Rambla in Barcelona when I met Masa. I don’t know if it was a first or last name and it hardly mattered. For 80 Euros and over a span of three hours, he sketched the Polaroid onto a canvas. Once finished, he handed it off and stuttered a valve in my heart. With gold teeth leading his smile, he looked to me with an earnest grace and said softly, as if it were a secret, “She’s so beautiful, it drew itself.”



Sadly though not as tragically as these things can go, the lady, my Navigator and I have since turned to separate journeys. Still, the picture leans against the wall next to my front door. If I weren’t a culprit, if it were an arbitrary work of art, I’d hang it high and proclaim to guests, “True love, found not sought and frozen in time…but lost.”

I’d offer them a drink and pour myself a triple, then slip off to the bedroom. I’d phone the co-star and we’d have a laugh about our last days and my sneaking the picture out of her apartment as she slept. We’d laugh heavy about now, how I had to have it and know why but don’t, its destiny…to always leap, tucked from sight.