Twenty-eight years have led me to this room up in the old hotel, above the neon. The manager, Mr. Chen, gives me the grand tour;…
Posts published by “Robert Mailer Anderson”
“Check out the rider for René Auberjonois,” our line producer suggested a week into the chaos of shooting an independent film in New York City;…
As unhip as it may sound — until you really listen to her voice and get past some of the cornier material and arrangements —…
Javier sat cramped in the second van’s cargo area smothered in brightly colored piñatas; Sponge Bob Square Pants, Dora The Explorer, Emmo, classic Mexican burros, and a cluster of canteros where Satan lurked inside the clay centers and tempted you with the decorated conical points, one for each of the seven deadly sins. Alma had explained the history and superstition of the canteros to him one better day when they were stuffing one full of candy for Alfredo’s birthday. She had told him that their used to be eight deadly sins, but good Catholics only believed in seven.
By the light of the moon, the last thing Javier thought he’d see in the middle of the barren Arizona desert were all these empty…
The electric gate wasn’t working and Ella had to get out of the truck and drag it open herself, which probably screwed things up worse and would make the gate harder to fix later, then she had to get back into the gargantuan gasguzzling Tundra that as an environmentalist she hated, drive the polluting monstrosity through the pie wedge opening, park on the outside of their property which had a steep incline just before the white line that marked the skirt of the two-lane highway – meaning some beer-drunk asshole could easily drift off course and hit her – set the parking break, get out again to close the stupid gate, and then climb back into the truck and hope the engine didn’t stall or the emergency brake didn’t slip. Rose was with her too, which made her worry even more about the beer-drunk assholes and the part where she had to leave the truck to close the gate.
Behind the crumbling Anderson Valley High School, Billy Lee held a scuffed football on a weedy field that resembled an over-grazed cow pasture. It wasn’t going to seed, so much as becoming a miniature desert. The ground was harder than the parking lot out front but not nearly as smooth, pocked with gopher holes and tufts of star thistle. Nobody would call this crap turf.
Javier didn’t recognize their faces, but he had seen the chairs before; white, plastic, cheap. Stackable. Their center of gravity was off kilter. They strained,…
“I should have buried Dad here,” Billy Lee Riley thought, standing in the unfinished grave up on Panther Rock, digging deeper with a pointed shovel…
All is well here at our house. Religious fanatics were on other side of town. But religious fanaticism is a threat all the way around…
“I can’t believe it,” Gooch said, after swinging open the polished door to his hotel room. “Imagine you and me, both right here.” I hadn’t…