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Throat Punch Essays

Just Pretend You're in a Movie

Mar 18, 2022

You are a pearl of great price to me, but there are times when you are an almighty trial to those who love you. ― Charles Portis, True Grit

Monday morning, cold and mean. Up at the corner, by the Elk Creek Cafe, I swing the hard left that aims my Honda down the valley. West. West in the morning. I always make this turn, never the right, never the east do I seem to seek. It’s old fashion in a way, heading out into a new day and aiming yourself at the long road of forever. The west, here in America, in my America at least, she starts up around the Elk Creek and she just goes and goes and goes.

In the rearview mirror I raise myself to get a little glimpse of Milla, my 10-year-old stepdaughter. She’s watching the world slash by. I watch with her. The old houses on Main Street fall away like desperate mamas hanging on the wings as we pull out of this damn old war and into the free blue sky. Out of the town: into the the farms out towards the public school: their long dirt lanes moving north and south off the western road towards battered barns that I’ll never see inside. In the sky the sun is cotton coming apart, more a spread than a star, and with the old Appalachians looking down on us- as always- I can feel the primitive eyes of the witches up there on the lonesome ridges peering out from rocky caves, the same as they do every day. Their stares slamming into me like sharpshooter shots/ Milla just looking out the window with her tired kid smile disappearing into the hand she is leaning her face on.

It’s just me and her this morning. Me in the front, her in the back, and I think about playing some music but I leave the thought behind. Instead I adjust the mirror with that pop-click down and suddenly I can sit back and see her fine. I can’t see the cars behind me but to hell with them. That’s what my brake lights are for. Cars behind me: it’s all on you.

“Hey,” I try. “Your mom told me that you got to see some pretty cool performances in that assembly before spring break.”

Milla drags her pale face from way out in the frozen fields back to where I’m calling it. Her dark eyes settle on mine in the mirror and I can see that she has heard my voice but isn’t really clocking what I said. In a child’s inattention/ in a kid’s wandering focus/ adults like me, we often jump to conclusions based on our own diagnosis or the ones from the doctors or the teacher’s helpless emails or the toxic internet or wherever we dredge up our own ideas these days. But at times like this, when it’s just me and one crusty-eyed kid, one wide-awake tired kid sitting there awash in the somewhat charming uncertainty of if she’s even freaking dreaming or not: at times like that: I see it all a lot more clearly, I think.

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Me with all that caffeine in my blood. Me with all that morning mountain air blowing through me. Me with all my jittery voices coming at me from down inside me like these gnarly witches coming at me from the hills; I get slapped, man; I get skippity-pap’d by one voice after another telling me ideas about what to write in an essay or how to create a powerful Civil War scene in the small endless window of some old cigar box or how to get Arle to dress like a roller derby woman just so we can smash it in the parking lot outside the rink/ two strangers in the night/ Pineapple Seltzer Girl and The Rioja Kid colliding/ skates in the air/ mountain witches watching us and they never blink, son.

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Me: caught up in my own funny little world.

Me, Serge, Thunder Pie, The Rioja Kid: as if I know a goddamn thing about any of it. A goddamn thing about the days ahead of this kid or that one. A goddamn thing about how they see things and how they smell them. Every far-off whistling train sounding different to every cowboy and every outlaw and every Lakota warrior and every buffalo shitting in the evening sun.

Some hear a wailing cry, some hear a call to arms.

Some hear invading armies and some hear the coming of the Lord.

Some hear Hank Williams and some hear nothing but the long lost wind.

Who the hell is to say what a train whistle sounds like?

And the same goes for kids.

Who the hell is to say what they are thinking/ imagining/ wishing for/ or hurting from when they are just sat there staring out the window on any cold Monday morning in the middle of all of space and time unfolding like it does?

One thing is for sure.

It ain’t me.

And whenever I act like I know/ just smack me with your whiskey bottle.

Promise?

_____

She lands her gaze on me then and her eyes are off somewhere but they are soft and quiet and I recognize the moment. Once upon a time, I wouldn’t have. I was lost myself in this particular stretch of woods, unable to really navigate much. Unable to fully feel connected to the kids with other blood in their veins. But I guess I played it right somehow. I stepped back when I needed to and I’m not bragging on my own moves or anything like that, but at least let a fellow who has fallen plenty gloatshine just a little as Milla’s morning eyes fall upon him saying stuff to her and in her eyes there’s real laughter (quiet as a mouse) and a speck or two of curious and a tight fat pinch of bemused acceptance that, lo and behold, it’s this guy she has to talk to on these kinds of mornings when all she wants to do is listen to the trains and look up at the tilted forest/ watch for witches just standing up there next to dark wet trees like deer.

I do my thing, of course. I talk. I can see she is coming back to the car from the sky so I rephrase, try and cushion the awkward landing.

“Was there anything about the school chorus or the rock band that made you think to yourself you might want to do that?”

Her eyes peer into mine in the mirror as my words get jumbled and then put back together inside her mind. It’s actually kind of beautiful to watch now that I know what I’m looking at. Remarkably, she holds her face steady, unwavering, with the glassy pacific of a riverboat gambler who knows that a single dirty coyote hair is all that has ever separated swift death from true fortune.

From the sky our Honda is a raft going up the Missouri. The long grey ribbon of Route 45 is what pulls us forward, westward, slowing only for school buses that turn off eventually, and then off we flow/ into the wilds/ into the jaws of an untamed beast.

_____

_____

Ahem.

Well. Okay.

I mean, I guess at this point I should note something I find useful for survival, especially when you might be feeling crushed under the back-and-forth heaving/ shifting of the fat ass of everyday living.

Snake Oil?

Pff.

Whatever

No sir. Not at all, madam. What I offer up here in the middle of my tale is a little commercial for what I peddle for free in my side hustle. It’s called Pretend You’re in a Movie and it is exactly what it sounds like. And what it sounds like is you getting through your goddamn day with a glint of hope and dignity still up in your eye because you wandered through your five big scenes today (or tomorrow at least, I hope) acting like your Honda was being filmed from a helicopter in the sky (or maybe a drone if you are shooting an indie film) and that you and your stepdaughter/ or you and whoever/ or just you by yourself (like Tom Hanks’ solo brilliance in Castaway), you’re all in a movie.

For me, it’s like a modern indie flick with old school western themes and I guess I’m like a fur trader mountain man dude with a big heart and a big chip on his shoulder because the world has stolen things from him like love and tenderness and left him rummy and greasy from running like an old Deadwood hog into the hills.

Out west.

Now, is that the movie that you need to be stepping into tomorrow morning first thing bright and early when your whole life takes on fresh poetic meaning around the breakfast table because ol’ Thunder Pie gave you a free nugget of genuine gold yesterday when you were halfway down his essay and wondering what in tarnation he was talking about?

No, partner, it most certainly does not.

You have to find your own movie.

But my guess is that you won’t have any trouble with that. Hell, my guess is that you have been planning this whole thing out for a long, long time now. You just needed someone/ ANYONE/ to grant you permission. To push your little raft off into that wide open river and wave at you from the bank/ shrinking smaller and smaller/ waving still/ your heart beating fast/ heading west/ heading east/ I don’t know where the hell you’re headed/ or where I’m headed for that matter.

But now maybe we can finally go there.

_____

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A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. -Orson Welles

____

She told me then, Milla did. She told me about the assembly even though I think she would have rather been out there in the frigid air, jumping barns and laughing at the YouTube video clips falling out of the electrified sky of her memory/ zapping across her screen like really important parts of her own movie. The one she stars in.

We talk about chorus singing together and how it made her feel.

“I don’t like people looking at me when I’m singing so I don’t know if I would like that.”

She pauses. She tightens her face a little.

“I get stage fright,” she sighs.

Maybe, I think to myself.

“Maybe,” I respond. “But there are ways around that, you know.”

I tell her about me. My own tales of being in a rock-n-roll band (she hardly knows/ as she should), of me being so self-conscious and so sure that I was horrible and that people loved the band but hated every background lyric I tacked on to my brother’s as he sang the songs for real. I tell her that I learned to live with fear in the beginning and that it ultimately turned into something better, something wonderful for me.

She listens attentively, never asks me questions. I suspect she is hearing me mostly, but if I was her I’d probably be rolling my eyes a bit too, you know? I mean, Jesus. This guy acts like he’s in a fucking movie or something. His monologues are impetuous and overwhelming. They’re like Minions coming down the goddamn chimney.

Still: I talk and talk like I do. Then we discuss eventually. I stop myself. I lay back from my audio-bookness and I ask her questions.

The thing is: Milla’s voice is wonderful. She has range and tone and pitch and all the things a singer needs/ the things I never had. And I just want her to find a thing, you know? Just like all of them, my kids, Arle’s kids. Our kids. The kids. This world is rough. Cruel. Twisted. Broken glass in the trash/ push your paper plate down. But in the end, you know, what can you do? What can I do?

I half man-splain my own old school shit and I don’t think she really hears me, but I hope it’s the vibe that helps her somewhere along the way. Not my words so much, but the fact that I tried. That I cared. Not the lyrics, but the melody. Not the singing in front of everyone, but the humming to yourself when you’re on a bus so far from home.

Anyway, I tell her to go out for the chorus.

“It’s only for a few months until summer vacation,” I say.

She says her friend Ella is in it. She says Ella had a solo and that their eyes locked during it and that Milla gave her the thumbs up. This moves me. I remember people in the crowd singing along to what I was singing onstage. I remember them smiling/ straining their faces/ their neck veins bulging/ drunk screaming words I’d written in high school in a land that lies across a wide unforgiving ocean.

I want to tell Milla that and I almost do but then I stop. This scene has slipped off from my movie into hers. I smile. Pop the mirror back up to its rightful place. I put on the Bluetooth, crank up the Spotify, talk into the phone.

Ella Fitzgerald. I say those two words like I’m talking into the ear of some old deaf man sitting there whittling a piece of wood outside the saloon. A dog barks. A hawk squeals and the wind rushes by so hard. I pop the mirror back down one more time, real quick and Milla’s eyes are still there, still watching me with uncertain but warming-up reserve.

I say some more.

“I bet you a buck your friend Ella’s parents named her after this singer right here. Listen to her voice. She reminds me of you, the way you sing. I’m not bullshitting you.”

She doesn’t react. She raises an eyebrow a little. That’s enough for me. I pop the mirror back once and for all and for the rest of this ride as her timeless moving Summertime duet with Louis Armstrong starts playing. It’s that long meandering intro first and I picture the movie starting: the camera shooting from some car just like this one/ moving slowly across bridges/ crossing over the creeping dark rivers/ the carp and the gar/ kudzu swallowing trees but there is no movement/ birds sitting on courthouse lawns still as stones, like old statues of generals/ a mule in a field and farmer in the sun/ a black man sitting on a general store bench drinking a bottle of pop in the shade of the awning.

We watch from our seats and we start moving the popcorn to our lips and we understand, almost at once, that there is, of course, so much more here than meets the eye. In the mirror once again, I sit up and right away I see Milla flipping her focus/ spinning it away from all this and back out into the world.

I wait for Ella and then she finally drops and you know what I mean if you know.

Summertime and the livin' is easy /Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.

Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'/ So hush little baby, don't you cry.

I’m Goose-Pimple Spine Boy as the song unfolds around us, around me and this kid on some random Monday morning when I didn’t know I was about to be in a movie. We’re no longer mortals, I guess, and that was easy. And now the camera pans back out of the car and out into the squelch of daylight and it’s just the Honda from above now/ pulling up higher and higher. It’s heading west, this car is. This dusty trail wagon train. This Pony Express. Can’t you tell? You can just tell.

They’re heading west, man.

Everyone can just tell.

Oh, old Honda on a country road.

Oh, two misfits on a scrappy raft.

There will be trouble, obviously. There always is with these sorts. And there will be sadness, tried and true. There will be midnight scalpers and blinding blizzards and bitter outlaws and bothered rattlesnakes and sweet creek water flapjacks and I am scared as hell, but here we go.

Louis Armstrong takes over, starts singing his part.

I sneak a look at Milla and she is out there somewhere, connecting.

We are fucking movie stars.

There will be sunsets forever.

And there will glory out the wazoo.

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