CUT.
Twenty-seven minutes later. Laughter is heard, clinking glasses, the hum of friendly conversation. The cure rolls onto its back, stretches its limbs to the point of shivering, and denim-colored spots arise on its body. It stands, arranges the blanket across its shoulders like a cape, cinching it with its fingers just beneath its chin, and within fifteen seconds, the cure, with the exception of its pupils (dilated) and claws, has become the same raw-denim blue as the blanket.
“Hey! Hey!” someone shouts, offscreen. “Guys, look! Come here.”
Clapping and cheering. Howls of victory.
“Where’s the mirror?”
“It’s over…wait…It’s…”
“Show it the mirror!”
A hand, gloved in white latex, sets a mirror inside the terrarium.
The cure approaches the mirror, checks out each of its profiles, makes a couple mirthful faces, flaps the denim cape, and reaches out to touch its reflection. No sooner does the cure’s hand make contact with the mirror than it pulls the arm back, as if burned, and hides its face in the elbow of the opposite arm.
The cape slides down its back to the floor of the terrarium. The cure, with the arm it isn’t using to hide its face, reaches outward again, touches the mirror, takes a step backward, slips on the denim, and, to catch its balance—at which it is successful—extends the arm thats elbow it’s been using to shield its closed eyes.
Slowly, cautiously, the cure seats itself on the floor by the denim and sings its painsong. The offscreen voices, which have all grown hushed, sigh and coo.
The cure turns its head in the voices’ direction. We can see it in the mirror, beckoning blindly with both of its arms in time with the painsong.
The sighs and coos increase in volume.
The cure sings and beckons for nearly half a minute, then it opens its eyes. Its eyeballs are boils. One of them has burst.
Retching is heard. Splashing. More retching.
Uncut Interview 1 (DVD extra)
from The Story of Spidge
1999, HBO Films, USA
[21 minutes]
Greenish morning light and the screech of distant seagulls. A sun-bronzed man with wraparound shades perched over his forehead sits shirtless on a bench atop a beachfront porch, holding up a just-a-sec-while-I-finish-this finger, and drinking long and hard from a steaming, clay mug. The sand behind the porch is comb-lined and white. The ocean is navy, and quietly laps. The man lowers the mug, insists with the finger, winks at the camera, starts drinking again. The sound of his Adam’s apple bobbing is audible. The sapphirine face of his platinum wristwatch has a diamond for a six and a crown for a twelve. Dropping the finger, he sets the mug aside and exhales, grins. “Where was I?” he asks.
“Dumb luck,” says a woman offscreen.
“Dumb luck? Just that?”
The woman offscreen giggles.
The man winks at the camera. “Man I really must’ve did need some of that el café. It wasn’t just dumb luck. That’s not how I usually like to tell it. It was a combo-Nazi-own-ay including, yeah, dumb luck, but also blind faith, and rabid tenaciousness—rabid tenacity. Dumb luck, blind faith, and rabid tenacity colon: the birth of a relatively minor and short-lived empire that turned a couple blue-eyed and kinda already rich kids lots richer. Should be the title of my memoir. Or autobiography. Or me and Burnsy’s memoir or autobiography. Whatever. Sorry. Still waking up here. Missing Burnsy a little. Just saying his name, you know? Even in that jokey kinda—okay, though. Okay! The story now, the tale, the whole goddamn adventure. So this is how it starts. Starts with dumb luck. There’s me. There’s Burnsy. Couple of fifth-year-senior outsider dreamer types at el universado up north of here a ways, a couple nothing-specials just sitting around the house one day, bored, and I was telling Burnsy about this one time when I was a kid and I was just, you know, sitting around my parents’ house, bored, with Magic, my cat, who was emphatically not bored cause he’d just been going at a hunk of catnip, and how I, being bored, I thought, ‘Why not?’ and I swiped about a cheekful out of Magic’s stash there, and I chewed it and chewed it and swallowed it down just as quick as I could, and it seemed maybe forty or sixty minutes later to make me feel a little drowsy maybe, and semi-happy, kinda maybe a little floaty, but maybe I was imagining it, and anyway it gave me a stomachache. Now that’s not much of a story is it? It doesn’t seem like much of a story at least. Ate me some catnip, might’ve got a little high, definitely got some kind of reflux or something. But except my pal, see, to whom I told that story some ten years later was, as I said, one Ricky Burnsy McBurn the Burner Burns. And Burnsy—he ran with the thought, see? My telling that story brought to mind for him a time that happened back in his teenage years, when he was bored. He was laying around his uncle’s house, bored, he said, and also hungover. His uncle, I should interject, was a pro-BMXer and also kind of a older-brother figure to Burnsy more than really an uncle cause of their ages being close, and so, before the uncle, who was not called Burns and who I probably shouldn’t and so therefore won’t name—he, before he OD’d a couple years later, him and Burnsy were just tight as fuck, and Burnsy’d gone over there for a party the night before this hungover morning of boredness I’m talking about, and maybe even he broke his cherry that night, I can’t exactly remember, but anyways, anywho, anyhow, anywhat…Burnsy said he was laying there, on his uncle’s couch, morning after this rager, and he was all hungover and maybe no longer a virgin as of just a few hours ago or whatever, and he noticed there was some white powder on the glass coffee table, like not a lot, but like a decent line maybe, all together, and Burnsy was pretty sure it was heroin cause he’d seen someone blowing some heroin there the night before on that table—his uncle or some chick, I can’t remember who he said it was—and he thought, ‘Shit. Maybe I should line that shit up and blow it.’ But, you know, its being heroin, and him being maybe just sixteen, seventeen, and never having done heroin, it seemed like a thing he shouldn’t decide to do or not do on an empty stomach, so he went to the kitchen and he scrambled some eggs, and brought the plate of scrambled eggs to the couch to like I guess contemplate the heroin, but just as he’s about to sit down on the couch, his uncle’s Dalmatian like blasts into the room, knocks against Burnsy’s leg, surprising Burnsy no end, and Burnsy drops half the plate of eggs on the heroin, and the Dalmatian, you guessed it: Dalmatian eats the heroin eggs.
“Now what happens to the Dalmatian? That is the question. That is the all-important goddamn question. And what happens to the Dalmatian is the Dalmatian’s fine. Gets really sleepy. Lays down and growls, maybe kicks at some ghosts in its sleep, even barks at some ghosts for a little while after it wakes up that night, but it’s fine. It had a bad time, but the bad time passes, and it’s fine, it’s fine.