Men in cities

Dear Lyla,
What can I say?

Bugsy Malone is on TCM tonight and it’s inevitably bound to take me back to an afternoon with you ten, eleven, twelve years ago over tex-mex burgers and onion rings.

Sometimes I find myself wishing things could have gone just a little different, you know, at least so I would know what to say to you when writing these posts: I don’t even remember what kind of movies you like and just the other day I was watching The Lady From Shanghai and I realized Orson Welles is such a dead ringer for Vince Vaughn and for the oddest of reasons I wanted to tell you right away. At least so as to know in which side of that fence you’d stand. Almost sent you an e-mail then & there, fact, and would’ve done it, all too true, if it weren’t such beyond all those rules we’ve never even bothered to actually make.

There’s this girl I know—her marriage hasn’t been going all too well lately—and we kind of like the same movies and the same songs so we get to talk a lot every now and then: Just the other day I had switched the background image on my computer at the office: I’d replaced Reneé Magritte’s The son of man for two pieces from Robert Longo’s Men in Cities series. Robert Longo was the guy who directed the video for New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle, just so that you know, and she did—and she walked over to my desk and made the usual funny remark that the two of us probably fell off the same spaceship, stuff like that.
I looked up at her and said that knowing there were still people like her around was the sole reason for my not slitting my wrists just yet—It was supposed to be a joke but it just didn’t come out like one, and quite honestly so. Sad but true. Thing is, she just looked at me and her eyes filled up and my eyes filled up too and she touched me very lightly on the shoulder, a gentle tap actually, and said she knew how tough things could get every now and then, and told me sometimes we just have to hang on.

I think it was the nicest thing someone’s ever told me in my life.