Page 13 - Finding Tulsa - Preview

Finding Tulsa 5

“Not even in a music video?” he asks.
“The last time. You want to know the last time?”
A lanky post-grunge tattoo-on-the-back-of-his-neck dude sits at a
table near us. I stare. So does Barry. We smile at each other on the return
glance.
“What film?” Barry asks.
We’re supposed to work together again, another movie, my fourth fea-
ture, his ninth. We’re fielding offers now. I love that phrase, so agricultural.
Barry writes. I point the camera, and cut, and overdub, and buy beer
kegs if necessary to cram a herd of people into different rooms and beaches
and sets to make them be my puppets. Barry knows I work hard. I also get
pretty pent-up, and he was there for me. But after the last shoot, the TV
movie about incest, we don’t sleep together anymore.
“We are Lost to Vision Altogether,” I say, waiting for him to register
recognition. It was a small, brilliant piece of film. “My last moments in
front of the camera.”
Barry doesn’t know the title. He never knows the title, even after writ-
ing it. I don’t usually like working with people who don’t know the title.
“Tom Kalin,” I say, naming the director. “He shot a kiss-in at Maria
Maggenti’s party on Tenth Street above Tompkins Square. Nineteen-
eighty-something. Snowy night and the second date with the first guy I
loved in New York. We’re out in the hall lined up and giggling like the way
Spin the Bottle should have been.”
I’ve omitted mention of the gay porn epic I recently wrapped, which
Barry refused to discuss. I’ll get to that, eventually.
“Where is he?”
“Who? Tom?”
“The guy you kissed at Maria’s party.”
“Naples, I think. This year.”
Barry lets his gaze amble. The tattooed guy catches my eye again, but
then lights up a cigarette. I feel a lunge of lust for it, for him, then pity,
then the thousand things that shoot through the synapses of an ex-smoker,
a collective metabolic replacement for a nicotine rush, an unfilled Mad
Lib.
The urge dies as I look back to Barry. His beard keeps my attention; a
bit of forest in the waxed-trimmed-shaved desert we call WeHo.
Barry’s beard is russet, the color of Labradors. There were times when
it was gummy with smears of my spit or other liquids. Now it’s clean,
evenly trimmed. I resist the urge to touch him. Barry’s a bit chunky, a bit
too much Metrex over muscle. I miss that.