Michelle the Hat

Like I mentioned yesterday, I don't have the time or the space to be a voracious book reader these days, though for many time periods in my life, it was my almost my sole domain, so much so, that it formed the basis for my scholarship, vocation, and religious worship. Occasionally I read other people's works, though not so much these days, with a few exceptions like "Twelve Years a Slave" and my long-term appreciation of Stephen King, whether or not I've read his most recent works. It's like being a U2 fan even if you miss the lavish stadium shows, or you hate their latest album because it sucks: you're still a fan, just not of that, or while you're working during your most creatively productive times. I didn't watch t.v. during most of the 90s, when I was in school and working hard. I've had cable t.v. in the past, but not right now. It's like phases of the moon that I pass through, noticed or not.

When King dropped his follow-up to "The Shining" (his period that I read the most, because I was a house-bound kid riding out childhood with one of my favorite Mainers and modern practitioners of New England Gothic), I knew I was going to read it at some point, life and work distractions be damned. It's like candy for me, and the hardcover edition jacket was a fucking bloody mess that immediately caught my eye on the shelf, which makes me love/hate book cover design all over again. I checked it out, and reading it was like trying on an old jacket of mine that'd been hanging in the back of my mother's closet for years that I forgot about, but recently rediscovered on a visit to find that it still fits me like a glove. It went down smooth, like greatly aged Irish whiskey on the rocks, drunk on a chilly autumn night in a certain Celtic-inspired hamlet with lots of misty fog from the river winding through it periodically. I inhaled it like I lived it, which I do.

And so I know really great life analogies when I read them, because I live life like a crazy Yankee who's a lot like the heroes of his horror stories, in my very own version of a funky New England "Halloweentown" that's always atmospheric and a little spooky, like the colorful fall leaves that are falling down around the old gravestones marking our distant and oft-forgotten Dutch, French, Indian ancestors. They're there, whether we recognize it of not. Denizens lurking around the edges of our lives are like that, too, like the wacky patrons who come here to the library because they have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. They're not like me at all, except for the very vague connection that we may or may not be sitting amongst the stacks at the same time, and that's exactly who "Michelle the Hat" is to me.

She's like a rotten character from some other writer's book life, because she has absolutely nothing to do with me, besides that fact that she and I may (or may not) be in Rockland County and alive at approximately the same time. I knew her as soon as I saw her (and smelled her), just as I knew that she would force a conversation with me, because she's the kind of ugly dyke on welfare who knows me and my work but stubbornly refuses to acknowledge it to my face, because she's a rotten fucking bitch. She purposefully stalks women in town by memorizing their daily schedules, and then acts on that information aggressively, much like the obnoxious odor always around her of rotting teeth and early death. 

She's disgusting to look at and she knows it, that's why she forces herself on us, like that fucked up and rather nondescript co-worker who smells badly on purpose just to ruin your day: she's another petty, vicious, gross-out artist among many, with nothing better to do than be the kind of annoying fucking bitch you want to go away or just die off already, since she's hellbent on doing that for a living, in lieu of an actual job or any real purpose in life. So, when I read about the lead bitch in "Doctor Sleep" who kills off humans by feeding off their souls, like the local toxic welfare cases around town who fucking hate us but lurk around us anyway, I already knew Stephen King's character called "Rose the Hat" (infamous in her ghoulish circle for wearing a man's old top-hat like a circus ringleader, and for sleeping with both men and women indiscriminately, because she'll take whatever life form she can get), because I knew it was the just the right fit for this fucking evil bitch at my local library.

And sure enough, she hits on men, women, and children alike, like the desperate foul-smelling ghoul seeking an early death she really is: not exactly human, but here among us somehow anyway, lingering like the backed-up sewer smell from the last big Nor'easter that ran through town, overfilling the drains and flooding the streets with the half-rotten corpses of every animal that died in the recent flood. On one particular afternoon, she left behind the ugly black Beatles cap that she wears every day to cover up her fat, round, misshapen head, and if I could bottle what "evil" smells like, that would be it. I smelled her hat before I saw it, and it was so aggressively bad, I used a pencil to push it behind a computer sign for patrons a few computers away, after quickly nudging it further and further away from me for a few lines or so before that final push with a big holding breath.

On another day, one of the other homeless disordered women who frequents here (a much nicer person than Michelle, actually), finally turned to her while I was working to tell her that I wasn't the only person offended by her deliberately bad smell; she's also offensive to other humans and lifeforms, too, so whatever performance piece she thought she was doing solely for me was failing badly. The odor that permeates everything around her is like a combination of really bad halitosis (she has rotten teeth that turned brown many years ago), toxic diarrhea from an old unchanged diaper, and the stank from a slowly rotting corpse in the sun, of a human being who ate only the worst junk food before she got cancer and died in her early 30s.

It was so bad that after I got home from the library, I could still smell it on me. I brushed my hair several times to get rid of it, scenting my brush with hairspray first and then a few spritzes of perfume....to no avail. I changed my clothes, put on some more deodorant, sprayed on some more scent, and then brushed my teeth again. Her rotten odor lingered like the bad taste in my mouth, finally forcing me to take a really long bath to wash it out of my hair through several good rinsings in mid-afternoon, a habit I am not accustomed to, because I bathe every morning (barring extreme circumstances or rarely occurring events), and I brush my teeth after every meal. Even when I smoked, all my friends told me that they thought I was a non-smoker (which I genuinely always felt myself to be), because I never had the really foul smell of a typically addicted chain-smoker attached to me, again, because I managed it like I tend to all the other aspects of my life.

I used to wash my hands after smoking outside in fresh air (with no children around to breathe in my second-hand smoke), and I was also a frequent user of breath mints and/or mouthwash to obscure the taste of cigarette smoke some more. I've also always burned either candles and incense, too, as well as performing regular seasonal house cleanings, because I like to have healthy habits even at my lowest points, and so I drew no other conclusion than the obvious one, dear readers: "Michelle the Hat" is pure evil, albeit of the boring foul kind that creeps around the dark corners of your hometown, like a certain infamously terrifying clown from classic horror fan fiction; a thing that hunted children by lurking in the darkness and murk of your town sewers. Beware this Halloween of the monsters you might already know, not the ones you don't. It's evil enough.

Keeping it Reel: "Gigante"

Any master storyteller knows bringing your audience in so close that you can almost feel them sitting on your lap is the hallmark that you've crossed the divide separating you from them. That intimacy is the biggest luxury artists and writers have, something lost in the sensory experience we have as moviegoers. It's a closeness we don't feel watching speeding images projected onto a large screen in quite the same way that we sense a closeness to characters brought to life through a book that's inches from our very face. We breathe them in, like we do the smell of ink and paper, holding a physical object in our hands, in a scale that's designed especially for our senses. The slow crafting of a story produced from the pacing of a book gives our human brains a time frame we can easily adjust to, turning pages slowly (or not), maybe going back to reread something again just to get it right in our head, or pausing to ruminate on the picture the author has just created that illuminates something in way previously unknown; it's that loving lingering that give t.v. shows and movies cause for frustration in hardcore book people like myself.

The director has already called the shots, creating their own world from words made precious in our minds through time, the way books and stories become. We get tripped up by niggling details like the anachronism of an actors' bad hairdo, let alone big story elements like time and space. That suspension of belief is the bane of many a lesser talents existence. It's what every classic, timeless, great story hangs upon; the ability for me to hold you right in the palm of my hand, where I need you to be, so you can take in the story richly from every angle, drinking it in, letting it soak into you, so that the story also becomes a part of you. Some people have it, some people spend years chasing it, some people try to learn it, and the rest become our wonderful audience who we spend our lives wooing in a necessary dance that exists between the creator and the viewer.

The freedom we give a reader to transpose what we've written or drawn into their own imaginative spaces is something that a t.v. director can't do, because they have to "draw" a character and tell a defined story in a half an hour. It's really hard. Books also have the same deadline. We must make something to print on the presses, and the edition that lives on your shelf is semi-permanent, at least until we reprint it and possibly revise it, just like a film is "cut" and released; the story stays that way until somewhat remakes it, which is way more expensive than reprinting a book. Genres are troublesome, too. I hate romances for the exact reasons I outlined above: I simply don't buy it. Love is something best left to poets, because it's like trying to explain the color purple to a blind person. What does color mean to them? I've seen a few really good adaptations of books to movies, but it's something best left to a truly gifted artist. Maurice Sendak wisely advised Spike Jonez to make his own Wild Things instead of trying to lavishly re-create his work into a movie, a world made specifically for children as a book, functioning best on the level it was designed for, and he spoke like a true master. The formats are too different to reconcile the gap that exists.

So when I see movies that have characters who feel so real, I actually know people just like them, it's a rare experience. I found this gem of a movie called Gigante that's the most flawlessly real depiction of actual human love than any other movie I've seen about it. There's just no false notes or wrong moves, because every heart-wrenching scene feels exactly like a young man crushing hard and falling deeply in love. There's no bullshit CGI effects, no bombastic declarations delivered hammily or wildly desperate acts for her attention (because our hero is very shy around his lady love), nor fake showiness of his affections. This is a real story that takes place in a real world you know exists, because it's the same thing that's happened to you. He's an average guy (but not to us), working cruddy minimum wage jobs for a buck (just like we have), falling in love with an average girl (but not to him, because she's his whole world), who gets mistreated because they don't love her like he does (or we do). It's that perfect.

Yeah, I know.