Authors: James Franco

Actors Anonymous (34 page)

i think it would be a mistake to ignore this and let it stew. it’s so much better to have this on the surface than brewing underneath, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Mark read the emails and read them again. What could he do now? Obviously there was strife between
The Actor
and his father, but the emails didn’t prove that
The Actor
murdered his father. He was certain
that the sketchbook contained answers. He would have a serious talk with Cent in the morning and tell her that she must hand over the sketchbook. He would apologize for being jealous and immature, but there were bigger issues involved now.

At her small apartment in West Hollywood, Cent spent the night transcribing the reversed writing from the sketchbooks. The writing told a frightening, albeit somewhat inscrutable story. It seemed to be a confession of murder, but it was unclear. Cent was aware of the shooting of
The Actor’s
father and
The Actor’s
possible guilt in the affair, and she knew that the
Spider-Man Journals
(as she now called them) could implicate him in the crime.

It was strange, but she felt an affinity with
The Actor
, even though she had never met him. She was ten years younger than him, and she had grown up watching his movies.
The Actor
had been her first Hollywood crush. The damaged sensitivity she saw in his movie roles made her ache, because she felt sensitive and damaged too. She also knew from interviews that
The Actor
painted in his free time. She loved to paint too, not that she thought she was any good.

Although the journals spoke about murder, they also had an endearing sensitivity, and she found herself siding with
The Actor
against his father. It was all so weird. She knew that she was possibly dealing with the life and death of real people, but it also felt like it was all a movie.

Cent made a decision. She would help
The Actor
and fuse herself with
The Actor
at the same time.

She cut out the pictures from the journal and began to make a collage. She loved to make collages. In addition, she painted over much of the reverse writing, to obscure the incriminating sections. In the end she had five large pictures.

At 1 a.m., she called her costar Zack and asked him to come over to look at the pictures. He came, and despite his earlier criticism of the sketches, he admired the new pictures. He thought they were cool.

Cent talked to him about Marc and how she knew she shouldn’t be with him, but that she was always looking for a father figure because her own father had abandoned her and her family. She talked about how her brother Butch was suffering from the lack of a father.

Zach seemed to understand. He said nice things, and when he kissed her, it was sweet and romantic, just like he did in their scenes in the movie. Zach wasn’t as deep as
The Actor
, but he looked a little like him.

They made love that night.

On a small piece of paper that she kept under her mattress she had written down what was in the journals, painstakingly reversing
The Actor’s
backward scrawl:

I don’t know what I’m writing, or even how to write, but I thought I should put a few things down, just so the record is clear from my side. The death of a father is a significant event in most people’s lives, albeit of varying degrees depending on the history between offspring and parent. The murder of a father is an even more poignant event, which can be inflated to exponential degrees, depending on the identity of the executioner. Patricide is the ultimate expression of a son’s maturation, whether it is realized physically or not. I recall from my high school English class that Oedipus stabbed himself in the eyes after realizing the identity of his murder victim. Well, that, and the fact that he was screwing his mother. I have not
slept with my mother (the closest I got was a proposal of marriage when I was eight) and I have not stabbed out my eyes, and I am still uncertain of my guilt.

A few things are clear: 1) My father is dead. 2) He died on Christmas morning. 3) There is a bullet hole in the front widow of my parents’ home.

I am still piecing this story together, so please forgive the mystery; I assure you it is unintentional. And please forgive any sloppiness in the craft of the story itself, I have never written anything like this before. Although I can boast of a lifelong love of literature, an affinity that developed in the midst of a neglected childhood. This neglect is not introduced here to elicit any pity; it is just a fact that my early reading was not encouraged by my father. He was too busy working on a business plans for his big Silicon Valley company to care about my discovery of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, or Raskolnikov, or Hamsun’s
Hunger
.

I can recall one conversation when I was twelve:

“What are you reading there?”

“
The Stranger
.”

“That existential shit is crap. You should be worried about science. Those French writers are full of shit. It will get you nowhere but murder.”

Maybe so, Dad, maybe so.

To my father, my heroes were all nuts writing meaningless words in a void. So I spent my childhood in books and found new fathers.

When I went to school, I got into acting. As an actor, I got to play many roles. I got to kill fifty fathers. Every thug I killed in every cheap crime drama I acted in was my father. I shot him and I shot him.

If I killed him, then I am a criminal, but only because it took place off screen. If I didn’t kill him in life, didn’t I kill him anyway? I killed him in my mind and I killed him on screen. He’s dead to me. My emotions tell me that I’ve killed him. But then again, when I “act,” I use
real
emotions.

Hard to tell where the acting ends and life begins. They don’t always say action or cut.

I can see the Christmas tree flashing its red, blue, green, and yellow in its corner by the window. I just can’t decide if it was a Christmas tree from my memories of childhood, or from last weekend. I guess the fact that I saw myself in the window, floating like a phantom over the bent figure of my father, says that I was standing outside.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my editor, Ed Park. He saw this book in its earliest form, when it was still rough and unified only in my mind. Thank you for your belief and for your help structuring the manuscript. I know that this book has its present form and life because of you.

Thank you to Amazon for interest in such a book.

Thank you to the teachers: David Shields, Dean Bakopoulos, Amy Hempel, Robert Boswell, Rob Cohen, Gary Shteyngart, Ben Marcus, Ed Park, Darcey Steinke, Victor LaValle, Stacey D’Erasmo, James Wood, Jonathan Lethem, Stephen Dobyns, Michael Cunningham, Mona Simpson, Ian R. Wilson, Peter Turchi, Kevin McIlvoy, C. J, Hribal, Jay Anania, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark McGurl, Kathleen McHugh, Eliot Michaelson, A. R. Braunmuller, Amy Hungerford, and Robert Carnegie.

Thank you to Frank Bidart, my ideal reader and my ideal friend.

Thank you to Richard Abate. It’s great to have a smart agent.

Thank you to all the actors who have filled my life and work. You are my people, and we speak a common tongue.

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