Saturday's Moments
David Herkt
shortly after the Town Hall clock chimes ten, the doors open and the waiting
forty or fifty people file in en masse. We've only got thirty minutes here
this morning. I hate these deadlines. I'm trying to grab books that will
sustain me for a week and I am aware of the time and somehow, between the
two needs, I get confused and end up by not finding anything.
John has to be at work by eleven and I have to be at Garth Maxwell's for a
play-around with a script. So I'm looking at the biography section and not
finding anything. I look at the new books section and just grab a catalogue
of the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy. I grab a transcript of William
Shirer's radio broadcasts from Berlin in the late 1930s. I grab a bad sci-fi
book. I grab another one called The Erotomaniac about a possible author of a
Victorian pornographic autobiography, Walter's Secret Life. I get a book by
Philip Glass, composer and another on Peter Greenaway, film-maker. John gets
two books on gardening and an art book from MOMA in New York.
Then John drops me off at Garth's. I'm not sure I have enough braincells or
time to work with him at the moment. My phone is ringing with courier
companies and I can tell Garth is getting shitty at these interruptions. We
sit down and watch some short movies by the New Zealand artist Len Lye. I
have never seen the 1920s Tusalava or his last movie Free Radicals. I enjoy
Tusalava with all its organic shapes and that magnificent story of
penetration, appropriation, assimilation and change. It really is an
incredibly good art-work. Free Radicals is very, very slick. Then we work,
getting someway towards that unselfconsciousness whereby we can both write
without shame in front of the other.
Then Deb Faith, cameraperson, phones. She asks us both out to a late lunch
at SPQR with Christine Parker, Deb's partner and film-director. Garth
accepts and we work for another couple of hours then go to SPQR. It is its
usual crowded Saturday afternoon. It is loud. It takes ages to score one of
the coveted outside tables and we are two bottles of wine along the way
before we get one. Garth and I have eggs benedict's. Christine and Deb share
a Cajun pizza. We are talking airline close-calls. Christine's story about
the bird strike above France and the plummet to an emergency landing is just
great especially when she gets out of the plane and it is covered with blood
from the birds. We have another two bottles of wine.
I go home and nap. I am a little stunned lately and I need my rest. I
actually stay in bed for the late afternoon and early evening, reading. I am
also confused about Marc because we have had no exchange of texts or calls
since Wednesday which is a long time. He is technically on holiday but
whether he has gone to Lyon or what I don't know. I have lots of details but
no overview of his schedule. I have the vague feeling he left his phone
behind if he did go. But then there was that weird visit to the hospital
last time he texted. It is all as little odd. Maybe he has lost his phone?
Anne phones and wants to come over. I am not encouraging. But she phones at
9:00pm and says she is down the road. 'Oh, no,' I wail, 'but I look
slovenly.'
She arrives and we look at the commercial she has just cut for the AIDS
Foundation. It is great and will screen at Out Takes. It still makes me
laugh on my tenth viewing. Then we end up watching gay porn because there is
that huge box of it. She has never seen any. I get all educational about it,
talking about the conventions and demonstrating national characteristics. So
this is my Saturday night, I say to her, sitting at home with a beer looking
at gay porn with a lesbian. We whinge a bit about our lives and she says
that though we might whinge about them there are lots of satisfactions. I am
not convinced. My existence, emotionally, seems bleak and empty. This is
ridiculous when I survey my last thirty-six hours but somehow I feel it.
John comes home at midnight and he and Anne talk for a bit. We show John the
commercial and he laughs. It is well-edited. She directed and edited it. She
said she noticed my research, writing and co-directing credit recently.
Anne goes and John and I go to bed. I am still tired and go to sleep pronto.
But I wake at 2:00am again and feel like I'm not getting there and there are
all these anxious things to do...
D.