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    Our Secret Life in the Movies
    Our Secret Life in the Movies
    Our Secret Life in the Movies
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Our Secret Life in the Movies

    By Michael McGriff and J. M. Tyree

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    About this ebook

    A whip-smart fiction debut, Our Secret Life in the Movies riffs on classic and cult cinema. Inspired by films from silent-era documentaries to music videos, the authors unfold a dual narrative about two boys growing up in the 1980s. Coming of age during the last days of the Cold War, these boys dream of space exploration and nuclear winter, Reaganomics and Dungeons & Dragons, Blade Runner and Red Dawn. Haunting, cinematic, and full of life, Our Secret Life makes it clear that we are in the movies and the movies are in us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Strange Object
    Release dateOct 4, 2014
    ISBN9781941920992
    Our Secret Life in the Movies

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      Book preview

      Our Secret Life in the Movies - Michael McGriff

      ABOUT OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES

      We wrote Our Secret Life in the Movies in San Francisco, in a shared sublet a block away from Mission Dolores, the site of Carlotta Valdes’s grave in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We’d hatched a plan to watch every film in the Criterion Collection’s sweeping catalog of world cinema classics over the course of a single year. This obsession fed off pizza boxes, sambuca fumes, and whatever is damaged on the Y chromosome.

      We watched film after film—as many as two or three a day—and wrote stories inspired by them. For each film, two stories, a double take. After completing a dozen sketches, it became obvious that we were writing a fragmented book of linked snapshots chronicling our parallel trajectories as the last children of the Cold War, coming of age in the 1980s amidst the white noise of intercontinentalballistic mayhem and Reaganomics.

      We all have a secret life in the movies, in which the pictures seep through our dreams until fantasy and reality become hopelessly blurred. We are in the movies, and the movies are in us.

      MM / JMT

      2014

      OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES

      PORQUE TE VAS

      \ After Cría Cuervos by Carlos Saura \

      In 1973, my local fame as a defective birth—holes in both lungs—spread to a Rosicrucian prayer group in Milwaukee. They chanted some incantations that mended the fabric of the universe for a time. For example, that same month, the final combat soldiers left Vietnam and Captain Beefheart declared that whales had high IQs from what I hear of their music. My lungs healed while Nixon’s White House crumbled. The Pioneer 11 spacecraft hurtled toward Jupiter and Saturn, eventually collecting an Emmy for its photographs of the outer planets and becoming the first human object to leave the solar system. Humanity lost contact with Pioneer 11 in 1995, the same year I left town, but fortunately both of us are attached to identical small metal plaques designed to shield us from interstellar dust. On each plaque there’s a fanciful diagram indicating that the Sun is our home star. My parents are shown naked on the plaque and my father is waving hello, even though they never spoke much after the divorce.

      WE BUY GOLD

      \ After Cría Cuervos by Carlos Saura \

      When I was born, my father wanted to name me Ruskin Marshall, the kind of name that leads to bare-knuckle boxing and haggis-eating competitions. My sister was to be named Mason James. Instead, my mother placed her bets on Michael and Mary. And it was good. Amen.

      Fergus came to live with us in the second grade. We called him Fred. He couldn’t stop pacing. His arms went crazy sometimes and his hands slapped around and he shouted a lot. He slept in my sleeping bag on the floor next to my bed.

      It was my job to get Fred on the bus and take him to class with me, saying that he was my cousin from Canada. His arms and hands flapped all day, and I explained to everyone that Fred was a Rubik’s Cube master training for a showdown in Moscow, that he could never stop practicing, calculating, thinking out loud, rotating and clicking the invisible into alignment.

      A few nights after he arrived, I awoke to my mother crying, and to another woman’s voice at the door. From my bedroom window I could barely make out my father loading Fred’s things into the trunk of a car I’d never seen, his cigarette moving in the dark at his side, like an empty playground swing. And then Fred was gone. And then it was summer.

      Last week, when driving my wife to work, I saw him standing near the entrance to a strip mall, twirling a sign that said We Buy Gold. I called my mother and she explained that he came from a side of the family I was never allowed to meet, that he and his mother were passing through on their way to San Diego, on the run from her maniac husband, moving from shelter to shelter. They had looked us up in the phone book, my mother said. They eventually had to change their names.

      MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION

      \ After Devilfish by Jean Painlevé \

      I was raised, in part, by my best friend’s family. Among the numerous bonfire-side drunken debates raised by this group of Jeremiahs (Sr., Jr., and my best friend, III) was the orbital relationship between the Sun and the Earth. I was persuaded by Sr. that the kiwi had evolved, in the span of a few centuries, from mammal to fruit, with the vestigial hair as empirical evidence of its transformation. Jr.’s new wife had a series of cassettes whose experts dated the world at approximately five thousand years. Based on the ratio of brain to body, Carl Sagan believed that whales could be our intellectual superiors. The leader of the free world wanted X-ray-laser-armed satellites in space to blast the Soviets’ missiles. We’ll always have Swayze and the Wolverines. The elements of the universe can be seen in a spectrum of bent light. Almonds and peaches share the same stone heart, everything can be represented by ones and zeros, and there’s a slow, dark movement in the deep, deep sea.

      THE DEEP

      \ After Devilfish by Jean Painlevé \

      In school we learned that the first submersible to reach the ocean floor was connected by a tether to a boat on the surface; they lowered it straight down. When the ball-shaped craft hit bottom, disturbed sediment puffed up in a great cloud and enveloped the windows, which were made from quartz. Lacking windshield wipers, the men inside couldn’t see anything more after that point, and when they returned from the deep with tales of weird fishes and other new species glimpsed during their descent, they encountered few believers.

      TUNA

      \ After Mon Oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra \

      Everyone was frothing at the mouth for Reagan, and I slept comfortably in the arms of his speeches, beating my tin drum and hoping the Communists stuck their toes over the line. My hometown started getting lots of attention. We’d become the possible retirement destination for the leader of a white supremacist group from northern Idaho. And we were enduring a winter with more rainfall than Bergen, Norway. During the month of November, Norwegian reporters and talking heads from network television affiliates interviewed people we knew about the rain and neo-Nazis in parking lots all over town: Bi-Mart, K-Mart, the Cenex feed store, labor halls, Gussie’s Dine and Dance. Women with big hair and assistants. White vans. Mobile satellite dishes.

      Inside our cupboards hung rows of grocery receipts taped up and highlighted. My parents invented a game. On Fridays we’d go over the new receipts—if we’d spent less money on food than the previous week we got to have ice cream for dinner and stay up late and sleep in the living room. All my sister wanted for Christmas was a

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