It Chooses You - Miranda July [23]
Car-door unlocking was my last real day-job, but the truth is I wasn’t entirely living off my art yet – I was a thief. I stole not only my food and clothes, but pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. One day I swiped a pair of black tennis shoes with velcro closures from Payless ShoeSource. They looked sort of like knockoff Reeboks. An alarm tag pierced the velcro flap of the left shoe, which was why I’d brought a pair of scissors with me. I cut the tag off and put the shoes into my purse. I walked out of the store and down the street and into a shoe-repair shop called Greiling Brothers. I asked the man working there if he could make these fine black velcro shoes taller; I wanted to be tall. He asked why part of the velcro tab on the left shoe was cut off. I studied it hard, as if seeing it for the first time. He leaned his head back, taking in my whole getup, and said something along the lines of “You’re an odd bird.” Not exactly that, but something that made me a bit defensive – which was my primary emotion in those years, understandably, since I had a lot I could be accused of, even jailed for. I responded with something vague about being a performer and needing the shoes for a performance. He said he’d like to know exactly what I did, performance-wise, and so when I picked up the now-taller shoes I brought him a copy of my CD, Ten Million Hours a Mile.
This was the beginning of my friendship with Richard Greiling of Greiling Brothers Shoe Repair. There wasn’t another brother; he just liked the sound of it. Richard was raspy and ragged, always on the verge of doing something ridiculously dangerous, or saying something flatly profound. In time, I convinced him that if he could repair every part of a shoe, then he could probably also make shoes from scratch. He made three pairs of wonderfully strange, blocky shoes for me that we designed together. Eventually he lost his shop and had to take a job selling shoes at the department store Meier and Frank. By that time he had starred in two of my short movies, Getting Stronger Every Day and Nest of Tens, and was the inspiration for the male lead, Richard Swersey, in the feature film I was writing, Me and You and Everyone We Know. I had imagined that he would play himself in this movie, but in the end I became either cowardly or smart and cast an actor who had a similarly raw, volatile quality – John Hawkes.
I lost touch with Richard for a few years after that. Without noticing, I mentally combined him with John; John’s career successes seemed to imply everything had worked out for everyone. But right around this time, as I was meeting actors and PennySavers, I crossed paths with Richard Greiling again. He looked the same but he said he wasn’t. He described his descent all the way to the very bottom, which is where he said he was now. He was still just as remarkable to me, but I could see he wasn’t kidding. The contradictions between him and the actor who had played him made my heart ache. I re-watched his performances in my short movies and he was really good, probably as good as John Hawkes, just more of a wild card. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake, but it made me wonder just what kind of director I really wanted to be. LA is so many things, but it is also a company town – almost everyone I knew worked on movies, at least part of the time. Which made it hard, almost rude, to resist the rules and rituals of Hollywood filmmaking; I was grateful to be a part of it, in a way. And in another way I was desperately trying to remind myself that there was no one way to make a good movie; I could actually write anything or cast anyone. I could cast ghosts or shadows, or a pineapple, or the shadow of a pineapple.
MATILDA & DOMINGO
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CARE BEARS
$2 - $4
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BELL
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I purposely hadn’t read The Future in a long time; at the very least, the PennySaver interviews were occupying me while I defamiliarized myself with Sophie and Jason. I liked to think of the dormant script curing like ham in a hickory woodshed. Each day I left it alone,