It Chooses You - Miranda July [30]
It was like the scene in Pollock where Marcia Gay Harden looks at Ed Harris’s first splatter painting and says, soberly, “You’ve broken it wide open, Pollock,” and you know she’s right because those splatter paintings are worth a kabillion dollars in real life now. Marcia Gay Harden wasn’t with me as I drove home from Sun Valley, so I had to say it, soberly, to myself – You’ve broken it wide open, July – and then I had to look exhausted and unaware of the greatness I’d stumbled into, the way Ed Harris does, and then I had to be the woman watching the movie based on my life, someone who might have been born today but who thirty-five years from now would know that history had proved the brilliance of Jason buying things through the PennySaver. She shivered a little, this woman who would be thirty-five in thirty-five years; tears jumped to her eyes as she watched the reenactment of this pivotal moment in film history. It didn’t even matter that she wasn’t a fan of my work – I’m not a huge Pollock fan. It’s just the way Marcia says it. I whispered it again: You’ve broken it wide open, Pollock.
I’d had a similarly groundbreaking revelation twenty-five years earlier, when I was nine. The epiphany came one night, just before I fell asleep: I would make an entire city out of cereal boxes. I’d collect the boxes over months and I’d paint them, hundreds of them, stores and streets and houses and freeways, forming a whole little world that would be an accurate
representation of my hometown, Berkeley (although I wasn’t totally married to the specifics yet – it might be better to make it more of an Everytown, USA, since geography wasn’t my strong suit). The city would take up the whole basement floor and I would bring special people down there, to the basement, and turn on the lights and, boom, their minds would be blown to pieces. After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: No I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one. But I also felt certain that the thought itself was the only thing that had stopped me, like a witch’s curse – or, no, like the witch hunters, the small-minded, fearful Local Authorities.
From then on to this very moment, I had done everything I could to avoid them, but after almost three superstitious decades I’d come to realize that the Local Authorities are always there, inside and outside, and they get most riled up when I begin to change. Each time I feel something new, the Local Authorities step in and gently encourage me to burn myself alive.
So now I called Dina immediately, before the second thought could come. She took the idea of an audition in stride, as if it were the usual outcome of trying to sell your hair dryer. The next day I drove back to the FEMA-like encampment with Alfred and a video camera and suggested that we begin by reenacting our meeting the day before. I would knock on the door, she would let me in, she would tell me about the hair dryer. Get it? Yep. Okay, let’s try it.
An unexpected thing happened when Dina opened the door, and it wasn’t the unexpectedly wonderful thing I was expecting. She stopped using any contractions or colloquialisms – isn’t became is not, yeah became