The Fassbinder Diaries Read online

  James Pate

  The Fassbinder Diaries

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Seven Corners for publishing the following pieces (some in a highly different earlier versions): “Extraction #1,” “The Fassbinder Diaries: Day 27,” “The Fassbinder Diaries: Day 733,” “Imperial Tangos #1,” “Imperial Tangos #2,” and Imperial Tangos #3.”

  I would also like to thank Action Yes for publishing an early version of “Exhibit B:” and Everyday Genius for publishing “Pig Beach.”

  The Fassbinder Diaries

  But hate is a passion

  and that’s near to love anyway.

  -- Marine Girls, “Tutti lo sanno”

  Part One. The Ascension of Veronika Voss

  Warm Dark and Dark Cold

  The first scenes are silent. The footage is grainy, as if the world being shown has gone through a storm of broken glass shards. As if the air has been delicately mangled. There are figures on the ground, squirming, and it is impossible to tell if they are outside or inside. They could be in an abandoned factory or in a very spacious bedroom or in the middle of a meadow in the middle of the night. We are watching them in the dark. I mean we’re in the dark ourselves. Dust floats in the light from the projector. It is a warm dark. Outside, there is a cold dark.

  The figures squirm as if they were trying to wrest free from their shadows. There is mud and white streaming rivulets. There is grain in the abandoned spaces and white streaming light dripping from the middles.

  The director has arranged the scene on two levels: there are things that blink and things that remain still. The light blinks and the mouths of the figures blink and some of the limbs blink back and forth out of the dark areas of the scene into the lighter areas. But some mouths seem to be crusted over. And all of the eyes are crusted over. Or maybe they aren’t crusted over. Maybe the figures never had eyes. Maybe only a few had mouths.

  The entire factory or bedroom or meadow dripping light from its lips. Or maybe delicate drops of acid have eaten the scene. There are figures on the ground, silently squirming. But it’s impossible to tell if they are silent because they are silent or if they are silent because this is a silent film. We are watching them in the dark. It is a black-and-white dark. Outside, it is a black-and-white dark.

  The Ecstasy of Mama Roma

  One night Franz and Mieze are watching a black-and-white Pasolini film. It is the movie where the mother is a prostitute and the son is a young criminal who eventually dies in jail in the shape of Christ. Not that he is crucified. But the director has made him look crucified. His arms are out and his face is a slice of bronze reflecting a distant light.

  Mieze after the movie says ____, and Franz after the movie replies ____. The curtains are closed. The curtains are the color of blood cells.

  And later that night they are in bed, Franz with a beer resting on his stomach, his head on the pillow, his eyes on the ceiling, Mieze on the edge of the bed polishing one of her boots, she is whistling, he is trying to figure out what song it is, it sounds familiar, but he can’t, no he can’t figure out the tune, and he doesn’t ask her. Mieze looks up at Franz and thinks about the last scene of the film, the way the film suddenly goes blank, suddenly goes white, it made her think of that line by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the one about the bright singular white light of eternity, something like that, something along those lines, she can’t remember precisely.

  A window in Berlin. A train in Chicago inching toward at a halt. A thread of black smoke rising in a certain scene in Memphis. Toward numerous night skies.

  Return of the Holy Beasts

  I was watching the film about the Catholic school, a French film with atrocious subtitles. I was twelve and in the living room of an otherwise empty house.

  I was of a certain age. I had recently turned a certain age. There were dripping noises inside one part of my head and red thoughts inside the other. There was salt in my mouth I couldn’t spit out. There was sand in my head I couldn’t brush away. The curtains were closed. The carpet was pink. The lights were out. The wallpaper was yellow.

  In the movie the fierce nun spanks the demure student. Or maybe that’s the Japanese movie, the one where the evil old nuns make the pretty young nun take off her blouse. Where the fierce older nuns then tie a crown of thorns around her torso. The School of the Holy Beasts. A film I saw in Chicago, in a theater where I had snuck in Vietnamese sandwiches.

  I was twelve or twenty-two. In one dark room or a later one. The Japanese nun hiking through the French woods. The French boy jerking-off under a blossoming cherry tree.

  Having arrived at the age where a fine violet shade lingered in my head. Where I imagined other shades in other heads. Nights heavy as damp sand and nights light as drifting sand. The scene in the French film where the shivering rain-soaked girl finds the Nazi flag in her father’s drawer. The taste of pork and cilantro in the silent and serious and ever alert theater.

  And the curtains remained closed. And the stand of the lamp remained orange and curved. And the chair containing myself continued to be crimson and heavily stuffed. And the wallpaper even in the dimness consisted of yellow flowers from which countless animals stared.

  Retroactive Nights

  Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not very easily. So we went to Naples. It was fun and tiring and boring and scary and hot and noisy and occasionally windy and perpetually dusty. We temporarily had some money because of X, not much, but enough for two maybe three weeks. When the sun fell it kept falling. When night arrived it kept arriving. That was how things played out there. Or that was my thinking at the time. The men were scraps of wind with red dots inside. The women were noises emitted from a crisp red light. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not very easily. So we grew hot and noisy and our heads turned windy, a breeze hazy with dust. There was a man begging by the train station. He looked like Jesus, had Jesus been fat. Dante stood in the middle of a piazza with trash at his feet and graffiti on the shops around him. We had coffee across the street, under the palm trees. One of us wondered how many people had been killed in Pompeii. None of us knew the answer. It was fun and boring and tiring and scary, like red lights, and then purple lights. Our heads sizzled fatly in the sun. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? No, not very easily. So I had dreams that turned me inside out, dreams that tended toward red fields, and then purple valleys, toward thighs the color of tongue, dreams that left me gasping for more much as I feared them, dreams inside of red rooms, dreams behind purple curtains. I was a red fish, with a purple spear in my throat. In Naples we played games. We played games with our fingers and our eyes and our knees. We played devil games and coma games and surgical glove games. We played inferno games and trash games and windy games and dusty games. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not so very easily. Our money continued with a commentary of its own. With a politics of its own. This season of rash investments and ashen expenditures. The higher bills we thought of as X and the lower ones as Y. The taste and therefore vomit of money. So we played with the devil’s hand. We played with the devil’s palm. We shaved the devil’s hair. We saw the porn film with seven devils and nine birds on the small TV in our hostel room. We watched the devil’s mouth blink. We watched the devil’s cock piss. We watched the devil’s cunt piss. We watched the devil’s thighs quiver. Could it have ever been resolved retroactively? Not easily. Or that was my thinking at the time. The sun continued to fall behind us, leaving our cold fat in the dark. Our investment sizzled into ash. Most of the shadows stood with their doors open, a fine pink dust blowing through.

  3:04

  Franz said bite me here, and Mieze bit him there, and Mieze said bite me here, and Franz bit her there. The curtains were closed. They were the color of gray snakeskin. Outside, a war developed in Berlin. A gun fired at Dillinger on a movie screen in Chicago. They were someplace else. The seconds were already ahead of them, waiting with their guns pulled. An alley with no escape.

  There was a red light flashing. Both in their heads and out, flashing. There was torturous rampaging music, what Mieze called Egregious Sonic Fuck Music. It sounded like iron hissing in a winter lake. It sounded like cold iron against hot iron. It sounded like cold soil thrown on a cold and gaping mouth.

  Mieze said suck me here, and Franz sucked her there, and Franz said suck me here, and Mieze sucked him there. On the walls were paintings of aged and vulnerable and meek and sultry cherubs that looked like dirtied candy. Between Franz and Mieze were many angels and demons. Their eyes blinked. Their mouths blinked. The cold and gaping seconds.

  An egregious room. An alley room. A Dillinger room.

  His hair, she thought, felt like the feathers of a dead bird, the dusty feathers of road-kill. Her hair, he thought, felt like a wig hanging from the crown of a nude tree, a wig with an extinct color and a texture yet to be invented.

  After the flashing, the biting, the sucking. After the soil, the cold, the gaping mouth. After the iron, the wig, the candy, and the cherubs. Afterwards Mieze took a sip from the whiskey bottle and peered out the window. The sheets were purple. The scratches and bites on their skin were purple. The purple of dark lipstick. The purple glow thrown from muted televisions playing at 3:04 in the morning. And a car passed by the house. And a car passed by the house. And a car passed by the house. And a car passed by the house.

  ~ ~ ~

  Q #1:

  Where was Fassbinder born?

  Q #2:

  What w
as his first homosexual encounter?

  Q #3:

  What was his first heterosexual encounter?

  Q #4:

  What was his favorite Jean Genet novel?

  Q #5:

  What was his favorite line from a Douglas Sirk Film?

  Q #6:

  How did he die?

  Q #7:

  What was found on his body at the time of death?

  Q #8:

  What was found in his body at the time of death?

  The Double Life of Mick Jagger

  I.

  There was this one time at a party in Detroit, this Christmas party. In 2003 or 2004. I was in the bathroom washing my hands and two women walked by outside and one said to the other that the other night she’d had a dream where Mick Jagger was trying to seduce her, except in the dream he was a woman. The other woman outside the door said he was a kind of woman. His mouth, she said, was a kind of vagina. And that exchange made me want to write a poem about that idea. About Mick Jagger’s vagina. I tried it the next day. My window overlooked a pawnshop with a shitload of lights flashing in the window. I came up with a poem about a couple, a man and a woman, and they both looked like Mick Jagger, and in a sense they both were Mick Jagger.

  II.

  In the hotel room in the poem the female Jagger will dress the male Jagger in whore clothes, call him whore names. The male Jagger will think during such episodes of how the meat inside of him could build a massive cathedral should it ever be extracted from his body. That is, if you took the meat and pounded it flat. And used quite a bit of metal wiring. His eyes could be in the center of the cathedral either in the floor and looking up or in the ceiling and staring down. Either way they would never blink. And his teeth. What could they do with his teeth.

  III.

  You fuck, the female Jagger will say, like a whore. You fuck, the male Jagger will say, like a porn film with the furniture scratched out.

  IV.

  Yet they do not know they are part of the same person. They do not realize their separate essences will only be reunited upon death.

  V.

  I was rereading Helter Skelter around this time. I was listening to some of the songs from the Manson family around this time, pretty songs sung by young women with childlike and fairylike voices. The two Mick Jaggers would be killed by a hitchhiking serial killer, a thug with a red mohawk. They would die on a bright June morning, in the silence of an Iowa cornfield. Did I hate them, the two Jaggers? I did not hate them. But I liked to think that in some way they hated each other.

  VI.

  The crows will eat the hearts of the Mick Jaggers. Plastic crows. Lipstick hearts.

  A Brief History of the Beatles

  Mieze said to me earlier in the week that as a teenager she’d been obsessed with the possibility that Paul really was dead, that the rumor from the 60s had been right after all, that a bland fake Paul had for decades lived under the name and sign of the actual boyish and endearing Paul, and that the most haunting lyrics from any song ever was probably I Buried Paul murmured during the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

  Mieze said to me later in the week that “Helter Skelter” was the song that turned into a crime that turned into a made-for-TV movie.

  Revolution Number Nine

  Mieze sits on the hotel bed smoking a cigarette.

  By her knee is an ashtray and a pair of sunglasses.

  She has recently showered.

  Her hair is wet and her cheeks are flushed.

  She is tired and sunburned and excited and hungry.

  Franz is under the covers pretending to be asleep.

  Franz listens to himself breathing.

  He is tired and sunburned and drifting and hungry.

  From the room next door comes music.

  It is a low murmur.

  Franz can barely hear it.

  Mieze can hear it a little better.

  She is younger and less sleepy.

  The Beatles.

  One of the ballads from The White Album.

  The television glows.

  The screen shows 7,000 figures writhing in the mud.

  Or 8,000.

  Because the picture is grainy it could be a cartoon.

  A cartoon drawn in a crudely realist style.

  Or the actors could be electrified mannequins.

  And therefore not even alive.

  And therefore not even dead.

  Many wear black masks and black gloves.

  A midnight ball strewn across the mud.

  An evening dance left out in the rain.

  The ballad ends. “Revolution No. 9” begins.

  The curtains are closed.

  The curtains are the color of dried rose petals.

  The sun is out.

  The sun lights the curtains.

  Franz thinks it is around four in the afternoon.

  Mieze thinks it is around two in the afternoon.

  Extraction #1

  The man without air used his stomach muscles to center himself in the middle of the field. He used his jaw muscles to extinguish certain ideas he had only come to understand recently. He used his skull muscles to watch films involving parades of pork moving through cities of delicate snow. He used his spine muscles to extract newer and drier shadows from a previously dribbling haze. Behind the purple curtain the 19th century withdrew. Behind the scarlet curtain Marilyn Monroe prepared for the Day of the Dead Mass. Behind the coarse curtain the sea tossed about like houses tumbling from clouds.

  The man was dead and had recently been stuffed with salt and black feathers. The part of him that had been dead longest heard voices that whispered from a closet stuffed with white and lemon dresses. The part of him that had been alive furthest waited for the dresses to melt so he could lick their drippings from the floor.

  Neither the alive nor dead part had ever waited longer than cloth. Neither the longest nor the furthest had grown past the customary whisperings.

  But other sounds continued. The soundtrack dealt with 17 recurrent noises. Other recordings played through the foggier arenas. The wolves made volcano noises. The owls made bone noises. The snakes made June noises. The vultures made scarlet noises. The panthers made soundtrack noises. The bears made lunar noises. The butterflies made gunfire noises.

  Demon Flower

  But soon afterwards I found myself dating this woman who played in this punk band, this group called Demon Flower. I can’t remember when we met but it must’ve been around Christmas that year because I remember that New Year’s Eve we’d been planning on going to this party downtown but ended up screwing the whole night instead and I had had just gotten out of the military and she’d just gotten out of an awful job in some shit town and Dick Clark, he was counting down the final few seconds of that year and she was standing on the bed against the wall and I was kneeling in front of her rubbing my face between her legs, and here I was, just out of the military, just right out of it, and there she was, no longer in a shit job and in a shit town. Then one year ended and one began. One night ended and another began. And millions of years had already ended and millions more were waiting. Each like an unmade bed. Each like a night in a shit town you never heard of. Each like a cot with a thin clean blanket. She stood there, her back against the wall, and I knelt there rubbing my face between her legs and licking and feeling, I don’t know why, but feeling like a cat. There was no new year and no old year. But there were some years and then other years. And the military. And the other militaries. And the shit jobs, and shit towns.

  U-Bahn

  I’m on the train under Berlin. I’m on the speckled train. The strangers look like gardens full of glass shards. They look like graffiti from a fading silent film. I’d had this dream before. The first part was a wall. The second involved a door that stared out into a cluster of blood clots.

  I was on the train, waiting. There were other parts of the dream waiting too. The strangers calculated one ride for every cloud in purgatory, one feather from every rubble, one sea for every beach. The strangers examined their hair and their hair and their mouths and their mouths. Under the lights they were naked the way rust is naked. They made sounds like cities passing over into sleep. Like subways with the brakes missing. They’d dreamt about their mouths for centuries. They swallowed over and over, to prove they had tongues. They blinked to prove they had skulls. They bit one hand among the many.