Characters:
Bryzynsky
The Man
Giuseppe the Wine Merchant
Young Man
Young Man's Girlfriend
Pizza Maker 1
Pizza Maker 2
(Wide angle shot of a New York City neighborhood from the air. It is day. A Gershwin clarinet initiates, somewhat ironically abates. Camera, awkwardly, rapidly pans in on a single window, travels through the window, zeros in on a man in his underwear laying on a fetid mattress leaning up against the wall drinking from a bottle of wine. The room is chaos, a sea of bottles and clothes. The walls are bare.)
Man (thinking): I was living in a fleabag C street apartment, driving a yellow cab and drinking during my days off. They had this wine for sale down the street at Giuseppe's. IL Primitivo. Giuseppe had a limitless supply he kept in crates in the back. He showed them to me. "IL Primitivo, look!" he said. It had an almost too sweet start that suddenly dried up like a conversation with a woman you meet somewhere. Then once you think the interaction is over, there's this light bluecheese aftertaste, like an unexpected touch to chase away the long, dead years.
(The man takes a drink from the bottle. Camera pans in on the bottles label. IL Primitivo. The man wipes his mouth with his sleeve, stands, puts on a his pants which are lying on the floor the belt still attached, puts on a jacket over the incredibly filthy, wine stained undershirt and walks out into the steamy New York late morning.)
Man (narrating): I was going to meet my old NYU dorm mate Byrzynsky. Over the last 12 years, Bryzynsky has become something of a celebrity, very much as I have become an undiscovered country unto myself. It's funny what life hands you. I used to think I was more or less in control, but not anymore. You aren't in control of any of this shit.
(Man walks down the street, enters the subway, sits waiting on one of the wooden seats below. The woman sitting next to him gets up and moves severals seats down. The train comes...)
Man (on the train, thinking): We haven't seen each other in five years. I wonder if it will be awkward. I wonder if I look horrible.
(Man exits the train at Avenue J, passes out onto the street, joins Bryzynsky in line at De Farra's Pizza.)
Man: Is this the line?
Byrzynzky: Did I ever tell you about lines during the Soviet Period?
(Byrzynsky is tall, with long dark hair and a beard. Hip. Designer jeans with, a mid length coat, a gray scarf. An Eastern European intellectual dandy, with that macho Eastern European edge.)
Man: Maybe. It's been a while.
Byrzynsky: The idea wasn't so much as to produce a sense of order as it was to see how long the line could get. It was like the game Snake Xenia. Do you have Snake Xenia on your phone?
(Man digs out his old phone)
Man: Yeah. Snake.
Byrzynsky: The Snake Xenia: she is a female snake: that is her name: gets longer and longer until the only way she can continue to survive is to make a spiral starting at the outskirts and spiral in on the last morsel she will eat just before she eat's her own tail, and at that point the game will presumably end.
Man: What happens at that point? Do you win?
Byrzynsky: I've never gotten that far. It's all theoretical, like the end of time, or alchemy, or maybe communism. It's like communism. It's as if the game itself -- the totalitarian structure which is the programming -- ironically mimics in the architecture of the snake's journey the phone's ultimate fate: the fate of the obsolete technology circling down the historical whirlpool toward Fresh Kills. Have you been to Fresh Kills?
Man: The dump out on Staten Island? No.
Bryzynsky: After I published my first book of poems, caused the sensation and did the Larry King interview and all that, I started going out there. You take the train out there for as long as you can ride and then you get off and walk down this long road through the forest. There is no sense whatsoever that you are approaching the world's largest garbage pile. And then you start seeing seagulls everywhere swooping in, ane the forest is littered with stray plastic bags and broken television sets presumably people discard as if they can't tell where is the dump and where is nature.
Man: Why did you start going out there?
Bryzynsky: I don't know, man. To get away. I think at that stage I needed a journey from the familiar to the totally unknown, and there is nothing like this place. It's like: the end of the world. Like our own collective destiny. Piles and piles of trash. Of course they don't let you into the main garbage city, but they allow you to prowl the outskirts with the rest of the garbage lovers.
Man: Garbage lovers?
Bryzynsky: Or scavengers or whatever. Fresh kills attracts all types. You'd be surprised. Lots of Swedish tourists for some reason.
Man: Swedish?
Bryzynsky: Yes, Swedish. The Swedes are for some reason fascinated by Fresh Kills. Just find a Swede, say Fresh Kills and you'll start a whole conversation, they'll be like 'oh, that place! I love that place! It is the most American place!'. And then there are the scavengers, the metal detector crowd. Don't talk to those guys! They don't like it when they are interrupted because they are always just on the cusp of finding diamonds in the trash, gold, I don't know what. And then there are the people like me who go there to think.
Man: Are there lots of people who go there to think?
Bryzynsky: Eliot Spitzer
Man: Really?
Bryzynsky: I once met Eliot Spitzer out there, but he ran away when I recognized him.
(They enter the perfumed and sonorous atmosphere of De Farra's where those two guys, their eyes clouded by staring at pizzas too long, take their order.)
Man: what would you like Byrzynsky? A square pie or circular pie?
Byrzynsky: Pizza should be circular, don't you think? The dough naturally wants to take the shape of the circle. But why don't we go against the grain today and experiment with the square? Break the routine, eh? Shoot for shocking geometries. Let's have him make us a Octagon.
Man: I don't think they do that.
Bryzynsky: How do you know?
Man (to Byrzynsky): I wonder if they have any wine. (to the pizza man) Do you have any Il Primitivo wine?
Pizza man: Il Primitivo???
Man: never mind.
Byrzynsky: It's OK. You could use a release from alcohol. It's a cage, you know.
Man: I've never thought of it that way. More of a crutch. At times a pillow.
(They sit down at one of the little tables. They are surrounded by people eating pizza.)
Byrzynsky: Most things in life are like that. Liminal holding cells between one state and the next. I write about this in Flozinksy.
Man: I haven't read that.
Bryzynsky: You haven't read Flozinsky? He is this kind of Blakean God, except that he is a post-modern and lives his life inside a blue jelly bean.
Man: Liminal.
Byrzynsky: Lets extend the metaphor, shall we? You have made love to a beautiful woman and you are exhausted. Spent. It hasn't just been good: it's been great, OK? You've found your zone where control and lack of control meet and time stops like out at Fresh Kills dump, OK? Then, you lay there smoking your cigarette or joint or whatever you like to smoke during that time as you wait for your desire to rejuvenate. Recently, I have begun to smoke a pipe.
Man: what?
Byrzynsky: A pipe. (he takes a pipe out of his inside jacket pocket) I take out my pipe and have a smoke.
Man: In bed?
Byrzynsky: Yes!
Pizza man: Sicilian Square.
Man: I'll get it. (Gets the pizza, brings it back)
Bryzynsky: Did I ever tell you the story of my first poem?
Man: No. Not that I can recall.
Bryzynsky: Well, I was seven years old, living in, this pizza's really good! living in Poland. You know, that is where I am from. Poland. I am Polish.
Man: yes, I do know that. It's on the back of all your books. From Poland. Polish.
Bryzynsky: Yes, and so it is, and so it is. Well, we were quite poor in those days. My father was an engineer, and in those days being an engineer meant nothing, and my mother worked in a thimble factory. All the thimbles in the eastern block came from this factory. That was the decadent thing about the planned economy. They planned to have all the thimbles in the world produced in one factory. All the cameras or watches or whatever were produced somewhere else.
Man: Like Willy Wonka.
Bryzynsky: Yes! The Soviets would have approved of Willy Wonka's world wide schemes.
Man: All the candy comes from one place, the socks from someplace else. It is excessive. Clearly the workings of an addictive personality.
Bryzynsky: When I was a little kid I would go and I would look at the thimbles tumblling down these fantastic, science fiction like tubes and shoots, and it was like an amusement park for me. Going to the thimble factory was my favorite thing in the world. And we aren't talking about a little tiny factory here: some micro brewery. This was totally macro: like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory -- almost a metaphore, but not, stretching on and on forever and ever like Snake Xenia at the moment of her death or rebirth: the hypothetical end state, the dream, the veil.
Man: Bizarre
Bryzynsky: Imagine the difference of a Soviet and American childhood! On the one hand you've got thimbles: these little things women put over their fingers when they are sewing, and then on the other hand you've got these video games or whatever, the guts spilling out, the Japaneseness. Meanwhile, I was growing up in these extremely spare surroundings which were nevertheless somehow connected with infinity. Everything was stripped back, bare revealing the cosmic forces. We of course lived on the outskirts in one of those old Krushchev era complexes that were once sparkling white epitomes but became gray and sooty. The paneling attracts the soot turning them into these blackened depressing monoliths. But for a kid, I remember being quite happy, playing in the little courtyard with the other kids, although we did not play on the spider but around it, hunting cats with slingshots and setting traps for drunks whose routines we had memorized.
Well, and so I think it was at this time, around 7 years old.
See, this is when I became a poet: this is when I new I was a poet. It was all connected with the falling out of my parents -- my father was having an affair with a Lithuanian prostitute named Milda -- I learned her name when my mother shouted it, shouted this strange name again and again, Milda! Milda! It's Milda! Is it Milda?! Milda!
Man: Is it Milda?
Bryzynsky: So, anyway, I don't know what it was, but all of a sudden the idea of death as void, as nothing which it certainly is, hit me. I just couldn't wrap my mind around it, here today, gone tomorrow, and not just gone but forever wiped off the face of existence! The concept terrified me. It was all I could think about. I stopped playing with the other children and spent all my time in the dirty stairwell contemplating the void. My world was shaken. This pizza is delicious. Oily.
Man: Fresh basil.
Bryzynsky: Yes, the basil! I think we all must eat more basil. Basil on everything. And it was as if all of nature could sense my thoughts, my powerful awareness of oblivion, and at school the other children one by one began to forsake me. It was as if they wanted no part of the stark realities I was grappling with.
So, coming home after school, the apartment full of my parents screaming, the only place left for me was the stairwell. And the only other living creatures in the stairwell were the ravens that would fly through the broken window on the top floor and scavenge in the garbage bags people left out by the clogged garbage shoot. Have you observed ravens?
Man: just crows and pigeons.
Bryzynsky: If you haven't observed Ravens before, you don't know how intelligent these creatures are. They are feeling creatures. They think. They observe. Watching the ravens, I felt soothed by their presence. There lives were as fleeting as mine, and once more, I was practically sure they knew what I was going through. In fact, I got the sense that that was why they were ravens! As if their intimate knowledge of destruction had led them to incarnate themselves as little black bird men, little philosophers thoughtfully pacing around the eternal winter of communist Poland. The ravens knew! I knew they knew because they would actually come right up to me and gently peck like this at my raggedy old sweater produced in Bratislava because that is where all the sweaters came from. For some reason the pecking of the ravens soothed me, and so I took out my bit of chalk and wrote a poem on the wall, next to the scrawled phone numbers of prostitutes. Perhaps Milda's number was among them.
Man: What was the poem about?
Bryzynsky: well, it was actually a dirty limerick.
Man: Interesting. So your own first poetic impulse was lewd.
Bryzynsky: It was a protest. I wrote it as if controlling my own actions from a distance. The idea of writing a poem, much less a dirty one, had not been on my childish agenda, never. I never considered the idea of writing a poem, of even writing anything unforced, for pleasure, for myself. Up until that point I had never really considered anything except the void which I had only lately begun to obsess over. And now I was writing a poem and I had this massive erection, or at least whatever it was in those days. And now ever since, I know that I am writing a good poem when I get a...
Man: I see.
Bryzynsky: An erection, a stiffy, a boner. What do you call it?
Man: I see. So, what have you been doing with yourself? You've attained such notoriety. I'm really impressed.
Bryzynsky: This last week, me and my girlfriend, my girlfriend and I, you know Serena...
Man: How could I not. Serena James. English super model. She's absolutely beautiful.
Bryzynsky: Yes, she's gorgeous, isn't she? Serena and I visited Omaha for a fashion show. We found the domestic flight so odd. Even in first class, it felt like one of those long bus journeys you take when you are 13 and have absolutely no money and are being shifted to spend the summer with some relative in Massachusetts or somewhere, and so you ride through the great American no where, and the detritus of fast food wrappers and water bottles begins to build up around you. Well, United Airlines was very much the same thing; like the re initiation of some uncomfortable American journey you thought you had escaped long ago but never did because you were always on the journey, down around the rim of the theoretical gravity well. Like Snake Xenia. It was so odd. We felt odd. We looked odd. I mean, look at me. I'm not exactly normal looking. I'm 6 foot 7 and most days I wear Armani, and Serena, well, as you know she is quite stunning, and she was wearing these Louis Vuitton shoes, very catty, very sexy. Did you know she is only 45 kilos.
Man: 45?
Bryzynsky: Yes, 45! She is like a leaf. And so I am with this mantis-like woman riding a flying, accumulating garbage pile, and we felt like we were slumming it, really, and all of a sudden, mutually, we wanted to make love.
Man: how did you know?
Bryzynsky: We have this thing. This radar for each other. It's really weird. We know.
Man: Love radar.
Byrzynsky: Yes, love radar. The question wasn't, did we want to make love? But, where were we going to do it? Were we going to join the mile high club? I never thought of this sort of thing. I've never had the passion that makes you want to make love in unusual locations, although some people feel that way like they want to make love in the movies or on the bus and that's OK! I don't judge them, but I myself have never felt that way and so casually, as a joke I made reference to it -- reference to the mile high club -- and the flight attendant, someone named Courtney or Cody or Casey: one of those names that can go either way depending on which state you are from, actually motioned with her head, did a little head jerk toward the bathroom.
Man: No way.
Bryzynsky: It was absolutely scandalous! That's what it felt like: like we had discovered the hidden scandal of the United Airlines. We made love standing up in the United Airlines airplane toilet, Serena's legs with those sexy shoes up by my ears, and then after I covered the smoke detector with my Fedora with one hand and smoked my pipe with the other.
Man: Are you serious?
Bryzynsky: Yes! And then after, when we were leaving, the flight attendants invited us to some thing, an orgy they were planning in their hotel room in Omaha. But after we left the airport and were driving to the city, it was like all of a sudden the weight of the universe descended, and we just broke down in each other's arms in the back of the limo crying. And then, after checking into the Hilton, We broke down again. Guess where?
Man: I don't know.
Bryzynsky: The Hilton stairwell!
Man: what? Oh, the stairwell. Were there birds?
(Young man approaches with his girlfriend.)
Young man: Excuse me, but are you Stanislaus Bryzynsky?
Bryzynsky: Yes, yes I am in fact.
Young man: No way. Could you autograph our pizza box?
Bryzynsky: Sure, why not, I'd be happy to. (takes the pen and signs their pizza box.
Young man: I love Flozinsky.
Bryzynsky: Flozinsky.
Young man: Flozinsky (Byrzynsky and the young man stare at each other as if they have just uttered a password).
Bryzynsky: People love Flozinsky. You know what the secret is? It's the name! The word flow coupled with a Slavic ending zinsky.
Man: Is it all that superficial?
Byrzysnky (shrugs): You know what my favorite part of the female anatomy is? The back. I think it's because the back has the biggest surface area, and a nude back reveals so much by revealing so little, and it is also like a man's back: let's be frank, a back is more or less a back, except for the subtle refinements which make it dramatically different: the slight tapering, and then the soft quality of female skin as opposed to male skin. The delicacy of the shoulder blades, the spine. Nothing captures the absence of maleness so totally and so suddenly.
Man:I kind of feel like I've slipped through.
Bryzynsky: That's a very poetic conceit.
Man: You think so?
Bryzynsky: What happened to your poetry?
Man: what poetry?
Bryzynsky: Didn't you write poetry? I always thought you wrote poetry, or intended to write poetry.
Man: I was an economics major.
Bryzynsky: Really?
Man: Yeah.
Bryzynsky: Shall I get the check? Let me pay!
Man: We could split it.
Bryzynsky: Ok, let's split it.
(Wide angled shot of Bryzynsky and the man standing out in front of De Farra's Pizza. We can't hear what they stay but they exchange parting words. The next moment we see the man leaning his head up against the window of the train. The camera focuses in on the man's glasses reflecting the setting sun from out the windows of the train. You see him exit the train in Manhattan, walk to the wine shop and buy two bottles of Il Primitovo from Guiseppi and then walk home. On the way home through the dusky city, the man recites in his thoughts the last few lines of the Dylan Thomas poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion". He speaks slowly, sadly, as if he is deeply familiar with the lines, caressing their every cadence...
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down...)
The End
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