Vincent Gallo

The pictures confirm what I’ve always suspected:  a person’s love for you can make you beautiful by sheer will.

            Jen and I are at the Piano Bar with Jesse, who, as a gift to me, agrees to take us to a Vincent Gallo show at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa. 

            It’s the day after my 35^th birthday.  Jesse takes pictures of Jen and I on the patio and I get nervous when I see them, like maybe I shouldn’t have let someone that into me go. 

            “I wish I looked like that,” I say. 

            “You do look like that.”

            As a sign of his power to make me look like the person I want to be, the image holds me hostage for weeks. 

            One year and one day earlier, Jesse and I had our first date at a Thao and the Get Down Stay Down show in Pomona.  My friend was the tour manager, so we went backstage and drank PBR on tap. 

            “How cool is it that everyone’s here to see you?” I said to Thao. 

            She laughed. 

            Onstage, she said, “You guys are great.  This is like the best first date ever.” 

            Jesse squeezed my hand—over, I guess, the comment I’d made at the bar before the show when I accidentally said, “At least I like you now.” 

            “That’s rude!” he said. 

            “That’s not rude,” I answered.  “It’s totally fucked up!” 

            Last night, a year later, Jen and Joy and I decided to just go back to our room at the Standard Hotel after I asked a waiter where a smart, hot chick could find tail and he said he didn’t know, he was new there.

We eat an Umami burger, and Jesse and I wait outside, smoking, while Jen buys a shirt at Free People.  It’s cold.  I pull my hands into my sleeves and blow warm air into my fists.  Jesse tries to give me his jacket, but I won’t let him so he wraps his scarf around me instead. 

            Hours earlier, we watched Under Great White Northern Lights, and on the drive to Costa Mesa, I think about Meg’s face during the piano scene, her broken face, the way Jack looked at her when he saw it, the way he put his arm around her shoulder pulling her in. 

             

            We get in line at the door.  I am wearing lipstick, which feels funny.  Women ranging from their twenties to forties wear boots and move their hair from one side of the neck to the other, the way you move straightened hair. 

Whenever Jesse looks at me, I have the same feeling I used to get when I’d carry my guitar off the ferry the weekends I left college to go home. 

            It makes me shy. 

“So you like girls?”  I say. 

            “A girl.” 

            “Yeah?  Like which one?”

            “Just some girl.” 

            Jen talks about the crush she had on Vincent Gallo in college. 

            “Isn’t he a Republican?”  

            “I heard that, too.” 

            “Like the really bad kind.  I one day googled Vincent Gallo and Charles Manson by chance, and it was like Manson was reborn in Vincent Gallo.”

            “That’s terrible.” 

            Facing Jen is the decision to take a part-time job in San Francisco in January or to stay in Riverside, where her partner makes a six-figure public defender salary and where people like Jen die a little on the inside.  Tonight, though, it’s so much like Jen is deciding about Vincent Gallo that I feel like I’m interrupting. 

            Eventually, she leaves the two of us to sit at the bar and watch the show from a screen. 

            An hour after show time, we are still standing before an empty stage.  It’s Sunday night; everyone has Monday to deal with. 

When the band finally comes out, hands shoot up to capture it.  The drummer, this badass twenty-something rocking an Afro, looks from Vincent to the crowd, shaking her head.  When the song’s over, she says, “It’s inappropriate for you guys to be taking pictures.” 

            “Ha!” I say.  “Maybe he wants money for that, too?” 

            Jesse laughs. 

            It would’ve gone better if instead of pretending the mob showed up outside Vincent Gallo’s bedroom window, they’d just owned it—like Hey Peeps, angry Artist doesn’t want his picture taken, ok?  We know, we know…sorry!

            I want words, but the music is instrumental for the most part.  Because the lyrics don’t really come and because Vincent Gallo stands with his back to the audience, like he’s giving us the silent treatment, I feel like something is coming.  Like he will yell at us or smash something and the evening will go down on his permanent record as the night he lost it.  

            I mean, for all anyone at the show that night knows, no sound whatsoever comes from him. 

When I post a Facebook link to an interview in which Vincent Gallo offers to sell his sperm for 250 K, Jen’s disgusted, sorry she saw him.  

            Her reaction surprises me.  He’s an asshole and all his choices are all wrong, but I don’t regret the music—just the pointlessness of his anger.  Still, it amuses me more than it makes me indignant; at least Vincent Gallo’s anger makes mine seem more legit.

I hope when I’m 50, basic human psychology doesn’t escape me—like how we’re not cool as a matter of fact.  We’re only cool if someone (a lover behind a lens, say) is willing to see it that way, and even then, their vision of us might any minute be influenced by an angle that does not defy the laws of physics, like gravity or the speed of light or a sudden lack of will.  

Unexpectedly, days or weeks later, I’m playing music in the garage with friends when I transpose the image onto somebody’s riff: 

            Your lips pout/ Are you ever coming out? 

            No one here is good enough/ To see you in hell

            You’re Vincent Gallo Man/ In Vincent Gallo Land

            Vincent Gallo Man in Vincent Gallo Land

I guess it’s not easy to watch someone’s back.  I guess you keep thinking she’ll turn around and face you.