I remember it being cold. Doubly when the wind ripped around the dirty motel in front of us. We were boxed in. Between its wretched backside and the Jersey turnpike. My face kissing its back door. Greeting every ghost that had ever walked here before.
I immediately began thinking of how many people that make out to be. How many had literally stepped right where my left cheek bone had been digging? It hurt too. All those damn pebbles and grooves and divots...nooks and crannies. They must have been laughing at me. The ghosts I mean. Laughing at how stupid I was to being doing this. Louis' ghost must have laughed the loudest. This was a re-creation show after all. The poor corpse I had now been dressed as was in fact a real person at one time. We simply re-created him... I was a monster.
Louis De Marco: shot in the back of the head over a few thousand dollars.
What had me thinking so much about it was the fact that just a week before, I'd suffered an injury that had me WebMD'ing myself into a tragic departure. I was in pain the day I got shot in the back of the head. I was worried enough to tell the whole set I had testicular torsion.
To clear that up. It wasn't testicular torsion.
Either way my brain had been cooking on this current metaphor for days. I had already planned sudden death in my head and how I could possibly, somehow come to terms with it. The day's fiction, however, gave me something more.
I sat on that disgusting hole of a hell with Jersey's finest crackheads and might-as-well-be-legal prostitution watching from the floor above. I let the film crew pull the only cloth away from the side of my face before they framed me up and waited ten more minutes to actually start rolling, and I let Louis De' Marco's sad ghost ingest my stress. I buried myself into him.
I had his laces around my feet, my fingers on his keys and his memory nestled calmly in my heart. I used his name to dig six feet under and waited until I heard the word 'cut' before crawling out.
Sounds cool and all right? I wish I could say I metaphorically crawled out of that grave with more strength and perseverance than ever before and that I actually went running the next day and all my needless worries and muscle binding stress was all gone like loose dirt before the tide, but in fact my leg is still bothering me and somehow my stress has grown more weary and I long for nothing more than another character for which I can die in once more and let this spell binding pain go away.
