THE AMERICAN

Q: How do you know you’re hanging out with poets in their thirties?

A: They’re all writing prose.

Let’s reject out of hand this panic over having “nothing to say.” Fuck that noise. You go to the computer lab, you sit down, the computer is frozen or perseverating on some weird alert you never get at home—what do you do? Exactly: get up and move to the next one over. Gmail, work mail, facebook, movie times. Mara and her sister are twenty minutes late to the show, which in retrospect delights me, though at the time they had Amy and I worried sick.

A cry for help. Spy stuff as allegory for Clooney’s grim, insistent bachelorhood. The Italy thing, he finds a working payphone in Rome (?!?), call it Skulk Glower Slay. And to test the rifle he spends the whole second act assembling he does what, shoots the tufts off pussywillows. He goes down on the prostitute, she bites her bottom lip, she’s totally sweating him, “You’re a good man but you have a secret.” Cold mountain-town puffs of breath—that scene in Michael Clayton with the horses is cheesy as hell but undeniably affecting, like James Wright, Mr. “I have wasted my life.” When he does die—sorry—the little white butterfly from the earlier scene goes fluttering straight up towards the sky.

The priest who tries to save his soul: “You’re American. You think you can escape history.” Above the theater, from across the traffic circle, one spies two beams of light striking low cloud-cover. There’s a new fall chill in the air, you want to get ultra-drunk. Of course there is no such thing as “the” American but always two, the one the world sees and the one who never forgets for a single moment his all-too-historicized birth. The crowded plane and the loaded gun. George, dude, it’s time to come back home.