The Filmmaker by John Thurgood

"We could have been anywhere, but we were still traveling through the states on roads that only seemed to split the difference between where we were going and where we wanted to be."

I’ve told versions of this origin story so many times, but I really discovered my love for reading as I was finishing college. I started reading more and more for pleasure, which got me writing, which led to more reading… and so the cycle goes. I graduated and moved away from home and worked in banks, and started an online literary journal, largely as something of a goof, as a way to pass the time and entertain myself. And—hopefully, ideally—my friends.

I’d found the world of literary journals through that early 2000s cool of McSweeney’s, a world that felt incredibly inspiring, and exciting, but also often not quite as exciting as I wanted. This is overgeneralizing, but so many of the stories that seemed to be getting published were the kinds that would probably hit me incredibly hard now, but felt boring to me at the time. I really wanted stories that felt as exciting as, and that captured the excitement and energy of, hanging out with my friends. Most of of my buddies didn’t read that much, but they would, when I really raved about something strong enough. I wanted to find and publish stories about skateboarding and road trips and fireworks. Stories about us. We were a bunch of dudes in college during the peak of Fight Club and Jackass, going to house parties and hardcore shows, often punching each other, throwing ourselves into bushes, pushing each other around in shopping carts, and whatever else we could think to do to make each other laugh. I wanted stories I could shove at friends and recommend excitedly enough to make them want to read.

It’s over 20 years later (that can’t be right?!), and John Thurgood’s “The Filmmaker” feels almost like a culmination of those two plus decades publishing literary journals. It’s about skateboarding, and dudes hanging out and getting in trouble and starting to discover the larger world beyond themselves, and also it written from the POV of a character looking back on his life, the kind narrativizing of his own experiences that I am such a sucker for in a short story. The kind that inspires me to start introductions by thinking about and retelling what I’ve come to think of as one of my own origin stories.

—Aaron Burch

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Listen to John read the story:

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“The Filmmaker”

Filming skateboarding is all about the feet. They're doing the work. They express balance, precision and strength; what it takes to do each trick. Even rolling down the street doesn't mean as much if the shot doesn't show the skater's feet. It's an incomplete story.

Feet can be a kind of heuristic for skateboarding. If you thought about your feet—your shoes, your stance or the weight distributed over them—then you were skateboarding. Otherwise, you were simply rolling on a skateboard. 

All this carried over to the rest of my work. I'm not sure if I would have been the same filmmaker if I hadn't spent those early years filming and photographing skateboarders. I've tried to explain to actors that they need to be more aware of their foot placement, not just hitting their mark but knowing how they were hitting it. 

But all this just shows I was overthinking an activity that at its most basic level was the equivalent of playing with a toy. On a scale of essential tools, a skateboard is somewhere between a bicycle and a yo-yo, and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, it's a lot closer to the yo-yo. I think Wayne understood that sooner than I did, and much sooner than Ned. 

*

But I should start with Brandon. I can't say I remember Brandon Ames that well. The image I have of him from back then is probably all wrong. His black glasses, thick and rectangular, well before that sort of thing would be considered stylish. A white polo, even though I'm not sure he ever wore one. And he’s wearing a pair of Nike runners, the kind with the bubbly air pocket wrapping around the heel.

We weren't friends, me and Brandon, but I wanted to be. He was clearly from a better family. He probably lived in those nice houses east of the new Target, but he seemed innocent enough with just the right amount of compassion for others; it seemed if I continued being nice to him, we would be friends, possibly, eventually. 

What I remember most was the noise his pencil made when Mrs. Szczepaniak asked us to freewrite. His pencil tapped and clicked against the desk and scratched across his paper as if the freewrite were some kind of race. I couldn't understand what he must have been writing about, or how someone could follow their thoughts so quickly without it coming out as gibberish.

Brandon appears in a lot of the films I've made: the repeated image of children tapping out their words on pieces of paper. I must come back to it for a reason, though even I'm not entirely certain why. Perhaps because those early memories seem the simplest. 

I only knew him for four days. I sat beside him for fifty minutes each day, while Mrs. Szczepaniak walked us through the five-paragraph structure. 

*

That was the year I got my first camera. I bought it from a Goodwill the same year Brandon flashed and disappeared. A VHSC, big as a breadbox. It sat in a bin near the toys. A scattered stack of VHS tapes lay beside it. I was there with my mom, looking for clothes for my younger cousin, and I remember glancing across the store to see where she was, spotting her curls of brown hair moving through the racks and thinking quickly of a reason why I needed a ten dollar camera that may not even work. 

I was already feeling jealous of my cousin, Ned, the center of attention. His father had recently lost his job, and my mother was helping my aunt with some of the shopping. He was tailing her around the store silently shaking his head at each article of clothing she pulled from the rack. She held items one by one like a model in a showroom. It was hard to tell what Ned disagreed with most, the clothes or my mom making a spectacle. 

I waited until they circled the final rack of tee shirts. Then I knelt as if I'd discovered something. I tried to time it so when they walked up, they would see me bring the viewfinder up to my eye and pan toward their curious yet hesitant faces. But when I turned, they were still looking at clothes. 

I lowered the camera, and my mom glanced over. 

"What are you doing over there?" she asked.

"Look what I found," I said. My enthusiasm was clearly forced. "What a deal, right?"

"That piece of junk?" 

A lump caught in my throat, but I rallied. There was still a chance.

Then my cousin stepped over. He slid his fingers across the buttons on the side of the camera.

"Oh man," he said. "Does it work?" 

Ned pressed the eject button, and the side folded open with a clunky pop. He smiled up at my mom. I couldn't tell if he was being sincere or if he was simply trying to direct attention away from himself. 

"How much is it?" she asked.

I was an opportunist, if not very good at making friends. Even before all my troubles came in middle school, I would sit on the playground, and try to think my way into friendships with classmates. It never worked. 

So I hung out with my cousin a lot. We would lay on his bunk bed, him on the top bunk and me on the bottom, and trade the same handful of comics back and forth, making up backstories for each character and pointing out flaws in their superpowers. He'd get upset for the dumbest things. 

When I showed him a boy standing among a crowd in awe of Bruce Banner, The Hulk, Ned blinked. I claimed that The Hulk was no match for that boy. 

"Not possible," Ned said. Then he searched the illustration.

"See, he's a skateboarder," I said and pointed to the boy's skateboard and backwards cap. "And he's from space, here to turn Earth into a giant skatepark."

"That doesn't even make sense," Ned said. 

"You just don't get it because you're not a skater."

"Neither are you."

"Yeah I am," I lied. 

There were two kids in the 5th grade who skateboarded, and one lived at the end of my block. I had seen him skating in his driveway the day before and asked him if I could try. I spent nearly half a second on his board before it slipped out from under me and I landed on my rear. 

Ned studied the picture of the boy with the backwards cap and skateboard. "What's his name?" he asked. 

"Ollie," I said, not knowing what the word meant, but I'd heard it from the boy down the street before I fell on my ass. 

Ned looked suspicious but willing to play along.

*

It took me a long time to learn that a common interest doesn't make a friendship. It's only shorthand for the amount of work involved. After a while, I suppose Brandon's pencil became a way for me to think I was capable of that work, only I'd missed the opportunity or, as I had come to think of it, had been denied it. 

Instead, I stuck with the only friend I had managed to make, the kid down the street, Wayne. We skateboarded after school every day, and for the most part, ignored anyone who didn't skate. We talked about Brandon a lot. The impact of losing someone was still only vaguely permanent. We hadn't truly known him, not well enough to call him a friend. We had never been over to his house or sat with him at lunch, but knowing his name and what happened was enough to understand that life was temporary. 

The impact showed most in Wayne, a stout, tightly-wound red-headed boy with a short attention span when it suited him. Teachers hated him. So did most other adults. Ned talked about him as if he were a kind of toxin, tainting everything he touched. He avoided him at all cost those first couple years they knew each other, before Ned started skateboarding himself. 

Wayne would bring up Brandon at odd times. It started a couple weeks after I had gotten the camera. He wanted to film everything, so most of those moments are on old VHS tapes somewhere. I never threw anything away, and often when I was in an editing rut, I'd go searching through those old tapes, looking for a reason why I had kept filming so much for so long. 

There was one tape I made, a master tape, with a lot of my favorite Wayne moments. There's a minute-long mashup of him saying, "This one's for you, BA," that loops over and over. Wayne at the top of a huge set of stairs or gap. The obstacles grow bigger and the camera farther away as the clips progress, until he's standing on top of a semi-trailer, looking as big as an action figure with an oversized shirt and a long sock hat that could have belonged to an elf. He gives his line. Then he hesitantly pushes off the end of the trailer.

On tape, it seems as if the screaming starts before he even hits the ground. He broke his leg in two places that day, and shattered his foot. 

*

When you know someone well enough, there's a point you reach when the car becomes a neutral space. Ned and I spent hours driving to locations for different shoots, and barely spoke a word. We did this when we were younger too, but I had never thought about it until I heard someone else explain the phenomenon as a milestone in a healthy relationship. 

Once it was explained to me, I couldn't stop thinking about it. On those warm summer mornings, when the work was finally starting to feel right, I thought about it most. Ned had grown into a muscular, young man at that point. He had married young and was divorced before his mid thirties. "A comic book marriage," he had called it, and joked about living separately-ever-after in apartments across town. His hair was long and sun bleached, and with the windows down, he leaned his head into the air blowing past, using the tips of his fingers to work the roots at his scalp. The sun skipped across the hood of the white Ford Ranger I had bought from a friend who built fences and didn't have time to keep up with repairs. I'd squint into the sun and glance over at Ned, and think about that thing I knew but didn't know until someone else had told me. We did this, driving out past corn fields to interview farmers who were losing their farms, up narrow two-lane highways, through one national forest after another, talking to conservationists and environmental scientists, until one day, I simply asked him what he was thinking about. 

He looked kind of embarrassed. Then he smiled and kind of laughed. "You're probably not gonna believe it," he said. "But Wayne." He slouched and moved away from the window. "I was thinking about Wayne, and what he would be doing right now." 

I steadied my gaze ahead. We could have been anywhere, but we were still traveling through the states on roads that only seemed to split the difference between where we were going and where we wanted to be. 

Before school one day, I found Wayne in the pine trees behind the special education trailers, a safe place to pee before the doors opened. But he was back there using the trunk of one of the trees as a punching bag, slowly drawing his hand back and hammering his knuckles into the bark. He didn't hear me at first, but turned when a stick popped under my foot. 

The skin on his knuckles had curled back in places and one knuckle had begun to bleed. He showed me the wound with pride. "That's what I'm gonna do to them," he said.

"Who?"

"Natalie's brothers if they don't stop messing with her." 

He reeled his fist back like he was gonna punch me, and I hesitated. He was still a half-foot shorter than me, but I had seen him get mad. It wasn't a matter of strength that moved him, it was will. 

*

We talked about it a lot when the diagnosis came back, and then we didn't talk about it at all. Ned seemed to think it could help. Not him, but possibly others. Once the documentary was cut together and optioned by a national distributor, I was never able to bring myself to watch those tapes again. 

It might have been because all through middle school I had spent so much time with the tapes I had compiled of Wayne. There was a time when they sat in a shoe box on my desk beside the high-8 camcorder I used to upload analog footage to digital. Even when I had started to film for the local skate shop and a few regional brands, moving into high-definition formatting and 4k resolution, those tapes held a place on my desk, the bright red box slowly becoming an object to place other objects on. 

I've edited those tapes too many times to count, each cut muddled and just as indiscernible. There might have been a point when I thought I could make sense of them, align the clips in a sequence that told the story his actions meant to tell, but I continued to edit long after I knew there wasn't. 

I had filmed his fight with the Loya brothers, but I had also filmed the many times he carried that VHS with him to show people at the skate shop or friends' houses, even calling parents into the room to watch as he sizes up to two older boys and begins to receive the beating of his life. I'm not sure why I felt the need to film as he and the others watched his fight, but in one clip we're all standing around the small TV in the skate shop—maybe six teenage boys all together—when Wayne turns to Wes Martin, and says, "This could easily make it into one of those Faces of Death videos." His unconscious body lies on the ground on screen as I place the camera in the gravel and run over to him. 

The Loya brothers had stopped kicking him when he went limp, and they stepped back as I ran over. They each seemed pleased with their work and chuckled as they turned down the alley that led to the Speedway on the corner. I wondered what they had thought when the little boy who was dating their sister finally stood up to them, if they admired him for trying or merely thought he was suicidal. 

Chalky dust from the gravel blotted a smear of blood on his forehead. He was still breathing when I knelt beside him. Not knowing what to do, I gently placed my hand on his back, and he shifted in the rocks and began lifting himself but wasn't coordinated enough to push his body off the ground. I helped him sit upright. 

I don't think he regained full consciousness until we got back to his house. The whole walk home, he kept asking about Natalie. Slurring slightly, he cycled through the same three questions: What was I doing? Did I have a cigarette? Where was Natalie?

*

There was an era in skateboarding when it seemed like a person had to be mentally unstable in order to progress. I'm glad social media democratized skating to a certain degree, but all that happened much later. Much too late for Wayne. 

I wonder now if I would have noticed his depression, his periods of manic behavior, his mood swings, if I hadn't spent those teenage years watching videos of my favorite professional skateboarders getting paid to do the exact same things. I didn't realize at the time that most of those pros probably went weeks without harming themselves, without jumping out of moving cars, without leaping off of parking garages into trees and without picking fights with older, much bigger boys. 

Even before we were old enough to drive, Wayne would steal his mother's Camaro, and we'd search for something to film. In the deep bucket seats, Wayne looked like he could hardly reach the pedals, craning his neck to look through the steering wheel and over the dashboard. He revved the engine at stoplights trying to get cars to race him. 

Out by the horse track in late summer when the corn was head high on either side, he'd open it up all the way to the river. Stalks flashed past close enough to touch and the stars paced us overhead. He'd flick off the headlights, and count, "One, two," and flick them back on.

"You fuck. You crazy?" I'd yell, or something like it.

But it only encouraged him, and again the corn would go black. "One, Two, Three."

"Christ! Are you trying to kill us?" I'd yell, gripping the seat beneath me with one hand and the camera with the other. 

The night he wrecked, the car fishtailed into a ditch and rolled through the corn. A flash of red hair, kernels and cobs. The headlights, first there, then gone in the weightlessness and back again. Overhead, it must have looked like a half-formed crop circle, a crop comma or part of a question mark, but in the dark, all we could see were the high beams over pressed stalks and corn all around. It was hard to imagine the city so close, and it occurred to me there in the quiet black, devoid of even the wind that would normally whip up from the shoreline, that we could have been dead. Wayne tried to start the car, but it wouldn't turn over. The dome light flickered and the starter clicked, but then nothing. 

Wayne smiled. Flakes of glass peppered his hair and shirt. "Welp, looks like we're walking."

The farmer must have found the car the next morning and called the cops. They thought someone had stolen it, but Wayne's mom knew. Before the summer was over, she made him get a job helping one of his uncles fix lawn mowers to pay her back or she threatened to turn him into the police. 

After the accident, it became harder to hang out with Wayne. Not just because he was working, but because he was becoming more and more possessive of the time he spent with Natalie. I'd catch glimpses of them after school, walking hand in hand, trailing the shade by the brick wall that separated the football field from Appleton Road. There was an ivy-covered fence at the end of the street, and they'd thread their way through a small opening in the chain link to cross the highway over into our neighborhood. I called to them once, but Natalie only glanced back before following Wayne's button of red hair through the gap in the fence. 

At the same time, Ned and I were discovering editing. Up until that point, I had been filming without much thought toward how to mix the raw footage. I used a simple VCR to VCR method to transfer clips and saved the ones I liked to a master tape. But there was no real consideration for the order in which they appeared or the effect they created. It was Ned who brought an instinctual understanding of sequencing and blending to the work, and it changed the way I had been filming, which meant I could film less but with greater purpose. 

Sometimes, I think the footage from that time period is the only active memory I have of that last year in middle school. It comes to me in flashes, in fragments from clips I've seen and recreated over and over again on screen. If I try to think of how I really spent that last year, I'd have to think about the assignments I'd completed and the books I'd read, the girls I'd liked and the boys I was afraid of. Because if I think of anything outside of school or screen, I get stuck in a loop of Wayne and Natalie disappearing into a hole in the fence. 

*

It's not Ned's fault for trying, but I think he saw what was happening before anyone. And I think his reaction was to simplify things, make them more manageable. I've been guilty of this too, filing away images on a two dimensional screen. Everything is more attractive that way. It's the act of capturing light, manipulating it, bending it to produce the perfect image. 

When we were able to get Wayne to film with us, it was usually because Natalie was busy doing something else. Occasionally he'd talk about her parents, how they didn't like him, how her brothers continued to treat him like he was unwanted. It was during these moments when he would become the most unpredictable. 

"Film this," he would say just before doing something stupid. 

Once, he climbed the employee ladder in a K-Mart department store to grab a new video game console off the overstock shelf. He removed the packaging and slipped it into his old army satchel. 

The footage shows us casually walking out of the store. Then it shakes erratically. If you look closely, you can see a man in a blue polo approaching from the side. Ned glances toward him, and hesitates just before the picture scrambles. 

The man called out to us, but Ned was the closest to him and didn't see us sprint. He was a year younger and didn't know to run first and answer questions later. Wayne and I were through the parking lot, across the highway and well into a complex of low rent apartment buildings before I realized Ned hadn't followed. 

At a buy, sell and trade shop, Wayne sold the console for a hundred and fifty bucks because it was an unreleased gaming system. We sat on the sidewalk in the shade as Wayne counted his money, smiling and giggling. 

I tried not to think about it, but I knew I was going to have a hard time explaining to my mother why Ned was caught shoplifting. After hearing the news later that night, she boxed my ear and told me to stay in my room because, "I can't even look at you, right now," was how she put it. I didn't find out until the next day that K-Mart was pressing charges. Ned had to go to court, but since he was a minor, he was given probation and fined for the losses. 

I asked Wayne to help with the money, but he scoffed and said, "I need that money. Not my fault he got caught." 

That was the closest I ever came to fighting Wayne. Looking back, I probably should have tried. Ned would have. 

We didn't find out Natalie was pregnant until much later. That summer it was clear Wayne didn't want us around. If I knocked on his door, his mom would say that he wasn't home, but I'd see him through his window, talking on the phone, shifting around his room and collapsing onto his bed or staring blankly into the mirror on his closet door. 

I suppose my curiosity made me do it, but sometimes I followed him to see where he went at night. There was a clearing in the woods where a cluster of Douglas firs had been planted in three long rows. A bed of pine needles covered the ground, speckled with starlight. 

He was meeting Natalie. She'd often arrive late, stepping cautiously through the undergrowth to the clearing, appearing as I had come to know her, in her usual loose fitting dress or baggy clothes, but somehow different. In the light angling through the pines, she seemed older and, at a distance, as if she were glowing, like I was seeing her at a higher frequency. 

Wayne would bring a blanket, and they would lay together sometimes for hours. I never heard what they were saying, but I've spent the rest of my life thinking about what I would have said, knowing what I know now.

As summer progressed, the meetings became less frequent, until Natalie stopped meeting altogether. Eventually it was only Wayne absconding to the woods at night, carrying his old army satchel and stowing its contents in a hole he covered with sticks and branches. One night, I snuck up after to see what he'd hidden. The hole was about the size of a kitchen sink and held two packs of ramen noodles, an open bag of off-brand potato chips, and a can of spaghettiOs. 

The assortment of goods grew little by little until one night when Wayne arrived with a second bag and packed away all the stored goods tightly into each. Once he was done, he sat and waited, occasionally walking to the edge of the pines and gazing out toward the break in the trees. Then he'd slowly shuffle back and continue waiting.

An orange glow crept over the brush, pushing the morning light at odd angles. Shadows moved like ghosts retreating from the dawn. And finally Wayne broke. He ripped his pack from his shoulder and slammed it down. He kicked it, and pine needles racked into the air. Packs of ramen and half eaten bags of snack food spilled to the ground. He ransacked his provisions until nothing was left. Then he stood there and yelled into the sky, a feeble shriek from his boy-sized chest. 

Sometimes, still, I think about Wayne on that night, how he was only fifteen, not prepared to deal with as much as he was, standing alone under a canopy of evergreen. Then I think about how much he thought he could take and how much he wanted in return. It's that image of him in the woods at night that still brings me back to how stupid I was, how cowardly, because after he stood there looking around at all he had planned and seeing it fall apart, I turned back through the brush and walked back to my own life, my own needs, and transferred the new footage onto the master tape. 

*

The day of the funeral, Natalie walked into the viewing parlor wearing a white sundress with a layer of sheer fabric that billowed out from the bust and over the curve of her belly. It became clear to us then just how pregnant she had been and how remarkable it was that we hadn't noticed. The ragged hem of her dress fell to just above her ankles, revealing the red Converse, faded and torn, she had been wearing every day since the summer before. Her black hair was bleached white, frizzy and shorn to the nape. The sockets of her eyes looked sunken, deeper than usual, and a dark scab marred her left elbow. The beauty I had come to see in her seemed thin and unremarkable as she stepped up to the casket and tucked a folded piece of paper into the breast pocket of Wayne's black suit jacket. 

Ned wanted to sneak a look at the piece of paper but said that Wayne's face had kept him from reaching into the pocket. The mortician had had a hard time covering the bruises around his jaw, and his neck wouldn't sit quite right. To cover it, the collar of his shirt had been pulled high, which gave the impression that Wayne had passed in a sudden moment of befuddlement. 

We wondered what Natalie had written on the note, and watched from across the room as she leaned over Wayne, awkwardly angling her belly to get close or to share a glimpse of the baby. Afterward, she stepped over to Wayne's mother, who had been shaking hands and accepting condolences beside a giant picture of Wayne on a tri-fold next to the casket. She showed little sign of recognizing Natalie, let alone the baby brewing in her gut. Given the state of Wayne's mother, it was possible that she had blocked Natalie from her mind entirely, wishing to forget rather than forgive. Natalie hugged his mother, gripping her around the waist much longer than the older woman seemed inclined to offer. Then she focused on the floor and started toward the side door of the funeral home. On her way out, she saw Ned and me, and lifted a hand to wave but stopped herself and looked away. 

I followed her, but wasn't able to catch up. It was as if she'd disappeared. I jogged to a stop beside a group of men smoking in the heat. After I returned to the parlor, I told Ned she was gone, and we stood there for a long time, watching all the uncles and aunts and cousins walk up to Wayne's mother and give their best attempt at making sense of the senseless. We never spoke about it, but it was entirely possible we had conjured that image of Natalie out of some lack of meaning.

I never told Ned about the final night in the woods. He knew they had planned to run and knew about their nightly trysts, yet, for some reason, I kept the final night a secret until one night when we were sitting alone in his hospital room. Ned's mother and father had been splitting the day duties, but I stayed with him through the night. I preferred to be there when the halls quieted and the nurses were less intrusive. In those hours, the monitors and tubes took less precedence, and we could talk about the old times like they meant more to us then than they ever did or ever would again. 

It wasn't on purpose that I told him, but when he brought up the hole Ned had used to hide his small stash of goods, Ned wondered what he had done with them afterward. 

"Imagine being on the lam and all you had were packets of ramen noodles and potato chips," Ned said with effort. His body was struggling to maintain some of his most basic functions, and even talking exhausted him. 

The lights were off, but the glow from the open door, the television and his monitor was enough to see his loose smile. Then he coughed and laid his head back. 

Instead of answering, I told him the story from the beginning, about how I had caught him sneaking out of the house and how I had followed him into the woods, and that I wasn't sure how long they had been sneaking out before then. I'm not sure why I insisted on telling Ned what he already knew, but it seemed important to get the record straight. 

When I told him about the food and how Wayne had kicked it and ripped it all apart and how he had stood there screaming, Ned lifted his head to look at me as if it were all insignificant. 

"Oh, I already knew that," Ned said. "I just wondered if he ever thought to hide the mess. I don't think anyone ever went back there to check."

"You knew?"

"Yeah," he said, and glanced over at me, "Natalie told me." 

They had been corresponding through email for years, he told me. Sometimes he would go months without hearing from her, then he would send her a little money or occasionally a gift. 

"Nothing big, you know," Ned said, "but like a baseball glove or soccer ball, things the kid might find useful if he ever gave them a chance."

"A skateboard?" I asked.

"Oh, no," he said, and shook his head like he would never think of it. 

*

The last time I saw Natalie, it was a chance meeting while waiting in line at a movie theater I hadn’t been to in years. I was alone and she was with a male friend. When we made eye contact, I thought she would recognize me, but she looked away, smiled at something her friend said. Her friend was younger, but it was hard to say by how much. And before I could say anything, she scooped her bag of popcorn off the counter, and they headed toward the theater.  

I thought nothing of it. We were both older. I was well over fifty, long past those days of making films of my own with insignificant budgets. Those years had not treated my body well.  All the traveling and late night film work had given me little more than a bad back and an even worse complexion, but I was still able to treat myself to a feature film occasionally, something spectacular with big names.

When I saw her again, climbing the steps toward my seat, our eyes met, but this time something in her glance changed. She must have known it was me. I caught a kind of fear in her eye or maybe just shock, as if she'd been cornered. I looked away, taking her cue from earlier and quickening my step toward my seat.

After the movie, while the crowd filed down the steps, I caught her again looking back over her shoulder at me. She whispered to the man she was with, a stout, bald man in a clean jacket and chinos. I lost them when they passed into the brightly lit lobby.

Partly to avoid confrontation, I went into the restroom and sulked at my own reflection in the mirror, a man I hardly recognized anymore. Then I flipped on the faucet and washed my hands. 

Not a minute passed when the man Natalie was with entered the restroom and began washing his hands beside me. He wore a leather band on his wristwatch and a gold wedding ring. 

"You like the movie?" he asked. 

"Very much," I answered. 

The man smiled into the mirror and shook the water off his hands. Then he gripped my wrist and wedged me against the counter. He leveraged my arm behind my back and maneuvered me into one of the stalls. I could feel his wet fingers in my hair, on my neck, slipping under my collar. He was stronger than he looked, and pushed me back beside the toilet, practically on top of it, and shut the stall door behind him. His eyes were familiar. He was Wayne’s son.

"If you ever see her again, walk the other way. Don't talk to her. Don't try to contact her. And leave her out of your little films," he said.

I didn't speak. His grip on my neck tightened, and I could feel my pulse slow. Then he gave me one final push into the corner of the stall, before leaving and shutting the door behind him. 

I locked the stall, and slowly straightened myself, righting my shirt and taking inventory of the damage. A button was missing. I scanned the white and black tiles to no avail. It must have popped off and tapped across the floor. Tap tapping. A small thing. Lost. I would have filmed it if I could.

STORY:
John Thurgood received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His stories have appeared in Story|Houston, Monkeybicycle and Another Chicago Magazine, among others, and his essays and book reviews can be found at The Millions, Electric Literature and American Book Review. He blogs about books and skateboarding at johnthurgood.com. 

*

ART:
Matthew Austin is an artist & designer from Maryland, he can be reached at www.matthewaustin.net.  

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with John about this story!

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