When I was in high school I wrote music. When I was in high school I did a lot of things. I used to write stories and write sketches and draw cartoons and draw comic books and play trumpet and play bass. I was not encouraged to do any of these things. I didn’t go to an artsy school and I don’t come from artsy people. I simply wanted to do many things and didn’t understand people who said it was important to pick one thing and stick with it. Who could be satisfied doing just one thing with their life?
Maspeth Avenue, 6:05pm
A mom and grandmother push an angry infant in a stroller. A two-year-old girl with dirty blonde curls flails at her restraints. She arches her back trying to snap herself loose and expels primal howls of want. If you had no visual and only heard her screams you would think the girl was either being murdered or was committing a murder. She doesn’t care that she looks and sounds crazy. Kids have to learn how to be sane.
I am a half a block away from the trio when the screams first catch my attention. I am walking the opposite direction. We will soon overtake each other. Once I spot them I feel my steps quicken. The little girl is a magnet of anger and id.
I have been where they are many times. Every parent thinks s/he can win a battle of wills with a two-year-old and every parent is proven wrong. You want to demonstrate you will not give a child what she wants just because she wants it. You want to instill some idea of patience and propriety. And then one day you’re out in public with your kid and she loses her mind over something trivial and suddenly your larger point is subsumed by the need for a few precious moments of peace.
The grandmother silently acquiesces to the little girl’s shrieking pleas. She reaches into a bag slung over the back of the stroller to produce the prize that will restore order to her universe. What the girl wants is a tiny toy gun. Assembled in garish plastic of purple and yellow and green. Shaped like a 1950s idea of a Martian weapon. It is a gun all the same.
The moment the little girl has the gun in her hands she points it at the only living thing in her line of sight. That thing is me. I am five or six feet away when she aims the gun at me and looks down the barrel and jabs it in my general direction. She doesn’t say bang bang but the motion has the same effect. After each “shot” she jerks the gun back and sets it up again as if reacting to recoil.
She adjusts her aim as I get closer and continues to “fire” at me even as I draw parallel to her stroller. The mom and grandmother are relieved the scene she caused is over and say nothing.
I pass them by and continue on my way. The little girl continues on hers being chauffeured toward new targets.
This Season on “Complicated Antihero”
HBO’s critically acclaimed series COMPLICATED ANTIHERO returns for another season of gritty, uncompromising drama.
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO wakes up in a seedy motel room next to a stripper who is totally naked and nude but still asleep. The end table is strewn with empty fifths of Jack and overturned pill bottles. He sits up in bed and places his weary head in his heads while we hear Metallica’s cover of “Turn the Page.”
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO
You try to be a good man. But what is a good man? What is good? What is right and what is wrong? What is “is”? Does anything mean something anymore? Not from where I’m sitting.
CUT TO: COMPLICATED ANTIHERO pouring wet concrete down a snitch’s throat.
* * *
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO is at his EX-WIFE’s house. She smokes and looks on disapprovingly while he watches his SON play with blocks. He has a look of paternal pride mixed with an immutable element of sadness and also wears a badass leather jacket.
EX-WIFE
You wanna be a father to him now, after all this time? You’re gonna teach him right from wrong? (sardonic laughter) You ain’t no father.
COMPLICATED ANTI-HERO
You think you know what a father is? You think anybody knows what a father is? You think anybody knows anything?
CUT TO: COMPLICATED ANTIHERO running over the mayor with a tank.
* * *
Police interrogation room. COMPLICATED ANTIHERO sits handcuffed to a desk and his face is a little beat up but not so much we can’t see his eyes still burn with righteous indignation over all the world’s injustice. His nemesis, DETECTIVE WISNIEWSKI, gets right in his face.
DETECTIVE WISNIEWSKI
You might beat this rap, scumbag, but mark my words, I will take you down if I have to do it all by myself. Because YOU represent everything that’s wrong with this world. We used to have RULES. We used to have RIGHT and WRONG. We used to have CLEARLY DEFINED BORDERS BETWEEN THINGS.
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO lets out a wan laugh.
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO
Did we?
CUT TO: COMPLICATED ANTIHERO whipping everyone in a subway car with a bike chain lit on fire.
* * *
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO sits in a confessional, his hands clasped in prayer and clutching a rosary.
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO
I used to have faith, Father. I used to believe in things like right and wrong. But I don’t see them in this world no more.
PRIEST
I wish I could tell you otherwise, my son. But I’m afraid I don’t see them in this world either.
A single tear runs down COMPLICATED ANTIHERO’s cheek, lit by the slightest hint of moonlight creeping through a latticed window. It also lights up his stubble and makes it look great.
CUT TO: COMPLICATED ANTIHERO forcing some dude to eat an anvil.
* * *
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO genuflects at his FATHER’s hospital bed. There’s tubes up his father’s nose because he’s gonna die of some cancer thing. COMPLICATED ANTIHERO grasps his father’s wizened hands in his own and chokes back the tears welling in his throat.
COMPLICATED ANTI-HERO
You never cared for me, Pop! You never taught me right from wrong! You never taught me nothin’!
DYING FATHER
I taught you the most important lesson of all, son. There ain’t no right and wrong in this world.
DOCTOR
So, let’s see how our patient is doing…
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO pistol-whips DOCTOR with crash cart.
* * *
A dream sequence. COMPLICATED ANTIHERO watches helplessly as a bird pecks away at his hands, eating the flesh all the way to the bone. The bird flies away.
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO wakes up, in a different motel room next to a different totally naked nude stripper. He sits at the edge of the bed and rests his head in his hands.
COMPLICATED ANTIHERO
What does it mean? What does anything mean?
CUT TO: COMPLICATED ANTIHERO throwing a flaming school bus at an orphanage.