Cowboy Mouth

I was a big fan of Sam Shepard.  His writing, his acting, his face.  Mostly his writing.  Mostly his face.

He was a man made of dreams.  ‘He was just everything one could want,’ said Patti Smith of their first meeting.  A cowboy, a writer, a rock n roll energy, a classic face.  A crescent moon tattoo in the crook of a hand, of course.

He’s the sort of hero one would conjure up.  A cowboy and an American literary genius.  Is there any word sexier than the word ‘playwright’ (and even then they so seldom look like Sam Shepard)?  A man of letters and the outdoors.  He was Cowboy Mouth perfect.

Last night, I spent a lot of time flicking through his Seven Plays.  Just reading odd pages and lines, the rhythm of it all.  The set-up to La Turista, talk of whisky under the sofa…

“This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.”

Later in the evening, and all I wanted in the world was to watch Paris, Texas.  (Shepard wrote the screenplay.)  It’s a film I haven’t watched in a long time, but which haunts my memory like I suspect it does all those who have ever seen it.  The loneliest film I have ever seen.  Nastassja Kinski in her pink sweater.  I watched it as a teenager, around the same time I first saw Betty Blue, and I still conflate the two in my mind.  Photogenic desert ennui, doomed love.  Something to aspire to – they probably had too much of an effect on me at too young an age.

The day before, the worst sort of Sunday, I had woken up in a half-dream panic: I could not remember the number of the house where my ex-boyfriend and I fell in love.  It was over a decade now, and yet this struck me as all wrong.  It was a significant house, even though it didn’t look like one.  I looked the road up on a map and I discovered the very same house was currently for sale.  The breath was knocked out of me as I scrolled through photographs.  An ugly sofa where there used to be a drum kit.  A baby's room where we used to sit on the floor and watch subtitled films with the curtains drawn, for days on end.  I knew those rooms; I walked those floors.  I used to live alone before I knew you.

The same desert feeling of sadness.

I was convinced I owned a copy of Paris, Texas.  Maybe once I did.  Turns out now I don’t.  I couldn’t find it anywhere.  I thought it had to be on Netflix; it wasn’t.  The closest matches that came up were Paris is Burning (a favourite that I have watched and watched into the ground) and Last Tango in Paris.

I had never seen Last Tango in Paris all the way through.  I vividly remember seeing part of it.  Drunk-ish, late at night, in bed with a boy called Rich, who was not my boyfriend.  He was an old friend, though; he was a sweet soul.  I was 21, before all of it.  Marlon Brando on a tiny TV propped in the corner of the room before we passed out.

Last night, I watched the whole film.  I hated it.  It was the worst thing to watch.  I thought I’d like that early 70s mood, the Paris apartment, the coats.  I love a good coat.  I hated Last Tango in Paris.  Did I mention I hated it?

It’s like when I read The Story of O and expected it to be much like Anais Nin, who is my favourite.  Safe to say, it was not, and I still pretty much take that book as a personal insult.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I do not find Marlon Brando remotely attractive.  Not at any stage in his career.  I do not care for his face.  I would like it to be known that I do not find angry men attractive.  I do not.  Give me the good ones.  Give me the Cowboy Mouth playwrights, please.  Or just a man with a truck in the desert, who writes books no-one will ever read.

It was number 26, by the way.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget it again.