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One-Eye), and everything else in our lives, except for sex, which I said at the start was off-limits.
    I wrote the play because I couldn’t explain the relationship; conversations about it ended badly and I longed to be understood on a grand scale. I put a casting call in the free weekly newspaper, and I held auditions in a reggae club. I cast a drug-and-alcohol counselor in his thirties as Franko, and the character based on me was played by a Latina woman in her early twenties named Xotchil. (I thought I would be taken more seriously as a director if I didn’t also act in it — something I keep forgetting these days.) We practiced in my attic and performed the play, The Lifers , at 924 Gilman Street, a punk club. I rented chairs from a church and sat in them with my friends and family and my family’s friends and a few bewildered punk rockers. Together we watched this enactment of my improbable friendship and its clumsy spiritual yearning. I was so electrified with simultaneous shame and pride that two-thirds of the way through the play I got out of my seat and crept up to the side of the stage. I’m not sure what I planned to do from there — perhaps stop the show or redirect it as it happened. The drug-and-alcohol counselor gave me a hard look from the stage and I slunk back to my seat. I would simply have to endure it.

BEVERLY
    —

BENGAL LEOPARD BABY CALL FOR PRICES
    —

VISTA
    —
    Movies are the only thing I make that puts me at the mercy of financiers, which is partly why I make other things too. Writing is free, and I can rehearse a performance in my living room; it may turn out that no one wants to publish the book or present the performance, but at least I’m not waiting for permission to make the thing. Having a screenplay and no money to make it would almost be worse than not having a screenplay and maintaining the dream of being wanted. At times it seemed that I was only pretending the script wasn’t finished, to save face, to give myself some sense of control. And on a more superstitious level, I secretly believed I would get financing when I had completed my vision quest, learned the thing I needed to know. The gods were at the edges of their seats, hoping I would do everything right so they could reward me.
    I had been avoiding Beverly because Vista, on the map, seemed dangerously far away. But I was becoming more intrepid, or else my time was seeming less valuable. If, worst-case scenario, I couldn’t find my way home from Vista, I could just live there. So I called Brigitte and Alfred and we set out in the morning. In between the towns and cities in California are straw-covered hills that sometimes burst into flames. Beverly lived on one of these brown hills, which made sense; you could keep a suitcase or a jacket in the city, but Bengal leopard babies would need more room.
    The road was dirt, the house was surrounded by abandoned furniture and equipment, and Beverly, who met us in the lawn, was painfully lacerated. She had told me on the phone that she didn’t want her face photographed because she’d just had an accident involving a shovel. The wounds were still spinning their scabs.
Beverly: Come on, I’ll take you in the house and show you the cats first, and then we’ll go from there. You know what this is?
    She pointed to something on the wall. It had eyes.
Miranda: Yes.
Beverly: What? What is it?
Miranda: That’s the butt of something.
Beverly: Yes — very good! Excellent!
Miranda: Of what, though?





Beverly: A deer. And this bone came from Vietnam. Some man there carves it. Isn’t that incredible?
Miranda: Amazing, yeah.
Beverly: It’s all hand-carved. Come on. These are fish. This was from a volcano.
    It was like a very questionable natural-history museum; each thing might be a million years old or it might have been made in the late ’70s. But I was learning to assess people quickly, and Beverly wasn’t crazy, just very glad to see us and in a hurry to get the party