Alright, here it is--the latest draft of my screenplay. It's hugely long, so if you're just browsing this website, scroll down or click on the archives or something. If you read it, I'd love it if you gave me some feedback. Oh, and I'm posting this on the internet, but please don't steal any part of it, cause I worked my ass off on it (but you can't tell from reading it), and I might actually do something with it, like produce it. That's unlike anything else I post on this site, which I would be honored if you stole. This will be my last post on this site for a while, because I am going to india for a really long time. You can follow my progress at my other blog, at jed-in-india.blogspot.com

I didn't edit out the apostrophes or anything, so deal with weird symbols. You'll have to infer when there's stage directions, because I didnt' go through and make them italic, either. If you want a word document of this play, which is formatted well, just email me.
peace
jed

Bey
© Jed Bickman

Characters:
Bey—Just out of college, half way through his first year teaching high school English. Considers himself a poet.
Milton—Bey’s friend. He makes his living in graphic design, but considers himself an artist.
Carla—The girl Bey’s been sleeping with. She’s a secretary-type at a corporate office
John—Friend
Jenny—Friend
Jack
Alexandra
Samantha Students in Bey’s class
Jason
Jessica
A Mental Hospital Attendant/Nurse—Male
A Mormon
Terrance—A black man in prison

Note: I intend for this to be a film, but I don’t know enough to write it as a screenplay, so the director will have to fill in the blanks. Instead of just showing Bey’s talking head when he’s doing poetry, I think the director should establish a visual vocabulary using montage images that add or change the meaning of the words.

poetry is masturbatory.

Scene 1
Bey is seen in the bathroom taking a shit. He talks to himself

Bey: Americans herd themselves through cement streets with their eyes on the grime of the city beneath their feet. They have learned that they have to hold their minds clamped tightly to their skulls in order to survive a routanized life, watched by their own insiders, plagued with guilt for that one time they stepped out of line. That one time they gave up and felt a real orgasm. Their dreams are straightjacketed within their own heads, so they can stay numb enough to move through the same shit every day.
But I’ve been feeling my thoughts vibrating up and down the elastic cosmos. My mind runs from language like a hunted fugitive. I surrender myself to the animal in the back of my head. ‘Humanity’ was manufactured by our leaders to justify a life devoid of spirit, to rationalize the greyness. Animals are simply the subjects of the natural beauty of the world they inhabit. Humans are the subjects of a controlled economy.

Scene 2
The living room
Bey and Milton, two men in their mid-twenties, recent college graduates, are sitting on living room chairs, half facing each other.

Milton:
My words hit the wall behind you.
The blank airspace in your eyes
dominates my thinking mind.
I need your voice.

Bey:
A manipulated existence
in command economy
manufacturing profits for some callous suit.
In defense of avarice
we hurl heads and hands
into the jackhammer booth
where we heave holes
in butterfly ballots.
struggling to believe
in our dangling chad
to justify our fossilized vocal chords.
When somewhere a bush burns
speaks, stutters,
prays for his country
and starts a war.
thank god, we cry
And In God We Trust

Milton:
You hide from yourself
under revolutionary phrases.
People suffer in the world
and the system is going nowhere.
and you are hungry for the same river
that flew past our banks
a thousand plastic times before us
only noticed ebbing
by dreamy textbooks
Receding golden ages:
Honorable samurai,
Soulless cowboy,
grassroots carpetbagger—
save me!
the external world
is terrorizing my skin again.

Bey:
Self dominates self in America
we have no autonomy
and the only way to destroy the manufactured apathy
is to control the mass of American minds myself,
I’ll kill my insides
my needs and desires
to pressure a false outer shell
to manufacture truth out of
mainstream media
to awaken humanity
Because of something related to this problem,
I’ve been full of self loathing for weeks,
months, now.
the only answer now
is to give my body over
to a thirsty language.

Milton: Sarcastic, but does Bey see that?
Yeah, you’re the liberal messiah.
Thank you for walking amongst us

Bey:
Walk the earth,
seeing the suffering of the proletariat
will be documented
Understood by men like you.
I will see, and in seeing
create change
through a poetic revolution
a change in the vocabulary
of domination which
has recapitulated power
in generation after generation
of the elite.

Milton:
But you understand
Your hypocrisy is inevitable.
You can never speak for anyone else.
You’re young,
you’re white, and you were born into privilege.
You are the eternal beneficiary
of the system that you so love to condemn.

Bey:
So it is and will be.

Scene 3
The next morning’s third period Sophomore English class at the Carnegie Magnet High School. Bey is standing in front of the class, leaning on his teacher’s desk, holding a copy of The Great Gatsby. There are twenty or so students, desks arranged in an oval around the front desk.

Bey: So we’ve unmasked Jay Gatsby by this point, yes? Can someone tell me what he’s doing in East Egg, and why?

Silence.

Samantha: Right now? Isn’t he dead by now? I mean, he wrote this book a long time ago, now.

Bey: I meant, “these days which the book is about.” And, thank you Samantha for reminding me to mention something important about this book. Jay Gatsby will never die, because he’s a fictional character, in more ways than one. He’s reproduced in every generation, in classrooms just like this. The author, a one Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, is, indeed, dead. He drank too much. But back to the point. Who is the Great Gatsby, and why is he in West Egg.

Silence

Bey: OK. Put up your hand if you did the reading.

Everybody puts up their hand.

Bey: I’m not handing out study halls for not doing your homework, here. I just want to know. So be honest—no repercussions—how many of you did the reading?

Six kids put down their hand.

Bey: Alright, now keep your hand up if you know what happened in the reading and could tell me about it.

Ten more kids put down their hand.

Bey: OK. You can put your hands down and start inventing answers for me. You guys know me, you know I try to be real with you, and you’ve got to trust me that reading this book is worthwhile. I’ve got to teach some books to meet the state standard, but I get to choose one book—(deemphasizing) from a list—and this one is the one I chose, because it’s a good one, and it’ll change the way your brain works. Alright, who is Jay Gatsby?

Alexandra: Jay Gatz. He changed his name when he went on a trip to the West Indies with a rich guy, and he decided he wanted to be rich, too.

Bey: Great job. So he invented a name and a life for himself, why did he go to East Egg?

Pause

Jason: Daisy.

Bey: Great. What about daisy?

Jason: He followed her East, without her knowing, because he was in love with her.

Alexandra: He was stalking her.

Samantha: Stalker.

Bey: OK. I think it’s good you think it’s kind of weird, because it is. The man gives up the life he was born into, makes himself into a fiction, and chases an unattainable dream across the country. It’s the kind of thing we’re almost more comfortable with, today, in the age of TV, fluid identities, and misguided love for flickering images. But what I want you kids to think about is, on a deeper level than the individual character of Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald was writing about America, and Americans, as he saw them. Might America itself be chasing an unattainable dream?

Silence

Bey: You ever heard of the American Dream?

Heads Nod

Bey: What is the American Dream?

Jack: (One of the boys who didn’t read) To have a family, and a house.

Bey: Good. Anyone else?

Alexandra: Anyone can come here, from anywhere, and be successful.

Bey: Good. Other ones?

Jessica: Freedom, and equality under the law.

Bey: Good. You kids are well indoctrinated Americans. I’m glad we’re safe from a revolution, at least for a generation. But do you see how these ideals aren’t happening? Millions of Americans can’t make it in our capitalist economy, they can’t buy a house, they can’t maintain a happy family life. Take Jessica’s point, for example: racism still runs rampant in America, and it’s most obvious in the legal system, which seems to exist mainly to imprison Black and Brown people. Have we come closer to attaining our American dream?

Heads shake

Bey: No matter what, Daisy cannot live up to Gatsby’s fantasy. Right? Why not?

Pause

Jack: Because she’s a human being.

Bey: exactly. The kid hasn’t done the reading, and he knows the answers before the rest of you. She’s a human being, she lives in reality, not Gatsby’s fantasy world. In Gatsby’s fantasy, she’s perfect, divine. But in real life, no matter how charming she is, she won’t satisfy him. And Nick knows that. So, somebody make the connection for me. how does this relate to what we were just saying about the American dream?

Silence. Some of the students look scared.

Bey: Come on, folks. It’s not a trick question.

Silence

Bey: OK. Our American dream, all our patriotic ideas of the land of the free, etc, are all fantasies. They’re unattainable. Because human societies are corrupt. For Fitzgerald to imply this in 1925 was an almost revolutionary act—to suggest that America will never be ideal, in the middle of the roaring twenties, it was a huge challenge to the powers that be, to the great optimism of America after WWI. That’s what got this book famous. But here we are, reading it almost a hundred years later, and it sounds different now, doesn’t it. How has our reading of this changed?

Silence

Bey: OK. You’re going to make me do all this on my own. Fine. Well, I think we’ve come closer to understanding the truth of Fitzgerald’s point, here. We all accept that America is screwed up, that it will never be free nor equal, and, moreover, each of our personal lives will fail to live up to our own standards. We’ll never reach satisfaction with society or ourselves. The defeat of the hippies, for example, was the last great defeat of this dreamy idealism. Under the reactionary power that we’ve been living under ever since, we’ve come to accept our fate, we no longer have cause to fight except for ourselves, we no longer have that sense that things could be better. So we’re ready to abandon our ideals, abandon our American dream, and live our own quiet, grey lives, waiting for death. Killing useless time with glowing screens, TV, internet, everything else.

Silence. The students look bored.

Bey: And with the death of ideals comes the end of cohesion, of a unified society. We can’t all believe in the same things, anymore, those things that we used to believe in, have fallen out from under us. And we haven’t been able to move on. That’s the job for your generation, kids. It’s up to you to build something real, something positive out of postmodernism. My generation was supposed to do it, and we failed. So now it gets passed on to you.

The students that have been paying attention look confused. Some of the ones who haven’t been begin packing up their schoolbags.
Bey: Alright, we’re out of time, but this would be the type of thing I would choose to write a paper about. Oh, I still don’t have your last papers graded…sorry about the delay. I beg you to do your reading. Um…it’s written on your syllabus, but remember we’re three days behind that (consulting a syllabus in his folder,) I think that makes it..Chapter 5. Read chapter 5 for next time.

The students leave quickly. Bey is suddenly left alone in an empty, silent room.

Fade out.

Scene 4
Carla is sitting alone reading a book in the living room, on the couch. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the table in front of her. She is Bey’s roommate.

Carla: my placenta sings late at night, cries for a holy inhabitant, absent in its misues. finally, once a month, in the early hours of the morning, sings its grand finale, its opus, aquifies itself, and leaves me lonely forever. pause the seven holy placentas of truth flying out of my ungracious vagina, pleeing a lonely life, my lonely life, useless and forlorn. it begins a seven day death pilgrimage to the toilet, seeking salvation in my underwear.

Enter Bey coming back from work. He’s wearing black pants, a blue shirt, and a tie with an outlandish abstract design. His collar’s unbuttoned, and his tie is loosened so it hangs like a ridiculous fish, the knot at about the level of his nipples.

Carla: Hey, Bey.

Bey: ah, shit

Exits off the other side of the stage.

Carla raises her book, sighs, flips through the remaining pages in her book. Sighs. Dog-ears the page she was on, and apathetically throws the book across the floor. Takes a cigarette out of the packet and lights it.

Bey re-enters in loose pants and an undershirt. flops on to the sofa.

Bey: those fucking children. Lived their whole lives never thinking an original thought. Someone must have taught them how to fuck their lives away, because I can’t imagine them coming up with the idea themselves.

Carla: I thought you said they were smart.

Bey: That was probably two months ago. I mistook sass for smart. An easy mistake under the modern reign of cynicism.

Carla: So why are you doing it?

Bey: Not sure. Nobody told me anything else to do, and this is what I came up with.

Carla: Because you believe that a good education is a right, not a privilege, and no one else prepared to give it to these kids.

Bey: Did I say that?

Carla: When we had John over for dinner.

Bey: I think I thought I was going to get paid. fuck it. how’s your life going?

Carla: Progressing smoothly towards the end of it.

Bey: And a worthy pursuit it is, indeed!

Carla: forced chuckle I was walking down the street today, and I realized something.

Bey: Momentous. Groundbreaking. What did you realize?

Carla: How much bad genetics we are burdened with. Most people should not be allowed to breed.

Bey: Really. And who is to decide who gets the right to breed?

Carla: I would, or anyone else who isn’t blind. It isn’t about judging people. It’s that some people should look at themselves, and realize that The End is The End, and they owe it to humanity that they should die alone.

Bey: Should I breed?

Carla: Look inside yourself. Do you deserve to continue for another generation?

Bey: yes.

Carla: You teach degenerate children how to waste their lives. I’m an assistant to someone who’s almost allowed to think, as long as its in a line.

Bey: But we have rich inner lives. We’re kings in the green pastures of our unconscious.

Carla: Enslaved by the superego.

Bey: I think you’re just trying to convince me not to get you pregnant. Or convince yourself…

Carla: Bey, the two of us? Will never come close to having children.

Bey: Can we still have sex? I quite enjoy that.

Carla: Um, yeah, we’ll talk about that later. I’m having second thoughts. Smiles.

Bey: But you’ll allow me to procreate? I’m going to teach my kid guitar before he learns to talk, so he can be an illiterate rockstar. Surely the world needs another illiterate rockstar.

Carla: OK. You’d be allowed to breed. but long as your son’s a complete animal, an eating-and-fucking machine.

Bey: But that’s what people are. And now you want them to kill themselves off? To stop fucking? it’s preposterous.

Carla: They could still fuck, with the right contraceptive measures. But we’ve got to cut the population by a third, at least, in twenty years, or else the environment will just stop being able to support us. We’re talking about a preemptive strike at the chemical apocalypse. People can barely hold it together themselves, and then they have kids and almost always fuck it up. Each generation gets progressively more fucked up and crazy.

Bey: I think you’re contradicting yourself, but I wasn’t really listening hard enough.

Carla: Most people suck, Bey. Look at the masses of Americans. You can’t find any redeeming quality. Look at mass media. These people lap that shit up. Reality television? Have you been to the movie theater recently?

Bey: Bey sits up on the sofa, and crosses his legs so he can face her on the sofa. People eat what they’re given. Most people recognize that mass entertainment is drivel, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. It’s what our culture is selling to them, and, as products of our culture, they’ll buy it.

Carla: And you don’t think that this is a situation that should be changed?

Bey: It is whatever it is. Most people are at least well-intentioned, most people are able to keep themselves to themselves.

Carla: You’re too forgiving. These people are tools.

Bey: Sure, they’re being used by the power structure of society. And we are, too. We have a privileged position on that power structure, to the point we can ignore it or be disdainful of it, but we will help reproduce it in the next generation to come.

Carla: It’s our decision, it’s our lives, we can challenge it if we want.

Bey: And how are you going to do that? Revolution?

Carla: Art. And sterilizing rednecks.

Bey: Art? Yeah, I guess that’s what I think, too. Art should be more political. Poetry, too. Poetry’s art.

Carla: Have you seen contemporary art? You think they give a shit about being political? No, they’ve finally all realized the truth that art is all bullshit, and they’re living the high life because they can get away with it. all of it—art, everything, art is masterbatory, and we as a culture, are just beginning to realize that. we depend on it to stroke our pleasure centers, our, let’s see, lascivious unconscious. sex and death, sex and death. The artist, the sacrificial lamb, starving, not soothsayer, truthsayer, prophet. Peepshow. A peepshow. For the rich. But that’s what gives us power. You’re trying to make art fuel a revolution? Fine, right, you can do that. But then what about when the next guy gets famous instead, a guy who comes along and he can make a canvass look interesting, make a poem that’s just good to read. Take Pollack, for example. You know Jackson Pollack? paintpisser, right? urinating on the canvass. His early work is better, but that’s aside the point. Actually, it’s not. Listen, the man’s a pretty good artist, studied painting, I like his stuff. No way he’s going to make it like that. Because he’s good, but he’s not Picasso, he’ll never be great, he’ll just be good enough. And that tortured him. All his life. He found a gimmick, something new, that gave him a life, a name. But couldn’t be great. So he created forms, his paintings feel good to look at.

Bey: You know you’re right. I don’t have to say anything.

Carla: But you will, you always do. You’ll keep writing your poetry. Trying to use politics as an excuse for it, instead of just owning up to the fact that it is useless.

Bey: I’ll own up to it. It’s useless, and self congratulatory. It’s arrogant to even claim you’re a poet. But it feels go good to shout a poem at some unsuspecting schmendrick.

Carla: I’m hungry.

Bey: I’m tired of this talk. You make me use my head too much, and it hurts. Let’s cook dinner.

Carla: I’ll help.

exit.

Scene 5
Milton and Bey. They are smoking a joint between the two of them, which they pass back and forth after one hit each time, so they’re smoking when they’re not talking. The pacing of this scene is important; don’t go as quickly as it is written, give a beat at the beginning at the end of each line. This is a type of competition between the two characters.

Bey: OBEY your uncontrollable day in and day out, your place in society. it is all you have. Milton passes him the joint

Milton: Obey the command economy, right? Bey passes him the joint

Bey: Obey consumption, rather. As long as you eat and wear clothes, you’ll be obeying yourself. And the command economy. Milton passes to Bey

Milton: Obey your testicles, spend night after night following them around. Bey passes the joint

Bey: Obey intoxication; hazy cage of droopy eyed alcohol and paralyzed by desire
and disgust. Passed back

Milton: Obey the sidelines of darkened rooms, the party won’t embrace you in these moments. Passed back

Bey: You can kill a party from the sidelines. Catch an eye corner here, there, destroy anyone’s bravado, if they know they’re getting looked at. Obey insecurity, man. Passed back

Pause while Bey smokes, passes it back to Milton

Bey: Obey green dreaming, you have to work for your dreams. Passed back

Milton: Obey your death, may it come after your dreams Passed back

Bey: It won’t. Obey your daily immortality, because you actually could die tomorrow. Passed back

Milton: The Russians might invade, yeah? Obey your work, even though you will die no matter how much of it you do. Passed back.

Bey: you know I don’t obey my work. Gonna have to start getting my shit together soon. Obey your shit, which is always falling out all over the floor instead of neatly in the toilet when you want it to. Milton passes to Bey

Milton: Obey sewers, because modernity hides our own shit from us Bey passes to Milton

Bey: Obey cities, where sewers tie us together Milton passes to Bey. Bey tries to hit it, coughs, makes a face, and puts it in the ashtray. This is beat man.

Milton: You’re beat, man.

Fade out

Scene 6
A party in a small flat in the City. On the hipster-end of the visual scene. Indy is the look of the day. The stage is full of mumbling hipsters, indie folk, the scattered polo shirt with the popped collar. All are white and holding red drink cups. The music is too loud, so they have to scream at each other. They naturally clump themselves into conversation cliques, circles. Carla, John, Jenny, Milton and Bey are standing in a circleish thing on the left side of the stage. Center stage, another clique of hipsters. Upstage right, a keg of beer up against a wall. Everybody acts kind of drunk, but not drunk enough to lose the awkwardness.

Milton: Pointing at John That’s right, we’re all fucked, you can see it. New Orleans was just the beginning. Global Warming, Man, it causes Extreme Weather Patterns. Hurricanes, more and more. All over the world, tidal waves, within ten years, we’re all fucked, we’re all gone.

John: Ten years? It’s not that bad. If it was that bad, there’d be hysteria, people would Freak Out, man.

Milton: I’m just saying, don’t work too hard now, you’ll regret it when you’re dead in twenty years. In ten years you’ll be getting fucked, homeless, whole family dead, and in twenty, you’ll be dead, and then your young years spent in pursuit of money will seem pretty stupid. We should be having fun now, getting to know each other. The last sentence was notably directed to Carla, next to Bey.

John: Then why aren’t people Freaking Out?

Carla: Because they’re not telling us about it. The government won’t tell anyone, because they know everyone would “freak out.”

Jenny: So now, it’s like a government conspiracy.

Carla: The economy would grind to a halt. It’s not hard to imagine. Most of the funding for science in this country comes from the Government; you don’t think they could have some control over what the scientists said to the public?

John: this is America we’re talking about here. They can’t do that here.

Carla: You’re the only one talking about America. Global Warming is Global. mumbles into drink: dipshit.

Bey: I’m done with my beer.

Bey walks off to the right side of the stage, where the keg is. As he moves away from their conversation, their words fade into the background noise of the party. He wades over to the other side of the party, not aggressively pushing people away but instead waiting for them to move out of the way. he then waits for the keg, and then very carefully and scientifically pours himself a beer, tilting the cup. Then he goes to the wall, leans against it (alone) and sips it.

Bey: The sidelines embrace these moments. I can’t talk to these people. A herd, impenetrable and horny. These moments, from the outside, that’s what I know best at a party. These moments foster an imperialistic cynicism that allows you to finally realize how ridiculous this picture is, created by this time and place. Any given human being in the room could never change any of this, yet it is them. god is our hive mind, we do what's available, we follow the herd, especially when it contains those few people we feel comfortable with, and we can never leave their sides even though we have grown to hate them. they could be anybody. but no one would be much better, so why bother. whoever is around is around. obey them.

Bey shuts up and drinks, the other conversation fades back in

Milton: So I’ve been working on my sculpture, you know the one I told you about?

Carla: The one with the eggs?

Milton: No, the new one.

Carla: to the rest of the group, no, so last week, this kid comes home with a huge fucking box of eggs. Like five hundred eggs. And we all spent all day blowing the insides of them out through little holes. Because he was making his sculpture, and he was filling it with eggshells.

John: Where’d you get the eggs?

Milton: Stole them.

Jenny: what do you mean, blowing out the insides?

Clara: Through little holes in each end.

Milton: Hey, at least I fed you.

Clara: Eggs. I never want another egg, ever.

Milton: No, but my new sculpture, I’m going to hang a shopping cart from the ceiling, and dangle wine glasses from it. And spraypaint the shopping cart red.

From this point, the two sides of the stage talk in their turn, but they can’t hear Bey talking to himself because they’re on the other side of the party

Bey: Right Milton? you’re around in my life these days, I’ll obey you. He speaks my language when he’s with me, and I appreciate that. But around Other People, he’s One of Them. A good man, though.

Carla: That’s cool!

Bey: And he wants Carla, obviously. I can’t keep her at bay forever. I gotta realize that she’s all I got. He drinks. They wouldn’t know each other if it wasn’t for me. Obey Milton, he’s your friend.

Jenny: Milton, where do you get your inspiration from?

Bey: Obey Milton, the Artist of All.

Milton: I don’t really think that words should be attached to art.

Bey: Obey Milton, Eternal Consumer, Destroyer of Words

Milton: I mean, my art shouldn’t have a meaning that can be spoken. It’s a visual statement.

Bey: Obey Milton, Consumer of Humans

Carla: The signified is enough of a burden in poetry, it’s nice for the artist to be able to get rid of it.

Bey: Obey Milton, Consumer of Flesh

John and Jenny look bored

Milton: You understand. Art is art for it’s own sake.

Bey: Obey Milton, Cliché Chewer

Milton puts his hand in Carla’s, they get closer.

Milton: But my inspiration? It comes from the unconscious, Art is indulgence of pleasure, of our urges, where we are all animals.

Bey: Obey Milton’s Stolen Theoretical Constructs

Milton: To fuck and to die, the only things we ever consumed with.

Bey: Obey Milton, he of the bigger cigar.

Carla: When you’re drunk, anyway.

John and Jenny laugh awkwardly.

John: Um, awesome. My beer’s empty.

Jenny: Me, too.

They hastily escape from the conversation.

Carla: To Milton You wanna, um, go home?

Milton: Yeah. Should we get Bey?

Carla: Um. I donno. I want to go home with you, you know?

Milton: You got it.

Bey: I’ll only go with them if they come find me.

They get their coats on and leave.

Bey drinks his beer silently, and moves over as John and Jenny jostle him upstage for the keg. He finishes it, throws the cup on the floor, and exits the opposite way.

Scene 6
Bey is alone on the street, walking home. His face looks a little beat up. It is night.

Bey:
Lost in the spaces between
My absolutes abandoned,
I stand alone…
trapped in the zone
by razor wire masquerading
as classroom walls
and ground rules.
No paper to receive my poem
society dissolves around me,
my eternal canvass melted
Ripped in the wind
of a thousand french-fry fallouts.
My skin can’t contain me anymore.
self to self, dust to dust
Earth smeared with asphalt:
asphalt my only friend.

Scene 7
It is morning. Bey is shirtless in the living room. He is drinking beer. Carla enters

Carla: Shit, Bey. I just woke up, and you’re already drinking?

Bey: Drunken. Drunked.

Carla: What the fuck is wrong with you these days? You spend all your time fucking around, drinking and smoking. Aren’t you supposed to work, or something?

Bey: Talking to you counts as work.

Carla: Weren’t you supposed to be a teacher to thirty five teenagers? What happened to them?

Bey: I’m a shining rolemodel to them.

Carla: Then there will be no future. We’re all screwed. grabs the beer away from him, sits down next to him. How can you be drinking now? you just woke up.

Bey: Nuhuh. I didn’t sleep. My mind, won’t let me rest—it’s empty.

Carla: Bey, you have to sleep. You didn’t sleep last night either.

Bey: I can’t. He makes a grab at the beer bottle on the other side of Carla, but drunkenly ends up with his arms around her You could put me to bed, though.

Carla: Bey, come on. You’re drunk, you couldn’t even do it.

Bey: Nuuhuh. I wrote you something last night: Pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket, and reads:
I will make earthly trees take root in your crotch.
Nighttime paradise
Where songs shout and gods play,
and the chaos is shaded by shade trees,
and I’ll bask in the bliss,
down by the waterside, I’ll lay my head, my head, lay my head.
Your crotch, leafy and green
protected by greedy photosynthesizers
from the white light of false love.
I hear factories clanging truths
I see eyes implode
your mouth on fire
and truth under your dirty toenails.
pause
Bey: hehe. I wrote that to try to get you into bed with me. Did it work?

Carla: making a face You said I had dirty toenails. Is that answer enough?

Bey: You do, but I think it’s sexy.

Carla: And You’re a huge pig. You gotta sober up, you’ve got class today.

Bey: Class? What is this class you speak of?

Carla: Come on, I’ll make you some eggs. You gotta eat, and drink lots of water for me, OK?

Bey: OK

Carla leads him offstage by the hand.
Fade out.

Scene 8
A classroom in ill repair. Bey is standing in front of rows of school-desks. He’s holding a copy of The Great Gatsby

Bey: Alright, kiddies. settle down now.

Bey: Alright, so we’ve finished the book. Right? Heads nod. So regardless of where you are in the book, today’s the last day I’m going to teach it to you. You’ll get a chance to write about it in the paper due next Monday—who didn’t get the paper assignment from last week?

A few hands go up, bey comes around and gives them handouts

Bey: A thousand students have written a final paper about this book before you. So I’m expecting each one of your papers to be completely unique, to make a good analysis of the book that no one’s ever made before. (He doesn’t sound particularly sarcastic)

Alexandra: And how’re you going to know? Have you read all those papers?

Bey: Yes. I have. OK. So, what goes on at the end of this book?

Silence. Jack opens the book under the table, and reads the last paragraph, trying to be sneaky.

Jack: Something about a green orgasm.

The class laughs.

Bey: OK. Good, work, Jack. You’re sort of right, even though you have no idea what you’re talking about. Let’s flip to that passage, everyone turn to the end of the book. Alright, who want so read?

Melinda, who hasn’t spoken before, raises her hand

Bey: OK. Melinda, will you read us the last…three paragraphs of the book?

She does so, in a beautiful voice, stumbling a few times. Shot of Bey’s head leads into a montage while she’s reading it.

Bey: The orgastic future is behind us now, swept backwards by the pull of fantasy, of allowing each thought to control the future, the failure of the promise of a democracy made long ago, now. And they say that you are the future, children—you have already been imagined, your eternal form has already been dreamt up by fire-eyed parents. And then, when you fail to become the New World, the shining light of a green present, when you become human-children who only watch TV and play with complex toys, when write a bad paper because you procrastinated, then the moment when you were their child begins to die.

Alexandra: Raises her hand, but Bey doesn’t acknowledge her, so she just says What? Are you talking about?

Bey: I got a little ahead of myself. We were talking about the green breast of the new world, the vast empty space that held the greatest of all human dreams. America, Fitzgerald is saying, is the greatest of dreams. It was the greatest of dreams. And now, it is whatever it is. An economy of greed driven by hedonism, a population controlled by TV, a society built on racism, the great empire of the 21st century. Surely this isn’t what George Washington and Ben Franklin were planning for us. Fitzgerald is talking about that original form of America, when it was just a dream that could be anything, when it was a vast, empty continent waiting to be exploited. That’s the dream that Gatsby inhabited, until the reality caught up with him.

Students have been writing or doodling in their books. Looking bored. Alexandra is paying attention.

Bey: For Fitzgerald, reality always catches up to the fantasy, the fantasy of a green America has to be replaced by reality, at some point. And, like we were talking about the other day, that’s happened—disillusionment has become the norm, and no one in their right mind can live under an ideal. But the problem is, the human mind craves fantasy, it depends on the green light, the promise of an orgastic future, to survive, to keep ourselves going. To beat on, ceaselessly into the past, as Fitzgerald would say. So what do you guys think we do in Modern society, to keep the fantasy alive?

Silence. Bey is too wrapped up in himself and his lecture to wait for the students to catch up with him.

Bey: TV. Internet. Pixels and projections. We drown ourselves in plastic media, fed to us straight from the belly of capitalism. This is the age in which data replaces reality. A future Fitzgerald could’ve never foreseen. Your time gave you everything:
instant access
the entire output of humanness
in your grubby hands.
And now that everything
is everywhere else at once
we drown in the sea of worthlessness
and sleaze that is the human mind
canals of tamed light
polluted by the giant mass
of the depravity of desires
twisted by walls of empty sight--
Darwin’s animal hedonism
perverted by dirty streets
flooded with words,
ravaged by nihilism
and poured onto sewers of data.

The students are looking at each other, trying to contain their laughter at their nuts teacher. Jack, silently egged on by the class, decides to take him on.

Jack: We’ve replaced the American Dream with TV?

Bey: Yeah, that’s good.

Jack: TV is the American Dream, better than what we had before—the land of great equality where everyone participates in the same culture that they create.

Bey: That is created for them.

Jack: You’re scared of progress, of the great possibilities that come with worldwide media.

Bey: The possibilities are worldwide domination, worldwide illusion.

Jack: TV, and everything that goes with it, are what we have now, Teach. You’re always talking about ‘cultural texts,’ and then you sit in front of us, violently condemning the cultural texts that make up our lives, the fabric of our culture. This is now, Teach. And this book flips to the copyright page was written in 1925. Do you know how long ago that was? This is completely irrelevant to us, to everything in our lives.

Bey: You’re just trying to excuse yourself from the reading.

Jack: I’m trying to explain to you why the reading is useless to me. This book, any of the books we’ve read in this class, have lost all their meaning today.

Bey: getting angry But you’ve got to learn. Where you’re coming from. How things got so fucked up, how they were always fucked up but in different ways. This shit is important.

Students are taken aback by bey’s language

Jack: Rising pitch to meet Bey, stands up Why? Why do we have to learn this shit? It’s useless to us, the world’s dissolving around us, we are completely out of control of it here, and you’re shoving Fitzgerald down our throats? This shit is useless.

Bey: The world’s dissolving around you, and Fitzgerald saw it beginning to happen. Are you going to try to save it? Or are you just going to watch TV while it all goes to shit?

Jack: What do you want us to do? There’s nothing do to?

Bey: I want you to LEARN! Throws the book hard at Jack’s face. Jack sits down, stunned. The classroom is silent.

Fade out.

Scene 9
The living room, with Milton and Bey, smoking.

Bey: So I got fired.

Milton: for throwing a book at a kid?

Bey: and swearing, and being a shitty teacher.

Milton: That’ll happen. I’m on the brink of the pink slip too. I better get to work on this project now. Shit, but now I’m high.

Bey: Fuck the work, man. Let’s entertain ourselves.

Milton: Alright. Seems reasonable. What’s to do?

Bey: Let’s go to that contemporary art museum. Re-opened last week. Look at shitty art and make fun of it.

Milton: aight.

fade out

Scene 10
In a modern art gallery. Highly abstract paintings of questionable technical skill hang on the wall. A few yuppies mill in and out of the gallery—it’s not hugely crowded, but there are some people. In the corner there’s that video instillation—Double No! by Bruce Nauman: it features two clowns jumping up and down saying NO! NO!NO! in a particularly annoying way. enter Milton and bey.

Bey: This museum is inside out. The walls…

Milton: The walls?

Bey: Are keeping America out.

Milton: Are keeping the paintings up.

Bey: Because Americans don’t want this

Milton: Art?

Bey: Americans don’t want art.

Milton: They just can’t deal with it.

Bey: They’re forbidden from it. They must be kept out, with white walls.

Milton: And paintings face inward, nudes on white canvasses.

Bey: And, facing inward, they see us

Milton: Hold us.

Bey: enclose us

Milton: A womb.

Bey: A prostate.

Pause.

Bey: I’m going to quit teaching and just do art. It must be so much easier than dealing with those children. Look at this, do you see how easy this was to do? Paintsplatterings.

Milton: It’s not easy to do it first, and call it art.

Bey: They produced bullshit and theorized it into art. I can do that. My entire education’s taught me to do that.

Milton: while the rest of us were learning, you were learning to bullshit.

Bey: It’s really just a question of if you can sell yourself. Your art, I mean. make a niche in the economy of art.

Milton: Sell out?

Bey: Out and into white walled fortresses

pause

Bey: This whole culture trip
Thirsty consumers
feed off art buying
off unspoilt white walls.
The misery of the mediocre artist
Trying to make a life out of what he knows
is bullshit.
Men who will never be masters
selling their humanity
to themselves
Hurling sperm onto canvass
their whole lives.

Milton: Their whole lives?
Each moment
of artistic creation
stands alone.
Each brushstroke
an isolated present
that never dies.

Bey: Getting worked up The present? Art is the present? Fuck the present. It waits in quivering anticipation for Gatsby's green light, wallowing in it's own semen of a thousand wasted teenage kleenex. Eternal present? Each brushstroke an eternity? The present is infinitely thin, like a line, like the wire around your neck, cutting into your skin, pulling tighter, tighter, and you can only get a moment's breath, a "present," a reprieve from death by relaxing, giving in to it, just long enough so you can hurl your elbow into your attacker's nuts. And then you wonder why your own genitals are so bruised--yet you and me, Gandhi and Ronald Regan, spend every moment hurling our fist into our own crotch, taking painful gasping breaths, trying to create a "here and now." Mostly because the Government's been telling you that you actually *want* to live in the present since you've been a baby, denying you your past, owning your future. You deserve more breathing room in time than this infinitely small point you've been given (and you have to pay taxes on even that! Fuck the welfare state!) Fuck the present.

Pause. Milton’s a bit taken aback.

Milton: Um.

Bey: OK?

Milton: You win. Look at this video installation. Gestures at it

Bey: I’ve seen it. It’s annoying.

Long pause. The sound of no.no. slowly grows louder

Milton: One lone man
paintbrush poised against society
The only hope
Against the everyday.

Bey: The artist? Or the Marlboro man?

Milton: It’s the American Dream. One Canvass, One Man Against All Institutions.

Bey: Alone?

Milton: Alone.

Bey: You’re not alone.

Milton: Artistically alone.

Bey: You don’t know alone. The loss of everything, but yourself. You isolate me.

Milton: I isolate you?

Bey: You subsume people.

Milton: You assume people.

Bey: You breathe people

Milton: I live off of people. Survive in their company. you isolate yourself. You love too little.

Bey: And the little that I love gets taken from me.

Milton: By yourself.

Bey: It should be a gift.

Milton: I love you. And that I can give you.

Bey: no. pause. no. pause. nono. pause. Milton goes to get closer to bey, give him a hug. nononononono!NONO! Bey shoves him hard away, so Milton is pushed back. Bey goes on the offensive, and launches himself against him, body checking him into a painting. The alarms that go off when you touch a canvass in a museum go off, and guards appear. They grab Bey, restrain him, and lead him offstage. Milton is unhurt, but too astounded by the events to speak. Bey is struggling against the guards.

Fade out on Milton standing alone.

Scene 8
Bey is sitting in a waiting-room in a fairly dingy mental hospital. He is wearing institutional clothes. He is attended by a male attendant, standing casually in the corner, looking at Bey.

Nurse: (attending him) So, didja have a job before ya came here?

Bey: Teacher. High school.

Nurse: Yeah? I went to high school. I known some high-school teachers in my time. What subject?

Bey: What subject high school teachers go insane?

Nurse: English.

Bey: My school calls it “Literacy.”

Nurse: Sure.

They sit for a while, the man looking at bey and nibbling on his lower lip.

Bey: What do they call this place?

Nurse: Where you’re sitting is in Taft Hospital.

Bey: They didn’t send me to prison?

Nurse: Hey, man, we’re here to help you, is all. What would you go to prison for?

Bey: Terrorism. Treason.

Nurse: Treason? You can be hanged for that.

Bey: For violating the Laws of Being.

Nurse: What’s your political faction?

Bey: And this is where they send you for it, for anarchism of being. This is the reactionary counterstrike. Episode II.

Nurse: Alright, son. You’re all right, not being punished for anything.

Bey: This is the middle act.
When the sun sank
deep in the west where daily God died—
Evil melts into abstraction
rivers of propaganda,
hardcore militiamen on bicycles ride
skinned kneecaps,
lines of Nazis electing
Cheeky Russians to be God.
Herds of hectic indigenous
displaced into a cartoon fire
erupting from bush eyes
staring down at his domain:
Texas.
Cowboys herding brown bodies through economies,
The middle passage reaches its end
tunnels built under the Atlantic
though which slaves
eternally march.
White men squat on rotting summits
flexing muscles flaccid
from malnourishment.
The truth is abu graib.
The truth is an ad against cigarette ads.
The truth is a cartoon
of a cowboy riding a talking horse
over a pile of black bodies
This is the nationalism of cowering pain
this is the middle act.

The nurse looks at him hard.

Nurse: Man, you got a vocabulary. you’re a dark crazy-man. You always talked like that?

Bey: I always talked like that. I talked like I talked.

Nurse: And nothin’s changed, eh?

Bey: The place where I talked changed. (getting happy, suddenly) Now I talk in the loony bin. Where I can talk all day, and no one will listen to me.

Nurse: Oh, now, we’ll listen. The doctors’ll listen to you, alright. It’s their job, in fact.

Bey: You know about re-education camps? Stalinist Russia?

Nurse: taken aback You a Stalinist? I mean, it’s OK if you are. The days of blacklisting are over, here, mah friend.

Bey: No, I—

Nurse: Interrupting as a door on the side of the stage opens and another nurse pokes his head out. Hey, the doc’ll see you now. Come on, kid, let’s go. See what the doc can make of ya.

Bey: I…

The nurse drags Bey through the door by his arm.

Fade out.

Scene 9
Carla and Bey are sitting in a completely white room on white chairs around a steel table. Bey is wearing the uniform of a hospital inpatient.

Bey: Welcome to the land of fluorescent light, examining tables.

Carla: Thank you.

Bey: An autoclaved world. The state of eternal ideal, where everything dissolves into the great unholy blank at the end of the sentence. The sentence, when it was passed down, surprised me in it’s leniency. Life without parole. Life without parole? For what? for slaughtering an entire world, an entire perspective, for extinguishing a universe of subjectivity. For surrendering myself to an ideal, an absolute, for raping the shadows on the wall.

Carla: You didn’t get life without parole, bey. You’re just here for a short evaluation.

Bey: And after here? I’m going to prison, I know that.

Carla: Prison? No, we worked it out. You’re coming home soon.

Bey: Parole? there’s no escape here, there’re no walls here. The shadows on the wall, my eyes chained to a fire in the middle of the cave, the cell, and I’ll burn my eyes, cast them into the fire which hurls the shadows onto the wall, which I never asked to see. Hurl myself onto the flames of perception. conception and reaction, reception and the final constipation of understanding, back and forth onto itself.

Carla: I dreamed of you last night.

Bey: You didn’t exist last night.

Carla: I thought of you last night. But you didn’t exist for me, either.

Bey: What is this place?

Carla: It’s just a place, where they can take care of you. Because I can’t help you.

Bey: No, the desire for pleasure, for lasting pleasure. What do I have to give you to get pleasure?

Carla: your mind. So I can straighten it out for you.

Bey: My life? you have it.

Carla: that’s shit to me. You’re shit to me.

Bey: this is the land of uncertain light, fluorescent light. You know I’ve ceased to believe.

Carla: that’s something, at least.

Bey: No, it’s not. Your eyes have no color when I look at them, and neither does the sky.

Carla: you’re alone.

Bey: to be alone is to exist, and I don’t. Can you see me? Don’t answer that, you’ll lie. You can’t see me. These days, I go to jerk off, only to find that my dick doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does my crotch.

Carla: do you think of me in those moments?

Bey: I’ve never met you, I don’t know you, and you aren’t here now, so how would I?

Carla: I think you know the answer to that. I see myself in every glance of your eye.

Bey: you exist only for me.

Carla: and I am beautiful?

Bey: and you are beautiful. And that is all. Because that is what I have brought you here to be.

Carla: There’s no sex in the final darkness, and finally that is the only salvation of absolutism. Because it replaces itself, immortality through procreation.

Bey: There’s no sex here. The final darkness. Institutionalization, now and forever. You’ve left me, severed me, and I spiral into nonexistence. Soon, I will have no relevance at all. I will cease to be controlled.

Carla: Controlled?

Bey: By the police state, the ideological reign of monotheism, belief in a singular power structure, bourgeoisie.

Carla: The fascists again.

Bey: And I don’t care anymore. I know, I can’t change it, I’m infinitesimal against it.

A metallic voice comes over the loudspeaker.

Voice: Visiting Hours are Over. Patients, Please Report to the Aerobics Room For Rehabilitation.

Carla and Bey look at each other in the eyes for a final moment. Bey breaks the moment, and looks uncomfortably downward. Carla quickly exits offstage without saying any goodbye.

Scene 10
Carla in Milton’s bedroom. She’s sitting up in bed.

Milton: So when’s he coming back?

Carla: It’s up to the shrinks. Soon, probably. He’s not half so fucked up as most of the other people in that place.


Carla: Oh, so that’s why you saw to it that he did get psychiatric help?

Milton: Come on. You know he needed it.

Carla: I don’t know anything. I don’t know what it’s like to be in his mind.

Milton: The doctors said…

Carla: The doctors just met him, they don’t know shit about him. Bey exists, Milton, and he’s a beautiful man, whose perception is it’s own art, whose perception has lead me through this world since I got to college. He pushed me, and I pushed back, and we got somewhere.

Milton: Not just somewhere. You got here. He’s lost control of his life.

Carla: No, he hasn’t. It’s something else.

Milton: Something else? Did he grow up?

Carla: He grow into himself, grew an exoskeleton. I don’t know.

Milton: He embraced the safety of delusions. He gave up. Everything is bullshit, right? It’s a great excuse to give up. He gave up his mind so he wouldn’t have to take responsibility for it.

Carla: I’m not interested in criticizing bey behind his back. You’re trying to get me to take sides

Milton: I’m not fighting. I’m trying to get my friend some help that he needs.

Carla: So you’ll get rid of him.

Milton: Get rid of him?

Carla: You two left for the museum. I sat at home, made myself dinner. Then I did my reading. My writing. Then you came home, without him. And he was all I had, and I can’t be alone right now.

Milton: reaches out to her you’re not alone.

Carla: And that’s why you think you’ve won.

Milton: What you’re accusing me of…is preposterous. He was my best friend.

Carla: You’ve known him for six months.

Milton: He was the only one I’ve known in this city.

Carla: I’m telling you what I’m going through right now.

Milton: Well, that’s insane, Carla. I didn’t put him there. …they Asked for an Explanation, and it wasn’t me that attacked him. It was a choice—prison or help, he could’ve ended up in prison. He ruined one of the paintings. And I knew he needed help, and I couldn’t help him.

Carla: But I could have.

Milton: You couldn’t have helped him. His exoskeleton, remember?

Carla: Oh, and they can? In that dirty fucking institution, where they don’t know him?

Milton: couldn’t help him.

Carla: I need to be alone.

Milton: Be careful being alone. I don’t want to lose you, too.

Carla leaves.

Fade out.

Scene 11
Carla is sitting on the couch, reading and smoking a cigarette. Milton walks through the stage on the way to the kitchen. Carla stares after him coolly. He avoids her gase. She stubbs out her cigarette.

Pause

Bey enters carrying a huge canvass and a plastic bag full of paints and brushes.

Carla: Bey!

She leaps up and tries to hug him, but he’s carrying a huge canvass

Bey: Whoa. hold about.

Turns around, and very delicately places the canvass against the wall. Then he takes the bag of paints, deliberately turns it upside down, shaking the metal tubes onto the floor. Then he turns back to Carla. They embrace.

Carla: Bey, bey, bey. He looks at the floor. Bey, you’re back! i mean, how?

Bey: I asked to go, they let me go.

Carla: Bey, How are you? I mean, how are you feeling?

Bey: Still looking at the floor OK. I mean, OK. They fixed me at the hospital. That’s what hospitals are for, and they fixed me.

Carla: Touching his arm warmly Bey, you weren’t broken.

Bey: And they fixed me, they fixed me. I’m sorry to come home, I mean now, interrupting you and all.

Carla: We were living in your absence. Nothing to interrupt. They fixed you?

Bey: I am now a productive member of society.

Carla: You bullshit badly.

Bey: No, Carla. What I just lived was big enough to snap my spine. Upright. In the final desolation of the White Castle, in the eyes of the straightjacketed prophets, I saw what it is to produce, to contribute.

Milton enters holding a big cooking spoon covered in red sauce.

Milton: Bey! You’re back!

Runs over to him and hugs him melodramatically. Still holding the spoon. bey halfheartedly tries to hug back, but is overpowered.

Milton: So how are you feeling?

Bey: Real

Milton: You feel more real to me now.

Bey: It gave me a purpose. A Meaning. The final dissent hanging on white walls, voices heard across the void, I saw myself hanging on a white wall, dangling by picture wire. art leaps through the skin, destroying what should only be caressed. To Produce, to Contribute, to Society, that is the mission of the White Castle, to create minds who Produce, who Contribute, and I will.

Milton: Produce?

Bey: Objects for consumption, my Best Friend.

Milton: It’s all still bullshit, isn’t it, bey?

Bey: I am bullshit, I am worthless.

Carla: I’ll decide that, if you let me—

Milton: Hold on. You think you can just claim to be sane, and you’ll be sane.

Bey: I am only acknowledging that I am insane. That’s all I need to do.

Milton: All you need to do?

Bey: To be sane again.

Milton: No, you have to do work to get better, Bey. It’s not easy like that.

Bey: If I produce something, worthwhile, it won’t matter.

Milton: You have a life that needs living. You’ve lost your job. And you have friends that care about you, and you owe it to us…

Bey: And I will, I will produce Objects of Art, for the Ultimate Consumption, I will categorize myself, I will lend my voice to the chorus of lost souls stacked on Super K-Mart shelves. Don’t worry, Milton, I will tag myself, barcode myself, and i will be read by lonely scanners. Electronic beacons of sharp red light will stroke my dying words, my final words, must be written in paint. Multicolored cum drank by a thirsty avant-garde.

Milton: What happened to art-is-bullshit, Bey? Now you’re trusting it to save your life? To justify you? It’s a desperate move.

Bey: Well, what do I have? What else is there? I’ve got to build something out of this. I’m never going to get a teaching job again. I need something. Nobody faults Van Gogh for being crazy.

Milton: You have us, you have your friends. We’ll help you.

Bey: Milton, you taught me that I am finally alone. And turning to Carla I need you. I am worthless. Sure, to the common man, I can have worth, priced—tagged and barcoded, exactly equivalent to the empty voices I share shelfspace with. I can produce something, my last hope. But regardless, worthless to you. You’re better than the average consumer, Carla. You expect humanity. And that’s why I’ll never deserve you, maybe your pity, but never you. I am determined to strip myself of every glimmer of humanity, so that I can integrate myself into this Economy, so that I can Produce and not question, so I can be Sane.

Carla: I…you don’t have to give up yourself to be sane…

Bey: Most people don’t, but most people aren’t insane.

Carla: You don’t have to give up me, though.

Bey: That’s up to you. And him.

Milton: Ah! So this is what this is all about. All this hate. And I couldn’t understand why you suddenly hated me.

Bey: Sure, you’re so fucking clueless. Look at that cute little innocent face.

Milton: Listen, man, it isn’t like that for me. (In a mocking voice) I’m not trying to take her away from you or anything like that. You both told me you weren’t in a monogamous relationship. Both men look over at Carla. Milton sobers up a bit OK. I’m leaving you two. She’s yours, if you’re going to be possessive about it. I won’t touch her.

Milton leaves

Carla: OK Bey. I feel bad about sleeping with Milton. Shouldn’ta done that. But you’ve been on your own trip recently. I thought you were trying to get rid of me, to be honest.

Bey: I’ve been a bit fucked up.

Carla: You’ve been a bit fucked up. And it’s been your own thing, you think it would be better if you were closer to me, but I can’t help you, Bey. Because it’s your own trip, your own mind. I’ll love you, and I’ll support you, but…you got your own work to do.

Bey: So I’m alone.

Carla: you’re alone in your head. I’ll take care of this body.

They embrace
fade out.


Scene 12
Bey is alone in the middle of the night hurling paint onto a giant canvass. He’s smoking. he is intent, but it looks bad. There’re all the other colors but no Red. On the other side of the stage, there’s a single shitty chair by a shitty table on which his paints are laid out.

The doorbell rings. Bey answers it. The Mormon is there. He is dressed in a dark suit, but he looks exhausted and crazy, has sunken eyes, and stubble. Or he looks like whatever actor plays him.

Bey: What are you doing proselytizing in the middle of the night?

Mormon: I…I…God won’t let me sleep. He, He keeps me awake, He talks to me. I’m here to tell you about the Grace of God, to urge you to open your heart to them.

Pause

Bey: I hate your kind, you know. But I been working alone all night, , you, you come in, look at my painting, lemme know what you think. But don’t try to convert me. I’m a homosexual and an atheist. And I have sex with horses.

He comes in, and Bey steers him to stand in front of the painting.

Bey: there it is. My first painting. What do you think?

Mormon: I see God in it.

Bey: You see God in it?

Mormon: I see God. I t…talk to God, every other night.

Bey: You talk to God?

Mormon: He’s. Um. He’s lonely. He has n-no-one to talk to. O-only the chosen ones to talk to. only You and Me. Me and You. If you let Him.

Bey: Only me and you?

Mormon: Only me. You haven’t Listened. Y-you’re too self-involved. You don’t listen.

Bey: You don’t know me.

Mormon: H-he told me about you. He told me to See You. To make you Listen. Suddenly gets much louder, passionate RIGHT NOW

Bey: Right now?

Mormon: Right now you will hear God. Why, Why else are you awake?

Bey: I’m awake, my mind won’t let me sleep.

Mormon: He’s keeping you awake.

Bey: No. I’m….I’m afraid to lose (pause) consciousness.

Mormon: You are Afraid of D-death.

Bey: Very Slowly I am afraid of death.

Mormon: But I will make you immortal.

Bey: Art will make me immortal. With a good agent or something.

Mormon: Are you trying to pass t-that off as art? S-seriously? gestures to the painting. He sits down on the chair and leans on the little table.

Bey: I don’t know. Yes.

Mormon: You, are Chosen, Bey.

Bey: How do you know my name?

Mormon: I know you are the Answer. You have a Duty.

Bey: I know.

Mormon: To spread the Word

Bey: My word

Mormon: The Word.

Bey looks at him and drinks

Bey: Hey, do you want a drink.

Mormon: Prophets should not drink. You’re destroying yourself.

Bey: Listen, I don’t like all this god shit. I’m an artist.

Mormon: I-it doesn’t matter if you Like it. God is Real.

Bey: Real? I don’t even think you’re real. Coming to me in the middle of the night, talking nonsense. I just got out of a mental hospital. Understand? The loony bin. Which makes you a delusion. Enough to get me put back there, probably.

Mormon: But you know I’m not.

Bey: Yeah? Would you bleed?

Mormon: Red blood. Like Christ.

Bey: I was always taught that Christ bled red wine.

Mormon: red wine…

The conversation trails off. Silence. Bey finishes his drink

Bey: Red. When I decided to be an artist, I forgot to buy red paint. all the other colors. Forgot red.

Mormon: When did you decide to be an artist?

Bey: Yesterday. He goes to fill his drink

Mormon: God made his plan for you before Time. You are to relinquish your subjectivity. Use god’s vocal chords. Feel the world reverberate at your feet. Make men bow before you.

Bey: Will you stop telling me what to do? He comes back from his drink, and stands right over the Mormon.

Mormon: And when you do, you will relinquish your fear.

Bey: Fear only a mechanism to control the masses. I am an individual

Mormon: No, you are all individuals. And fear controls your every step.

Bey: I’m done with this. Would you please leave?

Mormon: It is your anger. You’ve felt it all your life. Why didn’t the other kids like you in elementary school?

Bey: getting angry Silence. This is my house.

Mormon: Because you hit them.

Bey: Picks up the Mormon by his collar This is my house. Get out of it.

Mormon: Calm This is your head. Get out of it.

Bey: Fuck you! Throws him down onto the floor

Mormon: And that’s why you are Chosen. Because you alone have a voice.

Bey: Standing over him. get the fuck out of my house. This is my house.

Mormon: No, this is your life. You have a voice because you have rage.

Bey kicks him hard in the ribs

Mormon: Feel your rage, feel your power?

Bey: This is for a merciless life of proselytizing He hits him

Mormon:
door to door, rage to rage,
I fly through the plain
backbones of herds
of in sullen motion
shipped from store to carpet
by sleepy escalators.

Bey: For Infinite Arrogance He hits the Mormon hard

M: the silent rage of the masses
will swallow you whole
and your battle through
tracheas and lungs
your rage will break their teeth
and flatten complacent vocal chords.

Bey: And yet you still talk continues beating

M: They will feel you brewing
in pools of stomach acid.
The dumb beast of silent dreams
will enflame the night
and the false merchants
and dirty hands
will end their adulterous reign.

Bey: Eternal dishonesty Bey looks Manic, hits again.

M: Rage will rise
passing through blazing elevators
into Mary’s placenta
and through the eyes of black horsemen.

Bey: This is for the lie of objectivity Hit Justified by blindness

M: And the sea of white backed
soupy voiced
drinkers of culture
will face their finality.

Bey: For the universalization Hit Of Our Delusion

M: And we will be saved.
You and I alone
in the Kingdom of God

Bey: Sanity lay in my humble

M: You are the angel of blood
who else could be Elect?

Bey: And you’ve ripped me of my reality. Hits him I could’ve lived! Hits him I live in a society, a civilization! hits him Surrounded by beauty! Hits him And locked rage away. Hits him And now, my delusion, hits him you have robbed me of the Rest of My Life! Hits him My only hope hits him For Communal existence, Lies in the Death of Delusion!

Mormon: The suppression of yourself?

Bey: The Death of Myself

Bey has pulled out a knife. The lights black out. A sudden flash of light reveals his arm on a downward arc.
Fade out.

A shot of Bey mixing blood with paint and using it in his painting
Scene 13
Carla is on the couch, crying. Milton enters.

Carla: He’s gone

Milton: I can’t believe he killed a man. I didn’t think he had it in him.

Carla: He’s gone, and I’m alone.

Milton: You’re not alone he tries to put his arm around her to console her

Carla: Fuck you! She violently pushes him off of her and storms out. Milton is left alone on the couch. He lights a cigarette. and smokes it for a moment.

Fade out.

Scene 14
Bey is behind bars. He leans on the bars as he talks. Sitting on a cot in his cell is his roommate, a black man named Terrance. Past him file an unending column of prisoners, all black men. They each look in his cell as they go by

Bey
The final imprisonment
of american life
Everyone’s in here with me.
It isn’t lonely.
The spectacle of backlit life
I have no shame
or remorse
Only that more people
did not accompany my fall.
No shame…
only history
unwound by words
stretched into meaninglessness
by millions of strained vocal chords
Only history wound and unwound
by thousands of revolutions
that ended where they began.
Only history
where the clash of arms against arms
fades into silence
drowned by time
where blood spilled dries again
and mothers giver girth again
and ballots are flung into obscurity again
the unending spiral of spilt ink and blood
carefully filed away in library catalogues
and abandoned
because there’s a war on.
Because there’s a war on
hundreds of black brothers
threatening me
because the history of my skin
is their gaping wounds,
And in here
the final revolutionary act
is to forgive.
You may have my lunchtray,
my cigarettes,
Because I had power of birth
and chose to be here today.
They were born behind these bars.
I will end behind these bars.

Scene 15
Bey is lying in the middle of his cell in a pool of blood. A shank sticks out of his ribs. Terrance is sitting on his cot, looking at him. Two guards enter.

Guard 1: Shouts Open Fifty One!

The door to the cell slides open. The two guards enter, with their beating sticks drawn. They briefly glance at Bey’s body, then to Terrance

Guard 2: well, boy, what happened here?

Terrance: Ah….Two men jumped him. Ah didn’t do nuthin’

Guard 1 hits him in the head with his beating stick. Terrance falls on his cot. The two guards begin beating Terrance brutally, but unemotionally. Terrance cries out a little, but is quickly knocked unconscious. They keep beating him.

Fade out
Finis.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 8:02 PM ] [ ]