The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Read Free

of the chaos. It’s the same feeling I get when I think about my perished daughter Emily. There was something about his eyes that seemed mechanical, as if there was another pair of eyes behind them, and perhaps even a third pair behind those, so that you weren’t sure what Laing was seeing when he looked at you.
    “It seems to be a road movie. From the sixties. One of those.” (He talks in present tense throughout our conversations during the three days I interviewed him in Wisconsin, as if he’s watching the films right now, at this very moment.) I ask him if it’s okay to begin recording, and of course he says yes, and it’s then that I notice how large his hands are, like those of a basketball player. They’re resting palms down on the table and a crazy thought flashes into my head: Laing is receiving some signal, through his hands, which is why they’re resting there awkwardly, and I can imagine that this signal presents itself in the form of slight vibrations, and so I lay one of my hands on the table, too, casually, and then my idea doesn’t seem so crazy because I do feel something, or else I imagine that I do, the table vibrating ever so slightly, as if an electrical current were running through it.
    “It’s called Destroyer . This was the first one, the first film that had to be burned. I was still in Ohio then. A hippie, so-called, but the sort of hippie who was just biding time until punk came and laid waste to those false values. The open landscape splintering into shards and fragments that only further alienate the screen protagonists from the audience. Golden sunsets,” Laing says, “lens flare. Blood. Sand. I’m sitting in the velvet plush seats of a cavernous theater with Laura, a student who seems intent on getting me ejected for open displays of lust. There are people smoking six rows up. The light from the projector is blue and visible. Nothing much happens in the film for a good ten minutes. Then in the heated flash of a jump cut it comes to life. The New Wave pretense drains away. This was one of the few films I stole rather than bartered for or purchased outright, having persuaded Laura to distract the projectionist by lighting a wig on fire, clearing him from the booth long enough for me to scissor the film reels free from the projector. It was said to be the only film directed by Warren Oates, the year before he starred in The Wild Bunch . He’s credited as the director under the name Slate Oates, which only made sense to me years later, when I read aninterview with his wife Teddy who said that ‘Warren was heavy-duty into slate, natural things, not carpet.’
    “The fuck of denim.
    “Motorcycles on an American highway, the highway of serial killers, so they say. The engines sputter to life. Gasoline from one of the open overtopped motorcycle gas tanks splashes across the screen. Our napkins are soaked in butter grease. The girl’s thoughts are combustible.
    “Three motorcycles with black-leathered and blue-denimed helmet-less characters. Two men and a woman. You get the feeling that she sleeps with them both at the same time. Roaring across the desert. The first twenty minutes are like a mash-up of outtakes from Easy Rider . Jump cuts all over the place. The screen goes black for several seconds. When we see them next the three chopper riders are in a dingy roadside diner, their bikes parked outside the window. The name of the diner, we see from a menu insert shot, is Contina’s. The characters talk to each other over plates of pancakes and bacon and coffee in white ceramic cups, except that on the Woman’s plate it doesn’t look like pancakes at all, but rather a gob of red raw hamburger. Man #1 wears a red bandana. Man #2’s hands are tattooed in red and purple geometric shapes. The Woman is the one who commands the scene through her silence, picking at the bloody thing on her plate with her fingers. Only fragments of dialog are clear:
    “‘. . . still following