Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

and depths of streets and stores and bars while traffic signals flashed above, I dreaded going home to my haunted house, to await the ghost of my dearly departed wife who was off living it up in New York. So I called Milo, who was my dream date at that moment—an insomniac cinephile with no regard for marriage or books. He said to come over. He was about to watch a movie.
    The question of what film to watch when in distress can be a complex one, and by the time I arrived Milo had given it some thought. (Although, I suppose, if you are Milo or me, the question of what movie to watch is fairly complex no matter what.) Milo is, of course, an utter snob about movies, precisely the languorous know-it-all who might annoy you when you stop by his shop, like the lady who held up the recent megahit Fritz (“Who Says a Robot Can’t Be All Heart?”) and asked if it was good. Milo shrugged. “It’s no worse than any of that other Hollywood crap.”
    Awful, and yet I have a soft spot for such characters. Losers in all of society’s big games, they (we) are totally powerless by any measure except this one, which no one else even cares about, and which serves only as a means of recognizing one another, like fallen aristocrats from some other realm, whose fortunes, minted in a defunct currency, count for nothing here. Milo brushing off a billion-dollar hit was like some threadbare duke turning his nose up at an insufficiently stinky cheese or spitting out a Bordeaux that only he could tell was youngish or rather too muscle-bound, while crass hedge-fund millionaires lapped it up. In the eyes of the world, we are bums. Yet in a dusty shop, a ratty theater, a parent’s basement den, there we rule. But unlike the person with exquisite taste in painting or perfume, the movie nerd is classless as well. Grasping the genius of Russ Meyer or George Romero or Herschell Gordon Lewis carries no cultural cachet and gets no one laid, believe me.
    “How about I spit on your grave?” Milo asked by way of greeting as he opened the door.
    “I told you I’m freaking out about Lala,” I said. “The last thing I need is a movie featuring castration.”
    “Don’t be so touchy,” he said. “I got a new Italian DVD copy and thought it might relax you.” He was referring of course to I Spit on Your Grave, the infamous splatter film (Meir Zarchi, 1978), a classic of the rape-revenge genre, in which a girl, seeking woody seclusion in order to finish her novel, gets assaulted by a gang of men and then goes on a bloody rampage.
    “So what do you want to see?” he asked, following me into the living room, where an entire wall was covered in a bewildering array of DVDs, VHS cassettes, and homemade CDs. An enormous TV blocked the fireplace. Milo shared this house with two people, but since neither of them was ever around, he’d commandeered the communal living space as his screening room. The house was a vaguely Spanish, vaguely modern stucco box off Sunset in Echo Park. One rainy season, it had begun to slide down the hill and was now propped up, half off its foundation, with a dubious jack, some two-by-fours, and a couple of cinder blocks, for which its inhabitants received a reduction in rent. Tonight, however, it was just Milo and I, and the discussion got very deep very fast. “OK, Mr. Lonely,” he told me, waving at the movie wall. “What kind of heartbreak flick are you pining for? Sleepless in Madison County? How The English Patient Got His Groove Back? We’re all out of Eat Pray Love, I’m afraid. How about Shit Fuck Kill? ”
    “Actually, speaking of fucking and killing, I was thinking of something cozy and soothing like Goodfellas or The Godfather. ”
    How could a movie that features a guy getting stabbed to death in a trunk cheer me up? It is, I think, the combination of a certain kind of formal perfection, a calming flawlessness, combined with the warmth of long familiarity. These are movies I had seen countless times. I’ve worn