B008J4PNHE EBOK (28 page)

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At the exact moment when Roger clicks the unlocking mechanism on his key fob, the camera cuts to Claire as she pulls the passenger-side handle, and the handle just snaps—the door doesn’t open.

Roger climbs into the driver’s seat and turns to squint at the opposite door. His gaze is explained by a close-up on the black plastic lock button.

Claire raps on the glass. The silver ring she’s worn on her right pinkie in the last three cuts has multiplied to seven silver rings spread across all of her fingers. There are also some new colored threads strung through her hair.

“Let me in! I want Slurpee!”

“Slurpee motherfucker!” Hugh makes a megaphone with his hands and belches at the sky. A moment ago his blue button-down was merely wrinkled; now it has several juicy-looking stains.

“No!” To be heard through the closed passenger-side window, Roger, whose jaw has developed a patchy gristle, needs to yell, “It’s over! I can’t do this anymore, Claire!”

“What?” Claire bends to the window and cups a hand to her ear.

“I can’t be with you! You’re a handle-puller!”

Claire blinks. “What?” She blinks again, starts to tear up.

There was a united bellow from the crowd in the bar—“Drink!”—as the scene abruptly broke off, cutting to find a creature of myth sprawled
on his back on the floor of an Acadian forest. The satyr has a grasp of his hard-on.

Before Sam, the thirty or so viewers packed tight around the screen, tipped back their heads, chugging cans and glasses and shooters. There was laughter, hooting, stamping of feet. A man brayed, “The beast is us!” More people laughed.

Sam sipped.

On the screen, the satyr, naked as ever save for his bushy sheepskin shanks and hoof-shaped footgear, releases his penis and drags handfuls of leaves onto his body. This attempt at modesty—if that is what it is intended to be—actually has the reverse effect of further emphasizing the satyr’s singular property. Buried to the scrotum in leaves, his stiff penis looks less like an appendage than a horrible white sapling.

“The beast is us,” says the satyr, barely above a whisper. The wire halo holding his goat’s horns in place has slipped askew, so one is pointing from the top of his head and one is just above his ear. He gives his impossible penis a gentle bat. It shivers back and forth mesmerizingly.

“We are the beast!” The body that belonged to the braying voice leaped onto a table. “We are the fucking beast, people!” He was a small, wiry man in his twenties, wearing chunky black-framed glasses, a John Deere trucker hat, and furry leggings over his jeans.

There were more cheers and cackles, and the drunk in the furry leggings thrust his hips this way and that, screwing the air. Above the scrum, someone clapped a pair of oversize papier-mâché hoofs. Sam sipped.

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They showed it at hipster bars, at art house midnight shows, at college theaters, at 4/20 smoke-outs—wherever the followers of camp had a foothold and a screen,
Who We Are
played to packed, goofy, inebriated houses.

There were numerous rites and protocols.

Whenever the satyr appeared, you drank. (This meant that a proper viewing demanded forty-two swallows, one for each of the forty-two cutaways to the frolicker in the forest.) During those interludes where the satyr played the pan flute or his finger chimes, you danced in place. The appropriate responses to the satyr’s prompts had to be made en masse; a more veteran
Who We Are
audience than the one in the nameless bar
would have spoken “We are the beast” as one. To protect the dignity of Rick Savini, you turned your back to the screen whenever he appeared.

The wearing of costumes was encouraged. Goat horns were good, furry chaps were better. Goat horns, furry chaps, heavy eye shadow, and hooves were best of all. While sober viewers could obviously enjoy the elementary risibility of such an abundance of male nudity, for the full experience, narcotics were recommended. As with any mind-altering venture, it was recommended that newbies attend showings of
Who We Are
in the company of a clearheaded friend in case they should become anxious or start to feel uncertain of reality’s bounds. The synthesis of the satyr’s visual presence and his elliptical musings were said to cause upsetting effects for some sensitive viewers. In regard to these dangers, one enthusiast told a reporter from the Style section of
The New York Times,
“It’s not a sexy deal. If anything, it’s asexual. The satyr is old. He copulates with a tree. The whole thing can actually be very terrifying if, you know, you’re easily terrified.”

Internet fansites had flourished for the purpose of arguing the film’s meaning, creating new games to play while watching it, arranging showings and the sharing of tributes. Numerous auteurs staged and posted satyr videos of their own; a satyr at a farmers’ market in San Francisco asking bemused customers, “Who are we?”; a bandit-masked female satyr skulking around the ruins of the Parthenon after hours, stroking the pocked columns and cooing to the broken stones; on a roof across the street from Wrigley Field, a satyr in a Cubs hat seated in a lawn chair, earnestly complaining about his cursed team, while at the lower edge of the frame, his penis casually nestled in a hot dog bun.

There was nary a morning Zoo Crew in the country who didn’t have the satyr’s most famous declaration—“The beast is us!”—plugged in to their control board and ready at the press of a button. A successful English rock band, the Two-Handers, had shot a music video of themselves being chased, à la the Beatles, through the streets of London by a mob of female satyrs. The accompanying song, “Don’t Give Me the Poor-mouth, Sister,” had made it to the top of several alternative charts in the United States and the U.K.

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The provenance of the film was never definitively established. All that was certain was that one day in the autumn of 2003, Sam errantly flipped
the only known copy of the film—a DVD labeled
FINAL CUT
—off the lip of a trash can at the entrance of a housing development in Quentinville, NY. Supported by the fact that he had made no other copies (and that the chronically institutionalized Brooks Hartwig, Jr., had not been in a position to disseminate any copies he might have possessed), it seemed probable that a stranger had picked the DVD up off the ground. A few months later, the movie appeared on the file-sharing networks, and after that, it was everywhere. Makers of goat horns, furry chaps, and footgear designed to look like hooves confronted an unprecedented uptick in demand.

If Sam Dolan had climbed out of his vehicle and deposited the DVD in the garbage,
Who We Are
likely would have had the good grace to be just another lost film—if anything, a curious footnote on the filmography of Rick Savini. This was hard to think about, so Sam tried not to. He often failed.

Amputees, it was said, never stopped feeling their limbs. The elderly victim of a boyhood tractor accident still woke in the night, the ghost of his right arch cramping.

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In ’04 the growing cult phenomenon of
Who We Are
went mainstream when Bummer City released an official DVD. Their right to do so was arguable, but from a legal standpoint, Sam was outflanked from the beginning. WOUND had gone public by then, and they had too much money to fight. Through Greta—who had risen to the top of the operation and who, Sam hoped, was bilking Wassel and Patch for every penny they were worth—he had gained one concession: the removal of his name from the film’s credits. While a search of the Internet was enough to discover his association, the removal was better than nothing (and as it related to his work as a weddingographer, thankfully, for cost-conscious marrying types, Sam’s impeccable reel and reasonable prices nearly always trumped any reservations about his past).

Patch and Wassel had hired someone to clean up the assembly—adjusting and brightening the color, hiring a Foley artist to fill in the aural background, etc. The movie actually looked somewhat okay. As
Who We Are
became a dorm room favorite, special editions had proliferated: the Wood Beast Edition™ came complete with hoof gloves that you could clop together during your favorite parts, as well as a manual
of drinking games to play during the film. There was also merchandise: coffee cups, posters, bumper stickers, T-shirts, ski caps, boxer shorts, and a lilac-scented spray sold exclusively at Spencer’s, Eau de Satyr, that promised to “turn your man into a horny devil!”

A grizzled
New Yorker
reporter better known for his filings from Chechnya and Afghanistan had set aside his passport long enough to pen an ingenuous book-length essay about the film, setting out to understand what its popularity indicated about the next generation of American adults. “I can understand,” began the introduction, “why some critical authorities have been a tad squeamish in their consideration of
Who We Are
. The film’s central spectacle is, after all, an elderly man with a colossal penis whose antics include urinating, tree-fucking, and perhaps most disquieting for this author, noodling on the pan flute à la Zamfir.
The Bicycle Thief
it is not. But try and find an adult college-educated male who has not seen it, or an adult college-educated female who has not bowed to her boyfriend or husband’s insistence that she bear witness also. It is something—and that something is greater than freshman gawping or sophomoric irony.” As far as Sam was able to discern, the gist of what the author came around to say was that an ambient sense of amused disappointment was so commonplace among young post-empire Americans—especially the males of the generation—that, when confronted with an absolutely sincere illustration of sadness (i.e., the satyr, naked, wandering around the forest, speaking to himself in adages), they could not comprehend it, but it cast a spell over them nonetheless. The short book’s title was
The Age of Chagrin
. The final line was “Lest we forget, it is a naked man we are looking at here.”

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At the end of the film, the two segments collided in what was arguably the pinnacle of Brooks’s vandalization of Sam’s dream.

As Roger and Diana stand on the hill and watch the sunrise blaze across the inert bodies of their classmates, a still of the satyr, crudely superimposed over the original image, arms spread in a pantomime of wings, is made to swoop across and around the frame, like a hideous fly. Sam supposed that Brooks filmed the man stretched out on a stool or something, then glued him right on the film. The creature’s penis hung at a slant and actually scraped across the sunlit heads of the somber actors.

What Brooks had conceived of with his additions and edits was open to vast differences in interpretation, but Sam gradually came around to seeing it somewhat like Greta had at the screening in the Bummer City basement. Brooks was mad, and madness was pain, and pain was everywhere, between every character and between every scene, in their laughter and in their sex; the pain was in the woods; it buzzed just above their heads. Brooks had been crazy and unhappy, so he had made Sam’s movie crazy and unhappy.
Who We Are
was a joke, but not the happy kind of joke.

And it did not elude the former director that Brooks’s aims for the film had not been so, so different from his own. They both had tragedy on their minds.

Why so many people enjoyed something that was so plainly a wreck—well, that was harder to understand, or maybe not to understand but to accept, and anyway, he was working on his second beer, trying to focus on the screen, despite the cacophony.

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Outside the bar, a young woman stumbled into him. Her T-shirt said
WHO WE ARE
and had arrows pointing at breasts. The belly button of the shirt was stamped with the Bummer City Productions trademark that marked official
Who We Are
merchandise: an ovoid picture of the satyr’s face, grimacing and big-eyed.

“Oops,” said the young woman.

Sam was sent scraping along the brick wall and knocked over the sandwich board. “Jerk,” he said.

The young woman put a finger to her lips. “Shhh.” Her smile was wide, and her eyes were wet and stupid. In her sweet, glazed expression Sam read an existence starred with banality-defining passions: for those kitchen magnets that showed fifties-era housewives performing domestic tasks while musing archly about cocktails and naps, for beaded thrift store lamps, for karaoke, for her fat orange cat whose litter she never changed and who fantasized about cutting her throat while she slept. In other words, a typical fan of
Who We Are
.

“So this is what you do for fun?” Sam tipped his head in the direction of the bar, the movie, the entire stupid thing.

“Uh. Yeah,” said the woman.

The guy behind her, the dope who had jumped on the table and
started humping, came forward, a cigarette dangling from between his fingers. Behind the smeared lenses of his glasses, his eyes were hugely dilated. “Chillax, friend.”

Sam picked up the sandwich board and restored it against the wall. The combination of the fresh night air and the two beers made him feel uncapped, as if his brain were exposed. “Get fucked,” he told the dope.

“What?” The guy flicked a little ash, and it fell into the fur of his leggings. “I don’t understand.”

“I mean”—with his index finger, Sam drew a circle in the air that was intended to encompass the drunks in the street, the drunks inside, and everyone who had ever watched the movie—“that you’re a bunch of jerk-offs, and you ought to try and find something better to do with yourselves.”

The bouncer stepped from the dark of the entryway. “Better move along, big guy.”

The woman made an unhappy face. “I can have fun.” She turned to her defenders. “Can’t I have fun?”

Sam put his hands up; he didn’t want a fight. He started for the corner. Behind him, someone asked, “Who the hell was that guy?”

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There was that: he had not actually appeared in the film. Sam still had his face. No one had ever stopped him in an airport and asked, “You were in that movie, weren’t you? The one with the Cock Monster?”