First, James Dean died, then Humphrey Bogart two years later, then Marilyn Monroe's turn, Elvis Presley coming fourth. The large, rectangular poster I bought for $10 at a reprocessing center (recycle this, death) hangs in my bedroom on the way to the bathroom. We all know Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, three frail strangers (nobodies) sit at the counter and a man (working class zero) behind the counter serving late-nite coffee to anonymous, fictitious nothings. Premature dead performers (somebodies) now replace the diner patrons surrounded by the same lonely, back lot street corner.
They might have excelled with a script written for such a skeletal, B-movie set. Bold caricatures, images of catastrophic, airbrushed entertainers' notorious faces, a scheme dedicated to accentuate death's grip (that's a wrap). The four's memento mori performer's estates' second coming, a wet dream gone public.
I lived with the four at one time or another; they replenished my life, showed me feature movies, but a greater glory they hadn't truly earned, their five-star deaths (coming attractions) unavailable as yet. Their films I'd not likely see if not for star-making paraphernalia. Like runaway dreams, their box office hits splice onto celluloid specters, jump cut revivals. Such lit-up faces in otherwise noirish gloom of this Greenwich Village coffee shop, now a vacant lot.
I ascend from sleep, I among the stars' audience amok in my Technicolor, lingering wakeup nightmares. In a close up, my eye tracks the fours' still life, their permanent midnight. I piss their barbiturates, painkillers, cancer cells, and highway blood into the publicity-churning, award-winning, porcelain (Do I hear a film score?) action-packed flushed toilet.
Ah death, ah celebrity.
George Sparling says, "I live on the North Coast of California. I like the death of rain, each drop blood from the Void. I'm currently reading Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling. Suffering and pain bleeds on every page. My real life is the space between words on a page, a blank. Though an atheist by default, I have a print on my wall by John Martin, a 19th Century painter of "The Great Day of the Divine Wrath," fiery red flame, its dark, catastrophic clouds cracking earth apart, relief at last that our stinking entrails have sunk into oblivion."
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