The characters aren’t gone. I’ve just taken them off the stage for awhile.

I talked to a friend about how Fitz was a little hazy in my mind. She assumed I was referring to his physical appearance, but that’s only part of it. TRUE’s the one who writes in the voice that’s most like my own, Sterling is the one who got away—the creation I lost control of and had the thrill of watching blossom into her own person, and Fitz…Fitz has the unlucky heritage of being loosely based on someone I used to love, and now hate. As a result he’s an ever changing mélange of style and emotion, faggoty fluff and fucked-up-ness.

He’s the monster in my mind—repressed, reformatted, reborn.

I took his name from "Fitzcarraldo", the movie, by Werner Herzog. The title character (played by the inimitable Klaus Kinski) is an opera fanatic who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rain forest. It’s based on a true story. There’s a scene in which he and a tribe of Indians construct a pulley system to drag a ship over a mountain. Herzog decided to film this without the aid of special effects—the actors reenacted the actual struggle of dragging a huge wooden vessel over a muddy mountain. In the Les Blank documentary, "Burden of Dreams", about the making of "Fitzcarraldo", we see just how close the project came to being a complete and utter life threatening disaster for Herzog and his crew as they battled the jungle and themselves to get the thing filmed.

Also worth watching is the Herzog movie, "My Best Fiend", about his tumultuous friendship with the often insane Kinski, with whom he worked on several films.

For me, 'Fitzcarraldo", the movie represents the dangerous, slippery slope over which one must haul the weight of real life in order to get to a place in which it is possible to make non-pussy, non-sellout art. One has to bring the opera to the jungle. It wasn’t that I saw the character of the drunk fag snake in the role that Kinksi played; rather, I saw my Fitz as the product of a will to power (my own) that was similarly hyperbolic in scope to this grand and misguided cinematic undertaking.

“I think he has a mole,” my friend offered.

“Hmmm,” I said, kicking my feet up on the coffee table and checking out my new Nike Shox.

“And stubble,” she said, getting excited. “A five o’clock shadow, but on purpose. You know, Miami Vice Style.”

“But he wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those suits,” I pointed out, as I turned my heel in horror at what I thought was stain but was really only a shadow.

“Oh, no,” she laughed. “No way. Not our boy. No chance in hell.”



Two from "our boy":


My Pot Dealer Boyfuck?

The Season of the Witch.