Game Over, Man!

Tomorrow is Alien Day, and you’ll forgive me for using a line from the sequel, Aliens, in the title, honoring the great actor Bill Paxton, whom we, the cinephile community of the world, recently, and quite devastatingly, lost.

Besides, with the Alien universe, there really are no awkward or humiliating sequels, but every film has its place and can stand on their own two feet, as part of the unending succession of stories still left to be told about our most beloved and feared – ok, second best in my book, but then who really can compete with the primal scare Jaws inflicted in me as a young kid? – movie monster.

Alien universe is not unlike the multiverse of Star Wars. The fans are quite fanatic, the trivia knowledge to be obtained is beyond measure, and the tee-shirts are getting better by the year. A customer at my work place was standing in line once, wearing a Weyland-Yutani Corporation tee, and when I complemented his taste, he asked me if I knew what it meant. I told him yes, it is the big bad firm from the Alien movies, who always wants to have the species transported back for further study. Needless to say, it always ends badly. The man told me I was the first one to know what it meant, and there was a moment where we both basked in our joint superiority, before I was due back to earth, to tend to the needs of other customers.

Of course, the cosplay aspect of the Alien universe isn’t perhaps a fruitful as with the Star Wars multiverse, but I remember once, coming home after a long day at work, only to find my man, excited to the point of hilarity, showing me pictures he had taken on his smart phone earlier that day, of a bachelorette party group. The bride to be was actually dressed, or, camouflaged, as the Alien Queen. And it wasn’t too bad, either; it was sort of stunning, to be honest. Now that was true devotion, we both concluded, marveling at the pictures of the horrid visitor from outer space, trapezing the cobblestone streets of Tampere.

Avid readers may remember my story with the vacuum cleaner and Ridley Scott’s first incredibly eerie, and gorgeous to the point of hurting one’s eyes, movie, and if you don’t, here comes the replay, because if this isn’t the forum to reminisce on old stories concerning the saga, I don’t know where is.

So I was spending my final summer of doing nothing, subletting a large two bedroom apartment next to a big park, and my days usually went along like this: I would sleep until noon, sometimes longer – the only time in my whole life to have nursed that habit, by the way - then have a small breakfast in the huge kitchen that was painted yellow. After finishing my morning cigarette, I would think about leaving the house, and because it happened to be an extremely scorching summer, most times I’d go sit in park, with my writing gear and my journal. I was barely out of my teens, then, and exhibited more enthusiasm than actual skill in writing, and because I was also going through a difficult break-up, I was quite obviously playing the part of the suffering artist, if only to myself – also the only time in my life to have had the luxury to do that!

I wrote about the people in the park, and what I was feeling, and random musings, and sometimes my best friend would come meet me there, and we would go have dinner, or, in my case, lunch, somewhere cheap, and just wander the streets for hours, sometimes until nine or ten in the evening. In the fall, I would move to a different town to study writing, he’d stay and go to work as a pizza delivery man for a while, so there was a feeling of urgency, and of bitter-sweetness, in those otherwise seemingly endless days of the summer heatwave. (Incidentally, this was the young man, with whom in a year’s time, the pivotal friendship would mature into my first significant relationship. In other words, he is the Yawning Man!)

We were both collecting unemployment support at that time, it was that weird, rhapsodic epilogue of childhood, and the time and those walks, and the intimacy of spending all my time with someone who knew my darkest secrets and all my suffering, ha ha, and still wanted to hang out with me, those times are now embedded in my mind as a turquoise freeze frame, the same color as my bathroom in the huge apartment, where I spent my nights watching movies, writing, and contemplating my fate as a young woman writer. May I just remind you that it was the mid-Nineties, and the ball was pretty much dropping from everybody's hands who were roughly the same age as me, it was that time of uncertainty, of still needing money from our parents, of not really knowing what the hell it was that we were destined for.

I did a lot of reading that summer too, and such diverse books, too, as Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, and Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries – naturally channeling the great Ms. Nin in my own writing, to a fault – Blatty’s The Exorcist, and Joyce’s Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man (it would take me a few more years to finally tackle Ulysses), and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, et cetera. My friend wasn’t too big on books back then, but would listen smoothly to my ramblings, if I wanted to discuss a book.

We would smoke endless cigarettes, our clothes becoming quickly glued to our enviously nubile and limber young people’s bodies in the excruciating heat, fix drinks or drink tap water if we were broke, which we pretty much were, all the time. Sometimes my friend would come sit for a while in my apartment, in the room I was using as my bedroom, that was painted cerulean blue and sported a Leo DiCaprio fan poster above the bed, pinned there as a joke, I think, because the rest of the apartment was as cute as a gumball, decorated in Warhol-pop-style, and since I was just living there for three months, I ended up not taking down the poster, or touching the décor in any way.

I remember the deep purple ankle-length cotton skirt my mother bought me that summer, which I wore incessantly both to the park and at home, I think it is one of those rare garments of yore I still have. I loved it, it had a long slit that really helped with ventilation, and I wore it with a white lace top with spaghetti straps, and it was a time in my life when I had extremely short hair, like today, only I used to dye it blond back then, and used large black pins to keep the slightly longer bangs away from my face. I remember my bright red University of Michigan backpack that I used for grocery shopping, and the rest of the time it was hanging on the back of one of the chairs in the kitchen. I remember the three-legged Great Dane that used to go gallivanting in the park, untethered, with his owner walking behind him, around the same time I sat there, in the early afternoons, and although it was clear that he had more than made up for his short-comings, and was fast and enjoyed life, and clearly was extremely well taken care of, I still felt like crying sometimes when I saw him.

After my friend and I had said our good-byes for the night, and he had left, I liked to check if there was anything note-worthy going on on TV. It was very late at this point, but my sleeping pattern was all bonkers, and if anything remotely good was on, I would watch it. And this is how I stumbled on Scott’s Alien that one night, when I had vacuumed the apartment earlier that day, and, the way twenty-year-olds don’t really take care of their things, had left the appliance in the crammed, tight space of the hall that lead up to the turquoise colored bathroom. I had seen the movie before, although I think it had been a while, because I watched the whole movie, riveted, very immersed into the plot, and getting more scared by the minute.

As you may remember, my first encounter with the Alien saga was the second movie, the more action-oriented, James Cameron -helmed, ensemble piece, with Lance Henriksen, and Paul Reiser, and the aforementioned Bill Paxton. That was the movie, of which I knew the plot twists by heart, and was able to lip-sync the lines to, and thus, watching Scott’s Alien that sizzling July night felt like watching it for the first time. I remember being especially horrified with how the Alien had stashed itself in the equipment-shelves of the escape shuttle, and how vulnerable Ripley was, not noticing it as first, going about her business in her tiny underpants, the juxtaposition was truly incredibly strong, and I was on the edge of my seat, even though I knew it was going to be fine (although it really wasn’t, if you consider the whole story).

So when the air shaft was opened, and the Alien blown to the outer space, and the end credits were rolling, I was totally freaked out, and needed to go to the bathroom in the worst way, not having been able to tear myself away during the movie. It was, as you’ll remember, one or even two in the morning, it was dark, and when I stumbled on the vacuum cleaner I had left in the small space, head-on, on my way to the loo, I experienced a moment of terror so pure, I think I actually uttered a terrified shriek.

Ever since that moment of thinking there it is, in my fucking feet, I have always been careful to put the vacuum cleaner back to its place in the cleaning closet. Also, the whole concept of a cleaning closet came to me at that moment, how crucially important it was to have an appropriate place for the cleaning equipment, and from then on, I would always check for it, whenever I was looking for a new place.

I don’t think I mentioned the incident with the vacuum cleaner to my friend the next day, although maybe I did, those kinds of stories were distributed a lot in my then circle of friends, we were the generation who grew up watching Friends, and awkward, humiliating incidents were always cherished and fabled in our midst. But you had to choose your audience on these things, and another friend of mine from those days, who worshiped Giger’s art, and had reproduced posters of the original drawings and paintings for Alien on his bedroom walls, yes, in the bedroom, would have been someone to really appreciate the story, so I am pretty sure it was told at least once, to him. Although given the frequency that I am telling it here, in these stories, maybe all my friends have heard it already a thousand times.

Tomorrow, I, along with a whole bunch of other fans, am going to a special screening of Alien with my man, ready to recapture the horror of that one summer night. But before that, I got to tell you one more thing. I used to buy tons of film-related magazines, before the Internet blew up the whole information industry, and in a special issue of I want to say either Empire, or SFX, I saw a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos from when they were shooting Alien in England. Whenever I am talking about these movies with my friend from work, Hanks, I retell how there was this awesome b/w picture in the magazine, showing a foggy, sinister backdrop, and the Alien, standing in instantly recognizable Nike trainers, talking to Mr. Scott. Every time I get too scared, I tell him, I think about the picture. I have been meaning to try and find the issue from my archives. The project is still on-going, but I have a clear image in my mind of the picture, and, unlike many, my man for one, who don’t want to see behind-the-scenes footage lest it spoil the movie magic for them, I have never had that problem. Every year, when I watch Jaws in the spring, I always watch the making-of afterwards. And every time I manage to get scared anyway.

But hey. Maybe it won’t be so bad tomorrow.

Maybe it will be worse.

Barely mentioned, but hardly forgotten: I dedicate this story to the Queen, Sigourney Weaver