Insecure or homicidal: the adjectives don't bother me one bit. Having to silence a single man for the sake of solace does not make one homicidal. Of course I am a Christian and know the program, but love and sex have their own sacred creeds and they burn every bit as much as the ten laws of the Lord. I've perused the Kama Sutra. Listen: I was not proud of what I had to do, but I had to do it just the same. Some will understand, and those who don't know yet one day will.
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All I have to offer in my defense is the mathematical truth: I wanted to love my bride in peace and tranquility but Marvin Gluck was not going to let that happen. The way I see it, he made the decision, not I. He just had to go and pledge an undying love to Gillian and couldn't grab hold of the fact that such pledges are made every day and most don't mean a damn. I'll give him that: he makes a pledge and sticks to it. Still, his pledge was crowding mine. What a man feels for his woman can be all-out unholy. When Gillian tried on her organza wedding dress for me, I wept with the joy of the resurrected.I met her on the Ferris wheel at the local bazaar held to raise money for a children's hospital. I had volunteered to run the wheel because when I was a teenager, my kid brother Bartholomew was chewed up by leukemia, plus I thought I could add the charity-giving experience to my weekly memoir column for New Nation Weekly — circulation a hearty six hundred thousand — and thus come across as a guy who cares, a balladeer with heart to spare. It rained that night and hardly anybody came, but then in floated Gillian under a green umbrella, a tantric Mary Poppins, handed me a ticket, and said she wanted to ride the wheel 'round and 'round. This dazzling babe alone on a Friday night? I couldn't even speak; her odd beauty was the injurious kind, radioactive — it had physical effects on me, my anatomy in quake — lovely hawkish nose, straight black mane dyed with streaks of red henna, flat-teated and thickish through the bottom, symmetrical toes showing through her sandals. She was as if the word gustatory had grown legs and got a dress.
For twenty minutes she rode the wheel, and I watched her with her head thrown back and eyes peeled on the sky, patches of light aglisten behind evil gray clouds. And then, horrors: the rusty wheel stopped turning — the organizer of the bazaar had saved a wad by renting only semifunctional equipment — trapping my lady at the top, and this despite my frantic punching of buttons and yanking of levers, consulting with the bazaar electrician and other bewildered passersby. Can you imagine? The damsel a hostage sixty-some feet up there? Well, I in my valor and Levi's jeans could not very well let her stew in the drizzle, and so, with very little pause and a showy casting-off of my rainwear, I began climbing, lemur-like, up the steel links and bars of the Ferris wheel.
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2 of 19 (results 19)
Related:
Review: Circumstance, A study in anarchy, Review: Killer Elite, More 
- Review: Circumstance
Circumstance begins like an early Kiarostami film, but with schoolgirls in hijabs instead of schoolboys in sweaters.
- A study in anarchy
Named after a family of birds that is markedly playful and diverse, Corvid is a benevolent underground anarchist institute fostering eclectic inter-disciplinary thought.
- Review: Killer Elite
First Point Blank and now Killer Elite — isn't there a copyright law about stealing the titles of a better movie? Gary McEndry's espionage thriller isn't bad, but it isn't Peckinpah; all the two films have in common are the title and lots of shooting.
- Review: Happy, Happy
First time filmmaker Anne Sewitsky finds a compassionate way to tell a familiar tale of adultery, and she's helped immeasurably by a first-rate acting ensemble, especially the two superlative actresses, whom you could imagine cast in films of the late Ingmar Bergman.
- How a Rembrandt wound up on a pig farm
The next time you're bored on a Friday night and considering a caper at the RISD Museum, Anthony Amore wants you to consider this: you're more likely to make a few bucks begging the high school crowd on Thayer Street.
- Review: If a Tree Falls
Director Marshall Curry's If a Tree Falls tells the full tale of the ELF's genesis in Oregon, and of the group's badass campaign of "economic sabotage" that left more than 1200 symbols of bourgeois excess (a Vail ski resort, an SUV dealership) burned to the ground.
- Review: The Names of Love
Child abuse, genocide — those French have a way with romantic comedies.
- The Oracle Engine
The lizard of the wasteland, so dazzling to the eye, so rapid to flee or to strike, may grow to its full maturity only in the most brutal of deserts, where no dew falls to drink and where the sun is unrelenting. So, some say, was Marcus Furius Medullinus Machinator, he who first invented the oracle engines...
- Review: Love, etc.
Jill Andresevic's simply photographed documentary springs from an equally simple premise: shoot a varied bunch of New Yorkers, young to aging, who are thinking hard about love or are involved in relationships, and see what happens to them over a few months.
- Review: Margaret
Kenneth Lonergan offers no resolutions in this complex and moving parable, unless it's the observation that the only resolutions in life are in art.
- Review: My Afternoons with Margueritte
European cinema doesn't have as many sure-fire formulas as Hollywood, but the one described, I think, by Pauline Kael as the "lonely child, clean old man" scenario has long endured.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Books, Crime, killer, More
, Books, Crime, killer, chase, scary, Marriage, summer, fiction, sex, Dark, Less
