Dreamwalk (3)
INT. HOSPITAL (BRIGHT AND SCARY)
Series of shots showing Paco being prepped
for surgery and then the kidney transplant.
CUT TO:
INT. HOSPITAL ROOM (BRIGHT)
Paco wakes up in bed with his side sliced
open and stapled shut. Che is shaking him
awake. Che drops a leather shoulder bag
on the bed. It spills open. It's full of
$100 bills.
CHE
That's 100,000. You like that
better? You got anything to say?
PACO
Not really.
Che snorts in disgust and slams out the
door. Paco gets out of bed shakily, he
gets dressed and sneaks out.
He steals an orderlies uniform from a supply
closet and makes it down the back stairs to
the street. He’s in considerable pain and
punchy from the drugs, but nothing is going
to stop him.
CUT TO:
INT. OUTSIDE PACO’S SHRINK’S APT.
He knocks, She opens the door. She's wearing
the girdle and nylons with a negligee, a
mantilla and a black lace fan. Lightning
through the French windows, wind swirling
the drapes and violins on the sound track.
SHRINK
I dont see any point in continuing
this. I take your money and dont
do anything for you.
PACO
Then give it back.
SHRINK
I suppose it is an emergency, come in.
He does and gingerly lays down on the couch.
She sits down behind him.
PACO
He’s got it, it’s inside him.
SHRINK
And how do you feel about that?
PACO
Dirty. A woman who was raped
couldn't feel worse than that.
I have to kill him.
SHRINK
Rape victims usually end thinking
that they had it coming. But you
did have it coming and you're
baffled by it, that you might
owe something to anyone.
PACO
Then I'd have to kill myself. It's
the only way I could stop him from
getting my other kidney.
He starts to cry. The shrink gets
up and joins him on the couch.
SHRINK
Wait, I suppose it's time I did
something therapeutic for you.
PACO
It's alright, Mummy, I'm just
practicing for when I grow up
to be a gynecologist.
SHRINK
No, wait, I dont like it
from behind.
PACO
Please, Mummy, just this once.
SHRINK
I mean, I do, but I always get
the most tremendous diarrhea
afterward.
PACO
Dont let everyone know we're
fighting.
THE SAME
20 minutes later they're sitting up smoking
in post coital depression. She's refastening
her garters.
SHRINK
Oedipus, Schmedipus, so long
as he loves his mother
PACO
I suppose that's every patients
favorite fantasy.
SHRINK
Making love to your mother?
PACO
Giving your analyst AIDS.
CUT TO:
INT. AFTER HOURS CLUB (STRICTLY FILM NOIR)
Paco hobbles in. His back is killing him.
He tilt to one side, wrapped around his missing
kidney like a donut around the hole.. He sits
down at the bar. THE BARTENDER is named FIDEL.
PACO
Dos Equus.
FIDEL
No beer, bad for your kidneys, or
should I say "kidney". You'll never
get out of the toilet. Maybe, I
should serve it to you there and
avoid the rush.
PACO
Something tells me I've lost
respect around here.
FIDEL
That too.
PACO
I gave my brother a kidney.
Is there something wrong
with that?
FIDEL
He took it away from you.
PACO
It's half of what I gave him.
FIDEL
What's the other half?
PACO
I want to tell you a story.
FIDEL
I heard it.
PACO
It's about a championship fight.
FIDEL
Go on.
PACO
The Madness of Georg III: Beyond the
thunder dome He's the king, he can
have any woman he wants, but this
tavern maid says no. He says: You
have to because I'm the king.
FIDEL
So?
PACO
So, she goes out and deliberately
catches syphilis before giving
herself to her king.
FIDEL
He catch it?
PACO
He went insane and died of it.
FIDEL
Takes a woman to be that spiteful.
PACO
All his children too. Like Queen
Mary. She had these hideous sores
on the inside of her thighs.
She had to walk bowlegged. But
she was the queen so, everyone else
had to walk bowlegged too.
FIDEL
Another success story, that's
what we all love, so what?
PACO
So, before donating a kidney
to Captain Jesus, I went out
and caught AIDS.
FIDEL
Holy Mary, Mother of God. How
do you know you caught it?
PACO
I was exposed to it.
FIDEL
The only sure way is a blood
transfusion, you do that?
PACO
No.
FIDEL
Then everyone's got some kind
of a chance.
CUT TO:
INT. TENEMENT (NIGHT)
Gold lamps with red shades and crucifixes
everywhere. A Santaria altar.
CHULO
He's down there dead drunk and
bragging that he gave you AIDS.
JESSE
There was a test, you think
I'm stupid?
CHULO
The test is for antibodies. They
dont show up for weeks or months.
He went out and deliberately caught
AIDS before he donated a kidney.
JESSE
I didn't know he had that
kind of class.
CHULO
I dont think you understand.
JESSE
I understand I'm on cyclosporine.
It prevents organ rejection by
turning off the immune system.
I'm paying good money to get an
artificial case of AIDS, what
more can he do to me?
CHULO
So, you stop taking the drugs.
JESSE
I do and the kidney rips it self
out of my back and runs straight
to the nearest graveyard.
Hey, I'm not going to live long
enough to die of AIDS. I bought
a few years, that's all.
CHULO
You dont understand.
JESSE
There's more? You're still talking?
CHULO
You dont got years. You got maybe an
hour and a half, you're an embarrassment.
You're not scary anymore so you're dead.
Verdad?
JESSE
Yeah.
CHULO
You got to kill him, you got
to kill everyone who knows.
JESSE
You just told me he's bragging about
it, there's a bar full of people who
know.
CHULO
That's right, a bar full of people.
JESSE
Do it.
CUT TO:
INT. CUBAN-CHINESE RESTAURANT. (BRIGHT)
Cafe con leche, bull fight posters and 2 LATINO COPS
LATINO 1
You heard?
LATINO 2
Yeah, he can be got to. He's
vulnerable. The magic is over.
We do it now before he can
disgrace his shield
LATINO 1
Dont you want to wait to
find out if it's true?
LATINO 2
Dont matter. Saying it makes
it true. If he denies it,
that only makes it more real.
LATINO 1
He'll think of something.
LATINO 2
He'll think of words. Like any
form of combat, police work is
mostly intimidation. We lose
respect, we're fucked. We got
to deal with it now.
CUT TO:
EXT: AFTER HOURS CLUB (NIGHT)
Jesse, Chulo and Machito are coming up the
alley behind it. Chulo sets a thermite
grenade against the jamb of the metal door.
JESSE
Wait till you hear us.
Jesse and Machito walk around to the front.
Another heavy metal door and frame and the
windows are covered by metal grates.
Jesse forces THE DOORMAN inside at gun
point then throws in a white phosphorus
grenade and slams the door shut.
Jesse drops a sticky thermite grenade and
the door is welded to the jam. A whooshing
sound says that the same thing happened
at the rear. The club is sealed and then
the phosphorus grenade goes off.
The club explodes in flame. People are
screaming and clawing at the window gates.
The band starts playing loud, the singer
doing a frantic song and dance number on
the stage.
Jesse is watching them die. He’s bored and a
little embarrassed at the noise they make. The
glass breaks from the heat but the flames and
screaming faces stay on the glass as though it
were painted on. Behind it is roaring darkness.
Like the man said: Dancing women with their hair
on fire.
JESSE
I wonder if, perhaps, I've
lived life too fully.
INT. AFTER HOURS CLUB (DIM)
Paco sees what's happening and runs back
through the kitchen. He’ looking for a
knife, but all h can come up with is a
meat thermometer spike. He reaches the
back door just as the 2nd bomb goes off.
He runs back.
Paco is in the men's room when the fire
breaks out. There's no exit. There's
one window covered with heavy bars.
He braces his feet against the wall and
grabs the bars with both hands trying to
pull them out. The bars hold, but his
feet push through the bricks into the back
yard and he does a skid into the trash cans.
He tries to climb a fence, but the pain in his
side wont let him. He's bleeding again.
Using his legs causes too much pain. He
builds a pyramid of trash cans and climbs
up using only his arms. He tumbles out into
the street just as the whole block goes up.
He turns the corner, sees Jesse, then slowly
hobbles away. Machito sees him and starts to
give chase, but he's cut off as all the fire
engines in the world roar up in front of the
club and block his view. He starts talking
fast to a portable phone.
CUT TO:
EXT. STREET (NIGHT)
Jesse hangs up on his mobile phone and
climbs into a cop car. He punches on
the radio and talks into the mike.
JESSE
Breaker, Breaker. Siciliano, are
you there anywhere. It's Jesse.
There's a grunt on the speaker.
JESSE
It's my brother. Paco, that brother.
He torched an after hours club.
More grunts and stammers.
Yeah, the fire department is here,
all of that. I'm telling you it's
taken care of. He's running, seal
the island. Dont let him out, dont
give him a chance to start talking.
He knows I cant say no to him.
Shoot on sight, there's got to
be an end to this. Do you copy?
V.O.
(whispering)
Yeah.
EXT. STREET (NIGHT)
Paco is being chased by Pele and The King Of
The Tango (KOTT). He's chased down 5th Ave.
INT. MEAT LOCKER
NAKED MEN are hanging on meat hooks set into
the wall. They've been skinned expertly, but
still alive and twitching, trying to talk, to
signal, to negotiate.
The stomach and chest cavities have been
opened and the internal organs hang from
the ribs like Christmas tree ornaments.
Paco walks through them impassively then
turns back for a moment.
PACO
I'm sorry, but I cant allow
personal feelings to interfere
with business.
He dives through a side door to the street
and finds himself on the street surrounded
by cops pointing guns at him. He smiles
and flashes a gold detective shield
(courtesy of Jesse).
PACO
The basement's clear,
check the roof.
The cops rush past him into the museum and
paco oozes up to a cop car and glides away.
EXT. STREET (NIGHT)
PACO drives downtown. He tries the Midtown
Tunnel, but there are police checks at the
bridges and tunnels, at the bus and train
terminals. Paco keeps going. There are
police road blocks on the West Side Highway.
He takes off crosstown at 34th St. 2 COPS
IN A SQUAD CAR make him and phone in. They
take off in pursuit.
Paco drives up on the sidewalk to get
around a delivery truck. He makes it,
The cops dont. They didn't see the
fire hydrant coming.
CUT TO:
EXT. 34TH STREET HELIPORT (NIGHT)
It looks like Riker's Island. The same narrow
gauge bridge, the barbed wire fences in the
water and the Blade Runner look of the prison.
Paco parks and walks up to the terminal.
PACO
Next shuttle is?
ATTENDANT
10 minutes, to Newark.
Paco sits down to wait. Sirens in the distance
getting louder, police copters getting closer.
ATTENDANT
I wonder what that's about.
PACO
The usual.
A phone rings. The attendant answers it,
makes some guttural noises and hangs up.
ATTENDANT
The flight's canceled. They're
sealing Manhattan.
The other shuttle passengers complain and
wander off. Paco flashes a detective badge.
PACO
I know, but I think he's gone.
I'll see if I can head him off
in Newark.
The copter warms up. Paco gets on. He's
the only passenger. The machine takes off.
Sirens are getting louder and there is the
sound of gigantic machines getting closer.
CUT TO:
INT. CUBAN CHINESE RESTAURANT (NIGHT)
Signed photographs of Latino boxers, posters
of Victoria Abril in the Gaultier costumes
from KIKA, A Puerto Rican news program on the
TV yammering away about a case of child abuse
(with lots of pictures) and fake flamenco on
the sound track.
LATINO COP 2
Not another drive by.
LATINO COP 1
No, we're not trying to impress
him, we're trying to kill him.
LATINO COP 2
And no more exploding cars.
It looks like we're imitating
TV it loses respect.
LATINO COP 1
Yeah.
LATINO COP 2
So, what do you want to do?
LATINO COP 1
We poison him. Maybe, we'll get a
reputation for being intellectuals.
LATINO COP 3
He dies in the line of duty
with an Inspector's funeral.
He's a hero.
LATINO COP 1
Like how?
LATINO COP 3
Like right now. Maybe, he'd
like some coffee.
He drops rat poison, the kind that causes
internal hemorrhages, into a container of
cafe con leche.
Bring it to him, he'll drink
it cold.
CUT TO:
INT. COPTER (DARK AND ROMANTIC)
They're flying toward Newark. They're
soon overtaken by 2 police copters. The
cops try shooting at them. The copter
pilot cant believe it's happening, but
he easily evades their fire.
PILOT
This got something to do with you?
PACO
37 parking tickets.
The pilot tries bobbing and weaving The cop copters
are bumping into each other and crashing.
PACO
The Bronx Zoo.
PILOT
The Bronx Zoo.
PACO
I like animals
PILOT
Me too, but the bald killer ape that
hunts in packs is not my favorite.
There's still one police copter in pursuit.
The pilot starts a bumping contest with it,
as they spiral upward and try to gain the
advantage of height.
He tries slashing at the police copter with
his landing skids, trying to nick its gas
tank with his rotor blades. His skids rip
the stabilizing propeller off the rear of
the cop copter.
In accordance with Newton's 3rd law
of motion, it begins to spin lazily
out of control in the opposite direction
to it's rotor blades. It spins to the
ground like a maple seed. The other
cop copter closes in but, by this time
they're over the Bronx ZOO.
PACO
Set it down.
PILOT
That's the tiger pit.
PACO
That's right.
The pilot brings the copter down in the
tiger preserve. Paco jumps out and the
copter spins away into the night sky.
One tiger wakes up and snarls like thunder.
PACO
Bad Pussycat!
The tiger yawns and, honor having been
satisfied, goes back to sleep. The other
tigers ignore him. They've been fed and
are more pussycat that predator.
Paco climbs the pylons of the monorail
and walks off along it into the night.
The cop copters flies too low over the
African elephant preserve. An elephant
grabs the landing skids with its trunk
and pulls it down. The elephants play
soccer with it, butting and rolling it
end over end with the hoist of their
tusks.
A cop's hand shakily tries to open a
copter door and climb out.
An elephant brings his foot down
decisively, stomping the cop copter
with a huge crunch of metal.
The sound track is Coltrane playing AFRICA.
CUT TO:
INT: GORILLA HABITAT (ASTROTURF)
Fake looking jungle. The sound of SOMETHING
GIGANTIC heaving itself ponderously along.
V.O.
(sounding like James Earl Jones)
They call us The Man of The Forest.
PACO
So what? They call Woody Allen a Jew.
INT: MASTERPIECE THEATER KIND OF LIVING ROOM
Lots of warm yellow light, so saturated
it's almost orange, twinkling off the
brandy decanters and the brass work
around the fireplace. Red velvet
upholstery and Kazahkstan rugs.
A GORILLA WEARING STEEL FRAME BIFOCALS AND LOOKING
STRANGELY LIKE MICHEL FOUCOULT is lecturing PACO.
GORILLA
A gorilla has an IQ of about
80, smarter than most of the
people on the subway with you.
The elephants are a lot smarter,
IQ about 120, bright normal.
But consider man: A chimpanzee with
muscles that hardly bulge at all is
7 times stronger than a man.
Man is this pathetically weak bald
ape, almost deaf, almost blind with
no useful sense of smell at all,
hopelessly unsuited to any environment.
You had to invent civilization as a
protective barrier simply in order
to survive.
And that barrier is so complex and unwieldy
that merely keeping it going occupies the
entire existence of the race.
But the elephants, the gorillas, the
dolphins, the whales, we're on top of our
environment, we had no natural enemies,
we dont need Civilization.
We dont want the hot dog and the miniskirt,
we dont need it. Adaptation to a difficult
environment is the logical goal of the
superior being.
PACO
Except that: you didn't
invent language.
GORILLA
What do we have to talk about?
The banana I had today was better
than the banana I had yesterday,
but not nearly as good as the banana
I had the day before?
What do we have to say?
What do you have to say?
What does anyone have to say?
No one has anything to say, ever!
PACO
It's so true.
CUT TO:
EXT. MONORAIL (NIGHT)
Paco walks out of the zoo along the rail.
He passes the walrus pond. A JUBILANT
PENGUIN goes by carrying a banner on a
pole. On the banner is a picture of a
penguin.
PACO
That says it all.
CUT TO:
THE SAME
A troupe of antelope watch him go. One of
them isn't an antelope, it's a man with a
dog's head.
CUT TO:
LONG SERIES OF SHOTS of Paco making his way
back downtown through the sewers and subways.
There are SKELETONS IN 1920's GANGSTER COSTUMES
WITH THEIR FEET IN BUCKETS OF CEMENT.
There are SKELETONS IN 16TH CENTURY SPANISH ARMOR.
There are STOREROOMS FOR CHINESE VIDEO
STORES AND FISH MARKETS WITH LOTS OF
SCIENCE FICTION LOOKING FISH, ELECTRONIC
EQUIPMENT OF OBVIOUSLY EXTRATERRESTRIAL
ORIGIN
and lots of strange things whiz by at
the edge of vision: refugees from Max
Ernst paintings like NAPOLEON IN THE
WILDERNESS, ALICE 1940, THE EYE OF
SILENCE.
and lots of roaring trains almost running
PACO down.
CUT TO:
INT. JOEL’S OFFICE (SAD AND SEEDIER THAN USUAL)
Paco staggers in, exhausted, and slumps
down in a chair.
JOEL
Dont leave just yet.
PACO
I wasn't leaving.
JOEL
I tried to get you in on it.
PACO
What?
JOEL
So, like they say, you piss half
as much but twice as often?
PACO
Yeah.
JOEL
You look tired.
PACO
Yeah.
JOEL
Murray just doesn't like you.
Besides which, you got one
kidney.
PACO
Is that important?
JOEL
I mean, you could hurt yourself.
PACO
Doing what?
JOEL
Besides which, there's the
loss of respect.
PACO
You respected my kidneys?
JOEL
I mean, being had that way,
Anyway, Murray just doesn't
like you.
PACO
So, what is it? The usual?
JOEL
Well, yeah. This one's armed
robbery, that's the bottom of
the ladder, nobody's going to
listen to anything she has to
say.
ZOOM IN:
TV SET ON THE WALL ABOVE HIM.
INT. DUNGEON (ROMANTIC)
CHAINED GIRLS IN 4 1/2 INCH HEELS AND MICRO-MINIS.
ZOOM OUT:
PACO
How romantic.
Copyright © 2001 Angel Obregon |