«I'm driving us toward the vague beige shadow-filler wall, and I can only see and hear Joe's voice for a second, a high-pitched thing that cracks for just a second, and for that second I'm with his voice on a plateau in the black of space, wherever it is that noise cracks like that, and decibels live, and then it's gone because there's the metal sound so loud and it's how I had always planned it to be, crunching, and a jerk, and the front of my head fills with a cold hollow sinus pain, the surprise punch in the nose that takes you back to childhood, and there's an immidiate link to every other time you ever had your nose hit, by a ball, by your own knee, and after the surprise, it doesn't go away; but I'm still there and the tires behind me are screeching because my foot is still on the gas, and a car has gone a ways into into the wall but it ain't going any farther, and I look over at fat shit, and there is blood rolling out of a slice in his forehead, and some blood coming out of his mouth, and I think that it's from the head gash until I see one of those teeth is now a black gap and he looks like a fat something-awful: hockey-player-pumpkin-cartoon-shithead, and he says: "Why the fuck did you do that, Manuel?"
I laugh like crazy, a laughter that explodes like popcorn, because he looks so fucking silly, and because my name isn't even close to Manuel.»



(c) James Franco, "Palo Alto", Jack-O