earth is what i feel for you

Freddy is 29. L.A. county born and raised. It’s really important to me that Freddy is a fucking rat. He’s anxious and he’s spiteful. He’s got some formative psychic wounds; he still doesn’t have close friends as an adult. He hooks up with men but feels he’s above them, somehow. He keeps an ironic distance between himself and his sexuality. It’s important to me that his relationship with White really subverts that, in a way that disturbs Freddy. Being Orange allows Freddy to act in ways he wouldn't be able to do without a cover, but the boundaries between his identities start blurring fast.

Freddy listening to Sandy Rogers convinced me that he likes folk and country. Freddy was an only child who grew up with a single mother. Her people came from the south to California during the Depression, and one of things they passed on was country music. The one thing Freddy and his mother could always agree on was Dolly Parton. I mean, she’s kind of styled like a superhero, isn’t she? She looks wonderfully animated, like a cartoon come to life. I think as a really little kid, Freddy kind of got confused while praying at night and would direct his prayers to Dolly. Here’s an adult-Freddy bad dream that I couldn’t fit anywhere: 

It’s a start to a familiar dream: squad car, with Dolly in at the wheel. Empty, nighttime streets. He’s always riding shotgun– he wouldn’t be able to see around her hair to check the blind spots if he was driving. The very top of her yellow curls are crushed against the ceiling. He’s checking his gun, again and again, and she’s telling him tonight won’t be easy. Their matching jumpsuits flare at the wrists and ankles. They turn into a driveway, one of those impossibly long ones off of Mulholland Drive, up in the hills, low, shaded trees over parched desert soil. As they drive, the sick feeling in him rises and rises, never cresting. Dolly, he wants to say, turn around. But they keep on going. 

Freddy’s mom was shitty in a way I had fun writing:

Freddy’s six years old, his mother’s fuming about their landlord, who lived in the attached duplex and never fixed anything in their unit. He always parked like an asshole, half on their lawn, and always slept late. He watches through the kitchen window as she checks the mailbox and, still paging through the envelopes that arrived, walks over to the landlord’s car and neatly removes the parking violation tucked beneath the wiper. She returns to the kitchen, unhurried, and lights the violation and a cigarette at the gas range.  “God helps those who help themselves, Freddy,” she tells him, taking a long drag of a Virginia Slim and dropping the burning paper into the sink. She would do this for weeks until the man’s car was booted. Freddy remembers feeling a kind of pride as they watched him screaming at the tow truck, then at the cops who showed up to deal with the disturbance.

Pink is 34, a transplant from Greenpoint. His name is Andrzej. His family is Polish and involved with organized crime. He came to California with one of his cousins a few years back, started working straightaway with folks who had connections to his extended family’s operations back in New York. His California employers contract with Joe’s import/export empire, and he meets Joe while making deliveries. Joe and Eddie call him “Andy”, which he hates. 

Living alongside his family felt claustrophobic, and his parents were pressuring him to marry. Pink is gay. He’s still figuring his shit out in L.A.. I think the events of Reservoir Dogs take place in ‘92– same year as the L.A. riots. After seeing them on the news, I think his family has been leaving him a lot of voicemails asking when he’s going to come home. The best he can say for himself right now is that he’s making alright money and he is not living with roommates. 

It’s important to me that, upon meeting him, Pink does not like or trust Orange.  

Orange though-- he'd had a bad feeling about this guy since they met. There was something over-rehearsed and under-cooked about him. Gave Andrzej the creeps you get when someone is watching and listening a little too hard: Orange was always fast to laugh and first to stop laughing. 

A few months before the heist, Pink accidentally adopted a cat:

Andrzej long considered pets to be a dirty habit, and suspected, without evidence, that he was allergic to all of them. Last year he’d been seeing a guy in Altadena, who’d laughed and laughed at the way Andrzej stiffened and did not bend down to offer any pats to his smelly pit mix, who would charge at Andrzej whenever he came through the front door. But four months ago he started spotting this little tabby around the dumpsters behind his apartment. He’d already taken to sitting on the steps around eight or nine every night to smoke. She began coming to visit, rubbing luxuriously against his shins, sharpening her claws on the stucco walls. He’d watch her roll on the concrete and he’d take long, slow drags, watch dusk settle on the city. The only unhurried part of his day. It started as leaving out water on hot days. Then the odd can of wet food from the grocery store, when it was on sale. He’d eat dinner out there sometimes, and feed her strips of cheap chicken from his takeout pho. Then one day she’d showed up limping, with a ghoulish, bloody tear along her flank. He wrapped her in a towel and ran her to the vet a few blocks away. The vet had cleaned and stitched the wound, administered the requisite shots, and congratulated him on her good personality and easy handling. All this cost him as much as his rent.  “Oh, this is not my cat,” he explained.  “Okay,” said the tech. “She’s gonna need antibiotics once a day for five days.” He picked up a litter box on the way home, the cardboard cat carrier balanced under his other arm. He had moved her inside, the only decent thing to do. Now there is a corner of his quilt covered in fur where she sleeps every night, and every day at dawn there is a curious little face above his, letting him know that morning has broken and it is time to eat.