a bit from my new play "The Bull Crime"

Not even a finished play yet, and this scene may or may not wind up in whatever I call a first draft. But I've gotten bored of talking about talking about blogging and thought I'd post a little of what I'm writing lately. This is from the current opening scene. Gene is interviewing for a job at a pharmaceutical company.

HARRIET

What makes you so certain that drugs help people?

GENE

My father.

HARRIET

Was he a chemist?

GENE

No, he was a miserable bastard.

(Pause.)

Pardon my French.

HARRIET

Go on.

GENE

He…well…I prayed at night for the fucker to die, excuse my French. He was the sort of OCD old crazy person that would scream his head off if he came home and everyone else wasn’t upstairs.

HARRIET

I see.

GENE

I don’t usually talk about it. I’m sorry to curse. This isn’t going well.

HARRIET

My father died when I was six years old. He killed himself.

GENE

Oh.

HARRIET

Do you know how I feel about that?

GENE

I wouldn’t presume to…

HARRIET

He was a coward. A god damned coward. I mean, he didn’t even kill himself like a man with a gun. Turned on the car. Went to sleep. A fucking pussy, if you ask me.

(Pause.)

So… your father was depressed?

(Pause.)

GENE

In a way. I think so, yes. He had a weird way of repeating himself that made him seem dangerous. Like every time he said something, the subtext would change from insinuation, to sarcasm, to threat. We were all afraid of him.

HARRIET

Brothers and sisters?

GENE

Me, my foster brother, and the dogs.

HARRIET

You were adopted?

GENE

No, they took in an orphan in order to get a check from the government.

HARRIET

The dirty, swindling government.

GENE

Exactly. But me, and my foster brother and the dogs…we were sure he was going to kill Mom. I think a few times he did try to actually poison her. She would get sick and take to her bed and not move for what felt like weeks. She wouldn’t cry, she just had red crusty eyes. I was sure he was mixing chemicals into her food. But I never called the police. I was terrified. I was sure I was next. My foster brother did, for his part, actually die. So did the oldest dog, Helga. But that was a bus accident, so I was never able to tie her death directly to Dad’s personality disorders.

HARRIET

Correlation and causation and that nonsense.

GENE

Still…our house, my entire life until I left home, and then for years after; everything was surrounded by his miserable nature, his cruelty, his small mindedness.

(Pause.)

Then, a few years before his death, I got the money together to put him into a nursing home. And the nurse gave him a pill. And even though he could never, ever undo years of being a fucking asshole, he seemed, in a day or two, like this different man entirely. He smiled at kids. He became patient. He actually wrote me a letter apologizing for about a third of what he’d done. Which, for him, was like everything.

(Pause.)

That drug made it possible for me to watch him die without completely hating him forever. It is, and was, a miracle. And I want, more than anything, to help other people. However I can. That’s why I believe in drugs. I believe they’re good, and that the people who toil in their creation and marketing are doing good.