Category Archives: memory

death, memory

THEY SAID I KILLED A GIRL

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[A sixty-year-old man with messy hair and bags under his eyes. He seems slightly deranged.] 

“They said I killed a girl… But I didn’t remember doing it.

Someone had strangled her near the river and dumped her body in the water. A family on a picnic found it floating downstream later that day.

The police came home looking for me at midnight; they took me to the station, they questioned me about the girl, who, yes, I had seen that day because we had a date… we had met online.

I told the detectives I left her at a café two hours after I met her because I got a call for a job… I used to be a plumber.

The police asked more questions and took lots of samples. And a few hours later, I stopped being a free man for the next twenty-four years.

During the trial, I couldn’t believe the evidence the police had found. My fingerprints around her neck, my DNA at the crime scene, her skin under my fingernails…

And, like I said, I didn’t remember killing her. I still don’t.

Why shouldn’t you believe me? … After all, what would be the point of lying? I already paid for the crime!

Anyway, I was going crazy during the trial. The more evidence the plaintiff put forward, the more obvious it became that I was guilty, even to myself.

I ended up accepting it. I had killed her and, somehow, forgotten all about it. It’s happened before. A kind of selective amnesia triggered by deep feelings of guilt… at least that’s what the prison shrink said.

I changed my plea to guilty. According to my lawyer – who was an ass by the way – that strategy saved me from a life sentence.

I was thirty-five when I got locked up. I’m almost sixty now. I got out yesterday.

The first thing I did was to visit the place where they found the girl’s body.

I did it because my biggest fear, the heaviest load I carried while in prison, was not knowing for certain if I had done it. What if everyone was lying? What if it was a conspiracy?

I needed to know.

And I was hoping that place would help me unearth some buried memories, force me to remember. Because I still wanted to believe I’m not a murderer, that despite all the evidence, I couldn’t have killed that girl…

But nothing happened when I got there. I still couldn’t remember a thing.

Well, something actually happened, something that surprised me because I had never felt it before.

I felt like killing someone.

So I waited  until eventually this woman came jogging by. It was easy to strangle her. She wasn’t very strong. There was no one around. I dumped her body in the river and then came here… I’m waiting for the police to arrive now.

I have a good defense this go ‘round. After all those years paying for something I don’t remember doing, I needed to do it. I had to know how it feels to kill someone… and make sure I remembered it this time.”

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 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

history, Hollywood, irony, memory, politics

REAL FICTION

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[A man in his late thirties. The liberal type, dressed casually and with messy hair. Something about him screams intellectual.]

“My grandfather was an old Hollywood screenwriter back in the forties. He only has two or three credits to his name on obscure films… To be honest, I used to think he had had a mediocre career and that he had retired early.

Later on, I learned he was also a member of the communist party, and that his political views had landed him on Hollywood’s blacklist…

Unable to get work as a screenwriter, he took any film-related job to make ends meet; production assistant, gaffer, grip… even as an extra.

According to my father, he once got a background gig in a big Hollywood production, a romantic drama, set in the Russian Revolution.  Anti-communist propaganda of that time…

My grandfather had no idea what the scene was about but, still, he put on his proletarian costume and showed up on a set that looked like a muscovite street, along another hundred extras.

There, this assistant to the director instructs them to parade down the fake street singing The International, you know, the United Worker’s hymn.

The song was banned in the US back then, so instead of teaching them the lyrics, the assistant just hummed the melody a couple of times for the extras to memorize it.

And so, when the director called “action”, all the extras began to hum the song, more or less successfully… All of them except my grandfather. He shouted it from the top of his lungs, enunciating every single word.

I like to picture him with a Cheshire grin, tickled by the irony of getting paid for something he had been banned from doing and being in real life.

It probably was the biggest victory of his life…

I’m sure he’d tell the story better himself.

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016

love, memory, video

IN SILENCE

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EXTENDED VERSION:

[A woman in her mid-thirties. Soft spoken but with an expression that denotes intelligence. She holds a cell phone.]

“My mother passed away recently… and quite unexpectedly.

The first few days after her death I missed her so badly that all I did was look at photos of her… I had this weird fear of forgetting what she looked like…

I went through every single photo she was in. I searched albums, shoeboxes, my phone, my computer…

I paid special attention to the portraits that captured her in a natural pose, unaware of the camera’s presence. I would stare at those images for so long… trying to get a glimpse into her soul, into her real self… and maybe because of that intensity, the photos began to lose their meaning.  After a while, they became mere representations of my mother… lies, in a way.

Then I moved on to her voicemails saved on my phone… dozens.

I listened to them over and over, very carefully, trying to find my mother in her short greetings, in her requests to call her back as soon as I had time…

They were satisfying at first…  like a comfort blanket…

Until one day her messages started to sound artificial… I could predict what she was about to say; I found myself mocking her inflections…

I realized that, like with the pictures, I had exhausted her recorded voice…

I was devastated, and frustrated. So much so that I began deleting all her messages, one by one…

Until I got to one that was almost two minutes long… I had always skipped it before because it was a butt call, you know, an accident…

All you can hear in it is a subtle breathing and some creaking sounds, maybe from the chair my mom was sitting on.

But that day I listened to the message, the whole thing this time…

I could feel my mother in that silence, as if she was alive, as if I was spying on her from behind a door. I was curious about her… asking myself what was she doing, what was she thinking…

I started crying half way into the recording.

I cried out of happiness because I’d finally felt her in that silence. I was more than happy, I was at peace… there she was, my mother, living in a question mark… in an unwritten story.

I deleted the other messages and kept only that one.

Sometimes I play it… but not too often… I’m afraid to wear it out too.”

Are you an actor or director interested in using this monologue? Contact us in ABOUT MONOLOGY!

 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016