A Love Song for Bobby Long

Bobby Long:
It's all right, I can walk to the curb from here. Get me a beer.

Lee:
Look, I'm sorry. Why don't you just cook me some dinner and I'll go rent us some porno?

Pursy Will:
I have to go to a funeral, Lee. Unless I missed it because you forgot to tell me that my mother is dead!

Bobby Long:
He can make a lovely corpse!

Lawson Pines:
Come on, man. Charles Dickens. You serious? Martin Chuzzlewit.

Bobby Long:
Smart ass.

Bobby Long:
[looking at hospital] I'm not worth this much...

Lawson Pines:
[taking hospital bill] F*** no you aren't.

Lawson Pines:
Damn girl, you woke up productive. Bobby, come see what Pursy did.

Bobby Long:
I see what she didn't do. Leave.

Pursy Will:
She ain't gonna leave.

Lawson Pines:
Time was never a friend to Bobby Long. It would conspire against him, allowing him to believe in a generous nature and then rob him blind everytime. We'd lost Lorraine. All of us. But long before she died.

Georgianna:
So now what? Lorraine finally kick ya'll out?

Bobby Long:
No... she never would. Besides, God wouldn't let that happen.

Lawson Pines:
Really? And why not?

Bobby Long:
Cause God knows me and I know God.

Lawson Pines:
New Orleans is a siren of a city. A place of fables and illusion. A place Lorraine had to escape from and Bobby and I had to escape to. Away from Alabama, away from lives that no longer belong to us.

Bobby Long:
We cannot tear out a single page of our lives, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

Lawson Pines:
George Sand.

Bobby Long:
Now I thought that would be a hard one.

Lawson Pines:
We die only once, and for such a long time.

Bobby Long:
Moli?re.

Lawson Pines:
A New Orleans summer drowns in thick, dank stillness. Lorraine's house shrank with each passing day, straining uneasy walls closer.

Lawson Pines:
You know you eat like sh*t?

Pursy Will:
You drink too much.

Lawson Pines:
Okay.

Pursy Will:
Why'd ya'll leave that school?

Lawson Pines:
It's complicated. So many reasons.

Pursy Will:
Tell me one.

Lawson Pines:
A lot happened really fast. And New Orleans, all this, seemed romantic at the time.

Pursy Will:
Is it? Is it romantic?

Lawson Pines:
It has its moments.

Bobby Long:
Now just exactly who is Plato and who is Socrates in this equation? Cause f***, I'll just stay out.

Lawson Pines:
You are Socrates, of course. You are the teacher.

Bobby Long:
Goddamn right I am.

Pursy Will:
I wish you'd all just shut up. Cause if it's gonna be like this, I ain't learning nothing.

Bobby Long:
Girl, your English is f***ing atrocious!

Cecil:
Your mama thought you were golden so we named you after yellow flowers and corn. This is you here...

[cuts some purslane from garden]

Cecil:
...pretty, golden purslane.

Pursy Will:
Purslane's really a weed, you know. A neighbor told me when I was 9 and I ran over his tomato plants. He said all gardeners hate purslane.

Cecil:
Yeah, and dandelions. Doesn't stop kids from making wishes on 'em.

Bobby Long:
Someone should have told those Creole people we got something called winter in Louisiana

Pursy Will:
Well, y'all might've improved on their oversight with this cool new invention called HEAT.

Bobby Long:
Pursy, where'd you put the vodka?

Pursy Will:
You told me to hide it.

Bobby Long:
I did. But where did you hide it?

Pursy Will:
I'm not supposed to tell you, remember?

Bobby Long:
Goddamn, you don't do anything else I tell you to do. Now where is it?

Pursy Will:
Lawson! Bobby's trying to get me to tell him where the vodka is again. [Lawson enters]

Lawson Pines:
Pursy, it is Christmas.

Pursy Will:
Oh whatever. It's under the back stairs.

Bobby Long:
Think she'll come right home?

Lawson Pines:
Where else would a teenage girl go but straight home to her endlessly entertaining middle-age room mates?

Lawson Pines:
Autumn comes slowly in New Orleans. The grass remains a stubborn green, but the heat gives way to a gentle warmth. Pursy did begin to catch on in school. She was surprised. We weren't. Winter arrived before we realized the sunlit hours of summer had waned. So now the wine began to outlast the day and that was more than anyone could've asked for.

Lawson Pines:
[Carrying in a tree] Ho ho ho!

Bobby Long:
Where did you get that?

Lawson Pines:
Fell off the back of a truck.

Bobby Long:
Like hell it did.

Lawson Pines:
All right, maybe it was a volvo.

Bobby Long:
Lawson is not in love with you.

Georgianna:
Bobby, I don't think thats any of your damn business.

Bobby Long:
I've seen him with a woman that he can't get enough of. A woman that's crawled into every molecule of his being. That consumed his every thought and turned him into a creature of devotion and obsession. I have the scars of that love on my face, have ya told her about that? Have you told her about the difference between true love and a warm bed to pass the time away?

Lawson Pines:
Oh cool it man. Don't go after her, I never said I was going anywhere.

Bobby Long:
I only speak the truth. The woman deserves to know the truth. And you, you're free to do as you please.

Lawson Pines:
Am I, really? Finally free huh?

Bobby Long:
I wanna say something on this occasion where I celebrate my love and frienships with one another. Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud.

Lawson Pines:
Bravo, man. Now why dont you come out and f***ing say what you really mean. Does every word out of your mouth have to be in character? Or is that the idea? Just to be anyone but who you really are. You want to tell me that your disappointed in me? Cause maybe im disappointed in you. You know I never asked to write your damn book. Your redemption and my penance, right? Havent I paid? Nine f***ing years. I'm sorry. I am sorry all right. I am so f***ing sorry.

Bobby Long:
It's Dylan Thomas. That's an easy one.

Lawson Pines:
Get up old man. I hear we gotta take you to the doctor and get that of your pecker.

Bobby Long:
What do you care? You'd slice it up anyway.

Lawson Pines:
Doesn't mean I want my book getting the clap.

Lawson Pines:
It was our home that night. All of ours. We both knew we should tell her the truth, but every day felt like the wrong day. And Christmas is as good a day as any to believe in fairy tales. That night reminded Bobby and me of a time in our lives we'd both chosen to forget until she'd arrived. It felt good to remember, if just for a little while.

Lawson Pines:
Winter never feels truly at home in New Orleans. An unwelcomed visitor that shows up long enough to remind us of what we're missing, then leaves us just in time for us to forget again.

Lawson Pines:
Some people reach a place in time where they've gone as far as they can. A place where wives and jobs collide with desire. That which is unknowable and those who remain out of sight. See what it is invisible and you will see what to write. That's how Bobby used to put it. It was the invisible people he wanted to live with. The ones that we walk past everday, the ones we sometimes become. The ones in books who live only in someones mind's eye. He was a man who was destined to go through life and not around it. A man who was sure the shortest path to Heaven was straight through Hell. But the truth of his handicap lay only in a mind both exalted and crippled by too many stories and the path he chose to become one. Bobby Long's tragic flaw was his romance with all that he saw. And I guess if people want to believe in some form of justice, then Bobby Long got his for a song.

Lawson Pines:
That girl looks so much like Lorraine. Remember the first time you took me to see her sing was my first time in New Orleans. [pause] I was so taken.

Bobby Long:
Well... you were kind of. You were kind of sheltered. Choked by that silver spoon.

Lawson Pines:
I thought she was so beautiful.

Bobby Long:
She was.

Bobby Long:
[singing] Mother, go make my bed, / Make it long and narrow. / My true love died for me yesterday, / I shall die for him tomorrow. She was buried in a church house yard, / And he was buried there beside her. And from his grave grew roses red, / From hers grew green briar. They grew and they grew so very high, / Till they could grow no higher; And at the top grew a true lovers' knot, / Twined with green briar.

Pursy Will:
Everyone knows that books are better than life! That's why they're books!

Bobby Long:
Well, years ago he trusted my opinion.

Lawson Pines:
Years ago you were easier to trust.

Lawson Pines:
You know, I knew your mother pretty well.

Pursy Will:
How well?

Lawson Pines:
She was hard to understand. But she kept the door to her heart open.

Pursy Will:
Well, the way I heard it was more of a revolving door, now, wasn't it?

Epitaph on Bobby Long's gravestone at the end of the movie:
And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world. - Robert Frost

Bobby Long:
Happiness makes up in height, what it lacks in length.

Bobby Long:
Think she'll come right home?

Lawson Pines:
Where else would a teenage girl go but straight home to her endlessly entertaining middle-aged roommates?