Memoirs and Misinformation

by Jim Carrey

  After, there was a dinner in his honor at the Quirinale Palace. A table for one hundred had been set by the president of the Italian republic. They’d all come for a brush with performative genius and watched, appreciatively, as at the head of the table, Carrey asked the veteran sommelier pouring wine into his glass if he could inspect the bottle. The man stopped and handed it to him. Jim sniffed the cork and examined the label, all of it just a setup for the moment where he plugged the bottle into his mouth and took a long chug before, with the face of a true connoisseur, declaring, “Wonderful. They’ll love it.” They did. They roared, all of them: the Swiss art dealer and the Three Men from Merck and the waiters watching from the kitchen, where the cooks were laughing, too. And the Camorra enforcer who had, that week, put two bodies in the Tiber. And the Swedish ambassador’s husband. They laughed for this sudden relief from the burden of manners, and the laughter bound them across languages as they ate and drank on the marble terrace in the Roman night.

  A twelve-piece orchestra played tangos, music that moved the owner of a dry-cleaning chain, a round woman, lonely in her late fifties, to decide, after three proseccos, that, having paid five thousand dollars to a corrupt senator’s even-more-corrupt secretary to be here, there was no reason not to approach Carrey for a dance. She moved toward him like a heat-seeking credenza, and something in the boldness of her spirit swayed Jim Carrey. He waved away his bodyguards and took her hand, leading her out onto the colonnade. They tangoed passionately. She was surprisingly nimble, ready for every turn even though her fingers, greasy from the grilled branzino, kept slipping from his. He turned it into a set piece, feigning lover’s frustration before taking her arm and throwing it over his shoulder, then pulling her close with eyes that said: I’ll never lose you again. It had been so long since she was held. They spun like galaxies colliding, the whole orchestra soaring, the grifting crowd demanding crescendo and receiving it as Carrey dipped the woman in his arms and, seeing her lips pucker an invitation to kiss, licked her sweaty face from the chin up to the forehead, then stared at her like a happy puppy. This brought the whole room to its feet, love’s caricature sowing want of its real form in the hearts of all present—even his own.

  * * *

  —

  Soon he was back home in Brentwood, not a flicker of joyful mayhem in that famous face, only languor where so much raw charisma had recently shown.

  The movie was falling from popular consciousness.

  He felt his spirits fading with it, as if by unknown laws of human-industrial entanglement. He was lonely. And he was longing, truly if ridiculously, for the real version of that which he’d clown-played with the dry-cleaning duchessa. She’d given him a voucher for ten free shirt pressings, and taking it from his wallet he’d fixate, masochistically, on All That Might Have Been with Renée Zellweger, his last great love. She’d left him for a bullfighter, Morante de la Puebla. His heart had never completely healed, he realized, alone now on his Brentwood couch, numbing himself in television. He was clicking back and forth between Engineering the Reich, where Wernher von Braun was shooting men through the sound barrier as practice for the Apollo program, and Vietnam Reunions in HD, where a legless American hugged a toothless Vietnamese on the jungle hillock where each had lost his youth.

  It was in the switching space between programs that Carrey glimpsed TNT’s Oksana, and one of his mind’s trillion synapses fired brighter than all others, demanding that he stay on the channel. There he saw a C- or even D-list actress, Georgie DeBusschere, as fully into the character of a Russian assassin as her modest talents allowed, torturing the Kyrgyzstani arms dealer whom she’d lured to a Bucharest safe house with promises of exotic sex. She’d drugged and bound him, then, when he woke, demanded the antidote to a flesh-eating virus currently thwarting her character’s plot arc. Citing the virus’s “rapid mutation rate” the man said he couldn’t help her. She buried her power drill into his femur, then killed him with a judo chop to the nose.

  Beholding Georgie in this moment of high violence, Jim’s subconscious saw her eyes as his mother’s eyes, her skin as his mother’s skin, and her nose as his mother’s nose: an error that filled his conscious mind with raw, candied rapture.

  His early life was marked by the financial struggles of a beloved father, Percy, whose smile grew apace with the family’s descent into poverty. His mother, Kathleen, sometimes channeled their decline viscerally, as her own imagined dying.

  “The doctors say my brain is deteriorating at an incredible rate!” she would tell the family at the dinner table, her words filling young Jim with terror, fear that one day he’d return from school to find his mother lying brainless on the floor. Doctors prescribed codeine and Nembutal. She grew dependent on the painkillers, as so many have. He performed his earliest comic routines trying to make her feel better, a rail-thin seven-year-old entering her bedroom in his BVDs, pretending he was an attacking praying mantis, head crooked, pincers flailing, making her laugh against her suffering, which grew over time.

  But the painkillers, over decades, took their toll. She’d lie there, rigid with arthritis, chain-smoking on the sofa of the North Hollywood apartment where Carrey had invited his mother and father to live with him when they ran out of money in old age. He’d come home from work on his first television series, NBC’s The Duck Factory, to find her fast asleep on the sofa, stray cigarettes smoldering into the cushions.

  Then the show was canceled and, running out of cash, he told them with deepest regret that they needed to go back to Canada, where at least if they got sick they could afford health care. He promised to send them money.

  “You never see anything through, Jim,” she’d told him. “You just never see anything through.”

  It was a crushing blow. Sometimes he’d dream of strangling her, then wake in cold sweats, guilty for his own imagined matricide, filled with a want of lost nurture that came back to him now, watching Georgie on TV. Who was this actress whose image stirred him so? What was this show? He pressed INFO: “Oksana: Subjects of an aborted Cold War experiment finally seek their truth.”

  Across twenty mind-rotting hours he joined them. He watched Georgie DeBusschere and her sisters battle to the Moscow laboratory where they learned that they were all programmed killers, all hatched from the eggs of Soviet gymnasts fertilized with the frozen sperm of one Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, raised by supercomputers on an unmapped Aleutian island. Awed by her beauty, he imagined her as a minor Kennedy, the only girl in a family of brothers. They must have played touch football on the beach after clambakes, he thought, watching her lay out a henchman with a roundhouse kick.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  * * *

  —

  She’d been born seventy miles outside of Iowa City, raised on a street of broken sidewalks. Her father was an alcoholic gym teacher. Her mother was a quiet and accommodating labor-room nurse. Georgie was one of eight children who fought viciously over bathroom time and frozen dinners. By her fourteenth birthday she had risen from the middle to the top of the pecking order, dominating her seven siblings—Cathy, Bobby, Cliff, Gretchen, Vince, Buster, and Denise—the family’s increasingly strained resources making each child just a touch craftier than the one before.

  She’d won a Rotary scholarship to Michigan State, where, assigned by a mainframe error to a graduate-level game theory seminar, Decision Making for Changing Times, she earned an A without even trying, finding the concepts came naturally. After graduation she went to Los Angeles, working briefly in print modeling before submitting an essay on Robinson Crusoe and a set of bikini pictures to the casting agent who landed her a contestant spot on Survivor: Lubang.

  There, across the summer of 2000, she became loathed by millions for betraying her best friend in the Gee-Lau tribe, a Mary Kay sales representative named Nancy Danny Dibble. Dull featured and acne scarred, Nancy had b
een cast for the strong response she elicited in focus groups: pure pity. The producers had planted her as a moral obstacle. For the contestants, the logical move was to dispatch her quickly, without regret. But what of the debt owed the weak by the strong? What of the viewers’ delusions of morality—and the wrath that lived just beneath them?

  Thinking to gain an ally on the cheap, Georgie shared her lip balm with Nancy during their first hours on the island as the castaways were ordered through seventeen takes of wading ashore. And while Nancy Danny Dibble may have never known a lover, she was a creature as erotic as any other. It’s all there online, five seconds long, a voyeur’s opera: compacted longing rushes through Nancy’s eyes as Georgie applies the ChapStick to her lips. How long has it been since Nancy Danny Dibble was touched? “I need more,” she says, and so Georgie runs the balm over her lips again. The gesture far exceeded whatever modest aims Georgie had for it, seeding a friendship that was cemented in episode 3, when, face lit by campfire, Georgie observed to Nancy that “Danny” was an odd middle name for a woman. The cameraman crouched low, his lens only feet from Nancy’s face as she told how she’d taken it to honor the brother who drowned in the rainy spring of 1977, diving into a swollen Mississippi creek to rescue Dolly, a mass of dishrags and mop bits with purple button eyes, the only doll that Nancy had ever owned. Even in America, even from a casting pool of eighty thousand, this was no ordinary misery. Nancy’s sorry aria soared until, with a feeble sob, she reached into the night like it might contain a wisp of Danny’s hair. Georgie comforted Nancy, running her fingers through her hair, its Walgreens dye already fading in the sun.

  “Georgie,” said Nancy, “I’d-a liked if we were sisters.”

  “Nancy,” said Georgie, as if the cameras weren’t there, “we are sisters.”

  They pledged to win and split the money. But Nancy’s misery proved contagious: handicapped by this woman (who also had arthritic knees, her very gait a show of weakness), the Gee-Lau lost a string of elimination challenges. Soon they were half the strength of the Layang, teetering on the edge of game-show extinction.

  Ratings soared. Georgie DeBusschere’s bikinied body became known to bankers and janitors, all in condos and projects. And why not? A million dollars was up for grabs here, enough money to grant that wildest of American wishes, escape from the lower class. Nancy Danny Dibble still believed Georgie would deliver them a victory. At night she dreamed herself driving a new, fully loaded Chevy Malibu through Jackson, Mississippi’s finer suburbs, received by glowing housewives as a valued friend.

  Georgie, however, knew the game was lost, and soon wanted just a warm bath. One night she walked up the beach, then crawled through the undergrowth to lie in a stream, where, bracing herself into the silt, she felt the edge of a dagger dropped by a Japanese corporal three days before Hiroshima. She worked the blade loose from the riverbed, tucked it into her shorts. The next morning, clenching it in her teeth, she swam deep into the cove, past the turquoise shallows, into darker depths where she encountered a full-grown moray eel.

  How many watched Christ on the Mount?

  Ten million ogled Georgie as she rose from the surf, the poor eel (the only innocent in this whole equation) slung around her neck, dripping black-green guts into her cleavage. She’d hunt again, and trade her kill for a favor after the next tribal merger. One of the Gee-Lau was sure to go, and while the Layang were likely intent on eliminating the strongest, Georgie bribed them toward the weakest, Nancy Danny Dibble. “Nancy’s made us weak,” she’d whispered. “She’ll destroy you, too.”

  “I thought we were sisters.” Nancy wept at the elimination ceremony, when the votes were finally read. “You promised! Say something!”

  And here, as elsewhere, Georgie paid less for raw cunning than brutal honesty. The statement which viewers found so reprehensible was only made so for its cold truth—its unflinching appraisal of the crude gears that animate illusions of freedom. Georgie believed she’d done nothing wrong. She forgot the cameras and drew from the game theory she’d learned at Michigan State.

  “All of life is a series of interlocking games, mainly meaningless, perhaps rigged,” she told Nancy. “Some have rules we know; most have rules we do not. Are we being guided to some higher state? Or just forced from game board to game board for no end at all? The only way to know is to do what the games demand; I did only what the game demanded.”

  Nancy’s cheeks glistened with tears.

  The torches coughed up sparks.

  And the Layang, sensing themselves in the presence of an advanced player, decided Georgie would be the next to go.

  She quickly returned to Los Angeles, bent on turning infamy into celebrity. Represented by Ventura Talent Associates, she spent three years trying to become an actress, billed as the Eel-Slayer of Lubang, taking meetings for talk shows that never happened, winning roles in stillborn network pilots, unable to shake her Survivor anti-fame until, the greater horror, it was all gone.

  She posed for men’s magazines, each time wearing less, each time earning less. A gig as an auto-show bikini girl led to a job selling cars at Mazda of Calabasas, where, court documents allege, she once stole a used Miata. In time she married Darren “Lucky” Dealey, a rage-prone stuntman fired from leaping walls of fire for Rutger Hauer after assaulting a sound technician. Shortly before their first wedding anniversary he gave her a black eye; and she, in turn, sprinkled rat poison in his protein powder. Here was romance tragic even for a fading reality star. It was seven years, the biblical length of plagues, before fate showed her any favor; and even then, it was cruel.

  Mitchell Silvers was a television writer and producer who as a USC undergraduate had obsessed over Georgie on Survivor. As an adult he abused power in service of desire, arranging through her VTA agent to meet Georgie at the Chateau Marmont. There, with a medicated lack of affect that she mistook for innocence, he offered to cast her on his upcoming TNT espionage series in exchange for sex in a junior suite. It’s just sex, she told herself, a means to an end, molecules bouncing around.

  Two months later, responding to Silvers’s threats to abandon the project, TNT cast Georgie as the Russian assassin Nadia Permanova, a hard-bodied killer fighting central Asian warlords in the formfitting dominatrix gear that so beguiled Jim Carrey, who as a young boy had fetishized the buxom Vampirella.

  * * *

  —

  And who, as a man, watched slack-jawed as Stalin’s daughters entered the Moscow lab where they found primitive hard drives containing every memory to be wiped from their brains across such lethal girlhoods, lost selves locked in magnetic tape. And finally, in a secret chamber, specimen jars containing human embryos floating in murky formaldehyde, the waste products of their creation. Georgie’s character flew into a rage, smashing everything in sight.

  And as the prop fetuses bounced across the concrete floor, Jim Carrey felt all the pain of lost love vanish. He felt himself, suddenly and surely, receiving nothing less wondrous than a message from the cosmos: Georgie, he knew, was his soul mate.

  CHAPTER 2

  Call it messy, call it madness; Carrey called it love.

  He contacted Georgie through his publicist and suggested they share a night of self-discovery under the guidance of Natchez Gushue, a guru then popular among the city’s spiritual seekers. Across the nineties Gushue had turned a Tucson AutoZone into a real-estate empire, at his peak swaggering around the city in a Stetson and fringed jacket, boasting of his royal Cherokee blood, asserting a spiritual mandate to reclaim his ancestors’ land with a sprawl of Pollo Locos and payday lenders. Lawsuits describe him as delusional, profligate, only barely Cherokee. They say his empire was ruined by the same psychosis that found him, at the end, driving around Tucson with a loaded Uzi on his lap, ranting in word salad, high on methamphetamine. Natchez said that he embraced poverty willingly after receiving visions of Jim Morrison in a Cherokee Ghost Dance; t
hat, if only more spiritually attuned, the Tucson police might not have mistaken his mystic tongues for word salad. He posted bail with cash he’d hidden in a fiberglass lawn armadillo, then fled north to California, prospecting for souls.

  His first job was with Deepak Chopra, leading Quantum Encounter Workshops for corporate executives. But Natchez soon found fault with Chopra’s teachings, perhaps because there was fault to be found, perhaps because he himself needed to be the alpha guru. He rejected Deepak’s view of an eternal spirit as incompatible with the destructive nature of the universe. How, he asked, could Chopra deliver people from suffering through fantasy? No, it worked the other way around: the truth of cosmic brutality would unveil the truths of the self. Soon he was using meditation not to gloss over traumas but to induce them. One day he slipped ayahuasca to a group of Avis executives, then led them all in a visualization of the firebombing of Dresden that left four vice presidents curled fetal behind the Healing Pagoda.

  Natchez was demoted to office work.

  A yurt that housed the Sacred Gourd went up in flames.

  Then Chopra cast Natchez out of his realm, a move that might have ended his career if he hadn’t already found his first devoted follower in Kelsey Grammer.