Memoirs and Misinformation

by Jim Carrey

  “I am,” Silvers said, voice breaking. “Yes, Calvin, I am.”

  And so he received his final frames of consciousness, false memories streamed into his mind so that he experienced them as his own personal history while describing them aloud.

  “I see Georgie…,” whispered Silvers. “I see Georgie, she’s so beautiful.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Her face, close to mine. I feel her breath on my skin, her lips so soft against my ear. She whispers. She tells me she loves me…”

  “Let it take you.”

  “She loves me,” said Silvers. “Calvin, I was loved.”

  “Yes! And now you lift up the gun.”

  Silvers obeyed, shedding tears of joy, raising the pistol to his head.

  “She loved me.”

  “Bravo.”

  “I was loved!”

  “Bravissimo!”

  Then Mitchell Silvers’s brains splattered across the windows where they’d cook for three days in the sun, generally admired by neighbors who mistook them for art.

  CHAPTER 5

  Georgie discovered the body.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon; she and Silvers had scheduled a meeting to discuss a spin-off series. She left Brentwood in the silver Porsche at 2:07 p.m., taking Santa Monica Boulevard to Lincoln, then Lincoln into Venice Beach. At 2:24 she passed the condo’s front desk, and at 2:28 she exited the elevator into Silvers’s penthouse, where nature, ever thrifty, was hatching blowflies from his corpse. She gagged against the stench, then turned from Mitchell’s body to the final product of his tortured mind, his unfinished symphony, the disjointed story lines for Oksana’s adventures in space. In suicide Silvers had derailed Georgie’s hopes to finally be first on the call sheet, killing any chance for her spin-off. TNT quickly canceled Oksana. Stalin’s daughters were left frozen at the end of season 4, discovering their father’s corpse in the Moscow sewers, learning he’d ordered them all sterilized to keep his genes under strict control.

  With her fortieth birthday approaching, watching this very fertility-focused last episode, Georgie felt a driving maternal urge. A desire, quite natural, to reclaim the right of motherhood she’d signed away in her domestic partnership agreement with Jim. She broached the matter one night as they ate ceviche on the back patio of the Hummingbird estate, the artificial waterfall running against jackhammerings of neighboring mansions metastasizing from great to gargantuan.

  “Do you ever get lonely, just us?”

  Jim pretended not to hear her against the hammers and the water. “What?”

  “Wouldn’t you like a little girl, a little boy?”

  “I thought we discussed this. I thought we were clear.”

  “People change. I’ve changed.”

  “You can change all you want.”

  “But?”

  “But you can’t make me a father again.”

  “What gives you the right to deny me motherhood?”

  “You did.”

  “When?”

  “From the beginning. We had an agreement.”

  As he stared coolly through her, she thought of the Blueberry 9000, a Japanese sex robot she’d seen while googling, a steel-and-plastic woman complete with mouth, anus, and vagina, all imbued with advanced robotic clenching powers. It could sigh, moan. Scream. And it was only a matter of time, said one Tokyo technology reporter, “before cyborgs and humans dance in the fat and honeyed lands beyond the uncanny valley, sharing love as a feedback loop between all that was ever wished and all that has ever been”—words that had stuck with her.

  “What am I to you?” Her hands were burning.

  “Right now? Right now, you’re someone who’s going back on a contract, is what you are right now. Lots of women don’t want children. You said you were one of them.” His voice turned to pleading. “What are you doing?”

  Callous, yes, but honest. This relationship was fueled by Carrey’s deep need of maternal love, something Georgie was hard-pressed to deliver in the first place. How could she sustain the dynamic while nurturing a child of her own? And yet how could she endure it without one? She left the house, drove to stay with Lunestra Del Monte in Pasadena. For Carrey it was the opposite of endless motherly acceptance; it was indifferent abandonment. He begged for her return, by turns plaintive and enraged. Two weeks later, low on cash, she came back. But distrust had infected intimacy. He began counting her birth control pills and found sex so infected by anxiety that he couldn’t maintain an erection. He turned to Viagra, and Georgie would lie beneath him, wondering, as Carrey struggled toward climax, if it might be nice to have a Japanese sex robot on hand to relieve her of the conjugal burdens that now seemed obligatory, mechanical, and even (she resisted the word) servile. One day she dug up their cohabitation agreement from his office drawer and felt a sudden nausea to read that there were three more years before a breakup scenario would yield her a dime.

  And she felt no guilt at all, savoring sweet schadenfreude when the Fates delivered Carrey just a bit of the torment they’d long visited on her.

  * * *

  —

  His two finest performances, in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, had been ignored by the Academy. Making I Love You Phillip Morris was supposed to change that. It told the true story of a devoted husband, Steven Russell, who discovers his homosexuality following a violent car crash, then abandons his family to pursue a life of fraud, cons, and hedonism. Sent to prison, he finds love with a fellow inmate, ultimately faking advanced AIDS so they can live together in Key West. Carrey had expended huge professional capital on its production, fighting to keep a scene of his character in the act of anal penetration, even defying CAA’s mass psychologist, whose warning, “America has issues with sodomy,” had all but predicted the New York Times review: “A star vehicle whose first gay erotic moment shows Mr. Carrey engaged in loud anal sex is asking for trouble.”

  Which it found.

  The Bible Belt was written off from the start, but its capacity for vengeance was sorely underestimated. Carrey became the target of jeremiads from the pulpit of the Reverend Reggie Lyles Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old New Revivalist standing five foot seven in three-inch heels. His five-hour radio show reached three million people in America, and each week he raged against Jim Carrey’s degradation of the American family, his promotion of adultery and divorce, his complicity in a gay cabal. Even after distributors abandoned the film, Reggie’s acolytes, whipped into a fervor, pressed on with the crusade. Security feeds showed three figures arriving at the Hummingbird estate in a pickup truck one night at 4:13 a.m., wearing ski masks. They spray-painted GOD HATES FAGS on his gate, then turned to his security cameras quoting lines from Revelation: And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. They’d emptied barrels of bloody guts down his driveway, then—in a mad dash—befouled his swimming pool with the heads of the three pigs who’d provided the guts.

  “Always pigs,” Carrey’s security chief, the former Israeli army commando Avi Ayalon, said, watching the bloated heads bob in the water. “Someone wants to send a message? They always go with swine. Filthy animals. Very intelligent. Did you know they eat their own?”

  Security was enhanced across the estate. Avi moved temporarily into the pool house and, through Mossad connections, procured Jophiel, the steel-fanged Rottweilers that would, in time, be Carrey’s only friends. The creatures came pretrained. “Kowtow,” said Carrey, reading from the command list, “kowtow!” And as the Rottweilers whimpered at his feet, he smiled his humungous billboard smile; he felt the dogs were fully worth their hundred-thousand-dollar price tags, the warmth of the wish that money could bring death to heel. He and Georgie began savoring the nightly ritual where, per the training regimen,
they’d hurl a lamb shank out into the yard—crying “Intruder!”—and watch the beasts tear toward it, rip it apart, clocking the response times.

  While these dogs brought protection from marauding born agains, they offered none from the greater film industry. I Love You Phillip Morris ended its run losing millions. Now it was Carrey’s turn for a lesson in powerlessness. He was nearing fifty, his fans aging, too. His talent was such that Hollywood could not replace him in its usual way, the kind of body snatching that saw Emma Stone swapped in for Lindsay Lohan, Leonardo DiCaprio taking over for River Phoenix. But, still, they could tame, control, punish. Disney and Paramount froze slated projects; a third, at Sony, was quietly killed. It hardly mattered that Carrey was still beloved, as his agents said, from the Ganges to the Andes, a reliable global draw. All across Los Angeles estimations of his industrial worth declined so steeply that his managers, Wink Mingus and Al Spielman II, arranged an emergency phone call to discuss what was then being called the Situation.

  “We need to reaffirm the Carrey brand,” preached Al Spielman II.

  “We need something with penguins or polar bears,” said Wink. “People love animals. People miss the days when they lived in jungles among animals and heard their own souls in the sounds of those animals. That’s why Ace Ventura worked.”

  “I think it was the character they liked,” said Carrey.

  Wink Mingus said, under his breath, “Ace Ventura worked ’cause Ace Ventura loved animals. Just like people do. They saw their animal love in his.”

  “We need something four quadrant,” said Al. “And fast.” Then he sighed the sigh of his heart surgeon father, Al Spielman Sr., a sigh to suggest that while the situation was dire, heroic procedures might, just might, deliver a miracle. It usually bent Carrey to his will, but here, to Al’s dismay, it had no effect.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” said the star, on his patio, Jophiel gnawing lamb bones at his feet. “Why should I make some stupid family film?”

  “You wanna tell him, Deuce?” asked Wink.

  “I do,” said Al.

  “Then do.”

  “You apologize so you don’t end up playing lounges in Vegas,” blurted Al.

  Early gigs in Vegas had always sapped Carrey’s soul. He’d feared growing old there, dying there. In nightmares he’d seen his own desert-aged face, an image that now returned: jowly with bleached teeth and hair plugs, whoring for the bingo crowds.

  He froze, dread struck.

  “I’d listen to him, Jimbo. Don’t wanna end up back in Vegas, playing for the bused-in package tours. Old ladies clutching change purses.”

  The haunting deepened. A close-up on his orange spray-tanned face, a weary persona playing greatest hits on eternal loop for the casino crowds. Why was this vision so clear? Was this end somehow fated? He wondered all this just beneath his breath.

  “Whatcha mumbling?” asked Wink Mingus. “Huh?”

  “You think you’re hirable right now, Jim?”

  “If Robert Downey Jr. is hirable, I’m hirable.”

  “Downey never fucked a guy in the ass on film!”

  “What’s wrong with playing gay?”

  “It’s not commercial. Leads to confusion. A couple of my golfing buddies started asking about you.”

  “Oh yeah? Are they cute?”

  A click on the line.

  “Deuce?” said Wink. Silence. “Nice goin’, Jimbo.”

  “I don’t want to do some middle-of-the-road family movie, Wink. It amounts to propaganda for the wars. We’re just distracting while—”

  “Going into the underground parking. Gonna lose ya.”

  Then Wink Mingus was gone, too, and Carrey all alone with his fears.

  He walked off the patio, across his lawn, up through the ravine to his cypress-wood prayer platform. There, sitting half lotus, Jophiel tight by his sides, he closed his eyes and beseeched the cosmos, “Guide me. Show me. Use me.”

  And, like so many of his prayers, this one was answered.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, on a clear night after days of rain, a 1988 Volvo 240 station wagon approached the Hummingbird gates, pale blue body rotted and rusty, riding low on its chassis. Georgie was asleep, Carrey alone in the living room, watching a YouTube video on the role of cheesemaking in the rise of Genghis Khan. Avi Ayalon heard the Rottweilers howling and checked the security monitors to see a man who hissed “It’s not safe!” over and over, demanding, “Open the gates!” Carrey rose to study the night-vision figure. Hair oily and unkempt, cheeks gaunt, the eyes of a biting creature. Only his voice defined him as more than a straggling junkie, as Charlie Kaufman, the shape-shifting auteur who had written Carrey the finest role of his career with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

  “Kaufman?” Carrey gasped. “Let him in.”

  Jophiel growled as he entered. Kaufman was tunnel eyed and jittery, hoodie pulled tight as he shielded his face from the foyer’s security cameras, insisting they speak outside. The dogs followed them to the back patio, where Carrey and Kaufman sat on a teakwood bench beneath a sky of depthless blues, the night air sweet with mangoes rotting in the trees above. “You got a cell phone on you?” asked Kaufman. Carrey produced the gadget from his pocket. Kaufman snatched it from his hand, throwing it hard into the pool, hushing Carrey until it had sunk to the bottom.

  “Christ, Charlie!”

  “Oh yes. Be scared. These are vicious people.”

  “Who?”

  “They got to my maid, Magda. She did some public-pissing films back in Berlin right after the wall fell. You know the drill. Squatting by the Reichstag, hiking up her skirts, a healthy flowing golden shower. Artful stuff. Even if it wasn’t, Christ, Jimmy, she was just a kid! Trying to get by. Taking a pee. Reclaiming the odd square foot of history. And they used this past against her. Blackmailed her into poisoning my pet butterflies, Jan and Dean! I found them bobbing lifeless in their sugar water, I lifted them out with my fingers. So delicate. I kept blowing on them, Jimmy. I kept wishing my breaths could bring them back to life.”

  Kaufman paused, wiping tears from his eyes.

  “Charlie, what’s—”

  “They fried my hard drives. Hacked my house so all the lights flicker and strobe and my stereo plays secret recordings of Richard Nixon confessing dreams to a shrink. You know what Dick Nixon dreamed? He dreamed of himself as a young boy leaping from a rusty swing set toward a distant Wabash freight train whistling songs of escape velocity, offering the promise of being anywhere but where he was. He leaps from the swing, he soars so high, little Dicky, seeming to fly toward that train, then falling toward the place where his shadow should be but isn’t. The void. They’re sending me a message. Making it very clear. These people? They’ll disappear you. Make it look like a heart attack. A suicide. Hang you from a ceiling fan, pants around your ankles, your cock in hand, big kitchen spoon up your—”

  “This is crazy talk!”

  “I got people coming for me! I’m haunted by a monster!”

  “Charlie! What kind of monster?”

  “Krueger-esque! But no more hiding. I gotta tear him out from my nightmares. Into the light of day. Which is art. And you’re the only guy who can help me.”

  “Help you what?”

  “Strike him before he kills me!”

  “Who?”

  Shivering with the twin chills of fear and desert night, Kaufman dared to whisper his tormentor’s name: “Mao Zedong.”

  “Mao Zedong…the brutal father of modern China?”

  “Shush!”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “Is he? Mao. Director of the largest, most lethal theatrical production ever conceived. Isn’t that what a revolution is, Jimmy? The pageantry. The lights, the music, the costumes. Lavish set design on a massive scale. It’s the ulti
mate mash-up of genres: romance, action-adventure, murder-mystery, thriller, coming-of-age. Fantasy. Mao, who promised to end all bourgeois privilege, then married a sexy Shanghai actress. Mao, who starved millions while lazing poolside, getting fat and writing bad poetry. And what’s that telling us about hidden circularities? Why do these monsters yearn toward beauty? You ever go wandering alone at dinner parties? Say you’ve gotta pee, then explore all the rooms of the house? I do that all the time. You know how many Hitler landscapes hang in Hollywood’s private collections? Behind false panels? I count seventeen. Ever shave off a full beard? You just gotta try that little mustache before you’re done. Next thing you’re spouting fake German, goose-stepping around the bathroom. We’ve all got it in us, man!”

  “Charlie. What’s happened to you?”

  Kaufman dropped his hood, then recounted his season in hell.

  * * *

  —

  That autumn, acting on a therapist’s advice that travel might free him from troubling dreams of his boyhood self in a cowboy outfit on a Coney Island carousel, he’d agreed to judge the Shanghai Biennale with Taylor Swift and Jeff Koons. Afterward they’d been taken on a tour of luxury condominiums across China’s northern provinces with representatives of the Biennale’s major sponsors: Louis Vuitton, Morgan Stanley, and the People’s Liberation Army. In rural Henan, hiking on a sloped hillside, they were caught in the first spring rains, mudslides came roaring down all around them. Struggling to save her Pucci scarf with one hand, her iPhone with the other, Taylor Swift felt her big toe catch in the earth. She’d twisted and wriggled but couldn’t free it from the muddy suction. It was trapped, she saw, looking down, in the eye socket of a human skull. Horrified, she’d gasped a perfect E-flat that hung in the air as more human remains surfaced around her. Rib cages tangled with spines, jutting femurs, grasping hands. All rising up from the liquid hillside.

  She was far from Nashville now, wandered into a mass grave from China’s great famine, the starvation of forty million caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward.