Memoirs and Misinformation

by Jim Carrey

  “Come, Jimmy!” said Hopkins. “Din-din!”

  He returned to find Hopkins rummaging through the plastic bags.

  “They forgot the fortune cookies,” he spat. “The Huns!”

  “They didn’t forget,” said Kaufman, fevered. “They just ran out of prophecies. We’re at game’s end, cowboys. All of us. With only one move left: complete annihilation. Of lives, of loves. Languages and species. Somewhere it’s all already ended. All the words forgotten. This life is just a sloppy flashback.”

  “I’ll take sloppy flashbacks over dead air,” said Hopkins. “Let’s eat.”

  So they feasted on shrimp fried rice and vegetable sukiyaki, TV flickering famine horrors: the withered elderly, children with distended stomachs, piles of dead sparrows fallen from the sky. Carrey ate with supernatural hunger, slurping lo mein noodles as the viewing climaxed in handheld footage of three men in extreme starvation, their every step an impossible task, sinew and skin, they moved like tragic marionettes.

  “Dammit,” said Carrey as his cheap plastic fork snapped in two.

  “Use it!” cried Kaufman. “Eat with your hands! Feed the glutton!”

  So Carrey clawed his fingers, snatching up greasy braids of noodles and stuffing them into his mouth. Hopkins cheered. “They starve while you gorge! Just as it was with Mao, dancing in Shanghai as the peasants ate their children.”

  Perhaps it was simply bad shrimp lo mein. Or perhaps Hopkins had spoken too soon, and his words (in distinguishing actor from subject) drove Mao’s spirit from Carrey’s plastic flesh. Carrey now experienced a nauseating tremor, an urge to flee this wicked séance. He tried wishing it away with the fire-breathing technique of Guru Rajneesh, which in the late 1990s had reliably purified his karmas and filled him with cosmic laughter. But tonight it failed him, each breath only spraying noodle mash across the television. The food stuck to pixelated peasant faces, blurring the space between worlds.

  “I can’t bear this anymore,” said Carrey. “It’s too much.”

  “I could call Johnny Depp,” said Kaufman, waiting just a beat before finishing with cruelty, “We all know what Johnny did with Jack Sparrow.”

  “Enough!” said Carrey, with the double fear of not only playing Mao, but also losing him to Depp. “I’m trying, but it’s terrifying. Do you know what it took to get my aura to radiant gold? Energy vortex visits. Malibu Memory Retrievals. Seven-day intensive Abraham-Hicks seminars. Georgie spends so much money on crystals. And right now? Right now my aura is like a toxic mist hanging over a poisoned creek with little kids playing in it, sweet, unsuspecting kids with cheap plastic toys. That’s my aura right now, Charlie. Not to be unprofessional, I’m just concerned for my humanity.”

  “Humanity?” said Kaufman. “Humanity gets carpet-bombed in Baghdad so you can heat your mansion. Humanity dies slowly, cruelly, in Congolese mining pits so you can have a flashy new iPhone. Humanity gets pistol-whipped in the de facto penal colonies of South Central while you eat quinoa and ogle ass in yoga class. Humanity? It’s a story people tell themselves to escape guilt while they capitalize off others’ misery! You, you peddler of false escapisms! Big star. You lament your lost humanity? It’s a little fucking late.”

  Then he hissed in Carrey’s face with a breath so noxious that Carrey grabbed him by the throat, and then Kaufman (often slightly ill) spit phlegm in self-defense. Hopkins stood on the bed, pelting them both with shrimp lo mein, taunting, “You’re worse than Sicilian street children!”

  But the slur failed to injure as it had in his postwar boyhood. Hopkins lost his balance. He grabbed at Carrey, who was latched to Kaufman, and soon they all spilled to the floor in a cascade of noodles and profanity. They were now offensive even to their fellow Saharan reprobates, as an angry pounding on the wall was followed by the voice of a frustrated adulterer, “Shut up!”

  “Sorry,” answered all three men, suddenly still.

  “Mao is sculpting history, which means using flesh,” said Hopkins, picking a tiny shrimp from Kaufman’s hair. “It’s unpleasant business—but didn’t Yahweh send the flood? Mao, too, felt he was justified. He, too, was creating a people.”

  “You gotta override your empathy,” said Kaufman. “Can you do that?”

  “I’m trying,” said Carrey. “I feel very menaced. It’s like he’s taking hold of me. It’s like he wants to consume me, you know? Along with all the rest.”

  “Let him in.”

  “I’m frightened, Charlie.”

  “You should be,” said Hopkins. “Mao is hardly foreign to you. To any American, really. The death of religion. The holding of industrial quotas as society’s highest aim? The crushing of human lives in service of the marketplace? The rule of super-empowered elites beyond all accountability? What is Mao but the father of modern capitalism? And, more, of celebrity’s place within that capitalism? As a distraction. A diversion. As an ever-grinning knockoff god. Luke—he’s your father.”

  “Where’d you get all that?”

  “Dark nights.”

  Carrey’s eyes went wide—this was a lot.

  “Don’t put Star Wars in his head,” said Kaufman. “We’ll get an Asian Jedi.”

  “Relax, Chucky Boy,” growled Hopkins.

  “Don’t you condescend to me. You? You’re just a reader of lines. A Howdy Doody. I’m the one who dives into the human muck to find them!”

  “Oh, Chucky Boy,” said Hopkins. “Spare us the bluster.”

  “I never bluster. And don’t call me that.”

  “Both of you,” said Carrey. “Stop it.”

  “Chucky-Chuck!”

  “Call me that again.” Kaufman, hand slipping beneath the pillow, he clenched the Colt pistol. “Call me Chucky one more time and you’ll—”

  “Guys. Stop, I’m ser—”

  “Who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop,” sang Hopkins, merrily, “Who put the Chuck in the Chuck-a-Chuck-a-ding-dong?”

  Fearing losing control of his own project, Charlie drew the Colt out from beneath the pillow, aiming it squarely at Hopkins, who lunged to disarm him. As they grappled, Charlie’s soy sauce–slickened finger slipped on the trigger, firing off a round that grazed Carrey’s shoulder. The blast left them all in shock, ears ringing. Touching the wound, Jim experienced no horror, little pain, only a giddy thrill and the warm-dawning realization that he’d never felt so alive. A twisted grin overtook his face.

  “Mao’s spirit is well with us,” said Hopkins. “Let’s call it a day.”

  He and Carrey departed, leaving Kaufman all alone in the sorrowful room.

  For a while he just lay there on the comforter, calming himself with breathing. Then he reached for a small box on the bedside table, opening it with care. Inside, laid on tufted cotton, were the bodies of Jan and Dean, his beloved butterflies. Gently, he stroked their wings, imagining the moment as a scene from his masterpiece, how the digital effects team would bring the creatures back to life, how they’d flap from his fingers and flit across the room, wings shining in fluorescent light.

  * * *

  —

  There would be no such peace, real or imagined, for Carrey.

  Awaiting him at home was the script for Disney’s Untitled Play-Doh Fun Factory Project. Usually he ignored such fluff, but this was different, marked as high priority, messengered from the Creative Artists Agency, a large-scale cultural-reprocessing facility in the California desert. Gerry Carcharias had attached a handwritten note:

  Hey Jim,

  Jack Black, Jude Law, Antonio Banderas, Katy Perry, Zoe Saldana, Wesley Snipes attached. Jackie Chan circling as well. Do you know what that means in Asia? Good chance to show you can play well with others. You’re my favorite!

  Gerry

  Once he’d entered Rome in triumph. And now…a feature-length commercial for Hasbro? He dressed his shoulder
wound, then climbed into bed beside Georgie, falling through garbled thoughts into a nightmare version of the memory whose retrieval he’d resisted under the guru Natchez Gushue.

  * * *

  —

  Forty years ago, his family had lived in a fieldstone caretaker’s house while working at the Titan Wheels factory outside Toronto. Now he was back there. It was winter, cold. Filthy snow at his feet. They’d taken jobs as janitors after his father lost the accounting position he’d held for thirty years, fired by his own brother-in-law, Bill Griffith, a man whose name, across Percy Carrey’s struggle, became a byword for cruel fate. “Fucking Bill Griffith,” he’d spit when his checks bounced. “Fucking Bill Griffith,” he’d sigh to the mirror as he noticed his hairline receding.

  In the dream Carrey approaches the sad little house, peers through its winter-brittle windows, and sees his mother, Kathleen, kneading onions and celery into ground chuck, a family staple bought at discount a day before its expiration from DiPietro’s supermarket; its aroma, from a distance, often fooled him into thinking they were having steak.

  He calls, she doesn’t answer.

  He turns from the house toward the factory’s gray hulk, its floodlights cutting through the dusk. He knows that he’s expected inside.

  He walks shivering across the empty lot. He enters through the loading dock, punches the time clock, goes into the workers’ locker room, pulls on his janitor’s coveralls, laces up his steel-toed Greb Kodiak work boots, and tugs on his yellow rubber gloves. He finds his mop and his wheeled trash can and pushes them into the bathroom where his shift always begins, where the Jamaican workers would shit in the urinals to amuse themselves and torment him. He scoops out a slick turd with his rubber-gloved hand, scrubs the porcelain with disinfectant, gagging as he breathes.

  He hears a playful jingle, like from an ice-cream truck.

  It grows louder, beckoning. He follows it down a dingy corridor toward the steel doors that open onto the factory floor, where his father and brother work. But now they reveal something quite different from years ago. It’s no longer the Titan Wheels factory—it’s a Play-Doh Fun Factory, all machines candy colored, belching gusts of glitter that sparkle in the rainbow lights.

  “Jimmy!” he hears his father’s voice from above and looks up to see him trapped in a huge neon-pink funnel, his legs minced by giant blades painted with rainbows. They’ve chopped him up to the waist, but Percy Carrey is still beaming, a vision of Catholic martyrdom, eyes fixed on heaven.

  “Fight it, Dad!” cries Jim, decades of anguish finding voice. “Why don’t you ever fight it? Why’d you take us here? Why’d you just give up like you did?”

  “The Fun Factory’s not the worst place to work,” replies Percy, with a shrug.

  “It’s chopping up your legs!”

  “Don’t fuckin’ talk to fuckin’ Dad like fuckin’ that!” another familiar voice bellows from across the factory floor. Carrey turns to see his beloved big brother, John, trapped in a similar machine, also devoured up to his waist. “You’re the fuckin’ unhappy fuckin’ one, Jim. Fuckin’ you with your fuckin’ insecurities. Your fuckin’ suppressed rage and your needi-fuckin’-ness. It’s pa-fuckin’-thetic. We fuckin’ pray like mad whores for you. I swear to fuckin’ God.”

  “You make me sound awful,” says Carrey. “I’m happy. Enough. I didn’t do so bad. Made some good movies. I have a good domestic partner—”

  “Rub fuckin’ that in my fuckin’ face, why don’t ya?”

  “God you say ‘fuck’ a lot.”

  “What are you? My fuckin’ mother?”

  This would be their last exchange. John bucks up and down in the funnel before, with a final utterance of his favorite profanity, he slurries through the factory’s tubing.

  “Can you get me my smokes?” calls Percy as the blades gag on his femurs. “Could really use one.”

  “Why didn’t you sue them when they fired you?”

  “Good men don’t sue, son,” Percy says as the blades snap his pelvis. “Fucking Bill Griffith!”

  “It’s not Bill Griffith. You could have done so much more. You had talent. Why’d you let them take your life away? Why didn’t you fight?”

  Percy shrugs. “One day it just got dark for me.”

  “So you gave up on your dreams?”

  “I didn’t give up any dreams,” said Percy, now short of breath. “One day you made me laugh so hard my teeth fell out. After that I was dreaming for you.”

  Suddenly ashamed of his anger, Carrey climbs up the funnel, straddling its rim, reaching for his father’s hand. But the gears pull Percy down to his neck, arterial blood spraying everywhere, coating the funnel. Jim slips, scrambles, trying vainly to find a grip. But the walls are too steep, too slick. Down into the Fun Factory Carrey goes, steel teeth crushing his bones, the factory’s cloying jingle soaring as it pulls him down to the knees, then the waist. Futile clawing, no escape. It chews him up to his shoulders. His neck.

  Then blackness.

  By its own twisted logic, the dream returns to the little fieldstone caretaker’s house, the factory becomes the kitchen. He and his father are now ground human meat, sizzling in a gigantic frying pan alongside onions and celery, tossed by his mother’s spatula.

  “Mom! It’s me! Turn off the stove!” screams Carrey. But his words are just the squeaks of bubbling grease.

  “She can’t hear us, son,” says a clump of meat beside him. “She’s in pain.”

  * * *

  —

  Carrey thrashed in the sheets, sweat-soaked, wailing, waking Georgie beside him. A month ago she would have woken him, would have held him and talked him back from the nightmare. Now, with their love touched by contempt, she only watched him flail and whimper, fascinated, even satisfied, to see the mighty star so helpless.

  CHAPTER 7

  Carrey woke to find Georgie gone, off to a screenwriting class she was taking with Caprice Wilder.

  He had no memories of the Fun Factory; only a sense of submerged menace, from which he sought escape through a Buddhist teaching: that the mind is untrustworthy, a sewer of illusions. The problem with this, of course, is that, as all the world’s minds are linked together, the sewer runs ever fouler, ever deeper.

  He was just out of bed, standing in the kitchen with his coffee, when his publicist, Sissy Bosch, emailed, alerting him to a deep-fake video that had, almost overnight, gained such virality as to merit concern. Somewhere in the Korean peninsula a tech-savvy pervert had feminized Carrey’s features, given him long raven tresses, and then spliced this new, female face onto the bodies of evidently incestuous lesbian twins. Their performance, in the subsequent HD video, had become a phenomenon through sheer exuberance, earning ten million views overnight. And tempting his hand beneath his bathrobe when, after clicking on the link, he saw his two digital female selves in fevered coitus.

  How very smoldering his eyes were, in that heavy mascara. How pouty his red painted lips. How breathtakingly symmetrical, his four teardrop breasts. How coy, his gasps and giggles. Was this a pent-up transsexual drive finally given outlet? Or merely a particularly intense expression of masturbation’s guiding narcissism? Despite Sissy’s fears of brand catastrophe, he had no worries about copyright infringement, authorship, ownership. He watched, transfixed, fascination overriding all concerns for the strangeness of this new dimension; he dreamed himself alongside his female selves as they rode each other through pornography’s Persepolis. Far from wanting to sue anyone, Carrey longed only to pass through the screen. To caress and be caressed, to meld with these female versions of himself in some ultimate feat of completion. How effortlessly they would read the language of one another’s faces. Nothing to hide. No need to perform.

  I’d be totally understood.

  It had been decades since film had captured him so entirely. He forgot his coffee and luste
d into the screen, jackhammering away at himself in the laptop light, and he might well have climaxed but for the biting thought that suddenly consumed him. If these South Korean lesbian Jim Carreys could get ten million views overnight, did it even matter what he, the actual Jim Carrey, did or didn’t do with his talents? He’d fought all his life to build and control a public persona. And now he’d not only been drafted into amateur porn but was performing in duplicate without pay of any kind.

  As if sensing this surface fracture of the self, a pop-up ad offered him a hot deal on numbness: a commercial for the loveliest fast-food delicacy he’d ever seen: the Wendy’s Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit. Its deep-fried surface was shot in dreamy HD, buns supple and crusty. He wanted only to eat these biscuits, to drown them in the two new dipping sauces whose names—Zesty Barbecue, Honey Mustard—were sung by an off-screen gospel choir as they drizzled across the frame.

  He raced to his Porsche, salivating.