by Parker Posey
They drove down the gravel driveway, which had needed repair for years now, and the paramedics got out of the ambulance unfolding the gurney and shot me up with morphine once I got inside, where the drive up the bumpy driveway had me bawling, but there was a new hero to hold on to: Indiana Jones. The ER team went through the protocol—“What is your name? What happened? How did you fall? What day is it?” They asked me the same questions again, minutes later, and I had to say it all over again. “What horseshit,” I thought. I said, “I told you already, ugh, I told you.” Someone asked if I was still in pain and I said, “Yes! Look at my arm,” and they stuck me with another shot of morphine. I asked for more morphine when they made their final stop to wheel me into the hospital because they were about to ask me, anyway.
The hospital, which struck me as sad, made me even sadder when I was told there was no bone specialist in the building. The doctor on call was animated. He liked that I was a celebrity. “I know who you are,” he said, and I cried harder. How could he know who I am? The presumption of that. “I’m not sure if you have any movies coming up, but you have a serious break.” Yeah, I know! I started to really wail, like Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Seinfeld, and looked around for a laugh track. Then he said, “We can’t do anything about it here”—hold for laughter—“except remove that blue tape around your arm to try to get an X-ray.” I knew what he was saying, that he was going to break my wrist back into place.
“I know what you’re going to do!” I cried. I wasn’t born yesterday.
He waited a beat and said, “Do you need more morphine?”
Of course I did. “YES!” He gave a nod to the nurse and I reached out with my good arm and we high-fived.
Jim was there for that show, and would squeeze my foot or shin softly and smile in that way that’s reserved for hospitals, with queasy love. He was there for the bigger show, too, when they pulled that blue tape roll off my arm to reset my wrist, and I screamed bloody murder. He was there for the taxi ride to the bone specialist, further into town, a visit I don’t remember at all, because it was a blackout—the stage was dark and no one was home. I like to think the bone specialist was Quincy, from the seventies TV show Quincy M.E., played by Jack Klugman.
When I came to and regained consciousness for a minute, Jim and I were sharing a taxi with a motley crew of teenage boys (not a lot of cabs in the country) and they were getting their Saturday night party on in the afternoon—laughing and bobbing to the loud bass of rap music, their arms pumping to the beat, not even aware we were there. I was holding my cast arm at the elbow, like kids who know the answer do in class, but I was a mess. We scampered out of the taxi feeling like invisible teenage losers and we were glad we weren’t made fun of or beaten up.
Sitting on the curb, waiting for our friend Mindy to pick us up, I called Lowe’s to check in on some twin bed frames for the house I barely owned and that was sucking me dry financially. But since I had the Partridge Family fantasy, I wanted very much to keep it alive. It would have to be rented to help pay the mortgage.
I nodded out on Jim, slobbering on his shirt, for an hour and a half, because that’s how late Mindy was when she arrived. There were two streets that had the same name for some cockamamie reason. She was so shocked that I was so wasted that she still blushes when she talks about it. She drove us back to my house and left as I swayed a few feet from the front door by the TV room: “I’ll just sleep down here and watch these shorts I have to judge for the blardy blar festival . . .” And then I touched Jim’s shoulder and he must’ve thought I was going to say good night and thank you and “I love you, what would I have done without you?” but instead I threw up on him and myself. He ran upstairs to get towels, which I threw up into some more. I was cogent enough, though, to blurt out where the washing machine and dryer were, and able enough to make it to the bed, where I was out like a light.
* * *
–
The next day, I woke up to a fresh cup of coffee, a Vicodin, and a cast on my arm. A couple of my girlfriends, Leana and Keetja, had come upstate to get away from the city and the demands of being artists in the fashion world. They were just barely surviving the “Big Apple,” which was more the Big Applebee’s (wait for it), “home of the crave and the land of greed!” They sat in my screened-in porch, relaxing with handmade scented candles and essential-oil perfumes that Keetja had made—sandalwood, ylang-ylang, wild orange, lavender. They were like me and could land or plant themselves anywhere.
I sipped my upper, swallowed my downer, and back up the ladder I went. My friends couldn’t stop me and it was the last bit of work—with my left hand I painted and I kept my right arm raised above my heart, like the doctor said—like I knew the answer in class. Fonzie charged through the front door and do-si-doed with Jim, who made a fast exit.
Fonzie barrels into every room he enters. Several months before, he’d barreled into my apartment—throwing his carry-on bag to the floor, and hugging and kissing me, “Darlingdarlingdarling.” He then stepped back from me, with intent, like an animal in the jungle listening for predators. He circled his arms three times in the air, like a magician doing “hocus pocus” but even bigger and faster. After the first time, he said, “My bag,” and looked around. The second time, his arms swung fast again, “My bag.” The third time, bent even further, “My BAG,” in umpire position. I’d never met anyone who’d forgotten a bag at an airport, so this was pretty funny. We’d drive to the airport the next day and what was lost would be found.
* * *
–
Fonzie did take very good care of me before we went to the city to see a “serious doctor.” We watched the Woody Allen documentary on Netflix and I built fantasies to fend off my fear of working with him. Penélope Cruz talked about how she thought she was going to be fired. There were scenes on set of Woody directing, and Josh Brolin looked handsome and brooding, sitting in a kitchen while Naomi Watts laughed at Woody and batted her eyes, looking thin and gorgeous and blond. She gushed about the letter she’d received from Woody, asking her to act in his movie, so charming and witty that she’d had it framed. I’d gotten a letter, too, but my letter wasn’t frameable at all. It was very meh. Naomi’s was one hundred Watts.
Fonzie had brought me plastic Academy Awards that he’d gotten from LAX: Best Actress, Best Woman, Best Sweetheart, Best Secretary, Best Mother. He drove me to my wrist surgeon in a downpour (he’d driven an ambulance in his twenties) and even found a servant’s bell for me to keep at my bedside. He got me ready for baths and stacked towels for me to prop up my elbow with. He was at his best in a mode of high stakes—an emergency where he could come to the rescue. The high-stakes mode was familiar and special for both of us.
He reminded me of Erich von Stroheim, the great silent-film director. He was an actor, too, and played Max von Mayerling in Sunset Boulevard, the former director, husband, and servant to Norma Desmond. He was arguably the greatest silent-film director there ever was. There’s a great documentary about him that you can watch on YouTube, called The Man You Loved to Hate. His cinematographer said that he loved realism so much that he made his actors hate him. He’d scream at them, “Fight! Fight! I want you to hate each other as much as you hate me!”
He was interested in how men and women conquered their passions or how their passions conquered them. This was racy stuff back then and it’s racy stuff now, but he was an artist and realism was his passion. He even shot in Death Valley, when it was 125 degrees, and everyone had to stay there, obviously. No one could sleep because it was so hot. One of the caterers died there. This was the movie Greed, which confronted systems of capitalism and marriage. I saw it at the Film Forum in New York—the studio version. Stroheim hated the edits the producers had enforced and said of it: “The man who cut my film had nothing on his mind but his hat!” His version was ten hours long and although he knew he was making a masterpiece, he also knew he was making a financial flop. And he didn’t
care.
He met Gloria Swanson when she produced and starred in the silent film Queen Kelly and asked him to direct. There is a scene where Swanson and a group of nuns from a convent pass a cavalry from some mythical kingdom and when they meet the prince, they curtsy. Well, while shooting the scene, Gloria Swanson’s pantaloons happened to drop down around her ankles. She was of course mortified and all the guys laughed at her, but she rose to the situation with her dignity, and stepping out of her pantaloons, then threw them at the prince. He caught them and then put them to his face and smelled them, saying “Ah” and smiling. Stroheim loved this moment, so this is what the scene became. I mean, that would probably be scandalous today, right?
So, the next day, at dailies, they watched it with the investor. He asked the cinematographer what he thought and the DP said he’d liked it, and got kicked simultaneously under the table, by Swanson and Stroheim. Gloria Swanson was concerned about the censors at the time and Eric von Stroheim wanted to challenge the censors—he’d already shot orgy scenes that had nothing to do with the original story and turned the nuns to prostitutes, which was probably really artful and punk rock for him. I’m sure he got out of hand.
There’s a scene where she marries a man, and the part of the groom was turned into a drunkard. They were setting up the shot and Stroheim had wanted tobacco juice to drip out of this man’s mouth and onto her hand when he proposed to her. This was Gloria’s limit, and she excused herself from set and went to her bungalow to call the bankers and share what the process of shooting had been like so far. She explained that Stroheim was manipulating the story and she had not planned on playing a madam at a brothel but a nun in a convent. How would that get past the censors? The slobbered tobacco juice on her hand from the man she was going to marry wouldn’t get past the censors, either. They’d only shot twenty thousand feet of film and if they continued in this way, the film wouldn’t be completed for a year and it would cost over a million dollars more to finish. They’d already spent $600,000. And so the bankers flew to Africa the next day to shut down production. Can you imagine? Gloria Swanson produces this silent film and it’s taken from her and turned upside down and inside out. What was Stroheim thinking and what was in his twisted genius? Where was his wife during all this?
When Swanson and Stroheim met on the Sunset Boulevard set, they hadn’t seen or talked to each other in twenty years. Stroheim had reservations about taking a small part in a film, and questioned whether it was beneath him. He had become a character actor after the experience of Greed and lost much of his dignity as an artist, but luckily they welcomed him in France, where he worked with Jean Renoir as an actor in La Grande Illusion and collaborated with other French filmmakers. But in regard to this part, he concluded that the pain he had experienced as a director, having not worked in twenty years, was just as painful as the part of the butler, so he was on board.
At this point, Gloria Swanson had also been forgotten about, so they shared this fall from grace. They met now, laughing and hugging each other, with respect and appreciation for one another, and excited about the experience of working with the great Billy Wilder, who directed the film. I love that the small part wasn’t too strong a blow to Stroheim’s ego, and that it didn’t prevent his attraction to playing it, or any of his creative ideas that would go into it. Gloria Swanson talks about this in an interview I watched on YouTube. The script was yet to be completed when they were filming, so Stroheim had many ideas for his character and the story as a whole. He was back at his beginnings, when he’d worked for D. W. Griffith as a first AD and character actor. He’d made his small characters memorable with distinct traits and wardrobe, things like an eye patch. He’d created so many villains that people loved to hate him—he was actually spat on and thrown out of restaurants, but he loved this persona since it created the necessary power and force to become a great director.
He’d pitch his many ideas for his character to Billy Wilder, and Mr. Wilder would reject most of them because they didn’t “further the story,” which breaks my heart. I would’ve loved to see another Sunset Boulevard from his character’s point of view. He had a lot to give, and the one idea he had that made it into the movie was that the fan mail Gloria receives is all letters written by him. This idea made his character the heart of the movie, not only with his silent and tragic unrequited love for her, but as her final director within the film. He’s there at the very end, standing behind camera as she walks down that huge stairwell and into the lens and to “all those wonderful people out there in the dark,” on her way, through us, to the mental ward.
If only I could weave baskets for the rest of my life. My psychoanalyst, Mark, says every director has a touch of sadism. I’ve been seeing him for well over a decade and when I tell him my experiences, he says very simply, “The business you are in is perverse.” Like politics is corrupt, showbiz is perverse. People lie in politics and there’s perversity in showbiz. Period.
I was nervous to work with Woody Allen, since he had been so steadfast to his psyche—both creatively and in his life. “The heart wants what it wants,” the pronouncement he made on 60 Minutes about his love for Soon-Yi. It could be an aria from an opera, couldn’t it? Any person left by their mother in childhood has an enormous weight and longing in their heart and soul, with a life spent recovering. If I didn’t believe in the complexities of another’s heart and soul—their story, their mystery, their truth—then I really would have to weave baskets. A culture that loses this becomes unhinged; it’s the chewing gum, Mark calls it, that holds us together.
Mark would compare Woody to Lewis Carroll, who he knew a little about. I didn’t know Lewis Carroll suffered from a stammer, did you?
16
Gracie
She looks like Falkor, the dog from The Neverending Story, doesn’t she? Her ears flap up and down when I walk her down the street, like she could almost take flight. I have this rope leash that I can clamp to a belt loop and I think of it as an umbilical cord and of Gracie as a white shadow-creature pulling me into pleasant thoughts and encounters. She is a bichon frise/poodle/Maltese mix, according to the vet. She is the energy in every situation we’re in together, and people react in almost always positive ways. She deflects negative stuff coming toward me and I see people’s faces light up at how animatronic she looks, like she could start talking. Then they reflect this happiness walking past me, and I hear “That dog was smiling at me” a lot, which is the bichon part of her genes. I learned that from the Westminster dog show.
Gracie sits in my chair and watches me work on set, sometimes in the director’s lap, where she fits perfectly at the monitor, and sometimes curled up in her bag, where she doesn’t block the view. I am in love with Gracie because that’s what she’s there for. She is a vessel of spirit for dark gaps in people, places, and things. Trained on wee-wee pads, she goes on corners of welcome mats as well as rugs. Her early years were spent in hotel hallways, where she’d catch air as she leapt like a gazelle in her supreme agility, as I’d lie on the floor and she’d hurdle over me. In dog runs and parks, she sits next to strangers and cuddles up or places her paw on them to show her devotion. She likes to stop at nail salons and barbershops to look inside because she’s a poodle and likes hair and nails. She likes makeup stores, like Bluemercury, and prefers sitting at the entrance of doorways, like the Anubis jackal from Egyptian mythology, the central figure in the journey through the underworld.
The paparazzi adore her. The “papps” or “paw-perazzi,” as she refers to them. Strangers ask to take her picture and she gets a lot of hits on Instagram. I put her into the arms of people when they look like they want to hold her. So yeah, she’s working all the time. She was attacked by the press, though, and suffered greatly after being unfavorably written about in Gawker—she called the site Barker, saying it was “all bark and no bite,” but I knew she was hurt on the inside. They called her a “devil dog,” and to this day, people still say that the
y heard she was mean and it’s clear that she’s not and wasn’t. Lena Dunham told me that they called her dog a devil dog, too. We were in the works to start a protest called MODADOCOD, which stands for Mothers of Dogs Against Defamation of Character of Dogs, but people got in the way of it.
Gracie stayed indoors for weeks after the shame of that fake news and became eccentric for a while and started wearing wigs. She took the bait of the hate-talk and started biting back, but this was when she was younger and took things personally. It sounds crazy but the other’s voice became her own so easily that it would wreck her spirit, as she chewed the wedge cork heels of my favorite slipper shoes. “I’m not a devil dog! That’s not me!” she said, almost foaming at the mouth. She was upset and angry. “‘Dog’ spelled backward is ‘God,’ what blasphemy!” She started to cry and I picked her up and said, “Calm down, blessed creature, little lamb . . .” I held her by her armpits and looked her in the eyes. “If you let them hurt your feelings, you let them win, Cake Batter.” She loves when I call her this but she was still devil-dogging and twisting and turning.
“Listen,” I said. “They have to keep their website going because old-school journalism is almost out the window and they’re just trying to make a living in this strange culture we have right now. Just see the big picture and don’t attach yourself to the fiction of what they wrote. It’s all fiction anyway, Gracie. Keep working on the Ruff Times blog, about your early years in the puppy mill, and make your own fiction . . .” She let out a growl and I lifted her high into the air with one arm in the “I’m the boss” position. She was still frustrated so I calmly said, “Relent and restore your spirit, Gracie. Recover, Butter Bones . . .” She started to let go of her anger and her body became softer as she felt the sadness.
