At the Château Marmont hotel, beside the room where John Belushi had recently overdosed, I waited for the call. Marty picked me up in his Jaguar. He was an outsized man in every way, and as we drove up Benedict Canyon, he told me, “Just be yourself, kid.”
A tall blond Adonis answered the door. He spoke with a thick Russian accent. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” he said, and extended his well-tanned hand. It was Jacqueline Bisset’s lover, the recently defected Russian ballet star Alexander Godunov.
I entered the Spanish-style bungalow and slouched on the couch in the sunken living room. Marty parked himself in a plush chair nearby. We sat in silence. He never took his eyes off me.
“Just relax, kid,” Marty said after a while.
Then I heard a distant toilet flush, and I started to laugh. Jackie entered the room and sat on the ottoman across from me. She was gracious, interested, and extremely beautiful. I don’t remember anything I said, but after a few minutes she turned to Marty and said, “He’s cheeky,” in her lush English accent. “I like him.”
We were done—Marty drove me back down the hill and dropped me at a taxi stand to get a cab back to my hotel.
The film, called Class, was shot in Chicago. I lived in a hotel off Michigan Avenue for the duration of the shoot. I was nineteen. The acting work was the realization of my youthful dreams, but it was in that room, a yellow-walled junior suite with a king-size bed and a partial view of the lake, that I felt at home in a way that I hadn’t before. Alone, far from everyone I knew, with work to do, I felt insulated and safe.
When the film ended, I returned to New York. I found no work for another year, except playing the role of Pepsi Boy in a Burger King commercial—it didn’t matter. My life finally had direction, and I followed it unequivocally.
At twenty-one I landed a part in a movie called Catholic Boys (someone later changed it to Heaven Help Us), and the success that happened next happened fast. That I was unprepared, or ill-equipped, to best capitalize on my good fortune is something best decided in hindsight. My life was rushing forward; I was not interested in stopping it. Nor would I have been interested in anyone’s advice on how I might do things differently, had anyone offered any. I was comfortable in my own company and convinced I knew my own mind.
Work led to more work and more travel. To Los Angeles, of course, and to Philadelphia and Kentucky, Kansas and Canada. I traveled to Paris and then London, to Italy and Brazil. Because of my natural inclination toward solitude I drifted away from the others after the workday ended and wandered the cities alone. I began to find comfort in the transience and invisibility of being a stranger in a strange place. Unnoticed and anonymous, I was relieved and excited as I discovered a world very different from the suburban New Jersey neighborhood of my childhood.
Success was something I craved—and yet it intimidated me. These mixed feelings were not new; ambivalence had already begun to assert itself in my life and had become hugely important in the most successful role of my early film work. I was an unlikely choice for the lead male role in Pretty in Pink—a now-iconic coming-of-age love story. At the time of filming, it seemed to me like a silly movie about a girl wanting to go to a dance. I was an oversensitive youth cast as a “hunk,” a twenty-two-year-old, middle-class kid playing a seventeen-year-old boy of privilege. What gave my portrayal impact and contributed to the movie’s popularity at the time, and its enduring relevance, was the ambivalence I brought to the role: the character’s uncertainty regarding his place in the world echoed my own and spoke to a generation of young women and men.
In St. Elmo’s Fire, that same ambivalence was amplified to an even greater degree and became the defining characteristic of a role that fit me better than any other. In that instance, because I was so actively living out my personal vacillations on-screen, I felt free—for the only time in my young life—to move fully toward a success I had decided I wanted. Only when the outlet of acting in that role was finished did my doubts and reservations return—and by then success was on its way.
Those films carried such weight with their intended audience because they gave credence to and took seriously the struggles of being young. Struggles I too was wrestling with at the time, and that I chose to ease through drinking. What began as a curiosity became a companion, then an emboldening habit, and finally an invisible albatross. Had I been interested in camaraderie, or allowing anyone to come close to me, someone might have pointed out that my drinking was in danger of derailing my plans—but it’s doubtful I would have listened. Alcohol became my master with impunity.
While still in my mid-twenties, I wrapped up work on a film in Berlin and returned to my hotel room alone with a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey. I toasted myself in the mirror for a job well done and then awoke in a different room. I had no recollection of changing rooms. Confused and still groggy, I rolled over in bed and called the front desk. A man answered the phone in a language that wasn’t German.
“Good morning,” I croaked.
“Good afternoon,” the accented voice corrected me.
“Oh, is it that late?” I asked, putting as much innocence into my voice as I could. “I must have overslept. What time is it?”
“It’s half past four, sir.”
“Oh, great,” I said, hoping to make this appear in accordance with my plans. Sounding as reasonable as I could, I continued. “What day of the week is it? I’ve forgotten.”
“Friday, sir,” the voice on the phone said.
“Of course.” I hadn’t misplaced an entire day. But I still didn’t know where I was. “Um, I’m just writing a postcard,” I lied. “Could you remind me again of the name of the hotel?”
“Hotel L’Europe, sir,” the voice on the phone said without hesitation.
This didn’t help to determine my location either. “Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know if you used ‘The’ in the title or ‘L.’ Thanks.”
“My pleasure, sir,” the very reasonable man assured me.
I paused.
“Is there anything else, sir?”
“What city are we in?” I blurted out.
After only the slightest hesitation, the ever-friendly voice answered back cheerfully, “Amsterdam, of course, sir.”
I hung up. “Fantastic,” I thought. I had always wanted to visit Amsterdam. That I never paused to consider how I had traveled from Berlin to Amsterdam without recollection goes a long way to explaining the depth of the grip alcohol had on me at the time. I showered and ran off to the red-light district to look at the prostitutes in the windows. I met a man in the shadows who offered me cocaine. When I gave him fifty Dutch guilders for two small bags, he handed me only one and ran off. I chased after him, over canal bridges and down dark lanes, shouting. Eventually he stopped and turned and threw the second bag at me.
“You’re fucking crazy,” he yelled as the bag landed at my feet.
In a dark corner, I sniffed the powder, which burned my nose and did nothing to alter my mood, and then found a bar filled with dripping candles stuffed into wine bottles, where I settled in for the night.
I came home boasting of the benefits of “blackout travel.” A few years later, I was not so cavalier, and the consequences of my drinking were not so easy to shrug off. At twenty-nine, I was played out. I traveled to Minnesota to get much-needed help with a drinking problem that had grown out of control.
A few years, and a lifetime, later, I was in a bookstore, gazing at a girl across the display table. She had sandy hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and wore a tight blue-and-white striped shirt—the kind the girls wore in French New Wave films. She had my full attention.
Eventually feeling eyes upon her, the young woman looked up and caught me staring. I panicked and grabbed the first book on the table in front of me.
“Here it is!” I shouted, and ran for the checkout counter like an idiot. Still flustered, I bought the book without thinking. Once out on the street, I recovered enough to take a look and see what I had just purc
hased. Off the Road, the title said. And then below it, A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain. Nothing could have interested me less. I took the book home, put it on a shelf, and forgot about it.
A few months later I was taking a trip to Los Angeles, and halfway out the door, I grabbed the book for something to read on the plane. It was about a man who had decided to walk the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. He walked from the south of France, over the Pyrenees, for five hundred miles to Santiago de Compostela, where, according to Catholic lore, the bones of Saint James had been discovered. In the eighth century, when this was news, thousands flocked across Spain to receive a plenary indulgence and get half their time in purgatory knocked off. The trail had fallen out of fashion in the last half dozen centuries, yet something about the author’s tale of his modern-day pilgrimage spoke to me. Once again I was looking for something, I just didn’t know what it was.
Two weeks later, on a bright and hot early summer morning, armed with a backpack and new hiking boots, I was crossing the border from France into Spain, high in the Pyrenees. By midafternoon I arrived, starving, with a blister forming on my right heel, at the monastery of Roncesvalles. Others who were walking the trail were already there, and we lodged together in a dormitory. Tentative allegiances were made and the next morning informal walking groups formed. I ended up with a Spaniard who was dressed in the costume of a pilgrim from centuries ago. He wore a draped brown robe and carried a long staff with a gourd affixed to the top. He looked like a seasoned Halloween trick-or-treater who knew where he was going and I followed close on his heels. He spoke no English and my schoolboy Spanish was hamstrung by self-consciousness. After three days of silent walking, my blisters became so bad that I had to stop in Pamplona for a week of rest, and my costumed guide left me behind without a word of good-bye.
I was miserable, lonely, and anxious. My long-established habit of solitude had left me completely isolated and without the resources to reach out. My worst fears about myself—among them that I just wasn’t man enough to handle this—were proving to be true. I had come to Spain, I now saw, to determine whether I could take care of myself. As I sat in the Café Iruña on the Plaza del Castillo, the answer that was coming back to me was not good. I sipped coffee where Hemingway had sat and decided I would go home, my inadequacies of character and strength laid bare. Then the longer I sat, looking out on the plane trees that lined the square, the more I came to see how failure in this endeavor would later come to haunt me. This was a turning point and I knew it.
When my blisters stopped bleeding, I bought a pair of red Nike walking shoes, left my boots beside the sleeping figure of a homeless man who lived in an alcove of the ancient wall that still surrounded parts of the city, and walked on, alone. At night I often shunned the refuges where the other walkers gathered, choosing instead small inns or hotels where I could be by myself. When I did stay in the pilgrim hostels, I felt a great distance between myself and the others, as if a giant and opaque wall had been erected with me on one side and the rest of the world faintly visible but untouchable on the other. It was just such a barrier that I had once dissolved through drinking, but now, having been away from alcohol for a few years, my natural tendency toward isolation had me in its grip and I was trapped inside myself. I trudged on, hating every step.
A few weeks later, I was in the high plains of north central Spain, outside of the charmless village of Hornillos del Camino. The July heat had taken hold. The sun bore down as I marched mile after mile through low and sickly fields of wheat. The earth was parched and cracked. Sweat poured from my face and down my back under my heavy pack. A black raven circled overhead and then flew over the rise; I cursed the ease with which he covered a distance it would take me a day to accomplish. And then I was on my knees, weeping, sobbing, and then screaming—at God. I literally shook my fists at the heavens and demanded that this suffering stop. I insisted that someone come and pick me up, get me out of this—why couldn’t it just be okay, like it seemed to be for all the other walkers? I cursed my isolation. Why did I feel this burden of separation? I sobbed some more; snot ran down my sweaty face.
I sank back onto my heels. My walking stick was twenty feet away, hurled aside during my tantrum. My pack had been likewise jettisoned. I picked at the hard-caked ground, embarrassed in front of no one but myself; looked up into the cloudless sky; and saw the raven had returned. He circled high above me twice and flew back over the horizon. I rose to my feet, retrieved my pack and stick, and shuffled after him.
In the sad-sack village of Castrojeriz I found a room and fell into twelve hours of dreamless sleep. When I awoke, I ate with appetite and set out again. The withering wheat I had marched through for days was behind me, and signs of life were beginning to return to the camino. After an hour I stopped, without reason, by the side of a barn and sat on an elevated plank. It was too early for my midmorning break, and yet I sat. Since breakfast I had had the feeling that I was forgetting something, that my pack felt lighter. I looked off toward the horizon, the distant spire of a church indicating the next village was nowhere in sight. I swilled some water and then began to feel a tingling between my shoulder blades. And suddenly I was smiling. It was the first time I remembered smiling since I left New York. And then I knew what was missing, what I hadn’t carried with me that morning. Fear. The fear that had calcified between my shoulders was suddenly not there—fear that had been my center of gravity, fear that had been so ever present in my life that I was unaware of its existence until that moment of its first absence.
The tingling between my shoulders continued and grew. Soon my entire body felt as if it were vibrating. I felt physically larger, as if I had grown—or was growing. I breathed deep and spread my arms. I tilted my head back and began to sing. The Who’s song “Getting in Tune” spilled from my lips. I had no recollection of ever singing it before and yet I knew all the words and sang without restraint.
Beside a barn in the middle of Spain, I had the same elation of being at home in myself as I had with the Artful Dodger and in that hotel room in Chicago, only this time I needed no work to hide behind. I was in my own skin and on my own terms.
The next two weeks went by in a blaze. Every step took me deeper into the landscape of my own being. I was in sync with the universe. I arrived at my chosen destination just before a downpour. I slept in and missed the pack of wild dogs that terrorized the early walkers. I met people I found fascinating. Where had they been hiding? I grew physically stronger each day, and by the time I strode into Santiago in late July I felt the way I always wanted to feel yet somehow never quite did. I needed no validation, no outside approval—I was myself, fully alive and satisfied in simply being.
I returned home changed by my experience. The acute euphoria of my trip faded, but my sense of self lingered and went deep. And so I began to travel, not for work, but for travel’s sake. I returned to Europe, to the cities I had been to before, rewriting my drunken travel history and giving myself clear-eyed recollections. I began to take longer trips, to Southeast Asia and then Africa. Always alone. Often I arrived with no plan, no place to stay, knowing no one. I wanted to see how I would manage, if I could take care of myself, and inevitably found myself walking through fear and coming home the better for it. Success in acting had given me a persona and a shell of confidence; my travels helped me find myself beneath that persona and fill out that shell with belief. Through travel, I began to grow up.
Whenever I would tell people that I was going off on some trip or another, I was met with remarks like, “Oh, tough life,” or, “That’s rough.” Even good friends reacted with outright hostile envy—“Must be nice,” they often said. I used to try to explain and justify my travels. It was pointless.
Travel—especially by people who rarely do it—is often dismissed as a luxury and an indulgence, not a practical or useful way to spend one’s time. People complain, “I wish I could afford to go away.” Even when I did the math and showed that I often
spent less money while on the road than staying home, they looked at me with skepticism. Reasons for not traveling are as varied and complex as the justification for any behavior.
Perhaps people feel this way about travel because of how it’s so often perceived and presented. They anticipate and expect escape, from jobs and worries, from routines and families, but mostly, I think, from themselves—the sunny beach with life’s burdens left behind.
For me, travel has rarely been about escape; it’s often not even about a particular destination. The motivation is to go—to meet life, and myself, head-on along the road. There’s something in the act of setting out that renews me, that fills me with a feeling of possibility. On the road, I’m forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on the kindness of strangers, in ways that illuminate who I am, ways that shed light on my motivations, my fears. Because I spend so much time alone when I travel, those fears, my first companions in life, are confronted, resulting in a liberation that I’m convinced never would have happened had I not ventured out. Often, the farther afield I go, the more at home I feel. That’s not because the avenues of Harare are more familiar to me than the streets of New York, but because my internal wiring relaxes and finds an ease of rhythm that it rarely does when at home.
At some point in my travels I began to jot down notes. I had tried to keep a journal, but I found my reminiscences indulgent and silly. I found no joy in writing them and was embarrassed rereading them.
One day I wrote a scene of an encounter that I had with a young man who offered me a ride on his moped in Saigon. The scene captured the essence of my trip. Then a woman I saw behaving rudely in Laos shed light on my experience of that silent city. On New Year’s Day in Malawi, the image of a small girl carrying a large umbrella in the sun stayed with me. I wrote it all down.
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