“Well. All right.”
I could pay my rent. I could buy things for the apartment: a cup to hold my toothbrush, deli sandwiches, more pie, a color TV. I was on the verge of becoming a consumer.
I headed out to the local library to start learning Spanish. First book I saw: Berlitz: Learn Spanish in 90 Days. That wasn’t going to cut it. I saw another book, Spanish in a Month!. I was thinking, at least we were moving in the right direction. I kept scanning book titles until I got to: Learn Spanish in One Hour. Bingo. The mother lode! This book is exactly what I need. I would walk into rehearsal the next day with the language learned!
The book was not a real working template for learning a foreign language. There was no grammar. There were no verbs. There were few nouns. It was primarily a book of words that are the same in Spanish and English such as federal, national, cafeteria, and taco.
I would have to learn this play by rote. But we had time and I had discipline. We worked on the show for several hours a day for three weeks straight. It was all coming together. I played a bad guy in a sombrero and a mustache. I played guitar and shook maracas when needed. I used hand puppets with comic effect singing songs. I would then run over to the piano and start playing a cha-cha. The kids would love it.
It was the day of our first school performance. We had two shows in Indio, California. The first show was a snap. Not a single mistake. We were high-fiving backstage while out front they moved the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders out and moved the first, second, and third graders in. I put the sombrero back on and rushed out to play a little dramatic rumba music on the piano. The kids were booing me, and I was making faces at them like “I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna get you . . .” They laughed. Everyone was having a good time. Then the play started.
Our boss, a beautiful Peruvian actress named Jenny Gago, played the heroine of the piece. She was dressed up like a little girl. She was lost and about to be kidnapped by bandits (me). In the play, she comes to my door. I bow to her and with a wink to the audience say “Pasa, jovincita.” Which means “Come in, little girl.” And all of the kids yell at her not to come in with me. It was great.
Whether it was the adrenaline or exhaustion I can’t say, but when the little girl came up to me, my mind went blank. I tried to remember my Spanish, but it swirled in my head like alphabet soup. Instead of saying, “Pasa, jovincita” (“Come in, little girl”), I said, “Peto, jovincita,” which means “Fart, little girl.” The audience erupted. The teachers ran back and forth to quell the chaos. Jenny looked at me in horror. I still had no idea that I had said anything wrong. I stood grinning with the big sombrero, twirling my mustache. The play continued. At the next juncture, I was supposed to say, “¿Tienes algunas preguntas?” which means “Do you have any questions?” My mind went blank. I muttered a combination of Spanish-sounding words that almost sounded like that. The audience once again exploded in shouts and cries. I was told later I said to the little girl to “Sit on it and squeeze.” Through the laughter and screams, Jenny stared at me. I asked her what was wrong. She just whispered, “You’re fired.”
It was the only time I had ever heard of an actor being fired onstage during a play. Afterwards, she asked why I did it. I told her I had no idea what I did.
That was the end of my performing in Spanish with Twelfth Night Repertory Company. It was the end of my job. However, a man in the audience saw my single performance in Indio. He was a TV producer for SIN, the Spanish-language network. He tracked me down and asked me if I would do a commercial for him, in Spanish. Which I did. I made $500 for the day playing the dumb gringo who can’t speak Spanish. The commercial was so successful he hired me to do two more, in Spanish.
I was not done with Twelfth Night Rep, either. They called me a month later and said they were willing to let bygones be bygones. They asked me if I wanted a job in the English-speaking company. I accepted. Jenny Gago was still my boss. She forgave me, and for three years, we performed all over the state. The governor at the time, Jerry Brown, declared us the official theater company of California. Our company grew from eight people to over eighty people. Some of the alumni were none other than Mare Winningham and Brian Stokes Mitchell. It still amuses me to think of Brian Stokes Mitchell acting with a sock puppet.
It wasn’t long after I got the job in the English-speaking company that I decided to move again. I bid farewell to Naked Man and left the apartment and the used furniture behind. I rented a house. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a swing on the front porch, and a backyard. I was a working actor. I was making $260 a week. A consumer at last. A success. But I had the strangest feeling I couldn’t shake. I didn’t know where it came from and I didn’t know where it was leading me, but its meaning was clear. It was not the time to be blinded by good fortune. The price of nothing was getting higher every day.
9.
ONCE IN A LIFETIME
THERE IS A story my brother told me from when he was an intern at Boston City Hospital. It was about a woman who came into the emergency room laughing, saying, “This is my lucky day.” She had been in a car accident—but right in front of the hospital. So she just got out of her car and walked right in. How lucky can you get? She was put in a bed in the emergency room and was laughing and joking with interns and residents. She had a vivacious personality. She was telling all the doctors and nurses to do what they had to do so she could “get the hell out of there.”
One of the interns left her room and went to the doctor in charge. The intern was shaken and asked his superior what to do. He just checked the vitals of the woman who was in the car accident, the same woman who was carrying on down the hall, and she was—actually—dead.
The doctor in charge grabbed the clipboard and looked at all of the numbers. There had to be a mistake. He went back to see the woman who was still laughing about her fortunate misfortune. She asked him when she was going to get back home. The doctor said, “Soon.” He just had to double-check some things. He ran another series of tests and came back out to the intern.
The impact of the accident had destroyed every organ in her body. She was, for all practical purposes, dead. But her body didn’t know it yet. Her vivaciousness was a product of shock, not joy. The best they could do was to keep her quiet. The doctors didn’t tell her about her condition. They just asked her to call her husband and tell him where she was.
The intern gave her a sedative and sat with her and talked. She fell asleep and died two hours later.
I recently asked my brother for more details on the story. He told me he had never heard it before and that it certainly didn’t happen to him. He said I was mistaken.
How was that possible? I remember the night when I heard it in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts. The story had haunted me for years with a sort of primal power and now the prospect had arisen that the whole thing was not true. Did I just make it up?
Truthfully, I’ve gotten no comfort from the inconclusive origin of this story. It just moved in my brain from the “medical oddity” area to the “urban legend” area, which resides in the same subdivision called “crazy adjacent.”
I’m wondering if my lack of relief is because I know the story is true. Not that a woman walked into a hospital laughing saying it was her lucky day, but that it is possible that you can be dead and not know it.
I’ll go further. I know it happens all the time. And not just obvious cases like my friend, actress and marathoner Kitty Swink. She felt sick one morning before a run and dropped in to see a doctor and found out that she had late-stage pancreatic cancer. She went into emergency surgery that day and survived.
It happens in less dramatic ways every day with relationships. My girlfriend, Beth, and I had been together for fourteen years but something had not been right for a while. Something indefinable. There was a distance growing between us. Like other accident victims who repeatedly say, “It all seemed to happen in slow motion,” our relationship was fatally adrift. We never knew it.
I don’t think it
was our fault. A lot of times we have trouble recognizing the fatal or near-fatal collisions in our lives as they often come in disguise. One of my collisions came in the guise of a party Beth and I threw at our home in the Hollywood Hills one New Year’s Eve.
The invitation said our party went from “Nine p.m. until—?” There is almost nothing more inviting than a “?”. But as I look back, one of the things I have the most trouble believing was that the party started at nine p.m. Nine p.m. is bedtime. Ever since I’ve had kids, if I’m not in bed at nine p.m. watching reruns of Law & Order, it means I’ve been arrested or I’m doing a night shoot. But this was back in the 1980s, the decade that made self-destruction a popular form of recreation.
I had some argument with Beth right before the party started. I made a martini to calm myself down. It worked so well I made another one and chased it with a reefer. One of the first guests to arrive was a rock and roll friend of mine. He came dressed as a surgeon holding a plate of cocaine. I did a line. That had the effect of falling thirty feet into a vat of coffee. Then another rock and roll friend came in with tabs of acid. I put one on my tongue. The elapsed time from the first martini to the last tab of acid was about twenty minutes. I had my first misgivings that I had overmedicated.
Two hours later I was naked, wearing a red derby. Our house was overflowing with other overmedicated people. Outside, the hot tub was cranking at about 105 degrees. Girls were taking off their clothes and jumping in.
As a rule, once girls start to take off their clothes, events change. You can count on it like the tides. This party was no different. The men moved their beer drinking en masse toward the hot tub area like they were iron filings being pulled by a magnet making a beard for Wooly Willy.
My friend Budge got an idea. That was never a good thing. He was an actor, but he also made money as a writer. In porn. And not just any porn. He wrote movies for none other than Marilyn Chambers. He wrote under the pseudonym Manny Haten. I looked him up on IMDb. One of his many works was Insatiable II. Still available on video.
He made some phone calls to about half a dozen of his porno friends. They were shooting Wet and Wild Nurses in the vicinity. He told them to drop on by. That did it. Just like taking too many carbon rods out of a nuclear reactor, there is a tipping point where you reach critical mass. The porno people were it. And I have to take my hat off to them. They were highly sociable. They took almost no time in making themselves right at home. They came in, grabbed a couple of light beers, grabbed some chips and salsa, and then started having sex with everyone.
Ordinary men and women who had been drinking Bloody Marys and talking about how tough it was to get auditions dropped their paper plates, stripped, and started having sex in the backyard. Or on the living room couch, or in the back bedrooms, or in the Jacuzzi. Just the fumes from the hot tub could make women pregnant downwind.
It was like something you would imagine during the last days of the Roman Empire. Any second you expected Caesar to walk through the front door.
Caesar never made it. Instead, it was Sir Ian McKellen. Yes, Sir Ian heard there was something interesting going on. I have no idea how. I have a kind of psychic theory mixed with Star Wars that when there is a rift in the moral universe it sends out a sort of Bat Signal for all the curious. It says, “Come one, come all—something like this may only happen once in a lifetime.”
Rickie Lee Jones came over. Before jumping in the hot tub, she sang “Under the Boardwalk” a cappella in the living room. That remains one of the most beautiful musical performances I have ever heard.
Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Oda Homsey (one of the lead dancers of the Martha Graham Dance Company), and blues singer Bonnie Bramlett all dropped in to see what the commotion was about.
This was it. This was the Hollywood party I’d heard about my whole life! And it was at my house! And I was the host! Despite being naked and wearing a red derby, despite standing on ground zero of a hands-on display of the seven deadly sins, despite being high on acid, cocaine, marijuana, beer, and martinis, I never did anything. I was too busy loading the dishwasher, putting out bowls of chips, refilling dip, opening beers for people, getting desserts on plates, cleaning vomit off the walls, and sweeping up broken glass. Debauchery requires maintenance.
A friend of mine, Mary, said she would help me put out more food. She mistakenly filled a bowl on the table with my dog’s gourmet liver treats. By the time I discovered the error, half of them were gone. No one complained.
Rickie Lee asked me to make a toast. I had no idea what to say but then I raised a glass and yelled out, “Here’s to dumb luck!” The crowd cheered and raised their glasses. And I guess it worked. No one died that night.
The party lasted thirty-three hours. At the end there were a dozen naked bodies on my living room floor. It was dawn of a different day. I was cooking eggs and salmon. There were open bottles of champagne everywhere. I went outside and slipped into the pool. It was cold and quiet. I ducked down into the water so that just my eyes were above the surface. I held my breath and stayed silent for as long as I could. Then, flapping down onto the roof of the house about thirty feet away came a great horned owl with a wingspan of about six feet. It was amazing. He must have heard about the party, too.
I felt invigorated by the water and the owl. I put my red derby back on. I finished cooking breakfast for the remaining revelers and noticed a cluster of shiny metallic Mylar-covered helium balloons floating in the corner of the living room. I thought I would greet the new day with a private moment. I opened my front door, saw the rising sun, and said a little prayer.
I think I prayed for peace of mind. I may have prayed to get my life back or to find love again. And if that was too much to ask, I prayed to at least find my connection with Beth again. I released the balloons. They drifted up, up into the sky. And then they veered into a transformer on a telephone pole. There was an enormous electrical explosion. All of the power in the area went out. I ran inside and closed the door, hoping neighbors didn’t see the naked guy with the red derby and the shiny balloons.
I made my way down the hallway to my bedroom. I lay down and closed my eyes. My mind was spinning endlessly from the combination of the drugs and being awake so long. As my breathing slowed and as I felt myself start to drift away, the last thing I remembered was what I whispered a few moments ago to the rising sun. And I was afraid. I was afraid that not all prayers are answered, or that maybe they are, but not in the ways we expect or in a language we understand.
AT A CERTAIN point, Beth and I had inflicted enough misery on each other that if a meteor fell from outer space and took us both out, the average happiness of Planet Earth would have gone up two percentage points.
We broke up. I moved to another place about a mile away, and Beth went back to see her family in Jackson, Mississippi.
Curiously, at the same time that my personal life hit historic lows, I got a gigantic career break. My agent set up a meeting with Alan Parker for the film Mississippi Burning. I was being considered for the part of Clayton Townley, the head of the Ku Klux Klan. I went in and met with casting great Howard Feuer and Alan Parker in Century City. I was not nervous at all. Probably because I was miserable. Misery is nature’s form of Prozac.
My calmness could also have been a product of a simple artistic truth: I had an idea. I knew who Clayton Townley was. Lots of people think acting is about emotions. Can you cry? Can you laugh? Can you scream? Well, guess what, you can. We are all human beings. We are emotional creatures 24/7. But do we know what we’re doing? That requires an idea. Most of the time actors just throw themselves at a part in what I call the Linguini Method. Throw it against a wall and see what sticks.
I thought about Clayton Townley and one notion came back over and over again. He didn’t think he was a villain. He thought he was a hero for the white race. An advocate. I would not play the man as if he were one chromosome short of being a human, the way most of the villains in action films are portrayed.
I walked in and shook hands with Alan. I was thrilled to meet him. He was always one of my favorite directors. Completely unpredictable. From Bugsy Malone, to Fame, to Midnight Express, whatever he touched became visual gold. I was surprised I wasn’t starstruck. Alan looked me over once and smirked, “Clayton Townley. How do you see the man?”
“Abraham Lincoln.”
“Beg your pardon?” Alan said.
“He sees himself as Abraham Lincoln, saving a nation,” I said. “I intend to play him as a hero.”
Alan lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Let’s read some.”
I read a couple of scenes looking out at a golf course across the street. I never looked at Howard or Alan.
My agent called up and said it went well. I was going to have a callback. Great news. I went back a week later and did the same performance. Alan called me back a third time. Now I was getting nervous. In the waiting room before the audition, the secretary smiled at me. She said they liked me a lot. She said that a lot of the other actors reading for the part were trying to be scary. I seemed to be scary naturally. I thanked her.
I read a third time and still felt good. I heard nothing. After a couple of weeks I got a call that upped the anxiety level. Alan wanted me to read a fourth time. In Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi. They would fly me out for the day, put me up at the Holiday Inn. I would read for Alan one more time, and then fly back to Los Angeles.
As much as I was thinking about the movie, I wondered if Beth was still there visiting family. Would I call her? Would I not? Would it be just my luck she would be hanging out at the Holiday Inn? The suspense made me crazy.
I flew out to Jackson. My audition was at one p.m. so they could get me back on the four thirty p.m. flight. I walked down to a nearly empty room on the first floor. All of the lights were off except one. There was just a desk lamp focused toward a chair where Alan asked me to sit. He was sitting in the dark across the room holding a video camera. I just heard his voice.
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 10
