I thought for a second and said, “Crustaceans.” The C stands for ‘Crustaceans.’ Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
And it was. We shot the scene with the alien detector. It remains in the final cut of the movie. No one mentioned it at the network, in the reviews, or in the letters to TV Guide. As I recall, the alien remains in the box the entire film, never to be seen. As in all science fiction we ended up following the “Chekhovian tradition”: “In two hundred years, who will know the difference?”
That night I celebrated in the Gerard Lounge. I had drinks with the producers and the cast. It was the happy meeting of triumph and disbelief. We had navigated the uncertain bridge of reality and crossed over into an even more uncertain world where everything was possible.
I WAS IN Vancouver shooting the movie formerly known as The Traveler, formerly known as The Visitor, currently known as Night Visitors, and I had a day off. Days off in Vancouver can be wonderful. You can go to Stanley Park or Granville Island and explore. You can eat fudge by the pound at the candy store across from the hotel or just sit outside and sip a cappuccino at one of the three hundred Starbucks in the city.
I walked in the park by the seawall until it looked like rain and then I headed back. I went up to my room and turned on the TV. The television at the Sutton Place had three regular channels. I flipped on channel one. There I was on Seinfeld. I changed the channel. There I was again in an old TV movie, The Marla Hanson Story. I changed the channel again, and bam! There I was in Thelma & Louise, sitting in a helicopter with Harvey Keitel. It was supernatural.
There were lots of ways to interpret this omen. I could have been proud to be all over Canadian television, but that’s not what I felt. I was working on a science fiction movie. Perhaps I had died at the fudge store earlier this morning and went into some sort of hell where I was doomed to watch myself forever. No, that wasn’t it, either. What fascinated me was that each role on TV displayed me in a different state of baldness. It was like strapping into an unflattering time machine. Dorian Gray in reverse. The bottom line was I couldn’t afford to age any more. I turned off the set and went down to the bar to kill some time before the television killed me.
It was early. The Gerard Lounge was pretty empty. Deb, the bartender, had been there for years. (Ann and I met Deb in this bar when we were dating.) I decided to sit at the bar, study my script, and chat with her. I started reading scenes for tomorrow when an older man sat down a couple of stools away from me. He eyed me, then opened his newspaper and began to read. There was the Zen sound of reading while drinking alcoholic beverages for a couple of minutes. Then, the man spoke to me.
“You an extra?”
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
“I see you’re reading a script. I wondered if you were an extra.”
“No. I’m an actor.”
“Extras always say they’re actors.”
“Maybe. But they don’t give extras scripts.”
“So, you say you’re an actor. Do you have lines?”
“Yes. I have a lot of lines.”
“You don’t look like an actor. You’re bald.”
“You can go upstairs right now and turn on your TV and see me with hair.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. On three different channels.”
“What do you play in the movie?”
“The bad guy. The main bad guy. I murder people.”
I was thinking about murdering this strange man, and I had only been talking to him for forty seconds. In acting class, students always ask, “How would you play a murderer like Othello or Macbeth?” Easy. Imagine you’re Othello and Desdemona comes into the bedroom and asks you if you’re an extra.
I can’t think of any other profession publicly hammered to the extent that acting is on a regular basis. I would never go up to someone and say, “So you say you’re a waiter? What restaurant do you work at? Nice place, or just a McDonald’s? If it’s a McDonald’s, then you’re not really a waiter. Do you do dinner or just lunch? Do you have a jacket with your name on it? Oh, you don’t have a full bar—just wine, okay, okay. I get it.”
This fellow at the bar was riling me. But I thought that I was in this country for two more weeks. I didn’t want to be arrested by a Mountie. It would be humiliating. I introduced myself.
“Good evening. I’m Stephen. Stephen Tobolowsky.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Well, what’s your name, because I’m sure I’ve never heard of you, either?”
He offered his hand. “Freddie.”
He didn’t look like a Freddie but why would he lie about something like that? “Nice to meet you, Freddie. What do you do?”
“I’m a gambler.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“A professional gambler?”
“It’s what I do. And if you play me, I’ll break you. I mean it. I’ll break you.”
“Well, then I won’t play you. I don’t gamble, Freddie.”
“That’s what they all say. Then they take me on. And I have no mercy. I’m not kidding. I’ve broken men. They’ve cried. I took away their homes, their cars, their bank accounts, and they cried. They say, ‘Please don’t. Please don’t. It’s all I’ve got. I have a wife and family.’ I just looked at them. I didn’t care. I didn’t even feel sorry for them.”
“Well, that sounds a little hard, Freddie.”
“If it’s all he’s got, he shouldn’t have played me.”
“You’re right. You’re right about that. That’s why I don’t gamble.” I knew at this point I was involved with a crazy person, a drunk, or Satan. I didn’t like my options.
“Afraid to lose?” Freddie muttered.
“What?”
“Are you afraid to lose? Is that why you don’t gamble?”
“No. I don’t gamble because I don’t get pleasure in winning. I get tense when I win. I hate it when I lose, so what’s the point?”
Freddie straightened on his seat. “The point is I’m a fuckin’ millionaire. That’s the point. I can buy this hotel. I can buy this whole fuckin’ block. I can buy and sell you a dozen times over.”
“Of course you can. That’s easy. I’m an actor. I’m working on a space movie now where we never see the alien. What does that make me?”
“What?”
“Exactly. I can be bought, Freddie. That’s kind of my job description. Stephen Tobolowsky. He. Can. Be. Bought.”
Unaccustomed to verbal aikido, Freddie just stared at me. He pulled out a folded dollar bill. “You want to play Liar’s Poker?”
“No! Are you kidding? Put that thing away. That’s probably your goofy Liar’s Poker dollar with six zeros on it. Put it away. I don’t want you to break me. I don’t want you to make me cry. I don’t want to be another corpse on your doorstep, Freddie. I’m doing you a favor.”
Freddie put the dollar back in his wallet. “Margo begged me to stop.”
“Margo?”
“My wife. She begged me to stop.”
“You should listen to her. Especially if you’re already a millionaire. Maybe enough is enough. Do you have any children?”
“I have a son. He’s studying to be a screenwriter at USC.”
“A screenwriter? We could have used him on this movie. Well, God bless him. I hope he does well.”
Freddie grew pale. “What does God have to do with it? God has nothing to do with it. Fuck that. I paid for his school. Not God. My son does the work and gets the grades, not God.”
“Freddie, it’s just an expression. I was only wishing your son well.”
“Then keep your stinking God out of it.”
My cheeks flushed. Freddie noted my shaken composure with another sip of scotch.
I’ve heard gamblers always look for the “tell” in their opponents. The little subconscious gesture that always tells the truth, the sign that betrays your bluffs and reveals what you hold dear. Freddie had been looking for mine, and he may have found it.
The glue that holds a person together is either values or vanity. It is always detectable when we least expect it.
Two women in their midtwenties walked past us and took a table near the end of the bar. It caused Freddie to stop midsip. He watched them as they took their seats and scoped out the room. Freddie eyed them. He sipped on his scotch. He grinned and spoke to me with a certain air of conspiracy. “Hmm. They’re cute.”
“They’re twenty-five years old, Freddie. They’re supposed to be cute. That’s their job.”
“Should we buy them some drinks and go over there?”
“What?”
“Should we buy them drinks?”
I was unprepared for this turn. I don’t know why. This man who had been trying to dismantle me all afternoon wanted to hit on these girls. And he wanted me to be his wingman.
“Freddie, we’re married. What would Margo say? And they’re young enough to be your granddaughters. Your granddaughters! What would you talk to them about? School? What cell phone plan they have? Try to get them to play Liar’s Poker with you and break them? I’m sure if you went over there, you would make them cry. I guarantee it. I’ll go further, if you bought them drinks and went over there, you would ruin their evening.”
“You think?”
“One hundred percent positive. Absolutely. No question.”
“Really?”
“Really. I’ll bet you.” The words were out of my mouth before I knew what I had said.
Freddie went silent. He stared into me. “What do you want to bet?”
“Well, you know how I feel about gambling—we’ll have to make it interesting . . .”
Freddie’s complexion started to transform. “Name it.”
“I bet that I can prove to you that God exists. Right here. Right now. In fifteen minutes.”
Freddie was glowing. “And if you lose?”
“If I lose I’ll buy drinks for the girls and go over to the table with you.”
Freddie was almost jumping off his stool. “And if you win?”
“If I win, we don’t go over.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Just the look on your face will be enough. I’m sure of that.”
Freddie considered the wager. He looked at me again. He offered his hand. “You’re on.” He looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes. Starting now.”
I looked into Freddie’s eyes and sensed a line of attack. “Freddie, what was the time in your life you were most desperate, in the greatest despair?”
Freddie smiled, his face softened. “I was twenty-seven years old. I was a geologist surveying one of the ice sheets of Greenland. It was winter. That means night. No sun. We were sent out in groups of four. We had small lanterns dangling from our backpacks so you could see the rest of the party in the dark. We had been out for hours. We were exhausted. We were walking back to base camp. A blizzard was coming in fast. It was over 100 degrees below zero. The wind made it hard to walk. I had fallen behind the rest of the group, but I could still see the three lanterns ahead of me swaying in the distance. With the roaring wind and the darkness I couldn’t see where I was going. I lost my concentration, and I stepped into a hole in the ice. A crevasse. I fell into a fissure two thousand feet deep. But I was lucky. I landed on an ice shelf three feet wide—thirty feet down from the surface. Another foot out from the wall and I would have fallen half a mile. I landed on my backpack. I tried to get up. I couldn’t. I was hurt. I didn’t know if I had broken my spine, my pelvis, an ankle. I just knew I couldn’t feel my legs. I couldn’t move. It was quiet down in the ice. I could hear the wind roaring up top. We were given whistles for emergencies. I got mine out and blew it. And blew. It echoed in the glacier, but I knew in the blizzard they would never hear me. So I’m thinking if I tried to stand up and my leg gave way, or if I slipped on the ice, I’d be dead. If I tried to climb out and fell, I would never land on that shelf again. All I could do was lie there, looking up at the black sky, and die. And I know what you’re going to say. That while I was lying there, I prayed to God. ‘Oh please, please, God, please, help me!’ I did not.”
“No, I wasn’t going to say that at all. I was going to say, ‘Wow.’ That sounds bad, Freddie. That is a bad situation. I was sitting here wondering how you got out. I can’t believe you’re sitting here. How did you survive?”
“And I know where you’re going with this, too, and it had nothing to do with God. It was my partners. They saved me. They got back to base camp. And after about twenty minutes, they realized I wasn’t coming back. They got dressed again and went out and found me. They pulled me out. They saved my life. Not God.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did they save you? You weren’t family. I’m sure it wasn’t your endearing personality. Why?”
Freddie raised his eyebrows. He sipped his drink. No answer. I pressed on. “I’m looking at it from their perspective, Freddie. They come back. They’re wet and freezing, too. They get back to safety, to the fire. They undress, and even have a hot toddy and are getting ready to unload on the day. Then they realize you’re not there. What do they do? They make a decision—a decision not based on logic—certainly not based on self-preservation or survival. They put their drinks down, curse you a little, and then they suit up and head back out into the storm. They left safety and comfort for you. They did it for selfish reasons. They knew if they left you to die it would haunt them forever. They knew that they had to do everything in their power to save your life. Not because it was you, but because it was life. In that instant they knew on a molecular level that life is holy. Yes, it was your friends that saved you. But they did it because they felt the invisible connection that holds us all together. And I would say that invisible cord is God. Without God there is no holy. And without holy, there is no you. You died on the ledge.”
Freddie looked at me. I felt as though we sat there for five minutes, even though I’m sure it was only five seconds. And then he smiled. “Pretty good. Pretty good. Okay. I’ll give you that one.”
I was right. The look on his face was enough.
I don’t know that Freddie bought everything I said, but I do think he was amused by my effort. Maybe that was Freddie’s “tell.” He would always have a weakness for someone who made an effort. Someone who suited up and went back out to face the storm. We ordered another round of drinks. Freddie paid.
He took a sip of his scotch and looked over at the girls again. “Do you really think it would be a mistake to buy them some drinks and go over there?”
“Freddie, I thought you said you were a gambler. And the way I learned it, the first rule of gambling is that if you’re afraid to lose, you can’t afford to play.”
11.
LISTEN TO THE DOG
IT WAS CHRISTMAS Eve in Topanga. 1979. It was a party of about twelve friends. We had a turkey dinner with all the trimmings: apple pie, bottles of wine, homemade jalapeño jam. We were sitting around by the fire drinking buckets of cowboy coffee listening to Blood on the Tracks when Joe came out from the kitchen, smiling.
“Attention, everyone. I have an announcement to make.”
We paused in our merriment.
“My Christmas gift to you all has come a little early. To brighten up your holiday I’ve put LSD in all of your coffees.”
I stared into my now empty mug. Different phrases popped into my mind, like “Kill him, kill him, kill him now,” “With friends like that you don’t need enemies,” and “Why are the lights on the Christmas tree moving around the room?”
You have to understand that I have never been an advocate for drugs, even in college, even in the late sixties. I never understood them. I avoided them. People who did drugs in those days didn’t bathe regularly. They missed a lot of classes. They wore odd clothing combinations like T-shirts with top hats, and they listened to lots of FM radio. It all scared me.
I later learned that the main reason people took up drugs in grad school was to watch
something called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I had no idea. So I broke down. In 1975, at the University of Illinois, I succumbed to peer pressure and smoked something called “hash” and watched the program. The show was quite humorous in its own right. Mercifully the “hash” had no effect on me at all. That time.
It had no effect the next week, either.
The third week it had an effect.
My friend’s version was I was watching the show, smoking hash, and I passed out. My version was that the couch I was sitting on turned into a large, toothless mouth covered with cat hair. It swallowed me whole and I slid down an upholstered esophagus lined with chips and beer, and landed in the stomach of hell.
My first high. After this first experience, I was reluctant to use drugs again. This disappointed many of my friends. I never knew which part of the drug experience they wanted me to revisit: the nausea, the cat hair, or the loss of consciousness. The First Rule of drug use: There is no experience bad enough, no decision boneheaded enough that it cannot be revisited—often.
I counted myself one of the lucky ones. The only long-term effect of those Saturday evenings with the hash pipe was that I did start listening to more FM radio.
But I digress. ’Twas the night before Christmas. I had drunk a mug of LSD and the lights on the Christmas tree had started walking around the room. They were changing colors. My heart pounded in my ears louder and louder. I was furious that I had been ambushed over the holidays and I wasn’t even visiting my parents.
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 12
