My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life

by Adam Nimoy

“Especially my cooking.”

  Mom’s pretty good with the sarcasm herself when she wants to be.

  “Yeah, Ma, like your Meat Loaf Surprise and the liver and onions. Makes my mouth water just to think about it.”

  Mom starts laughing.

  “Do you want to be mentioned in the memoirs?”

  “Well, it would be nice.”

  “What do you want me to say about you?”

  “That I tried so hard to be a good mother. That I tried never to yell at you and I let you get away with stuff sometimes. I stood between you and your father, which may not have been a good thing. I let you have friends stay over and I never made judgments about the friends you ran around with later on except Brian Stevenson, and I never made many judgments about him either. I just tried to be there for you. You would come home from elementary school very angry. The incident with the coat was early on. The gray coat with the elastic neckline. It didn’t matter how hot it was, you insisted on wearing that coat. And when the teachers made you take it off, you went bonkers and I had to come get you. You would roll in the grass and then break out, you were so allergic. And I would have to go get you and bring you home. You were a very sensitive kid. It all came from my side of the family of course because we were not shtarkers.

  “But you were a good boy, a sweet boy. You just got really crazy sometimes. You had a precise world and didn’t like it being disturbed. You liked things to be in order. That’s why, later on, you started to wash your own sheets and make your bed the way you liked it. And you couldn’t stand to have a tag on your shirts. And your shoes had to fit a certain way.”

  Yeah, my shoes and my shirts and my pants and my underwear . . .

  “Now I see you wearing T-shirts and shorts that a few years back you wouldn’t walk around in. You just used to look like you stepped out of a band box, a fashion show, your shirts perfectly ironed and your pants perfectly pressed.”

  I don’t know who the hell she’s talking about here. Her other son maybe.

  “Now you come over and you’re in a shirt that’s not necessarily ironed and shorts. You just don’t dress the way you used to. And you tell me your apartment is a mess, but I still have trouble visualizing that. You were always so neat and liked everything to have some sense of order. I guess that shows strides for you. I don’t know if it’s the therapy or you getting out of an unhappy marriage or what, but I think you’re more comfortable with yourself.”

  HOLLY

  I MET HOLLY at a meeting. She’s a pretty redhead in her early forties. We’re on our first date. We walk down to the beach and sit on the berm overlooking the waves. Holly says that she’s been sober six weeks and that she feels like she’s finally beginning to live a sober lifestyle. She tells me about her job and how lucky she is to have it and that things are getting exciting because she and her partner are buying out the company. She tells me how great sober sex is. She tells me that when men have sex, they act like they can’t believe they’re getting laid. They start thinking of other things so as not to come too quickly and so when you look in their eyes and think you’re making this big connection, they’re thinking about pickle sandwiches or something.

  Pickle sandwiches?

  She tells me that men are simple, they really want only one thing. She tells me that to keep the sex interesting, you have to stay on the couch as long as possible, because once it gets to the bed, that’s where you always go. She tells me that it’s better to have sex before going out to eat because afterward, people, especially women, get too full and tired. She happily lets me take the phone calls from my kids as we sit on the beach. She comments that the weather is perfect and it is. She tells me no kissing on the first date but that touching is welcome and then comments that our legs are rubbing up against each other. She keeps touching my arm when she laughs and she laughs a lot. She tells me she was adopted and that she knows she looks like someone, that she never knew her birth mother and is somewhat curious to look her up but is also afraid she’ll find her in some run-down trailer park.

  * * *

  When I call her today, she tells me she’s disappointed that I can’t make the meeting on Monday, that she wanted to look at me knowing that she knows me but not let anyone else know. That she would make eyes at me but not let anyone else see. I tell her how complicated my life is and she tells me that maybe what I need right now is just a friend.

  “You mean you want to be ‘just friends’?”

  “No, I just think that maybe right now, that’s what you need.”

  I really like Holly.

  We agree to meet in the afternoon on Saturday, July 3, and that I should call her around noon to discuss details. I’m really looking forward to this. On Saturday, I call her at noon and leave a message on her cell. I then drag Jonah and his entire drum kit down to a party in Santa Monica and then I have to run back to the house because he forgot his high-hat stand. When I finally finish with him at one-thirty, I call her again and again it goes straight to voice mail. And then nothing.

  And it hit me hard. Because Holly is a no-show. I’m standing in a market getting something to eat when I leave her one last message. And that’s the end of that.

  And for consolation, I remind myself that she’s an addict who hasn’t been sober very long and maybe she needs a little more time.

  When I talk to her the following week she says she didn’t know we had plans and that she was up in Malibu for the day with “a friend.”

  THE RIV

  I’VE SEEN A lot of Spock pix in my day, but one of my favorites is of Dad in full costume and makeup leaning against the front of his first luxury car, a beautiful black Buick Riviera. It’s parked in his spot on the Desilu lot directly across from Stage 9, where they shot Star Trek. Dad’s got his arms crossed and he’s got a half-smile going as he leans against the hood of that shiny black car. It’s only a black-and-white photo but it’s got to be one of the coolest images on the planet.

  It was 1966 when he bought the Riv. Dad can be a pretty frugal guy, and he was always very good at living within his means. But Trek was on, meaning he had a job for the entire season, meaning he had some money to burn. The Riv was a used ’64, but it was beautiful: black with silver trim, pointed leading edges at the front fender, and a sleek contour angled to razor edges at the back. That car looked like the consumer version of the Batmobile, and it was Buick’s answer to the Ferrari and the Thunderbird. The Riv didn’t so much drive along the streets of Los Angeles as swam. It swam like a killer shark.

  Dad enjoyed that car so much that two years later, in 1968, he bought himself a new one. We hadn’t had a new car since the Pontiac LeMans that he bought back in ’62. The ’68 Riviera was brown and it was a tank compared to the Riv and not nearly as cool. But he gave the Riv to my mother and I was glad we kept it in the family.

  I really loved the Riv. In fact I loved it so much that in the winter of 1970, when I was fourteen, I would occasionally take it out for a spin in the neighborhood while my parents were out for the evening. This went on for weeks and I got pretty good at driving the Riv until one of my joyrides ended up at the Purdue Police Station in West L.A. where I was mugshotted and fingerprinted along with three girls from my school who were in the car with me.

  After my parents bailed me out, I spent the night in a sleeping bag on the floor of their room whimpering and generally feeling sorry for myself. My mother tried to comfort me. My father yelled. He simply didn’t know how to deal with this kind of situation. It was an incredibly painful experience. The next day, I was grounded.

  * * *

  Oddly enough, the story of the Riv has become an important part of my curriculum at the film school because I’m teaching an acting class now. It’s a summer class for high school freshmen students. There are a dozen students in my class out of about a hundred students in the summer program who come from high schools all over the country. I’m giving them “Adam Nimoy’s Incredibly Wonderful Lecture on Working with Directors.” It’s act
ually the same lecture on acting I’ll soon be giving to the directing classes, only then I’ll be calling it “Adam Nimoy’s Incredibly Wonderful Lecture on Directing Actors.” In the lecture, I talk about the practical tools I use on the set to help actors with performance issues. I constantly repeat in all my classes that I teach three things at the film school: story, performance, and the technical aspects of filmmaking, in that order, with strong emphasis on story and performance.

  “And when we shoot a show, or a movie, for that matter, we don’t shoot the story in a linear continuum, right? We don’t shoot scene one and then scene two and then scene three. We shoot . . . ?”

  Someone in the class who knows something about filmmaking answers.

  “Out of continuity.”

  “Yes, we shoot out of continuity. We shoot all the apartment scenes at one time and all the office scenes at one time and all the courtroom scenes at one time. Why is that?”

  “Because it’s faster.”

  “Yeah. It’s faster and easier and really the only economical way to do it. And because we do so much skipping around, when we’re on the set, one of the first things I talk to actors about is where we’ve been in the story and where we are now so that we’re consistent in developing their character arc.

  “I do try to schedule story events in order if I can, particularly if I think it’s critical to help with performance. But it usually doesn’t work that way. Imagine this scenario: A fourteen-year-old boy likes to take his mother’s car out for joyrides when his parents are out for the evening. He’s not a bad kid but he’s looking for some kicks and he grabs a pillow off the living room couch to sit on and takes his mother’s luxury car out for a drive through the neighborhood. And after doing this three or four times, he gets cocky one night and picks up three girls who go to his school. And now he’s driving on big streets like Westwood Boulevard heading toward the Westwood Village. And while he’s stopped at the light at, say, Wilshire Boulevard, who do you think pulls up next to him?”

  “His parents.”

  “Close, and that would make for a funny situation. But no, he’s not that lucky and this is not a comedy, it’s more of a tragicomedy. Who do you think pulls up right next to him?”

  “The cops.”

  “The cops. And they’re looking at this kid and they know he’s not sixteen and the girls are telling him to sit up straight and the cops let him drive by and they get behind him and pull him over. And the cops arrest them and handcuff them and drag them down to the police station and separate them and take mugshots of them and fingerprint them. They tell the kid he’s going to be charged with driving without a license and stealing a car and reckless endangerment and that he’ll probably spend the next six months at a road camp for delinquents. And why do you think they do all this?”

  “Because they want to scare him.”

  “Yeah, they want to scare the shit out of him because the kid’s clean, he doesn’t have a record. They just want to scare him so he never does it again. And it does scare him. Then his parents come and bail him out and during the car ride home, it’s basically the silent treatment because they’re going to discuss all this in the morning. And then the next day, we have the ‘showdown’ scene with the parents, the ‘what were you thinking?!’ scene where the kid ends up getting grounded. And you’re originally scheduled to shoot the police precinct on location. On day three of the production, you’re scheduled to shoot the ‘scare the shit out of him’ scene at an actual police station. The showdown scene with the parents at home shoots on, say, day five, so you’re shooting in continuity, which is great, particularly for the actor playing the kid. Why?”

  “Because he gets to experience what it’s like in the police station.”

  “Exactly. But guess what? You lose the police precinct because Officer Training Day gets rescheduled to the day you’re supposed to shoot and the precinct is no longer available. And now you can’t get back in there until day eight, until after the showdown scene with the parents, and you can’t move the showdown scene.

  “Do you see the problem here? Do you see your problem as an actor? Because I would come up to you, the actor, and describe exactly what is going to go down at that precinct. I might go over to the actor playing the kid, and before we rehearse the showdown scene, I might walk him through the whole litany of what went down the night before: the mug shots and the fingerprints and the police in his face and the stuff about road camp and he can hear the girls crying in another jail cell and he barely slept that night after he got home with his parents at one AM. And now rehearsal’s up for the showdown scene. I do this kind of thing because I happen to think it’s going to help the actor.

  “But guess what? That actor may not get that direction. You may not get that direction because many directors don’t talk to actors either because they don’t know how or they just don’t have the time. And this is the kind of work you’re going to have to do on your own. This is the work of your craft that you need to do to prepare yourself for that showdown scene when, for whatever reason, you aren’t given much direction.

  One of the girls raises her hand.

  “Yes?”

  “This sounds like a story about a boy crying for attention.”

  “Yes, depending on the rest of the story, that may very well be the case, and you can certainly choose to play it that way. Good observation.”

  But I don’t tell her that what the boy really wants is the attention of the girls he picked up that night. I don’t tell the class that he wants Sarah and Cyndi and Lori to think he’s cool so that they’ll accept him and bring him into their circle of friends. I don’t tell them that although the father is extremely focused on his career, the kid really doesn’t want the dad’s attention. Because, throughout his childhood, there’s been a lot of awkwardness and distance with his father and the kid never intended to put more strain on their relationship.

  And I don’t tell the class that when the kid turns fifteen and is about to begin driver’s training, his mother will laugh out loud when the instructor asks if the kid has any prior driving experience.

  MY NEW NOT-SO-BRILLIANT CAREER: EVERYBODY WANTS TO DIRECT

  THEY FINALLY ASSIGN me to a one-year directing class. I’ve had a couple of one-week crash-course directing classes, which went really well, but this is my first time with a full-fledged class. This class is going into its second semester and they’re about to start shooting their short films.

  The class is a mix of American and international students. I have a guy from Korea, two guys from India, a girl from China, a guy from Italy, a guy from Spain, and a guy from the marines.

  When I start with a new class, I try to learn all of their names the first day. I start with the student in the front on the left and ask them to say their name and tell us something about themselves—where they’re from, what it’s like where they live, and whether they have any experience in film. Then I continue on down the row, always going back to the first student and repeating their names.

  “Thank you, Jeff. So that’s Cindy and Terry and Barbara and Alex and Cole and Jeff. Next?”

  And so on all the way through until I know all twenty-two names. And somehow, I usually manage to remember all of them. I tell them I do this not because I care to learn their names, I do it because I don’t want to get Alzheimer’s, and scientific studies have proven that memorization is one way to keep senility at bay. But deep down I do it because I know that remembering a student’s name is a powerful tool for a teacher because when you call them by name, each and every one of them feels special and gets all warm and fuzzy inside and this helps to get their attention and keep them participating. Except in law school. There you pray the teacher forgets your name.

  “So that’s Cindy and Terry and Barbara and Alex and Cole and Jeff and Chad and you are?”

  “Max.”

  “Where are you from, Max?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “What part?”

  “Zuri
ch.”

  “Zurich, huh? I had a girlfriend in college who was born in Basel.”

  “Oh, yes, Basel is very close to Zurich. Just about eighty-five kilometers west.”

  “I haven’t seen her in twenty years. If you happen to bump into her when you get back there, tell her to call me.”

  “Of course. What’s her name?”

  “Beatrice. Beatrice McClam. I tried to Google her but she’s not very Google-able. So that’s Cindy and Terry and Barbara and Alex and Cole and Jeff and Chad and Max and . . .”

  “Soren.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Sweden.”

  “Any experience in film or TV?”

  “I worked for a postproduction company for Norwegian TV shows and I worked for three years as an editor.”

  “Good, so you have some serious experience. What’s life like in Sweden?”

  “Cold all the time. July and August are nice summers, the rest of the year it’s cold.”

  “Why do people live there?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s because of the women. Almost all are blondes.”

  “Did you leave any Norwegian or Swedish women behind when you left?”

  “Ya.”

  “And were they crying when you left?”

  “Ya, all five or six of them. Ya, they were crying.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing, you guys. I know you’ve already been through directing classes, but I’m going to be reviewing with you some things and then spending class time throughout the semester critiquing your films. In keeping with the curriculum, we teach three things here at the academy: story, performance, and technique, and by that I mean the technical aspect of filmmaking. Now, I know you’ve spent a lot of time learning all the technical aspects of filmmaking in terms of lighting and camera, and don’t get me wrong, that stuff’s important. But from my experience working in television, I can tell you that what really matters is story. It’s story, folks. Because I don’t give a shit how fancy you are with the camera or with lighting or with special effects. If you can’t tell a good story, or, more correctly, show, because you’re working in a visual medium, if you can’t show us some little piece of truth about the human condition, then you’re wasting your time. Because we have plenty of flashy directors who have wonderful visual style and technique and know all the latest technology. But good storytellers? Those are in very short supply.”