And of course I won’t get it back and it will be consigned to the great necropolis of dead scripts, a massive tomb under a mountain in Utah where the air is dry and cool. A friend of mine was sent down into this awful legacy of failure to root around and see if anything was worth bringing back to light. He found a script by F. Scott Fitzgerald and for a while, the studio was looking for someone to rewrite the great man; but I’ve heard no more about it and presume it’s gone back into the darkness.
In my struggle for survival I have dragged my simian arse as far from its origins as I could—from the lawns of Cambridge to the Mercedes-littered lots of Hollywood, then to New York’s Upper East Side—and all I’ve achieved, ‘spiritually,’ is that: survival. I have a life which requires me to earn at least half a million dollars a year. I am always either in debt or on the verge of it. I have no money saved. I could be wiped out by a few months of studio indifference. I feel drained. What is the purpose of all this?
If I believed in God, I could comfort myself with the thought that once in heaven the bills would at least stop coming. Instead the only relief in sight is complete extinction. Circumstances change and in response, I simply become more anxious. It’s as if my whole character has become vestigial to this constant fear. Somewhere in my mind there still swaggers the fine young, atheistic monkey waving his insolent hard-on at the world, but suddenly it’s no longer amusing or effective and soon it will become embarrassing. I am not afraid of death, I’m afraid of a moment when, immobilised by something fatal, and unable to distract myself with work or sex or illusions of progress, I reflect on my life and see a rich and fascinating landscape, and me off to one side of it, a rat inside a wheel of darkness.
It’s time to become wise and happy. But how? I am an adolescent lobbed into middle age without the necessary equipment. Sitting in the bus, cut loose from obligation and decency, I start to wander inward. When I look out the bus window now, what I see are scenes from my childhood, and I find myself compelled to write them down. Another book, an unasked for book, takes shape in my mind, The Monkey and His Education.
There’s a sudden random swath of wildflowers on the meridian. It passes by like a brush stroke and jolts me back to the external journey. The country has become more hilly with tree-covered mountains in the distance. The highway is less crowded.
To my left a Hispanic woman sniffs constantly, every fourth or fifth breath. It’s really incredible. If the seats reclined, she could lie back and the fluid would drain down her throat, but they don’t. You get a two-inch tilt that’s barely noticeable and she doesn’t have a tissue.
A sign on a mountainside says ‘Endless Caves’ but nothing can compete with the endless sniffing. Many hours have passed and many more are yet to come. Since the book I was reading on Darwin brought on a crisis of memory and self-loathing, I decide to go back to my book on the South.
Tobacco, it tells me, introduced to the whites by the Indians (some small revenge, I suppose, for the theft of their land), soon became the major crop in the South. Tobacco was labour intensive. The first people to work in the fields were indentured servants from England who worked off their passage and were then set free, at which point they became expensive to hire.
Enter the slave. You could lease an Englishman for a year or two, but a black man you could buy for a lifetime. The outlay was higher but once purchased you could literally work him to death. I remember when a movie of mine was being shot in Atlanta, arriving late to my hotel and being ushered to my room by a young, gay African-American man. When I asked him where I could buy cigarettes, he told me it was too late and offered me one of his. I thanked him effusively. ‘No, no,’ he said, waving my gratitude aside with a complicit smile, ‘I too am a slave to nicotine.’ How ironic, I now think, seeing a larger meaning, that African-Americans who continue to smoke in America are in fact continuing a 400-year tradition of slavery to the deceptively beautiful plant.
The bus stops and about half the occupants leap out to smoke. It’s quite comic this. Sometimes the bus stops for only thirty seconds. The true addict gets out none the less, lights up, sucks feverishly on his cigarette, then re-enters the bus, coughing. This, however, is a longer stop. I haven’t smoked in a long while, but suddenly, I have the urge to have just one. I go to the mixed-race couple and burn a cigarette. We sit in the sun, our backs to a dilapidated convenience store. She is a Certified Nursing Assistant and he’s in the building trade, bricklaying, concrete. I ask him how he feels about moving to the South.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘as a man of colour …’
He takes a drag on his cigarette, looks off into the distance, exhales, and lets the smoke drift off with the rest of his sentence.
CHAPTER TWO
An Alligator Up My Arse in Roanoke, Virginia
About twelve hours after I get on the bus in New York, I arrive in Roanoke, Virginia, and my buttocks are numb. I have decided to travel only during the day and to stay in the best possible hotels at night. Roanoke, known as the Capital of the Blue Ridge, is a town on the Norfolk and Western Railway. It advertises itself as a centre for ‘transportation, distribution, trade, manufacturing, health care, entertainment, recreation, attractions and conventions.’ As I take a three-minute cab ride across town, I don’t see much evidence of any of these. The place seems a little beaten.
The best hotel in Roanoke, the Patrick Henry, is a grand, faded downtown hotel not far from the railway station, which, having spawned the place, now seems curiously irrelevant. A large lobby with antique tables and Fifties sofas is only slightly marred by modern signage. Behind the desk is a woman in her early twenties with five earrings in each ear. She is short and slight and has reddish brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wears a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and has a rueful, mischievous look, as if she’s acting a role and is slightly embarrassed by it. Her name is Tasha.
I ask her which room in the hotel is the most luxurious. It’s the Governor’s Suite at $250 a night. The next best is the Honeymoon Suite, which she’ll let me have at a special rate of $99. She gives me both keys and I go upstairs. I prefer the Honeymoon Suite and go downstairs to return the other key to Tasha.
‘If you have any questions,’ she says, taking my credit card, ‘don’t hesitate to ask.’
‘What’s the meaning of life?’
‘Love, Happiness, and Art,’ she replies without hesitation.
‘But if you have love, aren’t you already happy?’ I suggest.
‘Oh, no, love is painful,’ she says with a pained smile. It turns out she is a local artist, as is her boyfriend.
I go up in an old elevator, along some narrow corridors where no attempt has been made at ‘decor’ and let myself into the Honeymoon Suite. It’s a big-piped, disjointed corner. It smells of old cigarettes, the curtains are tattered, but the antiques are real. There’s a living room, about twenty-five feet by fifteen. In the kitchen there’s a massive refrigerator which has the fat, rounded, confident lines of forty years ago. If you tipped it over and put fins on it, you could drive it. The bedroom has a king-size bed and off it a bathroom that was once grand but now has a chipped birthmark-coloured bath with one of those shower heads where the water comes at you like ten different squints. Such a room in New York would cost $500. It’s a room where drugs are done, a room for provincial whores with a tendency to fall on their tits after a few drinks. It’s perfect and I’m happy.
I leave the hotel and wander along the street looking for a restaurant. I’m in the downtown area of a typical small town. Once the centre of commerce, it has been abandoned for the suburbs, for strip malls and modern office buildings with convenient parking. Too late, the community has realised the value of having a heart. Although parts of it have been recklessly knocked down, this remains the most beautiful part of town, with old red brick factories and warehouses waiting to become lofts and boutiques. At the moment, though, it’s still in transition. The shops that have survived, a stationer’s, a small depa
rtment store, are dusty and understocked. Here and there you see a tall, pointless wall, a survivor of demolition, painted with a large fading advertisement in lettering from the Thirties, ‘Virginia Carriage Factory’ or ‘Pepsi-Cola 5 cents, Fountains and in Bottles.’
A few blocks away, I find The Street, the one where development has taken hold. There are shops for tourists and several bars. I look in the window of one and see a short but fat congaline thudding around between cramped tables. Few sights are more pitiful and depressing than fat middle-aged drunks dancing like teenagers, but I am immune and walk away smiling. I go by some antique shops, a health-food peddler, a pawnshop, and a restaurant called Awful Arthur’s. Now I’m at the end of the street.
I turn around and go eat at Awful Arthur’s, crayfish and melted butter served by a waitress who went into the Navy to study medicine but didn’t like it.
‘Now I’m thinking of animal training,’ she tells me. ‘You know, like Shamu at SeaWorld, and dogs and so on, too.’
My guidebook tells me there were several Civil War battles in the Roanoke Valley. In one of them Union General David Hunter was forced to retreat up nearby Potts Mountain and 700 of his horses died of exhaustion. It took the local people a week to bury them. On the top of Mill Mountain, just outside of town, is a 100-foot-tall illuminated concrete-and-steel star which can be seen from sixty miles away on a clear night. It symbolises ‘the friendliness, industry and civic progress’ of the town. Because of this Roanoke is sometimes known as Star City. I don’t know about the industry or civic progress, but, as far as I can tell from the cabdriver, Tasha, and the would-be whale trainer, it certainly is friendly.
A squad of students—they look like students anyhow, in fact they look like students of the late Sixties—hang around outside. One of them, a white guy with frizzy, colourless dreads, has an African drum which they all take turns beating incompetently and with obvious self-consciousness. One girl is really pretty and seems appropriately embarrassed. She doesn’t beat the drum. One of the boys has a meagre moustache and wears a bike helmet which makes him look like an insect.
Having proudly pursued a life first of determined ignorance and then of almost compulsive solitary study, I’ve resisted the temptation to envy the more structured academic life. Lately, however, I have found it impossible to resist entirely. I have a stepson who goes to college and have seen the thing up close for the first time.
Diogo is a rare young man, completely his own person, eccentric, original, and a good poet. He attends Bard, a college a couple of hours north of New York. It’s an amazing place. A typical semester consists of Russian Humour, Computer Science, and The Irish Bardic Tradition. You could fall backward into a secondhand bookshop and get the same effect without having to shell out $30,000 a year, but America has become addicted to the college degree and everyone is terrorised into attendance. You can’t even get a job in the mail room of a Hollywood talent agency without a degree from Harvard and where previously an enterprising kid would drop out and leave for Paris or Haight Ashbury, he or she now dutifully stays and receives the scroll and hat or whatever token it is you receive for your $120,000.
Youth, as the saying goes, is wasted on the young. So, I would argue, to a large extent, is higher education. It’s like force-feeding caviar to a baby. An incredibly rich experience is offered—access to a billion eggs of knowledge—but youth has no idea how rare and exotic this is. Their virgin palates are immune. Caviar? Knowledge? So what?
In my late forties, I’ve now worked up a discriminating appetite and taking even as little as a year off to fill in some gaps which the autodidactic method leaves in its wake is tempting in the extreme. My God, you could wake up in the morning with a question about philosophy or art or religion or quantum mechanics or history and before breakfast locate a man who knows the answer! Exams and degrees pollute the whole experience, but looking at the workload of the average student, I figure—if they’d let me—I could probably pick up two to three degrees a year.
‘I have an essay to write,’ a friend of Diogo’s tells me. ‘It’s got to be at least five pages long. I should have it finished in a couple of weeks.’
Five pages?! I write five pages before lunch.
But the scholastic element is only a part of what I’ve come to envy. There’s the social aspect. As Diogo writes:
She saw me as we crossed.
Across the bridge I saw her wink.
It was the kind of thing you feel
Before there’s time to think:
Love, it’s batting lashes,
Burning simple dreams to ashes.
You get the impression there’s a lot of lash-batting and burning dreams and smouldering ashes, all occurring at an exquisitely leisurely pace. Time, this is what I never had, this extensive, carefree time, days passing in a slow miasma of cigarette smoke and anticipation. I started work at fifteen and haven’t stopped since. No, I stopped once. When I was twenty I inherited some money from my paternal grandfather and took off for North Africa in a van with a Belgian dancer I met while working a spotlight in a nightclub. That lasted six months, and even then I was trying to write a play, actually two plays side by side on the same stage, which meant I had to lug around a typewriter designed for accountants, with a carriage twenty inches long. The rest of the time I was either writing or directing my way in and out of debt. And still am. My so-called youth was never like this, where you sit around for several hours at a time patting a drum and nodding your head.
So I’m watching these kids and envying them their idleness and irresponsibility, and then I leave Awful Arthur’s and walk back up the street to the hotel, and along the way I look inside one of those metal vending machines and read the headline of the Roanoke Times which is: ‘Cow Proves She’s Not Part of Herd—She Leaps Pickup with Single Bound.’
And suddenly I’m not so envious of these particular students anymore. There might be more exciting places to slap a drum.
Back in my hotel room I call my ten-year-old daughter, Anna Bella Charles Darwin Teixeira Chapman, who has inherited from me, along with the Darwin name squeezed in there for possible use during seduction of academic snobs (it worked for me a couple of times), a tendency to riff on a theme. She warns me to shake my shoes in the morning.
‘They’ve got spiders down there, you know … and tarantulas and scorpions.’
‘And alligators and crocodiles,’ I add, untruthfully, trying to impress her.
‘Don’t be stupid, they won’t get in your shoes, they’re too big, but be careful of the toilets, the young alligators might come up the pipes.’
‘Bite me in the arse?’
‘Might go right up there, then you’d have to buy a pair of pants with a hole in the back. People would say, “Gee, what a beautiful, green scaly tail you’ve got,” and you’d have to say, “No, that’s an alligator up my ass.” ’
I got her mother, Denise, a Brazilian actress, pregnant almost on the first date. Denise is the daughter of Humberto Teixeira, a lawyer, composer, and lyricist, who wrote the musical copyright laws in Brazil. The author of ‘Asa Branca,’ one of the most loved of Brazilian songs—in a recent poll it came in just behind ‘Brazil’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’—he was a stubborn romantic originally from the harsh northeast of the country. Her mother, Margarida Jatoba, was an exceptionally beautiful concert pianist with pale skin, red hair and green eyes. When Denise was only five, Margarida left Humberto for a journalist who lived upstairs from their apartment overlooking the sea in Rio de Janeiro. An ugly divorce followed, during much of which Denise was not allowed to see her mother and was raised by her heartbroken father and his mother.
Humberto never remarried. He devoted much of his time and money to building and rebuilding a mansion on the hills just outside the city, as if in preparation for an ideal marriage, or the return of his red-haired wife.
Denise grew up between her grandmother’s house in Ipanema, overlooking Rio’s lake Rodrigo de Freitas, and the ever
expanding mansion, a place of waterfalls and secret doors. Soon she became as beautiful as her mother. She was a good student, the youngest in her class by two years but always at the top. She wanted to be a children’s doctor until she was sixteen, when, against the wishes of her father, she started acting, first in theatre and then on TV. By the time she was seventeen she was a star, recognised, as she is today, on the streets of any city in Brazil. When she was eighteen, she came to New York to study at NYU under Stella Adler, but dropped out two years later because of the pressures of her career in Brazil. Soon after returning, she married Claudio Marzo, father of the aforementioned Diogo.
The dictatorship was still in power and artists of all kinds were frequently jailed and tortured. Claudio, then and now one of Brazil’s best known actors, was part of the left wing opposing the dictatorship. He was ten years older than Denise and very attractive. They married when she was twenty and separated a couple of years later.
Denise and I met for the first time in Los Angeles about ten years after this. She was very striking with the exceptionally white skin of her mother and long, dark red hair. She had moved to New York after the release of Kiss of the Spiderwoman with Sonia Braga, William Hurt and Raul Julia, in which she played Michelle, the cigarette-girl. Though this was not the lead, she had attracted some attention. We were introduced by a mutual friend, a woman. Over dinner Denise produced some bent coins which she claimed had been telekinetically twisted by a friend of hers in Brazil, a guru named Thomas Green Morton. He also bent forks. I knew these were common magicians’ tricks, and as I find credulity the most irritating of all vices, I put her out of my mind.
A year later, she moved to Los Angeles and the same friend, the actress Dana Delaney, brought her along to a screening. Again, the three of us had dinner, and now I saw in Denise qualities which overwhelmed my irritation. Putting aside her lack of scepticism about the coin-bending guru in Brazil, she was intelligent, funny, informed, well read, and sexy. Capable and determined, she used words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ and did not use words like ‘commitment’ or ‘nurturing.’ She was radiant with honesty and goodness and lacking in pretence, artifice, or guile. She drank and she smoked and she laughed. Diogo was turning eleven the next day. She invited me to come to his birthday party. I accepted.
Trials of the Monkey Page 2
