The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  He was, though. It was him. It looked exactly like him. Exactly.

  "What are…what?" I managed to mumble.

  "Sorry if I gave you a fright," he said, smiling.

  I leaned over to pick up my bag, but stood back up empty handed.

  "What…uh," I stammered again.

  "Just back into town?" he said.

  "Yes, I guess."

  "Terrific," he said, "Me, too."

  "Who are you?" I asked, squinting, "I mean, can I help you with something?"

  "Just wanted to say hello," he said, picking up my bag and holding it out to me.

  I took it from him slowly, and my voice cracked as I squeaked like an eight year old.

  "Are you the Lone Ranger?"

  "No," he said.

  "No?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "You're not?"

  "No, sir."

  "You're not the Lone Ranger?"

  "No, I'm not. I'm an actor, like you."

  "You're an actor?" I asked, then chuckled, "I mean, of course you're an actor, because, um…What?"

  "My name is Clayton Moore. I'm not acting anymore, though."

  "You need to get the clothes back, then," I said.

  "Heh, maybe you're right."

  "Well, what are you doing now?" I asked, expecting to hear something about his busy schedule of personal appearances at very late night conventions.

  "Many things, friend. I do many things."

  That answer was strange enough to snap me out of the weirdness and start walking. He walked along beside me, his polished boots clicking across a subway grate hissing warm steam.

  "Things like what?" I asked.

  "Things like talk with you," he said, smiling and getting creepy.

  "I've got to say, you look exactly like that guy, though. The guy who played the Lone Ranger."

  "I am the guy who played the Lone Ranger," he said.

  "You said you weren't!" I said, turning on him.

  "No, I said I'm not the Lone Ranger! I'm the actor who played him."

  "Wait a minute! Were you on the train with me? Did you go to that thing?"

  "What thing is that?"

  "The convention thing in New Jersey," I said, trying to remember his table, "Was your table in Western Land or something?"

  "No, I wasn't in Western Land in New Jersey."

  "You didn't go to Chiller Theater?"

  "I don't know what that is," he said, smiling.

  "So, you weren't following me?"

  His smile never wavered, as he stared at me silently.

  We crossed the street together, and he held out his hand for a moment, protecting me from a cab turning a corner too tightly. After I'd given the cabbie a powerless tough guy stare, I hopped off the curb to look at him again.

  "What are you doing here? Are you doing a show or something?" I asked.

  "Nope," he said, starting to cross the street after me. That was it. "Nope." He kept up with me as I took bigger and bigger steps, ready to say good night and adios.

  "Then why are you dressed like that?"

  "For the fun of it. The company sued me so I couldn't wear the outfit anymore, couldn't even bill myself as the Lone Ranger, so here we are." "Where are we? What do you mean?"

  "It's a little present I give myself. So sue me!" he said, his laughter bouncing off the glass windows of a Seven-Eleven, swirling above the lit cables of the Walt Whitman bridge arching above the curves of his hat. The Lone Ranger's laugh must have been heard across the Delaware River and into Camden, New Jersey, as I became sure that he was an insane look-a-like, following me and carrying a pair of guns.

  I couldn't run. I'm not a runner. I'm hefty, with the addition of hip replacements, so I'm pretty much a stand my ground and hit you as hard as I can guy, because I'm big, slow, and want to save my life and property, but the thing was, the guy looked exactly like-

  "Clayton Moore," he said again, extending his right hand, and grasping the brim of his cowboy hat with the other.

  I gently set my bag back down on the pavement. "What is this? Is this a joke?"

  "No, friend, not a joke," he said.

  "Well, why are you following me?" I asked.

  "I want to see your show!" he said.

  "My show? You want to see my show?"

  "Sure I do! You do a show, right?"

  "I do…yes" I stammered out, "Yes, I do a comedy show, well, standup comedy,"

  He rested the palm of his hand on the pearl handle of a gun.

  "You have a show tomorrow?" he asked.

  "Yes, I do," I said.

  "When does the show start?"

  "Wait a minute. How do you know I have a show tomorrow?" I asked, "Why do you want to see my show?"

  He put both hands on his hips and leaned into me. "Now that's not the best attitude to take in the entertainment business, is it?" He almost put a hand on my shoulder, but pulled it back to his belt when I stepped backwards. "Why do I want to see your show?" he laughed, "Why doesn't everybody want to see your show?"

  "Maybe because they're lazy and have televisions?"

  "Gosh golly but you're no salesman," he said, smiling through the mask.

  "Okay, you're right. Yes, I have a show tomorrow. It's going to be great!"

  "Now that's the ticket right there!" he said, apparently incapable of understanding sarcasm.

  "I have to go," I said forcefully, picking up my stuff and moving toward the hotel and away from this phantom nut.

  "Alrighty," he said, "What time is tomorrow's show?"

  "What's tomorrow?"

  "It's a Sunday," he said.

  "Sunday? 7:30. It's a 7:30 show."

  "7:30 then. Okay, see you then," he said, nodding and tipping his hat. "Good night, friend."

  He turned and walked away, crunching across windswept mounds of maple leaves.

  "Bye" was all I could manage to get out as he stood at the corner, waiting for the pedestrian "walk" sign before he crossed the empty intersection and turned the corner. I stood there for at least four minutes, staring at his boot prints in the leaves, until the breeze swept them into dusty copper question marks.

  THREE

  Standing onstage at a comedy club is like being enveloped in a black-hole blackness that's blacker than Crispin Glover's apartment. We're talking black.

  1984 was a strange year, because it was supposed to officially be the genuine "future," since corduroy jacketed English teachers had been reading us the George Orwell novel over and over throughout the seventies, and 1984 was the magical year where we were all supposed to have rocket packs to jet us from class to class, drinking Tang and eating dehydrated astronaut food. Apart from a few party conversations about how amazing it is that everyone really does work for Big Brother and doesn't even know it, nothing much seemed to happen in 1984, except that I worked every night as a stand up comedian, acted in the T.V. shows "Knight Rider" and "The Facts of Life," and was cast with the actor Crispin Glover in the movie "Back To The Future."

  Crispin loved to rehearse. He loved to rehearse a lot outside the casting offices before we went in to audition for the movie, and he loved to rehearse after we were cast as Biff and McFly. Since it was my first movie, and I had just come from a role in "Knight Rider" where it seemed that the star of that show, David Hasselhoff, didn't want to rehearse all that much, I wanted to rehearse a lot, too, as much as possible, or enough that people around us would say to themselves "Wow. What an actor! He sure likes to rehearse a lot!" We did rehearse for a week or so with the rest of the cast, meeting in a conference room at Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment offices, with the director Robert Zemeckis, the writer and producer Bob Gale, and the other actors, Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd, as well as the kid playing Marty McFly, the actor Eric Stoltz.

  Yeah, he got fired and they replaced him with Michael J. Fox. Long story.

  The thing was, with all the distractions that the director had to deal with, stopping the rehearsals to talk to camera opera
tors, and costume designers, and special effects people, Crispin and I were left at the far end of the polished walnut table, staring at each other, ready to rehearse and not doing it very much. At the end of every day's session, after everyone had said goodbyes and walked toward trays of bagels and artist's renderings of flying DeLoreans, we stared at each other, coiled with energy and ready to do something, anything to make it seem like we were actors, not marionettes hired to dance around a flying car. Late in the week, at the end of the session, Crispin stared at me with George McFly's cocked head, brushing aside a thick stripe of brown hair, and said in his halting character voice, "So…Biff. What do you want to do now?"

  I didn't know what to say. Was he kidding? Was he calling me my character's name because this kid Eric Stoltz was being all weird and making everyone call him Marty? Yes, in some artsy method actor pretensiousness, Eric Stoltz stayed in character, hating my guts and demanding to be called Marty and live out every aspect of his character, except when he was with Lea Thompson, in which case he could suspend the rules of method acting to try to make out with her. Yeah, I didn't understand it either.

  Did Crispin really want to keep improvising? I squared my shoulders and squinted. "I don't know, McFly. What do you wanna do?"

  "I don't know, Biff," he whined, "Do you want to take a walk?"

  The game was on. Improv Biff and McFly.

  "Let's go," I grunted, and headed out the door, George McFly in tow.

  We walked up and down the hills of the Universal Studios back lot, past giant sound stages with heaving trams rushing by us, carrying hundreds of tourists oblivious to the fact that they were passing by two characters from a high school in 1955, improvising like crazy. We didn't stop, either. The sun was setting on the green hills behind the set, and Crispin didn't show the slightest hint of slowing down.

  "So, Biff," he said, "I don't know that much about you."

  "McFly, you Irish bug, what makes you think I'll tell you anything about myself?"

  "Well, Biff…I mean, do you have any hobbies?"

  "Hobbies? What kind of freak are you? My hobby is kicking your butt."

  He doubled over like a frail question mark, laughing in character; a sharp staccato "Ah, Ah, Ah, good one, Biff."

  We'd been released from work, so I thought we'd do a little improv on the way to our cars, say goodnight and I'd see him tomorrow, but Crispin showed no signs of slowing down at all. No matter what I said or hinted at, he would not break character.

  "Hey, McFly," I said, "I'm gonna get in my car and go home now. I'll see you later."

  "Why Biff? Do you really have to go?"

  "What are you talkin' about?" I said. I did want to go. I wanted to drive my rusted Datsun over the hill to Santa Monica, have dinner with my girlfriend and tell her about the cool artist's renderings of the flying DeLorean and brag about being in Steven Spielberg's office to some comics I knew. But really, if it was going to be a contest of wills, a sporting event deciding who would stay in character longer, I'm just the kind of improv warrior that would exhaust him. He would never outlast me. Oh, you think you're one of those artsy guys who thinks you can out-improv me? Huh? You want to improvise, kid? Bring it on.

  See, I really didn't know Crispin all that well yet. We improvised a scene between Biff and George McFly for five hours, and Crispin gave me the clear impression that he was ready to say goodbye to his old life and be completely consumed by the character forever. He could not be stopped. I began a rehearsal with a fellow actor in order to discover hidden nuances in the character in bursts of surprise inspiration, but after a couple of hours, I was just hanging on for dear life, ad libbing in troubled amazement.

  "This kid is nuts," I kept thinking to myself, "Or wait a minute! Is he the sane one, desperate to stop and convinced that I'm insane?" The improv chess game continued, bringing us through the office buildings and stages of the Universal lot, all the way out to Courthouse Square itself, the Back To The Future set, where greasy workmen, wearing embroidered souvenir crew jackets from every disaster movie ever made, were testing the giant wind machines for the night of the big storm when Eric Stoltz, excuse me, I mean when Marty would take the DeLorean to 88 miles per hour and go back to the future.

  Biff and McFly stood in front of the ten foot tall fans, raising our arms and leaning into the wind, smiling and ready to blow away like ripped pages from the script we were writing moment by moment. And somehow, in one of the moments, we were blown over to the parking lot and ended up driving Crispin's ancient convertible with its shredded top over the Cahuenga Pass to his apartment in Hollywood. That's where the black comes in. It was black. I mean, it was completely black. The floor was black, and the walls, the window treatments, the kitchen was gleaming black, and the bathroom was tiled black, with black walls and a black bathtub lined in black towel racks hanging black towels. Get the picture? Black. I stepped gingerly through the doorway, expecting to see a blinking neon sign on the wall – a smiling Lucifer with scarlet horns and an extended hand "Satanville! Co-op homes from the mid 400's!"

  As I looked around, squinting in the blackness though the lights were on, I noticed one signature piece that wasn't black, gleaming in the middle of the living room. A steel gynecological exam table, from a clinic forced to sell it in the early sixties, its stirrups raised and ready to hold a highball glass, no doubt black.

  It was time to go. As Crispin - acting as George McFly, gave me a brief tour of his Alice-Cooperian lair, I tried desperately to pop the bubble of this careening improv, tripping him with crazy tangents and asking ridiculous questions, trying anything to get him to stop.

  "Hey, McFly," I said, ready to go for the cheap and easy route with a guy.

  "Yes…Biff?" he said.

  "You ever been kissed by a very big man?" I asked, ready for both of us to double over in laughter and say our goodbyes.

  "Well, no Biff, er…What do you mean?" he said, in perfectly stuttering believability.

  He won. I broke character in a major way.

  "Okay man, I gotta go," I said, moving powerfully to the door. "Bye."

  But my point is, his apartment was really black, like when you're performing stand up comedy.

  FOUR

  Sunday night is usually a crowded one in nightclubs, because the room is "papered," which means it has a lot of people using free passes in it. On this particular Sunday night, the "Comedy Connection" was pure smash and clatter, with doormen shoehorning parties of four into tables for two, eights into a six, and twelve onto a long, sticky vinyl bench next to the stage. I ordered the main perk of the headliner, a free cheeseburger, and stood next to the bar, waiting my turn as the bartender mixed a long line of bulbous glassware into a parade of Long Island Iced Teas, squeezing in a request for a Coke before he turned away to blend Margaritas.

  I settled into the folds of a darkened booth in back, pulling the candle closer to me and sipping soda as I twisted my guitar into tune, looking forward to the promise of a coming cheeseburger and the last show of the week. Wrestling a notebook out of my bag full of scribbled jokes, late night diary desperation, and flight information, I built my candlelit kingdom and rested in the calm before the spotlit storm.

  "Hey, Tom," a kid wearing a black T-shirt with the club's logo called to me from the door, "There's a guy who wants to see you."

  "Who is it?"

  He took a step toward me and lowered his voice. "He's not on the comp list. Says he's your friend."

  "My friend?"

  Two more steps toward me and half the volume. "He's like, a cowboy or something. Says he's your friend."

  "He's what?" I said.

  Just as I've been confused in the middle of the night about what town I'm sleeping in, or which direction the hotel is in, or so many other bits of the confused dream of travel, I really thought it had been a long and realistic dream. Maybe just a strange guy who needed attention last night, or like so many things, more evidence that I needed to take a long rest and get off the ro
ad. I grunted my way out of the comfortable booth and walked out to the lobby, turned the corner around a glass case full of souvenir shot glasses and saw him. The Lone Ranger guy was standing next to the front door waiting for me, as the line to get in passed right by him. He accepted the snide "Howdy's" from loose lipped twenty somethings in stained pro wrestling T-shirts, and tipped his white hat to every lady passing by.

  I struggled upstream against the incoming line, bumping and squirting my way back outside, and he beamed a smile, his blue eyes shining behind the mask. I stomped down the block away from the line and jerked my head to get him to follow me. He ambled along the sidewalk and joined me behind a van in the parking lot.

  "What are you doing here?" I said.

  "Here to see your show," he said, smiling.

  "My show? You want to see my show?"

  "I told you that last night!" he said.

  "Well, I didn't think you were serious. You seriously want to see my show?"

  "Yes, of course I do!" he said, hands on his hips, looking like a publicity photo of himself.

  People in the line were yelling "Butthead!" at me, and "Hey, Cowboy Bob!" at him. And they were yelling worse things, too, things that people who come out to nightclubs for free on Sunday night yell.

  "Can I get a ticket?" he asked, "Looks like you're a sellout!"

  "You need a ticket?"

  "I could use one, yes, that'd be terrific."

  I stared at him for a moment in wonder, but it was overpowered by standup comic cynicism as I was certain that this guy was a crazed phony.

  "So, buy a ticket and come on in, champ. There's a two drink minimum."

  The embarrassed chuckle and hurt in his eyes made me feel badly somehow.

  "The situation is this, friend," he said, leaning toward me, "I'd buy a ticket, but I don't have any money."

  He stood there, looking exactly like the Lone Ranger, I mean EXACTLY like him, and he needed a comp to get in. I sighed, incredulous.