I do not mean to suggest that working around movie stars was devoid of life and familiarity. I shared genuine moments of casual intimacy with certain of the celebrities I have mentioned. At the very least I retain snippets of memory about each of them—tidbits that have survived my twenty-seven-year stint in the business. Some of these memories seem almost surreal now, like the time Bobby V. and I, in the company of Treat Williams and his girlfriend, snorted cocaine from a tablecloth in one of New York’s famous four-star restaurants, while the headwaiter and patrons looked on, mesmerized and appalled.
Or this:
It is the first day of shooting on the movie Cop Land. From my position behind the dolly, I am trying to size up Sylvester Stallone, who is standing a few feet away. His muscular back and ropy shoulders suggest a well-developed shell. His posture exudes rigidity. His reptilian eyelids veil surprisingly sad eyes. How much of this is Stallone, and how much is Freddy, the character he is playing, is hard to tell. In any case, I am secretly hoping for some eye contact—something to break the ice—since, after all, we will be working in close proximity for the next two months. Basically I am gawking, of course, just like one of the many spectators held at bay behind the police barricades. Suddenly Stallone’s eyes sweep my way, too fast for me to affect professional disinterest. But I needn’t worry; his gaze passes over me like an unmanned beacon in a prison yard. The effect is chilling.
Just then, the young director, James Mangold, approaches Stallone and asks him to tone down the sadness he had been projecting earlier during rehearsals. “Remember, Sly, you aren’t really depressed yet, at this point in the script. What you really are at this point is . . .”—and here Mangold pauses for effect—“. . . what you’re really feeling right now is . . . lugubrious.”
“Lugubrious?” asks Stallone.
Our eyes never do meet—Stallone’s and mine—even on the smallest of sets. But from that day on, in every on-set interview he gives to the media, I hear him interject his newfound bit of vocabulary: lugubrious. Perhaps because of this, I actually like him.
Or, at the warm end of the intimacy spectrum, take the movie Compromising Positions, starring Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia: It is a fine summer day in East Hampton, New York, 1984. Susan is sitting in the driver’s seat of a car rigged with lights and cameras and diffusion frames. My crew is attaching the car to the tow vehicle, getting us ready to head out on back roads for a running shot. I knock on the drivers-side window to give Susan instructions about what not to do while we are on the road—don’t use the brakes, let the car steer itself—but for some reason Susan moves over and beckons me to sit down next to her. I open the door, slide in beside her, and close the door behind me. The commotion outside suddenly sounds far away. Some of the guys take their tools and move away from the car. Susan sidles closer to me, hooks her arm in mine, then rests her head on my shoulder. She is four months pregnant with her first child and has decided not to marry the child’s father. My second wife has recently discovered she cannot have children. Susan and I know these things about each other, but neither of us says a word. My left hand clutches the steering wheel, my right foot presses the gas pedal. For one long hallucinatory moment, we drive off into the sunset together.
As the dinner party sequence of Savages ends, a strange new title, written in classical Greek, comes at us from the depths of the dark screen and sparkles for several seconds before it disappears: OLESI-KARPOS. Olesi means “to destroy.” Karpos means “fruit.” Karpos is not just any kind of fruit; it is the bounty the ancient Greeks offered to the gods—the sacrifice. The phrase olesi-karpos shows up in the tenth book of Homer’s Odyssey, where Circe tells Odysseus that if he wants to enter Hades and survive to tell the tale, he must first make a sacrifice. She instructs him to make that sacrifice when he comes to a place where tall poplars and “fruit-destroying” willows grow.
The connotative meaning of the term olesi-karpos, the one that applies to our savages—and to me—is this: they drop their unripe fruit, they squander their substance. Distracted first by the croquet ball and then by their new lifestyle, the savages completely forget to offer up their sacrifice. As a result they throw away their potential as civilized human beings. Having lost touch with anything more important than their own affect, they find themselves adrift. Which is why everything seems to them to be happening someplace else.
Following the dinner party, the hostess, Carlotta (the queen of the tribe), gathers everyone in the library and reads the future from an overripe piece of fruit—the karpos. As if peering into a crystal ball, Carlotta intones her dark vision of the future with words like duplicity, abasement, remorse, obscurity. Her fellow sophisticates listen raptly, but they have no clue as to what her prophecy means. Susie Blakely’s character simply giggles. If the notion of a neglected sacrifice occurs to anyone, it is only subliminally. They drift away and play records on a wind-up Victrola. The Lewis J. Stadlen character—the songwriter—performs one of his new compositions. Carlotta judges the songwriter’s work to be—like my novel—quite well performed but ultimately disappointing. The group disperses and everyone goes outside to have drinks around the swimming pool. Everyone, that is, except the songwriter—who, after his failure in the hoopla world of the mansion, absents himself from all the hype, choosing instead to play his cello—alone—in the night-shrouded solarium.
After that everything begins to fall apart for the others. Sam Waterston’s character drowns himself in the pool, intentionally and in front of everyone. No one stops him, which makes his death a perverse and unconscious sacrifice. His girlfriend is found hanging by her neck from the limb of a tree, another botched sacrifice.
In the wee hours of the morning, the sophisticates join together in a round of yogic chanting and partake of a powdered drug. Then they file down into the basement (Hades), where they engage in ritual exhibitionist behavior and game playing. They rediscover the ancient symbol of the spiral, as things continue to spiral downward. They fight over possessions and bright jewels. They humiliate and degrade one another and squabble over the carcass of a chicken.
When dawn finally comes, the now unsophisticated savages rush up from the basement (from their own abasement) and, after smashing all the Victrola records (the records of civilization), run out onto the lawn to play a rowdy game of croquet. They smack the balls into the pasture and, in a spirit of wild abandon, follow the rolling balls back into the forest—presumably back to their Stone Age lifestyle. There, we imagine, they will forget about their experience with civilization and pick up where they left off with their primitive sacrifice, which consists of crushing the skull of the queen’s consort with a huge rock.
Only one of the savages lingers at the mansion: the songwriter. Or, let us say, the writer. Before running off into the forest, the writer watches bemusedly as his fellow savages flee the experience of civilization, and he takes a moment to ponder what that experience might mean.
After thirty-odd years I am struck by Susie Blakeley’s almost biblical offering to me. Looking back on it now, I see her enticement—two gobs of gray mud—as a vision of alternative possibilities, the mud of creation, the mud of the grave. Write or die.
I sometimes marvel that I spent the prime of my life in a servile relationship to an art not my own. I can never get that time back. What was I doing there all of those years?
Recently I called the gaffer Bobby V., whom I had not seen for years. I guess certain statutes of limitation have run out, because he goes by his real name now, Robert Vercruse. He lives with his wife in the country and works only occasionally on films. I asked him why, thirty-three years ago, he had made the seemingly fantastical leap from a career as a cat burglar and car thief in Chicago to working as a gaffer on movies in New York.
“That’s easy,” he said. “The adrenaline rush of working on movies was better than stealing.”
I would take it one step further: working on movies was stealing. Under the cover of servitude, I pilfered the sensation of cel
ebrity; appropriated by association the identities of the famous; embezzled the ambition of the powerful; borrowed funereal episodes of despair and grief; pinched moments of hysterical laughter and promise; lifted for weeks at a time the lifestyles of the rich; hijacked the desperate environment of the poor; pocketed plots and structure; and made off with meaning and arc. It was all about story, all along. The sacrifice—the offering up of story—that comes at the end.
7. When You Finish Your Beer
YOU’RE TWENTY-SEVEN years old, and you don’t have a clue yet, do you? No idea what you’re really seeing across the street. Just a tall black man, standing alone and motionless in the center of the sidewalk, wearing a red bandanna. You’re sitting sideways in an open window five floors up, sipping Miller beer from a frosted mug. The evening ushers in a welcome breeze. Your wife is reading to your daughter in another room: Petunia, the goose. Sounds drift up from the block: bongo drums, the clack of dominoes on a tabletop. Staccato chatter, followed by hoarse laughter. From a transistor radio you can hear staticky bursts of news in Spanish—something or other about the progress of the war in Vietnam and President Johnson’s latest assessment. A reference to Martin Luther King Jr. You light a Marlboro, the last in the pack you opened this morning. You chase the hot smoke with beer, lean out, and spit. The man with the red bandanna hasn’t moved an inch. He’s staring at a crack in the sidewalk, puzzled by what he sees.
You like this perch. It provides you with a God-like omniscience. You like to think you’ve developed the eyes of a hawk, but you keep an old pair of binoculars on a nearby hook, just in case. A week ago you saw a man shot down there, a middle-aged guy dressed in a khaki trench coat and lugging a tan briefcase home from work, making his way toward Riverside Drive. He took a bullet right between the eyes, fell face first, hit the pavement like a parade-ground soldier. You never heard the shot (“not even a pop,” you told a detective later). But you saw the man’s hand fly open and the briefcase drop. An hour later, they found the kid who did it. He was sitting on his mother’s bed, engrossed in a comic book, a .22-caliber rifle on his lap.
Eighty-fifth Street is littered with subject matter. Take Re-naldo, for instance, the pimp who lives across the street, a few buildings west. Lean out a little farther and you can see him, hair all slicked up like Little Richard’s, sitting just inside that first-floor window, looking out from the darkness of his room. One elbow rests on a purple cushion he keeps on his windowsill. He’s staring at his new cream-colored Caddy, with its two circular side windows and its sky blue dashboard rug. Soon he’ll be out and about in a white suit and a broad-brimmed chartreuse hat, everyone around him cowed by his flamboyance. The rumor is that he has three whores.
What’s up with Bandanna Man? He’s bracing himself for big things now. Totally zoned out on heroin, still staring in disbelief at the crack in the sidewalk: a chasm. He’s tilting back a little on his heels, and his hands are raised, as if he’s about to make a passionate declaration of despair. What is his problem?
You put down your beer, take the binoculars off the hook, and focus them on the pavement in front of him. There’s the problem, wedged in the crack: a bright wooden matchstick, its self-strike phosphorus tip still intact. You pan the glasses to the right. Bony knees, slightly bent, the right one poking through a rip in the man’s pitiful jeans. Scuffed black shoes, the left without a lace. No socks. Fly wide open. What a wreck. You’ll jot down those details when you finish your beer, you tell yourself.
You’re going to fail, aren’t you? That’s still to come. Put the binoculars back on the hook. Don’t let your beer get warm. No way you can know it yet, but for all your bright ambition, you’ll wind up, four years from now, renting a little two-room dump at the other end of this block—without your wife and kid. No way to predict how many seasons, how many years in a row you’ll stumble home from the bar after work, beneath this very window. Do you already sense the attraction—the raw magnetism—of the dissipated life? Do you really want to knuckle down and write? What do you imagine for yourself as a consequence? Success? Be honest. Is it love?
There’s this quart of beer to finish up, right here next to you on the sill. And a spare bottle in the fridge for later. Be careful not to drop the mug out the window. Wouldn’t want to distract Bandanna Man. Look how he’s got his left foot lifted six inches off the ground, like a stork in shallow water looking for a fish. His hands, waist-high, move slowly sideways, for balance. Fingers stretched like a hurdler’s, to the limit. Just about to take that giant step.
You still don’t get it do you? There’s you up here, and then there’s him down there. Oh, you’ll manage aphorisms on napkins at the bar, and the rumor of your opus will precede you into every room. The empty page. Your unstruck match.
8. Jump
ON A FINE MAY MORNING in 1963, a parachuting buddy stopped by my apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side. Jim was the reigning world champion skydiver. His handsome likeness had been captured recently on the Camel cigarettes sign in Times Square. He’d rented a tiny room right around the corner from the famous ad, so he could just step out there on Broadway, beer in hand, and admire those giant smoke rings wobbling from the steam pipe hidden in his billboard lips.
“That’s me,” he’d tell passersby.
I was grateful that Jim had seen fit to tear himself away from himself long enough to visit me. I was an undergraduate at Columbia University and had moved on from skydiving, but the sport still had its hook in me. We cooked up a pound of bacon and a ton of eggs and were recounting our most riveting parachuting stories when we heard yelling outside. “Call the police! Call the police! She’s going to jump!”
On the sidewalk, a middle-aged man wearing a khaki overcoat was pointing straight up. “Stop her!” he shouted, stamping the pavement. “She’s going to jump!” Four floors above him—directly across from us—a dark-haired young woman stood barefoot on a narrow balcony. As I tried to make sense of the scene, she jumped.
I don’t mean that she simply stepped over the knee-high railing and leapt into midair. Rather, she left the balcony in precisely the fashion I would have taught a beginner to jump from a single-engine Cessna. Taking hold of the railing, as if it were the wing strut of an airplane, she stepped calmly onto the ledge and turned her back on the middle-aged man below. She held this crouched position for a moment, hesitating, as any student jumper would, then kicked her feet out directly behind her and pushed off with both hands.
Jim was halfway downstairs before the woman actually jumped. I doubt he had time to notice that she wore a dark blouse, only partially buttoned in front, and black chino pants that seemed, before she hit, too tight around the waist. It was later rumored that she and the middle-aged man had been lovers. Someone suggested he was her professor. Safe to assume that there had been a crucial error at the heart of their relationship. Whatever imbalance that error had triggered, she wound up harnessing gravity to even the scales, though nothing in her calm demeanor had suggested that she actually intended to harm herself—or him. In any case, she could not have been thinking lucidly. Who would jump, even from a city stoop, in bare feet?
I’d always taught first-time jumpers to keep their eyes on me as they fell away from the plane. “Maintain a head-high position before the chute opens,” I would tell them. “If you look down, you’ll nose down.” Well, this woman, this jumper, looked down. Had she begun counting up from one thousand one when she left the balcony, she would have gotten no further than one thousand two before she hit. Hardly enough time to gasp. She landed on the crown of her head in the center of the sidewalk.
I must have blinked just at that moment. My memory of the impact consists of only the sound—harsher by far than the crack of a rifle or the slap of an ax against oak. Was I, even then, racking my brain for words, for the aural equivalent of the popping open of a human skull? If so, my efforts were derailed by the inhuman howl that issued from the middle-aged man. A pool of thick blood widened around his black shoe
s.
The building superintendent, who must have been standing at the front door all along, suddenly yanked a blue kerchief from his back pocket and began to polish the brass doorknob—a touch too vigorously. On the balcony above, a pigeon cocked its head this way and that, as if puzzled by the woman’s failed flight.
Jim and a few other onlookers watched from a distance, but no larger crowd gathered. Neighbors didn’t shout the news to one another, as they would six months later, the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. The woman’s body was removed by ambulance and the middle-aged man went off in a squad car. The superintendent hosed the blood from the sidewalk, deftly adjusting the spray as he channeled first red, then pink, then clear water into the gutter drain. When the pavement dried, he hosed it down again.
9. Grace
IF YOUR PARACHUTE doesn’t open, you’ll hit the ground at 125 miles per hour. This means going from a vertical speed of 174 feet per second to a dead stop, instantly. The resulting energy (mass times acceleration) splinters bone and liquefies cartilage, and usually shoots the innards, if not through a ruptured abdominal wall, then directly out the anus. You might bounce, you might not. But to the folks who will have to convey you from the scene, your body will feel rubbery and limp, like a jump suit stuffed with applesauce and gristle.
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