by James Franco
“You’re from Italy? Bullshit.”
“No, I’m-a from Italy, but I grew up-a here.”
“Which part of Italy?” He was enjoying himself, the black guy.
“Pisa.”
“Oh, yeah, I lived there. Which part of Pisa?”
“Near-a the tower?”
He started laughing and everyone else in the car started laughing.
“That’s great, Mario. Where’s Luigi?” he said. “So you’re from Italy but you grew up here?”
“Si.”
“Si. Shiiiiiit, so where did you go to school?”
“North-a Hollywood High.” I handed him his change.
“Great, I’ll know never to send my kids there, you fucking moron,” he said, and he laughed and all the others laughed and they drove forward to get their food.
After that I stopped doing the Italian accent and I just focused on the Brooklyn accent. It worked better and I could talk about Bensonhurst a little because of what I saw in the Spike Lee movie. I would do the accent outside of work too, and I was getting a little better at it. Every once in a while someone on the street would ask if I was from Brooklyn or New York and I’d get to say yes, and it was kind of like I had a little bond with the person.
One night this other blond girl came through. She was driving a black Jetta. She had ordered a small fries and a small Diet Coke. She gave me two dollars and a quarter and I gave her eighteen cents and the receipt.
“There ya go,” I said.
“Where is your accent from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Really? It doesn’t sound like it.”
“What’s it sound like?”
“I don’t know, Bugs Bunny or something.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m just kidding. Are you from around here?”
“No, I’m from Brooklyn, just out here trying to take care of my sick mother.”
She was pretty. Her cheeks were smooth and her eyes looked like they knew things. When I said “my sick mother,” she had laughed, which was strange, but then she said, “I’m Karen. Here, give me a call sometime if you want to do something fun.” She wrote her number on the receipt and gave it back to me. “What’s your name?”
“Jim,” I said. I don’t know why.
“Well, I’ll see you later, Jimmy,” she said and drove away smiling.
I kept going to the meeting every morning at El Jardin Encantado, even though it meant I’d only get four or five hours of sleep. The place was funny, a Mexican place in the middle of a wasteland. At night, I’m sure the place was full of show biz folk from all the studios. The interiors were painted with palm trees and exotic gardens; jardin meant garden and encantado meant enchanted. Because I went almost every morning, the guys in the meeting all knew me and nodded when they saw me, and some said hi. I had never talked in the meeting before, but the Brooklyn accent made it easier, so one morning I talked, using it.
“Yeah, and then I woke up that mornin’ and this fuckin’ lady was going crazy across the alley from me. She’s like this fucking religious lady and she is always chanting on the rosary and praying to Mary and Jesus out loud in this hysterical kind of way, like a fuckin’ nut or sumptin. And I was like comin’ offa the shit, ya know? And I just couldn’t take all the he-be-Jesus bullshit that mornin’, ya know? So I opened my window and yelled, ‘Hey lady, shut the fuck up!’”
Most of the guys in the meeting seemed to like that story, and they laughed, especially some of the older guys. It felt good to get that approval. But Sonny, my sponsor, didn’t laugh. He was sitting across from me in the booth. When someone else started talking, he whispered to me, “What the fuck was that? From a movie or something? And what was that stupid accent, the Dead End Kids?”
That pissed me off because it was from a movie, the beginning of The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio, which I loved because it was all about heroin, and I would watch it all the time when I was high. I didn’t say anything back to Sonny, and he kept going in the half-whisper, “What, you think you can pretend to be a New Yorker and forget about all that damage that you did as yourself?”
“No.”
“Then what the fuck was that fucking charade? I’m serious. You need to be honest. You need to be honest with yourself most of all, and telling bullshit stories in here isn’t going to get you anywhere. I don’t care how funny they are. And that one wasn’t even funny.”
What he was saying pissed me off, partly because he was always telling unfunny stories that he thought were funny, but especially because what he was saying about me was true: I had stolen thousands of dollars from my family, and I had the two kids that I never saw, Caleb and John. They were five and six now. Now that I was working I could send a tiny bit of money; and I was planning on seeing them, which made me happy to think about, but it also reminded me how deep I was in. At the rate I was going I’d pay off the back child support in forty years.
Later that month, I started sending money to my ex, and as soon as I did she started asking for more. Years of nothing and then finally I can give something and she asks for more. But I did get to talk to the little guys on the phone, which was heaven, just to hear about kindergarten and their sports. About the fourth time we talked, Caleb told me about his mom’s boyfriends, and I said, Boyfriends, like there was more than one? And he was like, yeah. And then I asked John, the older one, about it and he said she was getting drunk on weekends and maybe doing drugs. That’s what the extra money was for, for sure. But what could I do?
At work I was putting in the hours and still doing the Brooklyn accent. Late one night, at 2 a.m., everyone was cleaning up. The drive-thru was closed, and I was helping Dylan, the only other white guy, clean the hot fudge sundae machine. It was one of his only jobs because he was slow and couldn’t interact with the customers. We worked in silence. We had to take the nozzles off the dispenser part and clean those and wipe everything down. Juan came over from the back where he had been cleaning the grill. He leaned his huge hips against the counter and watched us, smiling an infant grin that stretched into his fat cheeks. I continued wiping. Dylan stopped and stood and stared at Juan until Juan stopped grinning and said something in Spanish and pointed at me.
Then Dylan said, “You shut up, Juan.”
I had never seen Dylan get angry before. Juan was grinning again.
“You speak Spanish?” I asked Dylan. “What did he say?”
Dylan looked like he was struggling with his thoughts. Then he said, “You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, I do, what did he say?”
Then Juan said something else in Spanish and made a gripping and stroking motion with his hand. Then he laughed.
“Shut up!” said Dylan. He tried to walk away. I held him by the shoulder.
“What did he say?” I said gently.
“He said he’ll give you five dollars if you go in the bathroom and let him jerk you off.”
I let Dylan walk away. Juan was smiling slyly now. His fat pelvis ballooned his pants so that all the contours of his body were visible through the fabric. One tiny baby’s hand rested on this roundness. The little tapered fingers were sickening. He licked his top lip and then let his teeth rest in the flesh of his bottom lip. The teeth were small and sharp like he’d filed them.
I flashed both hands with all fingers flushed three times and said, “For thirty.”
He let his teeth back into his mouth and said in his high voice, “Twenty-five.” The words sounded like a ventriloquist was projecting the voice of a small Mexican girl into his mouth.
I said okay to the twenty-five and we walked around the counter to the bathroom at the back. No one was around and we went in. The bathroom door didn’t lock so we went into one of the two stalls. There was writing all over the place, all in different pens and different colors. I locked the stall door. There wasn’t much room in there with the two of us and the toilet. Juan didn’t seem so confident anymore.
“Give me t
he money,” I said.
“¿Qué?”
“You have to give me the money before I do anything.” I made a gesture like I pulled my wallet out and then like I was counting money.
“Oh, bien, aquí.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a five and eight ones. “Te voy a dar trece más tarde,” he said, and made some gestures saying that he didn’t have the rest but he would give it to me later. I said okay, and then we stood there waiting.
His eyes were a little watery and his mouth was wet at the corners with a little white mucus. I unzipped my fly and put his hand on my crotch. He wasn’t doing much because I wasn’t hard. I didn’t like looking at him so I pulled him close to me. His face went into my shoulder. I could feel the fat of his pelvis against my thigh. His hand gripped tighter and pushed my limp dick forwards and back. I couldn’t get hard. I was looking at the wall. There was a rough drawing of a girl’s ass under a guy’s ass and his dick was penetrating her. Underneath, it said, “Grimace and Ronald, hot sex!” There were other things written around the place like “McFaggot loves his meat” and “Ronald is gay.” I closed my eyes and tried to picture girls that I had been with, but there hadn’t been one in a long time. I thought of the girl from the drive-thru, Karen. Her blond hair and the way that she blushed when I asked about guys. I could see that she had been hurt. I wanted to fill that place for her. Maybe I could be a different person with her. I would have to tell her that I wasn’t from Brooklyn, but there was time. I could get to know her a little more and then when she felt comfortable with me, I would tell her that it had all been an act. She would understand. I kept thinking about her face and I felt myself get hard. For a little bit I could forget that I was there with Juan. He moved his head under my chin, his thick hair was in my mouth, and his lips were wet on my chest. But I could pretend that they were Karen’s lips. For a while I thought about being in The Basketball Diaries and doing anything to get some smack and it made what I was doing seem cool. But it also made me go limp a little, so I just thought about Karen, and making love to her.
Then I came. It felt pretty good to come, like it always does, but it got on Juan’s pants. He just stood there like he wasn’t sure what he had just done. I zipped up my fly and took some toilet paper from the roll and wiped his pants off. I could see jizz on some of the papers on the floor.
Then he left. It wasn’t so bad. His hands were soft. And I then had a little extra money that I could spend on a date with Karen. My kids needed money, but I needed a little too.
STEP 8
Made a list of actors our “character” had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
Harry’s Story
MY FIRST BRUSH WITH ACTING was when I was eight. I was in a play called Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys, and Their Monkey Business based on a children’s book by Esphyr Slobodkina. The story follows a cap salesman with a mustache who wears his entire stock of caps on his head—seventeen including his own cap. He travels from town to town yelling, “Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!” Then the cap seller takes a nap under a tree with all his caps on his head. When he wakes he realizes that a bunch of monkeys have stolen all the caps except his own. They all sit in the tree above him wearing the caps, and when he yells at them to return the caps, they imitate him; hilarity ensues. Finally the cap seller throws his cap on the ground in frustration and the monkeys imitate him by throwing their caps down at his feet; pleasantly surprised, he stacks the caps back on his head and leaves, calling, “Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!”
I played one of the monkeys. If I had been capable of such awareness, the monkey character was something that I should have paid close attention to because it was a role that suited me perfectly. If only I had known how apes would become my life. No doubt the seeds for many of my later issues were planted during the rehearsals and production of this play. You might focus on the thieving aspect of my role, but there was much more to that little monkey that has stayed with me. If my memory is correct, I played that monkey to perfection: mouth open, teeth bared, back arched, arms hanging relaxed, full of potential power, and my screeches were the loudest and shrillest. I was a primate natural.
Later, at summer camp, when I was eleven, my summer friends and I performed a lip-synched version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” for the air bands show. I played the monster version of Michael. The idea was that one kid would play the human version of Michael at the beginning of the song and exit the stage under a cheap smoke effect and I would quickly change into his red leather jacket wearing a wolf’s head; then I would enter the stage with the other zombies and monsters and the girl onstage would scream, then the other monsters and I would do our silly dance. This performance too did something to me, something I think was dark and damaging, but in the very least it revealed my penchant for transformation. I had never felt so exhilarated as when I had that mask on. It was the exhilaration of escape, escape from the self. I was no longer Harry, I was at the service of another consciousness. Maybe this “other” was something that had arisen from inside myself, but it was triggered by the change on the outside. The cheap scowling wolf mask gave me permission to do anything: I could easily be onstage in front of hundreds of people; I could dance when previously I had been paralyzed whenever the occasion for dancing had arisen; not only that, I was able to dance with an energetic flair I hardly knew I possessed; and most important, I was able to interact with the young actress in a way that was new. I was only eleven, but I had already had my share of fevers for young women, obsessions and pursuits all ending in rejection. But where my previous approaches to romance had always been of the sweet, demure style, I found that as the wolf I could approach the girl with aggression and panache; I could force myself into her consciousness without the trepidation of a courting poet, a permission-seeking wimp. I was restricted by the parameters of the performance: dancing with a high step and swaying, zombie-stiff arms in large circles, wrists bent. But I gave her meaningful looks from the eyeholes of my mask that I would have never dared before. My stare was the stare of an uncompromising carnivore that saw her young flesh as food; like Chaplin’s companion in The Gold Rush who is transformed into a scrumptious chicken by the starving man’s eyes, she turned into the Platonic form of the Female, a pinup’s bent-over rump in a tingly blue G-string. She was only eleven, but I never broke my vampiric stare as I went through our moves with the other zombies.
At the end of the dance section, I was supposed to pursue her, and did I ever. I chased her from one end to the other, around the other kids in masks, knocking one frail zombie to the floor, until finally the girl ran behind the stage curtain and I tackled her into a pile of hay that was going to be used for an Oklahoma number. Snarling on top of her, I pressed the snout of the mask so forcefully into her cheek while attempting to kiss her, that when two counselors finally pulled me off there were three red streaks across her face that remained for a week. I avoided major punishment for my first assault charge because the performance onstage had been so great—everyone really got into the dance number, which won us the competition. I claimed that the mauling in the hay had been a result of going so deep into character. It worked. Thus, I learned that when my identity was concealed I had permission to be whoever I wanted and to do whatever I wanted. I also found that sexual energy was a great engine for performance: My lust had turned what would have been an otherwise bumbling adolescent attempt into a passionate and flowing rendition full of the requisite tight kicks and turns, drops and thrusts. My desire had turned my body into a voice, and the voice was saying: “I want to fuck, even if I don’t know what that is yet.” But I also learned—and this was an acquirement of dark knowledge, something out of Faust—that when I was performing, others gave me permission to be a madman. As long as it was part of the “performance” the audience would accept almost anything, in fact they wanted me to go beyond civilized bounds.
In sixth grade I played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. K
ing of cats, indeed. I wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it guided my performance. I had grown up with a cat in a neighborhood full of cats. One neighbor kept his cat on a small chain that was attached to a cement block. I have no idea why Mr. Johnson did this, because when he was home he would let the cat roam freely. The cat was called Gray. Gray was large and gray and had a boxy face, like a bulldog. Because the chain was attached to the block, Gray could move it incrementally, and over time he became very strong from pulling the cement block around, tight muscles under a silky gray coat. More than once I witnessed Gray stalk unsuspecting birds sitting on a high fence in the front of Mr. Johnson’s yard. Believing themselves safely out of range of the cat, the birds chattered away, confident and stupid. Finally, after a slow ritual of low belly stalking and long stretchy steps, in a move that was both startling and sexual, Gray would leap with illogical power and pluck one of the birds off the fence. It was hard to perceive the moment of impact, but after the squawking explosion of birds toward the sky, Gray would land on the cement of Mr. Johnson’s driveway with a wing-flapping bird in his mouth. The force with which he whipped them about in his jaws and then lay on his back and clawed their feathers from their breasts and wings with his hind legs was intoxicating. As a boy I too wanted to tear into birds until their heads detached and their blood smeared purple across my lips.
That is how I played Tybalt. I began the production with a quiet approach and proceeded with a slow accumulation of rage. I was in love with the girl playing Juliet, Elizabeth Gross, and I despised the faggot playing Romeo, Jesse Porge, pronounced Por-hey. Everyone called Elizabeth “Gross Lizard” because she wasn’t the prettiest girl around and because of her name. To me she was the prettiest. She had large eyes and large cheeks and breasts just forming and legs smooth and thin. I called Jesse Porge “Pordge,” pronouncing the g because he was a fucking pordge. He was a round-faced little tub of lard, a pudge with a butt-cut, and he thought he was the shit. He ate Romeo up, loved it like it was his life’s purpose; he even wore his cape around school. I think he would have worn the tights too if it didn’t mean that I and the rest of the class would have beaten the shit out of him.
