Actors Anonymous (25 page)

In real life,
The Actor
had chickened out on Joe Donuts’ offer to fly his thug friend out from Boston, and all he could do was write a scene for a UCLA Extension class. The rape and his inability to rectify it drove his friend Joe Donuts crazy. Joe, that ex-con who had seen so much bad happen to so many people, couldn’t let the rape go. It was the injustice of it, and that it happened to the girlfriend of
The Actor
, whom he considered a son. When
The Actor
didn’t take him up on his offer for revenge, Joe had to anesthetize the pain that the rape had caused to his own soul. He went out and started using heroin again. He would never have been at the drug deal that ended with a bullet in his head if
The Actor
hadn’t told him about the rape.

Missy said that
The Actor
had been extremely serious when he read this scene in class; he wasn’t crying, but almost. Missy said the teacher, Ms. Prism, loved the scene. Ms. Prism
had
cried. I said that Ms. Prism had probably been raped when she was younger. Missy didn’t like that.

I begged Missy for more scenes, and just before I was about to resort to stealing her computer, she gave me an additional snippet from
The Actor’s
play. It’s a speech; Saul, the father character, is speaking again:

SAUL
: When I think about that night, I can’t help but wonder if she called out for me. And if not aloud, was she thinking of me while it happened? And if she did, was she hoping that I would come save her, or was she thinking that she was shaming me?

She didn’t tell me it happened. I had to hear it from her mother.

One night out of the half million in human history. One girl out of millions who have been raped. It’s a small blip on the great radar. But down here on earth, the imprint of this act has been pressed upon my family and me. Somehow, the course of human actions brought her to that room on that night, the molecular balance of that boy mixed with his temperament and the physical disparity between him and my daughter was forced closed. Something that can never be erased.

Somewhere on the scrolls of history, this act is recorded. Now the only thing in question is if the act will be answered.

This kind of thing will never end.

It’s a little melodramatic, but can you blame him? The poor
Actor
was trying to process his pain and impotence. Of course when we read about a rape, it sounds cliché and overdone, but does that mean that it isn’t fresh and painful for those involved? Ever since Daphne, Leda, and Persephone, women have been raped in literature. Sure, we’re sick of it. But how does a young man get over it? A young artist? What can he do?

I’ll tell you what he did. He slept with every young girl that he could find. He wanted to take Ben’s place. He couldn’t stand that someone had taken advantage of his lover, so he was going to take advantage of everyone he could find. But he didn’t have to rape, he was
The Actor
, he had the charm, he could have as many girls as he wanted freely.

And I’ll tell you what else happened (I figured all of this out as I donned
The Actor’s
sunglasses I had found, left in the apartment, and walked down to the street through the rain to the secret Sunset gate; it was getting late): After
The Actor
had slept with many women, before France and in France, while the Angel was busy doing her shampoo commercial, he got caught.

It wasn’t the Angel’s sister, the Virgin (or Heart as she likes to call herself) that exposed him, (and she certainly didn’t kill him); it was Diarrhea. The little anecdote about
The Actor
being murdered on the UCLA campus was just another attempt by
The Actor
to purge himself of guilt, to expose himself for the chickenhearted cheater that he was. What the UCLA murder scene was covering was the very real, (but narratively uninteresting) break-up of
The Actor
and the Angel. You see, Diarrhea had found out that Cunty had been sleeping with
The Actor
in France.

This was months after Paris, when they had all returned to LA. Cunty and Diarrhea were at UCLA and
The Actor
was shooting another movie.
The Actor
would meet Diarrhea at the Chateau Marmont bungalow he kept for assignations, number 89. They would meet there in secret and relive their times in Paris.

The Actor
couldn’t stop. He had to be Ben. He had to fuck young girls. He had to own the rape.

During winter break, Diarrhea was visiting Cunty at the Mayor’s house in Cunt Point, Palos Verdes. They stayed up late one night and got drunk on the Mayor’s liquor, and Cunty let slip that she had been sleeping with
The Actor
in Paris. The girls got into a fight.

But it wasn’t
The Actor’s
infidelity that pushed Diarrhea over the edge; it was Cunty’s revelation that she, and
The Actor
, and everyone else who had been in the Pamplona hotel room had been laughing for months behind Diarrhea’s back about her record-breaking shit.
The Actor
had even turned it into an art video with a real asshole propelling real shit.

Diarrhea was devastated. She promptly called
The Actor’s
apartment, got the Angel on the phone and told her she had been fucking
The Actor
since France.

I now understood the second crumpled note written in
The Actor’s
hand that I had found at the apartment. It read:

“I’m a fool”

No one saw me as I approached the secret gate. I hoped the glasses would be enough of a disguise in case I did come across anyone.

To my great joy, one of the keys on the chain opened the secret gate. I slipped inside to the brick-paved patio area; thick, exotic shrubbery, heavy with rain, surrounded me.

I saw no one. I quickly crossed the patio to number 89. (I instinctually knew where to go).

The second key on the chain worked in the door.

Inside, I was quick about my movements. It was almost midnight.

The lights were off and I kept them off. I left the door open a crack and made my way to the kitchen. Somehow, I knew where it was in the dark.

In the kitchen, I found two small bottles of gin and quickly swallowed both. They burned. Then I opened a drawer where a knife would be. In fact, there was a knife there. I picked it up. It was a small steak knife. A knife that
The Actor
had used many times to cut the juicy Chateau steaks.

I took the knife, went to the bedroom, and slipped off my clothes, except for the sunglasses, and waited under the covers. The knife was under the covers too.

me is he   him am I   see will you?   reversed
actor   the
avenge to want.

…smeared ben like walls on it smear and blood diareahs take  want i

me c u
u c i
toilet  the behind  
devil
of writing  
red
,
red
  write will i

anymore angel? no and love? no and acting no and hiding? no and end? No

TRADITION 5

Each film (or theatrical performance) has but one primary purpose… to carry its message to the public, to communicate.

Tristan

“
Y
OU HAVE TO DO THIS
.”

“But this director sucks… He sucks.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter? It does matter. He did
Robin Hood,
he did fucking
Robin Hood,
he sucks, he’s terrible.”

“This movie is a movie that Brando would do, okay? This is a role that a young Brando would do.”

“Ummmm…”

“I’m serious. You don’t see roles like this anymore.
Heroic
roles, especially for young people. You just don’t see it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t. The actor
never
knows. That’s why the studio system was so great, the actors were told which roles to play and
someone who was smart and knew what the people wanted put the actors in the right roles.”

Silence.

Teacher again. “The actor
never
knows. Trust me.”

“But…”

“
Trust
me. Okay? Trust me. You will have a sword, the girl, this script, you don’t know what this script is, this script is something that just isn’t made in Hollywood anymore. You don’t know how deep this script is. This is a very smart writer,
very
smart. This character, I’m telling you, the depth of a young Brando or an Olivier.”

I should have known. I should have known.

TRADITION 6

A performer (or film) must never endorse, finance, or lend its title to any related enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our art.

1. Tell a Lie

M
Y FATHER JUST PASSED AWAY
.
He died of a heart attack two days ago. Despite being educated at Stanford and Harvard, he hadn’t had regular employment for fifteen years. He and my mother had moved back to Palo Alto, California, after finishing business school in Boston because he had liked it while attending Stanford. He worked in telecommunications in Silicon Valley, at Rakem, IBM, and ROLM. When I was about to graduate high school, he tried to start his own company, some product that would help companies electronically organize their inventory. He was so excited and confident about this company; he would tell all his friends and family to invest in the company, not because he needed funding but for their sakes because he was so sure that this would be a huge success. Then, at the last minute, one of the major investors pulled out and the company folded and the
technology was developed by another company and my father had nothing.

That seemed like the end for him. He had many other ideas after that. He tried to open a restaurant with a friend from recovery and a coffee shop with an Afghan refugee he had befriended, but those fell apart due to personality issues. He went back to school and took science classes because he believed there are gold particles in rivers and that there was a way to pull them out. He did experiments in the backyard, little containers of river water that we weren’t allowed to talk about with our friends. He was an alchemist. He did math problems that he claimed to work on for years, on notepads and napkins and then, once he had the answer, he would say that it was obvious all along and he needed a new problem. He would ask for arcane math books at Christmas, but I am not sure if he ever read them. He meditated a lot and got my brother into it, and now my brother works at an ashram.

My father helped with charities to give relief to Afghanistan and Iraq; he even traveled there during wartime. But when he got grants for these companies, he didn’t receive any operating fees. He made no money. I helped my parents keep their house in Palo Alto. I paid for Christmas presents and dental work and my brothers’ college educations and I don’t know what else. I felt like I became the father.

At the end, my dad was very sweet. He was supportive of my film career, and he even started saying good things about the roles I played and the films I directed. The last time I saw him was at a screening for my film about Hart Crane,
The Broken Tower,
at the Los Angeles Film Festival. At one time in his life, my father had wanted to be a poet and had actually gone to Stanford to study with Hart Crane’s old friend, Yvor Winters, but the year my father arrived was the year Yvor left (or died, can’t remember) and Ken Fields took over. I also knew that my
father enjoyed the art films of Antonioni and Bergman and Kurasawa, and I think he saw me aiming for the greatness and austerity of those directors with my film. My mother said he was very moved by
The Broken Tower
. In it, I play Hart Crane, and I cast my real mother as Hart’s mother. Hart’s father was a millionaire, but he never gave Hart any real support, and then when Hart’s father died Hart expected a huge inheritance, and when it didn’t come he jumped off a boat and killed himself (there were probably many reasons he did this, not just the money). There were a few scenes where Hart argues with his father about following a career in poetry and his father tells him to be practical. I turned out better than Hart: I don’t have an addiction and I am able to support myself financially. I will not kill myself now that my father has died, and I don’t expect anything of his money.