All the Wild Children (28 page)

I'm 50, sitting at the kitchen table with Erika, Jared and his girlfrien
d
and we ar
e
all laughing.  I’m sharing stories of his childhood, “He was an amazing little kid, he got an opinion and that was it, no discussing.”

“Oh remember 'the kind'?” - Erika

“He was five.” - Me

“Four.” - Erika

“Four, and he wanted a certain look of jeans, but all he could say was ‘I want the kind, you know THE KIND, the K I N D.’ we finally figured out he meant five pocket jeans.  I show him a pair and he is looking at me like I am slow and finally caught up, ‘Yes, the kind.’  Still makes me laugh my ass off to think about it” - Me

“When we moved here, he slept on a pallet on the floor to be next to Dylan.  I'd tell him his bed would be more comfortable and he'd just look at me and say ‘so?’  He slept like that for years.  Dylan moved his pillow to the foot of his bed, so their heads were just a few feet apart.” - Erika

“I don't remember that.” - Jared

“Not at all?” - Me

“Not at all.” - Jared

MIND BOMB

I am 32.  I have secrets I don’t even tell myself.  Places I go where I close my eyes so I don’t know I am there.  Whiskey isn’t working.  I keep drinking.  I chase a peace it no longer brings me.  I keep Waits and Springsteen and The Clash at full blast to drown out my wandering mind.

It’s not working.

Of late the gears have been slipping.  The blinders slightly askew, for a moment I catch a glimpse of the monster who lives in my psychological soup.  He is gnarled and mean and petty and shallow.  I am afraid if I stare too long he will take control and I will be left as the shadow self.  Then the beast of need will walk among my fellow travelers.

I am Frankenstein.

I am the torch bearing village mob.

I am jailer, convict, judge and defendant.

But who pleads the beast’s case?

Who takes the stand to explain if not excuse?

Who will tell the tale of how he came to this?

Who if not me, will tell of a poverty that leaves one always hungry for more.  The beast defends what little he has heroically.  When the peacenik bully daddy came to dance, the beast stood his ground.  When the preoccupied parents left us alone in the house in the woods, afraid, it was the beast who took the can of turquoise spray paint and splattered our house in wet pain.

There is a monster in my room, under my bed.  Warm in the darkness.

It waits.

I deny.

I disavow.

I have some secrets I don’t even tell myself.  There is a mind bomb hidden even from me.  Airport screeners miss it every time.  Sometimes I can feel the faint ticking of it’s clockworks. 

I crank up the music.

Feel safe in Strummer’s rage.

I have secrets I will not even tell myself.  Deep buried pirate’s cache.  Curse upon he who opens it.

I have secrets.

I have secrets.

They keep me always moving.  From task to task.  Trailer to trailer.  Pay stub to pay stub.  Toy to toy.  Bottle to bottle.  Can’t stop.  Can’t think.

I have secrets.  But the walls are starting to weaken.  Through the chinks in the bricks the beast can smell fresh air.  The beast is hungry for light.  Sunshine.  Day.

I have secrets.

And someday soon they will be free.

I will stand, arm around the beast’s shoulders.

I will smile.

I will say, this here, this monster, he is me.

Until that day.

I have secrets.

DOS VADANYA MOMMA

1990 May.  I tell everyone who will listen that I am sober.  I go to meetings.  Just like I learned from Larkin: Come late.  Sit in the back of the room.  I leave early.  Most important, make no human contact.  Not that I could.  I hear them bitch and whine about their small lives.  I cannot relate to them.  They weren't raised by wolves.  They didn’t have a retarded son or work my hours, or… It comes down to this
,
my story is different from any of theirs
.
  I am in fact terminally unique.  These are the shallow painful times.  These are the chasing the elusive good drunk times. 

1990 June.  I am riding my Harley soft-tail to work, we are shooting an audience reaction spot for
RoboCop 2
.  I am hit by a Mustang.  My left femur breaks in half.  I trash my knee.  I crush my left great toe.  I’m on the ground, blood is spilling down my face.  I’m screaming.  When paramedics lift me onto the gurney, this nice Chinese man runs up with my sneaker, “I found his toe, here, reattach it.”  We look into the tore up Nike, the toe is pulp.  Bloody jammy pulp.  The paramedic and me can’t stop laughing.  Then I scream in pain again.

199
1
February
.
  I put together two months of dry time.  I am bored stiff, angry and a real bundle of joy to be with, but I ain’t drinking.  I’m working Josh’s program, and it is working just fine thanks for asking.  I have no sponsor, no home group, my chances of not drinking are slim to none, and slim just left town.

1991 March.  Bear calls, “Josh, I’m directing a film in Russia, the script is a total mess, the budget is nonexistent, we leave in two weeks and nothing is prepared.  I need a quick rewrite.”

“OK, send me what you got.”

“I got nothing, a mess.  I need you to come with me, basically rewriting as we film.  The pay sucks.  You interested?”

“Hell yes.”  Don’t give it a second thought. 

Bear and I came up together, when he called the answer was easy.

1991 April.  Soldiers with Kalashnikovs line the arrival gate.  The message is clear, capitalist pig may have a visa but they are still our bitch.  Our hotel is the communist party hotel.  Apparently they want us close. 

The joke goes – a man is queueing up at the tail of a long line. 

“What are you shopping for?” the woman in front of him asks.

“Shoes.”

“Then you are in the wrong line.  This is the line for the shop with no bread.  The line for the shop with no shoes is two blocks over.”  Pasha, our Russian location manager, laughs at this joke.  Only it is not that funny because it is true. 

“Pasha is KGB.”

“No.”

“Yes of course, it is normal.”  Leo is our first assistant director. 

“Then why don’t we look for a new location man?”

“No.  It is better to know who the KGB watcher is, than be surprised.”

“Are you sure he’s KGB?”

“Pasha has the best food and liquor, his shoes are Nike, and there is an automatic in his glove box.  I’m sure.”

1991 May.  Another meal of pickled herring, red caviar and greasy borsch.  Erika sends me a footlocker full of oatmeal and other quick meals.  I lose forty pounds on the trip.

I draw pornographic pictures to jerk off to.

I grow my beard out long.

I start to go native. 

I lose it.

1991 June.  I use tools from the grip truck to disassemble the locked mini bar in the communist party hotel.  I’m sure they are watching.  I don’t care, I need a drink.  Ten mini bottles later I am solidly off the wagon.  In the hard currency store I buy Pernod and scotch.  I am off to the races for real.  By now I’m not only writing but editing the film.  I am left alone in Moscow while the crew travels to the Arctic.  At Mosfilm I cut Ice Runner, surrounded by Russians.  I crank Seal’s
Crazy
mad loud.  I fill the austere halls with my screaming rock and roll.  I dance and edit film in the same room that Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein cut The Battleship Potemkin.  The room where the crosscut and montage were invented.  At night I work on re-writes.  I can’t remember my home or what my family looks like.  No one stares at me on the streets anymore.  I have gone native.  I am lost.

1991 July.  I have a moment of clarity.  A moment where it becomes clear I cannot drink like a gentleman.  It comes in Yaraslavle in a gracious hotel down by the river.  My moment comes just after a chair leaves my hand, and just before it hits Ed Albert Jr., the star of the film.  We are mopping up dinner in the hotel restaurant and tensions are running at blast off.  I am drunk.  That chair stops mid air and I see clearly that I must be done drinking when I return t
o
the States
.
  Then the chair hits Eddy. 

1991 July 27
th
.  Finnair, first class.  I drink as many rusty nails as the flight attendants will bring me, but I can’t get drunk.  The jig is up.  Booze, my old friend, has left the building.

1991 August 19
th
.  Tanks roll into Moscow.  Bear starts yelling that he hasn’t ordered any tanks that day.  The Americans on the crew are quickly hustled out of the country.  Communism falls.  Game up.  Old bosses, meet the new bosses.  Oligarchs meet the mafia.  I finish cutting the film and am stiffed $20,000 by the producers.  I am stiffed by the trailer company I was working for, before going to Russia to the tune of $14,000.  Money the owner Richard promised he’d pay my wife weekly so she and the boys could eat while I was in the Russia.  The checks stopped coming the day I left town.  Erika lived on credit cards.  I never bitch slapped Richard.  Should have.  Didn’t.  Weak.

1991 September.  I file for bankruptcy.  I take a job at Universal Pictures and start to rebuild my career.  Another editor there is sober.  He takes me to a meeting.  Looking back, I see that the bankruptcy was what it took to drive me to my knees and allow me to be humble enough to actually take direction and learn to get sober.  The path is twisted and shrouded in mist but looking back I see, Russia, drinking, the chair, the realization it isn’t working, it is all part of the trail that leads me to blowing out nineteen candles.

LIVE NUDE GIRLS

I am still working at Universal Pictures, Tad is in the middle of a pain filled divorce.  We walk down to the old NY street sets, and lean behind a fake tenement building.  We talk, he cries, I listen.  It is a quintessential friend moment.  It is a quintessential Hollywood moment.

He writes, and writes.  He moves to London.  He is bestselling Tad Williams now.  He is Tadly my best friend still.  H
e
marrie
s
a wonderful Brit, Deborah.  Second time’s a charm.

I work with a friend and direct a short 16mm film.  It doesn’t get me an agent or a studio deal.  “I am tired of watching no talent hacks direct while I cut their trailers.  Fuck, I’m ready.”  I am thirty-six and arrogant.

“Big man, either do or don’t make a movie, but stop bitching about it.”  Tad is thirty-eight and way smarter than me. 

“You can’t just make a movie.”

“No you can’t.”

“Fuck your skinny ass, I can too.”

Tad and I cook up a foolproof plan.  We will make a movie and set it in a strip club.  A world we both know miles about, and even if it is bad, tits have a market value.  Worst case we make it a yank film o
n
Skinamax
.
  We raise $159,000 from my mother, Lark, and Shaun’s husband Mario.  L.G. comes on as producer and starts to look for locations.  The ship is sailing minus one key element... A script.

Tad and I spend late nights writing and e-mailing scenes back and forth over the Atlantic.  I write lyrics for David Bergeaud a mad French composer, he delivers show tunes for the stage dances.
 
Tad comes up with other tracks.  He works with band mates from Idiot.  It is a coming of age tale set in wo
n
derland.  A musical.  Tits sell, I keep being reminded.  I see Bergman’s Sawdust and Glitter and I know we must shoot in black and white.

“No one wants to see black and white tits.”  L.G. has his eye on the bottom line.

“I do.  Tad does.  It’s good to be king.”  Tad and I keep the vision.  I’m sober and full of energy.  Our first AD flakes, Tad takes over.  The man is a monster.  The three weeks of shooting is the longest time I have felt alive, ever.  Erika brings the boys by the set, we eat lunch, shoot the shit and they take off and we keep filming.

SHATTERED MEMORIES FROM THE LOOKING GLASS

They Shoot Porn Don’t They
: 

We are setting up for a complicated scene involving lighting the club set and a staged dance number.  One by one the crew is drifting off.  Suddenly Tad and I look up and it is just us on a big empty stage.  We walk to the stage door to find our entire crew watching as another film company shoots a fuck scene on a Harley in the parking lot.  We get the stages cheap because they mostly shoot porn there.