Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (29 page)

Hearing Ty describe riding bulls later sounded almost Zen, though he had never read any Buddhist texts. When he rode, time slowed down enough so that he could turn what would feel like a car crash to the average person into a slow-motion give-and-take, where he responded in perfect time with the animal, feeling for every move it would make. He was entirely in the moment, focused only on the now. Living with fear and danger, but being able to remain fluid within it. He liked the stakes to be that high. He liked having to perform with that kind of pressure and consequence. It was truly beautiful to watch. When the whistle blew, he made sure not to get off in the well (the inside of the bull’s spinning, where he could be trapped), and walked stoically back to the locker room, but this time he nodded to the crowd, without really lifting his head, only giving them his eyes as he looked up at the audience. The place erupted.

We rode in his limo back to San Francisco and talked about life. Hours passed before we knew it. I would stay the night in San Francisco then fly to a show the next day. He wasn’t even spending a night before leaving for another show elsewhere. When it was time for his flight he hugged me goodbye. It was a sober and conservative hug. We were standing by the door, my unpacked bag holding it open. He wore a loose T-shirt and my hand accidentally landed on bare skin. There was an electrical charge and transference of energy that’s hard to explain. I had met guys on the road and never so much as a spark flew. When I hugged Ty, I suddenly felt I knew everything about him. I sensed that beneath his tough persona he was boyish and naive in a way, that his body had been battered and beaten and educated, but that he had made it through his life without his heart ever being
hurt.

twenty-three

so. she can ride.

O
ur next date spanned a four-day break we found in our schedules. We went camping in the mountains of Northern California with an old cowboy friend of Ty’s named Pat Russell. I met Ty in Reno, where he was up that night in all three events again. I went to find Pat’s truck after being given some vague directions via text like,
gray flatbed diesel with ball hitch and dent on left fender, back right of parking lot
. I found the truck and with it Pat, whom I had never met until that moment. He was in his sixties with gray stubble on his unshaved face and a grimace that must have been the original Clint Eastwood aspired to. We stood beneath the hum of fluorescent bulbs in the parking lot taking each other in. Other than removing his hat briefly when I arrived, he kept busy packing the truck and asked me nothing about myself, choosing instead to bark orders at me. “Grab that rope, would ya? Throw it over here. You need a bedroll, I suppose. I don’t see that you have one on you. Here, roll this one up.”

I had flown in on a private plane right after my show and had not
taken the time to change. I wore black leather pants, biker boots, a white T-shirt, and a jean jacket, and I was beginning to feel a chill as night closed in, leaving visible only the pinprick formation of stars.

The silence was unceremoniously broken as Pat was attacked from behind. A figure leapt through the air and put him in a choke hold, knocking off both their hats. Pat stood his ground and without so much as moving swatted Ty off as if he were no more bothersome than a gnat. “’Bout time you showed up, Pud.” Cowboys have a habit of nicknaming each other with handles that summarize their worst fear or trait. There was a cowboy named Jim Sharp, who, while a world-champ bull rider, was not known to be the sharpest of guys, so they called him Razor. Another had teeth with such wide gaps between them that they called him Rake. To Ty, the worst insult was to call him a Puss. In cowboy terms, if you pussed out on a ride, that meant you hunted for the ground instead of hanging tough and gutting it out to the whistle. Ty despised cowboys who did this. He’d heard that Walt Garrison would call other players Pudding when in front of the press, since he could not use the other word in public. Ty decided to try it out on a cowboy the next day, and told everyone that when he was calling them “pudding,” he really was calling them a puss. It backfired on him and he was stuck with the nickname for life.

At the truck, Ty said, “Pat, you old bastard, how the hell are you? Did you meet Jewel?” At this, Pat looked over and considered me directly for the first time. He looked back at his bag and said, “Yeah. A bit lean in the flank and poorly dressed for the task at hand. I guess there is no accounting for taste.” Pat had a rare talent for saying something mean and making you feel liked. He threw a thick coat at me as we got in the truck, saying, “She didn’t even have the good sense to bring a proper coat.”

We drove without talking for a ways, watching the road open up beneath our headlights and fly by into darkness again. Pat broke the silence
to keep himself awake as much as anything, I suppose: “Ty tells me you got a book of poems out. Recite us something.”

A Night Without Armor
had recently come out and was exceeding everyone’s expectations—poetry was finding a mass audience in spite of an industry’s skepticism. I was unprepared to recite some, though, and had none committed to memory except one called “Wild Horse.” Pat would accept no excuses, and suddenly I found myself reciting for a crowd of two. It was a love poem I had written years earlier.

I’d like to call you my wild horse

and feed you silver sage

I’d like to paint my poems

With desert tongued clay

across

your back

and ride you savagely

as the sweet and southern wind

through a green and wild Kentucky.

Pat interrupted. “Goddamn. This isn’t poetry. This is horny prose!” he exclaimed, and we all fell into laughter. It turned out Pat was fluent in Latin and he spent the rest of the ride reciting to me his favorite rhymes, limericks, and sonnets while Ty slept.

We arrived at Pat’s ranch in the middle of the night. He showed us to a single room. I was mortified. Ty could tell I was uncomfortable and we both went to bed fully clothed and he promised not to touch me. And true to his word, he slept. Instantly. I lay awake, unable to relax. It was strange to be sleeping next to a strange man, in a strange house. Around 3 a.m. I finally had to pee. I stumbled to the bathroom only to realize
there was no bathroom door. In bare feet I felt my way downstairs and outside with tissue in hand. It was about that time the dogs began barking. All of them. A chorus of bird dogs let loose a mournful wail and the whole place
had
to wake up. I cursed under my breath and headed back upstairs to see Ty was undisturbed. I would lie awake, thankful to finally see daylight slowly blush on the horizon.

I hadn’t told Ty much about how I was raised, other than mentioning I’d lived on a homestead as a child. He knew I had ridden horses, but I was not eager to overshare, because as a kid giving tourists rides, I had learned that when dealing with novice riders, they always seemed to brag about what great riders they were. The next morning I could see they had set aside the oldest, slowest gelding for me. That did not stop Pat from telling Ty to grab an ear on the old horse, while he mugged down his neck like one would to keep a bronc still enough for a good hand to climb on. “Very funny,” I said, and waited for the games to be over before I put a foot in the stirrup and swung a leg over.

“So. She can ride,” Pat said, unimpressed. Enjoying razzing me still. Those men razzed me the entire trip. “We need a fire. This is how you build one. It will be hot.” They “taught” me how to catch a fish, clean it, and cook it. They showed me how to find water and warned me I would have to use the facilities outdoors at night. I kept wondering what kind of person they thought I was, and more important, what kind of girls they had been hanging around with. I resigned myself to nod along, knowing that if Ty ever came to Alaska, the last laugh would be on him. (This eventually did happen, and my patience was rewarded. After seeing the place where I was raised, he said, “Do you remember when we first met? And how I assumed you knew nothing about camping? Your childhood
was
camping!”)

Ty showed off some fancy roping for me—he had competed in a
phenomenal six events in college rodeo before he decided to focus on rough stock events as a professional. He did ocean waves and hoolihans and figure eights and other fancy tricks. He had a makeshift roping dummy and when he set the rope down I picked it up and daubed it on the dummy, clean around the horns. I wasn’t sure I would nail it, but once I had, I was pretty cool about it. He sat up and said, “Well, where did you learn that?” “On a movie set, actually,” I confessed. “Here,” he offered, “Let me show you how to turn your wrist over so the loop won’t change planes when you release.” He came behind me and stood close. His body fitting the form of mine as he bent down and helped twirl my arm, both of us standing under the spinning canopy of the lariat loop. I was sure it was a tactic he’d used before but I didn’t mind. The closeness of his body felt electric. And my roping improved significantly. He taught me about heeling calves, walking in front of me so I could practice roping his feet. Eventually we sat in the shade of a tall pine and sipped fresh spring water. “So, you shot a film? Is it out yet? Was it a western, I guess, if you learned to rope for it?”

It was not out yet nor a western per se. It was a Civil War–era drama called
Ride with the Devil
, directed by Ang Lee. Acting had been a goal for me since the beginning of my career, though I rarely had time to go out on auditions. I happened to be in L.A. when Ang Lee’s office asked to meet with me. Thankfully there was no script yet or sides, so I did not have to read lines (a practice I was not particularly good at). Instead Ang asked me about how I was raised. To my surprise he asked me to walk for him. I walked across the room. “Again,” he said, in his quiet but assertive way. I walked back across the room. “Okay,” he said, “This time be heavier. You are too light on your feet. Don’t be graceful. Be determined.” I was caught off guard but obliged, and put more weight in my heels and let my arms feel the gravity of the room. He stood watching with his arms
crossed, his hand holding up his chin, his head tilted slightly to the side. He stared at my feet and my fingers. Abruptly he looked up at my face and said, “Thanks for coming.” That was it. I called my agent and recounted the odd experience. I expected I would never hear from him again. Every great actress in Hollywood was trying out for the part.

I was shocked to be offered the female lead a few weeks later. I had less than zero experience other than theater classes in high school, and was very intimidated by the cast of talented young male costars. Ang assured me that we would get together for weekly acting lessons. He began our next meeting by handing me his watch. “Pretend you are not from this planet. Pretend you don’t know what this is. Go.” I felt utterly ridiculous, but when he handed me the watch I dropped it immediately. It fell to the floor with a thud. I hoped I hadn’t broken it but didn’t pick it up. I felt if I had no idea what something was, I wouldn’t want to touch it before I’d figured out whether it was safe or not. I studied it there on the floor. Once assured it did not have legs or teeth, I touched it cautiously with my toe. When nothing bad happened I reached down to touch it quickly. I studied it like a child would. Was it soft? Edible? After I went as far as touching my tongue to the man’s watch he stopped me and I handed it back to him a bit sheepishly. He put it on his wrist. “Let’s do some tai chi.” After that the lesson was over.

For weeks I had lessons that consisted of nothing more than tai chi and walking. Ang gave me glimpses into my character. She was a Civil War bride, widowed. She would have a baby at a young age and need someone to protect her. She would learn to be tough and survive. As the filming date neared I began to panic. I needed to learn to act, not walk!

On the day of our last lesson, Ang and I shared a car back to a hotel in New York. It dawned on me that this was it—time was up! I felt utterly unprepared and massively underqualified. In tears, I looked at him and
whimpered, “Why did you hire me? You could have any actress you want. Why
me
?” He looked at me, his face as calm and smooth as the moon, and said, “You have period teeth.” And that was it. No pep talk. I turned back to the window. I was the only actress who had not fixed her teeth. That’s what had gotten me the role. Awesome. He got out and left me with my low feelings of self-worth and doubt. Looking back I think he was counting on these feelings, and also on my willingness to look inside myself and dig deep for solutions. It mirrored the journey of my character, I would find out. If I hadn’t been blinded by sheer terror, I would have laughed at the irony.

I showed up on set in Missouri to find a cast who, for the most part, were less than pleased that a pop star had been hired on their credible film. Many felt I was going to ruin it. I silently feared the same. I didn’t want to disappoint Ang, much less make a fool of myself in front of millions who were going to buy tickets just to see if I could pull it off. One actor in particular was quite mean to me, which was just the kick in the butt I needed. The more he hated, the harder I dug in.

I got into character using the tools I already had—writing. I was able to connect with her fear, her longing, and her strength when I wrote from her perspective. I wrote a song about her loss and her isolation and sang it before I filmed my scenes, to get into the emotional framework. By the time we finished rehearsing and began filming I felt mildly courageous, and for better or for worse was as ready as I would ever be.

I don’t think even Ang was prepared for how little I actually knew about filmmaking. In one scene early on, I was to walk into a cave where some soldiers were and deliver a line. Action was called. At the end of the shot, Ang came up to me and said, “Jewel, you’re not hitting your mark.” I thought he meant metaphorically—an emotional point I was not getting to. I vowed to act harder, to bring more emotion. Action was again called,
again I walked into the cave, and again I said my line, and again Ang came up to me afterward and said, “Jewel, you need to hit your mark.” He was perturbed, I assumed, by my lack of ability. I had a talk with myself and I went
big
the next time action was called. But still I fell short of the mark. Ang came out from behind the camera and said, “Jewel, you have got to hit your mark!” This time he pointed downward and I followed his gesture with my eyes to see a beanbag on the floor. The actors saw the light go on for me and some snickered. I never missed a mark after that.