Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

  It was around 1:00 a.m. I figured I should be back home in bed before five, so I had a few hours to work. The yard was quiet. I threw a couple of rocks over the fence to see if any guard dogs were around. Nothing. I pulled back some vines and bushes, then, with the flashlight between my chin and chest, I brought the wire cutters to the first chain link with both hands. Clip. It took all my double-fisted might to cut through it. Clip. Clip. Clip. Clip. Until I had cleared a space about six feet wide and a foot tall—wide enough to get those plywood planks through, small enough to go unnoticed. I hoped.

  Adrenaline pumping, I lay on my back and shimmied under the fence onto the private property. I went to the stack of 4 x 4’s, pulled one off, and dragged it to the opening in the fence. I pushed it through as far as I could, then crawled under the fence and pulled it out from the other side, where I then dragged it the few hundred yards deep into the forest and left it at the base of the big white pine. Then I ran back to steal the next one. Once I got my second load to the tree, it was already a little after 4:30 a.m. so I raced back to the fence, replaced all the brush and vines to conceal the hole I’d cut, then ran back home. I snuck in the window, put my Daisy and the flashlight back on the shelf and the wire cutters under my mattress, got under the covers, and slept until Dad woke me up at 6:00 to make breakfast.

  It went on like that for over a month. Getting little sleep at night, I’d take catnaps under that white pine next to my growing stack of lumber during the day, then make it home for dinner, and do it all over again. I did this every night until I had enough 2 x 4’s, 4 x 4’s, and plywood planks to build the biggest and tallest tree house in the world.

  With the most dangerous part of my plan behind me and two months of summer left, it was time to start construction. I’d also stolen about forty feet of 15-gauge Steel Trim Pin Nail gun nails from the yard and I already had a hammer and a twenty-six-inch handsaw from our toolbox at home. All I needed was daylight.

  Up at six and out the door by seven, I worked on that tree house until dark seven days a week for the next two months. Shirtless and shoeless in my shammy I crisscrossed two paper collated clips of the nails over my shoulders and across my chest. Half Comanche Indian, half Pancho Villa, with hammer in hand, I went to work. I started with the bottom floor then built up. I cut a two-by-two-foot hole in each floor next to the trunk of the tree where I nailed pieces of 2 x 4’s for ladder steps to get from floor to floor. I also made a pulley system that I raised with each floor. I’d pack my lunch each morning and take it to my construction site, put my brown bag in the trough, climb up to the highest floor, and hoist my sandwich up to eat during my lunch break.

  Six weeks later when I was done, my tree house was thirteen stories high.

  The thirteenth floor was over one hundred feet above the ground. From there I could see all the way to downtown Longview, fifteen miles away. For the next two weeks I spent every day up there, above the rest of the world, where I hoisted up my brown bag lunch and daydreamed, swearing I could see the earth’s curve on the horizon, now understanding where and why the city of Longview got its name.

  It was the best summer of my life.

  Greenlight.

  Then September came and I had to go back to school. Mom came back from Florida and we soon moved into a neighborhood house on the other side of town. I never saw that tree house again.

  I often wonder if it’s still there today. I thought of that tree house when I was making the movie Mud. My tree house was those boys’ “Boat in a Tree.” A secret, a mystery, a place of danger, wonder, and dreams. If Mud had been released in 1979, my dad would have come to me and said, “Hey, buddy, there’s this movie called Mud I saw, we gotta watch it together, damn it’s a good one.” Then I might have said to him, “Dad, there’s this tree house in the woods I built, I gotta show it to you, damn it’s a good one.”

  Oh yeah, that “extended vacation” in Florida my mom was on? It would be twenty years before I learned that in fact she was not on vacation, rather, she and Dad were in the middle of their second divorce.

  * * *

  During high school, we still lived in that same house on the other side of town in Longview. Mom had just started selling a product called “Oil of Mink,” a facial cosmetic that she peddled door to door. It was touted as a breakthrough skin care treatment that would “bring out all the impurities in your skin” and “saturate your face with beautiful mink oil so you would have a clear, glowing complexion for the rest of your life.”

  At the same time, I was entering adolescence—you know, pubic hairs growing in, balls dropping, voice lowering, and…a few pimples.

  One day my mom looked at my face and said, “You should use the Oil of Mink!”

  A fan of self-regard and looking my best, I listened to her and started applying Oil of Mink to my face each night before bed. The result? More pimples.

  “It must be bringing out the impurities!” Mom said.

  I listened to her again and continued to slather more Oil of Mink on my face each night.

  A week went by. More pimples.

  Twelve days passed. Now I had what looked like full-blown acne.

  “Mom, are you sure this is okay for me to be using?” I asked.

  “Of course it is, but let’s call my boss, Elaine, to come over and have a look just to be sure.”

  Elaine came over and took a look at my swollen, zit-infested face.

  “Oh, wow!” she shrieked. “Yes, the product is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s bringing out all the impurities! And my oh my, you must just have a lot of impurities, Matthew! Just keep applying the Oil of Mink each night, and eventually it’ll pull all the impurities out, and then you’ll have a clear, glowing complexion for the rest of your life.”

  Well, shit, okay. Sounded like I just needed to weather the storm. I stayed at it.

  Three weeks in, my entire cheeks were swollen, red pustules. Huge whiteheads. Blistering geysers of pus. I looked like a different person.

  Against my mother’s counsel, I decided to see a dermatologist. Dr. Haskins looked at my face. “Oh my, Matthew, what the…the pores on your face are clogged and holding oil and grease in. There’s no room for them to breathe. What are you putting on your face?” he asked.

  I pulled out a bottle of the Oil of Mink. He examined the label.

  “How long you been using this product, Matthew?”

  “Twenty-one days.”

  “Oh my god, no, no, no! This is for people that are at least over forty years old, definitely not for a teenager going through adolescence when your skin is secreting more oil. This product has completely blocked your pores, Matthew; you have severe nodular acne. You are ten days away from having ice-pick scars in your cheeks for the rest of your life. I am going to prescribe you a pill called Accutane. Hopefully we’ve caught it in enough time that the Accutane will dry you out to such an extent that maybe you can get rid of the acne within a year and hopefully not have lifelong damage.”

  “Well, that Oil of Mink didn’t work at all, did it, Matthew?!” Mom innocently proclaimed.

  “No, Mom…it didn’t.”

  I immediately got off the Oil of Mink and got on the Accutane, which came with its own set of side effects. After a few weeks, my skin started drying out, my face began to scale and flake, the creases in my lips dried up and bled, my knees got arthritic, I got headaches, my hair started falling out, I got hypersensitive allergic reactions, and I looked like a swollen prune. All side effects I was more than happy to live with to get rid of my Oil of Mink–induced acne.

  But that’s not the end of the story. No, not in the McConaughey household. My dad smelled an opportunity.

  “We’re gonna sue em!!! That goddamn Oil of Mink company! That’s what we’ll do. We’re gonna sue em and make some money off this whole deal. I mean, look at you, son, that product should have never been given out to
you, boy, and that lady Elaine, she shouldn’t have been telling your mother to give it to you! I’m tellin ya, we got a case.”

  Dad took me to meet his lawyer, Jerry Harris, a good-looking, erudite middle-aged man who had an air of confidence about him that made you think he was from Dallas, not Longview.

  “Damn right, we got a case,” Jerry said. “This product should have never been administered to a teenager, there’s no disclaimer or warning on the bottle about its possible harms either, and I am sure that besides all of the physical pain you’re goin through…”

  Jerry and my dad homed in on me.

  “You are under great emotional distress as well, aren’t you, Matthew?”

  “Uhh…yes.”

  Jerry pulled out a cassette recorder and pressed the red button.

  “Yes, what?” he asked.

  “I am…under great emotional distress at this time.”

  “Why?” he asked, nodding.

  “Because…I now have bad acne on my face that I never had before using this Oil of Mink product?”

  “Exactly,” Jerry said, “and has this predicament affected your confidence?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s lower.”

  “Good. Has it affected your relationship with the girls?”

  “I mean, I was doing really good with the girls before I had the acne, and I’m not doing as well now.”

  “Exactly,” Jerry said, stopping the tape recorder.

  “We got a case, Jim. Emotional distress is a strong tack for prosecution, and hell, look at him, he’s all swole up, looks like shit. I think we can get thirty-five to fifty grand out of this deal.”

  A big gunslinger’s grin spread across Dad’s face. He gave Jerry a heavy attaboy handshake and patted me on the back.

  “Good job, boy, good job.”

  Well, as you know, lawsuits take a while. Two years had passed since the Oil of Mink applications, and with my acne long gone, not a pimple on my face, and no side effects in sight, the Accutane had worked. I was now being called into a deposition with the defense attorney representing Oil of Mink. Cassette recorder on the desk, red button pressed.

  “Matthew, how are you, son?”

  “I’m doin better, thank you.”

  “I’m just so sorry that this all happened to you, Matthew, it must have been such an emotionally distressful time for you.”

  I couldn’t believe it. The defense attorney just lobbed me a softball and I was ready to crush it over the fence.

  “Oh, yes, sir. It was an emotionally distressful time. I mean, I looked like the Elephant Man, and my scalp was dry, my hair was falling out, my knees hurt, my back hurt, my face flaked, I didn’t have any confidence, and I wasn’t doing any good with the girls. I mean, that Oil of Mink almost scarred me for life.”

  “Oh, bless your heart, young man. I can only imagine how tough it must’ve been and still is on you.”

  I doubled down, “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  He stared at me a moment and then the slightest Cheshire grin began to creep up on his lips as he reached under the table and pulled out a high school yearbook—my high school yearbook—from that year, 1988. He slowly opened it and turned to a flagged page, swiveled the book around to face me and slid it in my direction. Then, reaching across the table, he put his finger on a particular picture and said, “Is this you?”

  It was. It was a picture of me with Camissa Springs. We both had a silk sash draped across our chests from shoulder to hip. Hers read “Most Beautiful.” Mine read “Most Handsome.”

  Shit. I knew right then and there our case was done. He had me.

  “Scarred for life, huh?…Sooooo emotionally distressed,” he said, as his grin got wider.

  I was right. We were done. Case dropped.

  My dad was inconsolable, he went on about it for weeks, muttering “Goddamn you, boy!!! Here I am, I got a chance to make thirty-five to fifty thousand dollars on a lawsuit that we coulda won!!! And you gotta go off and win ‘Most Handsome’! You screwed up the whole lawsuit, son! Damn you, boy!”

  * * *

  A few months later, with Mom on her second extended vacation to Navarre Beach (not another divorce, just a little “break” from each other), it was just Dad and me living together again, this time in our three-bedroom house instead of the double-wide. I got home by my midnight curfew. Unexpectedly, Dad was awake, and on the phone.

  “Sure, Mr. Felker, he just got in. Lemme ask him,” I heard him say as I entered his bedroom. The lights were on and he was sitting on the side of his bed in his underwear. He lowered the phone from his ear and held it between his neck and shoulders.

  “What’d you do tonight, son?”

  I should have known I was busted but instead chose to try and hustle the man who had taught me to hustle.

  “Uh, not much, me and Bud Felker went to Pizza Hut then he dropped me off here at home,” I said.

  “You pay for that pizza, son?”

  He was giving me a second chance to come clean and avoid getting punished for the one thing worse than getting caught misbehaving, lying about it. But rather than admitting what I had done, and instinctually knew he knew I had done, I chose to double down on my grovel.

  “Well, I think so, Dad…I mean, I went to the car before Bud, and I’m pretty sure he was supposed to pay for it.”

  Digging my own grave, I was in too deep to climb out now.

  Dad took a deep breath, a delayed blink, and looked distraught for a moment, then he lifted the phone back to his ear.

  “Mr. Felker, thank you, sir, I’ll handle mine from here,” then he placed the phone back in its holster.

  I was now starting to sweat.

  Dad calmly put his hands on his knees and raised his chin to look me in the eye when I saw his molars meet.

  “I’m gonna ask you one more time like this, son: Did you know you were gonna steal that pizza?”

  All I had to do was say, “Yes, sir, Dad, I did,” and he would have only cussed me about not committing a crime thoroughly enough to get away with it and lashed my ass with his leather belt a couple of times because I got caught, but no.

  My eyes widened, a quarter-sized spot of urine now showing on the crotch of my jeans, I stuttered, “No, sir, li-like I said I…”

  Whoppp!! The back of my father’s right hand crashed across my face as he leapt from the bed and interrupted my pitiful plea. I hit the ground, not so much from the force of his strike as from the instability of the cowardly, panic-stricken, lactic acid legs I was wobbling on.

  I deserved it. I earned it. I asked for it. I wanted it. I needed it. I got it.

  I lied to him, and it broke his heart.

  Stealing a pizza was no big deal to him, he’d stolen plenty of pizzas in his life and then some. All I had to do was admit it. But I didn’t.

  Now on my knees crying from shock and fear just like my brother Mike had done but for different reasons, I was ashamed. Unlike him at the barn, I was a rat, a fink, a pussy, a coward.

  That’s not my boy, Katy, that’s yours, is all I could hear in my mind.

  He stood over me.

  “The waitress at the Pizza Hut recognized Bud. She looked up his number and called his house, asked his dad to have him just bring the money for the pizza by tomorrow. Bud told his dad it was all his idea to steal it and that you just went along with it. But you lied to me, son, told me you didn’t know.”

  All he wanted me to do was stand up like a man, admit I had fucked up, look him in the eye, and shake it off, but no.

  I cowered, made excuses, and whimpered as he looked down on me. The piss stain on my jeans now spread to my leg.

  Getting more furious with my spinelessness, he dropped on all fours like a bear in front of me, then taunted me, “C’mon, I’ll
give you four to my one. Four of your best shots across my kisser to one of mine across yours!”

  Paralyzed, numb, I didn’t take the offer. The idea of striking my dad made my hands feel like papier-mâché. The thought of him striking me again made my brain drain.

  “Why?! Why?!” he raged.

  Unable to answer, I just stumbled to knee level and crawled to the nearest corner where I stayed until he finally stood up and shook his head at me, wondering what he’d done wrong to raise such a coward of a son.

  I’ve often regretted what I did—or didn’t do—that night.

  I had my chance at my rite of passage—to become his boy or a man in his eyes—but I got stage fright, pissed my pants, and failed the test. I choked.

  SPRING 1988

  My senior year in high school. I was rolling. I had straight A’s, a job that kept forty-five bucks in my back pocket at all times, a four handicap in golf, I’d won “Most Handsome” in my class, and was dating the best-looking girl at my school and at the school across town. Yeah, I was catching greenlights.

  Never the too-cool-for-school guy who leans against the wall and smokes a cigarette at the party, no, I was the guy who danced at the party. The guy who chased the girls and worked his way to the front row of every concert, no matter how late I arrived. I gave effort. I was a hustler.

  I drove a truck. I took the girls off-road muddin*1 after school in that truck. I had a megaphone in the front grille, and in the school parking lot in the mornings, I’d crouch down in the cab and say through the speaker, “Look at the jeans Cathy Cook’s got on today, lookin goooooood!”