Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

  I began to doubt myself. “This is what you have to do to be an artist, McConaughey. You have to see the art films at the art house, not the blockbusters at the Metroplex. You aren’t independent enough, you need to be more eccentric, less friendly.” I started untucking my shirt.

  But I still went to see the blockbusters. The next Monday I got in front of the class to talk about what I’d seen, and again, the rest of the students started murmuring, “That’s big studio shit, man…corporate America sellouts.”

  This time I said, “Wait a minute. Tell me why it’s shit. Why it sucks. What you didn’t like about it.”

  They all got quiet, heads started looking to each other. Finally, one of them said, “Well…we didn’t actually see it. We just know it’s shit.”

  “Fuck y’all,” I said. “Fuck y’all for saying something is shit just because it’s popular!”

  After that day I was comfortable being both in the fraternity and a film student.

  I tucked my shirt back in.

  We want lovers, friends, recruits, soldiers, and affiliations that support who we are.

  People, individuals, believe in themselves, want to survive, and on a Darwinistic level at least, want to have more, of ourselves.

  Initially, this is a visual choice.

  The where, what, when, and who…to our why.

  Upon closer inspection, which is the upfall of the politically correct culture of today, we learn to measure people on the competence of their values that we most value.

  When we do this, the politics of gender, race, and slanderous slang take a back seat to the importance of the values we share.

  The more we travel, the more we realize how similar our human needs are.

  We want to be loved, have a family, community, have something to look forward to.

  These basic needs are present in all socioeconomic and cultural civilizations.

  I have seen many tribes in the deserts of Northern Africa who, with nine children and no electricity, had more joy, love, honor, and laughter than the majority of the most materially rich people I’ve ever met.

  We have the choice to love, befriend, recruit, call to arms, associate, and support

  who we believe in, and more importantly, who, we believe, believes in us.

  I think that’s what we all want. To believe in and be believed in.

  We all must earn belief in ourselves first, then for each other.

  Earn it with you, then earn it with me, then we earn it for we.

  Travel and humanity have been my greatest educators.

  They have helped me understand the common denominator of mankind. Values.

  Engage with yourself then engage with the world.

  Values travel.

  And sometimes we get a stamp in our passport just by crossing the street.

  * * *

  Fascinated with the differences between people and cultures, I’ve always enjoyed looking for and finding the common denominator of values that are the foundation beneath our distinctions. When my college buddies and I would hit Sixth Street for a night out, they’d go to the popular bars littered with sorority girl possibilities and I’d go to Catfish Station, an all-black, sweaty bar that sold catfish, beer, and blues. It was standing room only when Kyle Turner was on his saxophone or the all-blind band Blue Mist were on the stage. I’d find my spot stage left by the beer cooler. I’d lean against it, serve myself, and let the cool air keep my perspiration from dripping. Laron managed the joint. Tammy was the black-and-beautiful-as-midnight rock star waitress who ran the floor and had every single dude in the joint thinking they had a chance just so they’d tip more. None of them did—have a chance, that is—me included, but we tipped a little extra anyway. One night around closing time while paying Laron for the six bottles of beer I’d drunk, I told him I wanted a job waiting tables. The hand modeling gigs were sparse and I needed some extra spending money, and besides, I liked the blues. Laron laughed. I was the only white person, male or female, who was ever in the place.

  “I’m serious, I need the cash and I like the music in here,” I said.

  He laughed again, then stared at me a minute.

  “Ahh-ight, you crazy motherfucker,” he said, pulling out a pen and writing on a receipt. “Go to this address Tuesday morning at nine and ask for Homer. He’s the owner. I’ll let him know you’re comin.”

  I showed up at the appointed time. The place was also on Sixth Street but in a much bigger, open-floored club. Business at Catfish Station was good, and the joint would soon be moving up to a larger venue—this one. In the middle of the room stood a black man, well over 340 pounds, wearing an all-white janitor’s uniform and dripping sweat on the concrete floor he was mopping. Another black man was standing at the bar, back to the entrance, doing paperwork.

  “Homer?” I asked aloud.

  The man at the bar didn’t move. The other guy kept mopping.

  “Homer Hill!” I said a bit louder.

  The man at the bar turned his head over his right shoulder like he’d been interrupted.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “I’m Matthew, Laron told me to come by here and see you. I wanna be a waiter at Catfish Station.”

  Over his shoulder he said, “Oh yeah, that’s right; grab a mop and go with Carl to clean the men’s room.”

  Carl turned with his mop and began rolling his water bucket back toward the bathrooms. Never turning back, he pointed at another mop and bucket against the back wall.

  Not what I was expecting. I smiled. Homer did not. So I stepped to it, went to the men’s room, and started mopping the floors like I was trying to take Carl’s job.

  Ten to fifteen minutes passed. Head down, cleaning a stall, I heard, “Man, put that mop down.”

  I turned and there was Homer.

  “You really want a job waitin tables?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said.

  Homer shook his head a bit and let out a breathy giggle. “All right, show up at the Station, Thursday night at six p.m. You can shadow Tammy and learn the ropes.”

  On Thursday night I showed up at Catfish Station at 5:45. I knew Tammy from the many nights I’d been a customer, but now I was there to learn from her and she was not too happy about it. Tammy was the queen bee—she ran the entire floor—and I was now trespassing on her territory, and her tips. But for the next three nights, Tammy initiated me. Where to clock in for work, how to run the register, how to place orders with the cooks, what to tip them at the end of the night, which tables would soon be mine, and which high-tipping customers I best not even look at.

  The next Thursday night I started waiting tables for real. Game on. The clientele was 90 percent black men, 10 percent black women with those black men. Eighty percent of those black men were single and as much as they liked the blues, they came to the Station for Tammy. And they weren’t delighted to be waited on by a young white man, and their tips told me as much. At the end of night one, I cleared $32. Tammy made $98.

  I waited tables at Catfish Station Thursday through Saturday for the next two years. Many of those black men became my friends and even came to choose my section. Many, not most. Tammy and I became pretty close but, like every other straight man in the Station, she never let me get so much as a peck on the cheek. I never stopped trying. I never beat her in tips, either.

  Homer and I have maintained a friendship through the years. We went to a Longhorn game together last season.

  Greenlight.

  We are not here to tolerate our differences,

  we are here to accept them.

  We are not here to celebrate our sameness,

  we are here to salute our distinctions.

  We are not born into equal circumstances,

  or with equal abilities,

  but we should have
equal opportunity.

  As individuals,

  we unite in our values.

  Celebrate that.

  * * *

  I had a little cash in my pocket from my job at Catfish Station, but not so much that I didn’t appreciate a free drink. I picked up my girlfriend, Tonia, and took her to the bar at the top of the Hyatt where my classmate Sam was bartending, hence the free drinks.

  “Two vodka and tonics, Sam.”

  He brought them over and said, “There’s a guy at the end of the bar who’s in town producing a movie. He’s been comin in here nightly. Lemme introduce you to him.”

  This is when I met the one and only Don Phillips.

  I welcomed him to Austin. We were both golfers and had played some of the same courses. He drank vodka and tonics as well, many of them.

  A few hours later, as Don stood atop a chair in the midst of delivering one of his legendarily loud charades of a story, the management, to no avail, tried to calm him down. When it was obvious Don wanted nothing to do with toning anything down, they tried to kick him out of the bar.

  Matching him drink for drink, I had no interest in Don calming down either, so we were unpeacefully escorted out of the Hyatt. Now past two in the morning, as he rode with me in a cab to drop me off at my apartment, I pulled out a joint and we smoked it.

  “You ever done any acting, Matthew?” he asked.

  I told him I’d been in a Miller Lite commercial for about a second and a half and had done a music video for Trisha Yearwood.

  “Well, there’s a small part in this movie I’m casting you might be right for. Come to this address tomorrow morning at nine thirty and pick up the script, I’ll have the three scenes marked.”

  The cabbie dropped me off at my apartment and Don and I said our good nights.

  The next morning at 9:30 (really the same morning just six hours later) I arrived at the location Don had given me and there was a script with my name on it, and a handwritten note from Don that read, “Here’s the script, the character’s name is ‘Wooderson,’ I’ll get you in for an audition in two weeks.”

  Over the years I’ve come to call the kind of line in a script that can send me flying a “launchpad” line. This script was for Dazed and Confused. The line that sent me into flight was:

  “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man.

  I get older, they stay the same age.”

  Wooderson was twenty-two years old but still hanging out around the high school. That line opened up an entire world into who he was, an encyclopedia into his psyche and spirit. I thought about my brother Pat when he was a senior, and I was eleven. He was my big brother, my hero. One day, Pat’s Z28 was in the shop so Mom and I were picking him up from high school.

  We were slowly pulling through campus in our ’77 wood-paneled station wagon, Mom driving, me peering out the window in the back seat. Pat was not where we had planned to meet him.

  “Where is he?” asked Mom.

  Turning my head to look left and right and then out the back window, I saw him about a hundred yards behind us, leaning against the brick wall in the shade of the school’s smoking section, one knee bent, boot sole against the side of the building, pulling on a Marlboro, cooler than James Dean and two feet taller.

  “Ther—!!” I started to shriek, then caught my tongue because I realized he’d get in trouble for smoking.

  “What’s that?” Mom asked.

  “Nothin, Mom, nothin.”

  That image of my big brother, leaning against that wall, casually smoking that cigarette in his low-elbow, loose-wristed, lazy-fingered way, through my romantic eleven-year-old little brother eyes, was the epitome of cool. He was literally ten feet tall. It left an engraved impression in my heart and mind.

  And eleven years later, Wooderson was born from that impression.

  cool

  cool is a natural law.

  if it was cool for THAT time,

  then it is cool for ALL time.

  a fad is just a branch on cool’s trunk,

  a fashionable fling whose 15 minutes can never abide,

  no matter how long she trends to try.

  cool stands the test of time.

  because cool never tries.

  cool just is.

  * * *

  I had ten days to prepare for the audition and I knew my man. But, being that this was technically a job interview, I made sure to shave and tuck in my best long-sleeve button-down. When I got there and met the director, Richard Linklater, he soon said, “You’re not really this guy, are you?”

  “No,” I said, “but I know who he is,” then I leaned back, lowered my eyelids, held my cigarette between the peace sign, and gave him my Wooderson.

  I got the job.

  He told me not to shave.

  Production was already in full swing. Soon I got called to set to do a “makeup and wardrobe” test, meaning, I would go through makeup and hair in the trailer that was already on set for the working actors, then I would get into my selected wardrobe, then Rick would come by during a break from shooting to approve or make comments on my overall “look.”

  They were shooting at the Top Notch hamburger drive-in that night. I remember stepping out of the makeup trailer, in full wardrobe, onto the sidewalk off Burnet Road in North Austin about thirty yards from set. Rick came over. On approach, he began to smile widely as he took me in. He spread his arms in his open-palmed way as he looked me up and down.

  “Peach pants…the Nuge T-shirt…the comb-over…the ’stache…Is that a black panther tattoo on your forearm?”

  “Yeah, man, whaddaya think?”

  “I dig it. This is great, this is Wooderson.”

  Now remember, I wasn’t there to act that night. Wooderson wasn’t in any of the scenes that were being shot. I was only there for Rick to approve my hair, makeup, and wardrobe.

  That’s when Rick got an idea, and we began to do something that to this day we still do, which is play a game of “verbal ping-pong.”

  “I know Wooderson has probably been with the typical ‘hot’ high school chicks,” he said, “cheerleaders, majorettes, girls like that—but you think he’d have any interest in the redheaded intellectual?”

  “Sure, man, Wooderson likes all kinds of chicks.”

  “Yeah, right?…Ya know, Marissa Ribisi is playing Cynthia, the redheaded intellectual girl, and she’s over here at the drive-in with her nerdy friends in the back seat. You think Wooderson might pull up and try and pick her up?”

  “Gimme thirty minutes.”

  I took a walk with myself.

  Who’s my man? I asked myself. What’s goin on tonight in this scene?

  It’s their last day of school, everyone’s lookin for the party. I’d know some Spanish.

  Next thing I know I’m in my car (well, Wooderson’s car) on set, mic’d up.

  “So on action, you just pull up next to her car like Wooderson would and try and pick her up,” Rick instructed.

  “Cool, got it.”

  Now, there were no lines written and this was my first time on a film set. I’d never done this before. Anxious, I started going back over in my head who my man is.

  Who’s my man? Who’s Wooderson? What do I love?

  I love my car.

  Well, I’m in my ’70 Chevelle. That’s one.

  I love getting high.

  Well, Slater’s riding shotgun and he’s always got a doobie rolled up. That’s two.

  I love rock ’n’ roll. Well, I’ve got Nugent’s “Stranglehold” in the 8-track. That’s three.

  That’s when I heard, “Action!”

  I looked up across the parking lot at “Cynthia,” the redheaded intellectual, and said to myself, And I love chicks.

  As I put the car in drive and slowly
pulled out, I thought to myself, Well, I’ve got three out of four and I’m headed to get the fourth, then said aloud,

  alright,

  alright,

  alright

  Those three words, those three affirmations of what I, Wooderson, did have, were the first three words I ever said on film. A film that my character had only three scripted scenes in, a film that I ended up working on for three weeks.

  Now, twenty-eight years later, those words follow me everywhere. People say them. People steal them. People wear them on their hats and T-shirts. People have them tattooed on their arms and inner thighs. And I love it. It’s an honor. Because those three words are the very first words I said on the very first night of a job I had that I thought might be nothing but a hobby, but turned into a career.

  Greenlight.

  oneinarow

  Any success takes one in a row.

  Do one thing well, then another.

  Once, then once more.

  Over and over until the end,

  then it’s oneinarow again.

  * * *

  Five days into shooting, I got a call from my mom at about seven o’clock in the evening. I was in the kitchen.

  “Your dad died.”

  My knees buckled. I couldn’t believe it. My dad was the abominable snowman, the immovable force, a bear of a man, with the immune system of a Viking and the strength of a bull. Impossible. He was my dad. Nobody or no thing could kill him.

  Except Mom.

  He’d always told me and my brothers, “Boys, when I go, I’m gonna be makin love to your mother.”

  And that’s what happened.

  When he woke up that morning at 6:30, feeling frisky, he made love to the woman he had divorced twice, and married three times. His wife, Kay, my mom.

  He had a heart attack when he climaxed.