Yes, he called his shot all right.
Days of Prosperity
Days of prosperity make us forget adversity.
Good times seem out of reach during the bad ones.
Both can seem like final destinations,
the summation of our days.
Then the cosmic joker plays with our ways,
Yesterday’s condition no longer remains,
All commas, no periods, all stops, no stays,
the pleasure’s for rent and so is the pain.
* * *
I drove home to Houston that night. We had an Irish wake two days later where hundreds of friends gathered and told stories about him, just the way he’d instructed us to when he talked about his passing.
Losing my father, like it is for many, was my most seminal rite of passage into manhood. No more safety net. No one above the law and government looking after me anymore. It was time for me to grow up. Time to say goodbye to the boy I’d been, building tree houses in the middle of the night.
A realization came to me. I carved these words into a tree:
less impressed,
more involved.
The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things—the sooner we get better at them. We must be more than just happy to be here.
All the mortal things that I had been revering in my life, everything I was looking up to in awe, suddenly came down to eye level in front of me. All the mortal things that I looked down upon and patronized in my life, suddenly rose up to eye level.
Now, the world was flat, and I was looking it in the eye.
It was time to trade in any red sport cars I sill had.
It was time to stop dreaming and start dealing.
It was time for me to take care of Mom.
It was time for me to take care of myself.
It was time to sober up from boyhood whimsy.
It was time for me to get real courage.
It was time for me to become a man.
man enuf
man enuf
man enuf to admit I’m scared
man enuf to know it
just man enuf
man enuf to man up
man enuf to be a man
man enuf to be me
just man enuf
man enuf to feel love
man enuf to know love
man enuf to love
just man enuf
man enuf to want to be there
man enuf to be on my way
man enuf to be in a traffic jam and know I need a road trip
just man enuf
man enuf to be drunk and sober
man enuf to be sober and drunk
man enuf to get outta the trance to enter the dream
just man enuf
man enuf to lead
man enuf to follow
man enuf to lie beside
man enuf to sleep alone
just man enuf
man enuf to die for life
man enuf to live for death
just man enuf
man enuf to have heroes
man enuf to become my own
just man enuf
man enuf not to know
man enuf to find out
just man enuf
man enuf to apologize
man enuf to realize
just man enuf
* * *
Although the production team told me to take all the time away I needed, my family insisted I go back to Austin and finish the job I’d started. Four days after the wake I drove back and was on the set that night.
We were shooting one of the final scenes of the film on the football field that evening. Again, I had no lines in the scene but Linklater wanted me in it. Walking around the stadium at sunset before the night’s filming started, Rick and I were talking about life, loss, and what it’s all about.
“I think it’s about livin, man,” I said. “Even though my dad’s no longer physically here, his spirit is still alive in me for as long as I keep it alive. I can still talk to him, do my best to live by what he taught me, and keep him alive forever.”
I immortalized this idea that very night in a scene where Randall “Pink” Floyd is deciding whether or not to sign the “no drug” pledge to stay on the football team.
“You gotta do what Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd wants to do, man,
and lemme tell you this, the older you do get,
the more rules they’re gonna try-yyyy to get you to follow,
you just gotta just keep livin, man, l-i-v-i-n.”
just keep livin…lower case because life is nobody’s proper noun, and there’s no “g” on the end of livin because life’s a verb.
The three weeks I played Wooderson in Dazed and Confused were difficult because of my loss, but graceful because of my gain. The prior year my dad had given me approval to do what I wanted to do but was never able to see me do it, but he was alive to see me start what I would finish, a hobby that became a career. I felt a certain serendipity in the fact that the end of my dad’s life had overlapped with a new beginning in mine, on-screen, and off.
The three weeks of practical experience on the set of Dazed and Confused made me a much more competent director when I returned to film school as a senior that fall. I directed a documentary about the Hispanic lowrider culture in the South called Chicano Chariots that I was proud of. The same year, I acted in what I could, starring in an Unsolved Mysteries episode and another music video. I was ready to graduate and take “I would if I could” to “I can and I am.”
* * *
My plan was to drive out to Hollywood the day after graduation and sleep on Don Phillips’s couch until I could get paying work as an actor or in film production. The production manager on Dazed, Alma Kuttruff, had me penciled in to work as a production assistant on the set of the next Coen Brothers film, The Hudsucker Proxy, which was scheduled to commence filming in a few months.
But first, I booked a one-day gig in a local Austin film production, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. The role was that of a “Romeo to Renée Zellweger’s Juliet,” a motorcycle man in black leather and shades who mysteriously rides past her school at the beginning of the film, then returns at the end, after she’s survived a night from hell, to pick her up and ride off into the sunset. I don’t think I had any lines.
A couple of days before the Saturday shoot I met with the director, Kim Henkel, who asked if I knew any male actors who might be right for the lead role of Vilmer, the killer with a mechanical leg who drives a tow truck. I gave him the names of two actors I knew from the Donna Adams Talent Agency.
With a U-Haul already packed to the ceiling and hitched to the back of the four-cylinder Dodge pickup truck I’d named “Surf Longview,” I swung by the small home that was the production office to pick up the two scenes I’d be shooting that weekend. Come Monday it would be time to head west young man and chase down my Hollywood dreams.
With the two scenes in hand, I exited the house and walked up the small asphalt footpath that led through the unmowed St. Augustine yard to the curb where I’d parked. As I unlocked my driver’s-side door, opened it, and began to step into the cab, a thought occurred to me. Why don’t I try out for the role of Vilmer?
I stepped out of the opened door, shut it behind me, and strode back down the walkway to the office door and without knocking, went inside.
“Hey, Matthew, you forget something?” Kim asked.
“Yeah, I did. I wanna try out for that role of Vilmer.”
Clearly surprised, Kim said, “Well, sure,
that’s a great idea, when do you wanna try it?”
“Right now,” I said without thinking.
“Well, we don’t have any actresses here, it’s just you, me, and Michelle,” he said. I looked at Michelle, the secretary behind her desk.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
“You mind if I try and scare the shit out of you?” I asked.
“No, that’s fine, go for it,” she gamely said.
I went to the kitchen and grabbed an oversized metal kitchen spoon, stalked back into the room as Vilmer, and with a mechanical leg limp I skidded Michelle’s desk out of my way, pinned her in the corner, and proceeded to make her cry in fear.
“You got the part if you want it,” Kim said.
“Yeah, that was great, it was really scary,” Michelle agreed.
I’d taken a chance and I’d gotten the part. Shooting would last four weeks.
With all I owned already packed in the U-Haul and a terminated lease on the apartment I’d been livin in, I called a buddy who had a spare couch. My trip west was going to have to wait another month because I had my second role in a movie. I was going to play Vilmer, a tow-truck-driving killer with a mechanical leg and a missing remote to control it.
the genie’s in the steam
People wonder how to make it in life.
First of kin with innate ability and a lotta hard work.
Yes.
But don’t forget the steam.
The undefined asterisk and intangible.
Some call it juice.
Some call it magic.
The genie’s in the magic.
The magic’s in the steam.
* * *
Four weeks and four thousand bucks later, Surf Longview, a loaded U-Haul, and I hit the I-10 freeway for the twenty-four-hour drive to Hollywood.
My adrenaline pumping for arrival, I’d been driving for just over twenty hours straight when I got to Indio, California. That’s when I saw a sign for an exit that read Sunset Dr. Drive? Lane? Boulevard? Who cares, that has to be the exit for the one and only legendary Sunset Boulevard. It was 8 p.m.
Damn, I’m making good time, I thought as I hit the gas.
Back in Austin, I’d made plans to play the CD that was now perched on my passenger seat, the Doors’ L.A. Woman, upon my inaugural entrance into Hollywood. I put it in and cranked up the volume, Ray Manzarek’s keyboard and Jerry Scheff’s bass line began setting my stage. I turned it up louder, the soundtrack of my one and only introduction to Hollywood, California, pumping through my speakers and veins.
Well, Sunset Drive is not Sunset Boulevard. As a matter of fact, Sunset Drive off the I-10 West is about 162 miles from Sunset Boulevard off the same freeway. Not knowing this at the time, I listened to the song “L.A. Woman” twenty-two times in a row thinking the lights of Hollywood were just over the next hill.
At 10:36 p.m., I arrived at Don Phillips’s house on the beach in Malibu. I rang the bell. Nothing. I rang it again.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, who is it?!” Don finally said from the other side of the door.
“It’s me, McConaughey!” I yelled.
“Oh yeah, McConaughey, ya think you can come back later? I got this little chippy in the back.”
Exhausted from the twenty-four-hour drive and the overexertion from the premature anticipation of Sunset Boulevard, I barked, “Fuck, no, I can’t come back later, I told you I’d be getting here tonight. I just drove from Austin!”
Don opened the door, buck naked with a boner.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Gimme twenty minutes.” Then he shut the door on me.
Welcome to Hollywood.
Greenlight.
* * *
Life was good at Don’s and the couch was comfortable. Every night he cooked us a filet mignon, followed up with one scoop of vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream topped with strawberry marmalade that he always announced, in his best French accent, as the “pi-ece de re-sistance!” And there was always a fresh bottle of Stolichnaya chilling in the freezer. Still, I needed a job.
I was notified that production on The Hudsucker Proxy had been moved to an unidentified date later in the year, so that PA job I was relying on was no more. I was getting anxious, ready to go to work, land an agent, read a script, audition for something, or if I had to, get another PA job. Neither was happening and Don was the only guy I knew in town.
One night over a tenderloin I casually said, “Hey, Don, you think you can get me a meeting with an agent, man? I only got a few grand to my name and I need to get some work.”
HOLLYWOOD.
Want her don’t need her.
Do this and you have a chance, don’t, you won’t.
Forever for rent, never to own, the one we all lust for, the constant unknown.
The unattainable white buffalo that dares divinity with every moonlit tryst.
Does she even exist?
The answer’s what we need, the question’s what we want.
Want her don’t need her,
and she might give it up.
Don snapped. “You shut that fuckin talk up right now! This town smells needy; you are done for before you even get started, you hear me!!! You need to be cool. You need to get the fuck outta here! Get out of town, go to Europe, anywhere! And don’t come back until you’re ready to not need it! Then we’ll talk about an agency meeting, you hear me!”
He meant it, I knew he meant it, and I knew what he meant. He didn’t have to tell me twice.
* * *
Cole Hauser, Rory Cochrane, and I had become friends on Dazed and Confused, and with some of my newly legislated spare time, we got together and decided we’d go to Europe for a month, rent motorcycles, and ride. We rounded up our backpacks and some petty cash, bought round-trip tickets to and from Amsterdam, then headed overseas.
After landing, we rented a car and headed south, where we found a first-class motorcycle shop in Rosenheim, Germany. Wearing sleeveless shirts and dirty jeans we shared our plans to bike across Europe with the shop’s owner, Johan.
“Let’s find you the best motorcycles for your adventure,” he said.
Cole chose a big bull of a bike, a Kawasaki 1000. Rory, a Ducati Monster M900. Me, a BMW 450 Enduro,*2 All brand-new, never-ridden-before bikes. Perfect. Johan tallied the bill, over $12,000.
“We don’t have the money to rent these for a month,” I said.
“Well, how much do you have?” he asked.
“Enough to rent em for three days,” Rory answered.
Johan took a deep breath and a long look at us. His hairy-armpitted wife stood in the background, not happy with his breath or his look.
“When I was a young man your age, I toured Europe on a motorbike with my friends. I opened this shop so people like you could explore the same way I did. You need to take these bikes. You need to ride these bikes,” Johan said with certainty.
“But we don’t have enough money, all we can offer you is $400 apiece.”
“Do not trust them,” his hairy-armpitted wife said. “They may never bring them back if you do.”
“Yes, we will, you can have our economy-class airline tickets back to America as security if you need it,” I said.
His wife knew where this transaction was heading and didn’t like it. She violently shook her head no.
“Four hundred apiece is twelve hundred total, pay me that and you go have fun for a month on these motorbikes,” he said. “I don’t want your return tickets for insurance. Go, ride, explore, have an adventure, and I want to hear the stories when you return.”
We couldn’t believe our luck. We smiled at each other as Johan gave each of us a friendly bear hug, saying, “Have fu-uuunnn.” We began to roll our brand-new motorcycles from the showroom floor.
“Not so fast,” the hai
rpit interrupted. “I’ll take those plane tickets.”
We handed them over, then rode out of that parking lot, leaving a proud and serene Johan in the rearview mirror, his wife scolding obscenities in his ear as he watched us ride away.
We crossed Germany, Austria, the Swiss Alps, Italy. It was a geographic splendor, and what a way to see it. About eleven days into our ride, we were approaching the seaside town of Sestri Levante, Italy, when Rory laid the Ducati down doing 120 getting off the autobahn exit. Somehow, he came out of it with only minor cuts, bruises, a night in the hospital, and some mangled leather pants. But the brand-new Ducati Monster M900 was totaled.
Rory called Johan the next day with the bad news. “I wrecked the Ducati, Johan. I totaled the bike.”
“Wait, Rory, you wrecked?” Johan asked. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay, but the bike, it’s totaled. I’m sorry, man.”
“I don’t care about the bike as long as you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” Rory replied.
“Good, where is the bike?”
“It’s in a field just off exit 74 into Sestri Levante.”
“Okay, I’ll send a truck and driver to you now. He should be there by tomorrow afternoon to pick up the totaled bike. Meet him there. I’m happy you are okay.”
The next day around 3:00 p.m., the three of us were waiting in the field next to the mangled Monster when a large cargo truck showed up. Johan was behind the wheel. He greeted us warmly, eyed the totaled Ducati, then opened the back of the truck.
As Rory, Cole, and I moved to load the wrecked cycle into the truck, Johan unloaded something else from it. Another brand-new Ducati Monster M900. “I am glad you are okay,” he said. “Keep riding.”
So we did.
Thousands of miles and three weeks later we returned to Johan’s shop in Rosenheim on our bikes, no longer brand-new, but none of them totaled.
Johan greeted us in the parking lot with bear hugs on arrival.
Greenlights Page 9