Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

  I don’t know if you’ve ever shaved your head before, but if you have, you know it can be gnarly under there. I had dents in my cranium, a psoriasis patch, and my scalp was chalk white. The paparazzi got a shot of my freshly shaved nugget the day after I did it, and that photo was in People magazine the next week.

  Soon enough, my phone rang.

  “You did not shave your head,” an ominous whispering voice stated. For the sake of his privacy I’ll leave his name off the page, but he was a top studio executive with a very large financial investment in Reign of Fire.

  “Yes, I did,” I said bluntly.

  “No, you didn’t, I refuse to believe this, Matthew. You just wore a bald cap as a prank.” Again stating not asking.

  “No…I shaved my head.”

  He hung up.

  That afternoon the front desk delivered a handwritten letter to my room.

  In our talk this morning, Mr. McConaughey, you refused to admit that you had in fact not shaved your head.

  If you are in denial of this fact please come clean so we can proceed on the journey of making this film together.

  If, in fact, it is true that you shaved your head, this would be a tragedy, a major mis-step, and an act that May bring you very bad karma.

  Yes, he underlined and put in bold print, “bad karma.”

  Well, I thought, I oughta kick this guy’s ass for throwin the karma shade but the shaved head sounds like a real dealbreaker. Hmmm. That fight I was looking for? Got it.

  I’d learned a few things about the Hollywood hustle over the years. For starters, it’s better to play your own game in the business of Hollywood than to do your business playing Hollywood’s game. You have to get the joke, and the joke is, nothing’s personal. From the I love yous to the unreturned phone calls when your last picture didn’t perform, they will pick you up in a limo, but you might have to catch a cab home. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

  That bad karma threat? It wasn’t personal, but it was arrogant, cavalier, and in very poor taste. It was time to trump his gesture.

  superstitions

  The other day I went in a roadside quikmart

  and bought a candy bar and a beer.

  The total came up $6.66 on the register

  so I paid the cashier.

  And left a penny in the “need one take one, got one give one” saucer.

  * * *

  There was a big Hollywood industry party coming up that weekend. All the top executives and bigwigs would be there, and most likely Mr. Bad Karma as well.

  I bought a custom-cut three-piece Gucci blue suit that matched my eyes. I tanned my pale head poolside for four hours a day for the next five days, then I greased my now beautifully browned scalp with some oil, not of Mink, until it was so shiny it would have made Dwayne Johnson jealous. Then I went to that party.

  I didn’t see Bad Karma. I didn’t have to. People noticed, especially the ladies. And people noticed them noticing me.

  The following Monday my phone rang again. Bad Karma calling.

  “It scared me at first, but I’ve had a change of heart, Matthew. I love the shaved head! You look original. And so handsome! I love it.”

  I put a penny in the saucer.

  Greenlight.

  * * *

  I had two months to prepare and train to become my man, Van Zan. I needed isolation so I decided to go out to my brother’s ranch, LocaPelotas, in West Texas, seventeen miles outside of the nearest town of 518 people. Very secluded, fifteen hundred acres, hot as hell in the middle of summer—a perfect place to prepare to slay dragons. Next up was devising my own original dragon slayer mind, body, and spirit daily workout regime. What would a dragon slayer do? How would a dragon slayer train?

  I made a plan that would be executed in the mid-July 108-degree weather:

  1)Take a double shot of tequila every morning at sunrise before I get out of bed. Yeah, a dragon slayer would do that. Have fire breath to beat the fire breather, get the insides on fire first thing to start the day. To beat a dragon, be a dragon. Perfect.

  2)Run five miles across the desert daily, barefoot. Two and half miles out, two and half miles back. Yeah, toughen up the soles of my feet. I’ve got tender feet now, I wear shoes. I’ve got to toughen up the soles of my feet. Plus, dragons have tough skin and I have to become more like my prey, yeah, a dragon slayer like Van Zan would have tough soles, ward off infection. Brilliant.

  3)Keep my heart rate below 60 while standing on the edge of the barn’s rooftop overlooking a forty-foot drop onto the concrete below. Yeah, I’m afraid of heights, but Van Zan wouldn’t be. I’ll do it every day until I can stand on my heels with my feet over the edge while holding a resting heart rate in the low 50s. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Fuckin aces.

  4)Run out into the pastures every night at midnight and tackle sleeping cows. Yeah, I’m gonna full-on tackle cows, knock em off their feet, I’ll get thick, burly, strong, yeah, that’s what a dragon slayer would do. That’s what Van Zan would do. Deal.

  So, how did it go?

  Well, on the sixth morning I gagged up the double Cuervo shot that was awaiting me bedside at sunrise. Then again on morning seven. Bad idea. Done.

  At midnight on my ninth day a large bull headbutted me and gave me a concussion as I tried to wrestle him to the ground. Oops.*2

  After eleven days of running five miles barefoot across the rocky, 108-degree hot desert sand and stones, oyster-sized blisters formed on the bottoms of my feet so big and so bubbled that I couldn’t even walk, much less run. Uh-oh.

  And after two months of trying, I never got closer than three feet from the edge of that barn’s rooftop, and even then my heart rate never got lower than 125. Nice try.

  My dragon slayer workout regime had failed miserably, but the upside was that I experienced a lot of pain, as any good dragon slayer would.

  * * *

  With my self-inflicted sixty-day dragon slayer boot camp complete, I headed to Ireland to make the movie. Van Zan was a blast to inhabit—a warrior without a country and bald with a battle-ax. I miss him. Great characters earn my respect and Van Zan was one who didn’t so much get the madness out of my system as he made me own more of my own. He elevated my expectations of what it takes to survive and reminded me that duty is worth more than the vanities of a home field advantage. His tomahawk still hangs on the wall behind my back in my office today.

  After wrapping four months of filming in the wet and cold Irish winter I was physically and mentally exhausted, and pleased to finally get some rest and mend my bruised and battered body and mind. Spiritually, I was strong; challenging my reliance on God’s existence in order to rely more on my own was proving a valuable practice. Like the time when my dad moved on, I practiced being less impressed, more involved once again.

  It was three days after completing principal photography, and I was getting some much-needed sleep one night in the Morrison Hotel on the north side of the Liffey River in Dublin, Ireland, when…

  I had a wet dream.

  I was floating downstream on my back in the Amazon River. Wrapped up by anacondas and pythons. Surrounded by crocodiles, piranhas, and a few freshwater sharks. There were African tribesmen lined up shoulder to shoulder on the ridge to the left of me as far as my eyes could see.

  I was at peace.

  Eleven frames.

  Eleven seconds.

  Then I came.

  Again.

  Yes, the exact same wet dream I had had five years earlier.

  I was sure about two things in the dream. One, I was on the Amazon River and two, those were African tribesmen on the ridge.

  It was a sign.

  Having already been to the Amazon and physically proven that it was, in fact, located in the continent of South America, I knew it was now time to go to Africa. But where in Af
rica?

  A couple of nights later, while cross-examining the African atlas, wondering where in this massive continent the wet dream was calling me to, I was listening to one of my favorite musicians, Ali Farka Touré.

  Then it came to me. Ali is known as the African Bluesman.

  Where’s he from? I hopped from the couch to grab the CD case with the liner notes. “Niafunké, Mali,” north of Mopti on the Niger River.

  “I’ll go find him,” I said.

  It was time to chase down the other half of my wet dream.

  * * *

  I got a one-way ticket to Bamako, the capital of Mali, then hitchhiked nine hours to the port city of Mopti, where I met a guide named Issa who had a boat. I introduced myself as “David” for anonymity’s sake and told him I was looking for Ali Farka. We set sail upriver toward Niafunké the next day.

  After a four-day trip up the Niger River in a small, four-horsepower outboard-motored dugout canoe called a pirogue, I arrived at the small river town of Niafunké, where after five hours of searching, I found Ali at his second wife’s house. He had no idea who I was other than a traveler from America who was a fan. His second wife prepared lunch for us and we ate in the traditional Malian way, sitting on the floor in a circle around a communal bowl of seasoned rice, serving ourselves with our right hand, never the left.*3

  Ali was one of my musical heroes but he was also, unbeknownst to him, my journey’s only port of call on the second-largest landmass on earth. The lone geographical coordinate I chose to chase in my dream: 15°55'55.92"N, 3°59'26.16"W (the longitude and latitude of Niafunké).

  What sign would my stop with him give me that might lead me to the meaning of the African tribesmen lined up along the left ridge of my Amazon River wet dream? We ate, he played me some of his songs, and Issa translated my passion for his music in the local dialect, Bambara. Later I asked him, “Why do you only perform in West Africa and France, why do you not tour in other countries, including America?” He solemnly answered.

  “Because there I would be dried shit, neither me nor my scent would stick with you.

  Here, I am wet shit, both me and my scent stick with you.”

  At the end of the day we hugged our goodbyes, then Issa and I returned to the pirogue, destination unknown. Now what? Where does the dream want me to go from here? I thought. Without any solicitation from me, Issa began to speak.

  “There is a magical people in Mali called the Dogon. They have an extraterrestrial transmission of knowledge of the cosmological facts of the stars that they knew long before the development of modern astronomy. They fled to a place called the Bandiagara Escarpment to escape the Muslim invasion over one thousand years ago where they now live in villages along the river’s edge. I think this is a good place for you to go to, Daouda (“David” in Bambara), a place you will remember,” he said.

  Another celestial suggestion.

  Remember, I thought, better to have a scent and be remembered, than to have none and be forgotten. That’s it. Wet shit. “Yes, let’s go there,” I said.

  We loaded the pirogue and headed up the Niger for a five-day journey, first north, then south to chase down the rest of my wet dream.

  * * *

  On the way to the Bandiagara, we stopped in the legendary town of Timbuktu. A center for art and learning, it is a quiet little trade settlement situated just north of the Niger River on the south side of the Sahara Desert.

  One night, after an afternoon of racing camels in the Sahara, Issa, two of his well-educated friends, Ali (not Farka Touré) and Amadou, and I were finishing dinner on the veranda of the hotel restaurant when a pretty young lady about twenty-five years of age came strolling through, having a solicitous look at each table full of males. It was obvious she was a lady of the night and was trolling for business.

  “Oh, this is, this is not good,” said Ali. “This is a Muslim woman, and this is not the Muslim way. You do not go and sell your body, this is a disgrace, she should not be doing this.”

  “Well,” Amadou countered, “it is not for any of us to judge what someone should or should not be doing. We do not know her particular circumstances, what she does or does not is not for us to say.”

  The two men went back and forth in this conversation, which grew increasingly animated, passionate, and loud. In what appeared to me to be an argument, I interjected at the first pause in their discussion.

  “I agree with Ali. It is not what she should be doing. She is young and has her health, she should be putting out more effort to have a respectable job rather than choosing prostitution at her young and able age. I believe Ali is right, I think—”

  Just then, Ali, the guy whose side I was agreeing with, snapped at me,

  “It is not about right or wrong. It is ‘Do you understand?!’”

  Slightly stunned, I leaned back in my chair sheepishly as Ali stared at me with sobering vengeance.

  At last, Amadou, whose side I was against, looked at me and asked kindly, “Do you understand that?”

  I did. “Yeah,” I said, “I do, sorry.”

  To which Amadou just as sharply and still holding my gaze said,

  “You’d better be different, not sorry.”

  Wow, he’d just recited to me a version of what I’d said to myself in Australia when I’d refused to call the Dooleys Mum and Pop. A double whammy of African proverbs: They are not trying to win arguments of right or wrong. They are trying to understand each other. That’s different. (Hey, America, we could learn from this.) The next morning we continued toward the Bandiagara Escarpment.

  * * *

  A Dogon village in the Bandiagara is made up of a small cluster of mud huts. Each settlement is spaced about eight to fifteen miles apart along the river’s edge. Upon arrival, the chief greets you at the encampment’s border where, if he likes what he sees in your eyes, he welcomes you in. If not, you keep walking. I was always welcomed.

  Having just come off filming Reign of Fire, I had a shaved head, a big beard, and was in sturdy physical shape. Upon coming to Mali I told Issa and anyone who asked me that I was a writer and a boxer by profession. With no electricity in the Bandiagara, nobody recognized me from my movies, and they were not very interested in me being a writer. They were, however, very interested in the boxer part.

  Word started preceding my appearance in each village: “Strong white man named Daouda is walking these parts.” One day, after I showed up at a beautiful village called Begnemato, exhausted from the fourteen-mile hike to get there, I lay down on the ground to stretch my legs. Two young men soon approached, stood above me, and started talking at me, not to me, a challenge in their tone. A crowd began to gather.

  “What is it they say?” I asked Issa, who sat near.

  “They say they are the champion wrestlers of the village and want to challenge strong white man named Daouda to a match.”

  I continued to stretch on the ground, measuring the situation, when suddenly, the two young men ran away in opposite directions as the crowd worked into a frenzy. I looked up, and now standing above me was a large shirtless man, much more able-bodied than the two before him, with a burlap bag roped around his waist. He pointed down at my chest, then to his own, then off to his right. The crowd amplified another notch. I turned my head to have a look at what he was referring to, where I saw more excited villagers, all surrounding a Big. Dirt. Pit.

  I then glanced at Issa.

  He smiled. “This is Michel, he is the re-aaal champion wrestler of the village.”

  My heart began racing, the crowd roared. That’s when I heard my own voice whisper in my ear, Take the challenge or you will forever regret not knowing. Leave your scent. Slowly, I got to my feet. Now standing eye to eye with Michel, I raised my right arm and pointed at his chest, then back at my own. Then I turned and walked toward the Big. Dirt. Pit. The villagers went apeshit.

  * * * />
  I’d always been a fan of wrestling. I followed the WWF as a kid and had decent leverage skills defending myself as the youngest brother of three, but this was different. I was in the middle of rural Africa, ninety-five miles from the nearest telephone line, standing in a Big. Dirt. Pit. in front of a well-built native African man wearing a burlap sack for pants. What were the rules? Could you strike, bite, fight till the last man is standing? I didn’t know but was about to find out.

  Michel and I stood face-to-face, the chief of the village circling us. A bead of sweat began to run down the back of my neck when Michel swung his right arm to my left hip and secured his hand to my shorts, then he looked me in the eyes and nodded. I took this to mean I should do the same, so I did, and got a firm grip on the left side of his roped waist. He then grabbed a handful of my shorts on the right side of my waist, I mirrored his move. Our faces now inches apart, the crowd decibels rising once again, Michel lowered his forehead into the soft spot just below my neck above my collarbone, and burrowed his brow in. I followed suit. Both our arms attached to the other’s waist, our foreheads bored into the shoulder girdles of the other, ear to ear, we began to back our feet away from each other into an interlaced horizontal plank position, then dug our feet into the sand to get anchored. All I could see were two tree trunk thighs bulging in front of me, braced for attack. The chief rested his hands on our heads like a baptism, then, as he quickly lifted them, he yelled “Taht!,” which I correctly took to mean “Ding ding.”

  Round 1. Head-to-head we spun in a few circles measuring the other’s might before Michel lifted me up and into him, my chest to his face, then body-slammed me to the ground, knocking the wind out of me. One for him. The crowd howled as he quickly mounted to try and pin me. On my back, I swiveled, trying to evade his grip, then I whipped my hips upward and swung my right leg over his head and back under his chin, and slammed his head backward to the dirt. One for me. For three to four minutes we circled, flipped, and smashed each other to the ground, but neither of us was able to pin the other. Finally, the chief stepped between us and broke up the battle. Dripping sweat, now hyperventilating, I raised my hands over my head to try and catch my breath. Blood ran from my neck, mixing with shards of my beard that had been ripped away from my face in the friction, my knees and ankles bleeding. Michel, with barely a glaze of sweat on him, stood upright staring me down, not a happy man. That’s when the chief held two fingers to the sky and the crowd pushed the limits of hysteria even further.