‘You’ve got no right to touch me!’
‘Oh my GOD!’
I lift my hands out of the sink, dry them with the towel and walk as quietly as possible to the living room entryway. From where I stand, peering around the corner, I see Mom and Keith standing beside the coffee table, Keith’s meaty hands wrapped around Mom’s wrists. She’s staring up at him with her teeth clenched, her face red and mangled in anger. Keith stares back, jaw slack, eyes glassy with booze. Eddy sits cross-legged at the top of the stairs, shaking his head from side to side, making his blond mushroom cut flash clean and white in the amber glow of the hall light. He’s shaking and nodding robotically, his palms clamped over his ears, his fingernails digging into the skin of his scalp. Whenever he gets like this, you’ve got to hold his head in your hands to make him stop; you’ve got to hold your hands over his and say please, please, in a near whisper – you can’t be impatient because otherwise Eddy might be rocking for hours.
‘Just go!’
‘Where the fuck am I going to go?’
‘Find somewhere, anywhere, just get out.’
‘Would you just listen to yourself for once?’
I’ve got my fingers wrapped around the door jamb. Anything could happen, and each low blow or ripping yank they trade keeps me riveted in place. I wipe the tears from my eyes. I don’t want to watch anymore, but I can’t resist an ending, even a dark one, that’s so close. There’s no wrestling match that can forgive this. No bout to make sense of it. All the cartoon heroes flicker out, light to dark, the TV gone black.
They’re in each other’s faces, screaming nonsense, when Keith bangs his knees against the coffee table. In a split second he’s off balance, and then falling, hands still wrapped around Mom’s wrists. She follows, tripping against the sharp edge of the table, hands grasping at Keith’s crotch. And they go down, Keith dragging Mom to the floor. Cups and plates and cans fly in the air as they hit the surface of the coffee table. The table – cheap, shoddy wood – snaps down the middle. It’s an incredible noise, Keith splitting through the wood and Mom following after, sharp splinters and four table legs spiralling away across the room. Keith lies still, eyes fluttering, grip released on Mom’s wrists, as she tries to scramble to her feet. From the doorway I can see a spot of blood forming on Keith’s forehead, and from the way he lies there, groaning, I figure he’s gotta be at least partway hurt. Mom’s so drunk she can’t find a handhold, can’t get to her feet, so she lies there panting atop his hulking belly.
Please be over, I think. Please be finished. Let this be done. But there’s no logical end to this, no one to raise a victor’s hand in the air.
But then there’s Eddy, out of the corner of my eye, on all fours on the carpet. He must have crawled down the stairs while they were grappling each other. Mom looks up with tears in her eyes, spotting him, her face tormented and ugly. ‘Honey,’ she’s trying to say, but Eddy drops to one elbow, his legs splayed out behind him, and raises his right hand in the air.
No, I think …
Eddy slaps his hand down on the floor. ‘ONE!’ he screams, then raises it again.
And I close my eyes. I close my eyes and imagine Mom blowing the hair off her face and starting to laugh. She laughs so hard that she rouses Keith from his groaning daze, and he screws around his head to stare at what’s so funny, and seeing Eddy there on the floor counting them out, well, it sends Keith into hysterics, too. And I laugh with them from the doorway, and when Eddy’s finally finished pounding the floor he looks around, confused, but then that grin ripples over his lips as he sees real smiles and real laughs around him, and he leaps up and sprints over to Mom and raises her wrist in victory, points at her with his other hand, and this just kills everyone, and the joke gets bigger and fuller and richer because this was a work after all – that after the bloody performance we all find ourselves in the locker room slapping backs and swigging beers, giving respect and love for the broken bones and pulled muscles, for everything sacrificed and offered up in the middle of the ring, all the fake animosity and hatred for a common cause. And Mom kisses Keith, still on top of him, and they stand and Keith lifts up Eddy into his arms for the first time and swings him around the room while a big rock song plays for our victory.
And I keep my eyes shut, seeing it all work itself into happiness. Eddy goes to school in the fall and gets help from the counsellors and gets changed to a different school where he gets the kind of classes and therapy he needs, the kind of meds his fucked-up brain is thirsting for, and he grows up to be one of those kids who’re popular even though they’re challenged and the high school jocks defend him and give him rides and the girls kiss his cheeks in the halls and the teachers all love him because Eddy’s heart is fucking pure and simple, and one day he goes to work for a local wrestling show maybe selling popcorn and sweeping up the aisles (even if it’s just some borrowed gymnasium), but he’s there every night, exactly where he wants to be, watching from the stands as the indie-show wrestlers tell their minor-league stories and mirror the big guys into the next century. And I visit Eddy in his own place every weekend, and we grab McDonald’s fries and nuggets together and watch old WWF reruns on his crappy TV and laugh about how we were a tag team once, how we had so many cruel opponents and never had a chance at a title but we were the people’s favourites, the underdogs everyone screamed for in the dark matches of our youth, and Eddy never worked for Tim Hortons until his forties mopping floors, living without assistance, and he never had his accident on the slick stairs and he never ended up where he did, worse than ever, and I never became this crater that lies awake thinking of him, I’m back there in the living room watching him pound the carpet, I’m back there watching him in his pyjamas before the show went off the air and the bad guys won.
JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF SOMETHING
I
McConaughey loved the Painted Desert for its emptiness, its flat inhospitality. He loved it for its tiny unthinking lizard brain, buried miles beneath the buttes, dreaming its quiet dreams like some sleeping, insane god. How the chalky browns and whites could explode into lavenders and coppers, glorious pinks and yellows, spilling into canyons and valleys that would never feel the tread of a boot. The heavenly shadows of mesas, the secret, life-saving nectar of cacti. As a kid he loved stories of criminals tied to anthills, of horses keeled over from thirst, of terrible yawning jaws of human and mammal and monster skulls half-buried in the shifting sands. It was the tarry stop smell of it, the whipping gales, the grit of rock in his mouth; how suddenly the wind could rise to freeze his blood as the sun dropped low and gory, ripping out his guts with its beauty. How easily a rattler could nip his heel and stop his heart. To boil it down: it didn’t care about him. The buzzards hanging perfect and still in the painful blue sky, waiting to eat and digest and shit him down onto lonely, passing traffic. This was a place for rocks, not people. It hated his paper skin. It hated his gentleness.
Yet here he was, Matthew McConaughey, squinting over the dash of his beloved van behind tortoiseshell shades as the light seared through the glass and stuck his naked, sweaty flesh to the leather seat. McConaughey drove naked in the desert, always had – he felt entirely alone, and so why not feel the heat on every inch of his body, the raw lash of the passing wind against his temple and cheek and pubic hair as he cranked down the windows and cooked. On this summer day in the twenty-eighth year of his life, McConaughey headed south, ostensibly lost, though he knew if he unfolded the wrinkled state map at his feet he would find his way home. Soon the Petrified Forest Road would recede to a mote on the horizon, and he’d turn onto Highway I80, having then the choice of right or left, east or west – of more flat, open road or a town, a beer, a bed – the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity. Before nightfall, he’d be close to Silver Creek. Tomorrow he’d reach Mexico, if he gunned it, and so he did, fine to be lost and alone in the big empty, curling his toes over the sooty gas pedal and kicking the map away.
The
van, like all his vehicles and animals, had a name: Cosmo. It was his personal chariot through good times and dangerous places – hell, the whole cosmos, if his head was screwed on right. It was his key to adventure, immaturity, boyish exploration, and he loved its white base coat and slick blue stripe, its dependable, beat-up attitude (not the kind of thing you’d expect from the star of A Time to Kill, let alone Amistad). He liked to think he could count on Cosmo’s curving, faux-wood walls, the soft bed for napping behind him, the captain’s chair to his back draped with stained flags (of the Lone Star State and the U.S.A., overlapped), the bead curtain separating forward from rear decks, the blue carpet beneath his sandy toes and the glittering disco ball rocking on its ceiling screws. Today, he kept the television quiet, but blared his Amboy Dukes CD– Ted Nugent’s motorcycle guitars on ‘Journey to the Center of the Mind’ revving from six speakers, subwoofers, flowing up through his butt to hammer its way through his trembling hands.
Native American carvings and tokens – Navajo, Ojibwa, Aztec – dangled from short lengths of dental floss attached to the roof. A small brown Smoking Indian, just for the kitsch, rotated endlessly from his rear-view mirror. They were his talismans, wards against losing his path, against the demons that crowded lost roads and wayward travellers. Little pieces of the land held aloft to reassure the sleeping lizard god beneath his wheels that he came in peace, that he had prepared his offering. The ground begged for water, and in a place of such heat, human moisture was the most holy, precious gift. Clutching his penis one-handed, he aimed his stream of urine into a red plastic funnel attached to a tube leading beneath the van, sprinkling his piss along the asphalt in tiny droplets.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said breathily to the road, to no one, swigging from his bottle of mineral water and shaking his dick dry.
Beside the Smoking Indian, attached to his rear-view mirror by plastic clip, hung his reliable tape recorder, recently loaded with two double-A batteries and an unused cassette. He turned down the Dukes and made another entry in his road diary.
‘Time: 3:04 p.m. Making for the I80. And then, well, the sky being the limit, we don’t know … This is a voyage, all right … And something … some thing is definitely going to happen. But don’t get impatient, now. Let that some thing come to you.’
He pressed STOP. Maybe that last entry was unnecessary. Just a sigh to fill the silence. So far he’d done no profound thinking, but he knew if he kept driving the thoughts would come. The muses would start speaking to him, come whispering in under the radio and dash as he let the blankness purge all mind-fucking trauma. Muses, spirits, whatever – he needed the blankness to clean out his brain, give him the cherished white page upon which he’d record some mental masterpiece, some dexterous feat of thinking to save him from his city-based, head-clutter funk. He’d done some of his best acting alone, just Matthew vs. the recorder, working out his shit, practising his accents and tricks at delivery. Indeed, he’d recorded his greatest insight on the same device: a bit of wisdom that came to him last year on a nighttime highway in northern Texas, where he realized that true acting involved the head, not the heart. Only the head could get sucked in. A mature heart would stay put, no matter what sacrifices were made, so it made no difference how deeply you delved into a persona or how methody you got pursuing a role. If you knew this, you could allow yourself to get reckless, to lose for longer periods whatever you thought was some essential you. He had no fear, now, about going the extra mile, or going to those dark places certain roles required. Spielberg taught him some of that. So did Joel Schumacher, and the Buddha, and his father, and Val Kilmer, but it was mostly a Matthew original, thought up while doing his roadwork, confessing for his recorder.
Here’s a real confession, he thought. He hit REC.
‘I don’t want the day to end. I’m happy to be here.’
He let the wheels spin on the tape, recording dead air, the distant sounds of the highway and the weird whispers in the rushing wind. Happy to be here, he thought. Why? Because every city, cellphone and email meant a miniature catastrophe. Every convenience store, grocery store, pharmacy, doctor’s office in every town across the country: a tabloid shot of him and Sandra, neither of them smiling, at some early-evening L.A. premiere. He couldn’t remember the day or occasion, what the goddamned weather’d been like (though it was always sunny, he recalled: that one constant hurt). What could he do now but run, burrow, hide? He was tired, felt sick to death of heartache. The desert meant total erasure; it meant a fade-out to a new scene.
‘Something’s got to happen,’ he whispered, though not entirely sure how that something would turn out. There were two irksome worms troubling his conscience: one romance-related, the other a matter of career. He’d broken out of his Dave Wooderson, Dazed and Confused obscurity with the John Grisham project A Time to Kill, feeling that the time was finally right, that his moon had lined up with some ascendant star. The re-release of The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre merely amused him, now that he was famous; let all the mainstream filmgoers puzzle over his hammed-up role in the straight-to-video, schlocky gore flick. It amused him in the same way Cosmo could put people off, remind them he was wise to the head game of Hollywood, that he didn’t exactly want to fit in. And then he’d scored his next big shot, one of the surefire films of the decade: Amistad, historical tear-jerker, December release, with Hopkins overacting as John Quincy Adams and Spielberg almost frighteningly confident at the helm. It was like winning the lottery. How could he fuck up a film with such star power, about something as unanimously cherished as abolition? Got to play another smart-sounding lawyer, too: James Baldwin, southern gentleman and estate attorney, much like in his lucky break as the southern-born defence attorney Jake Brigance in A Time. All the right conditions, and he thought he’d kicked it straight through the posts: Oscars and Golden Globes, whispers of promise in the flashbulb air. Especially after his earlier summer exposure in the high-grossing Contact, which had him billed second to Jodie Foster and generally commended for his laid-back, soft-toned approach to playing a holy man. But what was the miserable, memorized consensus? Ebert put it plainly: he was ‘not much moved’ by his performance. TV Guide thought his accent ‘unidentifiable,’ his mannerisms a ‘liability,’ said he was still too much the ‘dude from Texas.’ The San Francisco Chronicle called his passionate exclamations ‘broad gesturing,’ his overall portrayal ‘close to embarrassing.’ There were some good reviews, sure, and thank the sleeping gods, but the split decision was pummelling, tripping him up with a hollow sort of fatigue: a hurt that kept on like a gnawing, persistent hangover, reminding him that lightning, as the saying went, only strikes once.
Then it all collapsed with Sandra: a pain that compounded the disappointments of those divided reviews. Everyone could see the honest gut-check chemistry between them. They ‘sizzled’ onscreen, wrote the journalists; the Deep South sexuality was like thick grease between them, coating them, slick and irresistible. They seemed powerless, innocent of design, as all the mags and TV spots started the rumours before they were even true: that Sandra and Matthew were an on-set couple, an affair in the making. He saw her as a geeky girl who couldn’t care less about how she was perceived. He dug her, dug the five years she had on him, dug the way her laugh turned to a honk, dug her heavy-lidded gaze. They could play together; they could high-five, wrestle, burp. He knew she dug him back, but maybe it was all the pressure, the articles and the gossip sheets and the surreptitious snapshots, all that public certainty, that sealed the deal. Maybe. Maybe, in some other, kinder universe, it would have been better to meet away from the camera’s imperious eye, to find their own pace, let things fall more naturally. In any case, it happened: they touched in trailers, they made love, they were out in public, and that was that. She’d been a rock throughout that whole crazy year, the New York and L.A. premieres of Contact and Amistad, the hoping and praying, the long periods of weariness and moping after the mixed reviews. She’d been the first ear for his fea
rs, a golden ear, willing and giving and so patient it made him cry, coaxing thin rivers of tears from his eyes while he toked from his three-foot bong on Cosmo’s rear bumper.
Her eyes were wet with crying, too, on the night it finally fizzled – fat, salty tears that he would kiss away, and that one-in-a-million wisdom he’d never find again. He was sweating buckets, not from the night (which was breezy and cool) but from the dread of what was coming. They pressed their foreheads together, fogging up the windows with their heat, saying they loved each other but it just wasn’t right – that it wasn’t being in love. And it was exactly what he’d been yearning to say, knowing through the heavy spring rains of ’98 that it was doomed, drawing them toward this quiet confrontation. The urge to see her had shrivelled during their extended time apart, they were talking less and less, and soon he’d begun to believe that their love wouldn’t have happened if not for the media’s meddling, the public’s demand for the beautiful picture of their pairing, which seemed so right. He felt a relief in voicing it, and they spoke in soothing tones, crying a little over what could have been and for the time they’d had, which he knew would stay like a damp, bittersweet chill in his bones. They kissed, slow and on the lips, the salt of her sweat beading there against his tongue. And then she slid the door open and left the van, gave a last small squeeze to his hand, called him Matty. He slept in Cosmo’s stale sheets until just before dawn, waking to a headache, to a clutching paranoia and regret: that even if there was no more thrill, no real connective tissue, no reason, there was still the past, and the fanatical force propelling him to hold her and envision some impossible golden future together, denying and delaying all the fine-cutting loneliness that was waiting high above, like a hovering buzzard, falling feather-like to rest and claw at his stomach.
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