Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  “He crawled under a lorry. A stationary lorry,” Jeff says.

  “No?”

  “The lorry started and ran over him,” Jeff says.

  “Really?”

  Ouch. That’s not supposed to be my next line, but . . . what is my next line? This time, Jeff cocks his head slightly. He can tell that something is up.

  “That’s what it says here,” he continues.

  “Really?” I say. Wrong again.

  What’s going on with me? This never happened during our rehearsals. This morning I knew every line in this play.

  “It’s enough to make you want to puke, isn’t it?” Jeff says.

  I open my mouth to say my next line . . . and my mind goes completely blank. Completely blank. This time I don’t have a clue what comes next.

  Jeff sits on the other bed, waiting. The audience waits, too. The theater is completely silent while everyone waits for me to say something. Anything.

  I frantically flip through the last few lines in my head, hoping they’ll offer a trigger. Nothing. It’s like all memory of the play has been siphoned out of my brain. Now my palms are really sweating. I wipe them against my pants. What the hell is wrong with me? Pinter is famous for using silence for effect but this brings dead air to a whole new level of absurdity. I carefully avoid looking at Mr. Thacker in the front row. I don’t think I can bear seeing his face right now.

  “I wonder who advised him to do a thing like that?” Jeff says. Right. That was my next line. Jeff is trying to save me, God bless him. Unfortunately, I’m beyond salvation by now.

  “A man of eighty-seven, crawling under a lorry!” Jeff continues. That’s his next line. Maybe the audience won’t notice that he’s doing both speaking parts. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course they’re going to notice.

  What the hell is happening to my brain?

  “It’s unbelievable . . .” Jeff says, shaking his head in mock empathy. He says it in character as if it’s been scripted, when it’s actually the start of my next line. He’s trying to feed it to me without giving himself away. My God, this guy is good.

  Somehow we stumble through the rest of the play. We cut ahead, we cut back, I ad-lib, and after a certain point we don’t even care where we are or whether the lines are correct, we’re just trying to get ourselves to the end. At one point the audience sits through, no exaggeration, four or five minutes of dead silence while I stare at the floor, wishing it would swallow me whole. I feel like I’m in the middle of one of those dreams where you show up at school naked or arrive just in time for a test you didn’t study for and didn’t know was scheduled. Except this is no dream and several hundred real people are witness to my humiliation.

  Afterward, my friends and teachers generously try to offer some form of praise. “I thought you were taking a moment,” one of the fathers says. “I thought that was a real actor’s moment.”

  Really? I want to say. Five minutes of silence, you thought that was scripted? but instead I shake his hand and thank him for coming. Then I walk away.

  I don’t know what I’m going to tell my parents on Sunday when they call. I can’t decide which is worse, having to get through this night without them or how I’d feel if they had seen me on stage. It’s a tie.

  Next time, I vow, I’ll pick a play that’s less challenging. I won’t pick material that’s over my head.

  Even now, thirty-five years later, the act of remembering that night brings back all the emotions I felt on stage. The humiliation, the anxiety, even the sweaty palms. But what strikes me most is not that I managed to survive the experience intact, or that I survived it at all, but that even as I walked away I was already thinking about the next time. Despite what had just happened on stage, I never doubted there would be a next time. I knew I wanted to act. A night of public humiliation wasn’t going to stand in my way.

  When I told my father about what happened that night, he shared a similar story with me about having once forgotten his own lines on stage. It was an actor’s rite of passage, it seemed, which made me feel better. Sort of.

  Monday morning, the seventh of March. I’m walking out of English class, heading for my locker, when a kid I barely know walks up to me.

  “Hey, I heard something on the news about your dad,” he says.

  “What do you mean?” I say. I have no clue what he’s talking about.

  “Yeah, he got sick or something. My parents heard it on KNX this morning.”

  Something’s wrong with my dad? My parents hadn’t called home on Sunday, but that wasn’t unprecedented. Normally they’d go down to Manila for the weekend to stay in the city, eat in restaurants, and use the phone to call home, but sometimes my father had to work weekends and couldn’t leave the set. Still, I knew that if he was sick enough to make the news, somebody would have called to let us know.

  At lunchtime, another kid walked up. “Sorry about your dad,” he said. And again in science class: “Bad news about your dad’s heart attack.”

  Heart attack? What?

  When the next bell rang I headed straight to the school office. “I need to use the phone,” I told the secretary. “I’ve heard something’s going on. I need to call home.”

  Jimmy and Joe were at the house, and both of them got on the phone.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Your dad’s in the hospital in Manila,” Joe explained.

  “He has heat exhaustion,” Jimmy added.

  Heat exhaustion? Having been in the oppressive heat of the Philippines for four months, knowing how much my father was drinking, heat exhaustion made sense. I can see that happening, I thought. It wasn’t a life-threatening condition. So I went along with my day.

  “Heard about your father’s heart attack,” a kid in my next class said. Word must have been spreading quickly.

  “No, it was heat exhaustion,” I said.

  “Sorry to hear about your dad,” my PE teacher said.

  “He got heat exhaustion,” I said.

  All afternoon, classmates and teachers kept saying “heart attack.” I pushed back with “heat exhaustion.” When I got home, Jimmy and Joe were sticking to the heat exhaustion story, but their grim expressions made me suspicious. Why such serious faces for something as fixable as overheating? Unless . . .

  “All right, guys,” I said. “Is it what you tell me or is it what’s on the news?”

  Jimmy looked at Joe. Joe looked at Jimmy. Finally, Joe confessed. “It was a heart attack. He’s in the hospital in Manila.” My mother had called home with the news right away. She’d spoken only with Jimmy and Joe, to discuss the situation among the adults first.

  “A heart attack? What?”

  “They want all of you guys to go back there,” Jimmy said.

  Back to the Philippines? I’d barely had time to digest that my father had suffered a heart attack. Now I was learning I’d be leaving school for who knew how long. Heart attack? Hospital? The Philippines, again?

  Later that night, lying in bed, I tried to piece together the day’s events. I knew how crazy the shoot was in the Philippines. It was hard to be surprised by anything that happened over there. But a heart attack? Heart attacks were something that struck grandparents, not thirty-six-year-old men in their prime. My father was young and very fit. A heart attack didn’t make any sense at all.

  I didn’t learn the details of what had happened until much later, how my father woke up with chest pains in the dark early on a Saturday morning while my mother was away in Manila; how he crawled alone for a mile through the jungle to get to the main road; how he was picked up by a bus and airlifted to Manila, where he was given last rites by a priest who didn’t speak English and so couldn’t hear his confession. To those who knew how he’d spent the previous few days, a heart attack made sense. He’d sat wet and dirty in a cage as a prisoner at Kurtz’s compound, had snakes crawling across his legs, and was dragged upside down through the mud by the Ifugao tribesmen, scenes that taxed him physically and mentally. I th
ink he reached a kind of invisible, inner threshold that only he could recognize. When asked years later about what he thought caused the heart attack, my father would explain, “I call it fragmentation. There was a lot of responsibility on me that I was unable to carry. I was divided spiritually. I was almost nonexistent, not in touch with my spirit at all. I was not in command of my own life.”

  It’s hard to re-create the week that followed with any clarity. Everything happened so fast. I went through another round of good-byes at school, another transpacific flight on a DC-10. Someone must have flown over with the four of us, but I can’t remember who. Unlike the last trip over, when we hadn’t known what to expect or how to prepare, this time we knew the place. We knew the players. My father’s condition was the only unknown, but it was a big one. We knew his condition was serious, but nobody had said he was dying. This gave us reason to be both scared and hopeful on the long flight overseas.

  By the time we arrived in the Philippines, my dad had spent three weeks in the hospital. My mother had not left his side for a moment. She and her former therapist, Denah Harris, a psychiatric social worker in New York, spoke by phone once or more a day, unraveling my father’s fears. My mother refused to let anyone but friends into his room. No producers, no studio heads, no Francis. She also kept the doctors at bay, refusing all medication and exploratory surgery, relying instead on therapy with Denah and food of her choice from the hospital kitchen. She must have appeared totally insane.

  On March 18, the two of them were awakened by a massive magnitude 7 earthquake that sent the entire hospital staff scurrying under their desks. My father yelled to my mother to bring his boots so he could lead the rescue down the nine floors to the street. Instead, they huddled together until the shaking subsided.

  Denah had suggested a healing technique that Norman Cousins had written about based on his own experience: laughter. Cousins had been diagnosed with a terminal spine condition and checked himself out of a hospital and into a hotel room with a stack of Marx Brothers films. As he describes in Anatomy of an Illness, he laughed so hard when he watched them he activated chemicals in his body that helped him heal. So my mother requested some funny films, and the production office sent a 16-millimeter movie projector and a projectionist over to the hospital one evening, along with the 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard.

  Near the end of the first reel the Filipino projectionist began to feel ill. My father called the nurse, who took the man down to the emergency room. A few minutes later they returned. The nurse announced that the man was having a heart attack but had no money for admission. My mother grabbed all the money in her wallet, thrust it into the nurse’s hands, and insisted that the man be admitted to the hospital and given all necessary treatments. While they waited for news on the man’s condition, my mother learned how to operate the projector. They later learned that the man was occupying my father’s old room in the ICU, where he eventually made a full recovery.

  After leaving the hospital, my parents moved to a Manila hotel where a large convalescent room was set up for my father. We were brought directly to the room when we arrived. My dad was sitting up in bed and looked tiny and scared and pale. I noticed a cane resting by the side of his bed. When he stood up to greet us, it was devastating to see him able to hug us with only one arm, while he used the other to steady himself. His voice was weak, which was the most alarming part. My father had always had a loud, boisterous speaking voice and an infectious laugh. It was as if the power had been drained out of him.

  We kids had our own room down the hall, and at night we’d go to my parents’ room to watch films with them. Charlie and I would open a canister, thread up the projector, and turn it on. We laughed many times while watching To Be or Not to Be. Several more comedies were added to the film library, and we were able to watch them with my father over the next three weeks at the hotel. Years later, Francis would tell James Lipton, the host of the television show Inside the Actors Studio, that my mother had saved Apocalypse Now. She probably did.

  Little League was gearing up for the season back in Malibu, and Charlie, who was an avid baseball player, was missing the start of it. Sometimes he’d take my father outside in a wheelchair to toss a baseball back and forth. Throw and catch, then Charlie would move the wheelchair back a few feet, throw and catch, then move the wheelchair back a few feet more. Eventually my father became steady and strong enough to throw and catch while standing up. Exercising outside in the sun also went a long way toward helping him heal.

  Without a set to visit, and because my father wasn’t yet strong enough to travel, we slowly started going stir crazy cooped up in the hotel. Charlie and I would kill time every day by walking the surrounding streets, where vendors displayed an array of balisong knives for sale—a kind of switchblade with a handle that splits in two and flips around to conceal the blade. In the United States they were called butterfly knives and at the time were banned in some states. In the Philippines balisongs were common pocket knives with a whole art form to opening and closing them. My parents forbade us from having any, so naturally that meant Charlie and I accumulated a whole mess of them. We took whatever money we could come up with, each bought one knife per day, and kept them hidden in our hotel room. I don’t know how we expected to get them back to the States. I don’t think we were planning ahead that far.

  One afternoon, like any two kids with a collection, we spread all our knives across one of the hotel beds to sort through and admire. There must have been thirty of them lined up on the bedspread. Some had three-inch blades and some had six-inch blades, most had metal handles, and a few were inlaid with wood or bone. If you twisted your wrist just the right way, at just the right velocity, you could flip the knife open with one hand. It was a much cooler maneuver than popping open a pocketknife. Charlie and I practiced flipping the balisongs open and closing them until we started getting it right.

  Only too late, I realized we’d left the hotel room door slightly ajar—a critical mistake. Charlie was standing with his back to the door, so I was the only one who could see my father’s cane as it poked through the slight opening. We had only about five seconds before he limped his way into the room. I didn’t want to imagine the outcome of his gaze landing on a bedspread covered with three dozen items of his underage sons’ forbidden contraband. It would not have been a stellar moment in Sheen family history.

  So quickly it was more of a reflex than a decision, I leapt on the bed and starting jumping on it like a trampoline. “Dad!” I whispered loudly. Charlie immediately leapt into action. As the knives started bouncing he swept them up in the bedspread in one swift move and shoved the whole bundle under the bed. I bounced off and landed hard on the floor a split second before my father stepped fully into the room. A Broadway choreographer couldn’t have timed it more perfectly.

  My father never had a clue what we were up to. Not a clue. Or if he did, he never let on.

  As my father slowly recuperated, we received word that the special effects team would be demolishing Kurtz’s compound outside of Pagsanjan. The production was required by law to remove all its sets, and Francis had worked the destruction of this one into the film. One version of the script called for Willard and Lance to call in an airstrike on the compound just before leaving by boat. The massive nighttime explosions would represent the eradication of evil. The surreal destruction footage appears at the very end of the film, as the closing credits roll.

  By the end of March my father was stable enough for me to leave Manila for a night, so my parents gave me permission to travel to Pagsanjan to watch the compound be destroyed. Fishburne was still in the Philippines and wanted to see it, too, so we returned to the riverbank set together. It looked exactly as it had when I’d left it five months ago, minus the Ifugaos, who had returned to their mountain home.

  The special effects team and camera crew had been preparing for the explosions all day. Bunkers had been dug out across the river for the c
ameras and a helicopter was prepared to capture the aerial views. Nobody knew, not even the special effects guys, how the demolition would actually play out that night. And this was definitely the kind of shot you could only do once.

  Fishburne and I got into position across the river to watch the action. Everyone on set assumed their places as well, and then—“Action! Action! Explosion! Explosion! Explosion!” The call signs were shouted quick and loud into the walkie-talkies. Massive fireballs erupted in ear-splitting blasts across the water as demolition charges starting going off one after another, in a carefully orchestrated sequence. Enormous walls of adobe and cement burst apart, spurting large chunks into the air. The night sky filled with billows of thick gray smoke. It was like having a front row seat to a volcanic eruption, without the flowing lava. Fishburne and I clung to each other as the earth rocked under our tennis shoes. The explosions were so intense and so overpowering, speech was impossible.

  A tech adviser looked up and cowered. Rocks and big clods of dirt came raining down.

  “Hey! Everyone!” he shouted. “Here comes the cement!”

  I looked up just in time to see a piece of cement the size of a couch flying toward us. Fishburne and I grabbed each other and dived under a massive tree trunk for cover. The cement landed on the ground with a deathly thud. We huddled there, shaking, until all the big pieces had landed.

  Here comes the cement! It remains one of the most outrageous sentences anyone has ever shouted at me, before or since.

  Production continued on the movie as my father recovered in Manila. Francis managed to keep the crew semi-busy by filming the other actors and the boat scenes from a distance. My uncle Joe, who looked enough like my father, was recruited from California to appear in wide and over-the-shoulder shots. Francis would get my father’s close-ups later and insert them at editing time.

  It looked possible that my father would be able to return to the set in a few weeks. He was steadily gaining strength, and my time in Manila started coming to a natural end. There was no reason for me to stay longer, and many reasons for me to go back to school.