The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  As it turned out, Ann was eight weeks pregnant, so now she was crying for two. We didn’t want to tell anyone because we were afraid the producers would say it violated the insurance for the movie and fire her.

  We started shooting our first scenes the next day. We had no idea that Paradise Island in the Bahamas was so far from paradise. There are no natural resources so everything has to be shipped in, making the prices sky-high. There was a lot of unemployment, making armed robbery a popular career path. The AIDS rate was rampant at something like 30 percent, making health care a large part of the gross national product. And to cap it off, the termites were swarming. This was not like termites swarming in Southern California. It was like something from Starship Troopers. The moment you walked outside after dark, two-inch-long flying bugs would land in your ears or try to lay eggs up your nose. It was ghastly.

  In spite of the nightmarish living conditions, the shooting of the movie was going well, thanks to Gérard, Katie, and Steve Miner. I remember a night shoot at the Ocean Club where we pretended we were at a swanky tropical party with occasional bugs flying into our drinks. It was fun to hear Gérard swear in French. There was a grand piano in the scene. During breaks I would go up and play. I had learned a Mozart piece used in one of Gérard’s films, Germinal. As I played, Gérard came up and asked me, “What is that song?”

  “Mozart’s Fantasie in A Minor. It was the theme of your last movie,” I told him. He laughed and said he thought it sounded familiar.

  We took a break at about three a.m. Everybody left the set. I had the night sky, the ocean, and a few minutes alone. I sat down at the piano and started playing the “Moonlight Sonata.” I sensed someone behind me. It was a Bahamian man who was an extra that night, playing a waiter in the background of the scene. He came around and leaned on the piano and listened. The song wound to its unrelenting conclusion. At the end the man stood and wiped the tears from his eyes and asked me what the song was. I told him it was the “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven. He said it was the most beautiful song he had ever heard. He asked me if there was a recording of it. I told him there were—lots of them. He gave me a piece of paper and asked me to write down the name so he could remember it. As I wrote it down, he told me he was getting married in two weeks. He wanted to find this song and have it played for his wife. She deserved something this beautiful. He said at the ceremony he would swear before God that he would try to make every day for her as beautiful as this song.

  If Beethoven could come back and read all of the writings by musicologists, all the reviews of his works, I would put money down that he would be more pleased by this one man’s pledge to his bride.

  We shot for a month. During that time I was so worried about Ann and so worried about Robert, I had not taken any Stephen-time to enjoy myself. It had been too hot to go outside without risking a stroke. I was too afraid of being raped or robbed to go shopping, so I lived in the hotel room or I went to the set and worked.

  I had a day off and I decided enough was enough. It was my life. It was my time here on earth and I was going to enjoy it. I exploded out of the hotel. The beach was amazingly empty. It was like a dream. I had the entire blue Caribbean to myself.

  I put on my mask and flippers and dove into the warm, beautifully clear ocean. I was one with the waves as I started to swim toward the horizon. I made it past the first line of breakers, and as I came up for air, out of the corner of my eye I saw a man dressed in white on the beach waving at me. I kept swimming and I waved back. He kept waving and yelling something like “Come back, come back.” I couldn’t quite make it out, I just kept swimming and I yelled back when I came up for air, “Yeah, I’m a-swimmin’! I’m a-swimmin’ and loving it!” and as I looked under the water with my mask, I saw with a new clarity that I was in the middle of what looked like a lot of trash. And then I thought back to the woman years ago in Thailand telling me to be careful not to swim in the ocean. That was where they dumped all the medical waste. What was this? It seemed like hundreds of clear Baggies floating in the water. I looked closer and I could see they weren’t exactly Baggies. They seemed to move on their own—and they had tails! Oh God! Jellyfish! I was in a swarm of jellyfish!

  I turned around and started swimming for my life. I felt the jellyfish cluster around me, swiping me with their tentacles. I was getting stung on my neck and across my chest. Oh God, oh God, get me out of here. I tore through the water like a sputtering motorboat. When I reached shore I headed for the man dressed in white. I fell down on the beach. I had red whip marks on my upper body. The man came up to me. He was the big black man who put deck chairs out by the swimming pool. He bent down and looked over my wounds. He shook his head. “Jellyfish. No good. Very poisonous,” he said.

  “It’s bad?”

  The man nodded. “It’s very bad. Very, very bad. You could die.”

  I started to panic. I said, “You’re kidding.”

  “No kidding. Jellyfish bad.”

  “Is there anything I can do? Go to the doctor?”

  “No, man. Doctor not gonna help you now. Only one thing can stop the poison. You need to pee on it.”

  I stared at the big man. He stared at me.

  Pause for reflection.

  I have learned that certain pieces of advice can change the way one views the world. Going to Illinois was a big example. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do at the time. But I took Hob’s advice, I went, and it changed my life. Conversely, the counsel I have given myself over the years has, on occasion, been suspect. Covered with fleas, I decided to drive through downtown Dallas naked during rush hour. That was not a wise choice. Now I stood at another crossroads. Would I take the advice of the Big Man, as curious and hideous as it seemed, and in doing so—choose life? Or would I just blow it off, and perhaps choose death?

  The red welts were starting to burn. I was paralyzed by fear, pain, and stupidity all at once. And now, in this diminished capacity, I had to find someone to pee on me.

  At first I thought if I could get behind the deck chair hut, I could pull my trunks down and try to get an arc of urine going and pee on my own chest. Then I noticed hotel guests moving down to the pool area. I would probably get arrested.

  Then I thought I could run up to the room and get Ann to pee on me. But she was a woman, and I needed accuracy. I could ask Robert to pee on Daddy, but then I thought about all of the psychiatry bills I would have to spring for later in his life. Then I looked back at the Big Man. Maybe I could just pay him five dollars to pee on me and call it a business expense.

  In the end, I chose death. I ran back up to my room and made an appointment with the doctor on call for the movie.

  The Big Man was right. The doctor didn’t help me much. She looked over the red welts on my chest and told me to stay indoors out of the sun. I asked her if it would help to get my wife or son to pee on me. The doctor stopped and stared at me for a long moment and asked, “Why?”

  “I heard that peeing on the sting will take the poison out,” I said.

  She laughed and said, “No. That only works for sea urchins.”

  The day was already looking up. I had avoided paying the Big Man five dollars to pee on me for no reason. The doctor said you can get your wife to pee on you if you want but if it were me, I’d just take a couple of Tylenol and rest.

  I HAVE MENTIONED that movie companies are notorious for shooting in any locale where they can save on living expenses. Cheap rooms, cheap food, cheap non-union crews are always at the top of any producer’s list. The ultimate find for any producer is a casino. Casinos love to get seventy or more people far from home with cash per diem in their pockets.

  I have a natural antipathy toward gambling. I have never liked it. I never am happy when I win and I hate it when I lose. I told Ann she would never have to worry about me sneaking off to the casino when she was asleep. I hated the thought of losing all my money in one of these places, especially with another baby on the way.

  One of our
first days on the set, our director, Steve Miner, cajoled one of our actors, Mike, to tell us about his experiences in the casino the night before. Mike was a funny guy, New York through and through. He just shrugged and said, “Well, I went to the casino and picked up three grand.” Wow. There were shouts of amazement, congratulations, and pats on the back. Mike shrugged it off and said it was nothing. Someone suggested evilly that I should go with Mike that night and play some blackjack. “You wanna come?” Mike asked.

  “No. I don’t do gambling,” I said.

  “I understand, from your point of view. But what I do isn’t gambling. I treat it like a business. I won $3,000 last night. I take $1,500 of it and put it in the sock. The sock remains under the bed. I do not touch the sock. The sock is inviolate.”

  “I got it. You leave the money in the sock,” I said.

  “The sock is never touched except to put money into the sock.”

  “Got it.”

  “So tonight, I will take the $1,500, and say I don’t win so much, say I only win $500. $250 goes into the sock.”

  “Which you never touch,” I said.

  “Right,” Mike said. “The sock is sacred. You don’t mess with the sock. Then I take the remaining $1,750 and play, and so on and so forth. They paid me ten grand to do this movie. If I play my cards right,” Mike laughed and continued, “Yeah, yeah, the play on words was intentional.” (Which it wasn’t.) “Anyway, if I play my cards right, I could leave with maybe an extra fifteen grand in the sock.”

  His strategy amazed me. It seemed so simple, so perfect. Four weeks later I asked Mike how he was doing. He grimaced and said he had had a setback. He had lost all of the money in the sock and lost his entire salary of ten grand playing blackjack. I was horrified. “How was that possible?” I asked.

  Mike shook his head and said, “I touched the sock, Stephen. Never touch the sock.”

  “I won’t, Mike. I won’t.”

  But I did.

  On the last day of the movie, on my way out of the hotel, I put a quarter in a video poker machine and pushed the button. I got a royal flush. I made twelve dollars on my twenty-five-cent bet. I told Mike about it on the way to the airport to go home. He laughed and said, “Hey, look at Mr. I-Don’t-Gamble. You beat me out by twelve dollars.” Of course, I was thinking I beat him out by $10,012—but who’s counting?

  As I headed to the airport, I carried a collection of thoughts for the long flight home. Only a few of them had to do with having been on location. I was worried about our son Robert. He had his fourth birthday in the Bahamas. He swam with dolphins. He caught a crab and brought it to our bathroom. We christened him Mr. Jones before we released him back into the ocean. But most of Robert’s time there was not happy. For several days in a row he pretended he was a king snake and crawled into a closet where he stayed for hours. He said he didn’t want to come out because it was his “nest.” He hated the food. All he ate for a month were hot dogs. He begged to go home. He cried so long and so hard, we sent him back with the somewhat ineffective nanny, Carla, who was also crying. She got her phone bill. She had been talking nonstop to her new boyfriend in the States. Communication at the beginning of a relationship is always difficult, especially when there are roaming charges.

  Ann was pregnant with our second child. Our lives were about to change again. That was far more present in my mind than the images of girls with the cornrow hairdos, calypso music, or jerk chicken.

  To be honest, as I got on the plane to go home, the main recollection I had wasn’t the swarming termites, or swimming with jellyfish, or even whether I would heed the Big Man’s advice—but was remembering one afternoon when a series of storms were heading in from the open ocean. From our hotel room we could see the curve of the earth and what Herman Melville called “the watery part of the world.” Ann and I looked out at the darkness that seemed on the edge of nowhere and watched the silent, tiny lightning strikes headed our way.

  As the plane flew back to Miami, I recognized that the real romance of travel isn’t travel at all, but the act of putting yourself in a position to be surprised. The key was surprise, not geography. As long as you keep that precious commodity, life becomes a romance. As we flew, I dug in my carry-on, and I found the case of CDs I had brought to listen to on the set—which I never did. I was too busy playing Tetris. In the small collection were two discs by Beethoven: one of the “Tempest Sonata,” the other, the “Moonlight Sonata.”

  My mind went back to the night by the ocean and meeting the young Bahamian man. I had forgotten about his wedding. It must have been two weeks ago. I wondered if he found the “Moonlight Sonata”? Did it play as his bride-to-be walked down the aisle? Did she know he picked the song for her, to honor her life with beauty? I was happy that one of my souvenirs of this trip was something I left behind.

  23.

  HEART. BROKEN.

  I WENT ON a Boy Scout hike one weekend with my then eleven-year-old son, Robert, in the San Gabriel Mountains. We were hiking to a place called the Bridge to Nowhere. It was a bridge built during FDR’s first term when the government made up all sorts of projects to get Americans back on the job. They built things all over the country, but few are as beautiful as this bridge. The problem was that they never got around to building the roads to or from the bridge, so consequently you have to hike a day into the mountains to find it.

  We saw it eventually. We didn’t see it that day. Our fellow Scouts were into competing with one another in hiking fast. Robert and I fell behind. Somewhere we must have made a wrong turn. No one looked back. And we ended up lost. Lost in the mountains. Lost in the mountains, alone, with about three more hours of daylight.

  It was a terrifying day, but a revealing one. I learned what is so awful about being lost isn’t really “where you were” but “when you were.” It is an issue of time more than location.

  The thought keeps coming back into your mind, “When did I make the wrong turn? If I can only get back to the spot where I went right instead of left, I’d be happy.” But you can’t. And the reason you can’t is that you don’t know how long you’ve been lost. A minute? Five minutes? An hour? Were you ever on the right path from the beginning? Without time as a frame of reference, your strategy can only be to wander.

  And after an hour of trekking through mountain brush with no path, you give up on that question and settle for the follow-up: “Okay, I don’t need to know how long I’ve been lost. Just please, make me found.”

  While lost, you look for all sorts of signs that you’re not conscious of in regular day-to-day life. You look for signs that others may have come your way. And failing that, you look to see if you can survive here on your own.

  I knew in the early eighties that I was lost. My life with Beth had become unrecognizable. Over the past decades my mind has sifted through clues, looked for bent twigs and footprints that could have shown me the first misstep. I keep coming back to that year in Illinois. Was it the night Beth and I read Claudia Reilly’s play, and we walked home in silence? That night when Beth made a declaration in our living room that she wanted to be a writer? I heard her words and supported her, but at that moment I felt that wanting to be a writer was like wanting to be an actor. No matter how much you want to do it, you become one when someone else hires you and says that’s what you are. Was that the first wrong step off the trail? My disconnect with Beth’s passion?

  Or was it the summer before Illinois, when Beth had the success of Am I Blue followed by graduation, followed by a large expanse of nothing, until out of desperation she got a job as a waitress at Pepe Gonzalez Mexican Restaurant? The net result of that endeavor was that, for the two hours she had the job, she got to wear an outfit that made her look like a farm girl on a chili pepper jar.

  Was it her crying in my arms that afternoon before my matinee of Godspell, when she looked up at me with a soul full of despair and said, “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?”

  Or was it a dream she had one night a co
uple of years earlier? She woke up screaming. She sat up in bed crying so hard it scared me. She stumbled to the bathroom sobbing. I followed her and asked what was wrong. Through her tears she just choked out mysteriously, “It’s too late. Too late. Nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing.”

  I remember a moment when I first felt our relationship tear. It’s a trivial moment, almost invisible. But I still remember it, almost thirty-five years later. Beth and I had just moved in together into the apartment on McFarlin in Dallas, the one with the fleas. We were playing cards on the living room floor. Nothing serious. Just something like Go Fish—and not for money, just killing time. Beth wanted a Coke, so I offered to get it for her in the kitchen. Beth wasn’t aware that on the wall of the kitchen was a picture covered with a glass frame. It acted like a mirror. I could see Beth around the corner sitting in the living room as I got her Coke. In the reflection, while in the kitchen, I saw her pick up my hand and look at my cards, and then look through the deck to put a card she wanted on top of the deck.

  I giggled in the kitchen as I put ice in her glass, figuring she was about to pull one of those Beth jokes on me that was nutty and dear at the same time. I came back from the kitchen waiting for the punch line. But she never said a thing. She asked for a card from me. I didn’t have it. I said, “Go Fish.” She drew from the deck, and whala! She had the winning hand. I stared at her, waiting, but there was no joke. She was just cheating at cards, with me, for no other reason than the thrill of it all.

  I never said a word. At first because I was waiting for the joke. Then because the timing was wrong and I didn’t want to embarrass her. I thought I was overreacting; after all, we were just playing cards. Then, I was embarrassed for myself—for conspiring with her to allow her to believe she had cheated me, to say nothing of forever ruining the integrity of the game Go Fish.