by Greg Sestero
“Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking I’d go play later.”
“Then let’s go play the soccer.”
I looked at his black slacks and long-sleeved shirt. “You’re sure?” I asked. “You’re not really dressed for soccer.”
“Forget about this stuff. I want to play.”
I’d been playing at Golden Gate Park’s Polo Fields all summer and suggested we go there. A few minutes later we pulled up and parked beneath some large eucalyptus trees. There were no summer-league games going on at the moment so it wasn’t too crowded. “My God,” Tommy said, “the sun shines like hell today.” He went back to the car to plaster sunscreen on himself. His pale face now looked even paler in the light. I noticed irritated red patches on the sides of his face and small bulges at his cheeks. His jaw was his best feature, as big and rugged as that of an old matinee idol. Everything else was . . . off, somehow. “This park is perfect place for vampire,” Tommy said, looking around happily. “I think vampire from Alcatraz live here.”
I had nothing to say about that.
“Okay,” Tommy said, running ahead. “Let’s play before I get heart attack!”
Tommy said not to take it easy on him, because he’d played plenty of soccer before. When we got to the Polo Fields I fed him a through pass. He bobbled the ball badly when it reached him.
“Where are you from, anyway?”
“New Orleans,” he said.
Tommy kicked me the ball. I kicked it back to him. From the look of things, I doubted Tommy had ever dribbled a soccer ball before. He was trying, though. In time he managed to boot the ball back to me, just as a misty fog started to roll in. The temperature dropped savagely, as though to accommodate Tommy’s undertaker presence. Tommy began making some peculiar “Woo woo woo!” noises. He was loosening up. When he managed to kick the ball into the goal, he said, “Touchdown!” At some point I realized that I, too, was having fun.
Tommy asked me what I thought of Jean Shelton.
“I like her,” I said, sending the ball over to him. “She’s tough but fair.”
Tommy kicked it back. “We argue, as you know. I don’t think she like me, but so what. I say how I feel. Feelings. That’s all we have as human beings. You know I have to work so hard to get to her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I study with her son first. Chris. You don’t know him?”
I didn’t know Jean Shelton had a son. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“He’s not so friendly guy. In one class we had big argument and he threw pencil at me.”
Despite not knowing Shelton’s son Chris, I had no trouble believing this.
“They play the politics,” Tommy said. Then: “I saw you one time when I come to observe the Jean’s class.”
“Really? When was that?”
“A few months ago. You were sitting there like you own the world.”
“Me?” Own the world? I lived with my parents. I didn’t even own a bicycle.
“I wanted to do performance in front of you, but you left before I could ask.”
This was bizarre. “Why?”
“I think, ‘Oh, I want to impress this all-America kid. I can show him good performance.’ ”
We kicked the ball in silence for a little while.
“You been to Los Angeles?” he asked.
“A few times.”
“In L.A., my God, everyone want to be big star! You go to gym and classes and all you see are actors, actors. Where do these people go? What happens if they don’t make it? Keep in mind, everybody there waiting for their chance. All these pretty boy.”
“You just have to do your best,” I said.
“No, I’m sorry, young man. May I correct you? You have to do more than that. You have to be the best.”
I’m not sure why, but Tommy’s words ran through me like a lance. Maybe that’s what I was doing wrong. Trying my best and not even thinking about being my best.
I told Tommy how close I’d come to landing a movie part the week before, and how disheartened I felt.
He stopped kicking the ball and walked over to me. “Then you should be proud of yourself! You need to think positive. Many people never get close to anything.” He paused and removed his sunglasses. “You can be big actor.”
In the time since I’d learned I wasn’t going to be in Wildflowers, not one person had consoled me. Tommy was the first. So he had a kind side to him after all.
“Thanks,” I said, touched by his sincerity. Tommy had no way of knowing how close I was to quitting acting. His little speech helped. It helped a lot.
As we were leaving, Tommy spied some pull-up bars and gymnastic rings at a workout area along the Polo Fields’ edge. “Watch this,” he said. He lifted himself into an iron cross position and held it for several seconds, before flipping himself backward while still maintaining his grip on the rings. He didn’t touch the ground—or, more surprisingly yet, dislocate both shoulders. As a display of upper-body strength it was incredible, but he’d also managed his flip with real grace. Tommy dropped back to the ground, every vein in his neck and forehead engorged from the effort.
I asked, “Were you an Olympic gymnast or something?”
Tommy, struggling for breath, laughed. “You ask too many questions!” He grabbed one of the rings and held it out to me. “Why don’t you try?”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“Come on! Just try. Don’t be chicken.”
“If I try to do what you just did, you’ll have to take me to the hospital.”
“No, not hospital.” He walked over to me and gave my back a manly swat. “Don’t be so dramatic. But you good sport overall.”
When he dropped me off at the Powell BART station, he did this extremely complicated fist-bump-good-bye-bro move. “Be cool,” he said. “We need to rehearse at least two or three times before the class. Very important. I’m serious actor.”
“I know,” I said. “ ’Bye, Tommy.”
He drove away. I wasn’t sure when I’d hear from him, but he called me the next morning, not bothering to introduce himself. “I’m sore,” he said.
• • •
We rehearsed again a few days later, this time at Tommy’s condo on Guerrero Street. He picked me up at Virgin Records on Market. It was pouring rain and he was late. When I got into the car he said, “We have groovy time playing with your soccer ball, but it’s time now to rehearse and do real work.”
We drove back to his place. Why Tommy didn’t tell me his address and have me meet him there, I have no idea. He also didn’t know how to use his windshield wipers. He drove leaning forward as close to his windshield as possible and made the sign of the cross after every church we passed. After nearly killing us several times, Tommy descended into his complex’s parking garage, which had hardly any cars in it. Every time he did see one, though, no matter how far away it was, Tommy slammed on the brakes. He pulled into a space that had a Bad-era Michael Jackson poster on the storage door in front of it. Once parked, he reached into the backseat for the anti-car-theft device known as the Club. He hung his Club over the steering wheel but didn’t lock it. I asked Tommy if he was going to lock the thing into place. He’d lost the key, it turned out, but the mere appearance of a Club, he explained, was enough to deter thieves.
Next to his parking spot was another car he owned, a beige, early-1980s Trans Am. All of its tires were flat and it was covered in roughly five coats of dust—in which someone (Tommy?) had used his finger to draw the Zodiac Killer’s symbol. This unnerved me greatly until Tommy admitted he had no idea what that symbol meant. At least I now knew that Tommy was (probably) not going to murder me when we got to his condo.
The parking-garage elevator to his third-floor condo required a key. When Tommy pulled his key ring from his jacket pocket, the Mystery of the Missing Club Key more or less solved itself. Tommy’s key ring had the diameter of an appetizer plate and was strung with so many keys that he suddenly looked like a me
dieval jailer. For several seconds, Tommy fumbled to find the elevator key. A few moments later, with a distant rumble, the elevator began to come down, clanking as ominously as I imagined an elevator in an old mental institution would.
“I must ask you again,” Tommy said, as the elevator doors opened, “that you please don’t talk about me. Where I live, for example.”
“I’m not going to talk about you,” I said. “Not even to my cat.”
Tommy’s condo felt like a foreign noir film—some dark, fascinating, catastrophe-breeding space. On every flat surface was a scatteration of papers and documents; along every wall were rows of boxes spilling over with videotapes and office equipment; in every corner were clothes-stuffed shopping bags emblazoned with a STREET FASHIONS USA logo, which I recognized from the card he’d given me a week before. In one corner of his condo was a blue unicorn statue with a gold horn. Near it, he’d parked a shopping cart filled with empty plastic bags. In the opposite corner was a life-size mannequin that had been posed . . . oddly, I guess you’d have to say; the thing sort of looked like it had been assaulted and left for dead. On the shelves were dozens of Dalmatian figurines and Disney toys. Every window was shrouded with red drapes, dyeing the little sunlight that managed to seep inside a hysterical, horror-film red. Tommy’s hardwood floor was partly covered with zebra skins. From what I could see of the floor, a lot of it had been ruined. This condo had a long, complicated archaeological history of mess behind it.
Tommy showed me around, starting with the photos on the walls, many of which were of himself, including a few grand, framed neoclassical portraits he’d had done. I didn’t have to be a French speaker to diagnose the syndrome afflicting a man who decides to commission an oil painting of himself: nouveau riche. He showed me his Skeletor death masks, his Pinocchio sculpture, his vases of crisply dead roses, his Julius Caesar bust with a sketch of Tommy directly next to it (uh-oh), his African and Aztec objets d’art, his impressive collection of memorabilia that somehow featured the American flag, his pyramid diorama, his small Statue of Liberty shrine, and a framed poem entitled “I Do Not Choose to Be a Common Man.”
On one cluttered desk, Tommy kept a picture of himself standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. It looked as though it had been taken in the 1960s. When Tommy noticed me looking at it, he said, “I almost got arrested because I try to walk on the grass. French assholes.”
One thing he didn’t show me, but which I noticed when I passed by it, was his framed degree from Laney College, a junior college in Oakland, where he’d made the honor roll.
“What did you study at Laney?” I asked, turning to him.
“I study the psychology.”
We came to his bookshelf, crammed with a peculiar collection of books: How to Write a Letter. Wealth 101. Shower Power: Wet, Warm, and Wonderful Exercises for the Shower and Bath. The Pill Book: A Guide to the Most Prescribed Drugs in America. Foot Talk. 100 Ways to Reward Employees. One shelf was filled with books about acting, the Stanislavski method, Brando, and James Dean. The year before I had read Rebel, Donald Spoto’s James Dean biography, which Tommy owned. He also owned another Dean biography I hadn’t read: Joe Hyams’s Little Boy Lost.
“James Dean?” I said, picking up the Hyams book.
“You must be kidding me,” Tommy said. “You don’t know James Dean?”
I did, of course, but I allowed Tommy’s misunderstanding of my question to hang there.
“Well,” Tommy said. “He’s the best. The best actor. You borrow this, you read about him, and it will all make sense.”
Like a million other young male actors, I was fascinated by Dean. The aspect of Dean’s life story that affected me most deeply was the lack of support shown to him by his father, who urged his son to pursue law. Spoto’s book had made clear that a lot of Dean’s legendary appeal was a result of his dying fast and young, with only three films under his belt. Still, Dean was compellingly raw in East of Eden, which remains one of my favorite film performances of all time. Maybe that was what I liked about Tommy, too. He went for it, however insanely.
I wanted to drink some water before we started rehearsing, so Tommy took me into his kitchen. All the cupboards were open and his sink was filled with a pile of dirty dishes and cloudy water. Hanging from the ceiling were two long sticky flytraps, both prodigiously covered in fruit flies. I no longer wanted to drink anything.
“How about some carrot juice?” Tommy asked.
I checked the date on the bottle he gave me. “This expired three months ago,” I said.
“Well, excuse me,” Tommy said. “The maid is on vacation.” He put the carrot juice back into his fridge.
On his refrigerator door Tommy had an array of magnets he’d collected of iconic American tourist sites: Las Vegas, the Space Needle, the Grand Canyon, the Hollywood sign, Graceland. Just in case his patriotism was in any doubt, he’d arranged them around a larger magnet of the American flag. Magneted to the fridge door was an outdated headshot with THOMAS P. WISEAU written underneath it. Below that was a picture of Tommy with what looked like his natural hair—it was shorter, and chestnut brown—sitting in a storefront window at what appeared to be Christmastime, in a place that may have been New Orleans. In the photo, Tommy was looking off into the middle distance, past the camera. How clean and untroubled these young-Tommy eyes were, especially compared to the eyes of the man standing next to me, and their spook-house repository of secrets.
“When was this taken?” I asked him.
Tommy looked from the photo, to me, to the photo. “A few years ago. When I was little kid.”
He looked at least thirty in this photo. “You look really young. Different.”
“I’m not so old now, you know.”
“So how old are you?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Okay, you rub it in now. Don’t go to certain territories.”
I leaned in for a closer look at the fridge-door Tommy as the following thought passed coldly through me: Something really awful happened to the guy in this picture.
In the living room we started preparing to prepare for our rehearsal. Tommy told me he used to take acting classes in Los Angeles with a teacher named Vincent Chase. I hadn’t heard of Vincent Chase at the time, but I would later. A lot of people would. Mark Wahlberg studied with him and named Adrian Grenier’s character in Entourage in his honor. Tommy referred to Chase as “the Vince.” I asked Tommy what kind of stuff he’d done with the Vince. Within seconds he was pulling an old camcorder from a box and hooking it up to his television. “Watch,” he said, and hit play. In the clip I saw Tom Sizemore critiquing the class along with Vince. A much younger-looking Tommy was doing a scene with an actor I recognized. He and Tommy hadn’t gotten very far into their scene when Vince began ripping both of their performances apart. “Hey,” I said. “Hasn’t that guy been on Baywatch?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “We were supposed to be roommates, but he find different place. I think he do gigolo stuff for money.”
The footage bore aging-videotape waveforms along the bottom of the screen, and both Tommy’s and his scene partner’s clothes had a Max Headroom, mid-1980s vibe to them. “When was this class?” I asked.
Tommy turned the video off. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t ask about that. Don’t be smart guy, okay?”
I dropped it. “So how was class,” I asked him, “when you weren’t being shredded by the Vince?”
Tommy shrugged. “It was okay. He’s good teacher. The Vince was tough, tough cookie. He kick your ass.” This wasn’t Tommy’s only L.A. class. He told me he’d also taken a film class at Los Angeles Community College.
“So you lived in L.A. for a while?”
“No,” he said. “Was like . . . commute. I would fly to L.A. on Thursday for class and fly back home the same night.”
I’d never heard anything so ridiculous. How did he afford that?
“I know, so crazy,” Tommy said. “But I have to take class. I want to be fi
lmmaker. I make movie in class. I got A minus.”
“You made a movie? What was it called?”
“Robbery Doesn’t Pay,” Tommy said proudly. “Tiny little thing. Shot on the super-eight.”
He showed me a couple of frames of the tiny little thing, which consisted of a large, hairy-looking guy in a white T-shirt casing an L.A. neighborhood for a car to steal, all of it scored to Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday.” Surprisingly, Tommy wasn’t in the film.
“Enough for now,” Tommy said. “Time to rehearse.”
We ran through the scene a few times, after which I suggested we put the scripts away and go off book. Tommy was hesitant but agreed. To give him a minute to prepare, I asked to use his restroom. There I found a professional makeup mirror and a pair of rusty twenty-five-pound dumbbells on the floor next to the toilet. Above the toilet was a large framed poster of the Disney character Aladdin.
Going off book turned out to be a bad idea. Tommy couldn’t remember anything, not even lines made up of nothing more than “Yes” or “No.” When he couldn’t remember his lines he waved his hands around, shouted, made up new lines, or did all those things at once. His mouth and mind had trouble establishing any lasting connection to each other; English was obviously not Tommy’s first language, but I was beginning to wonder if it was even his third or fourth. When he wasn’t being hysterical, he was critiquing my performance. “It has to be big,” he kept saying. “It has to be powerful.”
Of course this guy loves Brando and Dean, I thought. They’re captivating actors because they know exactly when to yell, when to floor it. Tommy believed you had to floor it for the duration of every scene.
What on earth compelled this man to want to act? His money explained his condo, his Mercedes, his weekly acting-class commutes to Los Angeles, but nothing I’d seen or heard so far explained him. I was no longer rehearsing a scene; I was private investigating another human being.
“What’s Street Fashions USA?” I asked him, in the middle of our scene, motioning toward one of the shopping bags in the corner.