by Greg Sestero
It was the first time Tommy had ever opened up to me. While I doubted some of his story’s particulars (to say the least), it was obviously a life-changing incident for him, and he believed his version of events. “After the accident,” he said, “I was sick for two weeks. I have bad dreams for long time. I never have been so scared in my life.” He told me that not even his second big car accident, which also had almost killed him, had been as terrifying.
I remained silent for a little while, thinking of a way to tell Tommy how glad I was he’d told me this story, but then I looked over at him and he was asleep.
I watched the mileage signs drift by and thought about what Tommy had shared. I hadn’t known him long, but in that short time I’d learned to detect when he was telling the truth. Something, I think, changed between us when he told me that story. Tommy had removed one small piece of his armor and placed it trustingly before me.
Before I met Tommy, I would not have day-tripped to the spot where James Dean died. There would have been too many critical voices in my head telling me how dumb and pointless such a trip would be. Tommy, though, made me realize I could drive to James Dean’s crash site for the simple reason that I felt like doing it. He made me realize that doing such things was the whole point of being young. This was not an attitude that came easily to me, but I could say or do anything around Tommy and he wouldn’t judge me. How could he? He was the weirdest person I’d ever met—but lovably weird. Around Tommy I could be who I wanted to be—and to me that felt like freedom.
When we got closer to San Francisco, I cranked up some music to keep myself awake. The only CDs Tommy had in the car were Van Halen and Richard Marx, so Van Halen it was. When the song “Dreams” came on, Tommy woke up and sang along for a couple of choruses, getting 90 percent of the words wrong. He sang with such deranged feeling, though, that I knew he would have been the toast of any karaoke bar worth its salt.
When the song was over, Tommy noticed how late it was. Which was when I realized that I’d missed our exit and gotten us lost. “You see,” Tommy said. “You act like crazy man first in class and now on highway. It’s midnight and you are lost like hell. But that’s okay. Don’t need to have panicky situation. No restrictions. Be yourself.”
I took the next exit I saw and only succeeded in getting us more lost. Tommy, meanwhile, pulled out his cell phone and called someone. I heard a woman’s voice on the other end. Their conversation was nothing but small talk, but who makes small talk after midnight? When Tommy told the woman he’d spent the day in Santa Barbara, I couldn’t decide if he was lying or simply confused. When Tommy hung up, I asked him to whom he’d been speaking.
He looked over at me. “None of your information,” he said.
“Come on,” I said. “Was that your girlfriend?” It hadn’t been a young voice on the phone. It sounded thin and trembly, more like an older woman.
Tommy laughed out loud. “No, not girlfriend.”
“Who, then? Your aunt?”
“Chloe is her name. Maybe she is my girlfriend, maybe not. You might meet her, but not at this time.”
By now we were lost enough to need a search party. Tommy pointed out a desolate truck stop and demanded we pull over and get directions. What he really wanted was a chance to buy himself several boxes of Cracker Jack. Tommy, I realized, didn’t care if we were lost. It wasn’t his bedtime for many hours yet and driving around rural California was a lot more interesting than being cooped up in his condo. Thanks to a road map inside the truck stop, I was able to figure out where we were.
Back in the car, Tommy animatedly pulled the prize out of every one of his Cracker Jack boxes, but the only one he liked was a little toy figurine he seemed to think was Pinocchio. I forged on back home. As we were driving, something caught Tommy’s attention outside the window. He pointed. “You see that? My God. Monster!”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was a deer.”
“Deer, my foot. That thing will kill you. You don’t know why or how. Speaking of killer, when I sleep, I have dream that you try to kill me.”
“How is it that you begin to get less tired at one in the morning?”
“Can I teach you something? Don’t say the word tired, or you will become more tired. Also, please be careful how you drive. I don’t want to die. I have many dreams in my life. I want to make a lot of movies, like Hitchcock. Maybe live two hundred more years, too.”
At the time, any one of those things sounded roughly as plausible as the other.
“And what about you, young man? What is your dream, other than finding map? Is it that you want to be James Dean? Class is over next week—you know that, don’t you? School is over, as they say.”
Tommy was right. Even worse, I hadn’t made any postclass plans. All I knew was that I didn’t want to take more acting classes anytime soon. So what did I want to do? I told Tommy the first thing that popped into my head: “I want to go to L.A.”
“Really,” Tommy said, impressed now, sitting up. “Okay. So why don’t you stay in my place?”
“Your place?”
“In L.A. I have apartment there.”
“You have an apartment in L.A.?”
“Yeah. I charge you two hundred dollars a month, and you can use it if you want.”
I have always believed that all dots connect eventually, that all experiences serve a distinct purpose. When I didn’t get the role in Wildflowers I tried, unconvincingly, to tell myself that there was good reason. That something positive would eventually come from it. Then I became scene partners with Tommy, and he brought up his hitherto unmentioned L.A. apartment. It was the opportunity I’d been waiting for.
“When is the apartment available?” I said, trying to seem only vaguely interested.
Tommy shrugged and smiled, seeing right through me. “Don’t play the politics, young man. So look, I have to go to L.A. next week after class. You can check out apartment. We go to L.A. together and you can decide. It’s up to you. I don’t force you.”
I trusted Tommy. He was secretive and moody but also giving and supportive. From watching Tommy in Jean Shelton’s class, I got the sense that he’d been judged his whole life. When it came to friendship, at least, I suspected that almost no one had given Tommy a chance. I was willing to take that leap of faith. What I wasn’t admitting to myself—what I probably couldn’t admit to myself back then—was that I met Tommy in the midst of the most aggressively, desperately lonesome months of my life. I needed a friend as much as he did. Maybe even more.
My mother wasn’t going to like the sound of me checking out an apartment in L.A. The worst thing I could imagine was Tommy and my mother discussing my future together. I couldn’t give her a chance to talk me out of this or forbid it. If I was going to pursue my dream, I had to take this chance. It was the only way.
“L.A., after class?” I said to Tommy, as though I hadn’t just torn my mind to shreds thinking the matter over.
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Next week. We go. If you want.”
“Okay,” I said. “That sounds good.”
• • •
Tommy’s and my final scene in Jean Shelton’s class was a pillow fight. This was a Shelton-devised exercise to keep Tommy and me from stepping on each other’s lines. After I said my line I would gently hit Tommy with my pillow. After Tommy said his line, he would hit me with his pillow three times. Shelton started laughing the first time Tommy did this, which only made him whack me more furiously. That was how our last class ended.
I told a few people about my upcoming trip to Los Angeles with Tommy, including an old unicycle-riding hippie friend of mine who worked for Lucasfilm as an editor. My hippie friend did not like Tommy. He’d sat in on one of Jean Shelton’s classes once and thought Tommy was almost certainly an addict of some kind; the word he used to describe him was “ravaged.” Based on what I’d seen, at least, the most dangerous thing Tommy put in his body was piping-hot water. My friend also thought it was incredibly odd that Tommy would
offer me his mysteriously vacant L.A. apartment at such a cheap price without wanting anything from me in return. “There’s a catch to this,” he told me. “Please be careful.” None of these were unreasonable observations, and had I not spent a good amount of time around Tommy, I probably would have thought the whole situation was insane, too.
I called Tommy the night before we were supposed to head to L.A. to see what time he wanted to leave. Instead of hearing his usual outgoing message, I heard this: “Hi, Babyface. I’m not around until ten p.m., but I call you later.” Babyface derived from something Tommy had said on the fly in class a few weeks ago, when comparing my face to his during a rant about what “type” we were acting-wise: “I have potato face. Your face is delicate, like a baby face.” He’d never used it as a nickname, though. I hoped this would be the first and last time.
I’d told my mother I was going to Los Angeles with Tommy. She’d managed to hold her tongue until the morning of our departure. “You’re crazy to be doing this,” she said, over and over. I countered that she had to trust me, just this once, and let me find my way. She heard me out but wasn’t convinced. “It’s just . . . crazy,” she said. “You realize this, mon cher, yes? That you’re crazy? I hope this trip is not your end.”
My end? My end, I wanted to tell her, my real end, would be never trying anything, not taking any risks, and working a job I had zero passion for. I reassured her that I’d be back in less than thirty-six hours. I hadn’t decided if I was moving to L.A. or not. I’d call her every hour if she wanted me to.
She drove me to the Walnut Creek BART station, where Tommy was picking me up. He was, of course, late, and as the time piled up, one swollen gray minute atop the other, my mother sat there and detailed the many ways in which my one day in Los Angeles was going to wreck my life forever. I have never been so relieved to see Tommy as when his Benz finally floated into that parking lot.
My mother followed me to Tommy’s car like a shadow. I started to say something to her, but she looked at me with such intensity that I knew I couldn’t stop her. I owed her the courtesy of letting her speak to Tommy directly.
Tommy obviously wasn’t expecting my mother to be waiting with me, and he powered down his window with the queasy, smiling nervousness of an inveterate speeder welcoming the arrival of a California State Trooper. He kept looking at me, but I couldn’t save him. He was going to have to endure this.
My mother didn’t bother reintroducing herself. “Are you going to L.A., Tommy?” she asked him. When my mother said “Tommy,” it sounded like Tome-EE, with a rise at the end so sharp you could jump a bike off it.
“Yes,” Tommy said. “I am. We are. We are going.” He was, unpromisingly, stuttering from sheer nervousness.
My mother nodded. “Perhaps you could wait to go until next week, so I can join you?”
“No, I’m sorry. I have to go now. I have meeting there. People waiting for me.”
She didn’t even bother pretending to believe him. “Tommy, I’m a little bit concerned, because I’m looking at your eyes and they are completely red. It’s obvious you haven’t slept.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say about that.”
“You’re going to drive like this?”
“I’m okay.” He put his arms up, smiling. He knew better than to tell my mother that I drove his car.
My mother stared at him with prosecutorial eyes. “Tommy, how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
She didn’t believe this, either. No one on planet Earth would have believed this. “Is that so, Tommy? Maybe, then, you could tell me why you want to help my son?”
“I think he’s cool guy.”
“Well, that’s very interesting. Because I’m very concerned, Tommy. Where are you going to stay in L.A.?”
“I have my place. It’s fine. We go for one day.”
“Is it safe, Tommy? I just don’t feel good about this.”
“Mom,” I said. “Mom, come on.”
My mother looked at me. She breathed very deeply, as though letting go of something. Which was, I guess, me. Then she looked back at Tommy. “Be careful, Tommy. Please.”
“I will.”
“Tommy, don’t hurt my son.”
I put my hand over my eyes. The worst thing Tommy could do in response to this request, I thought, would be to chuckle creepily.
“I would not,” Tommy said, chuckling creepily.
“And one more thing, Tommy. One more thing. No sex, Tommy, okay? Are we clear?”
“Mom!”
“Well, we all do.”
My mother looked at him coldly for a moment. Then she took a step toward him. “What was that, Tommy?”
Tommy shrugged, beginning to panic. “You know. We all do.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what this means, but I think you understand me now.” Translation: If you touch my son, I will kill you.
She walked away without saying good-bye. It took me a long, painful moment to accept that my mother had just asked another man not to have sex with me.
I got into Tommy’s car, emotionally concussed. Once my mother was gone he whirled on me: “What the heck was that? She’s crazy. Your mother is off the wall! Crazy. My God! ‘No sex.’ What a story!”
My mother was right about one thing: Tommy really hadn’t slept all night. He started nodding off at the wheel as he drove away, so he pulled over and we switched seats. Tommy put a white T-shirt over his head and neck, tilted the seat back as far as it could go, and was bombed out and snoring by the time we hit the highway. It was August 31, 1998. I had known Tommy Wiseau less than a month.
• • •
Tommy finally woke up at the moment we hit the Sunset Boulevard exit on the 405. “How do you always do that?” I asked him.
“Do what?”
“Know exactly when to wake up.”
“Vampire trick,” Tommy said.
Sometimes it really did seem as though Tommy wanted to be a vampire. Maybe being a vampire formed for Tommy a bridge between being objectively unattractive and subjectively attractive. The last thing Tommy Wiseau wanted to be was average. He had that in common with most people, of course, but Tommy took it several steps further. He took everything several steps further.
As we drove down Sunset Boulevard, Tommy described to me the vampire movie he wanted to make. It had, I must admit, a killer title: The Vampire from Alcatraz: King of Vampires.
Before we headed to Tommy’s apartment, though, he announced that he was hungry. I knew exactly where to go. James Dean’s favorite restaurant in Hollywood was an Italian place called the Villa Capri, where, according to legend, Sir Alec Guinness had warned Dean a week before his death that if he insisted on driving his speedy new Porsche Spyder, he’d be dead in a week. At Villa Capri Dean had become close with a young waiter named Mario Marino. In the acknowledgments of his James Dean biography, Joe Hyams thanks Marino, who now owned his own restaurant in Hollywood called Marino. I relayed all this information to Tommy and said, “Let’s go have dinner and meet a guy who knew James Dean.”
“Babyface’s ideas,” Tommy said approvingly, “are crazy. They never stop.”
I was unexpectedly nervous inside the restaurant. Was I really going to get to meet a man who knew—had spoken intimately to—James Dean? Halfway into our meal, I couldn’t hold back my curiosity any longer. I walked up to the hostess and asked her if Mario Marino was in tonight. He wasn’t. I returned to our table sorely disappointed.
“My God,” Tommy said. “You are obsessed. This is obsession! You will meet him. Don’t worry.”
“Thanks, Tommy.”
“You know,” Tommy said, forking away at his pesto, “I shot my super-eight movie near here.”
“The one you showed me? Starring Bigfoot?”
“Not Bigfoot. You must be kidding. Robbery Doesn’t Pay. I show you, remember?”
“Of course. How could I forget?”
“So we shoot few blocks from here. In
Westwood. I live there, too. My roommate had, like, a huge snake. I was so scared of it I had to move out. I thought maybe it will kill me. Then I get my own place on the Crescent Heights, which you will see tonight.” Tommy stopped eating for a moment. “I don’t know, maybe it’s not good for you. Maybe you don’t like it. We see.”
“Okay,” I said, getting a little anxious. These were a lot of caveats.
Tommy noticed my unease. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think you will like the place. It’s not castle, though.”
“Okay.” That didn’t make me feel much better.
Tommy looked at me. “I used to live in such small apartment with my family, you know, when I was little kid.” His voice lowered, as though drawing back into his memory to reclaim something truthful. “I even have to share bed sometimes with my entire family. When my little cousin fall asleep, sometimes he twirl my hair with his finger.” He quickly warded that memory away. “But let me tell you,” Tommy said, “coming to L.A. is not easy, my friend. But, you know, you take your time, you grow up. You are just sixteen now—”