by Greg Sestero
Oh, Tommy. “What did this letter say?”
Tommy started to read it to me. The most disastrously salient extract from Tommy’s letter to CAA was probably this: “Do you have the guts to take me?”
I wasn’t laughing anymore. “Tommy, to get repped by CAA, you need to have a lot of credits. You also need a referral.”
“I challenge them! Fuck referral. From who? You? Tom Cruise? I’m competition for big star. Referral nothing!” Tommy was sputtering now. “They don’t have the guts to take me. All these prima ballerinas do is take on big star, the people that already famous. So I challenge them! Take me and try to make me big star! We see if they have the guts to do that. Hollywood try to squash me, so I squash them back.”
“Tommy,” I said, “none of this is going to make you better. You have your long black hair. You’re kind of quirky and crazy, right? Embrace it.”
Tommy didn’t want to hear this. Couldn’t hear this. Tommy’s chief talent was his ability to be both cunning and oblivious at the same time. When he went into that mode, he could make me laugh harder than anyone.
I then made the mistake of mentioning to Tommy that in a couple of days I’d be in the Bay Area for that screen test in Palo Alto. He flipped at this news and told me I had to attend some monumental gathering with him in San Francisco. “You must arrive at my condo no later than eight a.m. You cannot be late. You will be shocked. If you say you don’t show up, I will hang up in five seconds.”
Hanging up if I didn’t immediately agree to something was one of Tommy’s favorite persuasion gambits. “Tommy, I have a screen test the day before. I’ll be way too tired to get up that early.”
“I don’t want to hear excuse. It is extremely important.”
Tommy hadn’t been this excited about anything since he’d bought his way into SAG. I’ll admit I was curious. I flew to San Francisco, did my screen test, and, the following morning, made it to his Guerrero Street condo at five minutes to eight. Tommy was waiting for me in the front of his condo and had decked himself out in running gear—the same outfit he’d later wear in The Room, right down to the fingerless workout gloves. He seemed in a state of hypercaffeinated agitation. “Come on,” he said. “We miss if we don’t hurry!”
“Where are we going?”
“Come on!”
Tommy rushed ahead down Market, toward the Embarcadero. I was wearing sandals and couldn’t keep up. Tommy was almost skipping as he walked. He was also spinning around, doing his hooting thing, his cheep-cheep chicken noise, and throwing out a few ecstatic whoops. Where on earth were we going?
When we arrived at the Embarcadero, I saw a teeming mass of people clogging the intersection. At first I assumed it was a protest of some sort. Everyone was yelling and cheering, and Tommy, of course, joined them. Then I saw the starting line. This wasn’t a protest at all but the famous Bay to Breakers seven-mile run across San Francisco. Tommy, who’d signed me up for it the day before, now squired me to the registration table. I got my number—a sticky piece of paper you were supposed to affix to your chest or midsection—and looked at it for a moment. Tommy clapped me on the back. I used that moment of camaraderie to remind him that I was wearing sandals. “I don’t care about your flippers,” Tommy said. “No excuse. The first ten thousand to finish make it into newspaper. So now we see how good you are.” Suddenly I was standing at the starting point. This was really happening.
I glanced around. A nearby woman runner was wearing a wedding dress with a WILL YOU MARRY ME? sign on her back. Several runners, both men and women, hadn’t bothered to wear anything at all.
“Prepare yourself physically and mentally for this crazy stuff,” Tommy said. “I see you at Golden Gate Park. Good luck!”
The signal shot fired and everyone took off, Tommy included. I went to find a bathroom as several naked runners hurled past me. Tommy looked back and yelled, “I’m not waiting for you!” I’d pretty much already figured that out. Tommy took Bay to Breakers very seriously, having run it several times before.
For my first Bay to Breakers, I walked. In sandals. It was actually a very pleasant stroll. I even made a pit stop at a race-side house party. Tommy was waiting for me at the finish line. He greeted me with: “You know I beat your ass, I’m sorry to tell you. I made top ten thousand. I will be in newspaper tomorrow. You will not.”
We followed the Breakers crowd to the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, where the race’s sponsors had set up a massive catering operation. As Tommy ate his plate of barbecued chicken and rice he continued to hector me about losing. I didn’t mind, mainly because he hadn’t mentioned anything yet about moving to L.A. Provided that topic didn’t come up again, Tommy could recite an epic poem about his victory for all I cared. When we were leaving, he asked if I wanted to come see him perform that night in Jean Shelton’s class. But I was heading back to L.A. in a few hours: I had my audition for Scream 3 the following afternoon.
Tommy was not happy to hear this. “Don’t play big-shot Hollywood with me,” he said. “Just because you have audition doesn’t mean you own the world. Friend is more important. Are you real cousin or fake cousin?” Tommy said I should postpone my audition. I explained to him that wasn’t really the way auditions worked.
“Why don’t I record you on camera and we send audition? I have resources for this. There is no problem.”
“Tommy,” I said, sighing.
“What, you think I’m not good enough to record you now? Why you give these people so much power?”
“I have to go back to L.A. It’s important.”
Tommy looked at me darkly. “Whatever,” he said, turning away. “That’s fine. If I’m not important in your life, it’s okay on me.” Before we parted ways he accused me of owing him several hundred dollars. At first, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. He left me standing on Guerrero Street as confused as ever. I’d just run—well, walked—a seven-mile race with him with zero preparation or forewarning. It was almost as if the more accommodating I was with Tommy, the stranger and needier he became.
I was so weirded out that when I got back to Los Angeles I sat down and wrote Tommy a thank-you/apology letter. In the middle of writing it, I thought to myself: This is getting too strange. Not-worth-it strange. Give him back his apartment. Your friendship with Tommy has cancer. Excise it. But I’m loyal by nature, loyal to a fault, and I felt I did owe him something. I managed to finish writing my letter and sent it to him that day.
Tommy never mentioned receiving it. Then, a couple of weeks later, the rent checks I’d been sending Tommy over the last few months were cashed—all at once. This effectively wiped out a quarter of my savings. Now I had to get a job. More than that, I knew I had to get out of his apartment.
• • •
On the one-year anniversary of my arrival in L.A., Iris got me a meeting on the Warner Bros. lot with director Joel Schumacher, who was looking to cast a film called Tigerland. Joel was kind and surprisingly approachable; we talked for almost an hour, mostly about France. Instead of having actors perform dialogue in front of him, he preferred to have a conversation with an actor and go off his gut instinct. I knew going in I was probably too young and wiry for the army-man role he was looking to fill—he wound up going with another young, then-unknown actor named Colin Farrell—but I left the meeting feeling pretty good and even somewhat revived.
It was the last time I’d feel that way for quite some time.
A few months later, Tommy got in touch to say he was coming down to L.A. for yet another business meeting. His calling frequency had cooled considerably and the few times we did talk felt awkward. Probably the most meaningful conversation we’d had involved rent, which he’d raised on me, claiming that the building had raised it on him.
On the afternoon Tommy was due in town, my phone rang. “My car just explode on freeway,” he said, somehow predictably. I heard another person in the car with him saying, “Dude. Dude! You gotta pull the thing over, man!”
Tomm
y had never had any other friends around him since I’d known him—and he hadn’t mentioned anything about bringing someone down to Los Angeles with him.
“I’m going to be late,” Tommy said, and hung up.
When Tommy finally showed up, he had Jared with him, a thin, curly-headed twenty-three-year-old skater kid from his Jean Shelton class. Jared and I exchanged a look like we simultaneously understood something about Tommy that neither of us wanted to acknowledge.
“I had to get new engine for car,” Tommy said, aloofly walking past me. He was behaving like he owned the place. Technically, of course, he did, but he’d never lorded that over me before. Jared seemed a little perplexed, not knowing why he was in this apartment. Tommy had not spoken of Jared to me. Not ever. I began to get the sense that Tommy hadn’t really bothered to explain who I was or that I was renting Tommy’s place.
“You guys don’t look like cousins,” Jared said. “At all.”
So Tommy had told him that much.
“We are cousins,” Tommy said, “whether you like it or you don’t.”
“Right,” Jared said, drawing the word out. Soon Jared explained he was staying with an ex-girlfriend in Westwood and it was time for him to go. We were in the middle of saying our uncomfortable good-byes when the doorbell rang. My doorbell didn’t ever ring. I hadn’t made many friends in Los Angeles. I’d made a couple of acquaintances, but certainly no one who’d spontaneously ring my doorbell. Maybe it was a neighbor? Maybe some solicitor had sneaked through the gate?
Tommy was looking at me in the most peculiar way. His face was getting redder by the moment. Jared was right by the door, so he peered through the peephole. “It’s some dude,” he said.
Jared moved out of the way and I looked through the peephole myself. It was my neighbor Cliff from the first floor. I’d run into him and his girlfriend earlier that day in the elevator. Cliff was an actor doing a play at a small theater nearby. They’d invited me to see it. I thought it was just pleasantries, but now he was apparently here to present me with my ticket for tonight’s show.
“Who is that?” Tommy said, his voice loud and suspicious, which Cliff had to have heard.
Why I didn’t simply answer the door, I have no idea. I think I was afraid of what Tommy would have done or said if he’d seen poor Cliff. That’s when I realized: Tommy brought Jared here to show me he had a new friend—that he was capable of making a new friend whenever he wanted. But Cliff randomly ringing my doorbell had somehow trumped Tommy’s friendship power play.
“Who is that?” Tommy said again, more aggressively.
I looked out the peephole once more and saw Cliff frowning and fidgeting.
“Do you know him?” Jared said.
“No,” I said cravenly. “Probably a solicitor or something.”
Eventually, Cliff gave up and walked away. A few minutes after that, Jared left, too, at which point Tommy was practically shaking. “So,” he said, “how’s your life? Any stories or experiences to tell?” I could tell he had gone deep into some paranoid, sinister place, and was angry that I’d revealed the existence of the mysterious Tommy Wiseau’s Los Angeles apartment. That’s the thing with Tommy: Even before he was famous, he acted like he was famous. Maybe that’s what, in the end, best explains him. Maybe that’s what explains the whole thing.
“Is something wrong?” I asked Tommy.
“I don’t know,” Tommy said, sitting down. “I guess I don’t know anything going on these days.”
He started paging through an old issue of Variety. At that moment Tommy looked like some hateful thing I’d fished out of a nightmare, all red-faced, veiny, vile, and suspicious. “Look, Greg,” he said, folding one leg over the other and still looking at his magazine. “Right now I need quiet because I have a big meeting with Stella Adler tomorrow.”
The Stella Adler Academy is a tourist-trap acting school on Hollywood Boulevard. Tommy was obsessed with Adler due to her renowned work with Brando. Tommy didn’t realize a few things: (1) You didn’t need a referral to become a student at the Stella Adler Academy, (2) the school’s lineage could be traced back only vaguely to Stella Adler herself, and (3) Stella Adler had been dead for almost ten years.
“Stella Adler is dead,” I told Tommy.
Tommy looked up at me, obviously confused. “I just talked to them few days ago. Jared has a meeting with her and he say I can go, too.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just letting you know. I hope you have a good meeting with the late Stella Adler.”
Tommy looked down at the floor. “Whatever. I don’t care.” He was, I think, trying not to cry.
Whatever had just happened here, it was obviously way more complicated than a random doorbell ring from someone I barely knew. This was about Tommy’s fears about being discovered, about being valued, about being admired, about being lost, about being young, and about being alone.
This moment was probably the worst imaginable time for my phone to ring and for me to learn that I had a callback for Viking, an NBC movie about Leif Erikson, the next day. I tried to cover up the excitement I was feeling, but Tommy was not impressed. “You have another audition?” he asked. “How good for you.” He kept looking at Variety while I did my best to ignore him.
At that moment, I felt like I didn’t know Tommy. In the past he’d annoyed me, sure, but he’d also been supportive and often made me laugh. Occasionally I thought that the way he looked at the world was genuinely delightful. But the closer you got to him, the darker he became. He’d never seemed as dark as he did right now, though. There was just so much I didn’t know about Tommy: his real name, where he was from, his age, his profession, what he did all day. Tommy, even the Tommy I thought I knew, was a stranger to me.
Cliff’s play started in a couple of hours; I could not compound my shunning him at the door with failing to attend. I went downstairs and caught Cliff just as he was leaving, and he gave me a ticket. Back in the apartment, Tommy was chatting on my fax phone with someone. When I walked in he fixed those dead, suspicious eyes on me. That was all I needed to see. “I’m going to see my friend’s play,” I told him. “I’ll be back later.”
Tommy continued to talk on the phone as though I hadn’t said anything.
I barely paid any attention to Cliff’s play. I spent most of it thinking about Tommy’s eerie behavior. Why was he always so secretive about everything? Why did he get so angry that Cliff rang my doorbell? Maybe, I thought, we weren’t friends. Maybe Tommy had somehow conned me this whole time. That’s the thing with con artists. They never tell you their story. They give you pieces of it and let you fill in the rest. They let you work out the contradictions and discrepancies. They let you believe that the things that don’t add up are what makes them interesting or special. They let you believe that in those gaps are the things that hurt and wounded them. But maybe there’s nothing in those gaps. Nothing but your own stupid willingness to assume the best of someone.
Tommy was still on the phone when I came back hours later, but he ended the call the moment I walked in. That he might have been on the phone all night concerned me. What if my agent had tried to call? What if, even worse, my agent or some casting director had called and Tommy picked up—especially given the state of mind he was in? Would he try to sabotage me? It suddenly did not seem beyond Tommy to do something like that. I hated having that thought in my head, but I couldn’t get rid of it.
“So!” he said, once he got my phone nice and hung up. “How was your night? How was your friend’s play?”
“It was okay,” I said, busying myself by pretending to look for something to eat.
“You know, I talk to your friend, for your information.”
I had no idea who Tommy was talking about. Iris? My manager?
“Which friend?”
“This goofy friend you have from San Francisco.”
Oh, Jesus. My unicycle-riding film-editor hippie friend from San Francisco was just about the only person, other than my mom and dad,
who ever called me here. This was a man whose distrust for Tommy and his intentions toward me had napalmic qualities. Whenever I talked to him, he pumped me for information about Tommy. He thought Tommy was bad news. Maybe in the mob for a while. Then he thought Tommy was a Serbian warlord. Then he thought Tommy was a pornographer. If the two of them ever got together . . . And now they had.
“You know this guy pretty well, I guess. He has number here; he knows to call number here. He knows you live in L.A. And he knows about me, too.”
I knew instantly what had happened. My friend, a straight shooter like no other, had asked Tommy all the forbidden questions—all the questions I had told him were the forbidden questions: Where he was from. How old he was. His occupation. Tommy tried to play his usual games, but my friend laid into him and sent him into a psychotic tantrum. Tommy’s secret identity was now, in his barbed and sick mind, in danger of being exposed. That’s why Tommy liked me, I thought. He saw me as this naive young loner—a non–security risk. The perfect friend for him.
“So you have two friends I don’t know about,” Tommy said. “This goofy guy and this doorbell guy. Why you involved with such strange people?”
“Tommy, I went to the guy’s play as a favor to him. He’s a neighbor. I barely know him.”
“Oh, wow. I guess I was not invited to play, huh? That’s too bad for me.” I couldn’t win. Whatever I said made me guiltier.
“I go for ride now,” Tommy said as he got up and headed to the door. “I don’t want to talk now. I go get fresh air—maybe see girl or something. You have audition and I don’t want to spoil. We talk tomorrow.”
I got into bed with psychic spiders crawling all over me. Was this just a pretext for Tommy to throw me out of here? Had I really done something wrong by talking about Tommy with my friend? Tommy had walked me into a minefield of paranoia and left me there all alone.
When I woke up the next morning I could hear Tommy snoring in the other room. I thought, You have built a human relationship on a foundation of asbestos.