Mentor: A Memoir

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Mentor: A Memoir Page 10

by Grimes, Tom


  home for the weekend. You want to get the

  parents out of the way immediately. Parents

  are death at the box office. Kill the parents.

  Mike begins to take notes.

  MIKE

  Parents dead.

  AL

  OK. Good. Now. Sally calls her friends the

  instant her parents leave in the Saab. They invite

  some boys over. This is where we throw in the

  sex angle.

  MIKE

  They all start jumping into bed.

  AL

  Right. OK. Now, little Joey, Sally’s little

  brother, suddenly comes down with a fever.

  He comes home from school . . . he looks like . . .

  MIKE

  Casper the Ghost.

  AL

  Great! Terrific! Write that down.

  MIKE

  He picked up the virus in school. Like, we’ll

  see him at the water fountain with some

  lower-middle-class kids—

  AL

  No. School is out. You gotta get a building, fill

  it full of kids, the whole thing costs too much

  time and money. I want to keep it simple. I

  want a virus to appear, wreak havoc, then get

  wiped out by some new brand of mega-

  antibiotic. The virus can run rampant, but

  only on one block. Remember: horror movies

  are microcosms of society. So: Think small.

  Think microcosm.

  Short pause.

  AL

  Help me. I’m totally lost.

  MIKE

  Joey.

  AL

  Right. Joey. Joey comes in, his stomach hurts.

  Sally, like a good sister, tucks him in, etc. In

  spite of this, his temperature climbs. Sally calls

  the doctor, a good-looking intern named . . .

  Matt, who Sally has a crush on.

  MIKE

  And he wants to get into Sally’s pants.

  AL

  No. Sally’s the heroine, therefore her pants

  never come off. Pants come off secondary girl-

  friend characters who are slaughtered by this

  raging out-of-control virus ten seconds after

  they have sex with their boyfriends. Got it?

  MIKE

  Got it. Secondary characters fuck and die.

  Keep lust to a minimum.

  AL

  Good. Now, Matt leaves, the other kids

  come over, they’re jumping into bed, etc.

  What happens? Little Joey’s temperature

  SKYROCKETS! He starts changing, getting

  more hideous. He’s turning into this, this,

  this . . .

  MIKE

  Thing?

  AL

  Thing! Exactly! You know, the red spots in the

  eyes, the vomit spewing across the room.

  MIKE

  Sounds like The Exorcist.

  AL

  The Exorcist. Nobody’s made an Exorcist rip-

  off for years. It could be viable.

  MIKE

  Are Sally’s parents religious people?

  AL

  When confronted by grief and death, yes.

  MIKE

  So this couldn’t be a speaking-in-tongues,

  gospel-type experience then, could it?

  AL

  Definitely not. (Beat.) Although, if you could

  imply that without stating it, so that we have

  this straightforward virus thing, and then tie

  in on a subliminal level this cultlike Black

  Mass religioso mumbo jumbo-type theme, we

  could double our audience.

  MIKE

  Like, “ Was it a virus . . . or was it . . . God?”

  Ingrassia settled my divorce within weeks. My wife kept everything we owned (which wasn’t much); I became solely responsible for our five-thousand-dollar credit card bill. But Jody’s husband refused to surrender a penny of their joint property and ignored motions demanding his appearance in court; her divorce took seven and a half years. During that time, Ingrassia closed his office and would vanish for months. When he reappeared, we’d meet him in odd places. One afternoon, Jody waited outside a Banana Republic store while he bought a safari jacket. Then he emerged and had her sign some papers on a metal trash-can lid. One evening, over cocktails in the Cornelia Street Café, he said to us, “But forget Jody’s divorce. I can get financing for a biker movie. You want to write it?”

  I said, “Okay.”

  Then, on spec (the Hollywood term for writing a script, then hoping someone buys it), Jody and I wrote Ingrassia a biker script in three days. As I sat at my battered desk and typed, Jody stood behind me and read over my shoulder. We began our marathon sessions by drinking coffee. After sundown, I switched to beer, and Jody switched to wine. Our task was to craft an interestingly terrible script, and we exchanged ideas like, Should the car sail off the bridge here? (Ingrassia planned to rent a car, have a stuntman drive it off a bridge into a lake, and then report the car as stolen. “Insurance pays for the loss,” he said. “It’s win-win for everybody.”) Then he saw a Sylvester Stallone movie and he liked the knife Stallone’s character used. “Give me an unusual knife,” he said. “Something menacing.” I gave him a mechanical arm that fired six-inch bullets. “We can actually fake this,” he said. “I love it.” But his mysterious investors backed out and we didn’t make the biker film. Instead, we made Hot Splash, a semi-soft-porn surfer flick, which went straight to videotape and late-night American TV. For the play’s next scene, I didn’t even need to invent dialogue. I simply transcribed Ingrassia’s words verbatim: MIKE

  So you want me to throw in a little more

  character.

  AL

  Character is a wonderful thing. But we don’t

  have the money to buy actors who can act like

  characters.

  MIKE

  Well, what do we have?

  AL

  Basically . . . ? Some girls who’ll take off their

  clothes.

  The Citizen Kane of Ingrassia’s oeuvre, however, was Snake Island. By the time he began filming it, Jody and had I moved from New York to Key West. Up the coast, in Cocoa Beach, Ingrassia had bought a modest villa, turned it into a small production studio, and convinced a retired stuntman who’d worked in James Bond movies to loan him his house, which was inland, surrounded by palm trees, near a swamp, and an ideal location for shooting Snake Island. The guy said, “Just stay out of my bedroom.” Otherwise, Ingrassia had permission to transform the two-story hut into a creepy, decrepit hovel, inhabited by snakes. Crew members leased machines that worked like vacuum cleaners in reverse and sprayed dirt, dust, and mold over the living room, dining room, and kitchen walls. They infested the place with spiders and let them spin webs. They slathered the house’s exterior with mud. A makeup person showed Ingrassia a sample of fake blood. “Darker,” Ingrassia said. “Use more chocolate.” Filming began with two couples—the girls wearing bikinis, the guys wearing swimming trucks—who get lost in the swamp. When their motorboat’s engine sputters and dies, they’re forced to step onto the island. “Stay together,” one of them said. (I didn’t write that line.) They soon lost track of one another anyway. The blonde couple’s response is to immediately undress. A few days later, the rented snake and his trainer arrived. Uncoiled, the snake was four feet long. While two dozen of us stared at it, Ingrassia sent for Murray, the twenty-three-year-old actor who played “Snake Boy.” As a child, a snake had poisoned him. Now he could inject venom with his tongue. We waited. Twenty minutes later, the casting director returned. Murray was having difficulty “getting into character” and had locked himself in his EconoLodge motel room. Baking in the hot sun, the snake rested in his cage, coiled like a bullwhip. Ninety minutes later, Murray showed. Ingrassia raised his megap
hone, ready to shout, “Action!” Then he signaled the trainer to release the snake. But the snake had fallen asleep. The trainer dragged him out of his cage, and the snake uncoiled, but remained limp. We gathered closer and watched it lie on the ground in a stupor. Ingrassia shouted, “Okay, forget it. We’ll shoot the fight scene on the roof.” But the roof’s sundeck had been sturdily built, and as one of the crew’s carpenters sawed partially through a wooden railing so the actor punched in the jaw during the fight sequence could fly backward through it to his death, the house’s owner bounded down his dirt driveway in his Jeep, skidded to a stop, stepped out, looked up, and yelled, “That’s it! Everybody get the fuck out!”

  Ingrassia finished the movie on another location and released it with the title Kiss of the Serpent. We never made Virus, but Ingrassia read its script. After we talked about it I had:SCENE FOUR

  Al’s office. Lights up. Mike paces, eyeing Al. Al, seated, reads Mike’s script intently. When he turns the last page, Al flips the binder closed and launches into his speech.

  AL

  I have to tell you something. This is a script

  I could love. (Beat.) If there could be physi-

  cal bonding between a man and a screenplay,

  Virus, for me, would be that screenplay.

  MIKE

  The gasoline . . . ?

  AL

  On the hair—

  MIKE

  The beach, the night—

  AL

  The terror, the bondage—

  MIKE

  The whole sexual subtext—

  AL

  The gunpowder in the mouth—

  MIKE

  The exploding head!

  Beat.

  AL

  I cried. (Beat.) I’m a man, I cried. (Beat.)

  Sweet little Sally dead? This was the death of

  innocence.

  But I had a collection of scenes, not a play. I needed a plot, a through line, and a time frame within which all action had to take place. The play was stillborn.

  One afternoon at the restaurant, I’d finished polishing wine-glasses, filling salt and pepper shakers, folding napkins, and setting electric candles on my tabletops. It was August. We wouldn’t be busy. So I sat on a stool at the short service bar and opened Premiere, a new movie magazine. I read an article about films currently being made in South Africa. Apartheid was ending and wealthy, white South Africans wanted their money out of the country. But transferring funds was illegal. If wealth disappeared, the regime would collapse. Money had to be invested in projects developed in South Africa. Except there was a loophole. Profits from investments could be deposited in overseas accounts. This money became known as “flight capital.” One of the best ways to create it was to make a movie. Investors pooled their money. Fading Hollywood stars were recruited to play the leads in mediocre action films. South African death squads supplied weapons, transport vehicles, helicopters, and planes. And military personnel were hired as extras. I put my own twist on the story. Browner, a CIA agent, convinces Ted, an investment banker, to make an action film, which is a cover for a coup:TED

  You want a script.

  BROWNER

  That’s right.

  TED

  Of this idea.

  Ted indicates the envelope Browner has set beside him.

  BROWNER

  Right.

  Short pause.

  TED

  What is this idea, Petey? As you see it.

  BROWNER

  In a nutshell? An exiled leader, a hero of the

  people, puts together an army of freedom

  fighters. He trains them in a country adjacent

  to his homeland that is sympathetic to his

  plight. The freedom fighters go in, depose the

  brutal, non-Westernized dictatorship, democ-

  racy and free trade are restored, and our hero

  rides off into the sunset with pledges of U.S.

  economic aid and contracts for billions in

  military hardware. So get us a script, Ted. And

  a crew. A film crew.

  In order to tie the story lines together, Ted knows Al, who says:What type of situation is it, Ted?

  Short pause.

  TED

  A high-concept synopsis? A man has been

  exiled from his home by a brutal, let’s say, a

  fundamentalist dictatorship. And now, the

  only way he can reclaim his home is if we

  help.

  AL

  By making an action movie.

  TED

  Yes.

  A year later, I gave the finished play, Spec, to a director at Key West’s Red Barn Theater, which had a ninety-nine-seat space with a proscenium stage. Its board deliberated for three months. On the afternoon Jody and I were packing the U-Haul truck that would carry us to Iowa, its members agreed to produce the play. A month before it opened, rehearsals started, and every evening from seven to midnight I sat in the theater, watched the actors, conferred with the director, and made revisions. During the day, I worked on the novel. I needed to maintain its momentum and hear the narrator’s voice. I didn’t want to leave the novel’s world entirely and return to it feeling like a stranger had written it.

  But I also felt like a stranger when I became a minor Key West celebrity. To my embarrassment, the restaurant’s owners had mounted an enlarged copy of the New York Times review of A Stone of the Heart and placed it on an artist’s easel beside the hostess’s podium, where Jody had stood for three years, scanning the reservation ledger prior to seating customers. Soon afterward, I appeared on the cover of Focus, the weekly entertainment section of the Key West Citizen. As directed, I sat at a table, held a pen above a revised page of the play, beside which lay a copy of my novel, and stared at the camera. The following day, while buying groceries, the woman behind me in the checkout line said, “You’re much better looking in person.” The reporter who wrote the article emphasized my waiter-turned-writer phenomenon, equating it with the evolution of ape to man. “Shortly after he arrived in Key West in 1986, Grimes worked first as a busboy, then as a waiter at Louie’s Backyard.” She also developed an anthropological interest in my work habits. “Grimes writes in longhand, perhaps one of the few remaining writers to do so.” I added, “Frank Conroy and I are the only two (at Iowa) who write in notebooks and transcribe.” Then, perhaps mindful of Frank’s minimal admiration for A Stone of the Heart, I said my new novel would “come in at around 750 to 800 pages” and “be considerably different than” my first, which she called “a small gem.” A week later, she described Spec as the worst play the Red Barn Theater had ever produced.

  Nervously wandering the grounds the evening before Spec opened, I noticed someone seated on a bench outside the theater. He had long, brownish-red hair and a ragged mustache. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t decide whether he was an actor or a Key West bartender who had served me when I was drunk. Anyone was allowed to attend the final dress rehearsal, and he sat in the last row. When he laughed halfway through act one, I recognized his voice. I’d seen him in a Sam Shepard play; his name was Jim Gammon. Between acts, I stood, turned, and began to introduce myself. Before I could, he said, “Hey, Tommy.” He’d seen my photograph near the theater’s entrance. He shook my hand and said, “This is a hell of a good play. After you wrap up for the night, I’d like to talk to you about it.”

  I said, “Sure.”

  We met in the courtyard. He would be in town for several days, he said, shooting a Goldie Hawn movie, in which he played an aging hippie, hence the long hair. He asked for my number. I gave it to him and expected never to hear from him again. He called the next day, and the following afternoon he took Jody and me, along with his wife, Nancy, to lunch. He told me that he’d run the Met Theatre in Los Angeles for twenty years. Briefly, it had closed. But recently he’d found a new space for it. He, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and a dozen other actors planned to lease the space and reopen the
theater. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to show them your script.” I said okay, gave him a copy, and thought nothing would come of it. In Key West, Spec ran for six weeks. Then Jody and I flew home to Iowa. A month later, with a hundred new pages to show Frank, I was back in his workshop.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Frank looked up when he sensed me standing in his office doorway. “Hey, babe. Come on in.”

  I took my usual seat and said to him, “How was your summer? Did you write?”

  “I goofed off. I wrote maybe fifty pages.”

  “Lazy fuck.”

  “How’s the novel?”

 

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