Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “Then there’s David. Basically supportive but I think he likes to look down his nose at the whole Hollywood scene. Not real social, my brother.”

  “Attaboy, David.”

  “Please. David is just envious that I got out and made something of myself. He’s a high school history teacher. At his old high school.”

  “And does he harbor some secret envy for his sister the celebrity notwithstanding his more reasonable disdain?”

  “Maybe. I give him some caché in the classroom.”

  “Living as a derivative of his kid sister. That’s got to feel good.”

  “Hey. Not my fault. Dave’s not the boldest guy you’ll ever meet.” I rolled my eyes, thinking of my brother; thinking of the hell he had just survived, if he had in fact survived. I had not been in touch with my mother since leaving for Africa and the events now unfolding back home were still in my head. In fact, all of a sudden my entire family seemed to be in fresh turmoil – David, my mother, and my father – each in their own separate upheavals. Everyone but Ben, who was as steady as ever. It was as though Columbus had been sitting atop an active volcano and no one had known it until a week before I had boarded a plane for another continent.

  “What about the other brother?”

  I recall not liking that he was taking an inventory. I did not like feeling examined, particularly by a writer. Tossing red meat to the tabloids was one thing, but discussing my family with someone who had the ability and professional compulsion to look deeper, to make subterranean connections, to actually understand; it was as unsettling as talking to a psychiatrist. But I also felt some lingering remorse for calling him a sellout, twisting the knife with which I knew he had stabbed himself. So I answered.

  “My younger brother is Ben. No concept of me as anything other than his big sister. Cares nothing one way or the other about the celebrity. He’d care if I played quarterback for the Buckeyes.”

  “Attaboy, Ben. I think I like the men in your family.”

  “What about your family? Are they all as cheerful and outgoing as you are?”

  It was a snotty question intended to cut off his interrogation. I had no idea at the time how much that question must have sliced through him until it dug into bone. He did not answer and I took his silence as a victory, although I must have had enough sense to leave it there and not push him further.

  “Has anyone told you that you look a little like Robert Forrester?” I asked, letting him off the hook. “Only with a beard.”

  “Yes.” Angus turned and smiled wryly at me through a cloud of smoke. “And all of those people are quite gruesomely dead now, so...”

  I choked back a laugh, not wanting to give him that satisfaction.

  “Well, tell me this, if you could choose any actor to play you in a movie about your life, who would it be?”

  He was silent so long I thought he wouldn’t answer.

  “Gregory Peck.”

  “Gregory Peck is dead.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Come on. You’re life’s not that dull. You’re in Africa, Angus, with a major director making a movie out of your own book.”

  “Story.”

  “Story. Whatever. You should be really pumped up about this.”

  “Have you even read it?”

  “Of course I’ve read it. Like maybe six times.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I am doing the movie, aren’t I?”

  “Oh, is that the litmus test? You also did The Cat House Diaries.”

  It was payback for asking about his family. It was my turn to nurse the silence.

  “Give me a break,” I said finally. “Steinkruger was a crappy director working from a crappy script.”

  “But he’s sure great in the ol’ sack.”

  “I told you to leave that alone. It was a long time ago.”

  “Just over thirty-six months ago, if I’m counting right.”

  “And I suppose you don’t even care about Peppermint Grove.”

  “Why should I?”

  “It was nominated for a Sundance Audience Award. And I was nominated for a Special Jury Prize for dramatic acting.”

  “So.”

  “So? That was my break through role. It launched me. I’m not bragging…”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m just saying why focus on The Cat House Diaries instead of Peppermint Grove? Unless you just want to tear me down.”

  “I’m not trying to tear you down,” he said. “It was an improvement.”

  “An improvement? That’s all?”

  “You didn’t win did you?”

  “On my first nomination ever? No. I never said I was Meryl.”

  He picked a leaf from the hedge and examined it before letting it drop.

  “On a first name basis with Meryl are we?”

  He took a long drag, looking at me out of the corners of his eyes and then away again. I knew then that this was as close as Angus ever got to enjoying himself. I looked down into the fountain, mumbling.

  “We’ve met. Once. So?”

  “That wasn’t a very friendly thing you said about her. At the premier.”

  “I was misquoted. I apologized.”

  “You called her a pig.”

  “I did not call her a pig. I said that she could transform herself into a farm animal if the script called for it. I was complimenting her acting ability.”

  “I don’t think she understood.”

  “Clearly. I told you I apologized. We laughed about it.”

  “Maybe she was acting.”

  “I thought you don’t follow Hollywood.”

  Angus turned his back again and looked up into the sky, exhaling up into a cloud of insects thrumming over the high shrubs. I could still hear the top-notes of Blair’s angry voice in the distance, his words indiscernible over the splashing water and the chorus of cicadas. I flicked an ash and started my way out of the clearing.

  “I don’t follow Hollywood.” He was staring at me through the fountain, eyes flashing in the moonlight. “Hollywood follows me. And I wish it would stop.”

  He did not want me to leave him. There was something desperate buried in his tone that I would only recognize later. Had I known him then like I eventually came to know him, with an insider’s guide to his words and his inimitable rhythms, I would have known that leaving was not an option. The sound of Blair’s screenwriters hacking up his story with dull axes was still pounding in his ears. His free-floating dis- quiet still needed bleeding. Experience eventually taught me that the subject of discussion never really mattered to Angus. Hollywood and the cult of celebrity was as good a topic as anything else. Politics. The economy. War. The weather. As long as someone was there to listen to him rail at the broken world or, more accurately, at his broken life within it.

  It was a kind of colic. Eloquently verbal and noetic, but a kind of colic nonetheless. He did not want to be left alone with himself. It took a long time for me to realize that about Angus. It was a very inconvenient problem for a man whose greatest wish was always to be left alone.

  “Oh?” I turned. “Hollywood follows you?”

  “Yes. I am stalked by your teasers and your trailers and your premiers and your gossip and your silly, masturbatory award shows and your contagion of relationships, if you can call them that, forming and disintegrating and reforming, passing each other around like dirty needles. It’s like being forced to sit on the edge of a giant petri dish.”

  His tone was measured, pulling hard against the leash, but never out of control. It is odd that there was ever a time in which his resonant voice and his way of speaking was new to me. I eventually came to understand that, with few exceptions, Angus emoted with his words, not his tone. The words may have been incendiary but the tone was civil and restrained. He spoke as if he sensed some danger in fully letting go. As if he knew that his feelings were too much for mere words, those tiny implements of his profession.
And yet he let the words carry as much of his burden as they could, like little shovels digging into a mountain. I took a seat on the fountain wall and watched him work.

  “The entire western hemisphere is transfixed, Matilda, locked in spellbound stupefaction at the great American bacchanal that is a day in the life of a Hollywood star. Our entire cultural raison d’etre is one great big slobbering, sycophantic, orgiastic pilgrimage to the front window of Spago’s.”

  “Spago.”

  “Spago. Pardon. Spago.” The word came out with a breathless flourish and Angus genuflected. “Spago. Spago. The place where we mash our foreheads up against the glass window until it hurts and we weep with gratitude at the sight of some tarted-up teen-aged silicone-enhanced gyndroid poking at her salad and complaining about the burden of fame.” He took a drag. Exhaled. Pointed moonward, as if making a resolution.

  “You know … I think if I hear one more coke-addicted waif simpering to a live studio audience, or whining out an interview to a magazine on whose cover she is splayed in some bare-footed, freshly-fucked pose, about how difficult it is to be a star, or regaling us with tales from the rehab clinic, or bemoaning the sacrifice of privacy for the sake of the public, I may just do something violent.”

  “You don’t seem like the type,” I said.

  “I’m not. But you’re driving me to it.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “Not you, Matilda; you, Hollywood.”

  “What did I, Hollywood ever do to you?”

  “Nothing except to try to misappropriate every moment of my life. You lay fraudulent claim to the rest of us. You lay claim to our dreams and aspirations. You lay claim to our past. And our future. You claim our reality.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes you do.” He dismissed me with the wave of a hand.

  “How?”

  “How? The movies are a pay-as-you-go interpretive machine for living. They deign to tell us what everything we have ever done meant to us, and what everything we have yet to do will mean to us. They homogenize. They orchestrate. They brainwash. Until we all want the same things and hate the same things and orbit the same asininely juvenile standards. They tell you how to act when you catch the pop fly to win the big game, or how to propose marriage, how to suspect infidelity and how to respond to it, not to mention how best to inflict that sort of romantic perfidy on someone else. How to quit your job.

  How to smoke. Drive. Flirt. Cry. Dress. Dance. Argue. Hollywood tries to pre-sell me every sexual experience of my life, from my first kiss to my last septuagenarian Viagra-assisted erection. There is no longer any virgin experience, Matilda.”

  “Tilly,” I corrected to no discernible effect. “It’s all in the can. We’ve seen it all before…”

  I do not know, all of these years later, if I have forgotten his words, or if I had allowed my attention to wander, listening to his even baritone and the soft splash and burble of that fountain. I do recall tum-bling down the rabbit hole of memory as he spoke, landing into an amalgam of diatribes belonging to my father, who was far less able than Angus to keep his emotions from overflowing the tiny cups of his words. His were diatribes devoted to entirely different issues, of course; issues concerning my teenage associations, activities, appearance, an unfavorable comparison to my older brother, and my general lack of direction; all of which are topics I still associate with half-eaten food on cold dinner plates and the image of my mother, marmoreal and frozen over her placemat on the dining room table of my childhood home.

  “… There is a script, you see. And we all have our recycled parts to play. We subsist on a diet of pre-digested experience. Life in this culture is all but a preconceived notion. Living should be our rebellion. But we no longer live our own lives, Matilda. We live through celluloid …”

  Not that my father would have disagreed with a single word of what Angus was saying. I suspect he would have stood and applauded had he, too, been there beneath that Kenyan moon. But my father’s harsh opinions of the entertainment culture and its corrosive effects on the idealized America that he carried around in his wallet like a family photo did not develop until I was out of the house and long beyond his control. He developed those harsh opinions solely in reaction to my abrupt exodus from the holy lands of Ohio. Had I washed up on the shores of Broadway rather than the shores of Hollywood, my father would have spent his days railing against the moral failings of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein and their corrosive effect on modern culture. And he still would have cursed me for throwing my life away.

  “We do our damnedest to approximate your life, or at least the life you pretend you’re living; your life in a fantasy world that does nothing to respect the difference between acting and living; real and make-believe. We look to you, Matilda…”

  “Tilly.”

  “… you and your fellow demi-gods, for our emotional template…”

  So the tumble down the rabbit hole of memory was occasioned not by a common subject so much as a common tone. It was, I think, the undertone of disapproval – a barely contained disdain for me – that connected Angus back to my father in my own mind. This was a disdain much larger and deeper than any particular issue under discussion. A disdain that used all of the smaller issues as proxies and camouflage.

  “…You, who have no genuine life of your own except to demean yourself by chasing after my adulation in the hopes of validating your supercilious pretension and further enticing me into emulating your make-believe existence. It’s positively diseased.”

  “I think you’ve stereotyped the whole industry,” I told him, snap-ping back into the present.

  “No.” He made a tisking sound and wagged his finger. “Don’t complain to me about stereotypes. The industry – how I loathe that phrase – is nothing but stereotypes. Hollywood eats, drinks, breathes and excretes stereotypes. The very lifeblood of the industry is one big technicolor, surround-sound patchwork quilt of stereotypes.”

  “So art imitates life.”

  “That old saw? You disappoint me.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “No. Art apes Life. Art comments on Life. Art editorializes. Art always has an opinion. Art simplifies and exaggerates Life. And then do you know what happens?”

  He waited for a beat. I shrugged.

  “It is Life that begins to imitate Art. Life begins preening in Art’s funhouse mirror. Life becomes infatuated with its own distorted image. And then Art, rather liking its power over Life, further simplifies and exaggerates Life as it morphs headlong into parody. Before you know it, Life has become a cartoon reality while Art, such as it is, has become the real reality. It’s as if Narcissus’ own reflection pulled him into the water, drown him, and then crawled out, toweled off and set out to murder the townspeople.”

  “Christ, Angus,” I said, mesmerized. “You’re certifiable.”

  “Of course I am. The inmates are now running the asylum and everyone else is inside wondering what the hell happened.”

  “Why don’t you just…”

  “What.”

  “I don’t know, go live in your own little world with all of your authentic rational fellows. Fly the flag of virgin experience. Don’t pay attention to the movie industry. Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.”

  “If only we could. The war is over. We’ve already been assimilated. There is no more distinction between your industry and our world. Eighty percent of what we know comes from what we are spoon-fed by the industry. Before the age of twelve, the average boy has learned how to fight, how to fuck and how to get high. He has seen every act of violence you can imagine and some you can’t. He has already started to form a system of values around the infantile notion that the earth, its environments, and its inhabitants exist entirely for his own convenience. You should be concerned, for instance, that the average twelve-year old boy is well on his way to forming very entrenched beliefs about the value of women as objects of his entertainment and gratification.”

  I
lost my composure at this point, laughing less at the prospect of being sized up and ogled by a hedonistic twelve-year old, and more simply at the absurdity of the unbidden, softly spoken diatribe to which I was being subjected.

  “Sure, go ahead and laugh, but most kids today know more about firearms and buying a hooker than they do about literature. Everyone knows how to tie a tourniquet on their own arm so that they can isolate a vein for a heroin injection. We could do it with our eyes closed because we’ve seen it so many times. And yet how many of the same people know how to write a coherent paragraph? How many know a single word of Joyce or Faulkner or Miller or Hemmingway? But every child knows that freebasing has nothing to do with baseball. Don’t you find that just a little disturbing? What percentage of eleven-year olds do you think would be able to find Africa on a map?”

  “I have no idea, but if you’re looking to Henry Miller as a more wholesome...”

  “I don’t know either but I’ll bet it’s a lot less than those who can tell you what a nine millimeter is, or how to screw the neighbor’s wife on the staircase, or just how to go about wiping down a crime scene. Children conspire to work their parents over for boob jobs and Botox injections before they can even drive. And who can blame them? They’re anticipating the Golden Age.”

  “The Golden Age.”

  “The eighteen to twenty-six demographic that rules the world. The demographic to which we are enslaved. The demographic to whose prurient and narcissistic sensibilities we pander at every turn. We want to look like them, act like them and think like them. There is no higher value, we are told every minute of every day, than being twenty-five years old, with the hair and the teeth and the abs and the glow of shamelessness. We are the most youth-obsessed culture on the planet. Looking older than twenty-six is almost a mark of shame. You’re better off with Cholera. You know why?”

  “Let me guess …” But Angus did not let me guess.

  “Hollywood. That precious film industry of yours. You’re part of an infernal machine that manufactures an ooze that sticks to every-thing. It’s like a bad commercial jingle you can’t get out of your head. And you know who programs the machine? Sixteen-year old boys. Not literally. Literally speaking, the machine is programmed by corporate execs keenly attuned to the preferences of sixteen-year old boys and the enormous market of moviegoers who share the emotional maturity and intelligence of sixteen-year old boys. As a result,” he held up a hand and started counting on his fingers, “we are nurturing a culture on recreational drugs, explosions, fast cars, short skirts, mounds of silicone, soulless, self-centered ambition and shallow, exploitative relationships. Hollywood is shaping our world; focusing our attention.”