So what is it about cigarettes?
“Well, if I have a drink, it doesn’t get in the air and bother you.”
I’m sitting next to a four-hundred-pound motherfucker who is eating a baked potato the size of a football, with fucking sour cream and butter on it, and a side of steak with more fat on it than you can shake a stick at, and he’s got his diet soda there—like that’s going to do him any good—and my cigarette smoke is going to kill him? When your cholesterol is 319 or some shit like that? Ban butter, you know? It’s ridiculous. There’s shit out there that will kill you the fuck dead. And maybe smoking will kill me, but it’s my business if I smoke a cigarette in my fucking alley. I’m sorry. That’s my air too. If you’re going to say that’s not my air, then I’m going to say it ain’t that city bus’s air either. Let everybody get themselves a wagon and go live in Pennsylvania Dutch Country with the Amish, and then maybe they’ll all be real happy because I guarantee you there’s shit killing you besides me and my little American Spirit cigarette.
I went to this asshole the other day (pardon the pun, and you’ll see why in a minute). I decided to get all my medical tests out of the way in January. Sometimes I have to get physicals several times a year because each time you do a movie you have to get a physical for the insurance companies that provide coverage for the production. Every year I try to go do my thing, get my own yearly physical, so this year I went and had the treadmill test with the cardiologist (checked out okay there), went to the dermatologist (everything’s fine), went and had my regular physical (no problems). I’ve had my problems in the past, as I’ve talked about with the starving-to-death thing, but other than that I’ve not had much. I’ve got a little bit of arthritis in my neck, my spine, and my knees because of sports and because of a horse accident years ago that nearly killed me. I had a kidney stone once, which really sucked. Otherwise, I seem to be okay.
I’ve never had a colonoscopy, and once you get to be fifty you’re supposed to go get one, so I asked my doctor if there was a gastroenterologist he could recommend me to see. He said he knew a doctor he thought was good, so I went to him. That doctor—with him it was like everything is about “You have to get a colonoscopy.” That’s the only fucking test you got? He proceeds to scare the shit out of me talking about “We put a tube down your throat and up your ass—we put you out, you don’t even know what happened.” I was trying to tell him about this problem I’ve been having with my stomach ever since we were in Atlanta shooting Jayne Mansfield’s Car. I was just dehydrated all the time, and I think I fucked myself up a little bit.
So there I am, sitting in the exam room, and I’m trying to tell this doctor what’s going on with me.
“The problem I’ve been having is—”
“I’ll ask the questions.” And he’s over there typing while I’m talking. Sometimes doctors want to act like they’re fucking God or something. Well, fuck you and your diploma on the wall. What do you mean you’ll ask the questions? If you’ll let me tell you for thirty fucking seconds about what’s going on, it may give you a clue instead of you asking me all the shit that you know about and seeing what little fucking category it fits in and what test that costs a billion dollars I can take that won’t be covered by insurance. He was a prick. A real asshole. (See? Does the uncalculated pun make sense now?) I was in there for about five minutes before I couldn’t stand it. I said, “I had a full body scan recently and an MRI on my head, and they said I’m good.”
“You can’t tell everything from the scan, or the this or the that …”
Well, they can tell if you have a fucking tumor the size of a goddamn grapefruit, which I don’t have. I went to a fucking blood specialist and got my blood drawn by a guy I know who makes his living as an expert—this is a high-dollar cat who looks for cancer in your blood, and he said I was fine. All you want to do, because this is your area of expertise, is shove a fucking camera up my ass and that solves every problem in the world. That’s the ultimate fucking test you can take. Okay, fine. I get it. I’m going to get a colonoscopy, goddammit. I’ve already said, yeah, I was going to do that, but I’m certainly not letting this cold fucking asshole do it. The upshot here is, at the end of the thing he said, “Why would you subject yourself to radiation having a full body scan and yet you eat vegan?”
I said, “Because I fucking want to. That’s why. I’d like to find out all at once if I’ve got any bad shit. When somebody’s sick in the hospital, you motherfuckers give them that test. You give it to them all the time. As long as you’re being paid by the motherfucker, then you’ll give them all the tests you want. But all of a sudden this test is no good. So in other words, you say that your profession is so underhanded that you have a test that’s dangerous to you and it doesn’t work. And yet you work in this fucking profession.”
I don’t trust these cocksuckers. My brother is an RN, and he teaches nursing up in San Jose and San Francisco. He’s a really good dude, and he knows that profession inside and out. There are plenty of good people in the medical field, and there are a lot of pricks too. It makes you wonder, Well, who do I listen to? You go to the holistic or homeopathic doctor, and they tell you, “Just eat this pill, it’s made out of licorice and it will cure you.” I’ve personally found that both of them, the so-called real doctors and the holistic/homeopathic doctors, have a lot of value. If you get your fucking arm cut off, go to the emergency room and let one of those hacks sew your fucking arm back on. But if you’re just feeling kind of nervous and you don’t understand why you got the shits three times a week and the other four days a week you don’t, try a homeopathic or holistic doctor. Get some acupuncture. Because sometimes that shit will fix you up without having these motherfuckers wanting to saw you in half to look at your liver.
My problem is that I’m too nervous and I have physical symptoms from being too goddamned worried and nervous all the time. If you can find something, like drink a couple of beers a day—some people like to smoke a joint, and maybe they’re better off—maybe that’s better than medicine. I’m not condoning drinking or dope, I’m just saying. Maybe you just need to do things that will calm you the fuck down, then maybe we wouldn’t need doctors so much. That’s what I’m working on. It was one of my New Year’s resolutions this year. Try to calm the fuck down and not worry so much. Doctors don’t want you to calm down.
I know a lot of this is very rambling and angry, but I think it’s important. I’m just saying. You’re reading words, but there’s blood in my eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Jayne Mansfield’s Car
Come on, kids, gather round
We have a treat for you
If you’ve never seen it
Then you’re long overdue
Observe the twisted metal
Bloodstains and broken glass
We’re glad your folks all brought you here
With pockets full of cash
For a dollar you can step inside the rope
You look to me like brave kids who can cope
For two bucks you can stand up on the stage
And look inside the wreck that’s all the rage
We travel around the country
To entertain the masses
To show the bloody floorboard
And the scarf and the dark glasses
Come on, folks, step right up
We’ve traveled oh so far
To let you people have a look
Inside Jayne Mansfield’s car
Gaze up at the horror
Tell me what you see
I know it’s just a mannequin
But a good facsimile
—“Jayne Mansfield’s Car”
(Thornton/Andrew/Butler)
ORWELL WROTE 1984, WHICH OBVIOUSLY HAD A LOT OF FORESIGHT, but now it’s Revenge of the Nerds. This whole thing I was saying about the computer—it has become the single most important tool in our society. Cell phones, gadgets, all this kind of shit. Before the computer, you had to
be able to run fast, jump high, write a book that said something worth a shit, write a movie, make a record, sculpt something. When I was a little kid, I lived in a place that didn’t have movie theaters, so we played with sticks and rocks. When I was about nine years old, I moved into a town that did have a movie theater, and I would be entertained by movies with Don Knotts and Dick Van Dyke because I was a little kid. When I started looking at movies in earnest, when I was probably a teenager, the movies that meant something to me were movies like the original A Star Is Born with Fredric March, A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan’s movies. The thing is, they all had something to them. They were movies that were based on something, they had a story to tell, with characters that had something to say. That stuff is no longer important. What’s important is that you can sit there and figure out a bunch of shit to bypass all art. The whole experience of going to a movie or going to a concert is lost now. The buildup was as fun as the experience; it was exciting, and when you finally got there, to the movie theater or the concert venue, you listened and you watched and you loved it. To anticipate it and to experience it, the smells and the sights and the sounds of it all, the whole carnival of rock and roll and the circus of movies, it’s a beautiful thing, and people don’t even have the time to do it anymore. Everything is so quick.
Movie stars used to be Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, and Fredric March. Now movie stars are short little fat kids with curly hair. They’re in movies where they go to Mexico and get in trouble with a goat and things like that. That’s what a big movie is now.
One night a little more than a year ago, I was sitting around bitching with a buddy of mine down here about how there are not any good movies anymore and how every now and then I have to go out and be in a movie and play some task force leader just to pay the bills. So I go into the office, and I start looking around at these plaques I have in there for writing shit and think, Well, goddammit, just write your own movie like you used to. You know, you reach a certain level in your career, and you start thinking it’s gotta be done that way, but then I realized things are never changed by rich people. If you look back through history, things are changed by poor people. Maybe not necessarily poor people, but whoever is on the bottom, and I started thinking, Instead of being on your high horse, look at it like, well, I’m a little shit with no money and nothing at all, and I gotta start all over, and so if I’m going to make my own thing, I can’t say, well, I want $100 million to do it. I gotta do it like I used to do it. Then I started thinking about what movie I was gonna write.
Now, sometimes you don’t have a conscious thought about something, yet it’s been there all along burning underneath you. For this album J.D. and I made, I wrote a song called “Jayne Mansfield’s Car” about something that always fascinated me about my dad. You know by now I was raised pretty poor in the South and my dad was a hotheaded little Irishman. And as I said, we didn’t get along very well—he didn’t pay much attention to me, period—but one thing that we did together was, and he was a morbid guy, from the time I was probably four years old, he would take me to see the aftermath of car wrecks. We would go out there, and he would study them. I think he had a fascination with the horror, but at the same time—and he wasn’t a very articulate guy—I think he wondered about life and death a lot. I think he was fascinated by what the people in the car—who had died—were thinking when it happened, how it happened, whether or not they were scared when they went up the tree, if the accident knocked them out enough to where they didn’t feel it. I think he thought about all that stuff and how this poor son-of-a-bitch was just going to get a roll of toilet paper and if he hadn’t been, then he’d still be alive. So how does that fit into the scheme of things? Is there a God? Is there a devil? Is there a heaven or a hell? Are we aliens? Somehow I think he had some thought process there.
THERE WASN’T REALLY A LOT OF ENTERTAINMENT IN OUR SMALL TOWN, but the carnival would come around every now and then. Some snake oil salesman figured out a long time ago that people are really fascinated with other people’s pain and misery, so they’d bring around the Spider Woman, the five-legged cow, and these other sideshows. It’s been going on forever. It’s not like human nature changed recently, it’s that now there’s more outlets for this fascination. Back in the old days, what was there? Before the printing press—which I saw on some show was the number-one invention of all time because it put news out in mass fashion—they were feeding Christians to lions and watching gladiators chop one another to bits. People have always wanted to see that shit, you know? So all of a sudden in the sixties, maybe even before that, these guys started bringing things around and charging you a dollar to see them because it’s like, hey, people like to see this shit, let’s make some money off it.
They also brought around car wrecks—Bonnie and Clyde’s car with all the bullet holes in it, stuff like that. One time they brought Jayne Mansfield’s car around, and my dad of course took me to see it. I was in my early teens by that time. Tom Epperson came out to see it too. So we paid our fifty cents or dollar or whatever it was to walk up on a little stage, and for an extra fifty cents we got to look in this destroyed car. Jayne Mansfield’s car. One of the added attractions to this deal was a mannequin head with a wig on it and fake blood on the wig. People think she was decapitated, but she wasn’t, she was scalped. There’s a technical name for it, I don’t know what it is. Tom remembers the head being in the backseat, I remember it being in the front passenger floorboard—who knows who’s right?—but anyway, people didn’t walk up, look in there, and go, “Aw geez, that’s stupid, they got a mannequin head here.” They looked at it like they were looking at the Grand Canyon.
Now, there are a couple of ways to look at that. I have friends who are great tourists. Not just tourists, but people who are interested in a bunch of shit.
When I was making Pushing Tin in Toronto, a friend of mine who was on the movie said, “Hey, the shoe museum is here,” so I went to the shoe museum. Well, I get there, and after I see about ten pairs of shoes—the kind of shoes that Chiang Kai-shek wore, the kind of shoes that they used to bind people’s feet in, the shoes that Elizabeth the Third or whatever wore—all I want to do is go outside and have a cigarette, because to me it’s all just a pair of shoes. But a lot of people like stuff like that. I don’t mind. I really don’t want to go to the Nestlé factory and shit like that. But I know people who do. And I’m fascinated with World War II and the Civil War to a degree, so I’ll go look at that stuff.
So these people go see this car, and as I said, to them it isn’t just some mannequin head. It’s her head on the floorboard, and it starts them thinking how it happened. “Wow! They ran up under this mosquito spray truck, and look, the top is all ripped off, and oh! She must have gone out that door!”
So I’d always wanted to do something on that. That’s why we wrote the song, and I loved that title: “Jayne Mansfield’s Car.” But it’s not a movie about Jayne Mansfield. What Jayne Mansfield’s Car is actually about is how different generations view war and are affected by it. It’s done in a darkly humorous way for the most part, with some drama in there too. It’s also about the fascination and the fear of life and death, and how families are affected by the dichotomy. Jayne Mansfield was killed in 1967, and the movie takes place in 1969, so it’s around the time of her death, and her car does figure into the movie, but it’s really just a metaphor.
I often find that when you can explain what a movie is about, it’s usually not very good. If it’s about a butler who goes insane and kills everybody and it turns out he was never really the butler, but the father, that’s fine, I guess. But Jayne Mansfield’s Car is a movie that we made in the spirit of the movies that I loved in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, so hopefully the people who loved those movies will go and see this one.
SO NOW A DINOSAUR LIKE ME COMES IN AND SAYS, “HEY, I HAVE A MOVIE I want to make that actually says something, and the cast list is me, Robert Duvall, John Hurt,
Kevin Bacon, Ray Stevenson, and all these other people, but I need $11.5 million to make it.” Ten years ago they would’ve shit themselves and opened the checkbook. But now they say, “Well, yeah, but you guys are these real actor guys, and there’s going to be a lot of talking in it and stuff. There’s no real market for that, so we’ll give you $4 million to make it.” So when your movie comes out and you’ve got a boom shot in one wall that you didn’t have the money to take out and everybody goes, “See? They make those shitty little art movies and the curly-haired little fat kid’s movie didn’t have a boom shot in it,” well, yeah, no fucking wonder. That’s because you gave $75 fucking million to the curly-haired kid to make the most vapid horseshit you’ve ever seen in your life.
I went around to everybody in town to try to get them to make this movie, and everybody wanted to finance it, but they wanted to finance it for a fraction of what I needed to make it, which wasn’t much to begin with. And this is, by the way, with me and the other actors making nothing. We didn’t even ask for any money. These are my friends, and they said they’d do it because they wanted to do something decent. Everyone questioned the foreign value. “The Japanese are never going to go out in droves to see this because it’s about America.” So guess who financed it? Well, not the Japanese, but my manager gets a call from these Russian guys who had read the script and an interview with me saying you can’t get a decent movie made anymore, and they say, “We want to finance your movie.” So Jayne Mansfield’s Car, which is about a British family and an American family meeting up in Alabama in 1969 and about their connection to each other through war, is financed by Russians.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 21