Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir

by Ron Perlman

  We went and saw this guy for six to eight months before we came to the conclusion that we were paying this doctor so we could fight in front of him. We could have done that for free in our house. We both said, “This fucking therapy is not working. Nothing is improving in our relationship at all. And if our relationship is gonna improve, it’s gonna have to be ’cuz we want it to.”

  So once I realized we would not be coming back to him anymore, at the end of that last session I said, “By the way, would you consider treating me on my own?” ’Cuz by that point I really dug the guy. He looked at Opal, and he said, “Well, since you came as a team, I would have to get permission from your bride.”

  Opal said, “Jesus Christ, just fucking take the fucker, man. This dude is fucking nuts. Maybe you can do something with him.”

  Looking back on it now, I can honestly say that going to him in the first place had less to do with the dynamic of me and Opal and more to do with the dynamic of me, myself, and i (and yes, it’s supposed to be lowercase). Because my main problem with Opal was that she was simply the closest one there to take all my own frustrations out on, the closest one to blame for everything not being perfect, the closest one to pin all the shit that was really about my shortcomings on. Even though there was no blame to begin with, it was just the way shit was. And if you’re somebody who hasn’t ever really worked on yourself and then tried to understand who you are on a core level, then you don’t really have very much to fall back on.

  I’m fortunate to be able to say that I was obsessed just enough with not wanting to go back to certain painful things that I was willing to do the work. But the work that needed doing never, ever, ever had anything to do with when I was on a lucky streak or when things were going well. It all happened when the wheels just completely came off, because that’s when you realize how fucked up your thinking is, how completely short-circuited you are. He taught me to look at things I had never taken a good long, hard, objective look at before so that, with any luck, I would drill down to a sort of core that I could depend on that wasn’t based on what I was doing, how I was doing, whether I was doing.

  I didn’t know to what degree I needed that kind of help except for the fact that there were so many ups and downs and so many highs and lows in that ten-year period that I was forced to turn inward and deal with the misery and the vast mood swings. I didn’t know how to begin to figure out what was wrong until I started to see Dr. Phil Stutz on my own. And although all I could see was the haze of what seemed at the time as an excruciating journey with dubious results, finally I had taken the first real step to confronting the issues that had my fingerprints all over them. This amazing shrink changed—or shrunk—the notion that I always had, that all of my wiring was intertwined with fame, success, the accumulation of wealth, how many friends I had, and so on and so forth—how often I worked, what my TV queue was, how I was regarded. All this shit completely means fuck all unless there’s a you there that it all can reflect off of.

  Once the real you emerges and appears unfettered, naked, and completely in touch with the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you really meet yourself. Then all those things take on a different perspective as well. Certain things fall away. Certain things are not quite what they were cracked up to be, but you begin to understand that yes, there are certain things that would make your life a lot easier. But they’re not panaceas. They’re not the answer. It’s no longer dependent upon if this or that happens to me all of a sudden, then I’m good from here on out. Then I have no problems, I have no issues, it’s all smooth sailing. That’s just an illusion. That’s just a lie.

  So a lot of this stuff was revealed to me when I began working with Dr. Stutz. It couldn’t have been couched in a better period because the nineties were so challenging on every level, thus allowing me to bring into the conversation Ron at his most fucked up, most terrified, most negative about his own self-image. The decade touched on all the little cracks that still existed and that, if left unchecked, could have flooded into irreparable damage, so it provided me with all the ammo I needed for full self-examination: there were career problems, money problems, parenting problems—you name it, I had it.

  In short, I couldn’t have been a better subject to test out the theories and efficacies of the renowned Dr. Phil Stutz. His beliefs sprung forth most specifically from the teachings of the great Carl Jung and the amazing Rudolf Steiner. Of course he threw in dashes of Freud and sprinkles of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But by the time Phil got through distilling them down, they were pure Stutz. And tailor-made for the sick, twisted wannabes who get off the bus every single day looking for fame and fortune in Hollywood. He is a truly, truly brilliant man, and what is beautiful about Phil is that whenever I was on the skids I could see him; there was never any of the bullshit formality of making and keeping sacrosanct weekly or biweekly appointments, with all the self-important crap most therapists throw down to confuse real help with rigid dogma.

  Phil didn’t give a fuck whether I saw him once a week, once a day, or once a millennium. I could call him when I needed him, and he would figure out a way to make time for me, just like ya’d do with any other doctor. If I needed him really bad, he’d make time for me quickly. If it was not such a big thing, he would fit me in. But he was in a lot of demand, so I was one of many people who depended on him for balance and equilibrium. That was the pattern in the nineties, when I went to see him a lot. The problem was that he was the most expensive shrink there was. No one in the world charges more than Phil does. So sometimes my real problem was, “Phil, I don’t have any money. And that’s fucking me up. I gotta come see you. But you’re really expensive and I really can’t afford you.” That whole thing was a catch-22. So I had to be very careful about how I administered his therapy and made sure I never took anything away from the other needs in my life that sometimes a dearth of resources were needed to cover.

  He worked things out so even when there were certain months when I couldn’t pay him, he’d wait. When I got a gig, I would make it all up to him. There was no issue that was coming up for me at that time that I wasn’t able to call him up and address. And the way it worked with Phil was, whereas most of the people I knew who were in therapy would lie there on a couch or sit there in a chair and talk for forty-five, fifty minutes and every once in a while the shrink would say, “And how do you feel about that?” and you’d be fucking talking and that’s what therapy was, Phil would listen to your version of what was fucking you up for about fifteen minutes, twenty if it was really serious, and then he’d talk for the whole rest of the time.

  Phil taught me that there are things that don’t square up inside of most people, but these are just distortions—they’re really not real. They’re just things you think are real because that’s what you’ve been wired to think. And low self-esteem is just another example of a bunch of bad assumptions, assumptions you are making that are reality to you, but they don’t have anything to do with real reality. It’s based on a bunch of assumptions that are the result of misfires or bad judgment. And those things don’t get removed if you make a lot of money, get lucky on a TV show, start driving a fucking XJ6 Jaguar, or are getting head seventeen times a day from hot supermodels. You know, all that shit is just a distraction. Well, maybe not all of it . . . but you know what I’m sayin’. The real work you do on your life is a question of how well you can recognize that you need to work on your life and how determined you are to look it straight in eye and figure out how to remove it and replace it with something that’s closer to real reality instead of the bullshit that got foisted upon you either by bad parenting or whatever other fucked up stimuli you experienced in your first five to ten years of life.

  Most people have the biggest trouble seeing life through their own eyes. They don’t have as much problem seeing someone else’s life objectively, but they have no way to see themselves with the same clarity. This is particularly the case for people who haven’t worked on their core, don’t have a whole l
ot of self-awareness, when the real you is a ghost.

  Essentially any search for inner truth begins with replacing all of the illusory things you think you perceive with the things that are really there. In other words, you must begin to train yourself to make all your judgments on the reality of a thing rather than the distortion that occurs when you look at the world through a distorted lens. This is the power of cognitive thinking: there is an objective truth to it that is undebatable. Hopefully you learn to get to the point at which you could now look at something in a way so that it becomes an offshoot of logic and, thus, a problem infinitely more solvable. And very often Stutz would give me a diagram that encapsulated the universe. He taught me the tool called The Grateful Flow. I think Carl Jung talks about that, in which you just begin by saying, “I’m breathing right now. I’m not in pain right now. I’m sitting down right now. I’m in a warm comfortable room right now.” You begin to list all the positive things you’re experiencing in the right here and now. And then the list is usually so vast that you completely obliterate and expunge any of the negative forces trying to invade you. So these tools were instantaneous—if you just took the time and accessed enough self-discipline to use them.

  And 100 percent of the time I would walk out of Phil’s office with such a cleaned-out vision of the world and myself in it that I had no recollection of ever even being in trouble in the first place. I could always leave Phil’s office with a complete spring in my step, completely unfettered, when nothing was bothering me, nothing. And he would do that in not a week or a month or three to six years, like I hear about from my friends with their own shrinks; he would do this in fifty minutes. Every time. No matter what shit I dragged in with me, he would get right to the matter. He would identify what the disconnect was, not ever giving a shit where it emanated from, that, “So when did you first discover you hated your mother”–type of shit. Instead he gave me specific ways of not only rethinking a situation but also provided a tool to help me get back to this place where I was able to remove it from allowing whatever it was that never existed in the first place to become a part of my perspective. And these tools were incredibly user-friendly, unbelievably accessible, guaranteed to be effective! As long as you were willing to call upon them regularly.

  I traveled great distances with Phil. Between my abbreviated description of the conditions that I was bringing him and his fine-tuned intuitive ability to not only identify it by name but also surmise the characteristics in me that made those conditions possible, Phil developed a mastery of me that is equal to none. Which allowed him, as we traveled along together, to zero in on my mishigas and cut right to its quick, by first identifying it, then obliterating it, so rapidly, so effectively that it seemed almost like magic. But there was no mumbo-jumbo, no psychobabble. Everything was in layman’s terms. And there was not one moment in all our years together of analysis when we drudged up past bruisings in pursuit of current events, because at the end of the day who gave a fuck what it all meant, these conditions of yours. Instead, here’s how you kick its fuckin’ ass. Here’s how you identify the high ground and then get yourself there.

  After years of working with Phil—’cuz that’s what it was: work, not treatment—we started to develop a deep fondness for one another, one that obviously sprung from mutual respect but nevertheless transcended normal doctor-patient protocol. “You lost a brother,” he said, “and you almost lost yourself. If you had gone to a hundred shrinks, ninety-nine of them would have had you on meds. What we did was work diligently and single-mindedly to teach you how to manage yourself out of harm’s way whenever it appeared. Because make no mistake, it will keep reappearing till they close the lid on you. But if you can get good enough to call upon a tool to redirect the flood of shit that comes to bring you down and you get good enough at it so reaction time is close to immediate, well, that’s as close as you can get to harmony and bliss.” I was never on a med. Not never, not no-how.

  Little by little this shit began to take hold in real time. The goal that Phil had set, which was to take the giant waves that existed between my highs and lows and diminish them to the point at which they were softer, quieter waves, was becoming a part of my everyday experience. And as we got closer to the end of the decade I began to notice a distinctive new level of peace and contentment during my alone times, something I couldn’t handle for an hour in my younger years. I became so much more comfortable in my own skin. I became, God forbid, one of my favorite people to hang out with; in fact, being alone started to surpass the need to always be with others, as if I could only feel like me if it manifested itself as a reflection of other people.

  Perhaps the hardest tool in Phil’s arsenal to master also happened to be the most profound in importance. It sprung from an approach that was central to Jungian philosophy; it had to do with the shadow. The shadow is that little person who lives deep in the bowels of your innermost self and is the part of you that you loathe. You usually perceive it as weak, ugly, twisted, and completely unacceptable. Phil tried to get me in touch with mine for years; I resisted. And each time he took me down the road where my shadow-self lived, I got to slowly and incrementally see what this little fellow looked and felt like, making it clearer and clearer why I wanted nothing to do with him. Well, after much poking and prodding, toward the end of the nineties I saw him, fully formed and in living color. He was very fat, of course. He was very weak, like “You’re a pussy” weak, and he was essentially helpless. Phil sensed that I had arrived, that I finally had him in my purview. He said, “Now tell him you love him. Tell him he is precious and beautiful. Tell him you have his back and that you will always take care of him, never let anything bad happen to him, never let him down . . .”

  Well, it wasn’t hard to see that this was the part of Carl Jung’s conclusion around which all others emanated. Just as I had become the parent to my children, I was now the parent of my own child. I was empowered, adult, responsible, and I loved myself for being badass enough to be ready to kick anyone’s ass before I would let anything happen to that precious being. Phil said, “That’s it. Get the fuck outta my office. You graduated. I got nothing left to teach you!” Well, that’ll never happen; I’ll always have things I’m gonna wanna hash out with Phil Stutz, my doctor, my guru, my friend.

  Phil is now a celebrated author, having written a book with another brilliant psychiatrist, Barry Michels, with whom Phil shares a passion, called The Tools. When it got released Phil invited me to do an hour-long interview he and Barry were conducting as part of a series. I, along with a host of others who had spent time with Barry and Phil, shared their experiences and insights. I’m incredibly proud of that interview I did with the lads. (If ya get a chance and can find the link, check it out and lemme know whatcha think.)

  I guess there was some other shit that went down in the nineties besides Phil, although all of it pales in comparison. I remember finding voice work in cartoons and falling head over heels for that. The first person who brought me into that world was Andrea Romano, who directed almost all the animation stuff for Warner Brothers that was and still is the biggest in the business. I mean Bugs, Yosemite, Road Runner, Porky, Daffy, and . . . need I say more? Andrea brought me in to do a regular lead role on a show called Bonkers. It was really cool, and I had a ball. I found the people who made their living doing nothing but voices to be some of the most raw, flat-out talents I had ever met. And I fell in love with the process: no rehearsal, no discussion—just get in there, give a balls-out performance, and get the fuck out. Couldn’t get enough of it, and, indeed, I did a ton of it through the nineties. Kept me busy during the slow times.

  And yeah, there were some movies and television thrown in during the nineties, but if you insist on reminiscing, you’ll have to take a trip to IMDb, ’cuz I ain’t getting into any of it. Suffice it to say, it was pretty much a period to coast, survive, and work on myself—that is, except for one little highlight, a freaky little French flick called La cité des enfants perdus
, or The City of Lost Children.

  (CHAPTER 18)

  Enfants Perdus

  The City of Lost Children required me to effect the most dramatic physical transformation I’ve ever had to make to my body. I worked my ass off, literally, to look like a street carnival strong man who could break chains with his bare chest. I ain’t sayin’ I had a six pack, but there was definitely a two-pack, which is twice as much as I normally have. But I was still young enough, hungry enough, and in love with the potential of the project enough to give me the focus to get into some serious shape. Even I couldn’t get enough of me!