Wildflower

by Drew Barrymore

  I am convinced you are a drummer. You even hold your sticks perfectly and will adjust them perfectly if they have slipped. You have rhythm in both arms, and you actually put your whole self into it. It’s amazing. (I have already enrolled you in music school. You start in the fall.)

  I know that you will grow out of needing to be on my hip or in my arms soon. I can feel it already. You walk and run around and you have things to do and places to go. You will start to find your autonomy, and there is nothing I can do but support you and cheer you on. Somehow this has gone by at the speed of light.

  And I don’t want you to grow too fast, although I will mark another notch soon on the height chart I have been doing for you and Olive on a wood beam on the wall (the kind I can take and keep if I ever need to—that’s why I did it there). You will start to talk and tell me who you are rather than just me projecting that you love smiling as much as I do. You are good at doing your own thing, but I am always right here.

  Just don’t ever stop needing me. That is what I am here for. You and your sister. To be there every step of the way. I fantasize about the future. And my fantasies are always the same. They are you and your sister feeling like you can always count on me. For the big and the small things, and everything in between. I dread the days you will slam a door in my face (I’m not an idiot, I know what having two teenage girls is going to be like), but I can handle it.

  I was built for this. In fact, I look forward to it. I will always do my best to present the high road in life. Teach you to be grateful, polite, and humble. It means everything to me. But you are my teacher too. And so far you have shown me that to love without end is perfectly safe. My heart grew bigger the day you were born, and it grows bigger every time I see your smile.

  To say I love you is the understatement of the world. To show that I do for the rest of my life will be my honor and my pleasure. As I sing to you to the tune of “Rubber Duckie” . . . “Little Frankie, you’re the one, you always make my day so fun. Little Frankie, I’m awfully fond of you.”

  Boulder, Utah, 2000

  OUTWARD BOUND

  Nan walked into my office one afternoon in 1998 and said, “Oh my God, they are making Charlie’s Angels at Sony! We have to pitch ourselves for it.” I was in the middle of shoving cheap sushi in my face and she was giving me indigestion. I had been so tightly wound on our last film, Never Been Kissed, because vanity deals were dropping like flies, and if your film didn’t work you were done for as a production company.

  Taking on a giant action movie seemed like enough for me to stop chewing long enough to say with my mouth full, “OK, tell me everything you know.” She said the studio wanted to make the movie but that the big idea was mostly what they were working from and they were looking for someone to come in and own it and really make it come alive!

  Then she started talking about how she used to play Charlie’s Angels with her friends growing up. They would all be a different angel and go solve cases. Nan looks like an original cast member, and I could picture it perfectly. And eventually we went in, pitched the movie and the world we wanted to create, the tone, everything. And wouldn’t you know it, they took us two gals on.

  Then we wanted to hire a first-time director, get a script written with a brilliant writer and create three characters out of nowhere, convince everyone it would be great and to trust us, help in the hiring of all the team of costumes, makeup, and production design to set the look of the world, cast Cameron, find our third angel, Lovely Lucy, call a pay phone to find Bill Murray at a cryptic location and set a time after flying to New York to stalk him in person just to get him to talk on the phone, wrangle the brilliant Crispin Glover and convince the studio to cast an indie darling as the villain, try to combat all the negativity about how much this movie was going to suck from everyone including early press and Internet whispers by writing in the first scene of the film that we know we are making another movie out of an old television show and we are not taking ourselves so seriously so neither should you, keep convincing the studio we would not lose their $100 million investment, crusade for the angels not to use guns but use their brains and hand-to-hand combat instead, train for kung fu, and shoot a five-month-long action film. Then, once it’s made, you start working with the team of marketing people and the publicity department trying to figure out how you are going to sell this movie! From the trailers and commercials to posters and a world press tour.

  And another way to do that is to do lots and lots of magazine covers. So when Marie Claire suggested that the three angels go to Outward Bound because that would make such a great story to publicize the film, we all went for it. But then I found myself being shipped to Boulder, Utah. At that point we had just delivered our first cut of the film to the studio and were getting a whole bunch of notes.

  The film was coming out in three months and it was crunch time. We had already been working on it for well over a year and I was burned out and stressed. Instead of being a mature and rational person telling myself that I was lucky to work with all these incredible people and no matter what it’s just a movie, I was wondering if all this hard work to have a company was going to crash and burn in a very public and irreversible way. And this company had become so important to me both professionally and personally. I wanted to be back at home problem solving and not anywhere else.

  These were my thoughts as we were driving in a van to meet our “instructor,” who had a giant hat with the word “BOSS” written on it. I was standing there as he was telling us we would be driven farther out to a deserted space, dropped off, and picked up in three days. We would hike forty miles. We would not have food, sleeping bags, nothing. Just the backpacks we had on our backs. Whhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaatttt???? What is happening? Where am I? How the fuck did I get myself into this?

  As we continued in the van, I noticed my fellow angels were nowhere near me. My whole vibe sucked, and as I was stewing in the back, I knew they had mutinied to stay away from my toxic energy. Fuck. Cameron and Lucy and I were usually three happy peas in a pod. We loved each other. Learned martial arts together. Laughed together. Pushed and inspired each other. Went to Vegas on weekends together. Braided each other’s hair together. And yet here I was, ostracized for my bad attitude. I just kept saying, “How did I get myself into this?” Or “Do I want to sell a movie so bad I’m willing to starve and freeze out in the wilderness for it?” No response. They weren’t playing. They were out to enjoy this. Fuck fuck fuck. The van went along driving farther out into where nobody could hear you and nobody cared.

  The first night we started hiking and I just kept muttering shit under my breath as I was trailing everyone. Half because I wanted to just be alone, half because my short legs couldn’t keep up. I was the least athletic of us three. I could pretend and train to be a badass, but out here there was no faking anything. Shit just got way too real for me and I was pissed. The guide started talking up front about how we would learn to make fire, survive, and find food in these conditions. He started by stopping by a bush and grabbing a hunk of white straw from it, saying, “This is peelu. It’s a tree and people use it in toothpaste and gum, but you can chew on it for hours and get water and saliva from it. It’s really pleasant. Peelu is your friend. Make a mental picture and let’s find some along our route.” Go fuck yourself.

  We walked for about five miles that night. The terrain looked like dried trees with orange and beige rocks. It looked like the areas you fly over in a plane and think, wow, there’s nothing but earth here, and if you were to zoom thousands of miles downwards, you would see us making our way through it like tiny ants.

  Once the dark had set in, they walked us over to a flat rock that was about fifteen by fifteen feet, and said, “You can all sleep here tonight.” I looked at Mr. Boss Hat and thought, are you out of your fucking mind? And then he proceeded to say, “You will want to huddle together because body warmth is all you have tonight. So the person in the middle
is going to get the most heat, but I would rotate all night, it will help.”

  I was going to fucking murder someone. I knew my dear girlfriends thought I should go suck an egg right now and I knew no one wanted to spoon with me.

  But instead Lucy, raising her hand like a good student, said, “They told me that sleeping in the leaves is good too?” And without showing too much pride from her paying attention at our orientation, he said, “That’s right. You can gather leaves and make a pile, it makes it a little softer, and you can even use the leaves as a blanket.”

  Well, I thought, why wouldn’t everyone just do that? You stupid ass, why are you suggesting this goddamn rock?

  Everyone said good night and dispersed, leaving us to our own devices and to crap in nature, brush teeth, take in the beauty, etc. I just sat there on the rock, mad. I saw Lucy making her leaf bed from the corner of my eye, and I just lay down on the rock, telling myself it was temporary. I decided that I would join her there after she fell asleep and wasn’t mad that I was enveloping her from behind. As mad as the girls were at me, I think it was sinking in that this was not easy and shit just got real once again. Nighty-night.

  Fat chance. Lucy got up from her leaves, freezing and shivering. “I need heat!” Cameron waved her over, and the three of us relented into our three-way spoon positions. There was no sleep to be had, not one minute. All we did was rotate all night like three human skewers on a hibachi—the only person who wasn’t dying was the one in the middle, and when your time was up your time was up.

  We barely spoke a word. We just knew what we had to do, and did it. When the sun rose we were happy for some warmth, and we roasted ourselves on that rock for at least a half an hour. I heard crunching footsteps and then the boss guy and his cronies approached. “Good morning! Who’s ready to walk twenty miles?” My anger bubbled up all over again. Tired and out of it, we made our way on foot. Again, I was the one bringing up the rear or dragging it down, I’m not sure. Either way I was back to muttering shit under my breath.

  I was also so hungry. I hadn’t really eaten yesterday traveling, so it felt like two days without food at this point, and it was just another thing to tip my scales of sanity versus insanity. I was lopsided and whacked out. All day long hiking, hiking, hiking, stopping for “life-saving tips” that I absolutely did not listen to. My inner dialogue said, “I would rather die out here” or “Kill me now and do me a favor.” And if I ever did get left out in the wilderness again, I probably would die, so there! Take that, boss man.

  We started to have to put carabiners on. We were attached to the guides for safety, to make our way down large boulders and rocks into little streams and rivers. We would hold our little backpacks over our heads as we made our way through the neck-high rivers, and sometimes the backpack would make it out dry and sometimes not. But we were truly in the earth now. If our hike last night was a level one or two, this was nine or ten. This was truly being a part of Mother Nature, and we were slithering through her veins like blood.

  We got to a large mountaintop and we all started clipping on to our respective people again, men who could give us slack and help us get down if we fell, as we were tethered to them in case of emergency. I didn’t even know my guy’s name and I am usually the conductor of a group. I am utterly social and usually someone who brings everyone together. In fact my girlfriends knew me as the producer who made shit happen and was in there smoothing everything over when it needed to be. We all did, we were a team, but I was used to being in some kind of leadership position. Now I was just dead weight, a carcass being slowly dropped down a chasm.

  Everyone made his or her way down. Lucy did it brilliantly and got lots of cheers and whoops from the group, like “Great job, Lucy, you’re like a spider!” and they laughed. Then they yelled, “OK, now your turn, Cameron!” A born athlete from Long Beach, California, she made her way down like the girl we all know and love. Cool, funny, capable. Everyone roared with delight.

  Then came a halfhearted to me “OK, now your turn”—no name, just a “c’mon, let’s get this over with and get the unfun one down the rock.” And so I did. And while I was clinging for dear life, my foot slipped and I fell a good ten feet, and then I snapped with a hard jerk as my tether caught, and I was just swinging in midair, back and forth like a stupid metronome in unflattering khakis.

  “FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKK!” I screamed and then the bat was let out. Wailing as the guy just dropped me down the mountain in midair, one embarrassing foot at a time, I just cried and yelled. And by the time my feet feebly reached the ground my knees buckled and I lay there like a hog-tied loser, all wrapped up in my cords and lines.

  A few humble and vulnerable hours later I watched from afar as the whole group bonded. Lucy caught a fish in the river with her bare hands (which she later puked out of her guts), and everyone cooked it and ate it, slapping her back as they feasted. I overheard Cameron saying, “How great was this!” (She later got a parasite called giardia.) Wow. Everyone loved them and their team spirit and can-do attitude.

  What was wrong with me? Why was I so at the end of my rope in every single way? I was seething alone in the bushes, furiously eating peelu because no one would officially talk to me. What was I going through in life? I was twenty-five—was this my midlife crisis? When you start work at basically one, and live life in the fastest lane, maybe this was it.

  I had an enormous amount of stress and no ability to filter it in a healthy way. I just would resort back to being a little girl who was never taught how to handle things. But I don’t boo-hoo in life. I pick up the pieces when something goes wrong.

  I heard myself saying, “Well, once again, you are going to have to figure things out for yourself. You are here in the bushes for a reason and you need an epiphany. And first you need to start eating, licking wounds, and slowly make your way back into everyone’s good graces.”

  I wasn’t outward bound but inward spiraling, and I needed to fix this. So I got up and walked over to the nature-loving circle and joined the group. I sat a few feet away, just like when a dog has done something really wrong and it worms its way back in slowly. That was me. The dirty little dog.

  That night, I had softened the girls enough to make my way back into the spoon, and we rotated all night. This time we tried the leaves, and it was a little better, but it was all about the human burrito. Simple as that. The next day, we hiked another several miles and made our way to a beautiful river. They told us we could bathe in there later, but first we were going to learn to make fire!

  They took us over to a cave to make a day camp where the wind would be milder. They had us take our sticks and twine and make a bow-and-arrow-type thing that would be the tool to make the friction to create the spark to start the fire. Then they explained the kindling—how you go and find something light, wispy, and flammable, and create a little bird’s nest with it. You could also take two rocks and rub them together until you create a spark right over your kindling and start your fire that way.

  Lucy took the two-rocks approach while Cameron took the bow-friction route. I chose the latter too. Within about thirty minutes they both had fire and were cheered on accordingly. As far as my encouragement from the guides, I had made my way back into the group over the last twelve hours to warrant a token “keep going, you can do it” type of salute. Three backbreaking hours later, I still had no fire. My scraped hand was bleeding, and I was straining out the last of my tears from yesterday, but quietly so no one could see it. I kept saying quietly to myself, “Motherfucker, I will never get this, fuck!”

  I kept rubbing, pushing, pulling. I looked like a mad monkey just throwing my arm back and forth, trying to create fire. I would not give up. I was tempted to just turn and say to everyone, “You know what, I tried, and I know you’re all disappointed, I just could never accomplish this, so let’s just chalk it up to me being the one who doesn’t make it out in the wilderne
ss.” I could do many other things in life, but this simply wasn’t one of them. As I swallowed my defeat and my arm started to slow, I felt sick and ashamed. I was quitting. My arm almost came to a full stop now, just a few disheartened rubs to look like I was doing it rather than actually doing it.

  Just then, my inner voice really kicked in, and it sounded different from the one that was practicing my excuses for the last few hours. I heard it, the volume turning up like a dial, fast: NO! You will not give up! You never give up! It doesn’t matter what shit you get yourself in. YOU don’t give up!!!! I started working my arm a little faster with each word of militant encouragement. I was my own personal drill sergeant, saying, Get up, you fucking loser, and don’t be such a loser! Faster, faster, faster I went, creating a much more momentous friction than before. It wasn’t happening. Still? Why? What’s it going to take? My voice answered me back. It’s going to take everything! Nothing comes easy. Earn it, goddammit! So I did. I put everything of myself into it and the whole world fell away and all I could hear was the silence of my mind that had been so noisy with negativity the last few days. Now it was clear and I had focus. I don’t care if your hand falls off, you are going to create fire, period!

  I kept going at a furious, physical out-of-body rate. And all of a sudden I heard other voices float in like a wave on the shore: You’re doing it! You’re doing it! I opened my eyes and sure enough! Smoke!!!!!!! I couldn’t stop. I kept throwing my arm back and forth on some insane autopilot, looking around with wild eyes. The guys ran over and said with an urgent voice, “OK, now pull back and start to blow on it!” I looked at him, confused, still pushing and pulling, and he said, “If you keep going, it will go out. You have to slow down and get the kindling going and then the smoke will turn into flame.” I was so scared to stop, as if it would all fall apart.