by Logan Miller
Those were tough times. We felt terribly inadequate. But we also felt defiant, defiant to make something of ourselves. We started at the absolute bottom: no film school, no college degree, no family or friends in the movie business. It took us eight years to make Touching Home. But during those eight years we worked at our craft with monastic discipline. Books became our sport. In them we found the tools of our future.
Touching Home had been rejected hundreds of times by hundreds of agents, producers, and studio executives. Thank God.
What follows is the year the cosmic forces started working with us. It’s also a year that started with great tragedy.
PART II
OUT OF THE ASHES
GOING HOME
ON JANUARY 5, 2006, our father died on the cement floor of a jail cell. He’d been in and out of jail over the past several years due to alcohol-related offenses, locked up this time since mid-December. He said nobody really messed with him in there because he was one of the oldest inmates, and the guys sort of respected him for that. He was also the resident artist. Our father spent his last Christmas and New Year’s behind bars. His name was Daniel Arthur Miller. He was fifty-nine.
Earlier in the year he’d been given a seat at the table with “the guys that run the joint,” as he put it, after one of them saw him drawing on a piece of paper at lunch. Valentine’s Day was approaching, and the guy asked if our dad would draw him a Valentine’s Day card for his girlfriend. No problem. Our dad drew the guy a card. The guy sent it to his girlfriend. She loved it. Word spread through the jailhouse, and by the time Valentine’s Day rolled around our dad had drawn cards for nearly every guy’s girlfriend in there. Free walls and refrigerators all over the county were displaying our dad’s love-work.
From then on, he was royalty. Whenever he was in the Marin County Jail there was always a seat waiting for him at the “don’t mess with us table” in the chow hall.
WE WALKED OUT of Loews Theater on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica after watching Walk the Line for the second time. We rarely watched movies in theaters. We were broke. This was high living, and to pay for a movie twice, well, that was downright profligate.
Noah turned on our cell phone. We had three messages.
“I’ll check them in a sec,” he said. “Let’s walk around a bit.”
During the movie both of us had unsettling thoughts, premonitions we were trying to ignore, though neither of us shared these thoughts with the other. We’d been thinking about our dad, reflecting on his situation, how to help him.
About a month earlier we were going to take him to see Cash on the big screen. We had come home to Northern California for the week of Thanksgiving and made plans to spend a day with him. It had been a long time since we’d all hung out. We were going to treat him to a nice restaurant or his favorite burger joint, eat a good steak or greasy cheeseburger, maybe both, and then go see Walk the Line, stuffing our faces with buttered popcorn and Milk Duds, tapping our feet to Cash.
Our dad had been homeless for the last fifteen years, mostly living in his truck, until it was confiscated by the courts ten months earlier. He’d been battling alcoholism his entire adult life and was now sleeping in a thicket of scotch broom, his “hideout” on a wooded hillside in Fairfax, a small town twenty miles north of San Francisco. We had given him a pager for Christmas years earlier so we could stay in touch. If we paged him and he didn’t call back within a couple hours he was either on a drinking binge or in jail. Otherwise, he was more reliable than Swiss time. He knew every pay phone in the area.
It was cold that week in November, the temperature dipping into the twenties. Early Monday morning we found our dad walking down the road, hands in his pockets, hunched over, brittle after a night in the woods. He was wearing a thick down jacket and backpack, incoherent, muttering to himself. We were supposed to meet him in town at 11 A.M. It was now 7 A.M., and we were happy to see him early, make a longer day out of it.
“Hey, Dad-o!” Logan yelled out the window as we pulled alongside him and stopped. “How you doing?”
He was shivering. It took him a moment to recognize us.
“Get in,” Logan said. “We’re gonna have a great day.”
He got in our car. The skin under his eyes was swollen from the cold, leaves in his hair. There was no energy to him, no happiness, no warmth of life. He usually lit up when he saw us. But there was no light today.
Tomorrow, he was going to start serving a thirty-day sentence in the Sonoma County Jail. He’d never been to the Sonoma County Jail before and didn’t know how he’d be treated, didn’t know if some young punk would mess with him or any of the other bullshit that can hit you in jail.
He didn’t know anybody in Sonoma County, and he was uneasy about it.
No worries, Dad-o, we told him.
Today was his day. We were going to spend some money on him, treat him to all the good stuff, whatever he wanted. But he said he couldn’t spend the day with us, wasn’t in the right state of mind to be around people, couldn’t sit inside a dark movie theater. He was in a bad way, the worst we’d ever seen him, like an abandoned dog on a lonely street. We just wanted to hug him and tell him everything was going to be all right.
He’d been a roofer for thirty-five years. But no one would hire him anymore. He said he was practically begging for a job. “It doesn’t feel good, you know…”
He’d lost his pride. And that’s what was most painful to see.
“We’re going to start making movies, Dad. You just gotta hang on for a few more years and then we’ll take care of you.”
“I can’t keep starting over…”
“Don’t worry,” we told him. “We’ll get through this.”
“You can let me out here,” he said.
We pulled over, sad, frustrated. We’d been watching our dad slowly kill himself for more than twenty-five years. A once vital and robust man, with limitless endurance and strength, was now weak and exhausted. His teeth were rotting. His body was so dependent on alcohol now that he started having seizures when he didn’t drink. He had his first seizure alone in the woods and said it scared him pretty bad, didn’t know what it was. He woke up on his back, staring up at the trees, couldn’t remember how he got there but knew he hadn’t been drinking. Then he had a seizure in jail, and they diagnosed him and started giving him meds. The meds sedated him. It was disturbing to see him that way, a man so far behind his eyes. But when he got out, the only medication he had to prevent the seizures was alcohol. The poison had become the cure.
Alcoholism steals the soul. Perhaps the most painful aspect is that it’s a gradual theft.
“I don’t want you boys to be angry with me,” he said, about to open the door, staring out.
“We’re not, Dad. We love you. We’ll get through this…We’re proud of you.”
He shrugged, frowned, as though he didn’t believe us. And that killed. We felt like failures. We weren’t where we wanted to be in life and neither was he. None of us could help the other, and we all felt ashamed about it.
We dropped him off in town and gave him money for a meal and a cup of coffee. It was the last time we saw him alive.
WE WERE FARTHER down the Promenade now, on the crowded corner of Santa Monica Boulevard, when Noah decided to check the messages on our cell phone.
When we were ten our mom’s cousin, “Uncle Gary,” was shot four times in the head and stuffed in the trunk of his car. We had just spent two weeks with him at Lake Tahoe. He was our first surrogate father. A few months later our uncle Dirk killed himself. And before we were born our maternal grandmother committed suicide by soaking herself in gasoline and lighting herself on fire in the backyard. At an early age we had a strong sense of mortality and took nothing for granted. Sudden death has a haunting energy running through it. And the phone messages had that energy.
The first and third messages were from our mom, the second from Coach Gough. Neither said why they called, something like “Call me
when you get this message.” But the tone in their voices said everything. There was terrible news awaiting us.
We called our mother. It was as though she didn’t need to tell us, we already knew.
“Noah, is your brother with you?”
“He’s right here.”
“Your father passed away this morning…I’m so sorry…”
“No…Poor Dad…Poor Dad…”
We leaned against the side of a building and cried. People stared.
“He deserved better…I wish he’d had a better life.”
We loved our father as much as any sons can love. We prayed for him every day and we prayed for him now.
Earlier that day two sheriffs had stopped by our mom’s house in Fairfax to inform us of our father’s death. At first, they wouldn’t tell our mom why they were there, only that they were looking for us. So she wouldn’t tell them anything either. If they wanted to know where her boys were, then they were going to have to tell her why, and maybe then, maybe, she’d tell them where we were.
We told our mom that we were driving home immediately. The next day there would be a story in the newspaper about an inmate dying in jail. We didn’t want Grandma to find out that way. We needed to tell Grandma in person, sit down with her. This was her son. Our dad was more than some reporter’s scoop.
We hung up our cell phone and walked crying down the busy sidewalk, around the tourists, panhandlers, and buskers. Everything was blurry.
We hugged each other when we got inside our apartment, threw some clothes into a duffel bag, and headed North on I-5. It was past midnight. We listened to memories through the darkness.
“Poor Dad…” Noah kept saying, shaking his head as he cried. “I wish he’d had a better life…”
He died alone in jail, a horrible place under any circumstances, but to die there gasping on the floor with no one who cared…
OUR FATHER WAS drafted into the army at eighteen and sent to Korea. He guarded the DMZ and was nearly killed in an ambush that killed two of his best friends. When he got out of the military he built a driftwood hut on an empty stretch of wind-blasted beach in Northern California. He grew out his hair and lived there for several months until a ranger burned down his hut and told him to leave. So our dad borrowed a Triumph motorcycle from a buddy and rode around the western United States, sleeping in churches and turnouts alongside the highway. After that he came back to Northern California, started roofing, and met our mother, Lynette. Our mom got pregnant, and they drove to Lake Tahoe and got married.
We were born six weeks premature with a host of complications and spent our first days in incubators. Noah had emergency surgery at three weeks after his appendix ruptured, and Logan at six weeks for a hernia; the scars are identical. Our dad said we were born fighters. When Noah was three he tried to pet a goose; it was taller than he was. The goose hissed and bit Noah’s hand. So Noah grabbed the goose by the neck and punched it. No goose ever tried to bite Noah again.
When we weren’t in the hospital we lived in a damp carriage house with a wood-burning stove on a dirt road in the redwoods of Lagunitas, California, a town of a couple hundred outlaws and outcasts doing their best to stay off the grid. When we were eleven months old our dad’s drinking led to divorce. We stayed with our mom, moving around for the next three years and finally settling in Fairfax, just over the hill from Lagunitas. Our dad moved down the road to another tiny place called Forest Knolls.
Our mom’s house had one bedroom, six-and-a-half-foot ceilings, no foundation, and a bathtub without a shower. There was grass growing on the roof. We called it “The Shack.” When men walked into The Shack it shook.
Our mom worked as a gardener and waitress in those days and drove a blue mail jeep she bought for a hundred bucks. In the summer we drove with the doors open. We took pride in that jeep and got in a couple fights at school when older kids teased us about it. We didn’t win all the fights, but that didn’t matter.
Our dad lived in a corrugated aluminum shed that he built on a woman’s property. Her name was Jean. She played the piano and harp, painted enchanting postcards of fairies and unicorns and medieval wonders. She was also an heiress to the Sterno fortune, or so we were told by our dad.
The shed had no windows, no electricity, and no running water and was bordered by horse pastures and a firewood yard with rats the size of cats. The interior of the shed was solid wood. It felt indestructible, like a cannonball, only square. Bunks were built into the walls; we shared the bottom, Dad had the top. Nothing was up to code. On winter mornings, before we crawled out of our bunk, the shed was colder than an Alaskan doghouse. But there was an open flame propane heater, and when our dad lit it with a match, it shot out blue fire like a military weapon. The shed went from arctic to tropic in three seconds. Our dad had lots of guns in those days and loaded his own ammo inside. The shed was a living and breathing powder keg.
We spent the weekdays with our mom and the weekends with our dad. Back and forth, from The Shack to The Shed…and we lived in one of the wealthiest counties in the world. Go figure.
We had some great times out there with our dad. When he was sober he was a beautiful man, a brilliant artist who could make anything out of wood, and perhaps more optimistic than the first astronauts. Everything was possible. If somebody else could do something, then so could we. But when he was drinking, he went to Mars, and it scared the crap out of us. The nightmares came with the bottle, and his screams were terrifying, especially in the claustrophobic darkness of the shed. We didn’t understand the craziness when we were young and cried and begged him to stop, thinking it was a switch he could turn off. We developed a bizarre sense of diplomacy and learned ways to deal with extremely irrational behavior.
One drunk night he blew off the meaty part of his left hand while playing with flash powder. A doctor had to sew his thumb back on. Another drunk night he spray painted red question marks on the doors and hood of a neighbor’s truck, turned it into the Joker mobile. Like we said, he went to Mars. After twelve years, Jean kicked him off her property. She’d had enough of his drinking.
From then on he lived in his truck, parking many nights at Samuel P. Taylor State Park, where we often ate dinner with him on a sturdy wood table under the towering redwoods. He called it his “Redwood Restaurant.” The house special was canned ravioli. Occasionally the chef would barbecue steaks on the park grill.
About the same time our dad got kicked out of The Shed our mom moved out of The Shack. A few years after Uncle Gary was murdered an attorney called and informed our mom that Gary had left a wealthy chunk of his estate to her. Gary wasn’t that fond of his other relatives, and his sister, whom he loved, had been killed in a car accident when she was nineteen. His mom and dad were dead.
So we were going to be rich. Not rich by rich people’s terms, but rich to everyone else, you know, like a million dollars or something. So our mom, expecting this windfall, went to the bank and secured a home loan and bought The Shack for $45,000. She then sold it a year later for $99,000 and bought a 1,700-square-foot house, with a shower—two of them. No more washing our hair under the faucet before school. Compared with The Shack the new house was a castle. But there was one significant problem that came to light right before we became rich.
According to the FBI, Uncle Gary made his money outside the law. And according to the IRS, they owned it. Our mom was stuck with a mortgage she couldn’t afford. So what do you do? Open up the house to roommates.
We recognized early on that we weren’t going to get anywhere in life through privilege. It wasn’t hard to figure out; it was in our faces. We always dreamed about doing great things and knew that we had to do more than just dream. There had to be action behind those dreams. Baseball was our chance to be great. We were terrified of failure and worked to become professional baseball players with frightened obsession. We always hated school and weren’t mature enough to appreciate the opportunity. But we couldn’t have played any more baseball than we did
growing up unless God had made more hours in the day.
We feared we’d become like our dad, still do at times. He was a man of great talents who never got to realize them. This was the greatest tragedy.
In high school we never had a sip of alcohol and rarely went to parties because we were scared of becoming alcoholics. We feared that if we had one sip we might forever be addicted. We were confused about the disease, and it scared us into discipline. At night we’d break into a basketball gym called the Pavilion, turn on the lights, plug in our Wiffle ball machine and hit for hours. Afterward Noah would work on his pitching mechanics, sweating, straining, striving to become great at something, striving to feel important, striving not to feel scared. We woke up at 5 A.M. and lifted weights three times a week before school with Coach Gough and the Fairfax rough squad, a motley band of knuckleheads who found significance with barbells and steel determination. Coach Gough, a cigar-chomping ex-marine and at the time a San Francisco cop, forged seven national champion Olympic-style weight lifters and one Olympian out of that crew. It was an ultracompetitive brotherhood where teenage angst was beaten into manhood.
Although our dad roofed every day, he gambled and drank away his money faster than he could make it. Every time he’d start saving his money to get a place to stay, he’d lose it in a card room, start over, and lose it again. Such is the curse of addiction. Toward the end, he stopped trying.
THE VOW
WE DROVE NORTH all night and arrived in Fairfax at dawn. We needed to go tell Grandma her son was dead. We went over to her apartment and sat down with her and held her hand. She reacted the way any mother would.
We stayed there for several hours. We did what we could for her and then it was time to go.
It was getting colder and darker and we needed to say goodbye to our father.
On December 19, he was released from the Sonoma County Jail, took the bus out of that county, found a liquor store, got drunk, and was picked up by the police and thrown back in the Marin County Jail eight hours after being released from Sonoma. He spent Christmas in jail, and we didn’t visit because we were pissed at him.