There is a monster in my room, under my bed. Warm in the darkness.
It waits.
I deny.
I disavow.
I have some secrets I don’t even tell myself. There is a mind bomb hidden even from me. Airport screeners miss it every time. Sometimes I can feel the faint ticking of it’s clockworks.
I crank up the music.
Feel safe in Strummer’s rage.
I have secrets I will not even tell myself. Deep buried pirate’s cache. Curse upon he who opens it.
I have secrets.
I have secrets.
They keep me always moving. From task to task. Trailer to trailer. Pay stub to pay stub. Toy to toy. Bottle to bottle. Can’t stop. Can’t think.
I have secrets. But the walls are starting to weaken. Through the chinks in the bricks the beast can smell fresh air. The beast is hungry for light. Sunshine. Day.
I have secrets.
And someday soon they will be free.
I will stand, arm around the beast’s shoulders.
I will smile.
I will say, this here, this monster, he is me.
Until that day.
I have secrets.
DOS VADANYA MOMMA
1990 May. I tell everyone who will listen that I am sober. I go to meetings. Just like I learned from Larkin: Come late. Sit in the back of the room. I leave early. Most important, make no human contact. Not that I could. I hear them bitch and whine about their small lives. I cannot relate to them. They weren't raised by wolves. They didn’t have a retarded son or work my hours, or… It comes down to this,my story is different from any of theirs. I am in fact terminally unique. These are the shallow painful times. These are the chasing the elusive good drunk times.
1990 June. I am riding my Harley soft-tail to work, we are shooting an audience reaction spot for RoboCop 2. I am hit by a Mustang. My left femur breaks in half. I trash my knee. I crush my left great toe. I’m on the ground, blood is spilling down my face. I’m screaming. When paramedics lift me onto the gurney, this nice Chinese man runs up with my sneaker, “I found his toe, here, reattach it.” We look into the tore up Nike, the toe is pulp. Bloody jammy pulp. The paramedic and me can’t stop laughing. Then I scream in pain again.
1991February. I put together two months of dry time. I am bored stiff, angry and a real bundle of joy to be with, but I ain’t drinking. I’m working Josh’s program, and it is working just fine thanks for asking. I have no sponsor, no home group, my chances of not drinking are slim to none, and slim just left town.
1991 March. Bear calls, “Josh, I’m directing a film in Russia, the script is a total mess, the budget is nonexistent, we leave in two weeks and nothing is prepared. I need a quick rewrite.”
“OK, send me what you got.”
“I got nothing, a mess. I need you to come with me, basically rewriting as we film. The pay sucks. You interested?”
“Hell yes.” Don’t give it a second thought.
Bear and I came up together, when he called the answer was easy.
1991 April. Soldiers with Kalashnikovs line the arrival gate. The message is clear, capitalist pig may have a visa but they are still our bitch. Our hotel is the communist party hotel. Apparently they want us close.
The joke goes – a man is queueing up at the tail of a long line.
“What are you shopping for?” the woman in front of him asks.
“Shoes.”
“Then you are in the wrong line. This is the line for the shop with no bread. The line for the shop with no shoes is two blocks over.” Pasha, our Russian location manager, laughs at this joke. Only it is not that funny because it is true.
“Pasha is KGB.”
“No.”
“Yes of course, it is normal.” Leo is our first assistant director.
“Then why don’t we look for a new location man?”
“No. It is better to know who the KGB watcher is, than be surprised.”
“Are you sure he’s KGB?”
“Pasha has the best food and liquor, his shoes are Nike, and there is an automatic in his glove box. I’m sure.”
1991 May. Another meal of pickled herring, red caviar and greasy borsch. Erika sends me a footlocker full of oatmeal and other quick meals. I lose forty pounds on the trip.
I draw pornographic pictures to jerk off to.
I grow my beard out long.
I start to go native.
I lose it.
1991 June. I use tools from the grip truck to disassemble the locked mini bar in the communist party hotel. I’m sure they are watching. I don’t care, I need a drink. Ten mini bottles later I am solidly off the wagon. In the hard currency store I buy Pernod and scotch. I am off to the races for real. By now I’m not only writing but editing the film. I am left alone in Moscow while the crew travels to the Arctic. At Mosfilm I cut Ice Runner, surrounded by Russians. I crank Seal’s Crazy mad loud. I fill the austere halls with my screaming rock and roll. I dance and edit film in the same room that Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein cut The Battleship Potemkin. The room where the crosscut and montage were invented. At night I work on re-writes. I can’t remember my home or what my family looks like. No one stares at me on the streets anymore. I have gone native. I am lost.
1991 July. I have a moment of clarity. A moment where it becomes clear I cannot drink like a gentleman. It comes in Yaraslavle in a gracious hotel down by the river. My moment comes just after a chair leaves my hand, and just before it hits Ed Albert Jr., the star of the film. We are mopping up dinner in the hotel restaurant and tensions are running at blast off. I am drunk. That chair stops mid air and I see clearly that I must be done drinking when I return tothe States. Then the chair hits Eddy.
1991 July 27. Finnair, first class. I drink as many rusty nails as the flight attendants will bring me, but I can’t get drunk. The jig is up. Booze, my old friend, has left the building.
1991 August 19. Tanks roll into Moscow. Bear starts yelling that he hasn’t ordered any tanks that day. The Americans on the crew are quickly hustled out of the country. Communism falls. Game up. Old bosses, meet the new bosses. Oligarchs meet the mafia. I finish cutting the film and am stiffed $20,000 by the producers. I am stiffed by the trailer company I was working for, before going to Russia to the tune of $14,000. Money the owner Richard promised he’d pay my wife weekly so she and the boys could eat while I was in the Russia. The checks stopped coming the day I left town. Erika lived on credit cards. I never bitch slapped Richard. Should have. Didn’t. Weak.
1991 September. I file for bankruptcy. I take a job at Universal Pictures and start to rebuild my career. Another editor there is sober. He takes me to a meeting. Looking back, I see that the bankruptcy was what it took to drive me to my knees and allow me to be humble enough to actually take direction and learn to get sober. The path is twisted and shrouded in mist but looking back I see, Russia, drinking, the chair, the realization it isn’t working, it is all part of the trail that leads me to blowing out nineteen candles.
LIVE NUDE GIRLS
I am still working at Universal Pictures, Tad is in the middle of a pain filled divorce. We walk down to the old NY street sets, and lean behind a fake tenement building. We talk, he cries, I listen. It is a quintessential friend moment. It is a quintessential Hollywood moment.
He writes, and writes. He moves to London. He is bestselling Tad Williams now. He is Tadly my best friend still. Hemarriesa wonderful Brit, Deborah. Second time’s a charm.
I work with a friend and direct a short 16mm film. It doesn’t get me an agent or a studio deal. “I am tired of watching no talent hacks direct while I cut their trailers. Fuck, I’m ready.” I am thirty-six and arrogant.
“Big man, either do or don’t make a movie, but stop bitching about it.” Tad is thirty-eight and way smarter than me.
“You can’t just make a movie.”
“No you can’t.”
“Fuck your skinny ass, I can too.”
Tad and I
cook up a foolproof plan. We will make a movie and set it in a strip club. A world we both know miles about, and even if it is bad, tits have a market value. Worst case we make it a yank film onSkinamax. We raise $159,000 from my mother, Lark, and Shaun’s husband Mario. L.G. comes on as producer and starts to look for locations. The ship is sailing minus one key element... A script.
Tad and I spend late nights writing and e-mailing scenes back and forth over the Atlantic. I write lyrics for David Bergeaud a mad French composer, he delivers show tunes for the stage dances. Tad comes up with other tracks. He works with band mates from Idiot. It is a coming of age tale set in wonderland. A musical. Tits sell, I keep being reminded. I see Bergman’s Sawdust and Glitter and I know we must shoot in black and white.
“No one wants to see black and white tits.” L.G. has his eye on the bottom line.
“I do. Tad does. It’s good to be king.” Tad and I keep the vision. I’m sober and full of energy. Our first AD flakes, Tad takes over. The man is a monster. The three weeks of shooting is the longest time I have felt alive, ever. Erika brings the boys by the set, we eat lunch, shoot the shit and they take off and we keep filming.
SHATTERED MEMORIES FROM THE LOOKING GLASS
They Shoot Porn Don’t They:
We are setting up for a complicated scene involving lighting the club set and a staged dance number. One by one the crew is drifting off. Suddenly Tad and I look up and it is just us on a big empty stage. We walk to the stage door to find our entire crew watching as another film company shoots a fuck scene on a Harley in the parking lot. We get the stages cheap because they mostly shoot porn there.
“I’m kinda doing a Goddard thing, hand held, verte.” He’s also directing something at the lot. “How's your shoot going? I’m shooting a prison scene. For a set the art department gives me two racks of bars and one cot. So I fill it with fog, hide the lack of set, go Fellini on it.” I eat my lunch to his monologue. He is a welcome distraction from my shot list and how far I am behind today. It isn’t until he is gone that I realize he is the director of the porn flick. And here I was feeling insecure because I never went to film school.
“I was just in the women's bathroom,” Erika says, “You know the porn they’re shooting?”
“They’re shooting in the ladies' room?”
“No. The trash in there is filled with empty Betadine medicated douches.”
“That is kinda disgusting.”
“Yeah, but it says all that needs be said about porn, doesn’t it.”
The Great Nipple Revolt:
The day before shooting our first dance scenes the ladies come to me and explain they want to wear pasties. They have decided not to show nipples.
“Would you feel better if I stripped down too?”
“Um... well...” At least they are smiling now.
“Fuck it, I won’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do.” The ladies decide nipples are OK and I direct the rest of the movie in boxers and Doc Martins.
Bronwyn's Big Day:
Today she shows bush. Really. In the film she is a sad girl who will do anything to win a dance contest, even break the club rules and go bottomless. Bronwyn is having cold feet. Understandably. I convince her it is for art. I convince all the ladies of wonderland that it is for art. Hell it’s black and white. Art. But truth is, it is for art. Black and white 16mm has insured it won’t be sold as a spank film. She does the bush shot. It is sad and powerful and degrading. It is everything we hoped it would be.
Eight months later we are buying tickets to see Kinda Cute For A Whiteboy. It has a two week run in a new director series. Holding that ticket in my hand I know a lifetime goal is about to be realized... I made a film. Me and Tad and a gang of others. And I am holding the ticket in my hand. Something shifts. I did it sober, and if I want to do more I might be able to pull it off. But what do I want to do? What does one do to find a new dream? My boys leave very little time to think about all this. I have no idea how far the tide has risen. Had no idea of the fifty-foot waves ready to crush us.
MY SON SOLD YOUR HONOR STUDENT HERION
When Hunter S. Thompson said that myths and legends die hard in America he must have been reading my mail. Every family has its myths, its tales of hope and glory. Most are bullshit made up after all the principal players have moved on to greener pastures. My great-great-grandmother was a cook in the Danish royal home in Ribe. She fell in love with a Mormon,they took the voyage and pushed a cart from NY to Salt Lake. I take all this on faith. Why not, sounds as good as any other story. It’s when we get closer to the bone that it starts to matter.
My Grandfather Harold was a drunk and a penny ante criminal from a young age. A rough and tumble thirteen year old, he sold hooch during prohibition from an orange juice stand on the pike in Long Beach. Sailors would order the special, and that meant bathtub gin and a splash of OJ.
Tobias Jean, AKA Harold Leon Stallings III, AKA Pops, was a wild lad and hard drinking teen. He joined the army during the Korean war. Given his later pacifism I can’t figure why he signed up. I could call Pops up and ask him, but the old bastard lies. So the myth remains. In boot, while the other grunts were training he was at the officer's club playing cards. For five weeks this was a fantastic plan. Then they started posting shipping out orders. Hal will soon be sent to a war zone and he has never shot his gun. Myth stands, Harold II (my grandfather), calls in some favors, has Harold III moved into the MP’s and kept state side. An act for which I’m sure my dad never forgave his dad. The Military Police gig doesn’t last. After he highjacks a car at gunpoint they didn’t seem to want him tohang around.
In our clan, the sins of the father are borne by his father. Pain stretches back generation to generation.
My brother's and my crimes are well documented. Why would I ever have the hubris to believe it would end with us.
“Mr. Stallings, Jared hears these stories of rebellion, and takes them as fact.” She is Jared’s second grade teacher, “Couldn’t you tell more authority friendly tales? Things that will help him get along with others?”
“I could but they’d be lies.” Her nervous laughter tells me she hopes I’m joking. In hindsight I wish I’d paid more attention that day. Maybe we could have discovered if the Stallings male time bomb is genetic or historic. Maybe that little experiment will be left for Jared’s kids if he survives to have any.
Jared is 15 and the warning signs are starting to stack up. Me, I’m chest deep in denial. I tell Erika I’d know if he was doing drugs, hell I’d been there.
Jared is 15 and the distance widens. He is often sullen or snappish. Gone is the funny silly brave heart we raised. He is replaced by this teen zombie.
It is totally age appropriate.
Jared is 16 and borrows my Yukon to visit a friend from the Unitarian Universalist youth group. A church friend. What could go wrong? Other than the parked truck being hit and near totaled in the night. Erika questions the whole event. I don't. I discover that the airbag hadn’t deployed so I am sure the engine was off at the time. Thus the story is true enough to deal with. Only it is a lie. One I won't recognize for years.
And then one day Jared overdoses on heroin and I have my blinders ripped from my face.
“You said you would know…” Erika is angry.
“I... I... ”
“I told you I thought something was going on. You said you would know if it were. I believed you.” I was tragically wrong.
To search for fault is human. I scan my son's friends to see who led him astray. There is thatsquirrelly punk ex-kid actor trust fund piece of crap. He did it. Must have. If I could I'd round up all the drug dealers in L.A. and pull that trigger until the coliseum ran red. I hate them for what they have done to my son.
I am 50 and can only now accept the truth of the matter.
1) That trusted church friend, she introduced him to Meth.
2) That kid actor was along for the ride. He bought his ticket, but he wasn't the conductor.
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3) The first time Jared shot smack it was with a lovely fresh faced theater student who injected him.
4) The kid going downtown and scoring, then bringing it back to high school was Jared.
My son sold your honor student heroin. If I am to kick anyone’s ass it should be my own, or my pops, or his pops. Hell I should climb our family tree kicking ass up one side and down the other. Or possibly, just maybe, no one is to blame. If he had been stricken with cancer would I be searching for who was at fault? Probably. I’m his father. All I know is someone needs their ass kicked.
RADAR BOY
Dylan is 5. We are on a road trip heading north. I am singing Wheels On the Bus. I am wondering if he’s getting hungry. Up ahead is a McDonalds and a Burger King. I’m wondering which to get him. Communication is hard, his tongue muscles are very weak, he slurs, he can be hard to understand. So I’m in my head wondering which restaurant he would prefer.
“Old McDonalds.” Dylan says, answering a question I hadn’t asked. This isn’t abnormal for us. He can read my thoughts. Always has been able to. We call him Psychic Boy.
Grandee, Erika’s mom, is seeing a healer, a layer on of hands named Joan Wulfsohn. Dee is pragmatic. Dee worships at the altar of logic. Dee has no truck with magical thinking. Dee believes in Joan and her healing hands. Joan heals my Epstein-Barr, while my doctors continued to be completely baffled by the condition. We decide to take eight year old Dylan to see Joan. It does seem to help him, or at least he enjoys it and it causes no damage.
All the Wild Children Page 20