Twenty years later I was warier. Ron felt like a cold spot in the universe, a place that just wasn’t going to warm up. There was still a small piece of me that wanted to be the only one who believed in him, the one he spared, but more than anything I wanted to grab the hand of myself at sixteen, and the hand of my future daughter, and run.
After I interviewed Ron, I had a meeting with an actor who had read my script and was considering the role of Marshall. It was Don Johnson, from Miami Vice. As usual, I was early, so I drove around and got lost, which made me late, as usual. I parked on the street and then walked up to a big gate and pressed a button that alerted a video camera. I waved and then tried to say something about how he didn’t need to open the gate all the way because I wasn’t driving in. I held up my hands to the camera to indicate the width of my body. The gate began rolling open, I slipped through, but it kept opening. Even after I was seated inside across from Don, in his den, I could still hear the gate opening. And then it reversed direction and started the long journey home.
Don was good-looking and very solid, the way men often become in their fifties. Sometimes men with this kind of body ask you to punch them; that didn’t happen this time. We talked about meditation and Buddhism. I couldn’t remember if he’d had any drug problems, but I hoped he had come to meditation through recovery. It’s always a relief to me when someone is in recovery; it automatically gives us something to talk about. Not that I’m in recovery, specifically, but I relate to the feeling of trying and failing and trying again. People who have been through rehab are used to talking about this — they’re required to.
Don and I talked about being present and the elusiveness of “now,” and then he praised the talents of his son for a while, which predictably moved me to tears. To keep from crying, I had to do the trick where you contract your butt into a tiny fist and mentally repeat the words fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. We discussed the script, and I suggested he audition for the part, which is the one thing you’re never supposed to say in these meetings — apparently it’s insulting, which I always forget. So the meeting was suddenly over. He walked me out, the gate opened, and it was still opening when I drove away.
I moved to Portland, Oregon, when I was twenty. Portland was the hometown of Gary Gilmore, the murderer Norman Mailer wrote about in The Executioner’s Song. I’d read that book when I was fifteen, so I’d been thinking about Portland’s dark side for a long time, but that wasn’t why I’d moved there. I wanted to be part of the Northwest Riot Grrrl revolution and closer to my girlfriend. Still, if that didn’t work out, I knew the underworld would be waiting for me.
I found a job in the classifieds, working for Pop-A-Lock, as a car-door unlocker. The job interview was conducted at a Denny’s, and I was trained in a dump filled with wrecked cars covered with blood and hair and biohazard stickers. I wore a big red vest and a beeper on my belt. I was on call twenty-four hours a day, serving the entire tri-county region. The customers usually looked dismayed to see such an unmanly person come to their rescue, and it often took me upward of an hour to get the door open, but I always succeeded eventually (“bind and jiggle” was the trick). I sang Pop-A-Lock’s praises right up until the very moment I quit, at which point I admitted it was one of the worst jobs anyone could have.
Car-door unlocking was my last real day-job, but the truth is I wasn’t entirely living off my art yet — I was a thief. I stole not only my food and clothes, but pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. One day I swiped a pair of black tennis shoes with velcro closures from Payless ShoeSource. They looked sort of like knockoff Reeboks. An alarm tag pierced the velcro flap of the left shoe, which was why I’d brought a pair of scissors with me. I cut the tag off and put the shoes into my purse. I walked out of the store and down the street and into a shoe-repair shop called Greiling Brothers. I asked the man working there if he could make these fine black velcro shoes taller; I wanted to be tall. He asked why part of the velcro tab on the left shoe was cut off. I studied it hard, as if seeing it for the first time. He leaned his head back, taking in my whole getup, and said something along the lines of “You’re an odd bird.” Not exactly that, but something that made me a bit defensive — which was my primary emotion in those years, understandably, since I had a lot I could be accused of, even jailed for. I responded with something vague about being a performer and needing the shoes for a performance. He said he’d like to know exactly what I did, performance-wise, and so when I picked up the now-taller shoes I brought him a copy of my CD, Ten Million Hours a Mile.
This was the beginning of my friendship with Richard Greiling of Greiling Brothers Shoe Repair. There wasn’t another brother; he just liked the sound of it. Richard was raspy and ragged, always on the verge of doing something ridiculously dangerous, or saying something flatly profound. In time, I convinced him that if he could repair every part of a shoe, then he could probably also make shoes from scratch. He made three pairs of wonderfully strange, blocky shoes for me that we designed together. Eventually he lost his shop and had to take a job selling shoes at the department store Meier and Frank. By that time he had starred in two of my short movies, Getting Stronger Every Day and Nest of Tens, and was the inspiration for the male lead, Richard Swersey, in the feature film I was writing, Me and You and Everyone We Know. I had imagined that he would play himself in this movie, but in the end I became either cowardly or smart and cast an actor who had a similarly raw, volatile quality — John Hawkes.
I lost touch with Richard for a few years after that. Without noticing, I mentally combined him with John; John’s career successes seemed to imply everything had worked out for everyone. But right around this time, as I was meeting actors and PennySavers, I crossed paths with Richard Greiling again. He looked the same but he said he wasn’t. He described his descent all the way to the very bottom, which is where he said he was now. He was still just as remarkable to me, but I could see he wasn’t kidding. The contradictions between him and the actor who had played him made my heart ache. I re-watched his performances in my short movies and he was really good, probably as good as John Hawkes, just more of a wild card. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake, but it made me wonder just what kind of director I really wanted to be. LA is so many things, but it is also a company town — almost everyone I knew worked on movies, at least part of the time. Which made it hard, almost rude, to resist the rules and rituals of Hollywood filmmaking; I was grateful to be a part of it, in a way. And in another way I was desperately trying to remind myself that there was no one way to make a good movie; I could actually write anything or cast anyone. I could cast ghosts or shadows, or a pineapple, or the shadow of a pineapple.
MATILDA & DOMINGO
—
CARE BEARS
$2 – $4
—
BELL
—
I purposely hadn’t read The Future in a long time; at the very least, the PennySaver interviews were occupying me while I defamiliarized myself with Sophie and Jason. I liked to think of the dormant script curing like ham in a hickory woodshed. Each day I left it alone, it got better. And now it was time to check on the progress it had made without me. I printed it out and put it on my desk. I left the room and came back in, pretending I was a snoopy housesitter; sometimes this helps make me want to read my own work. What have we here? I said to myself, peeking at the first page and then slyly glancing over my shoulder. By page two I was me again, but I kept going. By the last page I was in a panic. The break had had the wrong effect. The PennySaver sellers were so moving to me, so lifelike and realistic, that my script — the entire fiction, including Paw Paw and the talking moon — now seemed totally boring by comparison. I had no new thoughts about how to approach Jason’s scenes, and I had somehow lost the parts I thought I’d solved. Despair was gathering. Only it didn’t feel like the sentence Despair was gathering; it wasn’t impressively dramatic like dark clouds before a thunderstorm. It was pathetic and tedious, like a person you don’t want to be aro
und.
If I’d been Sophie, my character in the movie, I would have had an affair at this point. Not out of passion, but simply to hand myself over to someone else, like a child. But even in the movie this doesn’t really work out. And so I thought, as I often do, about the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana is faced with what looks like thin air, a void — and he steps into it. He does it expecting he will die but knowing he has no choice. Then, impossibly, instead of falling, his foot lands on something solid. It turns out there is actually an invisible bridge across the void. It was there all along.
Indiana’s predicaments are always life-or-death, so the daring move is obvious — it’s the one that will make the audience scream, “Don’t do it, Indiana!” My stakes were much lower. I could give up on the interviews and finish the script, or I could continue meeting strangers, believing that they would eventually lead me to the thing I needed to learn in order to finish the script. The audience probably didn’t care much one way or the other; nothing would make them scream, “Don’t do it, Miranda!” But I decided that Indiana would not sit down at the computer. He would ignore the voices that told him he was just a procrastinator and he would pick up the phone and call Matilda, who was selling Care Bears for two to four dollars each.
Matilda didn’t know we were meeting at such a pivotal moment, and I didn’t tell her. I just listened, as usual, and tried to feel the reality of her life, living with her husband, brother, son, and tiny puppy. She wore a pretty dress and had the confidence but not the face of a pretty woman. Her husband was regal and a bit dashing, occasionally passing through the living room with a polite nod. We sat on her couch, next to a pile of laundry, and discussed the bears.
Matilda: We collect them. I go to the swap meets, yard sales. But my special collection is over there, the Precious Moments. That’s mine.
Miranda: What do you like about those ones?
Matilda: Well, maybe their eyes.
Miranda: They’re kind of sad-looking. They kind of look like they’re crying.
I wondered if I was projecting. But Matilda nodded in agreement.
Matilda: They’re tender.
Miranda: And do you make decent money from selling them?
Matilda: Oh yeah.
Miranda: What kinds of people buy them?
Matilda: Well, most are American, Japanese... because Hispanics, you know — they don’t spend money on collections.
Miranda: Where are you from originally?
Matilda: Cuba. I’m from Cuba.
Miranda: When did you move to the US?
Matilda: In December 1971. I was fourteen.
Miranda: And what’s been the happiest time in your life so far?
Matilda: When I was living in my country.
Miranda: In Cuba?
Matilda: Yeah.
Matilda showed me around her house. The garage had been converted into a bedroom. Converted isn’t really the right word — all of the furnishings of a bedroom had been moved in, but it still had the automatic door that rolled up, and a cement floor. This was the master bedroom, where Matilda and her husband slept.
Her brother and son were in the proper bedrooms. I poked my head into one of these rooms. An elaborate collage of women and babies was taped above a twin bed.
Miranda: Oh, that’s a nice collage.
Matilda: That’s my brother’s. He’s a single man, and he’s a mess.
Miranda: So these are just like —
Matilda: He collects different kinds of actresses, actresses and babies. He’s a single one. Maybe he’s dreaming.
The collage was really the least of it. All over the floor were piles of manila envelopes filled with similar pictures and labeled PICTURES OF JAILS AND YOUNG GIRLS AND BABYS AND PICTURES OF LAPD CARS and INSIDE PICTURES OF LAPD SHERIFFS CARS AND NICE GIRLS AND PICTURES OF BABIES AND ALSO PICTURES OF A PRISON.
In my lexicon of signs and symbols, obsessively organized pictures of Prisons, Babies, and Nice Girls are an indication that something of great consequence is afoot. Someone is doing something unnecessary for reasons that are mysterious to everyone. Matilda’s brother, Domingo, wasn’t home, and Matilda didn’t have much to say about him.
I went home and stared at the pictures of envelopes until my curiosity overwhelmed me. So I called back and made a date with Domingo for a few weeks later. He was waiting on the sidewalk when we drove up — large, gentle, and nervous. The collage on his bedroom wall had changed, but it was still in the “Nice Girls and Babies” genre. It seemed impolite to ask about the items in question before I knew anything about him, so I began with what I knew.
Miranda: Do you remember when you came over from Cuba, or were you too young?
Domingo: I don’t remember nothing from over there. The only thing I do remember is living upstairs. That’s all.
Miranda: How old were you?
Domingo: I was six years old. I came as my sister did also, and my aunt as well, as a Cuban refugee. We didn’t come here illegally — at that time we were allowed to come from Cuba over here, free, without having to run away from Cuba or anything like that. Basically we were here and then a couple years later we became residents and then citizens.
Miranda: What’s a normal day like for you?
Domingo: I get up like about eight or nine in the morning. Get dressed, get a bag that I usually use, and I go to the Taco Bell that’s right here on Carmenita and Telegraph. I get a free soda because I know everybody there and I’m a humble person. I have a good heart. I like to help people, so I have friends there that I met. I called the corporate offices and I told them, you know, how great they are. There’s a young girl that works there — she’s very nice. She’s African American, but she speaks Spanish. If you go there she’s going to give you a smile. I’ve told her and her boss, you know, I think she’s great, and I’m going to keep calling the corporate office to get her promoted. There’s no person that she doesn’t smile around, and, you know, good morning, good afternoon, goodbye when they leave. She goes by the tables and says to everybody, “Is everything okay?”
Miranda: And how long are you there?
Domingo: Usually I’m there like an hour or two, basically. You know, they have air conditioning, so it’s nice in there. And then from there I either go to the library or go to the pharmacy. At the library I go to a computer and try to find some information, some pictures. But those pictures from the regular computers are, unfortunately, only black and white. If you want to get them in color, which sometimes I do, I have to pay a little more. But usually when my friend, the librarian, gives them to me, she does it from her computer, so she gives them to me in color. That’s usually my day’s routine. Oh, also sometimes I like to go to the courthouse and sit down for cases — you know, criminal cases and preliminary hearings, which are similar to trials. I observe the case from the beginning stages of the proceedings all the way until they get sentenced.
Miranda: Tell me about one of the happiest times in your life.
Domingo: Happiest time in my life was, I guess, when I became a citizen. I had to do a lot of studying for it, and I usually have problems in memorizing — like, reading comprehension I have problems with. But I was able to read it, read all the test questions and answers for the test to become a citizen. They test you — a person from the Immigration and Naturalization sits with you and they ask you questions and you have to answer them without looking. So you have to have that in your mind — you have to study before. There were a lot of pages, a lot of pages. I had to do a lot of studying, a lot of things that I studied for they didn’t really ask me about, but I did learn a lot.
Miranda: How old were you?
Domingo: That was a long time ago, in high school. But that was one of the happiest times in my life, where I did something that actually came through. I felt really happy about it, I really did.
Miranda: So tell me about these pictures on the wall.
Domingo: I have, like, fantasies and stuff, like I
pretend I’m an officer, you know, a deputy sheriff, things like that.
Miranda: When did you start collecting?
Domingo: I’ve had quite a few years doing this. Actually, I started after I graduated from high school. I was never able to become a police officer or a deputy sheriff or anything like that. And what happened there is that I built a fantasy that I’m a judge, that I’m a police officer, that I’m a deputy sheriff, and then I investigate — I call and see what their working shifts are like. I’m going through some psychological, psychiatric treatment as well, and so I tell this to my therapist. He said, well, if it’s something that doesn’t take you away from doing other things, it’s okay to have fantasies, as long as you don’t go and tell people that you are what you say you are in your mind. And it is all in my mind. And then I put pictures on the wall that I’m a judge, that I have a family, that I have a car, things like that. I have to have them on the wall for it to come true in my head. Because if I don’t put it on the wall —
Miranda: You can’t see it.
Domingo: I can’t focus it in my mind. So it’s got to be something that I, um...
Miranda: You can look at a picture.
Domingo: I can look at it and I have it there itself. I go to the librarian, my friend, and she’s the one that finds all these pictures for me. She knows what I have them for, so she knows that I never collect anything that’s, um, you know… naked pictures or things like that.
Miranda: It’s family life.
Domingo: Yeah, with kids and things like that. You know, I’ve been doing this for years, and I usually change my pictures around when I feel like I need to change, to be somebody different.