It Chooses You

  JOE

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  FIFTY CHRISTMAS-CARD FRONTS

  $1

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  LOS ANGELES

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  And so I went to Joe’s, knowing that he would be the last person I interviewed. The PennySaver mission had been a worthy escape, but it felt different now that I had tried to make it useful and failed so completely. It was a little bit silly and definitely frivolous, given how little time I had left in every sense. I’d gone from high-high to low-low, and now I was just trying not to disappoint the man selling the fronts of Christmas cards.

  Joe lived near the Burbank airport; a plane roared over my head as I rang the doorbell.

  Joe: What’s this, a machine gun?

  Miranda: That’s a camera. And just to get it out of the way, here’s your payment for the interview.

  Joe: Yeah, we could really use it, I’ll tell you. We’re living on about nine hundred dollars a month from Social Security, so it’s kind of tight, the money is, and as you get older you need more pills and more medical care. I never went to a doctor the first fifty years I was born, but after then you’re falling apart. I just turned eighty-one about three weeks ago.

  Miranda: How long have you lived here?

  Joe: It’ll be thirty-nine years in August that we’ve been here. Moved here in 1970.

  Miranda: Where are you from originally?

  Joe: Chicago.

  The house was very clean and worn; each piece of furniture was tidily being used to its very end. The walls were covered with a lifetime’s worth of pet photos, cat and dogs, but there were no actual pets in the house. Out of the corner of my eye I could see shelves filled with what looked like handmade cards.

  Miranda: And what was your work?

  Joe: Well, I was a painter, a painting job, and I turned into a contractor when I came out here, and I was doing real good.

  Miranda: So a painter of, like, houses?

  Joe: Houses, yeah.

  Miranda: What are all these cards? Did you make these?

  Joe: Yeah, I make cards for my wife. See, what I do is I make them out of paper like this, and I cut these pictures out of magazines and papers. Then I make the poem here, then I make limericks. But I don’t know if you want to read some of them — they’re pretty dirty.

  Miranda: Oh, really? Can you read me one?

  Joe: All right, if you want. Let me find a good one.

  There once was this beauty from the city

  And her boobs were so big it was a pity

  Her boyfriend marveled about her nice chest

  Then he proceeded to lunge for her breast

  Soon his mouth was jammed with her left titty.

  Miranda: Very nice rhymes.

  Joe: The first and second and fifth lines gotta rhyme, and then the third and fourth lines rhyme. Say for instance the word sex. Well, there’s only maybe two words that it can rhyme with, so I have to go through and dig back in the library.

  Miranda: And does she like them? What’s her reaction?

  Joe: Oh, yeah, she likes them. A couple of years ago she started wanting to make one for me, so she’s got a couple of little ones up there like these. I make her nine cards a year. Mother’s Day and our anniversary, and the fourth of July is the day I met her, in 1948, so that’s the last card I just made. And I make Christmas and New Year’s, and Easter, and Valentine’s Day. We just celebrated our sixty-second anniversary — we’ve been married sixty-two years.

  Miranda: I just got married about two months ago… I hope we have as many fourth of Julys together.

  I did some quick math — in sixty-two years I would be ninety-seven and my husband would be one hundred and five. Our limericks probably wouldn’t rhyme anymore. I turned my attention to a huge collage of pet photos.

  Joe: All them animals are gone now, but those are from years ago. The last dogs died in 1982. We had nine of them, and they all died within fifty-one days. Could you believe it? From Christmas Day till the first of February.

  Miranda: You had nine dogs at once?

  Joe: Yeah, we had twelve dogs when we moved out here, and for the first six, seven years people thought we only had one dog because they were more or less in the house all the time. Now we’ve got cats, but one, Mother wants to take him in tomorrow, I think, and maybe put him away. He’s maybe nineteen years old, and all of a sudden he started going downhill. We feed him about eight times a day, but yet he’s skin and bones now. The vet says that happens sometimes when they get older, because I know he eats. But he’s pretty bad now.

  Miranda: What’s his name?

  Joe: His name is Snowball, and his picture should be up here someplace. It’s over in those pictures over there — he’s a white cat. And the other one’s in the bedroom with my wife; her name is Silky.

  Miranda: What’s in that container hanging from the ceiling?

  Joe: Oh, that’s the favorite toys of some of our pets. See, it says, the names on this container are of the eight puppies that i brought to california in august 1970. rosie our outside cat for seventeen years, jannie, ginger, bonnie, huggy bumbum, big fat teddy bear, randy dandy do zo, princess tootsie bell, missapussy, clydie boops, blackie big boy, corky… and so on.

  Joe looked misty-eyed as he read the names on the bucket; a rare moment of silence came over him and he glanced around the room as if looking for something else to say. I pointed at a pile of lists.

  Miranda: Are these grocery lists?

  Joe: Yeah, I shop for seven different widows and one widower — they can’t get out of the house. I’ve got one jacket that I wear when I go to the store. It belonged to a policeman I knew that got shot and killed, and his brother gave me his jacket. He says, “Every time you go to the grocery store I want you to wear it.” Well, I go at least four times a week, at least maybe two hundred times a year, times thirty-five, thirty-six years. I must’ve worn that to the store, oh, three or four thousand times, and my wife has had to repair it. But now it’s almost beyond repair.

  Joe wanted to show me the backyard, which was filled with dozens of poky palms that he said were all descended from one tree that he had pulled out of someone’s trash. We wove between the plants to the back wall, which was engraved with names.

  Joe: This is where I got most of the dogs and cats buried. I don’t bury them six inches under the ground — I dig a hole seven foot deep, figuring no one will ever take them out, and I keep them close to the wall. I figure if anybody comes in there and puts in a pool, they wouldn’t affect it at all.

  Miranda: That’s pretty deep.

  Joe: Yeah, I have to have a ladder right next to the hole so I can get out. I can’t even get out of the hole.

  Miranda: What’s written in the walls?

  Joe: Well, I chiseled the dogs’ and cats’ names there with a chisel and a hammer. There’s names all over — there’s Jilly and Corky and Mittens and Puggy and all.

  Miranda: And the hole, is that for a cat that is —

  Joe: That’s Snowball’s — gonna have to be put down.

  Miranda: Right. So that’s in advance.

  Joe was overwhelming, but not like Ron. He was like an obsessive-compulsive angel, working furiously on the side of good. It became harder and harder to remember that I had met him just today and had no responsibility to him, or history with him.

  Joe: Maybe this Christmas you can come over, because I put my decorations up about the fifteenth of November and leave them up till the fifteenth of January. So you’re welcome to come anytime. What’d you say your first name is — Mary?

  Miranda: Miranda.

  Joe: Oh, Miranda.

  Miranda: What was your name again?

  Joe: Joe.

  Miranda: Joe. Right. Well, we don’t want to take up any more of your time. We’ll just get —

  Joe: That’s okay, I got time.

  When we finally extricated ourselves, we just sat in the car, very quietly, and were oddly tearful. Alfred said something about wanting to be a be
tter boyfriend to his girlfriend. I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.

  And yet the visit was suffused with death. Real death: the graves of all those cats and dogs, the widows he shopped for, and his own death, which he referred to more than once — but matter-of-factly, like it was a deadline that he was trying to get a lot of things done before. I sensed he’d been making his way through his to-do list for eighty-one years, and he was always behind, and this made everything urgent and bright, even now, especially now. How strange to cross paths with someone for the first time right before they were gone.

  I called Joe again later that day — I didn’t let myself think very hard about it. I picked up Alfred and the video camera and drove back to the house by the airport. I suggested we reenact our first meeting; I would knock on the door, he would let me in, he would show me the Christmas-card fronts. Get it? Yep. Okay, let’s try it.

  An unexpected thing happened when Joe opened the door, and it wasn’t the unexpected thing I now knew to expect. Joe ad-libbed. He told me to watch my step when I came in. He didn’t go straight for the cards — he showed me around a little. He pointed out some things he’d wanted to show me anyway. He hadn’t forgotten about the reenactment — he just had his own agenda. I had to interrupt: “Now I’m going to try to leave, and remember how you sort of wouldn’t let me leave last time?” He nodded. “Do that, don’t let me leave.” I headed for the door. “Stick around,” Joe called out. “I might show you some things you never knew existed.”

  We went to the backyard to reenact Joe’s tour of his pet cemetery. “Our cat is named Paw Paw,” I said, thinking Jason could say something like this. Joe looked at me with confusion and I explained there was a cat named Paw Paw in the movie. “Was he named after the lake?” he asked. “No,” I said, and I tried to explain that he wasn’t completely real, even in the movie; he was more a symbol of this couple’s love. He interrupted me. “Because me and my wife met at Lake Paw Paw, sixty-two years ago.”

  I drove home with a tape full of scenes that started out as improvisations but consistently careened into reality, becoming little documentaries. Joe could do what I asked, but his own life was so insistent, and so bizarrely relevant, that it overwhelmed every fiction. And I let it.

  I thought about his sixty-two years of sweet, filthy cards and something unspooled in my chest. Maybe I had miscalculated what was left of my life. Maybe it wasn’t loose change. Or, actually, the whole thing was loose change, from start to finish — many, many little moments, each holiday, each Valentine, each year unbearably repetitive and yet somehow always new. You could never buy anything with it, you could never cash it in for something more valuable or more whole. It was just all these days, held together only by the fragile memory of one person — or, if you were lucky, two. And because of this, this lack of inherent meaning or value, it was stunning. Like the most intricate, radical piece of art, the kind of art I was always trying to make. It dared to mean nothing and so demanded everything of you.

  I imagined Jason meeting Joe and experiencing the light-headed feeling that I was having. I knew I would fail at it, this reenactment; I would make something a little clumsier and less interesting than real life. But it wasn’t the Local Authorities telling me this; it came from higher up, or deeper down, and it came with a smile — a challenging, punky little smile, a dare. I smiled back.

  SHOOTING

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  THE FUTURE

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  LOS ANGELES

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  Jason: I’m gonna let it choose me. I just have to be alert and listen.

  Sophie: But what if it doesn’t—

  Jason: Shhh. I’m listening.

  If Sophie was all my doubts and the nightmare of who I would be if I succumbed to them, then Jason could be the curiosity and faith that repel that fear. I went back to the beginning of the script and added this impulsive, superstitious streak of Jason’s — he would meet only Joe, not all the other PennySaver sellers, but he would go about his expedition the way I had, on a whim, trying to believe that each thing meant something, and so eventually learning what he needed to know. It took me a little while to resign myself to the fact that Dina, Matilda, Ron, Andrew, Michael, Pam, Beverly, Primila, Pauline, Raymond, and Domingo would not all somehow be part of the movie, but then how could a fiction contain them all? I was now acutely aware of how small the world I’d written was; it had to be my bonnet-sized, tightly clutched version of LA. I knew that if I really wanted to introduce the people I had met, I would one day have to attempt some sort of nonfictional document. (That day has come.)

  I wrote a series of simple scenes between Joe and Jason that re-created my experience with him. After Jason and Sophie become fixated on their own mortality, Jason decides to use what little time he has left being guided by fate — first through a seemingly meaningless self-assigned tree-selling job, and then by answering an ad in the PennySaver. I wrote three scenes for Joe.

  (1) Joe sells Jason an ancient hair dryer (inspired by Dina), and in an unsettling way urges him to come back when he’s ready.

  (2) When Jason comes back, Joe shows him the cards he makes for his wife and reads a dirty limerick. He then recalls the terrible things that can occur in the beginning of a relationship. “We didn’t have any problems like that in the beginning,” Jason would say. “You’re still in the beginning,” Joe would respond.

  (3) Jason visits Joe one more time, and this time he notices Joe has three little hippo figurines that Sophie and Jason also have. And the couch — they have the same orange couch. And they both have the same M.C. Escher drawing of a never-ending staircase. I wanted to use the real-life Paw Paw coincidence, but it seemed too meaningful; these visual details were light enough to slip by, hopefully, and the Escher was my own joke with myself about what I was trying to do — to be almost kitschily surreal and yet also really mean it. Before Jason leaves, Joe gives him a toy for Paw Paw, a ball on a spring that swings back and forth like a metronome.

  These three scenes were 80 percent improvisation and 20 percent scripted; Joe was allowed to mostly just talk on a theme, but he had to say a few specific sentences, which I would read to him off-camera and he would repeat. He would wear his own clothes and we would shoot in his house.

  It was this quasi-theoretical ninety-third draft of the script that became fully financed, greenlit, in the winter of 2009. I always pictured a fat man flipping a switch by his desk to turn on a green light. It’s easy — you just have to convince him to lift his pudgy little finger. In this instance there was no man, no decisive switch, just a lot of calculations, mostly subtractions, emailed between like-minded companies in Germany, the UK, and France. The bulk of the money would come from Germany, with the stipulation that we hire a German crew, get them all visas and places to live in LA, fly them to America, shoot in twenty-one days, and then fly them back home. Also, a certain percentage of the cast would have to be European, with proof of citizenship — meaning that most minor characters would have accents. And finally, I would have to live in Germany while I completed post-production there in the winter. Great, I said, and meant it, knowing that this was the cost of casting actors who weren’t huge stars (including myself) and one actor who was actually a retired housepainter. It seemed like a reasonable price to pay for getting to tell such a strange story in the most expensive but ultimately most accessible of mediums. Dankeschön, I said. Let’s go.

  Now that I was counting on him, Joe’s entire existence suddenly seemed pretty precarious. Needless to say, he didn’t have email or a cell phone. I gave his number to my producer, but Joe never seemed to answer. Eventually Alfred drove over to his house and discovered their phone had stopped working and they hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. Alfred bought him a new phone, and I bought a La-Z-Boy chair for Joe’s wife, Carolyn; she had diabetes and the doctor said she needed to elevate her legs. I almost never saw Carolyn — she was a myt
hical muse to me, the subject of hundreds of poems. I’d read about her titties and even her twat, but she was always in the bedroom with the door closed.

  I kept Joe out of a lot of the preparation leading up to shooting. I didn’t really rehearse with him like I did with Hamish Linklater (Jason) and David Warshofsky (Marshall). I didn’t even show him the script, actually. My feeling was that Joe was pretty much going to be Joe on the shoot day, and there was nothing I could do to change that — which was why it might work. I didn’t ask him to participate in the screenplay reading I did a couple months before the shoot; it would be long and agonizing and might give him some bad ideas about what acting was. An actor named Tom Bower read the lines I’d sketched out for Joe. I asked Tom to also read the lines for the Moon; some roles hadn’t been cast yet, so a few of the actors had to play more than one part at the reading. We all muddled through it, and afterward I met with a friend to get her notes. They were many, but she did think I’d made some good changes, especially my idea for Joe to also be the Moon. Which he was, from that moment on.

  I’d rather not describe the first week of shooting. When I am anxious I lose weight, and I lost seven pounds that first week. Everything that could go wrong did. Except, and I pointed this out at the end of each day: no one had died.

  Then, at the end of the week, my producer, Gina, said she needed to tell me something; it was about Joe. My heart sank. He was okay, but when the location scout was looking at his house, Joe mentioned he’d just gotten a diagnosis of cancer from the doctor and he had only two weeks to live. We were shooting his scene in a week. Gina said she’d talked to him and he insisted he really wanted to do it, but that it was up to me. All our movie problems went away for a moment, and there was just sorrow, a terrible ache for this man and his wife. And I knew there was no way we could go forward with him; it was irresponsible and frankly just scary.