American on Purpose (17 page)

I
n 1994, I returned to the Edinburgh Festival.
The Odd Couple
revival was a big hit and it was packed every day for its afternoon show. At night, in the same theater, I performed a stand-up show I had written called
Love, Sex, Death, and the Weather
. This also proved to be a hit. It seemed that I performed better sober than drunk. Who knew?

I was riding high and feeling pretty good about things when, one night after my stand-up show, I walked into the artists’ bar, the same place I had seen Helen wearing that orange dress years before, and ordered my (now) usual club soda and lime. When I turned around I stood face-to-face, better make that face-to-chest, with Rick Siegel, the giant-sized American talent manager I had met in Montreal in ’87, the guy who first told me Bing Hitler wasn’t such a great name for a long run in showbiz. He’d flown in from L.A. to work with a client of his, the comedian Robert Schimmel.

“What the fuck happened to you?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You’re all thin and healthy-looking and sober, and I just saw your show and it was great.”

I thanked him but he brushed my gratitude away like it was a bad smell.

“No, I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. You need to get back to America. And you need representation.”

I pretended to be skeptical, but like most skeptics I was really just afraid. I had made a couple of failed attempts at an American career when I was drinking. In 1987 after Montreal, I had auditioned for a spot as a VJ for MTV in New York but they had decided a drunk, incoherent, vaguely enraged Scotsman with an indecipherable accent wasn’t exactly what they needed at that point.

Two years later I played the Montreal festival again and fared somewhat better. CBS talent scouts were there and I was cast in a pilot for an hour-long teen drama called
High
, in which I would play a high school teacher who was hip and foreign and really understood the kids.

That show hadn’t worked either, and though this wasn’t entirely my fault, I played a part by being out of shape and drunk during filming. Two of the kids involved in
High
went on to bigger things. Gwyneth Paltrow played one of the kids (her father, Bruce, was the show’s producer), and Zach Braff had the role of the school’s troubled nerd. I was too hammered on the set to remember either of them. Many years later, when Zach and I were both backstage at some Hollywood awards broadcast, he told me he’d been in the show too, and he probably thought I was being an asshole when I said I couldn’t recall him—but I really couldn’t.

I could blame my previous disappointments on alcohol, but what if I returned to America sober and failed again? Then I could only blame myself. Maybe it was safer to dream of being a success in America than to actually attempt it. Rick made a deal with me. If I came to L.A. for two weeks in November he would set up some meetings with studio casting executives and get me some stand-up showcase spots at the Improv comedy club. I could save money on a hotel (a good thing, as I was still quite broke) by
sleeping on his couch. The trip would only cost me airfare, and Rick said he was confident that in those two weeks he’d be able to get me some kind of a deal somewhere. But if not, I’d just go home. The worst thing that would happen was I’d have a vacation and get a tan.

“What’s in it for you?” I asked.

“Fifteen percent of everything you earn, if you earn anything. I’ll be your manager.”

When I spoke to John about it he reminded me that I was always bleating about how I wanted to go to America and now that I had received an invitation I should go.

My parents told me the same thing one afternoon during a visit to their house, and then my mother told me something else.

She had cancer.

I decided right there that I wasn’t going, I wasn’t about to leave Scotland while my mother was literally fighting for her life, but my mother said I was being melodramatic. She had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with a decent chance of making a full recovery, and her chemo treatments weren’t scheduled to begin for a while. I could leave for two weeks and come back and nothing would be different. I would be going for work (and remember: work = love), and Dad agreed with her. So in November of 1994 I went to L.A. on Rick’s invitation for what I assumed would be a short, fun, but ultimately futile trip, professionally speaking.

Right from the beginning, Rick delivered more than he had promised. I turned up expecting to sleep on his couch but he had made arrangements with a friend of his, the actress Brenda Bakke, for me to house-sit her place in Santa Monica while she was in New York City doing a play. It was a sweet little yellow house on Sixth Street, and from the front porch you could see the Pacific. I splashed out and rented a blue Jeep Wrangler convertible, thinking I was the fucking cat’s pajamas as I drove round L.A., feeling like a
movie star but looking for all the world like a moderately successful hairdresser.

Rick and I met with casting agents and executives at all the big studios. I will never forget the thrill of walking onto the Warner Brothers lot for the first time, seeing the giant soundstages, and witnessing the casual hum of the entertainment industry. Actors in costume chatting with irritated agents, chubby teamsters moving with aggressive sloth, fake New York and fake Wild West—this was real showbiz. This was Hollywoodland, the place I’d been dreaming about since I was a child. Sometimes I still feel that thrill, even today. On the way to or from a meeting at one of the studios I’ll see an actor or a set or an empty soundstage—and I will stop dead, in wonder that I finally got here.

The casting people Rick set me up with were nearly all women or gay men, which seemed to work well for me in the meetings, but no one followed up with any kind of a deal. It was always that old showbiz standard rejection line “We love you, but…”

I did do a ten-minute stand-up spot at the Improv and it seemed to go pretty well. Lots of people laughed, anyway, and industry types in the room said to Rick that they loved me, but…

My last meeting was at Disney Television, then being headed by Dean Valentine, who was supposedly one of the toughest guys in show business and legendary for his crankiness. I wasn’t hugely hopeful about this meeting. Neither was Rick. It had been set up by Disney’s head of TV casting, who had seen me in Montreal years before and agreed with Rick that I had changed sufficiently to be of potential interest to the company.

The Disney meeting was held in a giant air-conditioned oak boardroom with lots of fussy executives hovering around Valentine himself, who bore a worrying resemblance to the Satan of my imagining—slightly balding, with thin dark hair, thin lips, a thin trimmed beard, and cold angry eyes. As everyone sat around the
table, Rick began his flowery sales pitch about how sexy and great and marketable and brilliant I was. The junior execs nodded enthusiastically while glancing every so often at Dean, who looked as if he might fall asleep, or vomit, or both.

When it was my turn to talk I poked fun at Rick for overdoing it. This, wonder of wonders, seemed to crack something resembling a smile from Mr. Valentine. Encouraged, I pressed on. I told a few ribald drinking stories that seemed to make the nodding executives very uncomfortable. I yakked a bit about the old country and how I had made such a train wreck of my life there. I gave them my impressions of Los Angeles, which were by and large favorable, if somewhat condescending.

To my amazement, Mr. Valentine opened up. He laughed at the right places, asked a few questions, and after about twenty minutes he said:

“Well…”

That meant the meeting was over. So we all stood up. He shook my hand and said, “What do you want to do if you come here?”

“Take my shirt off and kill aliens,” I said.

He smiled and said that was more for the movies than for television. I told him I was prepared to slum it for a while.

The head of casting walked us out to Rick’s car. “I’ve never seen him like that,” he said, beaming. “I think you boys might have a deal.” But of course it’s never that simple.

R
ick and I waited for some news from Disney but all we could get out of them was that they were thinking about it. I delayed my return home in the hope that something would happen and as luck would have it, my friend John turned up in L.A. on business. He was headed to Las Vegas for a convention and, as I had never been there I said I’d drive him. It didn’t take long before we realized that traveling by car across the high desert in winter is not the sort of trip you want to make in a convertible, and like bickering wee girls we fought all the way there over who was sitting too close to the heater.

I dropped John off at the convention and before I turned back to L.A. I had myself a look around Sin City. I was intrigued and captivated by the sleaze and desperation, and thanked my lucky stars I had never been here drunk; I don’t think it would have ended well. The town itself made me uneasy, so I got out of there pretty quickly, savoring my solo access to the Jeep’s pitiful heater all the way across the Mojave Desert.

The desert is magical at night, and, with the instincts of a bikini model in a slasher movie, I turned off of the interstate and headed out into the wilderness for about five miles. Then I stopped the
Jeep on the lonely dirt road and listened to the silence. I got out and walked away from the car and looked up at the immense blackness of the night sky, and the tininess of myself against the enormity of the universe had never been more obvious, even on acid.

An inexplicable bolt of terror shot through my system. Then I remembered what Rock and Roll Susie had said, that fear might be God’s way of saying, “Pay attention, this could be fun,” and I said aloud to whoever was out there, even if it was only me:

“Between safety and adventure, I choose adventure.”

I stood for a bit longer until I started to feel a little foolish. Then I got back in the Jeep and drove to L.A.

There was still no news from Disney when I returned, and after talking on the phone to my sister Janice, who said that our mother seemed to be getting very ill very quickly, I decided I had to get home. The only affordable flight to Scotland I could find required a one-night layover in New York, and I took advantage of it by reacquainting myself with the old neighborhood. I strolled up from the East Village to Union Square and went into Coffee Shop, one of my old haunts, to get some milky caffeine and check in with Rick to see if anything had happened. It was 1994, and though some people were using cell phones by then, I was certainly not one of them.

I dropped the required quarters for a long-distance call into the pay-phone slot and plugged a finger in my ear to try and block the busy diner noise.

Rick, once I reached him, was in an excellent mood.

“They’ll give you a hold deal for pilot season. Congratulations.”

I asked him to translate.

“They’ll give you fifty grand to live in L.A. for the first three months of next year and audition for TV producers they’re developing shows with. They’ll also pay for your visa and immigration bills and will sponsor you for a work visa.”

I said that sounded very generous, and Rick agreed.

“Welcome to America,” he added.

I thanked him. Then I headed back to the airport for the second leg of my trip home.

The plan was to go to London first, pack up my apartment and put anything that I couldn’t or wouldn’t ship in storage. Then I’d join my family in Scotland for Christmas, returning to Los Angeles, as required, around the first of the year. Unfortunately by the time my plane touched down at Heathrow my mother had taken a turn for the worse and was now in intensive care, so I went directly to the hospital in Glasgow.

There I learned that my mother had accidentally been poisoned. She’d been receiving injections of gold for a few years to help alleviate the symptoms of her crippling arthritis but no one had figured out that these treatments had already so compromised her immune system that she wouldn’t be able to tolerate the cancer drugs. Essentially it was like giving chemotherapy to someone in the latter stages of AIDS.

My mother was still in the ICU when I reached the hospital, where I found my father and brother and sisters. They tried to prepare me but I couldn’t help being deeply shocked when I saw her. Ma was unconscious and hooked up to what seemed like dozens of machines. She seemed small and helpless in a way I had never imagined, with a plastic ventilator tube stuck down her throat and the other end of it taped to the side of her mouth. I remember being struck by how invasive that seemed, even though the apparatus was keeping her alive, literally breathing for her.

While the rest of my family came and went, I sat by the bed and told my unconscious mother all my news about America and droned on about the trip to Las Vegas, even though there was no response. It seemed she might die at any moment.

I asked to speak to a doctor about her condition but it took a long time before anyone was available. This made me furious, until
I found out why. There had been a terrible pileup on the local motorway and the medical staff was overwhelmed. Eventually a young and blond and beautiful woman doctor came.

“I’m sorry for keeping you,” she said in a clean and clear Edinburgh accent.

I glanced at her OR greens, which were spattered with little flecks of blood. Her eyes were bright and she seemed a little hyper, which was understandable enough, given that she had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with death. I felt ashamed and uncomfortable that she’d be apologizing to me.

“It’s okay. I heard you were busy.”

She gave a sad little smile, and I swear that for a moment I felt I was in the presence of a genuine angel.

She told me that my mother was very ill, which I could see for myself, but that upon arriving at the ICU her life expectancy was estimated to be about fifteen minutes, and that was twenty-four hours ago.

I asked if she was close to death now.

“I don’t know,” said the doctor.

“What treatments can you give her?”

“We can keep her comfortable and hydrated. The ventilator will keep her going. Other than that, I don’t know what we can do.”

I wanted to be angry, at the doctor, at someone, anyone, but there was no point. Everybody was doing their best.

They took Netta off all the meds she was on, everything, and for some reason that no one could explain, her vital signs started to improve. The ICU staff was amazed at how she clung to life, but of course they had no idea just how tough my mother was, and after a few days she regained consciousness. She was still on the ventilator and couldn’t talk, so she communicated with us by scribbling notes on scrap paper at the side of her bed. It took a lot of effort, so she kept it to a minimum.

I told her again about my adventures in L.A., only this time she could hear me and even tried to smile when I told her about driving to Vegas with John. She had always wanted to see the place, so I lied and told her Vegas was spectacular.

I also told her that I’d been invited to move to America but was going to wait until she got better before I did any such thing. This agitated her enough to indicate that she wanted some paper. I placed some in her hand, along with a stubby pencil, and after a struggle she wrote:

Still go.

Then she closed her eyes, exhausted.

I wasn’t sure how to react to this so I went to visit Jean Ingram, my mother’s mother, on the way home from the hospital. Jean was in her eighties by then and was living in an old folks’ home nearby. She suffered from terrible arthritis but her mental faculties were still very sharp. I gave her the latest from the ICU and then asked Jean what she thought about Ma’s note. Jean said, “She’s right. Still go. This is your life, son, not your mother’s. All you can do here is be another greetin’ face at the bedside.”

“She’s my mother, Nana,” I said. “She’ll want me here. She’s just saying I should go ’cause she knows I’ve always wanted to live in America, but America’s not going anywhere. It can wait.”

Jean argued that Netta wasn’t “just saying it.” She really meant it because she wanted what all good parents want for their kids, for them to be happy.

To which I said I couldn’t be happy running off to America if it meant leaving my mother to die in Scotland without me.

Jean clucked and shook her head like I was being an idiot.

“And what if you lose this opportunity you’ve been given and your mother dies anyway. What will you have achieved?”

It’s difficult to explain the resiliency of Scottish women without romanticizing them, which wouldn’t play very well with Scottish
women. Being one of them herself, Jean might seem callous, especially as she was talking about the death of her own daughter, but women of her generation had seen their fathers killed in the First World War, and their husbands and brothers in the Second. These daughters and wives and sisters had themselves been shot at and bombed and starved and had not faltered. To them, practicality took precedence over all. “Whatever it took you” expressed their attitude. In other words, make a living or die.

For all its macho posturing, Scotland is not a patriarchy but a matriarchy. The women run things. Certainly that’s how it was in my family. So I told Jean I’d think about it, kissed her cheek, and went home to help my dad put up the Christmas tree.

The deal I made with myself, and then with Netta, was that if and when she recovered sufficiently to breathe on her own and have the hated plastic tube removed,
then
I would go to the States. If she didn’t, I wouldn’t. Netta loved a challenge, so with the doctors scratching their heads, she continued to improve. She was moved out of the ICU and into a room of her own, complete with TV, and within a few days she was breathing unassisted. Her mouth and throat were still sore from the ventilator that had been in place, so she spoke quietly but she was sitting up in bed and drinking tea and even had some color in her cheeks. As soon as she could, she was ordering everyone around and telling them what needed to be done. My job was to go to America.

I said I would delay for a bit because after all she wasn’t out of the woods yet, she still had cancer and needed treatment—now radiation instead of chemo—but she said no. And that was that.

So on January 25, 1995, I arrived at LAX with two suitcases full of clothes. I had left a mountain of debt and a sick mother back home and I was in no way convinced I was doing the right thing, but a
deal was a deal, and I had made one with my mother, and another with Disney.

If I wanted to get paid I had to be here—and, to be honest, every time I get off a plane from another country and realize I’m back in the U.S., I get a charge of excitement.

It feels like anything is possible, that the adventure of my life is finally unfolding as it was meant to. It feels like I’m where I should be, at last.