Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (31 page)

Not only that, but Mexico was completely new to me. I’d never been there before, but it completely and immediately spoke volumes to me, almost as if, in a way I cannot explain, I had come home. I became obsessed with the culture, the mindset, the point of view, the humility, the joy (even in poverty) that I witnessed. They brought humor and goodwill, couched in pure humility, to their every waking moment. They never, ever took themselves seriously. No one in the Mexican culture I ever met seemed like they were entitled, imperious, or dogmatic.

We went out every night, ate, and danced. One night it was Cumbia, one night it was Merengue, one night it was Salsa, one night it
was Cha Cha. Every single night they took me to somebody’s favorite bar with live music and immersed me in this magical realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about, which is the Mexican experience. Hell, it was just fraught with magical realism everywhere you looked, ’cuz it’s the realest place on Earth, and yet they have this mindset, this way of moving through life, that is very sort of . . . I don’t know, two or three feet off the ground. And I got hooked into it in a big way, to the point at which I was looking for a house down there to buy. I was gonna fucking move there. I was gonna chuck everything and become a fucking Mexican. Get myself a sombrero, a poncho, whatever. I bought in, hook, line, and sinker. I was reborn. Praise the Lawd!

So many things have changed, so many things have evolved, so many things have happened as a result of meeting Guillermo. There have been so many new experiences, with so many old ones getting crossed off the list, but the things I learned in those eight weeks on
Cronos
in Mexico I’m still trying to apply to this very day; I’m still trying to duplicate, for this little experience down south of the border was to become my model. And even though my friend Guillermo has become a world treasure, having had bestowed upon him heaps and heaps of resources to make movies, I am still in search of the
next
Guillermo, the
next Cronos.

When I returned I had the enthusiasm to put this new energy surging through me to work. But, more importantly, I also started to experience some other types of changes in my worldview. Guillermo lit the fuse that would end up defining the second half of my life. The old dream that had burnt out two years earlier was finally rekindled, replaced by a new one, and it was powerful. Like I said, very rarely does change come in the form you imagined it would. When you’re in the cocoon you never know what kind of butterfly is gonna come flying out.

(CHAPTER 17)

They Call Them Shrinks for a Reason

We survived those two lean years by burning through whatever savings we had left from
Beauty and the Beast
. And a few little odds and ends that popped up hither and thither. Opal was great. She never put any external pressure on me; in fact, she acted as if nothing was wrong, and another job would come along, just as it always had. However, for me, it was a very worrisome period, tinged with the uneasiness that comes from thinking about the possibility of losing everything. I was obsessed with hanging on. I didn’t really have anything very valuable at that point other than the family and the house, but I was still putting so much external pressure on myself because I would have just hated myself if, five minutes after I got it all, I lost it all. So upon my return from Mexico I took whatever gigs came my way.

If you look at my IMDb credits in the nineties, you would say, “What the fuck was this guy belly achin’ about? It looks like he was working all the time.” And I would say that, with a few rare exceptions like
City of Lost Children
,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
,
Alien: Resurrection
, and then at the very end of the decade,
Enemy at the Gates
, all the other gigs were basically taken out of pure desperate desperation. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was ashamed of them; it’s just that I’d rather no
one ever sees them. It made me look like a total schlepper. But it was essential I keep stringing together a living: I had kids in private school and a roof over my head that I really wanted to hold onto. So whereas most guys can sweep their embarrassments under the rug, with me, every fuckin’ mistake ends up on Cinemax at 11:00 p.m., eight nights a freakin’ week.

But on a much more important level the nineties provided just the right amount of turmoil to start me looking inward. I guess I finally got fed up enough with the extreme nature of the highs and lows that I woulda had to be a total schmuck to not start looking for ways to remove some of the drama. I began to grow tired of leavin’ so much of my inner peace to outward events—indeed, events I took very little part in creating. Because as much as people want to think I had control over the jobs I ended up taking, that just wasn’t so. They just came at me and I took ’em, for the most part. Or they came, and I didn’t take them. But nothing that ever happened to me happened as a result of my own efforts; they always came out of the blue. Always.

Nevertheless, I think about the nineties as the toughest decade of my life. But, let me be clear, this decade also had pockets of pure sublimity, pockets of beautiful little things. But for the most part it was a real grind: there were real growing pains, a lot of testing. Our marriage got tested. Opal and I as parents got tested, whether we were good at raising kids got tested, whether I was ever going to be this vision of the man I aspired to be got tested, whether I truly even had any talent was tested. When I think of the nineties I think of it as a time of major assessment, as a period with a lot of sturm und drang. A lot of unease.

Opal and I actually had discussions about how tough it was starting to be to find that couple we started out as. And it didn’t take long to admit to ourselves that maybe this was a discussion we weren’t fully equipped to have. So she got me to agree and then went out and got the name of this shrink, Phil Stutz, who was supposed to be tops in taps. Don’t tell Opal this, but the idea of going to a shrink never really seemed like it was for me. I was never really too sure about this therapy thing. I’d heard about it, of course, because it was all the rage,
especially in Hollywood, where, on a per capita basis, it was second only to plastic surgery. And I never did understand how answering the question, “How old were you when you first discovered you hated your mother?” was gonna help me pay the fuckin’ rent, ’cuz, let’s face it, that was the
real
problem all along. I thought it was kinda like chasing your own tail to talk about psychotherapy. When she told me the shrink’s name and I told her that our friends went to him and the doctor told them straight out, “You can keep coming to me if you want, but your marriage isn’t worth saving,” Opal said, “Jesus Christ, how the fuck could my friend recommend me to this guy?” But that’s how fucking cool Phil is. He just fucking tells it to you like it is. So after a small degree of deliberation I figured, hey, this could be good just for the entertainment value alone. And thus started my long and beautiful friendship with what I endearingly refer to as the fourth leg of the stool, the other three being Ralph, Jean-Jacques, and Guillermo.

We went and saw this guy for six to eight months before we came to the conclusion that we were paying this doctor so we could fight in front of him. We could have done that for free in our house. We both said, “This fucking therapy is not working. Nothing is improving in our relationship at all. And if our relationship is gonna improve, it’s gonna have to be ’cuz we want it to.”

So once I realized we would not be coming back to him anymore, at the end of that last session I said, “By the way, would you consider treating me on my own?” ’Cuz by that point I really dug the guy. He looked at Opal, and he said, “Well, since you came as a team, I would have to get permission from your bride.”

Opal said, “Jesus Christ, just fucking take the fucker, man. This dude is fucking nuts. Maybe you can do something with him.”

Looking back on it now, I can honestly say that going to him in the first place had less to do with the dynamic of me and Opal and more to do with the dynamic of me, myself, and i (and yes, it’s supposed to be lowercase). Because my main problem with Opal was that she was simply the closest one there to take all my own frustrations out on, the closest one to blame for everything not being perfect, the closest
one to pin all the shit that was really about
my
shortcomings on. Even though there was no blame to begin with, it was just the way shit was. And if you’re somebody who hasn’t ever really worked on yourself and then tried to understand who you are on a core level, then you don’t really have very much to fall back on.

I’m fortunate to be able to say that I was obsessed just enough with not wanting to go back to certain painful things that I was willing to do the work. But the work that needed doing never, ever, ever had anything to do with when I was on a lucky streak or when things were going well. It all happened when the wheels just completely came off, because that’s when you realize how fucked up your thinking is, how completely short-circuited you are. He taught me to look at things I had never taken a good long, hard, objective look at before so that, with any luck, I would drill down to a sort of core that I could depend on that wasn’t based on what I was doing, how I was doing, whether I was doing.

I didn’t know to what degree I needed that kind of help except for the fact that there were so many ups and downs and so many highs and lows in that ten-year period that I was forced to turn inward and deal with the misery and the vast mood swings. I didn’t know how to begin to figure out what was wrong until I started to see Dr. Phil Stutz on my own. And although all I could see was the haze of what seemed at the time as an excruciating journey with dubious results, finally I had taken the first real step to confronting the issues that had my fingerprints all over them. This amazing shrink changed—or shrunk—the notion that I always had, that all of my wiring was intertwined with fame, success, the accumulation of wealth, how many friends I had, and so on and so forth—how often I worked, what my TV queue was, how I was regarded. All this shit completely means fuck all unless there’s a
you
there that it all can reflect off of.

Once the real
you
emerges and appears unfettered, naked, and completely in touch with the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you really meet yourself. Then all those things take on a different perspective as well. Certain things fall away. Certain things are not quite what they
were cracked up to be, but you begin to understand that yes, there are certain things that would make your life a lot easier. But they’re not panaceas. They’re not the answer. It’s no longer dependent upon if this or that happens to me all of a sudden, then I’m good from here on out. Then I have no problems, I have no issues, it’s all smooth sailing. That’s just an illusion. That’s just a lie.

So a lot of this stuff was revealed to me when I began working with Dr. Stutz. It couldn’t have been couched in a better period because the nineties were so challenging on every level, thus allowing me to bring into the conversation Ron at his most fucked up, most terrified, most negative about his own self-image. The decade touched on all the little cracks that still existed and that, if left unchecked, could have flooded into irreparable damage, so it provided me with all the ammo I needed for full self-examination: there were career problems, money problems, parenting problems—you name it, I had it.

In short, I couldn’t have been a better subject to test out the theories and efficacies of the renowned Dr. Phil Stutz. His beliefs sprung forth most specifically from the teachings of the great Carl Jung and the amazing Rudolf Steiner. Of course he threw in dashes of Freud and sprinkles of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But by the time Phil got through distilling them down, they were pure Stutz. And tailor-made for the sick, twisted wannabes who get off the bus every single day looking for fame and fortune in Hollywood. He is a truly, truly brilliant man, and what is beautiful about Phil is that whenever I was on the skids I could see him; there was never any of the bullshit formality of making and keeping sacrosanct weekly or biweekly appointments, with all the self-important crap most therapists throw down to confuse real help with rigid dogma.

Phil didn’t give a fuck whether I saw him once a week, once a day, or once a millennium. I could call him when I needed him, and he would figure out a way to make time for me, just like ya’d do with any other doctor. If I needed him really bad, he’d make time for me quickly. If it was not such a big thing, he would fit me in. But he was in a lot of demand, so I was one of many people who depended on
him for balance and equilibrium. That was the pattern in the nineties, when I went to see him a lot. The problem was that he was the most expensive shrink there was. No one in the world charges more than Phil does. So sometimes my real problem was, “Phil, I don’t have any money. And that’s fucking me up. I gotta come see you. But you’re really expensive and I really can’t afford you.” That whole thing was a catch-22. So I had to be very careful about how I administered his therapy and made sure I never took anything away from the other needs in my life that sometimes a dearth of resources were needed to cover.

He worked things out so even when there were certain months when I couldn’t pay him, he’d wait. When I got a gig, I would make it all up to him. There was no issue that was coming up for me at that time that I wasn’t able to call him up and address. And the way it worked with Phil was, whereas most of the people I knew who were in therapy would lie there on a couch or sit there in a chair and talk for forty-five, fifty minutes and every once in a while the shrink would say, “And how do you feel about that?” and you’d be fucking talking and that’s what therapy was, Phil would listen to your version of what was fucking you up for about fifteen minutes, twenty if it was
really
serious, and then he’d talk for the whole rest of the time.