Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (32 page)

Phil taught me that there are things that don’t square up inside of most people, but these are just distortions—they’re really not real. They’re just things you think are real because that’s what you’ve been wired to think. And low self-esteem is just another example of a bunch of bad assumptions, assumptions you are making that are reality to you, but they don’t have anything to do with real reality. It’s based on a bunch of assumptions that are the result of misfires or bad judgment. And those things don’t get removed if you make a lot of money, get lucky on a TV show, start driving a fucking XJ6 Jaguar, or are getting head seventeen times a day from hot supermodels. You know, all that shit is just a distraction. Well, maybe not all of it . . . but you know what I’m sayin’. The real work you do on your life is a question of how well you can recognize that you need to work on your life and how determined you are to look it straight in eye and figure out how
to remove it and replace it with something that’s closer to real reality instead of the bullshit that got foisted upon you either by bad parenting or whatever other fucked up stimuli you experienced in your first five to ten years of life.

Most people have the biggest trouble seeing life through their own eyes. They don’t have as much problem seeing someone else’s life objectively, but they have no way to see themselves with the same clarity. This is particularly the case for people who haven’t worked on their core, don’t have a whole lot of self-awareness, when the real you is a ghost.

Essentially any search for inner truth begins with replacing all of the illusory things you think you perceive with the things that are really there. In other words, you must begin to train yourself to make all your judgments on the reality of a thing rather than the distortion that occurs when you look at the world through a distorted lens. This is the power of cognitive thinking: there is an objective truth to it that is undebatable. Hopefully you learn to get to the point at which you could now look at something in a way so that it becomes an offshoot of logic and, thus, a problem infinitely more solvable. And very often Stutz would give me a diagram that encapsulated the universe. He taught me the tool called
The Grateful Flow
. I think Carl Jung talks about that, in which you just begin by saying, “I’m breathing right now. I’m not in pain right now. I’m sitting down right now. I’m in a warm comfortable room right now.” You begin to list all the positive things you’re experiencing in the right here and now. And then the list is usually so vast that you completely obliterate and expunge any of the negative forces trying to invade you. So these tools were instantaneous—if you just took the time and accessed enough self-discipline to use them.

And 100 percent of the time I would walk out of Phil’s office with such a cleaned-out vision of the world and myself in it that I had no recollection of ever even being in trouble in the first place. I could always leave Phil’s office with a complete spring in my step, completely unfettered, when nothing was bothering me, nothing. And he would do that in not a week or a month or three to six years, like I hear about
from my friends with their own shrinks; he would do this in fifty minutes. Every time. No matter what shit I dragged in with me, he would get right to the matter. He would identify what the disconnect was, not ever giving a shit where it emanated from, that, “So when did you first discover you hated your mother”–type of shit. Instead he gave me specific ways of not only rethinking a situation but also provided a tool to help me get back to this place where I was able to remove it from allowing whatever it was that never existed in the first place to become a part of my perspective. And these tools were incredibly user-friendly, unbelievably accessible, guaranteed to be effective! As long as you were willing to call upon them regularly.

I traveled great distances with Phil. Between my abbreviated description of the conditions that I was bringing him and his fine-tuned intuitive ability to not only identify it by name but also surmise the characteristics in me that made those conditions possible, Phil developed a mastery of me that is equal to none. Which allowed him, as we traveled along together, to zero in on my mishigas and cut right to its quick, by first identifying it, then obliterating it, so rapidly, so effectively that it seemed almost like magic. But there was no mumbo-jumbo, no psychobabble. Everything was in layman’s terms. And there was not one moment in all our years together of analysis when we drudged up past bruisings in pursuit of current events, because at the end of the day who gave a fuck what it all meant, these conditions of yours. Instead, here’s how you kick its fuckin’ ass. Here’s how you identify the high ground and then get yourself there.

After years of working with Phil—’cuz that’s what it was: work, not treatment—we started to develop a deep fondness for one another, one that obviously sprung from mutual respect but nevertheless transcended normal doctor-patient protocol. “You lost a brother,” he said, “and you almost lost yourself. If you had gone to a hundred shrinks, ninety-nine of them would have had you on meds. What we did was work diligently and single-mindedly to teach you how to manage yourself out of harm’s way whenever it appeared. Because make no
mistake, it will keep reappearing till they close the lid on you. But if you can get good enough to call upon a tool to redirect the flood of shit that comes to bring you down and you get good enough at it so reaction time is close to immediate, well, that’s as close as you can get to harmony and bliss.” I was never on a med. Not never, not no-how.

Little by little this shit began to take hold in real time. The goal that Phil had set, which was to take the giant waves that existed between my highs and lows and diminish them to the point at which they were softer, quieter waves, was becoming a part of my everyday experience. And as we got closer to the end of the decade I began to notice a distinctive new level of peace and contentment during my alone times, something I couldn’t handle for an hour in my younger years. I became so much more comfortable in my own skin. I became, God forbid, one of my favorite people to hang out with; in fact, being alone started to surpass the need to always be with others, as if I could only feel like me if it manifested itself as a reflection of other people.

Perhaps the hardest tool in Phil’s arsenal to master also happened to be the most profound in importance. It sprung from an approach that was central to Jungian philosophy; it had to do with the shadow. The shadow is that little person who lives deep in the bowels of your innermost self and is the part of you that you loathe. You usually perceive it as weak, ugly, twisted, and completely unacceptable. Phil tried to get me in touch with mine for years; I resisted. And each time he took me down the road where my shadow-self lived, I got to slowly and incrementally see what this little fellow looked and felt like, making it clearer and clearer why I wanted nothing to do with him. Well, after much poking and prodding, toward the end of the nineties I saw him, fully formed and in living color. He was very fat, of course. He was very weak, like “You’re a pussy” weak, and he was essentially helpless. Phil sensed that I had arrived, that I finally had him in my purview. He said, “Now tell him you love him. Tell him he is precious and beautiful. Tell him you have his back and that you will always take care of him, never let anything bad happen to him, never let him down . . .”

Well, it wasn’t hard to see that this was the part of Carl Jung’s conclusion around which all others emanated. Just as I had become the parent to my children, I was now the parent of my own child. I was empowered, adult, responsible, and I loved myself for being badass enough to be ready to kick anyone’s ass before I would let anything happen to that precious being. Phil said, “That’s it. Get the fuck outta my office. You graduated. I got nothing left to teach you!” Well, that’ll never happen; I’ll always have things I’m gonna wanna hash out with Phil Stutz, my doctor, my guru, my friend.

Phil is now a celebrated author, having written a book with another brilliant psychiatrist, Barry Michels, with whom Phil shares a passion, called
The Tools
. When it got released Phil invited me to do an hour-long interview he and Barry were conducting as part of a series. I, along with a host of others who had spent time with Barry and Phil, shared their experiences and insights. I’m incredibly proud of that interview I did with the lads. (If ya get a chance and can find the link, check it out and lemme know whatcha think.)

I guess there was some other shit that went down in the nineties besides Phil, although all of it pales in comparison. I remember finding voice work in cartoons and falling head over heels for that. The first person who brought me into that world was Andrea Romano, who directed almost all the animation stuff for Warner Brothers that was and still is the biggest in the business. I mean Bugs, Yosemite, Road Runner, Porky, Daffy, and . . . need I say more? Andrea brought me in to do a regular lead role on a show called
Bonkers
. It was really cool, and I had a ball. I found the people who made their living doing nothing but voices to be some of the most raw, flat-out talents I had ever met. And I fell in love with the process: no rehearsal, no discussion—just get in there, give a balls-out performance, and get the fuck out. Couldn’t get enough of it, and, indeed, I did a ton of it through the nineties. Kept me busy during the slow times.

And yeah, there were some movies and television thrown in during the nineties, but if you insist on reminiscing, you’ll have to take a trip
to IMDb, ’cuz I ain’t getting into any of it. Suffice it to say, it was pretty much a period to coast, survive, and work on myself—that is, except for one little highlight, a freaky little French flick called
La cité des enfants perdus
, or
The City of Lost Children
.

(CHAPTER 18)

Enfants Perdus

The City of Lost Children
required me to effect the most dramatic physical transformation I’ve ever had to make to my body. I worked my ass off, literally, to look like a street carnival strong man who could break chains with his bare chest. I ain’t sayin’ I had a six pack, but there was definitely a two-pack, which is twice as much as I normally have. But I was still young enough, hungry enough, and in love with the potential of the project enough to give me the focus to get into some serious shape. Even I couldn’t get enough of me!

I got the role because the producers were looking for a foreigner; they were looking for somebody to create a character who was kind of a fish out of water, a country bumpkin, an innocent in a world of decay and decadence. They didn’t quite know what his ethnicity would be; they just wanted somebody who wasn’t facile with the French language. So after spending a huge amount of time trying to cast the role in France and, indeed, throughout the rest of Europe, they broadened their search even further outward. It just so happened that there was a midnight screening of
Cronos
at a horror festival in Paris that Marc Caro went to. He dug it enough to arrange a screening of it for Jean-Pierre Jeunet the following night. They thought enough of it to reach out to my agents, who shall remain nameless because they never returned the fucking call. Finally, out of pure frustration they called Jean-Jacques
Annaud to ask him how to get in touch with me. He in turn gave them my personal number. I guess the Hollywood types don’t feel that dialing long distance to France is an expense worth making. ’Cuz shit, whoever heard of France? Whatever. Anyway, I eventually got word that they wanted to meet me. I was in Los Angeles, they were in France, and so we decided to split the difference.

I flew to New York, where they personally presented me the script, thus planning to give me a day to read and digest it before meeting the next day to make the formal offer. This turned out to be a good move, because it took me eleven hours to get through the fucker. It was so incredibly dense, layered, and textured, and on top of that, I think this English translation was created just so I could read it. I had to keep going back to the beginning. It was almost like trying to read
Titus Andronicus
because there were so many disparate facets to this completely made-up world; it was almost like Dickens on steroids. It was idiosyncratically postapocalyptic, if that’s even a thing.

I remember I went to see this French movie called
Delicatessen
, maybe a year earlier, with Guillermo one night when he was in town. We went to this art house theater to see what the highly touted new innovative team of Jeunet and Caro had done. I had never seen anything like it; this was as pure an original form of cinema as anything I’d ever seen. I wouldn’t compare it completely to Fellini, but it was certainly as stylized as that. Fellini sometimes made things so visually obtuse that they almost seemed like cinema for cinema’s sake. Whether you actually understood them didn’t really matter; you were enjoying Fellini’s feast for the eye as well as all the other senses. That’s kind of what
Delicatessen
was like, in which the world of the film, the logic of it, existed in some parallel universe created exclusively to embody a Rube Goldberg–style universe, where one thing would bump into another thing that would then lead to another that would bump to another. It was fascinating, yes, but also supremely clever and entertaining. And like nothing anyone had ever seen before. So going into this meeting for
City of Lost Children
, I knew I was going to be introduced to iconoclasts of the highest cinematic order.

Getting through the screenplay was akin to getting through
Name of the Rose
—there were many false starts because of the intricate and exotic world of the film. But around the fourth try I began flowing with it and started marveling at the premise of it, the richness of this imagined reality, and the epic scope that underscored its entirety. This was going to be way bigger than
Delicatessen
; this was a masterwork. When I finally got through the screenplay I spent the rest of the evening fretting about what would happen when they realized they got the wrong guy. ’Cuz this shit was way too good to be true. In my mind I had just read a masterpiece, something that, if executed properly, would take its place in the pantheon of film classics, the
Children of Paradise
of its generation. And from what I understood, the next step was to make me a straight offer—no audition, no screen test, nada. It couldn’t possibly be me they were culminating their six-month search with.