Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (37 page)

“Uncle Marlon, I just had the snot beat outta me in the Philippines. Mind if I hang out here for a coupla nights?”

“Of course not. C’mon in. I was just makin’ dinner.”

Dinner was a pot of boiling water with a can of Campbell’s soup heating up in it. Meanwhile, Uncle Marlon opened up a rare bottle of gorgeous Bordeaux, and they got off to what turned out to be a scintillating evening. One bottle of Bordeaux led to two or three more, and they were having a beautiful night and the conversation was flying, and that’s when Eddie figured, okay, it’s now or never. “Uncle Marlon, you’ve known me my whole life, right? And I know what the rules are. I know you as good as anybody on the planet, but Uncle Marlon, I’m an actor and I care about acting.”

Marlon said to him, “Eddie, don’t fucking do this. I just spent two thousand dollars worth of wine on you. Don’t ruin the evening.”

But Eddie said, “Marlon, you can excommunicate me, you can disinherit me, you can kick me the fuck out and send me packing to the airport. I’m going to ask you one question because if I don’t ask you this one question, I’ll never be able to live with myself because you’re the only guy I would ever be interested in the answer to this from.”

“Eddie, you’re fucking me up here. You’re ruining a perfect night, and if you keep goin’ down this road, I
am
gonna throw you the fuck out.”

“Uncle Marlon, throw me out, whatever you gotta do, but I’m going to ask you the question. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but I got to ask on behalf of every actor I ever worked with.”

“All right, Eddie. Because you are your dad’s son, because I love your dad so much, I’m gonna let you ask one question. But just one. And if you ever tell anybody what my answer is, you
will
be excommunicated.” Then he said, “What’s the question?”

“Here’s the question, Uncle Marlon: how do you know when it’s working?”

So Marlon said to him, “You had to ask me that one, didn’t you?”

“Yup,” Eddie said. “That’s the only one I want the answer to. How do you know when it’s working?”

“All right,” Marlon said, “I’m gonna give you the answer, but if I ever find out you’ve told another actor this, you’re toast, ya hear me? You’ll never hear from me again! Deal?”

“Of course, Uncle Marlon, deal!”

Marlon said, “I check my asshole.”

“Come on, be serious.”

“I am being serious, motherfucker. I check my fucking asshole.”

“You check your asshole?! That’s the answer you’re going to give me?”

“Yeah, that’s the answer I gave you and I’m giving you.”

“What kind of fucking answer is that?”

And Marlon said, “Think about it, Eddie. I check my asshole, and if it’s tight, I know it’s not working.”

So the first thing Eddie did when he came back to the States the next day? He found out I’m shooting some piece a crap some place in downtown LA and paid me a visit. And the very first thing he did when he saw me is tell me the story—word for word! He said to me, “I knew you would fucking love that story, so I hadda tell it to you.” So then I proceeded to tell every single actor I’ve ever worked with, from that moment forward, the asshole story. And so now, between Eddie and me there are, I swear to God—and you can ask around—there are generations of actors all over the world right now who, when the AD says, “Roll camera,” they put all their attention on their assholes. And if you’re on the set with somebody else who knows the story, you say, “Checking?” and they say back, “Checking!” To this day, even though it doesn’t work at all, I check my asshole whenever anybody says, “Roll camera.” And that was Marlon’s big fucking joke on actors everywhere. Like, “You fucking idiots, how am I supposed to know when it’s fuckin’ working?!”

(CHAPTER 21)

Piled Higher and Deeper

Funny how life works. Actually, lemme rephrase that: funny how my life works! In fact, now that I’m well onto the wrong side of the hill, among the many wonderful things I have obtained is perspective. I would imagine that it was the prime driver that led to my even entertaining the idea of ultimately sitting down and putting thoughts to paper. Writing enables so much perspective. It brings with it the beginnings of objectivity, which, as I tried to identify through all the years I’ve described here, was what I craved most, even though there was no way of knowing that until I actually began to have it. Because, clearly, what I was in the midst of living was an incredibly blessed life. It was as easy to see it as the nose on one’s face. I’m sure it was obvious enough so that everyone around me could see it. Everyone except me. And why I’ve identified the nineties as the most tumultuous of periods for me is because of how close I was growing to—with apologies to Jim Morrison—breaking on through to the other side. Looking back, the closer I got to finally reaching some semblance of happiness, balance, and self-worth, the more anxiety that possibility triggered. I don’t know, maybe no matter how fucked up a thing in your life is, the notion of changing it, of letting it go, is obviously way scarier than living with it. I mean, Christ, you see it everywhere you look: people stay in bad marriages, bad jobs, cities they don’t belong in—why? Because
any alternative to what is familiar, that “undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns,” is terrifying!

So if you look at my life in the nineties with any objectivity at all, it looks fucking beautiful, carefree, and dreamy most of all. So why could every muthafucka see it but this muthafucka?! I mean, you just look at the series of events, the body of work, and the people I got to be around, it musta looked like I was set for life. And yet . . . and yet! But hey, good news! I had already opened the box wherein lie the genie. And I was close, way closer than I even knew. The thing, the one thing that could put me over the top was determination. A determination to square up finally these absurd incongruities. ’Cuz let’s look at it:
A Few Good Men
on Broadway,
Cronos
,
City of Lost Children
,
Bus Stop
on Broadway,
Alien: Resurrection
,
Enemy at the Gates
—that’s not a good decade; it’s a GREAT one!!! So how in God’s beautiful world could I still be calling Phil to essentially discuss the merits and lack thereof of being a loser?

Phil never looked at it like that, never put it in those terms; in fact, he never put it into any terms at all. Why would he need to when I was so good at it? No, he would just spend those first fifteen minutes of the session doing what I chose, that time totally fashioned according to my needs, my urgency, my call to make the appointment, and he would listen, unprejudiced. I say fifteen minutes ’cuz that’s how long it generally took to describe the malaise du jour, and certainly he never needed more time than that to identify the disconnect. Because that’s what it was: a disconnect. A viewing of a set of circumstances that I was immersed in that in fact had nothing to do with what was truly happening and only to do with how I interpreted what was happening. It was baggage, and it was old baggage at that. How it got there, why it got there was none of Phil’s concern—only that it
was
there. And in being there, it was in the way. And the process Phil was able to bestow on me to get me to rearrange the wiring and, in turn, reinterpret the perception, objectify it, show me how little if any I even had a part in what I was describing was simple and effective. It was usually accompanied by a diagram that was passed down to him from one of his gurus,
either Jung or Steiner, and the very fact that there was a diagram for exactly what I was describing was indicative of the fact that, shit, I must not have been the first one to feel this way, a fact that in and of itself granted comfort. But the tool that accompanied the condition illustrated in the diagram was really simple, really user-friendly, and really easy to do, and, once I did it, it completely granted relief. One hundred percent of the time.

So the late nineties were like grad school. I began to sense that if I devoted myself voraciously to allowing Phil to one by one address each of these distortions I carried around with me like old friends and I used these completely effective tools like I used the barbells in the gym, in which with each rep I got faster and stronger, I would create for myself more and more moments of real peace through clarity. It was good! Good . . . it was genius! It was the best I could hope for. Because, as I said earlier and as Phil intoned religiously, there is no life free of pain, loss, despair, confusion, violence, and, yes, even death. To make it a goal to think you could ever live a life that avoided all these things is pure folly, and you can only fall short. What there is, however, is the ability to manage one’s way through these things so that, in addressing them, you remain as whole as possible, as present as possible, as undaunted as possible. For that is the closest you are ever gonna get to real, real contentment. And if that ain’t the name o’ the game, well, I just don’t fucking know!

So, yeah, I got back from Australia, and, sure enough, a whole shitload of time went by before something happened to replace the feeling that that gig gave me. That gig or any gig, in fact. Because no matter how fucked up the circumstances are on the gig, they’re a lark compared to the downtime, the not knowing, the wondering how to manage the money ’cuz you’re not sure when the next batch is coming, the
between
gigs. There are loads of reasons ya don’t wanna be outta work, but when the work is the direct link to your self-worth, then what would normally be an annoyance looms into something way larger, with overtones ya don’t, once you’ve had a bellyful, ever wanna revisit again. Plus, I’m just happier when I’m working. I love
the stimulation of it, the amount of me that it engages. I love the mind part of it, in which fitting myself into a picture is tantamount to solving a riddle. And I love just being on a movie set, ’cuz like the song says, “There’s no people like show people, they smile when they are blue.” And because I’m a bit of a clod in real life, I love how well I know my way around when I’m on a movie.

But never did this dilemma come into such stark relief as it did in the late nineties. It had been too long getting fixed. And the determination I was putting into it demanded a follow-through that I hadn’t heretofore applied. So I used those years to double-down with Phil Stutz. I became obsessed with closing the gap between the reality of how good my life really was going and this nagging feeling that it wasn’t going well at all. Nothing could have provided me as great an opportunity to bring all the elements to Phil that ultimately needed addressing than the lead up to the actual shoot and then the aftermath that was
Alien: Resurrection
.

I heard about the project when I got a really strange call from one of the higher-up production executives at 20th Century Fox. They were preparing to launch what would be the fourth installment of one of the most successful franchises ever. They were putting together a list of possible directors for the movie, and very high up on the list was my old friend Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with whom I had done
City of Lost Children
. Having done only independently produced movies in France, no one in Hollywood had a handle on JP’s ability to wield a big-budget important studio franchise flick. So, knowing I was the only American who had ever worked with him, they gave me a jingle to ask about my experience with him. Of course, my report was glowing: not only was Jean-Pierre a brilliant, innovative filmmaker, but he was also a devoted movie buff who had a real feel for international cinema and adored the great early American movies. Plus—and this was the surprising thing—he had confessed to me a real desire to make a big studio movie one day in Hollywood. I thought he would be a perfect fit and said as much.

He ended up getting the film and returned the favor by helping me win the role of Johner in the movie. The character was an over-the-top
loudmouth who fashioned himself a badass and had the attitude to prove it. As a guy whose work on big Hollywood studio movies is limited, needless to say, I was thrilled. The film also boasted Winona Ryder, who was at the peak of her powers then, and a coupla guys who remain friends to this day, Leland Orser and Raymond Cruz, great dudes, both!

Unlike most of the studio movies I’d made, this one shot right on the Fox lot in Century City, so I had the extra added luxury of sleeping in my own bed every night for a change. So I was able to take advantage of this good fortune by folding regular visits to Dr. Stutz into my schedule. And trust me, there was plenty to talk about. For instance, there I was, a forty-seven-year-old father of two, with a long successful marriage and a pretty decent résumé under my belt, and yet I can’t tell ya how much time I spent thinking about how I really didn’t deserve to be there. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I got through the movie just fine and for sure no one except me and Phil knew of these feelings, but they were there. So Phil and I handled those. Then there were the instances in which whenever anything went the slightest bit wrong—and trust me, the pressure on a big-budget studio movie is palpable—I always knew it was because of me. Unfounded? Of course. But I never referred to myself as rational.

Then there was the aftermath, ya know, that period right afterward, when the news is bad. And then right after that, when it gets worse. And finally two years go by, and there’s no news at all—
that
period! So Dr. Stutz and I had mucho, mucho, mucho to discuss. And discuss we did. And I started noticing signs of improvement—little things, like my highs and lows diminished by around 88 percent. And my demeanor at home got calmer, more dependable, and less unpredictable. And I became way more cognizant of the world around me and finally started to have an awareness and an empathy for what “the other guy’s” life might be like. And so I started looking for ways to put all of my attention on the outside world, on ways I could use my blessings to lighten people’s loads, even if it was just with a fucking smile. And discoveries and epiphanies started exploding inside of me.
And things Phil had warned me about, if applied assiduously, started to become just another part of my day. Things like the more I took the attention off of me and put it on the things around me, the bigger and more powerful I felt, and not powerful in the yucky way people in high places lord over the world, but rather a true power, one that lived deep inside me that no one could feel but me. This was the beginning of something big.