I'm Not Dead... Yet! (55 page)

In May 2009 we were doing 2nd unit shooting. My students worked! They were paid! This was
almost too good to be true
. It was.

We were deep into pre-production when a terrible rumor began circulating like Global Warming. Certain vendors were not getting paid. And worse, David Rudd’s weekly check not only bounced, but his wife and young children were in the apartment that the production was providing, when the landlord unlocked the door and showed it to a ‘future renter.’ How future? Next month. The economy was imploding and so was our film. Production department heads began jumping ship and taking other jobs—all in a matter of hours.

It was one very long year of…passion, heartache, and finally,
heartbreak
. Another in-your-face example of time slipping away...

And the death begins…

After a year of 24/7, hard and very creative work, the
film
was demolished, too.

Zephyr and I had the opportunity to see the death of a stadium and the death of a film. So did many of my students.

My deepest disappointment was that my students did not get the chance to work; to learn; to be taught by professionals in the skilled departments they wanted to pursue; to make contacts for an entire film—only for second unit. Still, a few did so well on the ‘second unit shoot’ that they impressed the right people and moved forward professionally, on to other jobs. More notably and enormously significant, they all had a unique, ‘box-seat view’ of a film folding, right before their eyes, yet they weren’t crushed in the verbal and career debris. It was educational, fascinating yet not detrimental or damaging to them.

What an education! I began my next class with: “This is show business. This happens. And you were not hurt by it, only disappointed. So, in a way, if the film could not be made, what an amazing opportunity it was for all of you to see your professor, who was the director, lose a job in a matter of hours. It’s a great experience without the heartache.” (My heartache was a very different story…)

We received terrible news
about Karla’s Aunt Marilyn; she had fallen and hit her head, and because she was on Coumadin (an anti-coagulant, anti-clotting drug), she had cranial bleeding. To survive, she needed emergency brain surgery. Not only was Marilyn best friends with her sister Vivienne (Karla’s mom) but Aunt Marilyn was a second mother to Karla. I came to love Marilyn as a cherished, treasured member of our family.

All of this weighed heavily on us. But, because of everything Karla had learned from going through her mom’s death, and all of my surgeries, she became
the ‘expert advocate’
and flew to Illinois. She wasn’t afraid of hurting feelings or concerned about how she was perceived. Only one thing mattered to Karla: to make sure Aunt Marilyn got the best care possible.

Marilyn’s brain surgery was miraculous—she came out of it like a champ. The surgeon predicted ghastly results, but Marilyn proved them all wrong.

A sadistically evil parable that only real life can write: as Marilyn was recovering so well, she was then diagnosed with lung cancer. She quit smoking at 55, but the tobacco companies arrived on cue to haunt her. As Marilyn got stronger, she decided to fight like mad to win this battle, attacking her cancer with chemotherapy and radiation. Then on the day she was being driven to her
last
session, she ‘threw a clot’ and had a devastating stroke.

Marilyn survived the stroke and was eventually put in a health-care dwelling where ‘she would either die or recover.’ Karla flew back and forth to Illinois.

Karla did everything she could to make the nurses aware that her aunt was a
person
who had needs that weren’t being addressed. She went to the store and got child-like materials; poster-board, glue, markers… and designed a poster with photographs of Marilyn, in chronological order, telling the story of Marilyn’s accomplished life. This simple poster awakened the dulled emotions of the caretakers and forced them to realize that Marilyn wasn’t a piece of meat lying in a bed. By humanizing Marilyn to the staff, Karla made a difference for everyone,
and every patient in that facility,
hopefully, until this very day.

When it became clear that Marilyn was not going to survive, Karla brought the family together and rallied them to get Marilyn home, where she could be in her own home and live out the rest of her life in peace. And where she could die surrounded by people who loved her dearly.

Hospice.
Something we should all understand if we’re lucky enough to have choices.

Hospice care

During this same time
,
when Karla would fly back and forth to her Aunt Marilyn in Illinois (I would do my best to come, too), her best friend and ‘best woman’ at our wedding, Billie Best,

found out her husband was dying.

Years earlier, Chet had been treated with full-spectrum radiation to cure Hodgkin’s disease and twenty some years later that cure was killing him. Billie was now his caretaker and advocate.
Hospice.
Chet wanted to die with dignity and die at home, and Billie made that possible.

Because of my heart,
we treat my ‘death’ with a sense of humor. The only way for us to handle my life-long open-heart surgeries in a healthy way was to laugh at it. But now there was nothing funny about death. We were constantly reminded how precious is each moment, each breath, each heartbeat.

Karla and I began thinking about our own future. Neither of our children were interested in living on the farm in Boone. It suddenly seemed too far away to have our peaceful retreat.

It was time to leave my friend behind.

In the spring of 2009,
while I was working on the Yankee film, we’d had to make yet another move, from faculty housing in the financial district at Water Street to faculty housing on Bleecker Street

in the Village. More boxes;

more tape—

a closet for my sound studio:

and a closet for my office!

Maybe, thinking back in time, those film people were wrong: I was authentic—
I was the epitome of
King of the Gypsies
.

In late July, Karla and Billie had gone back to North Carolina to prepare our house in Boone for sale. We were surprised by how quickly it sold, I went back to dispose of some of our belongings, put others in storage, and pack the rest. I had my last checkup with Dr. Rose in Charlotte just before the closing on October 23.

Selling the house in Boone was an astonishing stroke of good luck, but now I faced a life-long dilemma: When I fell in love with Karla, I had made a promise to myself that I would never let a day go by where my family didn’t have a roof over their heads, free from debt. And the reason I made that promise to myself was because of the very reason I couldn’t breathe—at any moment, something could happen to me and I wanted Karla, Zephyr and Lyric to always know they had a home. And now—we didn’t. Yes, selling Boone was an astonishing, yet ironic stroke of luck.

We were both thinking of places where we could downsize and still live the loving and artistic life we had always hoped to live. For the time being, that would mean continuing to live out of boxes in our small Greenwich Village apartment. We had both been trained to make decisions quickly; this didn’t mean foolishly, this meant we accelerated the decision-making process and came to a conclusion—and then tried to live by it.

When the Yankee film fell through that October, Karla and I had some free time. Since I wasn’t due back at NYU until second semester, it seemed like now was the time to look for a place for our new beginning. It could be anywhere…

We decided to look at the spectacular Pacific Northwest. The colors

and the cities (Portland, Seattle)

were remarkable.

The trees and flowers and the abundance of life that was growing everywhere,

and the spectacular beauty was beyond compare.

Then we were educated by my ‘sad’ friends about the ‘100 Days of Gloom.’ Rain and weather appealed to both Karla and me, but we were told over and over that it was drizzly
endlessly,
and sometimes—“If you’re lucky—you
may
actually see the sun. It can be very depressing. You’ll probably want to blow your brains out.”

Oh dear…

“But the coffee’s great!”

We spent Thanksgiving with my family in California, and when we got back to New York, we still had a week before I had to be back at NYU. So we visited the ‘best man’ at our wedding—which was almost 29 years ago! My ‘best man’ lived in Massachusetts; his name is Dan Berlinghoff. (Calling Dan ‘the best man’ at our wedding is like calling Secretariat ‘the best horse’ in the stable. Dan is the man I aspire to become.)

Massachusetts. We would also be in close geographic proximity to Karla’s best friend Billie, who had a beautiful farm in the Berkshire Mountains, so we decided to visit in a very small window of ‘off-time.’