You're on an Airplane Read online

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  My dad brings the “never met a stranger” phrase to a whole other level. I’ve met people on the sidewalks in New York who say they had a great time with my dad on a flight or in a restaurant somewhere—they go out of their way to tell me this. He’s so charismatic and seductive that he once gave an impromptu chiropractic adjustment to someone he’d just met at a business party, in San Diego. No, he’s not a professional chiropractor, he was a car salesman. He got that lady to lie on a table so he could crack her neck. When we saw her rubbing her neck, looking like she was in pain as she walked to her husband, we tiptoed, running, out of there. When he’d try to sell a new car to a potential buyer, he’d put a fake poopy diaper in the trunk to “break the ice”—that kind of shit. He could sell ice to water.

  Once I fell off a pier in the bayou and he pulled me out of the water by my ponytail. He’d forgotten I knew how to swim. I stepped directly over a boa constrictor in the funnel of a swimming pool when I was five. My dad stood at the end of the pool, saying, “Come directly to me, directly to me.” He was intense and frustrated but whether or not he was angry with me, I couldn’t tell. When I made it out of the pool, he ran to me and scooped me up and pointed to the snake—which even curled up was bigger than my body.

  Another time, we went deep-sea fishing in Florida, on a giant boat, and when I got seasick he said, “Come on, let’s throw up,” and he took me by the hand and then grabbed my ankles and turned me upside down over the water to vomit, shouting names of foods that he thought would make me sick: “Eggs! Rotten hamburger meat! Sardines! Hog’s head cheese!” I ate hog’s head cheese once, for a dollar, and to impress him.

  I drifted out of my body over the water. It gave me an aerial view of the scene: the fast-moving boat, the crashing waves, the gorgeous water spewing into my face. It was both exhilarating and terrifying and when I landed back on my feet, everyone clapped. This was the year Jaws came out and even if you hadn’t seen the movie, you knew the theme song; kids would imitate it—“buuuum bum, buuuum bum, buuuum bum”—pointing their elbows up out of the water like a shark’s fin and then ducking to swim under to pinch you. The older kids would run from the water and scream, “Shark! Shark!” pointing at the ocean and scaring the crap out of us. It was the summer I learned to put meat tenderizer on jellyfish stings, when a lifeguard rescued me—the summer when “everybody was kung fu fighting.”

  When I was five, my dad was shooting hoops in the driveway, and I walked out of the house with a cigarette.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “I’m smoking,” I replied.

  “Smoking’s bad for you,” he said.

  “Well, you do it,” I said.

  I’ll never forget how animated he was when he took his cigarette pack out of his pocket, walked to the garbage, and exclaimed, “Now I don’t!” and threw them away. He made a big show of it and I knew this was a performance, that he’d get the cigarettes out of the garbage once I went back inside.

  When Dad went to work, my brother and I had a routine where we’d chase him out the door saying, “Daddy, where are you going?” And he’d say, “CRAZY! Wanna go?” And we’d all do a crazy dance and be silly for him. He liked to ask, “What if you never got any taller? What if you just stayed the same size?” His face held a ponderous and sincere question—deadpan. He called us “the yard apes” because we were always climbing trees. When monkeys would come on the television he’d say, “Missy, Tophy! You’re on TV,” and we’d act like monkeys, climbing on him, and he’d throw us high into the air.

  My dad told us so many stories, and I wasn’t sure if they were true or not, and it didn’t matter then. He told us that there was a tiny repairman, Mr. Manny, who worked inside the TV. When we were five or six, my father drove me to his house. A woman answered the door and I asked for Mr. Manny. She said she was his wife and that he wasn’t available, that he was asleep inside his matchbox. I was too shy and stunned to ask anything else, like how she could be married to a man who was so small and did he really ride on record-player needles for fun and did he fix telephones? Did he know the little people that lived in the bookshelves on Captain Kangaroo? How did he make himself so small that he could go inside the TV? Because I really wanted to go there.

  Another of my dad’s favorite stories was about how we were made. “Well, God made you out of clay,” he’d say, and then he’d start to mime this. He’d roll the invisible clay between his palms and “show” us an invisible tiny ball between his index finger and thumb. “God rolled a piece of clay in his hands to make a ball for your head.” I was mesmerized since he was a good mime. “Then for your legs”—he’d rub his palms together, smoothly and gently—“he took more clay. And the same for your arms and fingers . . .” He’d place the invisible parts on a surface, for us to “see.” He could really rearrange reality.

  Another thing he could do was make other peoples’ warts go away by rubbing them; he said it came from his Indian blood.

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  In kindergarten, the teacher asked us to tell the class what our fathers did for a living. My brother raised his hand and said, “My dad was an Indian a hundred years ago.” This wasn’t true; he was a salesman at the Van-Trow Cadillac dealership owned by his uncle (Granny’s brother), Truman Van Veckhoven, who went by “Van,” and his friend Toby Trowbridge. Van was a self-made man who never finished high school; he played golf and ate at the country club. He shouted “Ketchup!” when there wasn’t any on the table, and was so charming that everyone laughed. He said things like, “Life is a pier and you walk down it like you own it.” He invented his life and then died of a heart attack on the golf course after he told a joke; he died laughing. I don’t know a better exit. I had another uncle, who died in a bathtub (after a heart attack) with a prostitute, before I was born. Bravo! Bravo to both of them.

  My dad’s father figures were his uncle Van, William Faulkner, Bob Dylan, Catholic priests, and God, the Father. And Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. Who didn’t want Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch for a father?

  We had a nightly prayer, my brother and I, that started with “I love you, Jesus, help me be better tomorrow” and then asked God to bless our family. We ended the prayer by saying, “And help Father handle his job.” When I was old enough to understand the real situation, my parents told me that we were praying for Father Rogers. The whole time I thought Dad couldn’t handle his job, but Father Rogers was a priest in the parish and was having trouble getting through the sermons sober. He was cool and we all loved him.

  I had some sweet nuns as teachers, but I had a mean kindergarten teacher named Mrs. Sweet. She once grabbed my brother by the arm and pointed a finger in his face for playing tackle instead of touch football. I marched over to her and pointed my finger in her face and said, “No one talks to my brother that way,” and got sent to the principal’s office. Sister Mary-Louise called my mom, who was so touched that she cried.

  In first grade, Sister Mercedes was our teacher and she was truly sweet. On Fridays, we would line up from shortest to tallest and walk down the hallway on our way to Mass. The girls would reach into the cabinets for bobby pins and round black doily veils to pin to the top of our heads. We’d walk very slowly, “heel toe, heel toe, heel toe,” focusing on our hands tight in prayer and standing up straight, as tall as we could make ourselves. I’d occupy this time by feeling guilty that Jesus was nailed on the cross and there was nothing I could do about it; the spooky organ music could be heard while we made our way through the cafeteria—grades two through six lined up behind us. Ash Wednesday was the most intense and ceremonious. “Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return,” the priest droned as he made a cross out of ash with his thumb on each of our foreheads. It was cool to keep the ash on your head as long as possible and the mood was extra somber and intense on that day—that was “the look.” Classes were lax and
we had more playtime to be morbid. “We’re all going to die anyway” is fun on a playground.

  Jesus was my first crush. How could he not have been? In those days, I tried to see him. As it got dark, I’d sit in my bedroom, on the floor and against my bed, far enough from the window to see a reflection in the glass if he should appear. I’d watch the lamp in the window’s reflection get brighter or more clear as the sun went down. I never saw Jesus and I was sad about that.

  My dad comes up to New York to Sloan Kettering for his prostate cancer that he’s had for more than twenty years from the Agent Orange in Vietnam. He flies up here on a private plane owned by an industrial chicken farm that flies patients out of goodwill and because they can afford to. Last time he was here, he told me his doctor called him a “drama king” and I told him I think she meant “drama queen.” He persuaded his neurologist to come to the hotel and have a drink with all of us (me, my mom, her brother Jimmy, and my aunt Catherine) and even got the doctor to remove the bow tie he was wearing because it was too uptight. Like a king, he wanted to arrange a marriage, and like a queen, I wasn’t having it.

  Part II

  As the World Turns

  13

  Dazed/“Sweet Emotion”

  I was a fan of Rick Linklater’s before we shot Dazed and Confused — we all called it Dazed. He made the movie Slacker, the seminal Generation X movie, and no one had seen characters like these in movies before. Nothing seemed to happen in the film, because there wasn’t a real plot, but if you were the black sheep, or the white sheep, or the “weird cousin” in your family who wasn’t conforming to what everyone else was doing but was instead philosophizing about how weird everything was, then you could’ve been in Slacker.

  I got a call from my agent at the time, Brian Swardstrom, who said Rick was casting a movie he was directing about kids in high school in 1976. I was excited about it; the nineties had a seventies counterculture nostalgia and I already had platforms and bell-bottoms of my own to wear. I was also really young, twenty-four, and confident.

  Don Phillips was the casting director for Dazed, and he’d cast Fast Times at Ridgemont High and was a character; so much so that he was made into one in David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly, which I ended up acting in years later. Eddie was his character’s name; the one with the heart and coke problem. Don is pretty special—they broke the mold when they made him. A good casting director is like the vibrant aunt or uncle to a film, or maybe even more so the godfather, since they’re the ones with connections to the agents. If your agent and the casting director have some vendetta between them, then you don’t even get “into the room” with the Don.

  I belonged in the room and had the right attitude. I remembered the seventies really well because I looked forward to growing up when I was little and still loved the music. We talked a lot about music in that first meeting. Rick said a lot of the budget was going toward getting the rights for songs like Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” and Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” and most everyone knows the title of the movie is taken from the Led Zeppelin song. I told them I wanted to play Darla, the main hazer, because I wanted to be a bad girl. I wasn’t one in high school but loved Rizzo in Grease and that’s what they said the Darla part was akin to. My aunt Peggy had some hazing stories, which I told them about—like having to swallow oysters knotted together by dental floss, only to have them pulled out of her stomach by one of the seniors. There were the Farrah twins, from back home, who’d keyed some cars of ex-boyfriends in high school, which I thought was crazy and pitched the idea, I guess. None of us, or at least none that I could remember, were rich kids; we were all more likely to have grown up around Harleys and good music.

  So, they flew me to Los Angeles for callbacks and that’s where I met Joey Lauren Adams, who played Simone; and Deena Martin, the blonde in the movie who could barely zip her jeans, who had lived around the corner from me in Chelsea; and Marissa Ribisi, who played Cynthia, and liked to sew and make things. We all hung out. Anthony Rapp played Tony, who was best friends with Adam Goldberg’s character, Mike Newhouse. Marissa would be their best gal pal and she was already sporting a cute red ’fro. Nicky Katt played Clint, Adam’s nemesis in the movie, and I’d meet his mom later that year. She had a parrot and was a free spirit living in California. After we were cast, Rick sent us all mixtapes of the music he wanted in the movie. I still have it somewhere. I think it starts with “Cherry Bomb.”

  Dazed shot in Austin and we all stayed in that hotel by the bridge next to the Four Seasons—I forget the name of the place, but now it’s something else anyway. I was on As the World Turns at the time, fresh from dropping out of college after three and a half years on probation, mainly for a bad attitude because I didn’t like rehearsing scenes, preferring instead to wing it. I had a lazy attitude for things I didn’t feel were important, like circus class. I didn’t have the guts to be a real clown and already knew how to juggle. I skipped class to clown around and kept my probation letters in the freezer, for some reason—an act of self-preservation, maybe.

  There were around twenty of us in that hotel in Austin, and for the first two weeks of rehearsals and cast bonding I was hardly ever there because I was doing the soap. I’d gotten cast in World Turns on April Fools’ the year before, so I flew back and forth several times. It made sense for the character anyway, since she was a bad girl with a rough upbringing, I decided. She made her friends do things they’d regret the next day, like drink too much and say something they wished they hadn’t—or go to the drugstore and swap the hair dye in the boxes, or put Ex-Lax in a batch of brownies, or Nair her dad’s hairy back while he was passed out, drunk. She was one of those “my feelings are facts” people—one of those drama queens.

  If she and her best friend, Simone, weren’t on-screen for the party, they were in the woods, kickin’ it with the older crowd. Joey and I wrote a casual scene where we were squatting in the woods to relieve ourselves but it was shot wrong; they were supposed to fake that our pants were down but you could see that they weren’t. I don’t remember if there was a scene with one of the guys going in the woods but we’d never seen a girl go (in a movie) and of course we had in real life. Joey and I were best friends for a while and we both had strong father figures, which makes girls more like tomboys and less like girly-girls.

  She lived in LA and liked building things, like a platform for her bed and a swing that hung from the ceiling in her living room. The vibe was Topanga Canyon–like and she’d helped a boyfriend of hers build a shack there, so Joey knew her way around a hardware store. Joey’s character was the girlfriend of Pink, played by Jason London; she’s the pretty blonde who says, “Fry like bacon!” to the freshman girls as they shake on the ground. We were like sisters, and since neither of us had one, that was nice. We listened to Leonard Cohen with Rory Cochrane, who played Slater, and watched the bats come out from under the bridge at sunset. Chrissy Harnos, who played Kaye, would join, as would anyone else who was around. The hotel was like a dorm, really. We went dancing down Sixth Street on weekends, and ate Tex-Mex breakfasts early in the mornings after we wrapped. Typically, the girls hung with the girls and the guys with the guys. They shot guns at the firing range and we decorated our rooms with scarves from the thrift stores. Here’s a bit of synchronicity: After Wiley Wiggins, who played Mitch (the younger kid whom Pink takes under his wing), finished working on Rick’s animated film Waking Life (like eight years after Dazed), he worked as a troubleshooter for Apple. Jason London had just gotten a new Mac. Wiley answered the phone—“Hello, I’ll be your helper, this is Wiley”—and Jason goes into his software troubles and Wiley’s like, “Jason, is this you? Jeremy’s twin brother? Dazed and Confused Jason?” And they’re both like “What?!” It’s all connected, man, cheers. Come on and take a free ride, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

  There was an actor in the film you may have heard of, named Matthew McConaughey? Well, we were a few weeks into production when I fl
ew in and went straight to work from the airport for an all-night shoot. Jean Black was our makeup artist and there were Polaroids of some of the actors taped to the makeup mirror. What can I say but wow? This Polaroid of Matthew was freaking great: Ted Nugent meets daredevil Evel Knievel and just as gorgeous as Jesus Christ. We died. Jean had her arms in the air like she was the next contestant on The Price Is Right, like a Baptist taken by the Holy Spirit, and we screamed with laughter at how genius his whole look was. That guy, yes! I got made up as quickly as possible and went straight to set to meet him in person. I asked Rick if I could stand outside the pool hall for Wooderson’s entrance into the party scene. The scene was set to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” and I loved that song. I listened to all his albums as a kid—my love for Bob Dylan’s music was one of the best things my father gave me. We’d talk about the stories of those songs and I’d sit on the floor, close to the record player, and listen to his albums repeatedly, holding and pressing those huge padded headphones to my ears, though they were too big for my head. “Hurricane” is about an African-American boxer named Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, wrongly accused and convicted of murder. It’s almost nine minutes long and a masterpiece. Oh man, I’m such a fan of Bob Dylan. Well, I guess it’s just something you have to grow up with.

  Rick’s laid-back. He’s from Texas and lives in Austin. He’s charming and nice, and he’s a dude’s dude, a sports guy, and a dad and the real deal as a filmmaker. So, yeah, I ran to set and asked him if he could throw me into the scene and he said yes. I introduced myself to McConaughey and explained Darla real quick—that she grew up with older brothers in a broken home and is tough but fun. We rolled soon after and when he and his posse strolled in, he came into the joint and slapped my ass and said, “Hey, Darla.” That’s what guys did back then, and in those days, it was a compliment.