You're on an Airplane Page 7
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Make My Day could’ve helped Gracie when she pooped later on that flight back to New York. She could’ve helped me when I took Gracie, and her bag, to the bathroom, where the flight attendant cornered me.
“I’m sorry, miss, but the dog must remain in the bag.”
“Really? Because she pooped in her bag, I have to clean her and the bag.”
“It’s not my decision, ma’am, it’s airline regulations and she must remain in the bag.”
We were standing outside the business-class bathroom, just a few feet away from each other and both talking in angry whispers.
“I either clean her and the bag or I go back to my seat and smell up business class. Now, which do you prefer?”
In retrospect, I can see that in his head he made me the bully and used me as an opportunity to finally berate someone. But I took it personally and defended myself: “I remember when flying used to be fun, don’t you?” Our faces were as close to each other as actors’ on a soap opera. I wish I could’ve marched away, slamming a door shut, but instead I clicked the tiny lock of the airplane bathroom and cried some more, and bumped around cleaning Gracie, trying not to get shit on my hands.
When I walked out, I saw that Seal was on the flight, too, so that “Crazy” song went through my head. “In a world full of people, only some want to fly, isn’t that crazy? . . .” No, “we’re never gonna survive, unless we get a little crrrrayyyy . . . zee . . .”
When I saw Nora walking out of the terminal, she told me that I had my shirt on inside out. It was a pajama shirt so it was fine either way, I explained to her. Gracie’s bag smelled so I kept it swinging and away from us. I was also nervous about her behavior and feared security might administer a Breathalyzer test for Gracie, because she was not okay to drive. Nora looked fabulous, as always, and I looked like crap. She knew then what I know now, that when you can leave a place gracefully, do. No need to look like a bat out of hell if you can help yourself because it only inspires other people to treat you like one. We had both just wrapped—me, I don’t remember, and Nora, Bewitched.
Around that time I ran into Nora’s sister Delia on the sidewalk, and so directly she asked me, “How do you do it, Parker?” She’d written movies with Nora and knew how much movies had changed. “I stay distracted,” I probably said, or “My denial skills are really strong.” I said both those things a lot during that time. It was nice to be seen and supported. I was taken aback, really; when you’re famous, people think everything’s okay. We said good-bye and I walked down the sidewalk thinking about these things and about the missed love stories and romantic comedies that, despite the success of You’ve Got Mail, weren’t easily financed and produced. It just became too much of a business, obviously. Stories of characters were swept under the rug, in favor of caricatures and stereotypes. I was feeling swept under the rug, too—maybe that’s why I didn’t care that I looked like a rug rat. It was difficult not to become jaded and feel left out when romantic comedies became bromantic franchises.
I’d had such a good track record with most of my choices for independent movies that I’d offer help to my agents in reading material. I couldn’t produce my own material because my name didn’t guarantee financing, but I could read stuff and know what was good, perhaps get a bigger star attached and shop a script around.
In the conference room, a young lady came to the door to drop off a script—hot off the press. She placed it right in front of me, on the huge table, and sashayed back out of the room. It was called Sara’s Cell. My manager, Alyssa, and I perked up. Alyssa is a Harvard graduate, and her beige patent-leather Christian Louboutin pump was swinging her ankle in strides under the desk. She was sharp and smart and blond and a Hollywood native, so she was in her element.
“I’m sure it’s awful,” I said, aloud, and everyone laughed. I think my gripe shtick was amusing enough without being alienating or a full-on attitude problem. At least none that I was aware of.
I opened the script to see where Sara was, and I found her on the floor of a prison cell, naked and shivering with a guard throwing a prison uniform at her. “What am I supposed to DO?!” she yells. “I don’t know,” the guard’s dialogue went, and then: “I don’t care. I don’t care if you shit yourself.” Wow, gross. I stood up and marched to the door dramatically, swung the door open, and threw the script like a Frisbee down the hallway, the pages flapping at first like a seagull and then sliding as it surfed at least twenty feet on the white marble floor in the CAA mausoleum. We all laughed as I ran out of the room to get it.
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On that same trip, I met up with an old friend, Joseph—we’d been dancing buddies in the nineties. He’d recently been made head of casting at a major motion picture studio and was casting a picture. The studio wanted a good actress to play the mom in the film, to help guide the thirteen-year-old actress playing the daughter into a good performance. It was a comedy, and I thought, “Cool! Studio job, comedy, residuals! If it’s not too gross I’ll do it!” I’d worked with the young ladies from Josie and the Pussycats and had a sweet time. I told my manager to set it up, that I’d be game for this. It was also partly an excuse to see Joseph again, because he was always fun.
I tried to read the script. It started out cute, until page 2, when the mom started making out with her twenty-something-year-old boyfriend in front of her kids, at breakfast, before they caught the bus to school. Then a page later, on the bus, our tweenage leading lady got into a conversation about a blow job with one of her girlfriends. Garbage pail, please!
I met Joseph at a new chic place off of Vine where they’d “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” It was a new building that seemed to have plopped down like a cemented island, surrounded by miles of concrete. The two huge potted plants at either side of the entrance doors were as big as statues and seemed to cordon off the place. They love that outsize look in LA, just like they do in Texas.
It was great to see Joseph. I congratulated him on his new job, and we sat down to eat before we headed to my manager’s party across the street. After we placed our orders, he got into it, trying to convince me to take the part. I’d read enough of the script that afternoon to have a lot of questions: “Why does it have to be so inappropriate and gross? It’s so weird that Hollywood makes this material sexing up thirteen-year-olds. You know that’s why other countries hate us, right? And this is a conservative country, mainly, with religious people who don’t want their kids even watching this, so who is it for? Is this for pedophiles? Do you want young girls emulating this actress, wanting to grow up faster so that they can give blow jobs, too? It’s disgusting. Why does this material get made, produced? I don’t understand, I truly don’t. And it will never make money, I can tell . . .” Blah blah blah! The words just kept spilling out.
I started to sweat. The warm dinner roll I was eating became the texture of a soapy sponge, and I got a kind of cottonmouth. Joseph started talking, pitching me on it, and then he started laughing, admitting, “I haven’t even read it.” My insides were swirling (my head, my stomach) and nothing made sense as Joseph’s face became a hypnotic spiral wheel. I needed to touch someone, to just hold the hand of someone fun and nice, which luckily I was able to do. “I need to get some air, come with me.” I squeezed Joseph’s hand and walked quickly outside, where I immediately threw up in one of the enormous potted plants. And then three times more. It was the perfect height, and I paused and felt blessed.
Joseph ran in to get a wet towel from the bathroom and when he came back outside he put a soft hand on my shoulder, and I started to feel a little better. He looked at me in an almost pathetic way but I could also tell he was suppressing a laugh. I relished the moment when I grabbed his shoulders and implored him to “please stop talking about that awful script.” It was a perfect Hollywood moment. We pulled open the abnormally heavy dungeon doors of the res
taurant, where I ran to the bathroom to gargle in the sink and to look at myself. A few young ladies withheld their concern, if they had any, and Hollywood types were arriving across the street to the party I would now not be attending, which was too bad.
I settled back at the table with Joseph and we got back to shop talk, which passed quickly. “Well, when I tell the studio what you said, your ideas, I’m sure it’ll make them want to hire you even more,” he said. We smiled at the system and I said I’d be game.
“If the studio wants notes, I’d be open to that. It would be fun to make it better,” I said. I was leaving town the next day, so I didn’t know how setting up a meeting could be possible. We brushed that off like it was something we’d worry about later, crooking our hands like otters in a lake.
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Meanwhile, back at the Death Star, we were all still laughing when I brought back the script I’d thrown down the hall and sat down to look at it. “Where is it shooting, if the story takes place in Afghanistan?” I asked. My agent looked at the cover letter: Ventura. “Well,” I said, “at least it will feel like Afghanistan in the Valley, where it’s sweltering.” I thought back to those TV shows from the seventies that shot in the Valley—Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman, tackling rough terrain and entering into danger-lurking soundstage sets, full of empty cardboard boxes that she’d fiercely kick away. So many cardboard boxes served as obstacles, back then. Knives would stab the backs of “dummies” and they’d roll them down a hill, which any seven-year-old would know wasn’t real. They really hammed it up back then and it was a little exaggerated, which was fun to imitate: a stab in the back, then hands flipped up, an “ugh” said in close-up, then the buckling of knees and a long shot from the back—rolling down a hill. As a kid, it inspired me to play in the yard, and I would pad myself with kitchen towels to roll down a hill.
“Who wrote this?” I barked. I flipped the script over: it turned out two brothers had written it. “Well, I want to meet these fellows and ask them what their problem is with women, why they want to put them behind bars and if they love their mothers or have any sisters. How is this torture porn even getting made? Don’t even send me this stuff!”
It creeped me out and I asked, “Why do they think that I’m right for this?”
They all assured me they hadn’t read it and I calmed down a little. I figured that one of them enjoyed the same coffee as another agent who knew of this movie, independently financed by who knows what person, and why or how.
We all laughed, like lovers after a dumb quarrel (how stupid we were! We love each other!), and Alyssa said, “When I looked at the title I thought it was a romcom about cell phones!” And we laughed some more.
Now, there’s an idea. A romantic comedy about cell phones—starring me and Vince Vaughn.
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Speaking of Vince, I met him at the Chateau Marmont a few years ago. I introduced myself and he hugged me. He asked how I was, like we were both war veterans or addicts out of rehab—this is not out of the ordinary, for actors to greet each other this way. I’d never met Vince Vaughn or at least that I remember, but we came up at the same time in the independent film world, so he knew the change, the “paradigm shift.” He put his hands on my shoulders, like a good dad, and said, “You’re talented. Don’t lose faith. Don’t get down.”
I said something like “I think talent’s a detriment. They don’t know what to do with me out here . . . They think ‘talent’ is another word for ‘crazy.’” Which it isn’t. What do I know?
I wish I could tell you that we went back to my room and pillow-talked afterward, riffing on our own version of Sara’s Cell, but that didn’t happen. I went back to my dinner and watched all the women in their twenties who dressed like they were older, in escort-trophy fashion, with their hair the same length and blown out straight, having a good time in Hollywood.
10
In Line
I escaped New York in January of 2017 to live in Vancouver for eight months. There were fewer buildings there and fewer people on the sidewalks and more sky all around. I’m aware of how mundane and obvious that sounds. But even walking the sidewalks in Manhattan is magical. Looking down as I walk, I’m both grounded and hovering, the mica in the cement glittering like stars with the hardened black chewing gum looking like planets—and a piece of trash, an asteroid.
Vancouver’s sidewalks were wide and more open, with less mica, and they’re clean because all the trash finds its way into the garbage cans. I felt more free there while walking and less like a ping-dot navigating its way when passing people, as you do in a video game, with that constant practice of reaction and instinct from one destination to the next. I love the grid of the city and the energy it creates but I had just moved and wanted to stop.
Vancouver felt like a town discovering itself as a city and landing in the 1950s. It likes its trends and style, loads of people had tattoos, and the guys had beards that they groomed. There’s a café culture that I’d never experienced, and I got a kick out of coffee sommelier talk in a barber shop/café/used furniture store called Space Lab. There was a newly opened sandwich shop called Say Hey, only a block away, where I met the owner, whose mother brought fresh flowers for the counter. A food truck could become a restaurant, like this place Tacofino.
One day, I was waiting in line at Tacofino, a restaurant in the cool part of town called Gastown, which was ten minutes from where I was living in Chinatown. There were enough tattoos at Tacofino to last a few days of storytelling. I wonder if an animated show starring the tattoos of people could be a hit. I was thinking of getting some teardrops coming out of my nostrils at one point. I’d get to say, “Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release” when anyone would comment.
There were a few “modern primitive” stretched earlobes in the place—one woman was sporting shiny silver gauges that made holes in her ears the size of silver dollars, large enough to contain a jalapeño. If she ever had a baby she’d get whiplash.
Two bearded fellows came in and one of them announced to all of us waiting, “There would be more room if we moved the line over here.” He gestured for everyone to move against the wall, and stood there as an example.
They were dressed like timber cutters or construction workers from the fifties. If smoking pot was cool in Canada, they may have been stoners, but since it’s legal and the sense of humor is laid back, it’s difficult to know. What did it matter anyway? But their suggesting how people should line up and everyone’s complying made me think of the fifties—of soda pop and greasers and rules adhered to.
I walked past them like a secretary taking a survey and said to the one who spoke up, “You must be the line guy . . . what is it like putting people in line?” I wagged my finger at him as I moved to the ladies’ room. His face flashed in recognition as I did a quick thumbs-up and shut the door.
This mode comes from my father. I describe him as “a comedian without a venue,” and he loves that. Restaurants, or any rooms full of people, naturally become stages for him, but if the room happened to be empty, he could flirt with a doorknob or entertain the wall, “no problem.”
Later that night I ran into the bearded guys walking on the sidewalk in front of me and said excuse me as I passed them, stumbling in my clogs, not recognizing them from earlier. I was on my way to have a “dirty burger” at a place that’s not advertised, because it’s that cool, and they only have a select number of burgers per night because the beef, which they cook medium-rare, “American style,” is pure. Cooking burgers medium-rare in Canada is almost against the law (the health department will shut you down), so the place was kind of taboo. You walked upstairs to a “hole in the wall” made trendy with a beautiful bar and gruffly handsome bartenders who asked what you wanted to drink as if they’d been out corralling all day, steering the grass-fed cattle from which you’d be fed. Prohibition hung
in the air, although nothing was illegal. There were just a few people there because it’s only ever crowded on the weekends.
I said, “Hey, Andre!” to the bartender, who’d seen me a few times before. I was always overly friendly here because the place had attitude. “We have only one burger left . . . he uh . . .” And he tilted his head toward a single man, sitting alone at the bar, and I completed Andre’s sentence. “He took the last one? Or there’s one left for me? Is that Van Couver?
“So there’s one more and I can have it?” Andre nodded yes as if we’d bartered. I always felt out of place when I went there but then loved it—and Andre. Plus, the burger was perfect with its special sauce of mayo and onion, but mainly, like every burger, it was the fries that did it. There was one time that they didn’t have a burger for me and I made a big show of my disappointment. “I’d like to speak to Van Couver about this, if he’s around.”
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I was a stranger in a strange town. When I met people, if they weren’t too shy for a conversation, they asked me, as a New Yorker, whether I thought Vancouver was a lonely place, or unfriendly. They got stars in their eyes when talking about New York, and told me, “Vancouver’s famous for being unfriendly.” Being a New Yorker romanticizes you, and the friends I made loved New York. It’s not an unfriendly place, but I had been yelled at by cyclists for not using a turn signal—a few times, I got a kick out of that, especially since I was in the turn lane.