The Reenactments: A Memoir Page 6

  TEN

  (2011) One day, in early January, the money starts to flow—the film is green-lit, which makes it real. Apparently it hadn’t been real until this moment—everyone (apparently) had been going on faith. The lunches weren’t real, the script wasn’t real, Hollywood wasn’t real. De Niro wasn’t real, Julianne wasn’t real—it all could have collapsed at any moment. Now, with the money flowing, it is closer to real. I get several calls a day now, mostly from Paul. Today he is at the dentist’s—De Niro is having some teeth pulled, to get ready for the part. Teeth? A couple years ago, apparently, De Niro needed some implants, and knowing he was going to, or might, play a homeless man, he had temporary teeth put in—placeholders—and now he is having them removed. In one scene in his descent he will get beaten, robbed—rolled is the word we use when a drunk gets robbed. He is having some teeth removed so he can (I imagine) embody damage. Paul puts De Niro on the phone.

  How’s your father’s teeth? he asks.

  PAUL Dano will play me, not as a boy but as an adult, a younger version of the me I have become. At twenty-seven he’s the age I was when my father first appeared at the shelter. I’d thought it was important that the actors playing us be approximately the ages we were—at the time I was in my late twenties and my father was in his late fifties. My father was thirty when I was born, still thirty when he left us, or we left him (it’s still unclear who left whom). In the film my father has to contain the potential to pull out of his tailspin, and fulfill his vision of himself as “America’s greatest living writer.” He cannot be pitiable. We must believe, on some level, his claim that he is above the situation he finds himself in—he has to embody a degree of both grandeur and menace, which is why De Niro is perfect for the part. At the time I believed that my father could destroy me, if I allowed him in too deeply. Does this mean Dano has to believe that he could be destroyed? I am speaking here only of myself; when one has not yet made it out of one’s twenties, one has to feign an air of solidity, when it isn’t yet deeply felt. One is still so unsure, one has to be careful, all the time, watching where one’s feet fall. It’s tiring, this endless uncertainty, which is perhaps why I would so easily burst into moments of such senseless self-destruction. By the time I made it to my mid-thirties my father had lost some of his bite, he’d become someone who genuinely needed my help or else he would go under (we will all go under one day, I know, but we don’t have to die out on the streets). By the time I was thirty-five I was able to offer him my hand at times, but when I was still in my twenties my father could destroy me, at least this was how it appeared.

  EASTER is known as the time of “bright sadness.” Lent means, simply, “spring”—from the Germanic word for “long,” since the days, in springtime, are visibly longer. From Lent till Easter, these are the days we’ll be filming. In the latest version of the script, after I first meet my father (after he is evicted), I tell the woman I am sleeping with that I don’t know if I ever want to see him again. I suggest to Paul that we cut that line in the script, but Paul says we can’t: You have to deny your father three times, like Peter—it’s part of the structure of the whole. Peter, you remember, was told that he would deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed, but he did not believe it. Yet in some parallel (biblical) universe, it had already happened—preordained, written, inevitable. The second time you deny your father, Paul tells me, is when you tell another worker, “That guy has nothing to do with me, he’s just a drunk and a con man.” The third time is when he comes up for barring, and you simply watch the other hands go up.

  The rooster crows. I never noticed.

  I get a call to be in Tribeca at noon (De Niro’s office)—today is the day of the table read, where a dozen actors, each with a role or two, will read the script out loud, to see how the words feel in their mouths (I guess). Coffee and bagels, we shake hands all around, each will pretend to be someone I once knew. We sit. De Niro opens his mouth and my father comes out, then Dano opens his mouth and I come out, then Julianne opens her mouth. De Niro pretends, Dano pretends, Julianne pretends. Day of the dead, dawn of the dead, I sit off to one side, pretending to watch myself, pretending I’m here, but I’m not, not really. My disembodied family, risen from the grave, sitting around a table, laughing. Fucken tower of babel, I’m nearly erased. Sometimes they speak their own words, sometimes the words I wrote, sometimes the words Paul wrote. The walls around us thrum with posters of De Niro—mohawked De Niro, head-bandaged De Niro, boxer De Niro. Then my mother pretends to throw herself in the ocean again, then my father pretends to sleep outside again, then my girlfriend pretends to break up with me again, then we pretend to make love. I’m here, watching us make love, pretending to understand, pretending to have forgiven everything, to have been forgiven.

  A question—What am I doing here?—passes through me whenever someone closes his mouth, whenever the words stop. A production office has been set up across town, on the west side near the Film Forum, I’ve heard about it but I’ve yet to see it. We are now in a state of preproduction—no camera rolling, no call sheets, not yet. Now is the time of questions, time to line the physics of the world up with my memory of that world. Why is it important for Julianne to know what my mother’s hair was like, for De Niro to know what jacket my father would wear? What does it matter if my father carried a flask or drank straight from the bottle? Later she will cut her hair, and he will put on the right jacket, and they will appear. Now she merely opens her mouth, says the words—He’ll show up—then De Niro opens his mouth, says the words—The question is why she stuck around as long as she did. This imitation of life, this simulacrum, this déjà vu—this is what was said (is this what is said?)—will these actors, these strangers, replace my family? Will they move in, somehow, push their way inside me, so that soon I won’t have to tell them a thing? Imitation, according to Plato, distracted people from reality, from the truth. Mimesis, to use Plato’s word, creates an alternate reality—through a play, say—which will draw us away, distract us, from the truth of this life. Yet mimesis, it would seem, can only come from close attention to the world, and this close attention (as Weil points out) is a type of prayer, another (possible) way to escape the cage of ego. To dissolve into something larger.

  IT is the emptiness of the bowl that creates the bowl. I meet Paul at his hotel to help him decide between two actors who are being considered to play me as an eleven-year-old. Paul sets me up with his computer to watch clips of each. One, reading a letter my father has sent from prison (My writing is going very—very—well), stumbles a little on his lines—one could believe that at that moment he is just learning how to read. The other is more polished—cuter, in a way, but it seems he knows he’s cuter. His voice is higher, which at first marks him as innocent, but at some point I sense that he is already getting high, that he has already gotten laid—something in his eyes is a bit too knowing, and something in me needs him to be innocent. I tell Paul this, and he agrees. We go with the innocent.

  I tell a friend in Texas that the film is green-lit, that I will likely be on set every day, and she sends me a copy of My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s book based on his film. It might help you, she says, in case you decide to write about it. My Winnipeg is the opposite, or perhaps the mirror, of Kiarostami’s Close-Up. Where Kiarostami used real people to reenact a moment from their lives, Maddin hires a group of actors to return to his childhood home and act out certain memories of his childhood. Where Maddin lines up with Kiarostami is by hiring his mother (who may or may not have been an actress in her youth) to play his mother. In one scene she has trouble remembering her lines, even though she was, presumably, the one who said them the first time around. Our film will not be a documentary, any more than My Winnipeg, or Close-Up. It isn’t my life, Paul Dano isn’t me. In the script the last scene has Dano giving a reading from his first book of poems—we will use my book (Some Ether) as a prop. De Niro will show up to listen, I will pick the poem Dano will read. My father never came to hear me read my po
ems, I never invited him. In this scene Dano will sit in a chair and read, If you find yourself lost, dig a cave in the snow, quickly. . . . (I never realized that poem was about my father until I heard Dano read it.) At the end of this scene (which will be the end of the film), I will introduce my father to my wife and child (which I have done), and I will let my father hold his granddaughter (which he has done). The film will suggest that I figured out how to write a book and become a father in a couple years—in reality it will take ten years for the book to come out, and ten more years for Maeve to appear.

  ELEVEN

  IN Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the eponymous main character spends the tail end of his birthday interacting with his former self. He does this by listening to an audiotape he made thirty years ago, on his thirty-ninth birthday. Making this tape is, or was (apparently), a ritual of sorts, a summing up of the year he’d just lived. It is unclear if the “last” in the title means that the last tape he made is the one he is listening to, or if the last tape is the one he is making tonight, as in the final tape, no more after this one. Krapp searches for a specific spool as a memory flitters across his mind, as a thought occurs to him, as he remembers a moment, a year. He finds the tape, forwards through it until he gets to the part he is looking for—this moment is, at times, bittersweet. (Once wasn’t enough for you. [Pause.] Lie down across her.) A man alone in a room at the end of his life. It’s hard to rewind your memory to the exact spot that once gave you comfort.

  FOR a while after my mother died, a few years, I kept a postcard near me—a stop-motion photograph of a bullet caught midflight, just after having pierced an apple. I would find the postcard in a book I was reading, or it would fall out of the notebook I was writing in. The photograph of the bullet piercing the apple is from a series of stop-motion photographs—a drop of milk making a white crown in a glass, a match head as it ignites. As might be expected, the entry hole into the apple is clean, but the exit wound has blown the skin all to shit. This apple is my mother, I’d think, holding her in my hands. The bullet hangs not an inch from the apple—it looks like it could either go on forever or simply drop to the ground with a small clatter.

  REBECCA Solnit offers this:

  In the spring of 1872 a man photographed a horse. The resulting photograph does not survive, but from this first encounter of a camera-bearing man with a fast-moving horse sprang a series of increasingly successful experiments that produced thousands of extant images. The photographs are well known, but they are most significant as the bridge to a new art that would transform the world. By the end of the 1870s, these experiments had led to the photographer’s invention of the essentials of motion-picture technology. He had captured aspects of motion whose speed had made them as invisible as the moons of Jupiter before the telescope, and he had found a way to set them back in motion. It was as though he had grasped time itself, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over. Time was at his command as it had never been at anyone’s before.

  As though he had grasped time itself. . . . Film, we know, does nothing to time itself, merely to our perception of it—we can speed it up, slow it down, rearrange it, stop it anywhere we choose. Film makes time appear to repeat, but nothing repeats, nothing comes back, nothing returns, except the feeling of what returns. In Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), the character Keaton plays falls in love with a woman who works in the newsreel department of MGM, so he decides to become a news photographer. Yet when he screens his first attempts we see that he has created a mishmash of double exposures—a battleship is now anchored on Broadway, cars drive into other cars and right through them, a diver enters a swimming pool and then rises back out of the water and back onto the board. He leaves the screening as a failure, yet in some ways this seems closer to reality, or at least to how we experience it, than the lie that time is unspooling chronologically.

  I walked out of the shelter one day, the shelter where I’d worked for nearly seven years, and didn’t cross the threshold again for nearly ten years. I didn’t exactly quit—I just never went back. In the film I will shake hands with my coworkers, say goodbye, but this was not how it happened. My father was still living on the streets when I left, still a guest at the inn, when he wasn’t barred from it. I decided to go back after I’d been working on the book for nearly five years, after I’d gone as far as I could into my memory of the shelter. I wanted to read over the logs we’d kept, the notes I’d written, in order to find the page where my father first appeared at the door, and the page, a couple years later, when we voted to bar him. This barring scene will appear in the film—in the film it will be the third time I deny my father (the rooster crows). In life I denied my father over and over. In life (and in the film), when it is time to vote I will not raise my hand, not to bar him, nor to allow him to stay. I will sit empty-eyed and let it happen.

  (1999) I call Pine Street and ask to be connected with someone in administration. I explain that I’m working on a book about my years working there, and that I’m hoping to read the logs from that time. The woman I’m speaking with connects me with Lyndia (the director)—that we know each other helps, it means I don’t need to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing, why I need to see the logs. I don’t know if I could have told her why, even if she’d asked. Lyndia, it turns out, had married a former guest: You remember Mike __________________ . (I don’t remember.) She promises to try to locate the logs, but warns that it might be hard.

  AT some point the logs had been boxed and shipped to Long Island Shelter, stored and forgotten in a damp basement. Lyndia sent a worker in a van to retrieve them, all ten boxes. On the day of my appointment, on my way to Pine Street from South Station (I’d taken the train up from New York), I stop into J.J. Foley’s, a bar I hadn’t set foot into for over ten years. I’d quit drinking when I was still working at the shelter, just before I began working on the Van. Before that Foley’s had been the bar I’d spent most of my off-duty time in—I can say I loved Foley’s as much as I loved any place on this earth. When I walk back in, Jimmy the bartender (maybe he’s the owner as well?) is where I’d left him ten long years ago—behind the bar, yet now looking (understandably) older, maybe even a-few-teeth-missing older. Paler. It’s ten in the morning. I stand in front of Jimmy until he looks up. Not missing a beat, he smiles: Nick, haven’t seen you around for a while, how you been? It’s been ten years, I say. Then he reaches into the well and puts a Harp on the bar.

  LAMAR could be found every night in a parking garage near J.J. Foley’s. He would take whatever we offered—sandwiches, coffee, blankets—but he would never come in. His clothes were always filthy, his pants often torn. He’d ask for a new pair, and I’d ask him what size, and he’d say thirty-eight. I’d tell him I’d be back on the Van Sunday night, and he’d say, Sunday? What’s the date Sunday? Twenty-first, I’d say, and he’d smile. Twenty-first is too late—world’s ending on the twentieth. When I was working with the homeless I sometimes felt, though I didn’t often articulate it, that a bomb had been dropped on Boston and we were all simply wandering through the wreckage. After politely refusing Jimmy’s ten a.m. Harp, as I make my way to Pine Street, I stop at Lamar’s garage—amazing and strange that this beat-up concrete box is still standing. But, of course, Lamar is nowhere to be found—even then he was almost never here.

  THE guy working the front door at Pine Street doesn’t even glance at my face as I raise my arms for the frisk. I tell the girl working the front desk (army boots, vintage dress, tattoos—I’d have dogged her if it was still then) that I’m here to see Lyndia. The guy who frisked me hears me ask for Lyndia, comes over, apologizes. It’s fine, I tell him, if you hadn’t frisked me I’d have been upset. To imagine I wasn’t scruffy anymore, to imagine I’d changed that much. He directs me upstairs, points to a door—I know the staircase, it leads to the showers. As I climb, another doorway appears, off to the right—they’d done some renovations since I’d last been inside. Lyndia appears at this door, we embrace
, she leads me through a suite of offices, which also hadn’t been there, or if they had I’d never gone up into them. When I worked here, in my twenties, I wore sweaters lifted from the clothing room, I did a lot of drugs. I didn’t belong upstairs, in administration. I belonged on the floor, with the guys.

  TEN boxes of logs await me, stacked in the corner of the conference room. Each log is simply a three-ring black vinyl binder, each holding a hundred white-lined pages. My own Dead Sea Scrolls—some have water damage, some already unreadable. We got to them just in time, Lyndia tells me. She gives me the code to the copy machine, points to a huge conference table I can spread out on, then she leaves me alone. I open the first box, pull out the topmost binder, look on the first page for the date. I want 1984, the year I started, I want to see what I wrote. I want 1987, the year my father was evicted. I want the entry that first named him—new guest—appearing at the door. I want 1989, which I think was the year we barred him, for being out of control. The logs smell like I remember—musty nicotine, panicky sweat. I spent that first day randomly opening pages, looking for my handwriting, but more often than not I’d simply get lost in a thread of thought. I went back every day for a week, it was like watching a movie, only the speed was off, as one image, one event, one disaster, folded into the next, and then the next. A name rose up—Black Cat Sam, say—then twenty pages later, or maybe it was five binders later, Black Cat was dead, dropped off by the police one night, left outside on a bench, likely already dead when they picked him up. I’d forgotten about Black Cat—what was gained by reliving his death, I cannot say. But I’m glad he came back, glad for the time before he was dead, when I got to write the note about him checking into detox, glad for the chance to remember how hopeful that made us.