The Reenactments: A Memoir Read online

  TWELVE

  I send a note to Paul Dano, offering to meet up. I get a note back: Sure, that’d be great. I assume he’s read the script by now, but I don’t know if he’s read the book, so I go to my local bookstore to buy him a copy. The owner (Zack) is a pal, I ask him if they have any in stock. As he checks the computer I tell him about the impending movie, he says he’s already heard—Dano was in a couple days ago, he lives around the corner. As he says this I see my book on the reserved shelf behind him. Zack picks it up, glances at the slip of paper tucked inside it, smiles—Dano’s name is on the slip, apparently he’d ordered it when he came in. Strange to see his name in my book. Should I sign it to him? I ask. Sure, Zack says. I hold the book open, the pen balanced over the title page. I don’t know Paul Dano. I write, I am you as you are me. . . .

  I don’t know if this is true or merely (merely?) apocryphal, but another actor, a younger actor (not Dano), was supposed to play the preacher in There Will Be Blood. But the younger actor freaked out at the way Daniel Day-Lewis (an actor who, I hear, immerses himself completely in whatever character he plays) would glare at him day in, day out, on set and off. During lunch. In the makeup trailer. In video village. Day-Lewis, whose character declares at one point, I just don’t like people, glared at everyone. It didn’t bother Dano, and so he became the preacher—the preacher who baptizes a reluctant Day-Lewis, the preacher Day-Lewis bludgeons to death at the end.

  DANO and I meet a few days later at a local restaurant. He orders a meatloaf sandwich, I order the same. I never order meatloaf, I don’t know why I do this—shouldn’t he order what I order? He tells me he’s halfway through the book, that he likes it. I tell him I like his work as well. We sit at a table facing each other, get right into it. He already knows a bit about me from the book. He tells me something about himself—his upbringing, his parents’ divorce, his mother’s struggles. I don’t need to know all this, but it helps, somehow. He grew up in New York, I’m looking closely at his face as he speaks. What am I looking for? It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing, it’s like drawing a self-portrait and finding you have no idea what you look like. He asks if I always dress up when I give a reading. What? He saw a clip of me giving a reading on YouTube, in it I’m wearing a suit jacket. No, I tell him, that was unusual. Any rituals, he asks, before you get up on stage? I think for a moment. I just need to be in my body, I tell him, but I’ve yet to find one surefire way to do that. I look at my coffee. If I drink coffee my consciousness ends up slightly outside my body, I tell him, so that I end up watching myself as I read—this consciousness is always judgmental, always murmuring, This isn’t going very well, you’re losing them. . . .

  BY Christmas we are a family. We have a mother, one who had a lot of different boyfriends, who may or may not have been an addict. We have a son, one who wandered the saltmarshes alone as a child (do I tell Dano this?), one who is definitely an addict. We have a father, one who drove a taxi off and on his whole life, who robbed banks (without a gun), landing in federal prison for three-to-five. A father who may or may not have been tortured in federal prison, who ends up sleeping on the streets for a few years. A father who, once he started (he claims he didn’t start drinking until he was twenty), drank a bottle of vodka every day of his life, except (maybe) when he was broke, or in prison, where he was likely drugged (he was held in the medical wings). Who is, perhaps, the one person I can point to as the reason I no longer drink (or smoke marijuana), if there is, or needs to be, a reason. Yet I could just as easily point to him as the reason I sought oblivion, though this would not be true. My family, it seems, has been seeking oblivion forever.

  A few days before we start filming, Dano sends me an email:

  Did you ever:

  Wear an earring? (I can picture one on my Nick, unsure if necessary)

  A necklace?

  Rings?

  A chain wallet?

  Have some sort of key chain for work/home?

  Did you carry a flask? (I was curious if it could be good for the van segment where he is hitting rock bottom to carry a flask . . .)

  Do you have any tattoos?

  Did you wear a watch?

  Where are your scars?

  THIRTEEN

  A man holds up an axe, says, This axe belonged to my grandfather—the head has been replaced three times, and the handle has been replaced four times. You might note—rightly—that the grandfather’s hand never touched this axe, and yet the man still believes it is the same axe he wielded. In Japan there is a temple said to be four thousand years old. When you visit you will read that it burned to the ground over a thousand years ago, yet it was rebuilt exactly the same—exact same design, exact same materials, yet the important detail is that the replica results from the same idea—the same intention—as the original. This is what makes the temple the same.

  (2007) In the years waiting for the movie to get made, my father’s condition worsened. A man alone in a room at the end of his life. Since he got off the streets he continued to pour at least a fifth of vodka into his body daily, at least until his disability check ran out—really, there was only one way his condition could go, and that was down. Now, once again, he is on the brink of eviction (his hoarding’s a fire hazard, he’s threatened a child, he’s stopped paying his rent, whatever), and there is nowhere that will take him in, besides a shelter. The other option is for me to take him in, which isn’t really an option. In a desperate attempt to keep him from ending up back on the streets, I contact a doctor I know from my time working at the shelter (Jim O’Connell), who sets up a physical—to qualify for any assistance my father needs to be evaluated. His tests reveal that at some point in the previous months he’d suffered a minor stroke, which partially explains his deepening deterioration. He is sent to a hospital for another evaluation, and from there to a rehab, and from there to a long-term care facility—Roscommon, like the county in Ireland.

  ROSCOMMON—every time I visit I need to ask someone at the front desk for the code, so I can take the elevator up the one flight (or is it two?) to his room. The elevators, as well as the doors to the outside, can only be opened if you know the code (in this way it resembles a film set). On my second visit I get off on the wrong floor—for some reason all the rooms on this floor are being broken down, emptied. The metal bedframes disassembled, the phones at the front desk gone, their wires connected to nothing now. It’s a ghost floor, eerie, as if everyone on it had died at once. I go to where my father’s room should be, past all the other empty rooms, just in case he is the only one left, but that room is, of course, also empty. Back at the elevator I forget the code to get back on, so I wander the empty hallways, find a door with a window in it, a window reinforced with steel mesh, and beyond that window I see nurses and orderlies and old people in wheelchairs going in and out of rooms. That hallway is lit, the hallway I’m in is dark. This door cannot be opened (of course) without the code, so I knock on the window to get an orderly’s attention. She comes to the window, I mouth, wide-eyed, Please open the door.

  You need the code, she mouths back, and points in the direction of the keypad.

  I’m not a resident, I mouth.

  The orderly shakes her head, turns her back, goes on with her mopping.

  WHEN does a thing stop being itself? At one point in the film De Niro will taunt Dano (as my father taunted me), insisting, You are me, I made you. Dano will shout back, I am not you. When the film is done I will show this scene to my father and he will perk up, and even begin imitating De Niro’s imitation of him: Listen to his voice, You are me—his voice is great. In the paradox of the grandfather’s axe, some relativist interpreters of Buddhism would say, elliptically, that it can be said to be your grandfather’s axe until it ceases to function as your grandfather’s axe. Another strand of Buddhism might say that it was never your grandfather’s axe at all—the self is made up only of nonself elements. My father, before his eviction, before we relocated him to Roscommon, would, at times
, brandish a spiked club inches from my face. He would, at times, threaten to take out my jugular (Someday, son, this awl will be yours). At these moments I’d simply stare him down, I’d learned to do that (like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire). This was the club he’d carry for protection, the years he drove a cab in Boston. When Paul visited him for the first time, my father held this same club inches from his head—Paul didn’t flinch. When I moved my father to Roscommon I put the club in a box in my attic. De Niro wants to see it, to hold it. I bring it to his office, pass it to him—it looks small in his hand. It’s decided that the props guy will make a bigger one, one that will read as more threatening, mythic—one De Niro can wield.

  THE paradox of the grandfather’s axe is a version of the Ship of Theseus, the question of whether a ship whose wood is completely replaced remains the same ship. This paradox has been wrestled with by Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Plutarch: When does a thing stop being itself? When does a person? In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the book, 1900), a lumberjack has an axe that is cursed—one by one it chops off all his limbs, which are replaced by tin replicas, until finally even the torso and head are replaced and he becomes the Tin Woodsman.

  Two years into my father’s homeless odyssey he claimed his toes needed to be amputated—he’d been sleeping out too many snowy nights. When I was eighteen I traded my spleen for a bottle of peppermint schnapps and a midnight motorcycle ride. You could say that the bottle functioned, for my father, and then for me, as an axe. In real life, afterward, you simply hobble on—no one replaces the missing toes, or the broken spleen.

  FOURTEEN

  A ziplock plastic bag full of Homies is on the conference table in the recently rented production office. Homies are small action figures that come in bubblegum machines and cost fifty cents each. Paul uses one for each character to storyboard our movie, he pushes them around on a table to show the cinematographer where he imagines each actor will be in each shot. My father looks like Johnny Cash—black cowboy hat, long black coat. I look like a wide-eyed urchin—shirtless, suspenders, carrying a banjo.

  THE costume designer (Aude) comes into De Niro’s office with a collection of bags. We need to pick two—one for when my father first appears at the shelter, one for when he’s been out on the streets awhile. When my father crossed the threshold he was still holding his life together, or trying to appear to be holding it together. For that we decide on a red and blue Naugahyde flight bag—stylish, in a downtrodden way. The other one, the one he will carry after he is barred from the shelter and living on the streets, is, simply, a paper bag with some duct tape holding it together. I point out that there should be more tape around the handles in the final scenes, that the paper bag should be inside a plastic bag, to keep it from the weather. De Niro and Aude refer to my father as Jonathan: This is for when Jonathan has been sleeping outside for a few months, she says.

  SEVEN of us pile into a van to visit abandoned Catholic schools as possible locations for Pine Street. Several of these schools have been recently closed down—the Catholic Church has hit hard times, between the sex scandals and the economy. We visit four or five—each looks perfect, each still thick with an air of punitive charity. The one we settle on—St. Patrick’s—is in Little Italy. In one room, on a bulletin board, the word INSPIRE is written out in two-foot-high letters, using clear pushpins, though it has been left unfinished. In another room Martin Scorsese went to this school is chalked onto a blackboard. Paul asks if it could pass for the shelter, and I look around: If we line up enough beds in the gym, sure. Almost anywhere could be a shelter—people sleep in trashbags and in cardboard boxes. If there is nowhere else they sleep where they fall.

  WHEN he was shipped to Roscommon I salvaged several boxes of my father’s things—notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, books, letters, ephemera. It’s all in the attic of a house my pal Debra lives in upstate. At my request she culls it down to one box to send to De Niro—on top she places a letter where my father concedes that I might win a Nobel Prize before him. A few days later I open the box in De Niro’s Tribeca office. I pass De Niro a photograph of my father as a young man, wearing a tie and a plaid vest and a suitcoat, posing in front of what looks like a grounded fishing trawler. He’s good-looking, De Niro says. Everything he wears is a costume, I tell him. A rubber band holds several small notebooks together, the top one has Montag’s Blue Horse Notebook on the cover, a horse’s head centered between the words. The writing inside is in my father’s handwriting—light pencil, hard to decipher. At the bottom of one box are four worn orange binders—my father’s unpublished novel, The Button Man. I pass them to De Niro. The Button Man is the project my father put all his chips into, what he gambled his whole life on.

  PAUL looks through the boxes for one letter—the rejection from Viking Press, which describes my father’s writing as a virtuoso display of personality (yet its dosage would kill hardier readers than we have here). Paul imagines my father—De Niro—carrying this letter with him everywhere as a totemic object, unfolding it when his faith in himself flags. After Suck City came out, a woman got in touch with me—she’d written another rejection letter to my father, this one from Little, Brown. She told me that she sincerely admired his writing, yet she was only an assistant, she wasn’t the one who made the decision about who to publish. The name she signed to all her rejection letters (Sandra Brown) was not her own—a pseudonym to protect her from disgruntled writers. My father had Sandra Brown subpoenaed to testify as to his character and talent when he was being sentenced for robbing banks—this was how he discovered that Sandra Brown did not exist. Telling the story now, he still seems genuinely crushed, more crushed about that than about the part where he’s sentenced, which he relates with what seems like bravado. In the boxes Debra sent us I find a letter that suggests that the woman he knew as Sandra Brown eventually ended up knowing my father a little better than as simply another rejected writer.

  AUDE sends me a link to photographs of De Niro dressed in various outfits. I’m unsure what I’m supposed to say—this one with the sweater looks like something my father would wear, but this one with the trenchcoat looks like someone who is trying to pass himself off as a dandy, which is something my father would do. A light-colored coat or a dark-colored coat? Scully cap? Fedora? And how will it change over the course of the film? What will he lose, what will he replace it with? We are trying to contain seven years into one hundred minutes, we will have seven weeks to do this, we’ve been working on it for seven years. Aude tells me that it is eerie, the parallels between her father and my father, that she will tell me the story one day.

  A producer (Andrew) is on the phone with a lawyer for Focus, they are asking me about characters in the book, they need to know if anyone will sue us. Beady-Eyed Bill? Alice? Marie? Skid? All homeless, all were living on the extreme margins of the city, it is unlikely any are still alive. Your father? I can sign for my father. Ivan? Richard? Both dead.

  Good, the lawyer says.

  FIFTEEN

  ON Radiolab I hear a story about a long-term care facility in Germany that has a problem—a resident will sometimes make it through the doors to the outside and wander off. It can take hours, or days, to find him, and in those hours, those days, terrible things can happen. The facility strikes upon a possible solution—they will set up a fake bus stop outside the building, on the sidewalk where a bus stop might be. It will be, essentially, a stage set. The plan works—now, when a patient escapes, she goes straight to the bus stop and waits, until a nurse or an orderly comes out, sits beside her. If this were a play, this is how it would begin. It’s a beautiful day, the orderly says, where are you going? No matter what the resident answers, the orderly says, O, I’m going there as well. They talk awhile, waiting for a bus that will never come. Then, when the resident forgets what it is she is waiting for, the orderly asks if she’d like to have lunch, and they go back inside. Of course, the facility has to explain to the rest of the neighborhood that no bus will ever pull
up to that stop.

  THE first time I visit my father in Roscommon he’s a wreck, barely lucid, seemingly overmedicated. Drugs are necessary, a nurse tells me, to detox him. It seems he won’t last much longer. The next time I visit, a couple months later, he’s transformed—his hair is cut, combed, he’s gained back a little weight. Pleasure to see you, he says, like he always says. He is, I realize, not drunk. This is the first time I have ever seen my father not drunk—is this his true self? They treat me like I’m a millionaire here, he tells me. Three meals a day, doctors, a room, but I got no money. I don’t know who’s paying for all this. Don’t worry, I tell him, we’ll work it out, you just get better. The next time I visit he takes me aside, asks if I can give him a lift to Scituate, he wants to visit his father—his father died forty years ago, I see no need to tell him this. He can crash with his old friend Ronnie Fallon—Rotten Ronnie. He lives up on Third Cliff, my father tells me. I know, I say—I think Ronnie is dead as well, but I’m not sure. I say, Sure, we’ll go to Scituate next time. When I visit next I’ll bring him a painting of Scituate that had hung on his apartment wall. I’ll bring him a potted plant, a leafy thing (he’d had many plants in his last apartment). I’ll bring him a copy of my book. The next time I visit all these things will be gone.