The Reenactments: A Memoir Page 8

  IN a play or a film, when one is supposed to be drunk, a bad actor will stumble and slur. A good actor will hold himself more upright, speak even more clearly, more precisely, and only if you listen closely will you sense the booze seeping out between the words (basic Stanislavsky). Profound inebriation has stylized their movements so they are invariably too slow, too intricate, too careful, too distracted, or too unpredictable. . . . I read this in Artforum, in a review of Gillian Wearing’s Drunk. The article describes, in part, the genesis of the piece: the door to Wearing’s studio, in London (I think it was London), opened onto the sidewalk, where a group of homeless street alcoholics gathered every day, all day, and drank. One day, Wearing invited the men into her studio, where inside she’d set up a camera, along with several bottles of booze—mostly cheap wine, the same rotgut she’d seen them drinking. Over the next several days, inside her studio, against a white paper backdrop, she filmed them drinking. And falling. And pissing against the backdrop. And stumbling into each other. And trying to hold themselves upright, with dignity. And fighting. And teetering out of the frame.

  DE Niro will have to drink throughout the film, more often than not from a pint of some nameless rotgut vodka. This is who my father was, this is how he spent his days—he poured vodka into himself. Occasionally he went over the edge—pissing himself, threatening children, wreaking havoc—but more often than not he held it together. He had what we drunks refer to, with pride, as tolerance. De Niro asks, What did your father drink? With ice? In a glass? With orange juice? Always with orange juice? Ever from a flask? Straight from the bottle? A pint? A fifth? A quart?

  ANOTHER version of the paradox of the grandfather’s axe is Sorites Paradox, also known as the paradox of the heap (Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap). It goes like this: Consider a heap of sand, from which grains are removed, one by one. When does it stop being called a heap? Is it still a heap when one grain remains? If not, when did it change from heap to nonheap? A guy who worked at Pine Street when I started—Eddie—used to try to get me to quit drinking. He’d go to his meetings and invite me along. I liked Eddie, but I’d just shake my head—I wasn’t like him, I wasn’t one of them. When my father stumbled through the door, Eddie again offered his hand, but I still wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Grain upon grain. Eddie had been a stickup man, had done some hard time, and ended up on the streets—almost beat for beat my father’s story. To look at him then it was hard to believe he was the same person—at that point he was nearly made of light. He’d distilled his life down to a single room, his work at Pine Street, and meetings—it’s hard to remember how much I resented that he could see through me.

  WHEN I first read about Wearing’s piece in Artforum, it sounded like little more than voyeurism, a tourist witnessing (is that the right word? provoking?) the suffering of others. I took myself to the gallery, and as I stood before it, as the film loop played, Drunk slowly, uncomfortably, convinced me. I can’t say why—maybe it’s the same reason I went to work with the homeless, or one of the reasons—I was a drunk, maybe not as bad as the street guys, not yet, but drifting close. Part of me knew that I needed to place myself that close to drunks, that close to my (possible) future, if I was to have any chance of pulling out of whatever tailspin I was in. Yet even that didn’t work, until my father showed up, and even then it would take two more years for me to even attempt to get sober. Grain upon grain. The drunks in Wearing’s piece know they are being filmed—they pose, they mug, they leer—and then they forget.

  ON the wall of the day room of Roscommon is a sign (the words in capital letters are on little signs that velcro to the background sign):

  Today is SATURDAY

  AUGUST 20 2011

  The Season is

  SUMMER

  The Weather is

  HOT and [a drawing of clouds]

  The Next Holiday is

  LABOR DAY

  In Memory Disorders in Clinical Practice, Narinder Kapur explains that chronic alcohol consumption can lead to marked memory loss and generalized cognitive defects, as well as “disorientation for time and also place.” Forrest Gander offers this: Certain diseases—such as alcoholism— . . . tend to devour memories in reverse order to their acquisition.

  SIXTEEN

  (2009) If anything happens to my father while he is in Roscommon I get a phone call. He cuts his finger, he falls out of bed, his meds need to be adjusted, I get a call. Do what you have to do to make him comfortable, is all I can think to say. After two years of relative stability he begins, for no apparent reason, to (literally) suffocate—something wrong with his lungs, he’s aspirating, that’s the word the doctor uses. He is taken to a hospital, stabilized, then a few days later he’s back at Roscommon, but now he’s having difficulty swallowing. After a few weeks they want to ship him back to the hospital, intubate him, hook him up to machines—they need my okay. A week later I send this note to my half-sister, Anastacia:

  I just thought of you, and thought to update you on Jonathan.

  Did you know he’d moved into a long-term care facility almost two years ago now? His health was slipping, he was no longer able to care for himself, and he landed, as per usual, in a pretty decent situation, considering—Roscommon, in West Roxbury. I see him there every few months, when I can make it to Boston.

  He ended up in the hospital a couple months ago, with pneumonia, and I got a flurry of calls from doctors, as to what level of treatment he would want, as he had slipped further into a form of dementia, so was unable to make his own decisions.

  After much research, soul searching, and (some) torment, I decided to sign a DNR (do not resuscitate), which means that they will not do major medical intervention on him such as breathing machines, feeding tubes, etc. If his heart stops, they will try to get it started. If he needs medicine, they will give it to him. But nothing beyond that.

  That said, I don’t know how much longer he will live. He’s back in Roscommon, back in the routine he was in before the pneumonia, and seems to be well cared for. He has nurses, physical therapist, aides, and, now, hospice workers. A priest visits him daily. I am going to try to see him tomorrow.

  I thought I’d let you know. I hope all’s well with you.

  Anastacia (known as Stacey) is my half-sister, from my father’s second marriage, which ended much like his first (to my mother), with her mother either leaving or throwing him out. Anastacia and I never met, until Suck City came out, then she tracked me down, sent a note. At some point I reintroduced her to our father—we met at a diner around the corner from his apartment, ordered eggs, listened to him tell his stories. He and Anastacia had never really met, not since she was an infant, yet he didn’t seem particularly interested in her, in what she had made of her life—he already knew she was a ski instructor at Vail, he’d told me as much a hundred times over the years, with a type of pride. What else did he need to know? My father named her Anastacia after the missing czarina, as I am named after the former czar—some days he claims to be a descendant of the Romanovs, though not so much anymore.

  IN medieval times monks spent their days, their lives, transcribing the Bible into illuminated manuscripts. Initially some of these texts were written without punctuation—commas, dashes, ellipses—none of it had yet been invented, or if it had it was lost. Suppressed. Not only was there no punctuation, at times there was not even any space between the words, the result being a solid block of text, often framed by illustrations—dragons, antelopes, angels. You’ve seen these books, we call them illuminated. Beautiful, yet the text—no white space, no hesitation, no delay—it was as if they’d forgotten poetry. This was deliberate, arising from what is known as horror vacui—the fear of empty space. The fear was—is—that the Devil will flow into any empty space, which is essentially the fear of thought, or of meditation, or of simply allowing the mind to wander. When I think about where my mind wanders, the bad neighborhoods I find myself in,
again and again (I dream only of the orifices of the body, beyond the body is nothing), perhaps this fear is justified, perhaps I—or my mind—should be kept in a cage. One monk—a rebel, a freethinker—eventually began putting a small mark beside certain words he felt needed emphasis, or that one should linger over for a moment. This opened the door—another monk saw these marks, came up with his own marks, and his own reasons for making them. In this way, over time, these seamless blocks of text were able to break open, once again, into poems.

  I had a handful of days, in Provincetown, with the poet Stanley Kunitz, the last summer of his life. He was one hundred years old, and that summer, when anyone would visit, the time was spent reading Moby-Dick aloud—I would read a chapter, then he would read a chapter. Until the reading began, Stanley seemed far away, almost asleep, sunk into his chair, but as soon as the words began he came alive—I remember he especially liked the part where a sailor falls headfirst into a whale’s body. It was if he were dissolving, gracefully, into pure language. I cannot imagine reading a book aloud with my father, unless it is the book I wrote about him, the only book that seems to interest him at this point. My father is constructed nearly entirely of the stories he tells about himself, each a little life raft to keep his head above the waves. He might (like Stanley), be pure language at this point (if his story were pure enough), yet his desire not to dissolve into it has always felt palpable (but his story is not pure), desperately treading the water below, anything but graceful. I tell friends (if they ask) that my father is in hospice. O, they say, then this is the end. That hadn’t really sunk in, that hospice means the end.

  THE brain creates the mind by creating images. . . . Damasio goes on to speculate:

  The decisive step in the making of consciousness is not the making of images and creating the basics of the mind. The decisive step is making the images ours, making them belong to their rightful owners. . . .

  Here’s an image: Dano, near the end of the film, will find De Niro sleeping outside, and hold up his hand to shield his eyes from a light. I don’t know if this effect was accidental or if it was planned by the cinematographer, but it makes Dano’s palm look like it is on fire. It reminds me of an offering I once made, to a lover who was living far away—I wanted to send her a photograph, I held my hand out to a mirror, and what the camera put in my palm was light. De Niro’s burning hand in The Godfather, Part Two reminds me of this, as does the apocryphal story of Saint Columba, how he stayed up all night, the last night of his life, transcribing the last remaining Bible on earth. The Roman Empire had collapsed, marauding hordes of Huns and Visigoths were burning all vestiges of culture, swarming over what would become Europe. As they stormed the monastery walls, Saint Columba, out of candles, lit each finger of his left hand on fire and held them aloft, so he could transcribe the Bible with his right hand. He finished at dawn, tied the manuscript to the neck of a black bird, which flew it into hiding as his door was bludgeoned open.

  I don’t want my father to die before we make the film about his life.

  I don’t want a note at the end of the film:

  dedicated to Jonathan Flynn, 1929–2012.

  Or do I?

  SEVENTEEN

  (2009) Hospice. I sit and listen to him breathe. If death is the River Styx, then hospice is the boat you use to cross it. A few days later I put up two thousand dollars to lock in his cremation at a special price—this is what the brochure promises. If I wait until the day he dies it will cost two hundred dollars more. Now two men will arrive at the nursing home the morning he dies, carry his body away. The urn I pick out from the catalogue will come in the mail a week later. I get weekly updates. A woman calls, asks if he really is a famous writer. I tell her about his time in prison for robbing banks. He’s a character, she tells me. Six months go by—improbably, he only seems to be improving. If he gets any better we will have to kick him out of hospice, the woman tells me. I thought this was a one-way ticket, I say. It usually is, she says. A week later I get the call—no more priest visits, no more hand-holding, no more candy stripers coming in with balloons and smiles—his one-way ticket is now a roundtrip. The movie is as far from being made as ever, and my father is still not dead.

  (2011) At the production office the hallway to the restroom is lined with chairs, in each chair a person—an actor—hoping to play a homeless man or woman. I know that some of them are—or were—actually homeless, I got Paul in touch with them, I met them through an organization I’m connected with in New York (AIDS Service Center NYC). I look into each face in the hallway, and yes, I can imagine each as a homeless person. Even if I didn’t know, I think I could tell the actors from the formerly homeless—the actors look a little too homeless, a little too wild, and the formerly homeless look a little perplexed, a little uncomfortable, yet more put-together. Again, the formula for acting drunk applies—if one is playing homeless one should try to appear not homeless, one should hold oneself with dignity. In a side room a camera is set up, a blue-green sheet hung on the wall across from it, a chair in front of the sheet. I sit behind the camera, Paul sits beside the camera, an assistant operates the camera, the casting director stands against the far wall. One by one the actors are called in.

  ONE comes in and curls up on the floor without saying a word. One comes in with the ass of his pants ripped out—he turns and shows us, his underwear flapping as he speaks. One is supposed to be a drinking buddy of my father’s, one is supposed to be the bootlegger. Each has only a line or two they’ve been asked to deliver—some have memorized them, some clutch onto the paper. Some need to be fed the line: Get out of the window, you’ll draw the police, or Hey, buddy, got a drink? We go through them quickly—to me, they all seem good. Paul reads from his list—the bootlegger is next. The actor—Vincent—walks in, shakes all our hands. Paul turns to me: Hombre, you want to improvise a scene? Vincent, you’re the bootlegger, and Nick, you’re your father—you want a bottle, but you only have three dollars, and a bottle costs four. I stand up, uncertain, go stand beside Vincent. I am not, in any way, an actor. ACTION. I start slow, all I can think to say is, One, holding up one finger, meaning one bottle. I have three dollars in the other hand, the bootlegger can see how much I have. I’ll bring you the other one tomorrow, I promise. He holds back. I reach for the bottle, he pulls it back from my hand. I offer, I cajole, I sidle up, everything short of begging. And then the next actor comes in, I’m my father again, this time telling another homeless guy about my time in prison. I’m on a bench, looking around the shelter, above it all: Look at these guys, none of them would last a minute in federal prison, their hands out, gimme gimme gimme. My father, it seems, is inside of me.

  ONE room of the production office is for props. Here is the club they will use to beat my father, here are the xeroxes of his letters on the walls, here are the bottles of vodka, and here is the tub I will find him in. A few days ago an unemployed man set himself on fire in Tunisia, today the president of Tunisia flees—WikiLeaks may or may not have had something to do with it. Then the streets of Cairo fill with protestors, and within a week the president of Egypt for the past thirty years will speak about stepping down. This will come to be known as the Arab Spring. Then an earthquake creates a tsunami that floods Japan, killing thousands and destroying a nuclear power plant—to this day the crippled plant is still leaking radiation, yet no one really talks about it anymore. By the time the film is finished, but before it comes out, there will be protests in every major city in the world—in America they will begin in a small park (Zuccotti) a couple blocks south of where we filmed De Niro in the snow. Tomorrow at seven the filming begins, I’m wandering the production office, everyone I know is gone for the day, the only people left in the suite of offices are people I haven’t met. A girl is sitting in the empty tub as I pass, to see if her body will fit. Who are you? she asks. I just wave a hand around the room.

  ONE part of the script troubles the studio—does my father have to be so, well, unlikable? Homophobic, a
lcoholic, sexist, yet especially troubling—uncomfortable—is his racism. At times he assumes black-voice (gimme gimme gimme); he calls a woman who works in the library an “ape.” The studio wonders if Paul can cut the next-to-last scene: De Niro is off the streets, in a new apartment, Dano stops by for a visit, yet De Niro goes off on another rant, once again about how the blacks, my African friends, rape ten-year-old white girls outside my window, day and night. . . . It is the end of the film, and he is off the streets, yet seemingly unchanged. Is there to be no redemption?

  I send these notes on racism (mine) to the studio: