Cosmo (9 page)

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF SOMETHING

 

 

 

I

 

M
cConaughey loved the Painted Desert for its emptiness, its flat inhospitality. He loved it for its tiny unthinking lizard brain, buried miles beneath the buttes, dreaming its quiet dreams like some sleeping, insane god. How the chalky browns and whites could explode into lavenders and coppers, glorious pinks and yellows, spilling into canyons and valleys that would never feel the tread of a boot. The heavenly shadows of mesas, the secret, life-saving nectar of cacti. As a kid he loved stories of criminals tied to anthills, of horses keeled over from thirst, of terrible yawning jaws of human and mammal and monster skulls half-buried in the shifting sands. It was the tarry stop
smell of it, the whipping gales, the grit of rock in his mouth; how suddenly the wind could rise to freeze his blood as the sun dropped low and gory, ripping out his guts with its beauty. How easily a rattler could nip his heel and stop his heart. To boil it down: it didn't care about him. The buzzards hanging perfect and still in the painful blue sky, waiting to eat and digest and shit him down onto lonely, passing traffic. This was a place for rocks, not people. It hated his paper skin. It hated his gentleness.

Yet here he was, Matthew McConaughey, squinting over the dash of his beloved van behind tortoiseshell shades as the light seared through the glass and stuck his naked, sweaty flesh to the leather seat. McConaughey drove naked in the desert, always had – he felt entirely alone, and so why not feel the heat on every inch of his body, the raw lash of the passing wind against his temple and cheek and pubic hair as he cranked down the windows and cooked. On this summer day in the twenty-eighth year of his life, McConaughey headed south, ostensibly lost, though he knew if he unfolded the wrinkled state map at his feet he would find his way home. Soon the Petrified Forest Road would recede to a mote on the horizon, and he'd turn onto Highway I80, having then the choice of right or left, east or west – of more flat, open road or a town, a beer, a bed – the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity. Before nightfall, he'd be close to Silver Creek. Tomorrow he'd reach Mexico, if he gunned it, and so he did, fine to be lost and alone in the
big empty
, curling his toes over the sooty gas pedal and kicking the map away.

The van, like all his vehicles and animals, had a name:
Cosmo
. It was his personal chariot through good times and dangerous places – hell, the whole cosmos, if his head was screwed on right. It was his key to adventure, immaturity, boyish exploration, and he loved its white base coat and slick blue stripe, its dependable, beat-up attitude (not the kind of thing you'd expect from the star of
A Time to Kill
, let alone
Amistad
). He liked to think he could count on Cosmo's curving, faux-wood walls, the soft bed for napping behind him, the captain's chair to his back draped with stained flags (of the Lone Star State and the U.S.A., overlapped), the bead curtain separating forward from rear decks, the blue carpet beneath his sandy toes and the glittering disco ball rocking on its ceiling screws. Today, he kept the television quiet, but blared his Amboy Dukes
CD
– Ted Nugent's motorcycle guitars on ‘Journey to the Center of the Mind' revving from six speakers, subwoofers, flowing up through his butt to hammer its way through his trembling hands.

Native American carvings and tokens – Navajo, Ojibwa, Aztec – dangled from short lengths of dental floss attached to the roof. A small brown Smoking Indian, just for the kitsch, rotated endlessly from his rear-view mirror. They were his talismans, wards against losing his path, against the demons that crowded lost roads and wayward travellers. Little pieces of the land held aloft to reassure the sleeping lizard god beneath his wheels that he came in peace, that he had prepared his offering. The ground begged for water, and in a place of such heat, human moisture was the most holy, precious gift. Clutching his penis one-handed, he aimed his stream of urine into a red plastic funnel attached to a tube leading beneath the van, sprinkling his piss along the asphalt in tiny droplets.

‘You're welcome,' he said breathily to the road, to no one, swigging from his bottle of mineral water and shaking his dick dry.

Beside the Smoking Indian, attached to his rear-view mirror by plastic clip, hung his reliable tape recorder, recently loaded with two double-A batteries and an unused cassette. He turned down the Dukes and made another entry in his road diary.

‘Time: 3:04 p.m. Making for the I80. And then, well, the sky being the limit, we don't know … This
is
a voyage, all right … And something …
some
thing is
definitely
going to happen. But don't get impatient, now. Let that
some
thing come to you.'

He pressed
STOP
. Maybe that last entry was unnecessary. Just a sigh to fill the silence. So far he'd done no profound thinking, but he knew if he kept driving the thoughts would come. The muses would start speaking to him, come whispering in under the radio and dash as he let the blankness purge all mind-fucking trauma. Muses, spirits, whatever – he needed the blankness to clean out his brain, give him the cherished white page upon which he'd record some mental masterpiece, some dexterous feat of thinking to save him from his city-based, head-clutter funk. He'd done some of his best acting alone, just Matthew vs. the recorder, working out his shit, practising his accents and tricks at delivery. Indeed, he'd recorded his greatest insight on the same device: a bit of wisdom that came to him last year on a nighttime highway in northern Texas, where he realized that true acting involved the
head
, not the
heart
. Only the head could get sucked in. A mature heart would stay put, no matter what sacrifices were made, so it made no difference how deeply you delved into a persona or how methody you got pursuing a role. If you knew this, you could allow yourself to get reckless, to lose for longer periods whatever you thought was some essential
you
. He had no fear, now, about going the extra mile, or going to those dark places certain roles required. Spielberg taught him some of that. So did Joel Schumacher, and the Buddha, and his father, and Val Kilmer, but it was mostly a Matthew original, thought up while doing his roadwork, confessing for his recorder.

Here's a real confession, he thought. He hit
REC
.

‘I don't want the day to end. I'm happy to be here.'

He let the wheels spin on the tape, recording dead air, the distant sounds of the highway and the weird whispers in the rushing wind.
Happy to be here
, he thought.
Why?
Because every city, cellphone and email meant a miniature catastrophe. Every convenience store, grocery store, pharmacy, doctor's office in every town across the country: a tabloid shot of him and Sandra, neither of them smiling, at some early-evening L.A. premiere. He couldn't remember the day or occasion, what the goddamned weather'd been like (though it was always sunny, he recalled: that one constant hurt). What could he do now but run, burrow, hide? He was tired, felt sick to death of heartache. The desert meant total erasure; it meant a fade-out to a new scene.

‘Something's got to happen,' he whispered, though not entirely sure how that something would turn out. There were two irksome worms troubling his conscience: one romance-related, the other a matter of career. He'd broken out of his Dave Wooderson,
Dazed and Confused
obscurity with the John Grisham project
A Time to Kill
, feeling that the time was finally right, that his moon had lined up with some ascendant star. The re-release of
The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
merely amused him, now that he was famous; let all the mainstream filmgoers puzzle over his hammed-up role in the straight-to-video, schlocky gore flick. It amused him in the same way Cosmo could put people off, remind them he was wise to the head game of Hollywood, that he didn't exactly
want
to fit in. And then he'd scored his next big shot, one of the surefire films of the decade:
Amistad
, historical tear-jerker, December release, with Hopkins overacting as John Quincy Adams and Spielberg almost frighteningly confident at the helm. It was like winning the lottery. How could he fuck up a film with such star power, about something as unanimously cherished as abolition? Got to play another smart-sounding lawyer, too: James Baldwin, southern gentleman and estate attorney, much like in his lucky break as the southern-born defence attorney Jake Brigance in
A Time
. All the right conditions, and he thought he'd kicked it straight through the posts: Oscars and Golden Globes, whispers of promise in the flashbulb air. Especially after his earlier summer exposure in the high-grossing
Contact
, which had him billed second to Jodie Foster and generally commended for his laid-back, soft-toned approach to playing a holy man. But what was the miserable, memorized consensus? Ebert put it plainly: he was ‘not much moved' by his performance.
TV
Guide
thought his accent ‘unidentifiable,' his mannerisms a ‘liability,' said he was still too much the ‘dude from Texas.' The
San Francisco Chronicle
called his passionate exclamations ‘broad gesturing,' his overall portrayal ‘close to embarrassing.' There were some good reviews, sure, and thank the sleeping gods, but the split decision was pummelling, tripping him up with a hollow sort of fatigue: a hurt that kept on like a gnawing, persistent hangover, reminding him that lightning, as the saying went, only strikes once.

Then it all collapsed with Sandra: a pain that compounded the disappointments of those divided reviews. Everyone could see the honest gut-check chemistry between them. They ‘sizzled' onscreen, wrote the journalists; the Deep South sexuality was like thick grease between them, coating them, slick and irresistible. They seemed powerless, innocent of design, as all the mags and
TV
spots started the rumours before they were even true: that Sandra and Matthew were an on-set couple, an affair in the making. He saw her as a geeky girl who couldn't care less about how she was perceived. He dug her, dug the five years she had on him, dug the way her laugh turned to a honk, dug her heavy-lidded gaze. They could play together; they could high-five, wrestle, burp. He knew she dug him back, but maybe it was all the pressure, the articles and the gossip sheets and the surreptitious snapshots, all that public certainty, that sealed the deal. Maybe. Maybe, in some other, kinder universe, it would have been better to meet away from the camera's imperious eye, to find their own pace, let things fall more naturally. In any case, it happened: they touched in trailers, they made love, they were out in public, and that was that. She'd been a rock throughout that whole crazy year, the New York and L.A. premieres of
Contact
and
Amistad
, the hoping and praying, the long periods of weariness and moping after the mixed reviews. She'd been the first ear for his fears, a
golden
ear, willing and giving and so patient it made him cry, coaxing thin rivers of tears from his eyes while he toked from his three-foot bong on Cosmo's rear bumper.

Her eyes were wet with crying, too, on the night it finally fizzled – fat, salty tears that he would kiss away, and that one-in-a-million wisdom he'd never find again. He was sweating buckets, not from the night (which was breezy and cool) but from the dread of what was coming. They pressed their foreheads together, fogging up the windows with their heat, saying they loved each other but it
just wasn't right
– that it wasn't being
in
love. And it was exactly what he'd been yearning to say, knowing through the heavy spring rains of '98 that it was doomed, drawing them toward this quiet confrontation. The urge to see her had shrivelled during their extended time apart, they were talking less and less, and soon he'd begun to believe that their love wouldn't have happened if not for the media's meddling, the public's demand for the beautiful picture of their pairing, which seemed so right. He felt a relief in voicing it, and they spoke in soothing tones, crying a little over what could have been and for the time they'd had, which he knew would stay like a damp, bittersweet chill in his bones. They kissed, slow and on the lips, the salt of her sweat beading there against his tongue. And then she slid the door open and left the van, gave a last small squeeze to his hand, called him
Matty
. He slept in Cosmo's stale sheets until just before dawn, waking to a headache, to a clutching paranoia and regret: that even if there was no more thrill, no real connective tissue, no
reason
, there was still the past, and the fanatical force propelling him to hold her and envision some impossible golden future together, denying and delaying all the fine-cutting loneliness that was waiting high above, like a hovering buzzard, falling feather-like to rest and claw at his stomach.

But that was all gone. That sun had set, and here he was. Alone. Healing.

‘Happy to be here,' he said again, before stopping the tape.

He reached an intersection. A line of automobiles had stretched behind him; he realized he'd been doing ten or twenty under the limit. Dwelling on all that baggage. Journeying to the centre of something. Sporadic cars and trucks thundered by on the I80, most heading northwest. McConaughey waited for an opening and merged, throwing Cosmo onto the road and following the main flow of traffic, instantly disappointed that he'd taken the more popular route. He wasn't
about
the popular route; he wasn't
about
going slow. He was all about trailblazing, speeding along the road less travelled. He'd turn off on the first desolate stretch that presented itself, he decided, as long as it meant plowing south, toward the heat and naked expanse that sat between him and the vigilant border: a place that would reward his loneliness, and in its absence both absorb and forgive. He drained the last drops of his water and threw the plastic bottle over his shoulder, where it came to rest amid the camp and detritus of his life.