And Sons (8 page)

A.N. D
YER
’
S OLDER SONS
, Richard and Jamie, I knew quite well. We shadowed one another in New York, within the crosshatchings of our fathers, my older brother squaring with Richard, and I with Jamie. It seemed no matter where we were, the Dyers and Toppings were within shouting distance—New York, Southampton, Hobe Sound—brought together by mothers who took the obligation of our fathers’ friendship more seriously than our fathers ever did. I think these women hoped that the continuation of this history might provide the missing words from these heavily redacted men, as if we might provide a full and pleasing account of their life together. We boys attended Buckley, then Exeter, and though Richard was expelled during his upper year for drugs (marijuana in general, LSD in particular), he managed to rejoin the cast at Yale, thanks to his name as well as a tenacious intelligence. This reunion lasted all of six months and ended with a cocaine-fueled car accident and a passenger’s ruptured spleen. His next semester was spent in rehab, the first of many stints. Since we are on Richard, we might as well stay with Richard, who at the time of this story was forty-five and living in Los Angeles, Anaheim to be exact. He had been in Southern California for twenty-three years, after his third and final attempt at college, at UC Irvine. Being an exile from the East was a point of pride for Richard, like a solid golf swing in a game he despised. Fifteen years sober, married with two children in their teens, Richard was handsome in the style of generations of handsome men who marry and pass along their handsome genes like pieces of family silver, in a pinch pawnable. His face was colored with almost exotic damage, like a psychological tan. He. Had. Lived. And similar to an athlete who has a hard time shaking
past glories, who misses the sanctioned violence of football or hockey or lacrosse, Richard Dyer was stunted by the depths of his early misery.

I myself was never a fan, but that’s beside the point.

The day after my father’s funeral, Richard had perhaps the most important meeting of his life. Right in the middle of his normal routine as an addiction drug counselor at Promises—group in the morning, one-on-ones in the afternoon—was a forty-minute drive to Culver City and the Sony lot, in particular the Judy Garland building and the ground-floor office of Rainer Krebs, through this door here. The interior seemed swiped from the 1950s of the imagination. Each piece of vintage modern furniture was a classic from that decade, along with the color-field painting on the wall and the rya rug on the floor and the most beautiful standing lamp in the corner, its black and red and white shades resembling hairdryers for three perfect pinheads of various height. Truth be told, nobody from that era ever lived in a room like this; what was once straightforward and utilitarian now stretched up on its toes. But it was an impressive collection, even to a nonexpert like Richard, who walked in and had the knee-jerk desire to smear his feces all over the wall.

“You recognize it?” asked the EVP in Charge of Production. His name was Curtis and he wore a bow tie and a seersucker suit and that was all Richard needed to know about the man.

“Recognize what?”

“The je ne sais quoi of it?”

Richard, on his best behavior, shook his head.

The pre-meeting, a minute old, was already shaping up to be a disaster.

“That’s a clue,” Curtis said.

“A clue for what?” asked Richard.

“Think French, think nouveau roman, think Academy Award winner.”

“I’m sorry?”

“
The Erasers
,” Curtis said, grinning like the canary that had eaten the cat.

Oh Christ. Richard hadn’t seen the movie, not yet, which was stupid since it was their most successful release, both critically and commercially, their obvious pride and joy, and he should have at least watched it before the meeting and been prepared to talk about it and tell them how much he love-love-loved it. Typical. His big chance and he had already sabotaged himself, like the loser he was and the loser he would forever be, from clueless boy to idiot teenager to delusional adult.
Who are you fooling, you motherfucking shithead?
The old Richard could have gone on like this to the point of running to the parking lot and doing complicated crack math in his head, but the new Richard (5,475 days sober) took a fair-minded, even-keeled breath and pushed his shoulder against that banging door. “Oh yeah,” he told Curtis, “I see it now. Such a wonderful film.”

“You remember Daniel Dupont’s office. Well”—Curtis let his expression hang for a moment, almost like a boxer’s taunt—“here it is, exactly the same, except for the rug. The rug had to be changed. Obviously.”

Richard nodded
Of course
.

“We don’t believe in props.”

“Oh.”

“For us, reality is the key.”

Richard—“Absolutely”—whatever the hell that meant. In a flash he pictured punching this Curtis guy in the nose
—pop
!—his knuckles perfectly designed for the bloodying of seersucker. The thought calmed him down. But he winced at how he started kicking the poor man in the head. His fantasies always turned into felonies.

“I tell you,
The Erasers
was an amazing project to work on,” Curtis started to say, his hands impatient, as if he constructed balloon animals in his spare time, “because I’m a huge fan of Robbe-Grillet and I remember reading
Les Gommes
at Brown with Coover and thinking even then that with the right tweaking this could be a terrific film. Very strange, very compelling. I’m the one who brought the idea to Rainer, just like I’m bringing you to him, or him to you, but that’s my job. I’m a facilitator. A connector. I thought it was going to be a hard sell—Robbe-Grillet, not you—but Rainer understood the potential immediately.”
Hands in need of something heavier than air, Curtis picked up a small wooden sculpture, a modernist totem carved from ebony. He could have been Yorick if Hamlet were the skull. It was clear that Curtis was part of that Ivy League crowd that Richard called the Moveable East, innately privileged yet no longer happy with the idea of simply making money, these pseudo-creatives embracing the business of Los Angeles, with its ease of living and its lifestyle of plausible deniability. Curtis smacked the sculpture against his palm. “This Noll right here is what Wallas used on Dupont’s head. It’s probably worth thirty thousand, but as a piece of movie memorabilia, who knows, maybe fifteen more. Rainer doubled the value like that.” Curtis put the sculpture back on the credenza, readjusted it numerous times as though its proper alignment would guarantee him a sleek afterlife. “But that’s what we do,” he said. “Attention to detail, Integrity toward the material, Respect for the artist.” Curtis stepped back from the sculpture. Perfect. “That’s the kind of place this is.”

The place in question was called Aires Projects, a production company under the umbrella of Sony Pictures. Aires had declared an interest in one of Richard’s screenplays, which was amazing, not the screenplay but the interest, amazing because Richard had basically given up on the screenwriting experiment. Over the last eight years he had written four and had landed an agent and a handful of meetings but that was about it, the
it
losing its meaningful referent, which was fine. Richard was perfectly content with his twelve-plus years in the trenches of substance abuse counseling. It was a good job, a sane job, a job he thrived in, bringing a particular brand of tough love to the process, breaking the body and its wants down to base mechanical function, emotion and ego the unwanted fuel. He preached a form of Radical Honesty and Personal Transparency. Some people even told him he should write a book on the subject, and though the idea of self-help literature turned his stomach, he often found himself coming up with imagined titles—
The Lasting View
—and perfect first lines—
When darkness falls, the window becomes a mirror
. These thoughts usually hit him during the first few miles of his normal eight-mile run, when his body preached the importance of exercise, his breathing a perfectly
composed pop song, verse-chorus-bridge, but by mile five started to go atonal with all the deceptions, all the rationalizations, the near-manic extremes, the nineteen vitamins a day, the regimented breakfast of blueberries and kale, his confidence splintering near the seven-mile mark as he considered his career helping fellow fuckups, his sense of accomplishment losing its wind, his wife and children falling behind, until his father invariably peeked in, disappointed at the square footage and the limited scenery—this is your life?—but by mile eight, as Richard made his final sprint across the Santa Ana River and headed home on South Street, all these old feelings that chased him shifted into action, a building about to explode, a killer stalking his house, the love of his life leaving on an airplane, one of those scenes in which our hero has to run, and it was here, in these cinematic equivalencies, that Richard became happiest. As many people know, or know by way of cliché, everyone in L.A. has a screenplay in their back pocket. Whatever the dubious truth of that claim, the idea can settle on your shoulder and whisper dialogue in your ear until you’re touched by the spirit and born into believing again. Hollywood, like God, needs constant feeding.

The thing is, Richard did have talent. As a boy he wrote comics that Jamie illustrated, stories like “The Destructor” and “Fealty Blaze,” which we all read with great gusto. I was a particular fan of “The Coarsers of Bedlam” and its tale of Random Coarser, who had to kill a person every week in order to keep Death from his terminally ill son. The ending, with Random’s suicide and the older son’s awful new responsibility, still unnerves me. Later Richard devoted most of his writing energy to his journal, which he maintained with teenage vigilance; whenever anyone came over, he made a show of Shut the fuck up until he had finished a particular entry and if you called him a pussy or a fag, as my brother once did, he’d slug you in the stomach hard enough to raise tears. All of this changed when one day his father asked if he could read some of his entries. Most kids would have said, Are you insane? but Richard had been waiting for this moment, had essentially been writing for this moment, and not only did he hand over his journal but he ran upstairs and retrieved his previous journals as well. He
was fourteen years old. For three days his father read without comment, and Richard waited. It was like a tight-lipped confession, a silent unburdening of self. There were long passages concerning the man and his literary fame, how Richard was proud yet tormented, wishing their relationship was better though also wondering if either of them really cared, or if maybe they preferred the easier distance.
Sometimes I think we should talk exclusively by telegram
, he wrote,
with its helpful shorthand and stops
. August 21 was a long-imagined eulogy to his father. April 5 was a make-believe suicide note. There were other things, feuds and crushes and the overall grind of Exeter, drinking beer and smoking pot in Central Park, Whip-its and minor shoplifting, a bit of sex on the weekend, in particular December 19 with Abigail Hunter, but years later Richard was struck by how father-focused these entries were, how every word seemed crafted for the old man and how even today that lone entry on February 9 (and who knew the cause) could stagger him:
Am I a cherished thing?
After three days his father finally returned the stack. “You have a good strong voice,” he told him, and gave Richard a tap on the back, like a doctor diagnosing good health without bothering with the stethoscope. Richard might have hoped for more, but this seemed enough, and for a while his lungs took in mellower air and he only slugged someone when they really deserved it.

Jamie recalled this short-lived period as the storm before the shit-storm.

A year and a half later,
Percy, By Himself
was published.

The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which some considered a consolation prize. The judges praised the story of Percy Sr. and Jr. and their silent struggle for connection, citing in particular the journal entries of Percy the younger and their uncanny adolescent verisimilitude (a word Richard had to look up, thinking it had something to do with vivisection). You have a good strong voice indeed. What a crock. Unbelievably his father pled ignorance to lifting so many of the entries word for word. “I swear I was just trying to get a sense,” he said. “I guess the writing stuck, which is a compliment in a way. There was nothing I needed to improve.” Isabel came down hard on him, calling him selfish and clueless, insensitive to the world outside
his own head. And she tried to comfort Richard by telling him that it was a good book, a really good book thanks to his writing, and that Jr. was the rooting force of the story, certainly the more likable of the two Percys. But Richard disagreed. If anything he thought the character was an apprentice idiot, confirmed by the last lines of the book:

Curtis gestured for Richard to sit, please. “I really like your script,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“It’s smart, it’s funny, the ending sneaks up on you.” Curtis remained on his feet as if playing a game of charades, trying to get you to guess his future success. “We’re all very excited.”

“That’s tremendous,” Richard said.

“Where have you been hiding? Do you have other scripts in the top drawer?”

“Actually—”

“Because we want to be in business with writers like you.” Curtis checked his phone. “That’s the short answer to what will be a longer conversation. We usually don’t go for movies about movies, I mean
Day for Night
, sure,
The Player
maybe, but mostly they tend toward the solipsistic and too clever by half, and the satire, because it’s always a satire, the satire tends to be a snooze. Actors are self-involved pricks, wow, alert the media. But you’ve done something different here. The setting is both real and absurd, and the characters, well, your Martin
Forge is right up there with Geoffrey Firmin in
Under the Volcano
and every other loon from
The Day of the Locust
. Reading these pages I kept on thinking of Brando toward the end, in one of those junk movies he did, Brando as played by Richard Burton stooping to the level of the gruff but lovable grandfather in—sorry, what’s the name of your movie-within-the-movie again?”