Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (42 page)

Let me be clear: the debate as to whether to stay on this show, given the mounting personal price that it exacted from my soul, was among the most dramatic and intense I have ever taken part in. And if ya don’t believe me, ask my wife, ask my team of reps and lawyers, ask the rest of the cast, ask my fucking shrink. For me, the joy that had once been a shining light on Mudville was replaced by, well, something short of joy. But at the end of the day I had a show to do, so the decision was to stick with it, for there was a deep and abiding knowledge that I was involved in the biggest juggernaut my career had ever experienced and that situations like this, maybe, if you are really lucky, come around once in a lifetime. And that’s only if you’re
really
lucky. And for the sake of who I was ultimately responsible to and for what I had worked toward for those many decades, I would try to keep my cool and hold my own, no matter what it exacted from my conscience. And so that is what I did. But it was essential to me to try like hell to do it in a way in which I was as true to myself as was humanly possible.

Regrets? I have a few. But then again, too few to mention. . . .

(CHAPTER 24)

Legacy

It doesn’t seem so long ago, looking back as I have had to do in order to write this, that I was the “kid” on the set, the baby, the one everybody worked around because of how little I brought to the table. But when I woke up one day to find these real young ’uns—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—who had literally just got off the bus that brought them seeking fame and fortune in “tinseltown,” walking up to me on movie sets, asking me questions like, “What was it like when
you
started out?” or “You know where I can work on my craft?” or “Can you give me some advice to get me to feel I’m not just spinning my wheels?,” I slowly started to get the joke: I’m now the “old guy” on set, the elder statesman, the white-haired, wisdom-bearing, cute old toothless sherpa who has lived
so
long that maybe even I, with my limited abilities, can impart a couple shortcuts for these fresh-faced innocents.

Further, I have kids of my own. And my kids have friends. And they’ve all gotten infected with the notion that a life in the arts is the coolest thing they could possibly commit their lives to. And when we spend time together I am reminded of how little they have traveled, how much they have yet to see, how confusing it must be clueing into that one moment that gets the momentum flowing. And I put myself in their shoes. And I think back to that very moment in my
own life when I had all the questions they did, all the concerns, all the uncertainties. And an obsession grows inside of me, an obsession to say something, something of use, something that can spark that moment from which the rubber and the road finally make contact. And so I am asking you to trust me when I tell you that it is for them and them alone I really write this book. Because Darwin looms! My time is short. My kids and their friends are the new hope, custodians of the new world, charged with making a place that reflects whatever it is they have come to hold dear. And so there is desperation on my part to paint a picture for them, to celebrate good ol’ American values that were the foundation that my own journey was a reflection of and to make note of when, where, and why they’ve evaporated in an anxious hope to light a fire under those charged with rekindling them.

My time here has borne witness to a golden period, when there were real iconoclasts walking the Earth, and I’ve watched those times evolve into these, when everybody’s measure of everything is directly linked to the new phenomenon of social media. Everything has come down to what the next guy’s doing—how to either stay with him or get ahead of him in rankings, ratings, hits, and follower counts. That’s the mission for many. The solution is not retro so much, because there’s nothing wrong with embracing technology for beneficial means; after all, it can reach more people. But the solution is a return to that time when a handshake was a handshake, when you said you were going to do something and then you did it. When, if you had a friend, you helped him and he helped you. When, if you said, “I got your back,” it wasn’t some hip, empty epithet you heard on Twitter but instead you meant it and didn’t run for the hills when the shit started to hit the fan, especially from the very people who professed to be your friends. This is what I was taught by my old man and that “greatest of generations”—the group of people who lived during that time leading up to World War II and right in its aftermath, who were not only capable of putting their own lives aside in the quest for some greater good but were also capable of real,
true
self-sacrifice. Not the momentary kind. Not when it’s convenient. Not when it gets you more likes on your Facebook wall.
Not when it makes you more popular. Not when it increases your TVQ. Not when it makes you more attractive as a money earner.

That’s not true heroism; that’s nothing to truly aspire to. That laundry list of names I made back in
Chapter 2
, the one that seemed to go on for way too long, that was but a fraction of the real iconoclasts who walked the earth when my values and aesthetics were being formed. Those were the true heroes, truly guys you can envision saying, “Fuck this shit, I’m outta here,” even when all the lemmings were rushing toward something, no matter how empty and wrong-headed that something was.

You can make excuses till you’re hoarse about how those were different times, with different values that are dated, that simply don’t apply anymore, but I say, “Really? A hero’s not a hero anymore? ‘I am my brother’s keeper’ is not a value anymore? That there are things worth fighting and maybe even dying for is not something to aspire to anymore? Really?” Because if that’s the case, if mediocrity finally is the new normal, then maybe we should all just take the fucking pipe. But when I talk about my kids and your kids and that whole generation I am desperate to open a dialogue with, it is alarming. They have no idea of where to begin. Nothing is universal anymore. Nothing is larger than life. There is no unifying cause. Yeah, there are individual little pockets of things we involve ourselves in on a momentary basis, but nothing is being celebrated in our culture that is cathartic, constructive, moving, and makes the ground underneath our feet tremble to the point that we’re shaken to some sort of action or direction.

So yes, if one is looking for and obsessed with finding the elements that exist for our kids today, upon which they can build something of substance, one must first look to the heroes. Who do they have to aspire to? And fuck me, if I can think of a single one! I mean, I don’t wanna seem snarky, but who the fuck are they? Are they the people you see in the top forties in music? Are they the sports figures who go from team to team, scandal to scandal? Are they all those amazing philanthropists who populate the seventeen thousand reality shows that clog my fucking arteries, gearing it toward audiences with third-grade
educations? Well, are they, punk? Maybe I’m missing something, but no matter where I turn, I can find nothing to point my kids to that even comes close to being an idea big enough to build a set of dreams on. And make no mistake, without a dream, as the song says, you’ll never have a dream come true!

So as I approach the rocking chair years of life, I realize that turning our backs on that and looking upon what went before us as hokum, as cornball, is not the best course of action. The things that are celebrated as human decency, true heroism, true self-sacrifice, and with a kind of leadership that was completely iconoclastic during the first half of the twentieth century are nearly forgotten. All of a sudden we started looking inward and becoming obsessed with behavior, idiosyncrasies, human flaws, and all this stuff. Some great accomplishments happened in the second half of the twentieth century, don’t get me wrong, but in the process we lost a template of what truly being human looks like. I dare you to look around in this world and show me ten people who I should aspire to behave like, who I should drop everything and study. Oh yes, there are millions of them where they’ve always been—behind the scenes, making up the backbone of this world, the salt of this earth. But in our leaders? It’s not even possible. It’s weird, and as somebody who has two kids who are just approaching the prime of their lives, where they should be at the peak of their powers, the world we are leaving to them deeply saddens me. My children have countless friends between them, and my friends have kids who have friends, so I’ve seen the ripples of disengagement and uncertainty among a huge segment of our young population. Everywhere I look I’m seeing a generation coming out of school directionless.

I write this book because maybe, just maybe, there are things about my little journey that will make you say, “Sometimes it’s not so good to throw out the baby with the bath water.” Sometimes it’s not so great to evolve to the point at which you lose yourself in the doing, you lose your sense of community, lose your humility, lose sight of the fact that you are part of some sort of collective consciousness, that there is universality of human rights. I don’t know what took us here;
I’m not a friggin’ philosopher. I’m just a friggin’ actor, so I can only just glimpse or guess at what went wrong. But I’m telling you, these are some fucked up times we live in. I’ve never seen such hypocrisy, such polarity, such hatred, such smallness. I’ve never seen such barefaced corruption ruling the day and so many people trying to create so much fear and disdain for so many other people because that’s what they think is going to advance their cause. It almost makes you think we’re in for some sort of biblical epoch. I mean, shit, every once in a while I say to myself,
Maybe that’s what this whole global warming thing is
. I don’t know. All I know is that if you turn inward to that degree and your mantra is, “What’s in it for me?” then we ain’t gonna be around very much longer. And even if we are, who gives a fuck? What the fuck is there to celebrate?

The generation my kids are in seems to have bypassed a sense of perspective when forming their core values. Because their diet has been so steadily informed by the highly technofied, highly corporatized world they were born into, when you make references to the bygone days they look at you like you’re speaking Namibian, if that’s even a language. I am noticing it’s hard to miss what you haven’t experienced. And so that was the point of this, my letter to the young artist, as well: to show me moving through the decades, to gain a sense of perspective of where our country came from and how it has changed. I described what I witnessed around me not only on a cultural level but also on a human level, and I saw how we allowed the corporatization of everything to come to dictate our lives. Everything has become a tiny line item on some vast corporate ledger sheet. Absolutely everything. Name the one thing that’s not just a line on a corporate ledger sheet. Yeah, I guess you’ll still find some old vestiges of the mom-and-pop days upon which the American Dream was founded, but there are only vestiges. Gone are the days of the sole proprietorship. Gone are the days when movie studios were run by movie guys, not lawyers and Harvard business school majors. Gone are the days when competition looked like, “Well, if you’re gonna hire Faulkner to write a screenplay, then fuck you, I’m getting Hemingway!”

Where there once were thousands of corporations, now there are hundreds, because they keep swallowing up themselves along with everything else in their paths. I’m starting to be able to envision the day when there will be four fucking corporations, when the real world will actually resemble what some of these cheesy postapocalyptic movies they are making these days look like. I know—I’ve been in some of them! In the truly scariest of these scripts there are no more ideologies—no more democracies, no more socialists, no more Marxists, no principles at all. There are only corporations. Only economies. Only bottom lines. There is no difference between freedom, anarchy, and oppression. The impulse to be human is no longer of any value, and people have been grappling with this now ever since we started to see the true price one pays when you corporatize everything. Look at these last five years: this economic meltdown, when we realized the games the banks were playing with all of our lives, with all our futures, with our children’s future, and how they cynically came out of it richer than ever before and not one muthafucka went to jail. That’s what happens in the corporate world, bro. They make the rules. They take the human factor out of it. It’s how much the CEOs can make. And they can
really
make a lot when they don’t pay anyone who works for them. So that’s the pickle that we’re in right now. And we’ve got a Congress that’s so fucking racist and a country that’s so fucking racist that they can’t even see a good idea when they trip over it, simply because a guy who happens to have black skin is presenting that idea.

And all of the places we once had that were our sanctuaries where we could go, they also have been co-opted. The music business is destroyed. We will never see a day again when a Beatles, Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, or Frank Sinatra, will emerge, ’cuz there’s no more recording industry. In the other arts it’s the same. I love Hemingway—do you think that guy’s work would’ve seen the light of day now? He’d be a bouncer at a bar somewhere while he scribbled stories in his off-time, stories that no one would ever buy ’cuz they could download ’em for free on some fucking Internet site. All that exists now is, “Who can we find who can sell the most
tickets to the biggest swath of people?” And you usually have to aim so low to make that happen that you end up taking the whole culture down with it. So in my business it’s all fucking dazzle with special effects. Everything else that might reflect the human condition is such a risk, such a gamble, and such a roll of the dice that the “smart money” is betting against it. You have to be a franchised superhero to have a movie made about you right now. What do I learn from those muthafuckas? How is my heart moved by them? How do I get some sort of a sense that life makes sense philosophically and spiritually from watching that fucking fare? We’re just anesthetizing ourselves, and we’re letting these corporate muthafuckas do it. And we’re not fighting back because it’s too big.