It Chooses You (12 page)

After a long time I began to understand that he would never let us leave. We just had to go. I silently counted to three and stood up. I brushed off my thighs as people do and made thank-you sounds and gestures. As we said goodbye and walked toward the door, Ron stopped me.

Ron: Miranda, quick question.

Miranda: Yeah.

Ron: Do you have family?

Miranda: Mm-hmm.

Ron: Kids?

Miranda: No kids. I just got married.

Ron: Oh, you just got married.

Miranda: Yeah.

Ron: I was going to say, somebody as adorable as you can’t be single. I’ve really opened up to you about who and what I am. And part of the company I have, I do marketing research. I do a lot of things where — well, I can show you better than tell you.

Miranda: We have to go, because we’re —

Ron: Okay, well, I was just going to simply grab something right here and show you.

Miranda: Okay, okay.

Ron: These are Starbucks cards. There’s twenty of them there. Do you see them?

He fanned them out like million-dollar bills, like our minds were going to be blown by these twenty Starbucks cards.

Miranda: Uh-huh.

Ron: I also have Exxon Mobil cards. I have more than twenty of them. I have wallets up there that are full of Wal-Mart gift cards, okay?

Miranda: Wow.

He was showing me his dowry. His nest egg.

Ron: These didn’t come because I stole them. These took a lot of time. They took a lot of patience, a lot of discipline, a lot of keeping track. But with that, with that comes the benefit of, well —

Miranda: Well, thank you. I wish —

Ron: Thank you.

Miranda: — we didn’t have another interview after this.

Ron: Yes. Okay.

Miranda: We could stick around.

Ron: That’s okay. I took so much of your time.

Miranda: Yeah, well, it was really great.

Ron: It’s been a pleasure.

We silently walk-ran to the elevator and Alfred hit the down button repeatedly until the elevator doors opened. Ron couldn’t help but remind me a little of Franko, my prison pen pal — or at least I was reminded of how much I gave Franko the benefit of the doubt. I focused on what was charming and tender about him and I never thought very hard about the person he killed. Who was I to judge? I was so young then that I couldn’t presume murder wasn’t in my future too. It seemed unlikely, but so did everything.

Twenty years later I was warier. Ron felt like a cold spot in the universe, a place that just wasn’t going to warm up. There was still a small piece of me that wanted to be the only one who believed in him, the one he spared, but more than anything I wanted to grab the hand of myself at sixteen, and the hand of my future daughter, and run.

After I interviewed Ron, I had a meeting with an actor who had read my script and was considering the role of Marshall. It was Don Johnson, from
Miami Vice
. As usual, I was early, so I drove around and got lost, which made me late, as usual. I parked on the street and then walked up to a big gate and pressed a button that alerted a video camera. I waved and then tried to say something about how he didn’t need to open the gate all the way because I wasn’t driving in. I held up my hands to the camera to indicate the width of my body. The gate began rolling open, I slipped through, but it kept opening. Even after I was seated inside across from Don, in his den, I could still hear the gate opening. And then it reversed direction and started the long journey home.

Don was good-looking and very solid, the way men often become in their fifties. Sometimes men with this kind of body ask you to punch them; that didn’t happen this time. We talked about meditation and Buddhism. I couldn’t remember if he’d had any drug problems, but I hoped he had come to meditation through recovery. It’s always a relief to me when someone is in recovery; it automatically gives us something to talk about. Not that I’m in recovery, specifically, but I relate to the feeling of trying and failing and trying again. People who have been through rehab are used to talking about this — they’re required to.

Don and I talked about being present and the elusiveness of “now,” and then he praised the talents of his son for a while, which predictably moved me to tears. To keep from crying, I had to do the trick where you contract your butt into a tiny fist and mentally repeat the words
fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou
. We discussed the script, and I suggested he audition for the part, which is the one thing you’re never supposed to say in these meetings — apparently it’s insulting, which I always forget. So the meeting was suddenly over. He walked me out, the gate opened, and it was still opening when I drove away.

I moved to Portland, Oregon, when I was twenty. Portland was the hometown of Gary Gilmore, the murderer Norman Mailer wrote about in
The Executioner’s Song.
I’d read that book when I was fifteen, so I’d been thinking about Portland’s dark side for a long time, but that wasn’t why I’d moved there. I wanted to be part of the Northwest Riot Grrrl revolution and closer to my girlfriend. Still, if that didn’t work out, I knew the underworld would be waiting for me.

I found a job in the classifieds, working for Pop-A-Lock, as a car-door unlocker. The job interview was conducted at a Denny’s, and I was trained in a dump filled with wrecked cars covered with blood and hair and biohazard stickers. I wore a big red vest and a beeper on my belt. I was on call twenty-four hours a day, serving the entire tri-county region. The customers usually looked dismayed to see such an unmanly person come to their rescue, and it often took me upward of an hour to get the door open, but I always succeeded eventually (“bind and jiggle” was the trick). I sang Pop-A-Lock’s praises right up until the very moment I quit, at which point I admitted it was one of the worst jobs anyone could have.

Car-door unlocking was my last real day-job, but the truth is I wasn’t entirely living off my art yet — I was a thief. I stole not only my food and clothes, but pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. One day I swiped a pair of black tennis shoes with velcro closures from Payless ShoeSource. They looked sort of like knockoff Reeboks. An alarm tag pierced the velcro flap of the left shoe, which was why I’d brought a pair of scissors with me. I cut the tag off and put the shoes into my purse. I walked out of the store and down the street and into a shoe-repair shop called Greiling Brothers. I asked the man working there if he could make these fine black velcro shoes taller; I wanted to be tall. He asked why part of the velcro tab on the left shoe was cut off. I studied it hard, as if seeing it for the first time. He leaned his head back, taking in my whole getup, and said something along the lines of “You’re an odd bird.” Not exactly that, but something that made me a bit defensive — which was my primary emotion in those years, understandably, since I had a lot I could be accused of, even jailed for. I responded with something vague about being a performer and needing the shoes for a performance. He said he’d like to know exactly what I did, performance-wise, and so when I picked up the now-taller shoes I brought him a copy of my CD,
Ten Million Hours a Mile.

This was the beginning of my friendship with Richard Greiling of Greiling Brothers Shoe Repair. There wasn’t another brother; he just liked the sound of it. Richard was raspy and ragged, always on the verge of doing something ridiculously dangerous, or saying something flatly profound. In time, I convinced him that if he could repair every part of a shoe, then he could probably also make shoes from scratch. He made three pairs of wonderfully strange, blocky shoes for me that we designed together. Eventually he lost his shop and had to take a job selling shoes at the department store Meier and Frank. By that time he had starred in two of my short movies,
Getting Stronger Every Day
and
Nest of Tens
, and was the inspiration for the male lead, Richard Swersey, in the feature film I was writing,
Me and You and Everyone We Know
. I had imagined that he would play himself in this movie, but in the end I became either cowardly or smart and cast an actor who had a similarly raw, volatile quality — John Hawkes.

I lost touch with Richard for a few years after that. Without noticing, I mentally combined him with John; John’s career successes seemed to imply everything had worked out for everyone. But right around this time, as I was meeting actors and PennySavers, I crossed paths with Richard Greiling again. He looked the same but he said he wasn’t. He described his descent all the way to the very bottom, which is where he said he was now. He was still just as remarkable to me, but I could see he wasn’t kidding. The contradictions between him and the actor who had played him made my heart ache. I re-watched his performances in my short movies and he was really good, probably as good as John Hawkes, just more of a wild card. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake, but it made me wonder just what kind of director I really wanted to be. LA is so many things, but it is also a company town — almost everyone I knew worked on movies, at least part of the time. Which made it hard, almost rude, to resist the rules and rituals of Hollywood filmmaking; I was grateful to be a part of it, in a way. And in another way I was desperately trying to remind myself that there was no one way to make a good movie; I could actually write anything or cast anyone. I could cast ghosts or shadows, or a pineapple, or the shadow of a pineapple.

—

—

—

I purposely hadn’t read
The Future
in a long time; at the very least, the
PennySaver
interviews were occupying me while I defamiliarized myself with Sophie and Jason. I liked to think of the dormant script curing like ham in a hickory woodshed. Each day I left it alone, it got better. And now it was time to check on the progress it had made without me. I printed it out and put it on my desk. I left the room and came back in, pretending I was a snoopy housesitter; sometimes this helps make me want to read my own work.
What have we here?
I said to myself, peeking at the first page and then slyly glancing over my shoulder. By page two I was me again, but I kept going. By the last page I was in a panic. The break had had the wrong effect. The
PennySaver
sellers were so moving to me, so lifelike and realistic, that my script — the entire fiction, including Paw Paw and the talking moon — now seemed totally boring by comparison. I had no new thoughts about how to approach Jason’s scenes, and I had somehow lost the parts I thought I’d solved. Despair was gathering. Only it didn’t feel like the sentence
Despair was gathering
; it wasn’t impressively dramatic like dark clouds before a thunderstorm. It was pathetic and tedious, like a person you don’t want to be around.

If I’d been Sophie, my character in the movie, I would have had an affair at this point. Not out of passion, but simply to hand myself over to someone else, like a child. But even in the movie this doesn’t really work out. And so I thought, as I often do, about the scene in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
where Indiana is faced with what looks like thin air, a void — and he steps into it. He does it expecting he will die but knowing he has no choice. Then, impossibly, instead of falling, his foot lands on something solid. It turns out there is actually an invisible bridge across the void. It was there all along.

Indiana’s predicaments are always life-or-death, so the daring move is obvious — it’s the one that will make the audience scream, “Don’t do it, Indiana!” My stakes were much lower. I could give up on the interviews and finish the script, or I could continue meeting strangers, believing that they would eventually lead me to the thing I needed to learn in order to finish the script. The audience probably didn’t care much one way or the other; nothing would make them scream, “Don’t do it, Miranda!” But I decided that Indiana would not sit down at the computer. He would ignore the voices that told him he was just a procrastinator and he would pick up the phone and call Matilda, who was selling Care Bears for two to four dollars each.