The Time of My Life (10 page)

“Hey, Lisa,” I said. “I’ve got some news for you.”

“What?” she said, probably expecting anything but what I said next.

“I’m buying a DeLorean.”

“You’re
what
?!” she said, surprise and excitement in her voice. She knew there had to be more—either that, or I’d completely lost my mind.

“I got a part on
The Renegades
!” I said, and whooped. It was such a great moment—the kind that Hollywood dreams are made of. And it was all the more amazing because it came just when we’d been on the edge of despair. Lisa was thrilled, though she did have one concern.

“Shit,” she said. “Now I’m going to have to build that doghouse all by myself!”

After I bought the car, Lisa and I drove up to Simi Valley to show it off to my parents. I’ll never forget my dad’s response when he came out to see us pulling up in the sparkling new DeLorean, with its signature stainless-steel panels and flat, square hood.

“Well, what are you doing driving around in a kitchen sink?” he asked, a big smile on his face. It was obvious how proud he was of me at that moment, and that was worth more than any role or any car would ever be. It was one of the best moments of my life.

The Renegades
was an updated version of
The Mod Squad,
a groundbreaking cop series that ran between 1968 and 1973. I played Bandit, the tough-talking leader of a gang of street thugs, although in my tight leather pants and sleeveless vests, I looked as much model as tough guy. Shooting
The Renegades
was definitely fun, and I was happy to have steady TV work. But I still wanted to find roles that would stretch me more as an actor.

All things considered, though, things were looking up. I was making good money, and Lisa and I were taking acting classes with the respected teacher Milton Katselas. We loved our apartment on La Jolla Avenue, and our circle of friends was growing steadily. Almost three years after moving to LA, we at last felt like we were settling in. We even made plans to finally move the rest of our stuff from New York.

Then, one day when I came home from shooting, everything came crashing down.

I pulled into our driveway and walked into the two-car garage we’d turned into our woodworking shop. I’d just started messing around with a project we were working on when I felt
Lisa walk up behind me. To this day I couldn’t tell you how I knew it, but I knew right away something was very wrong. Lisa put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Buddy, could you come into the house? I need to tell you something.”

I wheeled around. “What is it?” I said. “Tell me now.” I could see she’d been crying, and I felt the blood drain from my face.

“Your mom called,” she said quietly. “Your dad had a heart attack. He’s dead.”

My knees buckled, and I sank to the floor. As soon as the words were out of Lisa’s mouth, I was sobbing, crying like I’d never cried before. I felt sick, like I’d been sucker-punched in the stomach. I don’t know how long I was on the floor, but it felt like I might never be able to get up again.

“He was walking with the dogs out behind their house,” Lisa said, rubbing my back. “He died instantly. There was no pain.” This would be a small consolation later, but I wasn’t ready to be grateful for anything yet. I just couldn’t believe my dad was gone.

My dad, the gentle cowboy, was my source of unconditional love while I was growing up, the steady hand on the rudder. My mother loved us with a fierce, proud, demanding love, while my father loved us without question or qualification. Big Buddy had taught me what it meant to be a man, and he’d shown me that a real man could be tough and gentle at the same time. Seeing his example growing up was a huge influence on me, and I loved him all the more for it.

Born and raised in Wichita Falls, in the Texas Panhandle, my dad had grown up on a small working ranch. There, he learned how to do all the things a cowboy does—doctor and brand cattle, repair fences, ride and groom horses. He was a cowboy in his blood, not just for show. And although his life
wasn’t easy and they never had much money growing up, he always had a smile and a good word for everyone. In turn, everyone loved Buddy Swayze.

Dad and I had always loved being outdoors, and it was comforting in some ways that he died outside, with his dogs, in the beauty of nature. We used to go out into the wilderness together, with just a few supplies and his knowledge of living off the land to sustain us. I treasured those days with him, exploring the landscape and learning the most basic human ability: how to exist in the natural environment. I’ve always been proud of the skills I learned with him, and I still think of him whenever I’m outside, living off the land, or even just appreciating the sights and smells of nature.

As stabilizing a force as my father had been in life, his death had the opposite effect on me. Everything was suddenly off-kilter, and the pain I felt seemed bottomless. I’d never been much of a drinker, but one of the first things I did after my dad died was buy a case of his favorite beer, Budweiser. I hated the taste, but I popped open can after can, trying to get myself drunk. No matter how much I drank, I couldn’t feel anything. So I kept drinking.

My dad’s death was devastating for many reasons. For one thing, it just about killed my mother, who had loved and depended on him for all those years. She was crushed, and felt angry and alone without the man who’d always been there to support her. My mother is a strong woman, but her emotions run strong, too. And losing him nearly put her over the edge with grief. My brothers and sisters were devastated, too, especially Donny and Sean. Losing a parent is hard. But losing a father who was the embodiment of what you want to become as a man is crushing.

For me, my father’s death meant my very identity had changed. My whole life, he’d been Big Buddy and I was Little Buddy. But now that he was gone, I’d have to be the Big Buddy—I was the oldest male in the family, and now I had to step up and be a man. This marked a new level of responsibility, and it started right away. Lisa and I had to plan my father’s funeral and take care of all the details leading up to it. This was difficult enough, but there was one truly horrible moment that showed me just how strong I’d need to be.

It happened just before the viewing at the funeral home. I went down before the rest of the family arrived, to make sure the undertakers had prepared his body and everything was set. But when I looked in the casket, I was shocked. The man lying there looked nothing like my father—they had put too much blush makeup on his otherwise pale face, and his normally wavy hair was straight and stiff. He looked like a clown, I thought, as rage rose in my chest. And I knew it would kill my mother to see him this way.

“Take him back there,” I said to the undertaker, my voice tight. “I’ll do his makeup myself.”

And in the back room of that funeral home, I gently wiped my dad’s face while the tears streamed down my own. I desperately wanted to make him look like my dad again, but I just couldn’t get it—until finally, after a few fits and starts, I got the makeup right and managed to fix his hair the way he always wore it. When I was finished, I wiped the tears from my eyes and took him back out for the viewing. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

We buried my father in a simple wood casket rather than a fancy hermetically sealed one, as it just seemed right to let nature take its course, from dust to dust. I don’t remember much
about the funeral, but I remember wanting to carve his initials into the casket just before we lowered it into the ground. I didn’t end up doing it, and regretted it. He’d always carried an Old Timer knife, and I did, too—it was part of our identities as Swayze men. But when that last moment came, I just watched as the casket was lowered, and then we threw dirt over it, and he was gone.

In the months after my dad died, I began drinking like I’d never done before. I was trying to get drunk, but I never could feel it. In some strange way, I felt like I was honoring my dad, by doing something he loved to do—drinking beer. Like many men of his era in Texas, my father drank a lot, probably too much. And in some ways, I think I was trying to see how much like him I really was.

One thing about being a Swayze is, you never do anything halfway. Lisa was concerned about how much I was drinking, but I didn’t want to stop. Late at night, I’d take my DeLorean up to Mulholland Drive—the twisting, steep part through the Hollywood Hills where car aficionados would come to race. I’d put a case of beer on the seat beside me and go, taking on any and all comers to do suicide runs up and down Mulholland. I never got into an accident, maybe because I never felt as impaired by the alcohol as I probably was. But all the same, it wasn’t safe or smart, and Lisa was understandably worried about me.

In all my life, I never drank for the sake of drinking; it was always a response to some kind of emotional difficulty I was going through. Drinking for me was a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. But it certainly caused problems between
Lisa and me, as she grew increasingly worried about my behavior. She would plead with me to cut back, but I felt a deep, unstoppable need to go through with what I was doing. Every time a memory of my dad popped into my brain, it turned into a fresh, open wound again. His death had thrown me completely off balance, and I didn’t know how to cope with it.

All the insecurities I’d felt over the years came crashing down on me. I was still trying to find an identity for myself. Who was I? Was I just some teen idol, a piece of beefcake who’d never be taken seriously as an actor? Then what was all my training for? When my father was alive, I had his unconditional love to anchor me. I don’t think I even realized how much I’d counted on it. But now that it was gone, I felt the huge void left by its absence. And I felt angry, as if he’d abandoned me.

Lisa loved me unconditionally, too, but I wouldn’t let myself believe that. I still felt stung by her initial response when I’d asked her to marry me. Our relationship has always been passionate, in both positive and negative ways—our love for each other was incredibly intense, but so were our fights. This was the first really tough period in our marriage, and the intensity of it scared us both.

I knew all too well what had happened to so many creative artists—James Dean, Janis Joplin, Freddy Prinze, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix—who got swallowed by their ambitions and destroyed by the choices they made. I had studied their examples to make sure I didn’t end up going down that road myself. But as I soon discovered, whatever you resist, persists. I was drinking too much to prove I didn’t have to drink too much, in a cycle I didn’t know how to stop.

So I did the only thing I knew to do: I buried myself in my
work. At my dad’s funeral, I’d made a vow to live in a way that would have made him proud. The moment when he beamed at me in my new DeLorean was forever burned into my memory, and I wanted to continue to live as if he was watching me. From that time on, that’s what I’ve tried to do.

After I became an actor, I realized my life had a certain pattern to it. In high school, I had worked to become the best football player I could be—and once I hit the top, winning a couple of football scholarships, I stopped playing. I then turned to gymnastics, and the same thing happened: I was working toward the Junior Olympics, at the top of my game— and then I stopped competing. At Eliot Feld, I was offered the chance to perform at the pinnacle of the ballet world, dancing onstage with the legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov. And once I’d made it there, I left.

In all these cases, my decision to leave came partly because of injury. But I also realized that, in reaching these pinnacles, I feared that whatever came next would be a letdown. After you make the Olympics, what’s next? Your face on a Wheaties box? After you dance with Baryshnikov, what’s next? I always needed a goal, something to push toward. And I feared what would happen to me if I reached the top of a given profession, and then had nowhere else to go.

But acting was different. For the first time, I was throwing myself into something that could never be mastered. Acting wasn’t like sports—you didn’t win the world championship and then settle into retirement. No matter how great an actor you are, you can
always
be better. Every role is different, and the learning curve is endless. I was excited to find something that would never stop challenging me and humbled by the chance to make a living at it.

And soon after my father died, I would have a chance to stretch my acting ability even further, by working with one of the greatest film directors in history, Francis Ford Coppola.

The auditions for
The Outsiders
were unlike any auditions I’d ever been to before. Based on the best-selling book by S. E. Hinton,
The Outsiders
focused on a group of “Greasers”—a gang of high school toughs trying to find their way in the world. Throughout the movie, the Greasers clash with the “Socs”—pronounced “soshes,” short for the social upper-class kids. It’s a classic coming-of-age story, fueled by testosterone and violence, and Francis wanted to find young male actors who could disappear into those characters.

The movie’s climactic scene is a giant fight, or “rumble,” between the two factions. So for the auditions, Francis invited dozens of young actors to stage improvised fights on a sound-stage. Usually when you audition, you’re alone in a room with the casting director, director, and maybe a few other people. Auditioning with a huge group of talented young actors brought out the competitive fire in everyone. And because Francis was a legend, having already made
The Godfather
and
The Godfather II
as well as
Apocalypse Now,
everybody was pumped to impress him.

There was method to his madness, because he ended up with an amazing cast of up-and-coming male actors. Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Ralph Macchio all played Greasers, as did a young Tom Cruise, in only his third movie role. Matt Dillon was already a budding star, having played lead roles in
Little Darlings, My Bodyguard,
and
Tex
, but the rest of us were just starting out. And we were anxious to make our mark.