A Lotus Grows in the Mud (24 page)

Kindred spirits: Eileen Brennan and me during the filming of
Private Benjamin,
before her accident. (© Steve Schapiro)

I
watch the brown leather riding crop as it slithers down my chest, carving a path around my breast, trailing lower and lower. I don’t dare look up at the person who’s holding the crop. I’m holding on for dear life. I bite my lip until tears come from my eyes. I am helplessly losing control.

Inadvertently, I catch the eye of the perpetrator, “Captain Lewis”—otherwise known as my friend Eileen Brennan—and that’s it. I collapse into howls of uncontrollable laughter. Eileen, who can’t hold it together either, joins me, as do the entire cast and crew of
Private Benjamin.

“Cut!” the director, Howard Zieff, yells out through the laughter, his own face creased with mirth. “Okay, now, let’s try this again.”

We do the scene ten times before we can do it without cracking up.

Eileen and I are on the same wavelength, hearing the same music that connects our timing without words or need for translation. It’s like having a dance partner you’re at one with: no matter where he takes you, he never throws you off balance.

Comedy has its own special language, and in sharing the same rare and unspoken understanding of what’s funny you feel that in some way you have met a soul mate. That’s what Eileen is to me, my comedic soul mate.

Our joyful time working together ends all too soon, and we promise never to lose touch as we do so many times when we fall in love on movie
sets only to get caught up again in our lives. Before we know it, years go by without even a phone call.

I
t is now almost a year later, and Eileen and I have made a plan to meet for a long-awaited dinner and keep our promise to never lose each other.

My children and I are living alone now, in my new beach house in Malibu, while my house in Pacific Palisades is being remodeled. Broad Beach is far from town, and even farther—around forty-five minutes—from my planned rendezvous with Eileen in Venice Beach.

I feel strange tonight, and have a weird feeling that I should cancel. I’m really tired and just don’t feel like going. An indefinable heaviness presses down on me. I’m unable to settle on anything, listless and restless. I so want to see Eileen and share our times together; I haven’t seen her for far too long, but, for some reason, I just don’t feel like it tonight.

Maybe I’m just dreading that long trip down the Pacific Coast Highway late at night. It’s a horrible road, one of the most dangerous in Southern California. Looking out my window into the dark, I shiver. I pick up the phone and try to call her to cancel, but she’s changed her number, as I have many times. Frustrated, I walk around my bedroom, trying on this outfit or that, discarding them all on the bed as I decide what to wear. I try to reach her again, this time through other people, to tell her I don’t really want to leave my children in this house we’ve only just moved to. She’ll get it, being a hands-on mother herself; she’ll understand, and we’ll just rearrange our dinner for another night. But no one has her number.

Finally deciding on what to wear and realizing that I am already late, I kiss the kids good night reluctantly and jump in my car. I secretly hope that she will have given up on me and gone home. Then I could turn around, head back home and shake this ominous feeling.

It is totally dark. I have never known it to be so completely black. Looking up at the night sky, I see that there isn’t a moon. My fingers gripping the steering wheel, I have such an uneasy feeling nagging away
at me. I say to myself, You’d better be careful driving tonight, Goldie. Something bad could happen. Even though I am already an hour late, I drive well below the speed limit.

I turn down Washington Boulevard in Venice Beach and search for the restaurant down a dark street. There it is. I’ve passed it. I look both ways and make an illegal U-turn in the middle of the street. Porsches are good for something. I find a parking spot right in front of the restaurant. Lucky me.

Dashing out of my car, I run straight through the door and see her shining face. She’s here; she’s waited for me. It is so good to see her. Her great big smile makes my heart sing.

“Get in here, girl, and sit down,” she says. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Eileen, I am so sorry. I tried to call you, honey, and cancel. I don’t know what’s with me today. But you changed your number, I couldn’t reach you.”

She throws her head back and lets loose that cackling laugh of hers. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t. Now, have a glass of wine and tell me everything.”

“My God, where do I start?”

We talk about our children; we laugh about our time together on
Private Benjamin
; we order food and play catch-up. We talk about our recent trip down the red carpet when we were both nominated for the Academy Awards. We recall how we both came away empty-handed. I tell her of the sadness of my separation, and we speak of her love life. She makes me laugh, as she always did.

Dinner is great, but it is getting late. I look at my watch and then up at her smiling face. “My darling Eileen, I’m pooped, and I’ve got a long ride home.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

We argue over who pays the bill and I win. We kiss all the waitstaff as we wend our way through the tables and out the door. They close the little restaurant behind us. Wandering out into the pitch-black night, lingering on the sidewalk, neither of us wants to say good night. Hugging
me warmly, she says, “Kiss the kids for me,” and peels off to cross the street.

“Kiss the boys!” I call after her.

Watching her cross the street, backing up to wave good-bye, I feel like there’s a long cord of energy connecting the two of us. Unlocking my car door, I hear her call.

“Goldie!” I turn. “Let’s not leave it so long…”

But she cannot finish her sentence because a car flies out of the night, seemingly from nowhere, slamming into her sideways and tossing her into the air like a rag doll.

I am paralyzed. I can’t speak. I can’t even scream.

Time stops as I watch the car lift my dear beloved light, my joy, my friend into the air. I want to run and catch her, to break her fall. I want this not to be happening, but I am frozen stiff in a waking nightmare.

Her body slams to the ground and lies there, completely still. I begin to shake, my body vibrating from head to toe. People come running out of their homes and the restaurants. But I cannot move. I’m afraid of what I will see. I am afraid that dear Eileen is no longer alive.

I start walking around in circles upon circles upon circles, always the same circle. The owner of the restaurant, the one we were just joking with, comes and puts his arm around me. He tells me he’s called an ambulance. He tries to break my repetitive circling, but I can’t seem to stop. “It’s okay,” he says. “The paramedics are on their way. Everything is going to be okay.”

“No, no, it’s not going to be okay,” I tell him. “No. No. This isn’t happening.”

Looking across the street, I see people crouched beside Eileen. Strangers. Breaking the momentum of my little circles, I find my feet running toward her at last, not wanting anyone else to touch her. I lower my eyes, finally finding the courage to see her face. She looks like she’s sleeping. Her beautiful face seems to sink into the asphalt, as if it were a pillow. The only indication that anything is wrong is the blood trickling from under her head.

“Eileen,” I call softly. “Eileen?”

But she doesn’t respond.

“Oh my angel. My sweet angel.”

Just a few moments before, we were so alive, so happy, so joyful, and then, the next second, everything changed. In the blink of an eye, in less time than it took for her to say good-bye, a darkness descended on our light, extinguishing it.

I see her chest rise and fall, and relief floods me.

“Thank God!” I sigh. “She’s still breathing. Thank you, God.”

I am shaking so violently that my teeth are chattering. I can barely speak. The restaurant owner takes his coat off and puts it around my shoulders. “Come away now,” he says, pulling me away. “The paramedics are here.”

I watch them as they insert intravenous tubes into Eileen with breakneck speed, clamp an oxygen mask over her face and attach her to a lifeline. They lift her onto a gurney. They slam the doors behind her and take off, flashing lights and sirens clearing their path. I start to run after them as she disappears from sight. Standing in the middle of the street, I pray with all my heart. “Please don’t let her die.”

A policeman comes up and takes me by the arm.

“I have to go with her,” I tell him, running to my car.

“You’re in no condition to drive,” he says, pushing my car door shut. “I’ll take you.”

We follow the ambulance, and he asks me lots of questions, but I can’t answer one of them. When we get there, they wheel Eileen through one door and me through another. Looking down, I see that I am clutching her purse. Trying to steady my hands, I go through her phone book for numbers of her family. I call her sister, and I call her ex-husband.

I don’t know how long I sit in the corridor. Nurses keep bringing me cups of coffee, but I let them go cold. Every time the door swings open from the ER, where they are working on her, I stand up, hoping for good news. Finally, a doctor comes to me, his hands limp.

“She’s asking for you.”

The news lifts my heart out of the dark hole it sunk into in that deserted street in Venice. I want to burst in that door and kiss her and hug her and thank God that she made it.

The doctor warns me, “Prepare yourself. Her face is pretty smashed up, Goldie.”

At that moment, all I can hear is that she is alive. I run to her room, lean over her bed and kiss her badly swollen face. Her eyes flicker open, and she looks up at me. She is still so beautiful.

“What happened?”

“Oh, honey, you were in an accident. But don’t worry. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

W
hy didn’t I follow my instincts that night? Why didn’t I listen to what my heart was telling me? If only I had, this might never have happened. Eileen would have waited, eaten and gone home. I would have apologized profusely the next day. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. Why didn’t I listen to my mind?

During her long convalescence, sitting with her and talking to her meant so much to me. It helped relieve the guilt that I carry to this day. While she struggled with the consequences of her terrible injuries, I asked myself over and over what I could learn from this.

“What is it about us?” I asked her one day. “What is the magic of our friendship? And why is it that we felt so deeply connected, even before this happened?”

Then Eileen told me what happened in the back of the ambulance that night. How she left her body and was drawn to the light. How she sensed the warmth and felt her ego falling away, and how she was surrounded by nothing but pure, unconditional love. It wasn’t dissimilar to my experience when I left my body many years before—hovering, witnessing events with a strange emotional detachment.

Now I understand our connection. Our spiritual paths have grown in tandem. It seems that neither of us was supposed to die. We both still have things left to do. Eileen has raised two incredible boys, and she has continued to shine her remarkable light along her deeply spiritual journey.

Our love has left an indelible imprint on my soul. I shall carry it forever.

T
he day is orange, and the smoke from cow-dung fires hangs like a pall across the scorched African earth. I arrive in a cloud of red dust in my Jeep to find a remote mud hut settlement full of statuesque nomads from the Turkana tribe.

The hot wind, laden with dust under an equatorial sun, stings my eyes. Rubbing them, I see a group of half-naked men sitting on their haunches around a smoldering fire. Beyond them, their scrawny goats stand motionless in the glare of the sun. The scene is almost biblical.

I have agonized about leaving my children behind in search of this serene tranquillity that my soul is deeply in need of. It is something that seems to get lost in the Western world I live in.

O
n my way to this Dark Continent, I sat staring out the airplane window at the vast ocean below and wondered if this was too selfish, leaving my family for a short time, just to escape the shackles of my emotional life. But something drove me on; the gypsy in my heart told me I needed to place myself outside my own environment for a while, to make a left-hand turn.

As soon as the cabin door opened and the warm African air blasted me in the face, I knew I was right. Suddenly, I was in another world, on a continent I had never seen before. It felt instantly exotic, instantly dif
ferent. I could feel my pores opening and releasing some of the stresses of my life.

I hired a small single-engine plane, piloted by a beautiful woman. For a moment, I thought I had been transported to the pages of a novel.

“Have you ever been to Africa before?” she asked. I shook my head. As the engines spluttered to life and we took off down the runway, she added, “Then you’re in for a treat.”

We lifted off through the clouds. This was really higher up near heaven.

The first touchdown was on a thin, very bumpy dirt landing strip, setting off a stampede of what seemed like thousands of zebra, sending up billowing clouds of dust. It was the first time I had ever seen so many wild animals roaming free. I screamed, “Look at that! I can’t believe what I am seeing!”

The door opened. When the dust cleared, I came face-to-face with dozens of men from the Masai Mara tribe. They greeted me with megawatt smiles that just knocked me off my feet.

“Sopa.”
They grinned. “
Sopa,
madam.”

“Hello,” I replied.
“Sopa.”
I didn’t know people could smile that big.

Each night, I slept out under the stars, listening to the sounds of the jungle, reveling in the peace I felt inside. Each day, I did things I have never done in my life before. I ate food I’d never normally eat. I went on safari in a Jeep. I took a balloon ride across the Serengeti, watching the animals from a hundred feet up, the silence all around us as we heard their galloping hooves and inhaled their red dust.

After each new adventure, I sat on the edge of a dirt strip in the middle of nowhere waiting for my plane to appear. Sometimes the weather would be bad, and I would wonder, Where is she? Is she in those ominous clouds? Then my fear would kick in. Maybe I shouldn’t be flying in this. I’m a mother, after all. Am I being irresponsible? As always, I was torn between the agony and the ecstasy.

I could hear the droning of the plane’s engine long before I could see it. As if by magic, it found its way through the clouds, circled overhead and floated like a bird to earth. My pilot, looking very romantic in tight
pants, a man’s shirt buttoned low and her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, stepped out of the cockpit. She looked like a
Vogue
model as she stretched her legs.

“Ready to go?” she would say with a smile, throwing me a bottle of water.

I would climb aboard and take the right-hand seat next to her. Then we took off effortlessly down the bumpy strip. Soaring above the clouds, I looked down through their beauty and felt such freedom. I had never seen a land like this before.

“Oh, I live for this!” I told my pilot. “To experience these moments.”

“Yes.” She laughed. “Africa is a land full of moments.”

We touched down next in a place called Turkana in eastern Kenya. The plane kicked up the dust over the high-desert floor, full of boulders, rocks and escarpments. A single hotel sat on a hill above the landing strip, overlooking an encampment of tribesmen on the shores of Turkana Lake. A strange place for a hotel, I thought, but when I got there I discovered why. The few guests who were there were doing the same thing I was. They were people who lived in a busy world and wanted a break.

I was shown to my room—a cot on a cement floor, with a toilet, and a shower that was connected to the hot springs beneath the earth. My father would have loved this. No frills.

That night, the hotel staff invited some dancers from the Rendille tribe to perform for all of us. We sat around a campfire while a series of handsome young men formed a circle and started to jump and writhe and move to the sound of a drumbeat. They were wearing orange loincloths and had orange fabric draped over their shoulders. Some carried ornamental sticks.

The drumming was hypnotic, and the men danced in time to it, jumping up and down, moving their hips backward and forward. Every once in a while, a dancer would go into the center and perform a solo, or others would join him and they would do a movement in unison. I wondered if they were improvising. I know what that feels like, just moving to the sound of a beat. It was so enlivening and stimulating. Watching them dance by the flickering fire, listening to the rhythmic beat, it was all I could do to stop myself from jumping up and joining in.

A moment later, two of the dancers seemed to go into a trance. Their eyes rolled back in their heads, and, I must admit, it was a bit frightening. I couldn’t tell if they were in a state of ecstasy or if I was witnessing an epileptic fit.

I watched a young boy begin to convulse. I later found out that he was filled with the spirit. Then others followed, losing themselves and becoming possessed, and gyrating. For a moment, the cynic in me wondered if it was all theater. But it wasn’t. It was the real thing. I truly was in another world. I couldn’t help but think how extraordinary this experience was. I hoped that one day my children would be able to witness this, and that Africa still would be as unchanged by then.

Early the next morning, we set out from our hotel in a Jeep into the barren desert full of rocks, with no particular path to follow. We were journeying to remote villages, or
manyatas,
as I learned they were called. We had a Rendille and a Turkana tribesman with us. It seems that they don’t speak each other’s language. We first stopped at a settlement with only women and babies, all of them more beautiful than the last. Bony camels stood incongruously on the periphery of the encampment, and I was told they provided the staple food: milk mixed with blood, called
banjo.
I got out of my Jeep and walked toward these women, secretly hoping they wouldn’t offer me any.

“Sopa!”
I cried to one woman, holding my camera up to take her photograph. But she screamed at me unintelligibly and began to throw rocks at me.

My Turkana tribesman told me, “They believe that if you take their picture you steal their soul.”

I understood. On the occasions when I have been cornered by the paparazzi taking one picture after another, I know what that feels like. It strips me of something deep inside. It is as if all the color has been drained away, leaving me feeling like a negative.

W
e scurry on over the rocks and hills to the next village. Here, there are nothing but nomadic men, of all ages. Young and old. Some are sitting on their haunches in front of their reed huts, and I
feel as if I have walked backward through the pages of the Old Testament. Goat hides are draped over the roofs of the huts to dry. There are flies everywhere. I swat them off angrily, but everyone else seems completely unaware as they cluster around their nostrils, eyes and mouths.

I walk up to the men crouched on the ground, and they look at me as if I have just landed from Mars. I say hello, and they all say hello back, I think. In order to become part of the group, I decide to crouch alongside them, hoping to speak with them through my interpreter. But, unbeknownst to me, I am on a slight slope. No sooner do I squat down than I lose my balance and find myself doing a backward somersault in the dust, my bare legs helplessly in the air. Ass over teakettle.

Before I can restore both my balance and my dignity, the men around me begin to chuckle, the deep creases of their laughter lines forming fascinating three-dimensional maps across their faces. Looking up at them from the earth, I start to laugh too, and I can’t stop.

My strange companions can’t stop laughing either. I clutch my stomach. One of them imitates me. Tears stream down my cheeks and theirs too. Several of them flop back onto the earth like me. We are all equals. All dignity forgotten. For several blissful, powerful moments, we are all helpless with mirth. How about that? No one speaks the same language, but we all share this common language: the language of laughter.

I realize in this poignant moment that laughter is a sound. It is not a word. It transcends every language on the face of the planet. It needs no translation. It comes from an unknown sameness—a primordial innate sound that all human beings share regardless of language: It is a sound.
Ha-ha.
It is the sound of joy.

M
y journey continues as I ride in the back of our Jeep, intensely moved by the strange beauty of this sunbaked, barren land; this vast wilderness stretching endlessly beyond sight.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I see a flash of orange in the far distance lifting off the earth. I screw up my eyes. “What is that?” I ask my driver. “Look, over there. Let’s go toward that color.” I point, and he heads the Jeep in the direction of this mirage shimmering on the horizon.

The closer we get, the more the band of color separates, until we can see that it is comprised of six Rendille warriors strolling along in the middle of the desert. Draped in orange cloth, and seven feet tall, they walk toward us with bare feet, flatly.

As we get closer, I see that they are adorned with handmade jewelry and beautiful hand-carved sticks. They look so vibrant in this bleak landscape. What an exquisite contrast they make. Stopping the Jeep, we step out and say hello as they approach. These six young gods smile at us with those bright grins and flashing eyes. I can’t take my eyes off their jewelry. It is beautiful—red, blue, yellow, white and green beads hanging from leather strips around their necks. There are large bones threaded through their earlobes, stretching the skin. Ouch! I think. This definitely gives new meaning to body piercing.

I stare at their jewelry. They stare at my Rolex. For a second or two, I actually wonder if it is a fair trade. At which point one of the men bends his statuesque frame at the waist, takes off his necklace and hands it to me as a gift. I am in a state of bliss.

They speak to my Rendille guide, who nods. They pile in—all six of them—hunched over in the back of our Jeep. Knees and elbows, legs and hip bones dig into one another as we each squash up and try to find our spot. They bring with them the pungent scent of the earth. We drive off, and the rhythmic bounce of the bumpy road settles us into our seats like spring bulbs planted in soft earth.

Suddenly, I hear a sound. One of the men begins to sing. It is rich, a tone that emerges from deep within his throat. Another man quickly takes up the joyful tune and begins to harmonize, filling the space around us. Then the others join in. All six of them are singing now, the sound all around. It is clear to me that they must have spent a great part of their lives sharing notes, learning to harmonize. It is a very different harmonic arrangement than any I have ever heard before. I think it is the music of the gods.

As we bump along the ancient escarpment, the tribesmen sing and sing, the baritones and the tenors, their voices rising and falling like the swarms of flies that dance in tall columns by the water holes.

I can’t help it. I sing along with them, trying to pick up the tune as
best I can. Somehow, they make room for my voice in the tight company of theirs, blending it into a rich tapestry of what is now a Western and African sound. We laugh and sing together for all we are worth, our voices trailing out of the Jeep behind us like a gaily colored kite.

When it seems like we are truly in the middle of nowhere, with not a significant feature to be seen in any direction, my companions suddenly stop singing and ask the driver to let them out. But where are they going? I think. This piece of dirt looks no different from any other piece. It is a great puzzle to me.

Disappointment creeping into my heart, I watch as one by one they unfurl their long limbs from the back of the Jeep and pull themselves up to their full, impressive height. One by one, they smile and say their shy good-byes.

The tangerine sun is dipping below the horizon as I watch these beautiful orange-clad warriors walk off into the distance. Majestic in the sunset, they merge back into the sand and the dust and the sun like the mirage that they always appeared to be. I have rarely felt such happiness.