Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (43 page)

So what
do
you do?

Don’t get me wrong—I have nothing against business, and I definitely have nothing against money. Like Barzini says in
The Godfather
: “After all, we are not communists!” And in order for business to thrive it does need to turn a profit; it is obligated to perpetuate its own existence. If it didn’t, then we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. And I understand that. I get that. But at some point you need to make a choice about what you’re going to sell. You got to stand for something. If it’s just money and power and self-glorification because you were able to make money and acquire power for yourself—if that’s what you’re interested in, please don’t read this fucking book. Please unfollow me on Twitter. We have nothing in common, and I don’t want to hear your comments; I don’t want to hear your complaints. I have no fucking interest in your opinion. Does that sound harsh? Over the top? Do I not understand that I am an employee of some of the vast machines I indict here? Do I have no understanding of the price one pays when one opens his mouth as if to bite the very hand that feeds him? Because clearly history has proven that. Clearly I have opened my mouth way too much for my own good. I’ve burned some bridges because of the shit we’re talking about right here, right now. I get it. But hey, I’m writing this book in my sixties because it really doesn’t matter anymore who the fuck I piss off. So if I’m going to
say something of importance to my kids, my kids’ friends, and their friends, then it better be something that reflects all those heroes I’ve been droning on about. Wake the fuck up, muthafuckas: this is our world, and we’re letting it slip down the drain.

As an actor, as a storyteller, I feel like I’m in an anointed sector of the universe because, as I mentioned, it’s a true privilege to be working in the arts. So when I get around charlatans and vainglorious, narcissistic, low-life pieces of shit who manipulate the game, the system, in order to make themselves look good, get rich, feel important, and wield power to lord it over others and their intentions are nothing but corrupt, I take that personally. This is not some casual relationship I have in which I leave the important shit for others to do. This is my church; this is my crusade. This is war! I feel I’m in a war with the desensitization of all these things I’ve described. And that’s what corporatization does. Especially when it imposes itself upon our very culture. I mean we’re at the point now in which you can’t tell the difference between a reality show and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Duck Hunt
or whatever the fuck that shit is that parades as storytelling these days—that’s how efficient the corporatization of our culture has become.
My
premise is that people are smarter than that, that if you give them a steady diet of good shit, they will love it, maybe even more than the shit you give them that assumes they’re asleep at the switch. My faith in people’s innate class and intelligence is far, far more respectful than the impulse to simply appeal to the lowest forms of discourse. That is the bar I would like my kids to assume for their dreams.

What my sons and daughters and all our kids—and us included—have to come to understand is that we now move in an entirely superficial, consumer-driven reality. It’s like a fuckin’
Matrix
world. So there’s nothing more than what brand of sneakers you have, which is the only thing of importance left. It happened because they’ve been inundated with it since they were children. This generation is one born out of corporatization that aimed to turn each and every one of them into nothing more than a consumer. That’s the goal. With consumers, the more a consumer thinks, the worse that consumer is. He’s not
going to buy anything. He’s not going to buy $300 sneakers because a dude’s name is on it. He’s not going to turn on
Fuck-A-Duck
. He’s maybe gonna watch a classic movie that doesn’t have any commercials playing on it, and we can’t have that! Where’s the profit in that? Just distract, distract, distract, and while distracting, throw in some product placement, ’cuz God knows, it ain’t easy keeping those stockholders in their Porsches. The job now is to undo what corporations have done. We have to take back that which is precious in our society and the beautiful institutions of arts and sciences that made up our lives. That’s the job. And if you’re a young artist with all that powerful testosterone and estrogen coursing through your veins, you can do it. You can get into the arts and rescue our culture and reinvent it with human values and human dignity as its guide.

The hard part of trying to help my kids chart a course to success comes with the detritus of what all this obsession with progress has yielded. Gone are the days when you could appear in the next Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, or Samuel Beckett play. All the dudes who might have written the next great American play are now writing for cable television, ’cuz that’s where the money is. So rather than coming up through the great edifice of the New York Theater as I could do when I was staging my assault, that road is all but closed. And it’s not as if, if you are a singer-songwriter like my daughter is, you can be signed by a record label and be provided all the resources they once provided to turn an unknown into a brand. The record industry isn’t even a shadow of its former self, so that road is all but closed. And it’s not as if you can count on that one chance in a thousand that is making, starring, or directing an original film that might find its way to the marketplace—that road is all but closed. Publishing? Journalism? These are the venerable institutions that are on their last gasps, that are doing everything they can to prevent the inevitable, that are all but a historical footnote.

So what do you tell them, these bright, beautiful, fair-haired dreamers who possess every bit as much talent, intelligence, and integrity as any generations before them? Where do they begin? What is it that
they plug into? In fact, the more I obsess about answering these questions, the more I come to think we are probably in as revolutionary a moment as has existed in many aeons. For what does one do when the tide of technology has all but washed away all of the traditional edifices? Where do you turn but to yourself, your own gifts, light, passion, and determination to express yourself and, in so doing, leave something for the next generation to be inspired by? For that is immutable, nonnegotiable. It’s the way this old world’s been working since Jesus was a corporal. So if there ain’t nuthin’ but cynicism wherever you look, and if that just don’t cut it for ya, then the time for reinvention is here. Have at it, kids. The future depends on it!

Oh and hey, sorry to be the one to break this to ya, but ever since we stood upright, life’s been filled with tons and tons of bad news, tons and tons of things that don’t break your way, and tons and tons of things that you would love to be able to control but, at the end of the day, you realize you have zero control over. So you’re always only partially in control, but you’re also always partially in a state of prayer. It all ends up being a compendium, a little bit of good fortune mixed in with a little bit of perspiration and determination mixed in with a shitload of persistence. And even then there’s no guarantees of results, although chances are you’ll begin to see little victories, and the big ones will come from things you couldn’t have imagined. You are going to lose people; you are going to lose things. You are going to lose arguments, wars, possessions. You are going to lose a lot. Even if you’re a winner, you are going to lose. But if you remain idealistic and cling to good values, you will know how to make the highs less high and the lows less low.

There was this famous radio show my dad used to listen to back in the fifties that featured all the top, top people in Hollywood. It was a badge of honor to appear on this show, so the host could get anybody and everybody he wanted. His last question in the interview would invariably be, “What is your advice to the young so-and-so?,” depending if the interviewee was a director, a writer, or an actor. And I remember like it was yesterday when, one time, he had on Edward G. Robinson.
Now, Eddie G. was as smooth a muthafucka as ever came down the pike—by the way, his real name was Goldenberg, a Russian-born Jew—so when the host got to that final question, Eddie said, “I would tell the young actor to develop tastes for the finer things in life and to study them and to begin to surround yourself with them. The best wines, the best paintings. If you’re gonna buy books, buy limited series, one-of-ones, collectible things. Fine food.”

The host dude was more than a little flustered by that response, and so he said, “No, no, no. I was asking what is your advice to the
young
actor who is just starting out?”

“Well yeah,” Eddie said, “that’s my advice.”

And the host came back: “But how is the young actor supposed to be able to afford those things?”

To which Eddie G. said, “Well that’s just the problem. If you don’t get into wanting those things, you’ll never work hard enough to get them.” Huh! Fucking visualization! Who coulda guessed it would come from the cigar-smoking gangster Rico in
Little Caesar
and the tough-as-nails Rocco in
Key Largo
?!

That whole Edward G. Robinson approach to living is to put yourself in a position in which you are forced to reach beyond your grasp, forced to cover your bets, and if you fall short, you crash and burn. But if you don’t, you’ve done quite well. That was the encapsulation of the way Eddie G. lived his life, and of all the advice that got handed down from that show, this is what resonated the most. I reached for the sky; I reached for the stars. I said to myself, “I’m gonna go Eddie G. Robinson–style, man. Someday I’m gonna live in a place that I like. I’m gonna put my kids in schools that are a stretch for me,” because I’m going to make this visualization happen through hard work.

You’ll find what works for you as long as you get up the balls and go for it. We need you, man, to save our culture, one person at a time. And you’ll be fine if you make each little failure your friend. Look at it as a necessary phase from which all the growth emanates, otherwise you learn nothing, you will never experience “success,” however it is that you define it.

(CHAPTER 25)

The Power and the Glory

Considering what it all felt like at the start, I have no right in hell to have ever gotten close to this place where I find myself. I have tried assiduously to make a note to myself and, thus, to you, my friends, how improbable it is in the great universal scheme of things that all of this could have come to be. Because from where I sit, there is no rational reason for this almost “Unbearable Lightness of Being,” which, like the novel by Milan Kundera, challenges Nietzsche’s notion that all things have already occurred and will recur
ad infinitum
, instead affirming that each person has only one life to live and that everything only happens once and never again. Clearly, this has been my life, wherein I should have been counted out of this fight long, long ago. Clearly, the scope and breadth of what I now find to be the situations of my life have exceeded even
my
lofty and ambitious dreams. Clearly, all the things that set me on my journey, regardless of what they looked like at the outset, have evolved and morphed into a foundation upon which I finally stand.

What I truly thank God for, aside from my amazing family and a most colorful band of brothers and pals, is the fact that I’ve lived long enough to see things, things that so many of the people I cherished along the way never got a chance to see. And although the events I’ve chronicled at such length here are sources of infinite satisfaction and
pride, it’s the inside stuff and not the events to which I refer, not the things you find on a résumé or in a bio. What gratifies me most about the time God has given me is how I have come to feel inside when the glare of day is done and it’s just me and the night and the music. For it is there that I truly see footprints of a lifetime of just looking, searching, hoping there was a payoff and the diligence to do whatever necessary to earn it. Yes, I am terribly proud of so many of the events chronicled herein, tangible things that will be left behind to be considered and examined by generations down the road. And yes, I am amazingly blessed to have done the things I’ve done, seen the places I’ve seen, been around the people I’ve had the pleasure to meet, to work with. But as gratifying as all that is, what I was certain I would never achieve is peace—peace tied into a sublime realization that I am not in this alone, that I am a part of God’s plan, placed here but for a blink of a moment but also with obligations to justify the very miracle of my being. So thank you for the gift of longevity. Because, without a doubt, I was always gonna be the last guy to finally get the joke, what was I put here to do? How do I leave here confident in the knowledge that I did something, no matter how big or small, to simply leave a fingerprint, a clue or two, that the dude paid his rent? To even have a shot at that, the slightest of shots even—that, to me, is it: the all, the everything, the Big Casino. Einstein, one of the smartest dudes ever, said, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

It’s pretty clear to me how many times and ways I beat the odds in spite of the fact that I was often my own worst enemy. And even though, as I mentioned, there at first seems to be no reason why I had been given so many chances and not been ejected from the game long, long ago, I understand it now. So the obsession becomes: How do I show my gratitude? How do I do that in such a way so that it’s not just lip service, not just a guilt payment, but instead it’s something that truly moves the needle? What do I know that’s worth sharing? What, if anything, have all these incredible blessings yielded, that can brighten another life a fraction of how these multitude of blessings
brightened mine? And in the feverish search to unearth this “thing,” gal dang it, if I didn’t get even luckier by being given the opportunity to write a book, a book that forced me to go back to the beginning and look for threads, clues, and the actual DNA of things. And fuck-a-duck, if it wasn’t staring me in the face from the get-go, looming large all throughout, no matter where the detours of my life took me!