Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (6 page)

Jerry and my aunt and uncle laugh. “Yeah, it does reek, doesn’t it? It’s the costumes. They are pretty dirty and gross at this point.”

We enter the main area of the warehouse. Suddenly people are everywhere; the room is filled with energy. “Tonight we are shooting footage for the climactic battle scenes,” somebody explains. In front of me is a giant platform about chest high and easily forty yards long and twenty yards wide. It is covered with monochromatic battleship-gray miniature towers, buildings, trenches, gun portals, and radar dishes. I see that it is constructed with spray-painted egg cartons, elements of model battleships and tank parts, and other pieces of toys and everyday items. But in the hands of these crazy hippies, it looks like the surface of an absolutely enormous alien planet. “What is this supposed to be?” I ask, amazed. My uncle looks at the gigantic layout and smiles. “This … is the Death Star.”

“Action!” yells the cameraman. A specially built (the first of its kind in the world, I’m told) camera is lowered into the main trench of the Death Star. It moves at a snail’s pace down the crevice running the length of the platform. “Later, we will speed the film up and add the spaceship flying over this shot we are making now,” says my uncle.

“I wanna see the spaceship,” I say.

“It’s right over there,” he says, pointing to another corner of the warehouse. And there, sitting in front of what I will learn is a “blue screen,” is a six-foot-long model of the coolest spaceship I’ve ever seen. “It’s called the
Millennium Falcon
.”

I run my hands over it. Chad stares, too, slack-jawed.

“Well, why don’t you come look at some rough footage on the big screen?” Garcia says.

We file into a filthy, makeshift screening room. I’m introduced to my aunt and uncle’s boss. “Hi. I’m John Dykstra. I’m the visual-effects coordinator. I’m just about to watch some scenes we’re working on.”

As the lights go down, I turn to him and ask, “What’s this movie called?”

“
Star Wars
,” he says.

Even though most of the effects have not been added, what I see on-screen makes the hair on my neck stand up. When the hero grabs the girl and swings out on a rope to safety, even though they’re flying a foot off the studio floor, I don’t need the bottomless Death Star shaft to feel the rush. When the villain appears in the black mask and helmet, I am riveted, even when he pulls out a cool handle with a broomstick on it and begins a sword fight.

“This is what I do,” says my aunt. “I’m gonna add a laser over the broom handle. It’s going to be a laser-sword.”

“No, we’re gonna call it a
light saber
,” says Dykstra.

When the clips are over, we stop to see a small robot that is shaped like a trash can. Apparently the robot is a major character in the movie, and I think the name is cool, R2-D2. My brother and I also check out Luke Skywalker’s hovercraft, which has mirrors covering the wheels underneath it, to give it a rudimentary effect of hovering. Later, even that will be “rotoscoped” out for better effect, to make it look like it’s flying.

On our way out we pass the source of the terrible odor that has been wafting throughout the building. It is a giant, wooly-mammoth-looking costume for a character to be called a Bantha. It seems they are the horses of the future. But they stink like dead elephants. And, indeed, elephants have been wearing this gross stinky costume. “Yeah, the guy who rode it got thrown off. Almost broke his neck,” says Jerry Garcia.

The next day at school I tell all my friends about this amazing new movie that isn’t coming out for months but is going to be “the coolest thing ever.” In my opinion (and I am hardly alone),
Star Wars
did change the world. The movie business was never the same; the era of the blockbuster and the tent pole was now on the horizon. And, following the money, as always, was Corporate America and the dubious model of “vertical integration.”
Star Wars
made it attractive for an engine turbine company like GE to want anything to do with an inherently flaky artistic business that couldn’t be decoded by bean counters, MBAs, or “bottom-line” hawks, as much as they continue to try. Luke Skywalker’s photon torpedoes not only blew up the Death Star from the warehouse in North Hollywood, they ended an era when the movie business was run by people who, first and foremost, loved movies. Through all the years, and the changes they brought, I still feel lucky to have witnessed the birth of the movie that changed it all.

*   *   *

We are going broke. My mom and Steve are increasingly at odds. He works for the county government as a shrink, he doesn’t have a private practice like the big guns in Beverly Hills (I have no idea why), and my dad is always late with child support. I’m sure my dad’s point of view is: Let the “new” dad hustle some money.

The tension in the house is overt. There is no attempt to keep those issues from me and my brothers and as a result I am anxious and melancholy. When I hear that my dad is ducking his financial commitments to us, I take it personally. Is there something I should do about this? Is this in some way representative of how Dad feels about us? It also sometimes occurs to me that perhaps I’m only hearing my mom and Steve’s side of the story. I want to call my father, but I’m scared (long distance = expensive) and would have no idea how to begin a conversation about anything
real
, any interaction about our relationship. As always, I want to keep my head down and assume all is well. If there is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, I won’t be the one to point it out, lest I be eaten by it.

Although my classmates at school are decidedly middle class, the few who do have money are the popular ones, so there is plenty of the kind of talk that comes from cool kids with cash: exotic vacations, new skis, fun restaurants, new clothes, and what kind of party to have when parents are out of town.

We can’t afford restaurants much. If we do go out, the rule is: No desserts. There is never a vacation. And no new clothes: When I attend a bar mitzvah, I realize I don’t own a belt and my mom gives me a camera strap to use. I am ashamed that I don’t have proper clothes for this special occasion. I want to be respectful, and that’s a hard look to pull off with a camera strap around your waist. But this is where my ability to ignore reality is a gift. I walk in like I’m dressed like James Bond. No one says a word, and in fact, one girl asks where I got the cool belt. Fake confidence on the outside, as I will later learn, often trumps truthful turmoil on the inside.

Armed with this confidence, I’ve begun to put my toe into school politics. I’m savvy enough to know that I can’t compete with the handsome, older, and more athletic Emilio Estevez for “Boys’ Vice President,” so I choose an office that no one else wants: parliamentarian. (When I tell you I wasn’t a cool kid at Malibu Junior High, consider this entry from that year’s yearbook: “Evan is a babe, but you are gay, sorry, better luck next time!”) At the last second, a kid even more nerdy than I am runs against me. I crush him.

As the first order of business, the new student council stages a skateboard contest fund-raiser. The winner is a great-looking kid, a year older, named Paul, who runs with a rough crowd from down in Santa Monica, or “Dog Town” as they call it. They are the pioneers of the mid-’70s skateboarding boom; Paul is the first person I ever knew to have his own poster. Looking at him doing one of the sport’s first aerials, I think: I want to be on a poster!

A girl who I’ve been doing scenes with in my drama class, Holly Robinson,
is
popular. She’s a bit of an icon, being one of only two black girls in the school and having a father “back East” who appeared on
Sesame Street
. Holly is the star at all the talent shows and even people like Linda Ronstadt make the pilgrimage to our school auditorium to hear her sing. (Later in life, Holly will have a Hollywood career of her own, starring in tons of television shows. But now we do our scenes together in front of the drama teacher, who, the rumor goes, once stored a body in an industrial freezer—which seems outrageous to me, as there is nothing to indicate that the poor man even owns an industrial freezer.) Holly has the hots for Paul and is talking to him after the skateboard-contest award ceremony. She’s standing with her mother, Dolores, who is a fledgling Hollywood manager, and some guy I have never seen before. Holly and I are good enough friends now, so I walk over to say hi. Dolores knows I want to be an actor and she puts her arm around me.

“How is it going?”

“Okay,” I say, trying to be optimistic in front of someone legit.

“Well, you keep pushing. You’ll get there,” she says.

I look at Holly, but she is looking at Paul.

“Oh, and I want you to meet my client,” she says, gesturing to the guy standing next to her. “I want you to take a long look at this amazing young man. Take this moment in and remember it, because I promise you that this time next week, he is going to be the most famous person in America.”

I look him over. He’s not all that much older than me, really. Maybe nineteen or twenty. He’s black, with big, sweet eyes. I’m not sure what the hell Dolores is talking about, but she is deadly serious, so I am paying attention.

“Hi, I’m Rob.”

He smiles dazzlingly. “Hi, I’m LeVar.”

By the following Friday, LeVar Burton was the most famous face in America. His performance as Kunta Kinte in
Roots
put him on the cover of
Time
magazine and changed the course of television history. It also showed me how quickly the rocket fuel of stardom can ignite, how unimaginably
giant
the g-forces can be as you are propelled into fame’s orbit.

Looking back, I also wonder at the mystery of destiny and fate. I marvel at the mercurial forces of fortune and am reminded that one must be ever vigilant to stay on one’s own path, without envy of others. As the four of us stood in the afternoon light that day, LeVar was a week away from his triumphant destiny, Dolores was just beginning her journey, one that would make her one of the business’s first important black female managers (with clients like Wesley Snipes and Martin and Charlie Sheen), and Holly was just six months from starring in her first major TV role. Paul was in every skateboard magazine in the country, had girls falling all over themselves, and his poster was on the walls of teen girls and guys. I was still being called an “acting fag” at school and struggling to break in to Hollywood.

But fortunes change. Within a month I got that first break, so long in coming. And within a few years, Paul became perhaps the most notorious of all of Malibu’s Lost Boys when, high on PCP, he stabbed his mother to death with a butcher knife and was committed to a mental institution.

CHAPTER
6

“I hope you like my birthday present,” she says, handing me a package. She is practically shaking with excitement, her green eyes gleaming. “I’m sure it’s great,” I say, although I can’t imagine what could be worth getting in a box as small as the one she just handed me.

We are on what I am gradually realizing is a de facto date; she’s cooked me dinner, just the two of us, alone in a mobile home overlooking the beach at Paradise Cove. It’s taken me a while to figure this out for two reasons: (1) I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity with the ladies, and (2) she’s my little brother Micah’s sixteen-year-old babysitter. I’ve known her for a while, she’s given me rides to school in her red Ford pickup, and being a “driver” and all, to me, she might as well be an adult. Like me, she is sort of a social outsider. Her obsession is horses and she goes to some strange granola-crunching high school that no one’s really heard of. But she’s always nice to me, has beautiful eyes, Farrah Fawcett hair, and, Lord help me, an amazing body.

Recently she has been relentless about wanting to cook me dinner for my fourteenth birthday. I say yes without much thought to it one way or another: she’s a cool pal and I’ll suffer a bad meal if she’s gonna make such an
issue
of it. Also, we are going to celebrate my first two professional jobs in Hollywood. One is a commercial for Coca-Cola, the most expensive one they’ve ever done and, for the first time ever, made exclusively to be broadcast on the Super Bowl. The other is for some sort of blender and costars a former Miss America. I’m basically an extra in both commercials, but you’d have thought I was starring in a major motion picture. A pro gig is a pro gig, and I’m thrilled to have finally broken in. I’m paid twenty-five hundred dollars for the Coke commercial. I frame the check.

“C’mon, open it,” she says, and so I do. I tear open the wrapping paper (Christmas patterns) and look at the tiny present. She grins and my heart pounds. It’s a condom. A Trojan, just like the ones in my dad’s sock drawer back in Ohio. Now I get it; the dinner alone, at night, secluded location. It’s all a setup, her master plan; for my fourteenth birthday, I’m going to lose my virginity. I feel the slow, hot burn of what we today call “performance anxiety” flush through my body. I could, I suppose, not live up to my end of the elaborate plan. But it would be the wimp move, and I would never back down like that. It just feels a tad rushed, and contrived, and certainly not of my own making. It’s clear that short of using the chicken exit like those on a roller coaster, I’m gonna have to ride this baby all the way, like it or not.

And what’s not to like, really? Older girl, very cute, handpicks her prey and does all of the work. I guess I could’ve chosen my own time and place, but at the rate I was going, it could’ve been years till I got it together! I had no game at all. Any attention I ever got from the opposite sex as a teen was purely a result of the girl knowing the score, and acting on it. I had no killer instinct. That would come later.

Turns out, it’s her first time, too; so together on a moonlit beach, we cross that wondrous, anxiety-filled Rubicon, cutting away the last vestige of childhood. I wasn’t in love, she wasn’t even my girlfriend, but she was kind, she was pretty, and she was my good friend. I was too young to know how valuable and rare that combination is. But after that warm March night in Paradise Cove, I was on the road to finding out.

*   *   *

Other than on summer vacations, I saw my father only for ski trips. We met in Snowbird, Utah, and his method of throwing Chad and me up on the top of expert runs and letting us figure it out made us very good. I looked forward to being with my dad; he was unlike any man in my life. Whereas my two stepfathers were cerebral and sometimes socially awkward, Dad had the UVA law degree
and
the charisma of an actor. Women loved him and he loved them. With other guys, he was funny, competitive, and a loyal friend. He also had no qualms about busting someone up at the slightest provocation. He knew that even though it may be politically incorrect in a touchy-feely world, sometimes you have to kick some ass.

When I was living with my mom and Bill back in Dayton, I had a pet bunny named Miss Bunn. One of the North Dayton hoods was jealous of my white rabbit and I returned one day from school to see its disemboweled body lying in a grotesque scarlet pool in our snow-covered yard. Miss Bunn had been sliced in half with a knife. My mother and Bill held no one responsible, treating it as a piece of bad luck, something that just
happened
. Had I been living with my dad, he would have tracked down the perpetrator and there would have been a second disembowelment.

Skiing helped me come into my own. I was also playing Pony League baseball and finally outgrew my “last to be picked” athletic stage. The birthday at Paradise Cove, my two commercials, and my widening circle of friends at school were all ingredients in my slowly simmering stew of confidence.

I decided to enter the school’s annual “Turkey Trot,” a big deal at Malibu Park. How fast can a race be with the words “turkey” and “trot” in its name, I figured. Turns out the answer is very, very fast. I was smoked by a kid a grade lower. The guy was a rocket; I mean he ran like he was Superman. Turns out he would actually become Superman, playing the Man of Steel on
Lois & Clark
, alongside Terry Hatcher from 1993 to 1997. Dean Cain wasn’t an actor then, he wasn’t even thinking about being one. In fact, he, like Charlie Sheen, wanted to be a pro ballplayer. Dean was eventually recruited by the Dallas Cowboys and Charlie was a promising baseball player. In spite of the odd 8 mm home moviemaking, I was the only one who was “going pro” as an actor.

And for every kid on a date with destiny, there continued to be those on course for tragedy. The ranks of the Lost Boys of Malibu grew at a steady rate. Shane, the sweet, goofy kid from my woodshop class, went home one day, snorted rat poison, thinking it was cocaine, and died instantly. Sam, a young kid from Point Dume, lost control of his 10-speed on the way home from school and impaled his head on a tree. He bled to death hanging from the trunk of a eucalyptus tree on Bonsal Drive. An older kid at school dropped out suddenly and moved away entirely. We later learned his dark story: Hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway, he had been picked up by a man, driven to a remote canyon, tied to a tree naked, and had his pubic hair plucked out one by one with tweezers. There was also my brother Micah’s friend, the animal lover. Scuba diving at night with his girlfriend, he decided to rescue lobsters from a lobster trap. He got his hand caught in the mechanism and eventually ran out of air sixty feet below the surface, while his girlfriend struggled unsuccessfully to release him. And there was my buddy Tony, who heard a gunshot from a garage in Malibu West and rushed inside to investigate. He found a high school kid, his intestines hanging out from a self-inflicted shotgun blast. The kid muttered, “I’m gonna be sick, I’m gonna be sick,” over and over as he lay dying next to his parents’ station wagon. Within a few years, my friend Tony would be dead, too, from a weird new cancer. It would be another few years before they figured out what to call it. Sadly, AIDS was around way before the death of Rock Hudson.

Underneath the glorious exuberance of the counterculture ethos, the fantastical weather and dreamlike beauty, Malibu’s malignant undercurrents were a hidden danger to adults as well. An elaborate escape lane had to be devised at the intersection of Kanan Road and Pacific Coast Highway after a number of trucks lost their brakes and careened down the hill, killing their drivers. The Point Dume school bus was traumatized by the sight of more than one driver’s burning body crushed in the cab of his truck.

At Little Dume Beach, we mourned the death of the couple who kayaked every weekend from Paradise Cove to the buoy anchored off the point. They had been doing this for years until the foggy morning when they were both attacked and eaten by a great white shark. All that was found was their beloved kayak, with bite marks and signs of an awful struggle.

Why was hideous and untimely death so commingled with the experience that was Malibu in the mid-’70s? There were drugs, which weren’t as understood as they are today, there was also the wild and rough nature of the personalities Malibu attracted. But more important, there was a price to be paid for a culture that idealizes the relentless pursuit of “self.” Malibu was a wellspring of counterculture group think. To be counter to the culture, you are by definition willfully and actively ignoring the culture, i.e., reality. And when you ignore reality for too long, you begin to feel immune to, or above, the gravitational pull that binds everyone else. You are courting disaster.

*   *   *

Money was still tight at home. Mom and Steve were at war with my dad. “If he can’t make his child-support payments, how does he manage the ski trips?” Mom wondered. At one point, Steve called my dad to complain. “How about I fly out there, knock on your door, and kick your ass,” my dad responded. Shaken, Steve hung up and asked Mom if he meant it. “Probably,” Mom said.

I figured I could at least make my own spending money by getting some sort of part-time job. True to my passion, I found one at the Malibu Cinema, taking tickets, making popcorn, and threading the projector. The owner seemed gruff and fairly mean-spirited, but how bad could he have been to give a kid like me a legit job at my age?

I lasted about fourteen days. First, I was caught kissing Holly Robinson behind the Coke machine. Then came the Friday night opening of Dustin Hoffman’s new opus,
Agatha
. (This was a time in Hollywood when an A-lister would still do a movie whose title didn’t refer to his own character.) I had been struggling to learn how to properly thread the new projector. It was a complicated system where each reel was put on its own “platter” and then run through the projector at the proper moment. Obviously, placing the reels of film in the correct order was paramount. But somehow I bungled it. The audience erupted in confusion and rage as one moment Dustin Hoffman was in a rainstorm, hanging dangerously off a rooftop, and in the next angle, he wore a tuxedo and danced the foxtrot. To make matters worse, in the next moment, the end credits began and when they were over, there was Dustin doing some sort of love scene. The full house asked for its money back. I was fired on the spot.

I didn’t have much luck as a busboy either. I lasted three weeks at the Nantucket Light before I was a casualty of “downsizing.” It probably didn’t help that I was known for sneaking free slices of mud pie in the walk-in freezer.

All along, I continued my journeys into Hollywood for auditions. The best my agency could do for me were meetings on commercials. TV and movie meetings were clearly way beyond both of our credentials. I had recently gotten a commercial for Carl’s Jr., a West Coast hamburger chain. I was pumped because I loved hamburgers and the concept of being paid to eat as many hamburgers as I wanted sounded pretty good to my teenage mind. I also got a speaking part this time, biting into a burger and yelling “I’ve got taste!” over and over.

By the fourth hour, I was ready to vomit. My costar, a new local L.A. newscaster named Regis Philbin, was clearly a pro. After every bite he’d yell, “I’ve got taste!” and spit his mouthful of burger into a bucket he had strategically hidden underneath his chair. I had a lot to learn.

The commercial ran relentlessly that spring and did wonders for my social standing at school. Even some of the cool surfer set would call out “I’ve got taste!” when we passed in the halls. It wasn’t quite enough juice for them to let me paddle out and try my hand at surfing (they’d still beat the shit out of me) or to earn a seat on the back of the bus, but it was a start. And I’d take it.

Everyone knows that the teenage years are a time of profound emotion. The moody, exuberant, passionate, lethargic teen is a figure that has a special place in the hall of fame of clichés—and for good reason. It’s all true. When we ourselves are teenagers, we are living life as it comes. There is no point in reflection. We are so inexperienced, there is very little to reflect on. If we fail a big test, we just move on. We win an award and we smile and say thank you. We fall in love and it’s a thrill. We get our hearts broken and we suffer. And we feel all of these highs and lows in our absolute core; it feels as if it’s never happened to anyone else because it’s never happened to
us
before. Only later can we look back in the comfort that perspective brings.

I’m writing this looking out the window at my younger son playing with his dog, David. He is exactly the same age I was at this point in this narrative. Every parent feels that wondrous, prideful pang when they see glimpses of themselves in their children. I’m no different. I’m looking at him now rolling on the grass, backlit by the afternoon sun. He is a boy-man, wanting everything the world has to offer and ready for none of it. Wanting a girl, with no idea of how to get one. Wanting to make a mark in the world but unsure of how to do it. I look at my boy and I’m looking at myself. I want to run out into the yard and tell my young self that it’s okay, all will be revealed in time. I want to give the advice I know he needs to hear. And on the occasions when I do talk to my boys about love, career, family, and all of life’s unknowable mysteries, I realize that I am also talking to myself. And I wonder: Would my life have turned out differently had I had this perspective?

My first love was Corrie, a china-blue-eyed blonde with a rosebud mouth. She, for some reason, had gone totally undiscovered by the ruling class in spite of her archetypal beach-bunny credentials. But that was good news for me, as there was no competition for this overlooked beauty. I was stunned when she indicated that she was interested in me. I was about to graduate from Malibu Park Junior High School, and she was a year behind me. Looking back, I realize that probably gave me a leg up.