Relationships begin with the delicate, scared use of big words you hope will apply someday soon: concern, commitment, love. Sasha and I were in the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard when I said the first one, honesty.
"I have to be honest with you."
Sasha looked quickly away and I thought, Uh-oh. When she looked back, she wore a suspicious, unhappy expression. Said I didn't owe her anything, she'd gotten something "out of the fuck" too. The word sounded silly. I took her hand, but instead of responding or squeezing mine, she only looked at our two clasped hands on the table and asked if my "honesty" meant I was telling her thanks for the roll last night but go away now.
"No, my honesty meant admitting right away I'm in love with you."
"I wasn't ready for that. I'm still getting used to the idea of our sleeping together."
"Yes, get used to it. Get used to me."
We were each other's big, real hope and luckily recognized it fast. When good fortune pulls up in front of you too quickly, it can make you suspicious. You hesitate before getting in. But both Sasha and I had been through enough lonely times to know there were only so many chances at contentment with another person. In other words, don't think too long before acting.
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke copies down one of his correspondent Kappus's poems and sends it back to the young man.
And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.
For some reason, the idea of this great man hand-copying a fan's poem and sending it to him has always touched me deeply. What generosity! Who would ever think of doing that?
But then I met Sasha, and she took much of what I was or believed and, putting her own stamp on it, handed it back to me as if I had never seen it before. Perhaps that is what love is – another's desire to return you to yourself enhanced by their vision, graced by their script.
I asked her to live with me.
She looked at her feet. "I've never been very successful at that." Her smile was over just after it began to grow.
I reached out and stroked her hair. "I don't care what your won-loss record is. I want you for what you are, Sash, not for what I want you to be."
"Me too. And that's the best place to begin.
"When I was out walking Flea tonight, I saw this man on a big motorcycle with his girlfriend on the back. He started dragging his boots on the ground, and I guess he had metal heels or something because sparks flew in all directions. The girl laughed and did it too. It looked so impressive and magicaclass="underline" the big ruuuuum of the bike, her laughing, all those sparks. . . .
"I couldn't wait to get back in and tell you about it But then when I came in, after only ten minutes outside, I saw you and was so glad to see you that I forgot what I wanted to say. Those are sparks too, aren't they, Phil?"
Relationships that begin in your late twenties or early thirties have a dimension that doesn't exist when you're younger. Besides knowing more, you're also more grateful for the good things, forgiving toward the bad. What drove you nuts at twenty is only a crumb, at most a small stain on your sleeve, ten years later. It can be cleaned. It can be overlooked as long as the rest of the jacket hangs well and feels right.
From the beginning of our relationship, I didn't see great sparks flying up from our boots. I'd never have said it to Sasha, but it was enough to put my hand under her skirt in the dark at a film and feel the soft down of hair and stipply gooseflesh on the inside of her thigh. There was love and respect. We discovered we had a world of things to talk about.
When Weber came over for dinner one night, he said we felt like a couple. "Some people live together for years, but you never get the feeling they fit very well. It feels like they live on separate floors of their house. Not you two."
We agreed. What was odd was going to my office every day and working on something as vile as Midnight Kills, then home to Sasha and Flea at night and a life that had become so full and good.
In retrospect, I realize it couldn't have lasted a long time. I knew Midnight hadn't gotten me this good luck. Sasha admired my Esquire column about life in Hollywood, not Bloodstone. Yet, like it or not, he was my bread and butter and I spent a good part of my life thinking about him.
In bed one night as we watched Flea walk around on top of us, looking for a place to lie down, Sasha asked where Bloodstone came from.
"You mean really, or in the film?"
"Really. Where did he come from in you?"
Flea plumped down and, coincidentally, looked straight at me, as if she too were waiting for the answer. My two girls.
"Rock and Roll."
"Music?"
"No, not exactly. When I was a boy, my father took us on the first and last vacation we ever had: to Browns Mills, New Jersey. The only distinguishing things about it were it had a muddy lake and was near Fort Dix, one of the big military bases on the East Coast. We had a bungalow in the middle of the woods and were surrounded by army families from the base. One of them was named Masello, and the father was in the military police. My sister and I spent a lot of time in their house that month because they had – kids around our ages.
"One day after swimming we were out on their back porch eating brownies and listening to the radio. It was a station in Trenton. Remember the song 'Monkey Time' by Major Lance? That was on when it was cut off by a news bulletin. A man had walked up to a military police car on the base, leaned down, and shot the two policemen inside, point-blank. One of them was Mr. Masello.
"All of us kids looked at each other. I remember that very well, because we all had brownies in our mouth and were chewing."
"You used that scene in one of the Midnights!"
"Right, Midnight Too. I shot it exactly the way it happened: The oldest Masello kid's mouth dropped open and big chunks of brownie fell out. He closed his eyes and started screaming 'Rock and Roll! Rock and Roll!'and kept screaming until his mother came and dragged him on his knees back into the house."
"How could you use that, Phil? What if one of those kids saw your film?"
"They did. One wrote a letter and called me a motherfucker."
"Why did you do it?"
"Let me finish the story. My parents got so scared that this killer might come and get us that they packed us up that night and drove home. In the car I fell asleep and had a dream where a man with a silvery, featureless face chased me, screaming 'Rock and roll!' I've had that dream all my life. It still scares the bloody shit out of me.
"After that I was traumatized by Rock and Roll. Every time I heard of a murder on the radio or read about one, I thought of Rock and Roll. That was his name, and he must have done it. My mother read The National Enquirer, and every crime in there, brains on the floor, blood on the walls, was done by him. Everyone has their vision of evil, and he was mine. A war in Africa? Rock and Roll did it. A baby disappeared in Darien? Rock and Roll. He was everything bad. He covered the field. And every time I had that dream again, he got bloodier and more frightening because I'd given him credit for something else."
Sasha sighed. "How much of your films is from your life?"
"More than I like."
"Does it help to film it? Is it a catharsis?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes it's too far down. Like those glass-bottom boats you ride in Florida that let you see the big fish below? Sometimes doing this brings me close to the things, but I can only see them, their dark shapes. I can't get them out."