11 My arduous journey from pessimist to optimist is described in detail in My Emotional Fatwa.
12 I greatly admire the great Amerikan singer-songwriter Neil Young but have often wondered whether it would hurt him to try doing something with his hair.
13 According to Viva, whimsy itself is neutral. The user is the determinant of whether it has a “creative” or “destructive” charge.
14 It is not that I seek to liken myself to Christ on the cross but at times the looks I get from Dodge are as piercing as the point of St. Longinus’s lance.
15 Other scientific detractors cite the Leidenfrost effect (as musical as it sounds, it’s a dispiriting explanation of the phenomenon of fire-walking). In effect, just as drops of water dance about on a hot skillet because of the protective layer of vapour formed by evaporation, a fire-walker’s inevitably sweaty feet help create a similar protective layer.
16 In 2002, twenty Australian Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet managers had to be treated for burns caused by fire-walking. I ask you, is the Leidenfrost effect substantially different Down Under, or is it that they were insufficiently motivated in mind and spirit?
17 My colleague Tolly Burkan has called fire-walking a metaphor and contends that if you can master it, you can also muster the courage to demand a raise. With all due respect, this diminishes all of us, does it not?
18 Some useful advice from Tony Robbins: Visualize walking the coals while chanting, “Cool moss, cool moss, cool moss.”
MISTER KAKAMI
The man who is in charge of ruining Patrick Kakami’s life prowls the halls of Vancouver’s Telefilm office in search of personnel.
Across the street in Victory Square, rats the size of Whiskas-fed house cats patrol the base of the war memorial for abandoned pizza crusts and dropped panini fillings. In the garbage-strewn alley below the funding agency’s boardroom window, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict is in the final throes of an overdose, telescoping pupils in bruised eyes like some wide-eyed child in a velvet painting by a direct descendant of Bosch.
Inside, the workstations are alive with screen savers and nothing else-undulating seaweed, someone’s diaper-clad toddler, Bart Simpson on a skateboard flipping the bird. Syd Gross leafs through a bulging manila file folder labelled FUBAR, thinking, I’ll say.
Syd hates these trips to the West Coast. You can’t get a decent veal sandwich and just yesterday he met a woman who lived on a houseboat in False Creek who gave her two Abyssinian kittens bimonthly fish-oil enemas. Guys walked around downtown carrying waterproof briefcases and wearing flip-flops. How could you do business with these people when their hair-tufted toes were showing? It was like negotiating with hobbits. One of the teamsters on the Vancouver segment of the Rain Dog shoot, a soft, fiftyish man in an April Wine 4-Ever! T-shirt and Teva sandals whose job it was to drive in the honey wagon each day and then sit there for twelve hours doing absolutely sweet fuck all (for $37.46 an hour), kept telling anyone within earshot, “I came back from Hollyhock feelin g spiritually replenished.” Get a real job, Syd thought. Get a pair of real shoes.
From a cubicle in the far corner of the large open-air office, Syd hears the kind of gulping for breath children engage in when words fail them. He finds a man around his own age, mid-forties, sporting shocking sideburns and Tweety Bird suspenders, sitting on the ground crying, hunched over a mound of photocopied scripts, a clutch of forms strewn around him. The man looks up at Syd. “I spent the whole night at Kinko’s”-he pauses, striving to get his voice under control- “and I still missed the phase-three script-development funding deadline.” Syd makes a clucking sound with his tongue.
Because the thing about Sydney Gross is this. His name, his manner, his voice, his deep regard for the bottom line and affinity for darkened rooms redolent of the smell of Golden Topping® may have predestined him to become a producer of moving pictures, but somewhere along his ribbon of DNA there’s a den-mother gene programmed to respond to sorrow. This is the reason he continues to champion Patrick Kakami, not because the guy is on top of his game, but because Syd can sense he’s unravelling. And this is the reason Syd lowers himself onto the faux-distressed concrete floor, in his $475 (plus GST) “sport” slacks from Harry Rosen, and allows this weeping man, this complete stranger, to lay his head on his shoulder as he gives the man a one-armed hug.
Above them, a vulcanized-rubber wide-mouth bass mounted on the wall begins to move its tail and sing, in a deep, Barry White-type voice: “Take me to the river, / Drop me in the water…”
Syd’s cellphone jangles in his breast pocket, the Chariots of Fire ring tone more cloying than triumphant.
“What do you mean he’s disappeared?” Syd hears himself squawking, his shirt front damp with another man’s tears. He hates the squawk. But there’s nothing to be done for it- it makes guest appearances when he’s over-agitated, like acid reflux. “There’s no transport off the island till Sunday. He can’t just disappear.”
The rubber fish, oblivious to the drama on either end of the phone, continues to sing. Something about oceans. Something about love.
“Mr. Kakami? Mr. Kakami!” The first AD, a wraithlike woman from South Africa who always used the honorific and looked like a Brontë scholar, floated into Patrick’s field of vision. They were four scenes behind and it wasn’t even noon. Patrick summoned his trademark look of benign concern and huddled over her rain-pocked copy of the shooting script, randomly scratching out shots that, a few weeks ago, he would’ve sacrificed his right testicle to keep. She was clearly relieved, yet continued to look at him as if he were a man who kept his first wife in the attic. What he was, in fact, was a man struggling to remember why he was here in this island rainforest, surrounded by all this slurry of activity, in the first place.
Because. Because the low hum of his parents’ voices, whenever he had drifted off to sleep in the back seat of the car on the way home from the movie theatre, was the greatest soundtrack ever made. Because, once upon a time, Jessica Lange’s face had been the closest thing to looking straight into the sun and not going blind. Because his mother had always cheered at the end of that scene in The Sound of Music where the nuns stole the distributor cap from the Nazis’ car. Because, at eight, he’d developed a heart condition (sluggish flow through left ventricle) and his mother, afraid he’d die in his sleep, let him stay awake many nights in the long weeks leading up to the operation (experimental at the time, routine today), his head in her lap as the blue light of late-night movies on the oldies channel flickered over them (how his mother had adored Ernest Borgnine in Marty and Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field-again, those nuns!) but don’t tell your father, her unexpectedly cool finger to his lips.