Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (27 page)

And so the monster sat, and she waited and watched. She waited for another dark wave, one that would wash over me and send me so far under that I’d never be able to get back up for air in time. She’d be waiting for me, down in the darkness, when my strength ran out.

The monster knew me better than I knew myself. She saw the extreme ebb and flow of my life, the pattern formed by my genetics and my circumstances and my personal choices. She knew she wouldn’t have to wait long.

WHITE BUFFALO MEDICINE

The White Buffalo
was a script I’d written in 1996. My career was then on the rise with
Babylon 5
, and I was creatively charged. One night I’d read an article about Miracle, the first white buffalo to be born since 1933. When I went to bed, I had very vivid dreams and woke up at 2 a.m. with the whole story worked out in my mind. I’d never written a script before, but I’d worked on them from the other side of the fence for so long that I had some sense of storytelling and knew how to format the thing to make it look right. Inspired, I wrote the story out in under a week in short, intense bursts.

The Lakota have a legend about the White Buffalo Calf Woman. To them, she is a prophet or even a messiah. And they believe that when a white buffalo is born, it’s strong medicine—a sign from Mother Earth and the universe that things will change, that powerful magic is in the air.

And by 2002, that’s exactly what I needed. On some level I could sense that I was walking a tightrope. Beneath me was my monster, constantly probing me for weaknesses and calling out for me to slip. I was wary but not frightened, because I was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the other side. Waiting there for me was
The White Buffalo
. I’d spent seven years working on it, tinkering with the script, schlepping it around trying to drum up interest, and all of a sudden it started gathering momentum. I could see it, just in front of me, beyond my reach but clearly visible—the story closest to my heart completely produced and projected onto a forty-foot screen.

It’s a sweet family movie about a young boy whose parents get divorced. His father goes off with a new partner. His mother travels to India to “find herself,” and dumps the kid on a ranch with an uncle he’s never met. A white buffalo is born, and Native Americans from around the area gather at the ranch. They dance and pray and hang medicine bundles on the fence. The bank is about to foreclose on the ranch, and a conflict arises between the uncle, who wants to sell the buffalo; the kid, who forms a bond with it; the Indians, who want to claim it as a sacred symbol; and some Hollywood investors who want to turn it into a circus attraction.

The project was my baby. I’d been growing it for seven years, and now I knew the time was right. I was going to bring this thing into the world and make it live.
The White Buffalo
was hope, and it kept me moving forward and positive.

I showed the script to my Hollywood friends, and everyone who read it loved it. I was convinced that it would get made. I just needed backing of some kind to get the ball rolling. You know what they say, ask and ye shall receive. Well I did ask and the money came, but it was in a most disgusting and unexpected way.

I was doing this piece-of-shit movie called
Nightmare Boulevard
(also released as
Quiet Kill
), and I’m telling you, it was aptly titled. I was starring with Corbin Bernsen and Ron “Hellboy” Perlman, and the whole thing was financed by this sleazy-looking Chicago car dealer with hair plugs who’d decided he was an actor. I played Corbin’s wife, and the story was that I’d become bored with him and started having an affair with my tennis coach, who was played by (surprise, surprise) the Chicago car dealer.

The nightmare began with the bedroom scene I was in with Mr.
L.A. Law
. I was wearing pajamas, and he was wearing boxers. It wasn’t a sex scene—the movie didn’t have any. We were just sitting up in bed while the crew set up the lighting, the budget being too tiny for anything as glamorous as stand-ins. Then, right out of the blue and in front of everyone, Corbin leans over and grabs one of my breasts and says, “Oh, they’re real.” Then he reaches under the sheets, into his boxers, and pulls out a hand covered in sticky, white goo and holds it up in front of my face.

“Oh my god!” I reeled back. I was in total shock.

He grinned and said, “See what us stars can get away with?”

So the guy with one of the world’s biggest snow globe collections (yes, you read that right) turns out to be a total, masturbating misogynist.

I jumped out of bed, yelled at Corbin, then at the producers, and then I quit. The producers came running after me as I was leaving the set, my bags in hand. I gritted my teeth, readying myself for a fight. Honestly, what was there to say? There were thirty people on the set when it happened—they didn’t have a leg to stand on. But it turned out they didn’t want a fight.

“What do you want? Just name it. We want to make this up to you. We want to keep you on this movie.”

It turned out that they were almost as mortified as I was about what had happened. They didn’t want word getting around about what had happened on their set. I’ve never had a producer offer me carte blanche before or since, so I didn’t miss a beat in replying.

“You’re going to have to option my next film. It’s called
The White Buffalo
.”

So I walked out of
Nightmare Boulevard
with a movie deal and some up-front cash, and if you ever wanted proof that there’s such a thing as instant karma, Corbin Bernsen walked off the set at the end of that day only to discover that his brand-new BMW had been totally vandalized. The windows were smashed in, the hood and side panels dented beyond repair. I was pleasantly surprised. I guess stars can’t get away with as much as they’d like to think they can.

Not long after that, my friend Hilary Saltzman read the script and decided to help produce the movie. I was set to direct it. I’d written the male lead for Sam Elliott and then shown it to Bruce Boxleitner, who’s a big fan of Westerns. We’d done table readings and castings, we’d gone to the Disney ranch to scout locations, and we had a crew. I was still on good terms with John Flinn, my lover during
Babylon 5
, and he was going to be the director of photography. Treat Williams had read the script and liked it; it was underway.

Hilary was doing a great job. She even found somebody who knew the Native American keeper of the white buffaloes. By that time two more had been born, and these were very special. They neither shed their coats nor changed color as they got older. They were the real deal, and they’d been shipped to a secret location in Santa Ynez so they wouldn’t be killed. While the white buffalo is a sacred symbol of hope to the Lakota, people are people, and for a very few the white buffalo seems a form of medicine so powerful that they’d kill the animal to possess it.

What I’m going to tell you next really happened, I bullshit you not. If I had been alone I’d have had doubts, but there were three of us—myself, Hilary, and Alan, who was one of the other producers.

We drove to Santa Ynez and pulled up at a fenced-in pen. There was a partly Native American guy waiting for us. He had blue eyes and looked a little like Andy Kaufman, but with a braid of dark-brown hair that hung all the way down to his butt. Another guy sat by the back of the pen, a handsome Native American fellow with chiseled features and long hair. He was bare-chested and had brown, weathered skin and looked as if he’d stepped out of an old Edward Curtis photo. The handsome guy didn’t say a word, he just sat there staring at us while the first guy, whose name was Phillip, brought out a long pipe.

“You’ve got to smoke this before you can see the buffalo.”

So we all joined in this ritual. We stood in a circle and Phillip sang a prayer. It turned out that he was a Lakota traditional singer, and he started drumming and singing a high-pitched, wailing song that sent chills up my spine. Then we sat down and smoked some tobacco and sage from the sacred pipe, and I’m telling you right now that was all that was in the pipe, no hallucinogens or anything like that. When the ritual was done, the hot-looking guy pointed to the pen, and when we turned to look, the previously empty pen now had two white buffaloes walking around in it.

There was only one entrance to the pen, right next to us, and it hadn’t been opened. There was no way someone could have let the animals in while we were doing the ritual. We were right there. There weren’t any flashes or smoke or magic curtains. Then Phillip said, “I put a medicine spell on them, to keep them hidden. You smoked the pipe. Your medicine is good. You can see them now.”

We were totally blown away. It was one of the most bizarre, mystical things that’s ever happened to me. We received permission to film and photograph the buffaloes as reference for the CGI
⁴
white buffalo calf we were going to create. It was a huge thing, a great privilege, and we drove out of there feeling really good about the movie’s prospects. I could feel that white-buffalo medicine working its healing magic. I’d almost made it to the end of the tightrope.

That magic took on an additional dimension when I struck up a romance with Phillip, the half-Indian guy, and found out that he was of the elk medicine. I knew that the elk had something to do with sexual energy, but I didn’t understand the significance of that until we went to bed, and then, holy shit, did I get the whole elk thing!

We embarked on a very odd relationship. He was completely broke, never had more than a dollar to his name, but he’d do cleansing rituals at my house and stay there when I traveled. Eventually we stopped seeing each other, but things ended amicably, and we stayed good friends.

Another happy relationship, one more step forward, but I still wasn’t back to my former strength. There were still dents in the armor from my previous relationships that hadn’t been hammered out. They were the places the monster pressed on, but things were looking up.

The White Buffalo
movie was rolling along beautifully. It was one of those projects that
wants
to come into the world. We had investors. We were going to do the whole thing for a million bucks. Things were all lined up. Only a few more steps and I’d be clear—my life, my career, my emotional healing would be complete, and my life would move forward into a new phase of growth and prosperity.

And then there was Kenny.