Love Life (8 page)

I’ve long since learned that when faced with a problem, you should rip off the Band-Aid, acknowledge the problem and cut your losses.

“Just turn on the camera, I’ll do it without anyone.”

I did the two-minute pivotal close-up reacting to my own imagining of what the speech
should
have been like while staring at a strip of duct tape marking where the actor should have been.

Like life, moviemaking is never exactly what you think it will be. Sometimes it’s great when you think it’s gonna be a turkey, and sometimes even a ship of fools becomes
Battleship Potemkin
. You can go to all of the acting classes you want, you can be first in your class at the fanciest film schools, but you’re never going to know what to expect until you
do
it. And then do it some more.

I have nothing against film or acting schools. Many huge talents have come out of both, and lots of folks who are more accomplished and better storytellers than I will ever be owe them a great debt.

But today, anyone can make a movie on their phone. You can edit a film on a midrange laptop at the same level as the pros. Today, no filmmaker has an excuse to not make his movie. As the man says: “Just do it.”

And as for acting classes, drama schools, et al., let me say this: I’m thinking about opening one of my own. It won’t be a four-year impossible-to-get-into school; I’ll take anyone. It won’t be expensive, and as long as your check clears, you are in. You can enroll and graduate in a day. I’m calling it Film Acting School. In just one day, students will experience the
reality
of filmmaking.

Here is the breakdown of the course:

After being on set for thirteen hours, you will have approximately four minutes of ideal conditions to shoot your big scene.

Maybe you can pull it off, maybe you can’t.

If this sounds like something that interests you, you may have what it takes to be a working actor in the film business. And it won’t take you four years of drama school to find out.

1.
 You can choose whatever great speech you want memorialized and commit it to memory beforehand if you wish. The Film Acting School LLC does not guarantee any speech can be shot due to a number of possible unforeseen or force majeure situations that may arise, including, but not limited to, weather, illness, mechanical malfunctions, and personnel changes due to scheduling conflict, miscommunication, bad information, tardiness, nonperformance, incapacitation, drugs or death.

I
’m trying to remember
when I felt like this before. Like an elephant is sitting on my chest, like my throat is so tight and constricted that I can feel its tendons, like my eyes are 100 percent water, spilling out at will, down pathways on my face that have been dry for as long as I can think of. I’m trying to remember: When was the last time my heart was breaking?

The death of my mother was one time, but her passing was prolonged enough to let me prepare for it, to the extent anyone can. At the most intense moment, sitting at her gravesite, I felt like I could hear every leaf blower in a fifty-mile radius, felt as if I could feel the sun’s rays turning my skin darker shades with each second, my skin irritated and jumpy, making me want to crawl out of it. I’m feeling it all now again, but no one has died.

When I was a boy, I had to leave my friends in the summer, just as Malibu was becoming Malibu, say good-bye to my first girlfriend and go to Ohio to stay with my dad. There is a little of that sense memory
at play too, a feeling that I’m about to be left out of important events, separated from life as I know it, the world as I love it.

I am remembering and feeling the details of my parents’ divorce and our family’s forced march out of my home to an alien world across the country. The good-byes to my father and my beloved grandparents; rationally I knew I would see them all again, but now I have the same body-deadening weight of the condemned, counting the minutes until the final moments of a life that’s all I’ve ever known. This encompassing, exhausting sadness I had mostly forgotten, or buried, until now.

Today is my son Matthew’s last night home before college.

I have been emotionally blindsided. I know that this is a rite many have been through, that this is nothing unique. I know that this is all
good
news; my son will go to a great school, something we as a family have worked hard at for many years. I know that this is his finest hour. But looking at his suitcases on his bed, his New England Patriots posters on the wall and his dog watching him pack, sends me out of the room to a hidden corner where I can’t stop crying.

Through the grief I feel a rising embarrassment. “Jesus Christ, pull yourself together, man!” I tell myself. There are parents sending their kids off to battle zones, or putting them into rehabs and many other more legitimately emotional situations, all over our country. How dare I feel so shattered? What the hell is going on?

One of the great gifts of my life has been having my two boys and, through them, exploring the mysterious, complicated and charged relationship between fathers and sons. As I try to raise them, I discover the depth and currents of not only our relationship but ones already downstream, the love and loss that flowed between my father and me and how that bond is so powerful.

After my parents’ divorce, when I was four, I spent weekends with my dad, before we finally moved to California. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was incapable of enjoying the day’s activities, of being
in the moment, because I was already dreading the inevitable good-bye of Sunday evening. Trips to the mall, miniature golf or movies had me in a foggy, lump-throated daze long before my dad would drop me home and drive away.

Now, standing among the accumulation of the life of a little boy he no longer is, I look at my own young doppelgänger and realize: it’s me who has become a boy again. All my heavy-chested sadness, loss and longing to hold on to things as they used to be are back, sweeping over me as they did when I was a child.

In front of Matthew I’m doing some of the best acting of my career. I’ve said before that the common perception that all good actors should be good liars is exactly the opposite; only bad actors lie when they act. But now I’m using the tricks of every hack and presenting a dishonest front to my son and wife. To my surprise, it appears to be working. I smile like a jack-o’-lantern and affect a breezy, casual manner. Positive sentences only and nothing but enthusiasm framing my answers to Matthew’s questions.

“Do you think it’s cold in the dorms in the winter?” he asks in a voice that seems smaller than it was just days ago.

“Naah!” I lie, having no idea what his new room for the next four years will be like.

This line of questioning is irrelevant anyway, as Sheryl is preparing for any possible scenario, as is her genius. We all have our strengths; among hers is the ability to put anything a human being could possibly need in a suitcase. Or box. Or FedEx container. She is channeling her extraordinary love and loss into a beautiful display of preparing her son for his travels. And in the end, Arctic explorers will travel lighter.

Matthew’s dog, Buster, watches me watching Matthew as he sorts through his winter jackets. I am one of those people who believe dogs can actually smile, and now I can expand that belief to include an
ability to look incredulous as well. Buster seems to be the only member of our family to see what a wreck I am, and he is having none of it.

“You disgust me,” he seems to say, looking at me with his chocolate eyes. “Get a backbone, man!”