I can’t give up before I even try
I can’t put on the clothes before I’m dry
If I’m strung out before I come unwound
Then I may end up coming back before I come around
—“When I Come Around” (Thornton/Andrew)
TOM AND I EVENTUALLY MOVED INTO A ONE-ROOM APARTMENT OVER on Motor Avenue that was a converted motel. Then I went to work for about a year and a half at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Culver City, while Tom looked around for some kind of highbrowed work. He was under the impression that since he had been an English teacher back in Arkansas he was going to become an English teacher in California, until he found out that you have to take a whole other damn bunch of tests to be an English teacher in another state. Tom was smart and I was a dumb ass.
I have dyslexia and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, so when I’m reading a book, I can’t end a paragraph on the letters th or d. So when I finish a paragraph, I have to go back up and find a word that’s soft and doesn’t have any sharp edges on it or anything that ends in a th. Like a word that ends in an f is good, or a word that ends in a b is good, so I have to go back and read the sentence that ends in a b or an f and skip to the next paragraph without, even out of the corner of my eye, seeing the th or the d again. If I read things that are bad signs for my obsessive-compulsive disorder, I have to go to the previous page, reread it, and go to the bottom of the other page without looking at the rest of that page again before I go on. It can take me a month to read two pages. My obsessive-compulsive disorder is not “I put my left shoe on first,” it’s geometrical configurations in my head. I now figure out these things naturally, so you would never know that I’m doing all these things while we’re talking. Besides, as we’re talking, these are angles that are comfortable for me right now.
So you combine dyslexia with obsessive-compulsiveness and it gets to be some really complicated shit.
The point is, I’d never done anything except physical labor.
My first job was working in the grocery store that I lived by. I went in the morning or the afternoon, depending on when the guy wanted me out there at the ranch, stamping prices on cans and stocking the shelves. When I was done doing that, he sent me out to haul hay. That was a miserable fucking job. I also worked at a machine shop like out of a Charles Dickens book. That was also a miserable fucking job. I worked at a sawmill, which was a dangerous fucking job. I worked for the Arkansas Highway Department, Hot Spring County Road Department, where I drove a truck, shoveled asphalt, ran a backhoe, and hauled heavy equipment. I also worked as a carpenter and in a storm-door factory.
Anyway, sometimes I took Tom’s car, sometimes I took the bus to Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, where I made it all the way to assistant manager, which meant I was just kind of in charge of all these eighteen-year-olds. There was a manager, who was about my age—twenty-four or something—and we were the old guys. All the rest of them were kids. It was a pretty good job, though. It got us through.
I brought home $96 a week. We paid our $90 rent by the week for this one-room apartment with a bed and a bathroom—no kitchen or anything. It was just like the damn motel room that it used to be. Tom had a toaster oven, and we had one of those little bitty refrigerators about two feet tall, like you get in a minibar, but we didn’t have any money so we didn’t have anything to put in it anyway.
With the six dollars we had left over after rent, we’d buy a bottle of generic rum at Lucky Supermarket and a box of powdered doughnuts every Friday. You’re wondering how we ate. Obviously a box of powdered doughnuts wasn’t going to hold us over. Working at Shakey’s, every day on your lunch break you made your own little eight-inch pizza. I knew Tom wouldn’t have anything to eat until Friday, so every day, instead of eating lunch, I would make this damn personal pizza at the end of the night, and instead of just making a little pepperoni pizza, I stacked everything they had on there, cooked the shit out of it, and brought it home.
I would get home about one or two in the morning. Tom would go to sleep real early, so I’d wake him when I came in, and we’d get up and eat. At one or two in the morning, every night.
Nobody lived in this place that Tom and I lived in but probably dope addicts and stuff—and me and Tom. Tom had decided that since I was the junior partner of the team, I would sleep on the floor because we didn’t want to sleep two guys on the same bed. I mean, I would have been happy to—I sleep on the corner anyway and I don’t move when I sleep—but Tom had decided it would be better if he slept in the bed and I slept on the floor.
We were writing screenplays then, and on Friday nights we’d drink the rum, eat the powdered doughnuts, and talk into this voice recorder we used for writing our scripts. We started writing what was our second screenplay back then. It was called “Good Intentions,” and it was never made.
There was this girl that was living in the building who got a crush on me. She got a big crush on me. She would kind of follow me around and stare at me. She wore a newsboy hat, jeans, a shirt, and tennis shoes, but she must have been in some type of bad accident because she was burned and horribly disfigured beyond recognition. I can’t tell you how old she was, though she seemed to be maybe in her twenties or thirties, but she was literally melted. She had no nose, a hole for a mouth, and a very high-pitched voice. She had patches of hair, but it was mostly all burned off. She had no hands—she just had two sort of knobs there at the end of her arms, like pincers. Just horribly disfigured.
So I was in the shower one day, getting ready to go deep-sea fishing with Phil Bruns. See, Bruns told me, “If you ever want to go fishing sometime, you can go deep-sea fishing out at the marina, $17.50, and they give you the rod and reel, the bait, and they take you out on the boat for three hours. It’s fun, and I’ll pay for it because I know you’re broke.” This deep-sea fishing was for rock cod. You have five hooks on your line, you lower it to the bottom of the ocean out there, and five rock cods would hop onto it instantly, like fleas. Your limit is fifteen, and you catch your limit in like ten minutes. You can pay the guys there a couple of extra dollars and they’ll fillet them for you, but I didn’t do that. I brought them home, sawed their heads off, and cleaned them in the bathtub so that Tom and I could cook them in the toaster oven.
Anyway, I was taking a shower getting ready to go down to the marina to go fishing with Phil Bruns and somebody’s banging on the door. Tom’s not home, I had no idea who it was. I had really long hair then because, like I said, I had been a hippie musician back home and I hadn’t caught on yet that if you were going to be an actor you had to get a haircut. So I got this wet hair hanging down, I got a towel on, I open the door, and it’s her. Scared the shit out of me. She scared the shit out of me all the time when I saw her. Not any disrespect to her, it’s just that I couldn’t help it. If I open the door and there’s a burned person like out of House of Wax there, I jump.
She asked me, “Can I have a picture of you?” and I said, “A picture of me? I dunno. What do you want that for?” “I want to be able to look at beauty like you,” she says to me. And I go, because I got a little bit of an ego, I go, “Yeah, sure.”
So I had two Polaroids, one was of me and Tom with a stripper in Nashville and the other one was some Polaroid of me sitting there somewhere like an idiot. So I give her this Polaroid, and she says, “Thank you,” and she wants to know if I would come down to her room sometime, hang out with her and her roommate. Her roommate, who was a big, heavyset blond woman, used to get in fights with this dude in the middle of the street. Tom and I used to watch it out the window.
“Yeah, I’ll get back to you on that.”
Another time I was running across the street to use the pay phone—since we didn’t have a phone, every now and then I would take one of my quarters and go to the Korean market on the corner where there was a pay phone and make a call to my mom back home—I turned the corner, and the melted woman was standing right there. I screamed, “Goddammit!” because it was like out of a horror movie. She started crying and—I’ll never forget this because her face was like a road map of big, melty, waxy-looking stuff—the tears were going, like, not straight down. Now that’s a great image, of these tears that had to go down these trails.
We ultimately found out—and I’m not sure how we found out, I think Tom found out—that it was a guy. The melted girl was a guy.
I wish now that I had just hung out with this cat and found out his story and his mentality, but I wasn’t psychologically prepared to get involved in a friendship with him at the time. I wasn’t grown up enough to see the beauty in it.