Some of us are broken from the very start
And we don’t know how to fix ourselves
It seems, like me, you’ve been torn apart
There’s a lot of us on the shelves
It’s easy to escape through an open door
But the jail inside won’t die
Feelin’ claustrophobic and waitin’ for
The exhale of a sigh
—“Dead End Drive” (Thornton/Andrew)
I DON’T REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I EVER SAID ANYTHING PUBLICLY about these phobias I have. I don’t know if you call them phobias exactly. I just get creeped out by stuff. I don’t like real old things. I like modern. If I were given the opportunity to eat in an old English restaurant with old velvet drapes and castle-y-looking chairs, stone walls with mildew on them, or a bright spanking brand-new Japanese restaurant, I’ll take the Japanese restaurant, that’s just the way it goes with me.
I can’t watch those real old-time movies while I’m eating, especially silent ones from the twenties, even the sound pictures from the early thirties, when they’re about England, or Scotland, or France. If I see some big old gold carved ornate chair with a velvet cushion on it, I get spooked. It’s just something about that time period. I would have weighed about twenty-five pounds if I lived back then, because I couldn’t have eaten around any of that stuff. I can’t ladle out some gravy while I’m looking at some big old fat king sitting in one of those chairs with all the cobwebs in the corner.
I have a fear of Benjamin Disraeli’s hair. And I don’t know if it’s a fear, because I’m not worried that Benjamin Disraeli is going to show up one day and get me with his hair. It started when I saw this movie on Disraeli. I was broke at the time, and I was living in Arkansas in the house I grew up in. My mom had gotten remarried after my dad died and had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, with my younger brother. I was working for the county road department, and I lost my job in the winter. It was snowing, I didn’t have any money, but every now and then my mother would send me ten or twenty dollars, whatever she could. My stepfather had money, he was a doctor, but he wouldn’t give her any, and he sure as hell wouldn’t send me any. I got the gas turned off after a while. I would sit in this old easy chair that was my dad’s. It had holes in it by then. Somehow I had cable television even though I didn’t have any money. I didn’t pay for it, and they didn’t know I had it. I think I paid to have it hooked up, but then I couldn’t pay for the subscription and they left it on for some reason. This was around the time when cable television first came out.
Anyway, I was sitting in a freezing cold house wearing a coat. I slept in this easy chair every night in a big coat with a blanket on me. You could see your breath in the house, but I had cable TV. I’ll never forget it. I walked about a mile and a half up to the store with the ten dollars my mother had sent me. It was freezing cold. I bought myself a Swanson TV dinner—a chicken dinner, which was my favorite—some Hostess Sno Balls, a Dr Pepper, and some Lance cheese crackers. At the time, having all this food was a thrill. I was going to make my TV dinner and I was going to watch me something good on cable TV.
I had no gas, but the oven worked because it was electric, so I put the TV dinner in the electric stove, cooked it all up, and sat down to watch something on TV. I was starving and about to eat my TV dinner when I switched channels and, just for a second, saw this guy, George Arliss, who was playing Disraeli. He had this big old weird face and teeth and that creepy wispy hair sticking back like Larry from the Three Stooges. And the set showed heavy drapes and those big old chairs and a stone-looking table. I couldn’t eat my TV dinner just from seeing that. I switched the channel right off the bat and ended up watching a movie. Later on I was able to eat my TV dinner, but it was ruined at that point, because I had to reheat it. So that’s how that whole Benjamin Disraeli thing started.
I also have a real live fear of Komodo dragons. People say, “Well, why would you be afraid of Komodo dragons, because what are the chances you’re going to be walking down the street in Beverly Hills and run into a Komodo dragon?” I don’t even want them in the world, that’s the fact of the matter. One time a guy sent me a letter from some “save the animals” group—now I’m all for saving animals, but Komodo dragons are dinosaurs and they have no business here. They don’t do a thing for anybody except kill things and eat them. And the way they kill—they recently discovered Komodo dragons actually have pockets of venom. They used to think that it was just the bacteria in their mouths that made them so poisonous, but now they know they have venom. They bite you and the poison starts to work and you go blind and start to lose your muscles. They’ll sit there for however long it takes you to die, then circle around you and then they’ll eat you. Well, that creeps me out. Why would we want them?
In the stories we read growing up, guys slay dragons. They don’t have classic stories about a little boy getting his first dragon. (Well, except the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”) They’re dragons, you’re supposed to kill them. They generally only exist on one island in the world, the island of Komodo, in the Indonesian Islands, and it’s not like I want to go there, but they got one in the zoo here in San Francisco. Sharon Stone took her husband there for his birthday—apparently, he wanted to walk with the Komodo dragons. I understand swimming with the dolphins. I don’t understand walking with the Komodo dragons, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Sure enough, he got bit and ended up in the hospital. I just don’t see any reason to have them on the planet.
I don’t like to use real silverware, I never could. It doesn’t feel good in my mouth, and I hate it when it hits my teeth. And it’s too heavy. It’s just too goddamn heavy. You know, I like things streamlined. I prefer plastic spoons and forks. At the same time, I’m all for getting rid of this big wad of plastic out in the Pacific Ocean. I’m a recycler. At the house we have plastic stuff for me, but it’s the kind of stuff that’s made out of corn and hemp and bamboo. We just don’t use that regular plastic. I support not having plastic. I think people are too lazy these days. Just wash the dishes! I use everything else, real plates, real bowls, and the rest, but I prefer to use the phony forks and spoons.
I wish food and sleep weren’t necessities, that they were just pleasures. I love food, the kind I have these days, but I wish you only ate for pleasure and it didn’t put any weight on you and it didn’t suck for your system or anything like that. I wish it were possible that if you don’t want to eat for five days, you don’t eat for five days, and when you do want to eat, you just eat. Just eat some fucking ice cream with hot fudge on it and not worry about any bad side effects to your health. I wish you didn’t have to sleep and could stay up for three weeks and then one day think, You know what I’d love to do today? I’d love to sleep. Then just sleep for a week. Or three hours, or whatever you want. That’s one of the things that really makes you think that there has to be some kind of intelligence behind this. That maybe we are just stardust, and it’s this universe and the black holes and the big bangs and everything else, but that somehow, way back there somewhere, in the midst of all this, or in all of us or something, there’s got to be some kind of spirit, some kind of thing that started us all, because otherwise why would Ding Dongs and butter and just everything be bad for you? That naturally fucking happened? Why is it that sex and food and drinking and smoking and all that kind of shit are bad for you? That seems like a rule to me. That doesn’t seem like the natural order. It doesn’t seem like evolution. It’s just that that’s the way our systems are. That all the good stuff is bad for you and all the stuff that tastes like cardboard and mud, or smells like ass and nutsack, those are the things that are good to eat. How can that be? You’ve got things to do, you want to stay up and have a party with your friends, you want to record for three days without stopping, but you’ve got to do this thing where you go to sleep and don’t know shit and waste eight hours of your life. For eight hours of your life and you didn’t know shit. If you want to know what’s going on all the time, why not just be able to stay awake all the time? Somebody made a rule somewhere, that’s all I’m saying. Somebody made a rule that the good shit is going to suck, and there are going to be a lot of people out there who really believe in this thing or person that made these rules, and they’re going to judge people and talk bad about everybody who likes all those things that suck for you. Except for the food, by the way. I never met a real over-the-top, intense, churchgoing, fanatical-type religious person who didn’t like food. Gluttony is supposed to be a sin, I’ve heard. Well, go to church sometime, there’s a lot of sinners in there, believe me. So evidently, food is the one thing they don’t mind breaking the rule on, the really religious people. It’s just all the other fun stuff they judge you by.
There are certain phrases that get inside my skin. There are words that I can’t hear or say. When I was young, we had Tastee Freez and Dairy Queen. They had a certain kind of fried potato item at these places called T-A-T-E-R T-O-T-S. I can’t say the word, I have to spell it. It just bugs me that they’d name something that. I don’t like it when they name food anything cute.
I went to a shrink a couple of times because whatever girl I was with at the time wanted to go to couples therapy. I found it to be horseshit, because you go to this person and all they’re going to do is sit there and blame you for everything. All going to a therapist has ever done for me is get my ass chewed out by two people that day. So I never really did understand that. Well, you know the old saying: you split that word in half and it’s “the rapist.”
All that stuff seems normal to me, it doesn’t seem weird. I think crazy people are people who don’t know what they’re doing. They have delusions. In other words, they’re too crazy to function in life. I just don’t like some things. I don’t go bonkers and not know who I am, or start acting like a chicken. I just say I don’t like creepy old castles. Which is not that weird. So if somebody thinks you’re crazy because you don’t like Benjamin Disraeli—I don’t know, people have thoughts all the time that they just don’t express. I make the mistake of saying them every now and then, that’s the problem with me. I don’t think van Gogh was crazy. Most people say, “He cut his ear off, that’s insane!” No, the guy was so passionate over something that in the moment he went too far, but I don’t think he was a crazy person, just intense.
Part VII
Obviously, we found a way to stay in Los Angeles. I could write a book about what happened to us over the next decade, but a few sentences will have to suffice for now. In visual terms, I see that period as a dark, turbulent cloud, with occasional flashes of beautiful golden light. It was a time of frustration, conflict, physical hunger, booze and parties, broken hearts and broken-down cars, life-threatening illnesses, deaths in the family, hopes raised and dashed …