Nineteen sixty-eight was a year most people of my generation remember. For us, it started with a real bang on January 1. We’d been out patrolling on the Cambodian border for close to two weeks, chasing Apaches without much luck. We never saw more than two of them at the same time. We called them “gooks” because we feared or hated them, sight unseen. But we knew they were there, because we were finding stores of weapons, rice, maps, “order of battle” paperwork—but never “them.” We were locking into a two-battalion perimeter, about a thousand to twelve hundred active troops, which is a big deal because we were in a hot zone interdicting North Vietnamese Army trails coming from Laos through Cambodia toward Saigon, the capital, 150 kilometers to our southeast; in fact, we were right in the enemy’s crosshairs but had no idea.
We dug our foxholes on the edges of the jungle, leaving a large treeless area in our center for our helicopter pad and a heavily bunkered battalion command post with wires and antennae running off it and mortar pits dug around it with heavy sandbagging. Surprisingly, we had armored personnel carriers (APCs) and powerful M24 tanks parked in the tree lines on only half of the perimeter, our infantry on the other half. I didn’t understand the strategy, but in the army, you don’t want to think about these things too much or you get in trouble. I mean, why not spread out the APCs evenly over the 360° perimeter so that the infantry would be supported? But I didn’t go to West Point, and I guess we had so much firepower even with this configuration, it didn’t matter. There was some kind of truce going on because it was our calendar’s New Year. And actually, the previous night, New Year’s Eve, we’d gotten loaded, four of us in a foxhole, on whiskey and beer, which was a rare event “in the field.” Today we were hung over, and were pulling inner-perimeter duty, which is a way of saying “take a night off.”
With the light softening toward the end of day, our night ambush patrol headed out, about ten to twelve men; nothing was expected, as the truce was still in effect. The onset of evening was always a peaceful time, some food, rest, chores mostly done, foxholes dug and sandbags filled; it’d be a time to reread our mail from home, which had been delivered for the holidays.
It started not long after we were chowing down on hot food instead of the usual cold C rations. The unmistakable pop and rattle of distant fire coming from the same direction our ambush unit had taken, now maybe five hundred yards out, told us immediately that something was wrong—somebody was shooting, somebody hadn’t heard about this truce. And when the firing went on and on, we knew it was serious. But we couldn’t make out the radio noise, and before long, the firing dropped off—to silence. Information was relayed to our command post but rarely came back to us.
About fifteen minutes later, to the south and east sides of the perimeter, something was sighted moving toward us—“Tango two come in,” we heard from a whispery, unidentified voice on the radio. “We got movement out there.” Then nothing. A mystery sound of static. After all, this was the jungle. But where were they? The enemy never made a frontal attack, much less at night; we had too much firepower in the perimeter. It wasn’t their style. Nonetheless, we grew anxious, thinking ourselves surrounded; the mind goes quickly to these things. Then suddenly, from twenty or more miles away came the whistle of 155mm shells out of our howitzers, spinning and whirring toward us and then hurtling down just over us—exploding out there somewhere, not very far. But still no signs of them. Reports of small arms fire seemed to be picking up at certain spots in the perimeter, yet it was hard to tell if it was incoming or outgoing—us or them. A crucial signal.
Directly across the perimeter, about two to three hundred yards away, the loud bark of a 50-caliber machine gun on an APC jumped us. Had they seen, heard something? More firing now from another sector. Rumors spreading on the radio—“Movement spotted in the perimeter! Two! Three . . . Victor Charlies, between Bravo and Charlie Company, can you see them, out . . .” Where? The thought of them inside our lines was terrifying.
A human shape was approaching our position. Couldn’t see his face. A dark silhouette, moving cautiously. Too big to be one of them—or not? He called out something . . . his platoon, name, rank. We guided him in. A sergeant. He tried to sound calm, but he wasn’t. “You see anyone coming through here, password is . . .” I forgot what it was. Before moving on to the next position, he said something like “We’re gonna fire some beehive rounds, so stay low.” And then he ominously added, “I heard they’re hand-to-hand down at Charlie Company. Stay alert.” We looked. Charlie Company was maybe three hundred yards to our side, which in the dark is a long way. The sergeant ran on. “Hand-to-hand” meant close—close enough to see them—bursts of fire, grenades, entrenching tools. Eye to eye. Jesus. And beehive rounds were designed to stop human wave attacks. When fired, a thousand pellets would spread like shotgun blasts and, coming from a tank, carried the sonic power of a pressurized bomb that could sweep men off their feet. What the fuck was going on! No one was saying.
The firing was picking up elsewhere in the perimeter, but not around us. An hour, maybe forty-five minutes crawled by, and then “Puff the Magic Dragon” arrived. The giant CH-47 helicopter, with 50-caliber machine guns and rockets firing from all its pockets, sailed overhead, spitting red tracer fire. The drilling noise it made was intense, otherworldly, like the roar of some ancient monster.
As I struggle to piece together the chronological events, we were finally ordered to move out to reinforce another position. On command, a group of us assembled and began humping across the inner perimeter. Flares were by now lighting most of the sky to a sort of moonlit day effect, making us visible targets. There were more and more explosions in all directions; it was nearly impossible to hear anything. But at that point I heard the blast first because it was so loud, then felt the beehive round coming from a tank behind us, maybe a hundred yards away. Why? It didn’t matter why—someone fucked up! It engulfed us like a giant wave that swept us maybe ten or twenty yards through the air, maybe more. I blacked out, but I have no idea for how long, much less where I landed.
Moments later—again, perhaps five, ten minutes, perhaps longer, I’ll never know—I woke as if inside a dream. I was probably concussed, but I didn’t know that either. I struggled to my feet, couldn’t see anybody from my group. But I was moving all right, no blood I could see, nothing broken. I felt I was okay, although a week earlier, I’d seen a man in my platoon walk into a medevac chopper, wounded in the gut, relieved to be getting out of the bush, and then the next day we heard he’d died from “internal bleeding,” a form of death I’d never imagined. And the poor man thought he was lucky.
Rifle in hand, I was running toward an area I thought I recognized from the daytime. The jiggling sound of my equipment was banging loudly in my ears. There were more distant explosions now, one right after the other. Who knew what was happening? I’m not sure anyone did. I finally ran up on somebody from my company who was screaming, but I could barely hear, probably because my eardrums had been stunned by the beehive.
I was ordered to head into the jungle with two or three others to reinforce another section of the perimeter. There we found a soldier in his foxhole, alone, without a helmet, who was really scared, maybe in shock, yelling, pointing, “I seen ’em! They’re here.” But where? What time was it? Someone said “two”—middle of the night. It seemed that a few minutes ago, it was ten.
And now there was an enormous roar, like I suppose the end of the world sounds. So quickly, like a shark cutting through water, an F-16 jet fighter was coming in very low over our perimeter out of the lit night sky. So low, that doomsday sound—we were all going to die. This was crazy—they were going to drop their payload on us! I jumped into the scared man’s foxhole and buried myself as deep as I could in the earth, which trembled and shook as a five-hundred-pound bomb dropped somewhere close. Somebody was being shredded to pieces, my God! There’s nothing quite like a five-hundred-pound bomb to terrify any human being.
There was nothing for me to do really except stay alive. Our greatest fear was encountering a North Vietnamese shoulder-fired RPG, which could take out any of our bunkers from twenty to fifty yards out. I’d already seen bodies torn up by their RPGs; we were all scared of them, partly because we had no similarly efficient shoulder-fired rocket, and for that matter, their AK-47s were better than our toylike M16s. There were phosphorus shells from our artillery now hitting the jungle, burning white fire, incinerating trees and bushes and whatever stood in their path. The smell was chemical and horrific. Still no one. Then suddenly, the noise subsided. It was eerie.
The quiet continued for some time with occasional sounds of distant rifle and machine gun fire, but the volume was dropping off. What time was it? Around four? How could it be? It’d just been two. The next hour hung there in the torpor, the sweat of the jungle. Nothing. Nobody moving. Soldiers, dazed, appeared here and there. Some quietly talking. Daylight reasserted itself slowly, as if unsure. There’s been a battle. “They’d” been here, that’s for sure, but I hadn’t seen a single one of them.
And then, I believe, we were moving back toward our platoon command post just inside the perimeter. Helicopters were coming in to evacuate the wounded, who were far more than I’d imagined—maybe 150 or more men taken out in various stages of distress—as well as our dead, they said about twenty-five, but I didn’t see them. Though I think I was still concussed, I was assigned to “recon” the perimeter and bury the “gooks,” who were beginning to stink up the jungle with that awful intimate smell all of us could recognize.
Full daylight revealed charred bodies, dusty napalm, and gray trees. Men who died grimacing, in frozen positions, some of them still standing or kneeling in rigor mortis, white chemical death on their faces. Dead, so dead. Some covered in white ash, some burned black. Their expressions, if they could still be seen, were overtaken with anguish or horror. How do you die like this? Charging forward in a hailstorm of death into these bombs and artillery. Why? Were you terrified, or were you jacked out of your fucking mind? What kind of death did you achieve? It was frightening to contemplate, and yet, I wasn’t scared. It was exciting. It was as if I’d passed on from this world and was somewhere where the light was being specially displayed to me in a preview of another life. Soldiers might say it was hell, but I saw it as divine; the closest man would ever come to the Holy Spirit was to witness and survive this great, destructive energy.
In the next hours I grasped the extent of what had happened. Most of the dead were fully uniformed, well-armed North Vietnamese regulars. Some said they were Chinese troops disguised as NVA, but I didn’t think so; they looked Vietnamese. Those who were relatively intact we brought in on litters, walking out some fifty to a hundred yards to find them, or pieces of them. A bulldozer had been airlifted in to dig mass burial pits. I helped throw the bloating bodies into the giant pits late into that day. The gaseous stink was so bad, even covering our noses and mouths with bandannas made little difference. There were maybe four hundred of their dead. We worked in rotating shifts, two men, three men, swinging the corpses like a haul of fish from the sea. Later we poured gasoline on them, and then the bulldozers rolled mounds of dirt over them, so they’d be forever extinct.
No person should ever have to witness so much death. I really was too young to understand, and thus I erased much of it, remembering it in this strange way as a stunningly beautiful night full of fireworks, in which I hadn’t seen a single enemy, been fired on, or fired at anyone. It’d been like a dream through which I’d walked unharmed, grateful of course, but numb and puzzled by it all. It reminded me of passages in Homer of gods and goddesses coming down from Mount Olympus to the bloody battlefields at Troy to help their favorites, wrapping a mist or cloak around them and winging them to safety.
Almost a year later, in November 1968, I left Vietnam. By this time I’d served in three different combat units in the 25th Infantry in the southern sector of the country and in the 1st Cavalry Division in the northern sector. I’d been wounded and evacuated twice—the first a piece of shrapnel (or possibly a bullet) clean through my neck, nearly severing my jugular in a night ambush; the second a daylight enemy ambush where the shrapnel from a satchel charge planted in a tree penetrated my legs and buttocks. In another firefight, I was awarded a Bronze Star for heroism, which I’ll come to later. I’d been in some twenty-five or more helicopter assaults, been promoted to Specialist 4th Class, and although I was experienced, I tried to avoid any higher responsibility such as taking charge of a squad. I extended my tour three months, on the front lines in the 1st Cavalry, so I could be discharged three months shy of my two-year obligation, which meant I wouldn’t have to do six months of stateside duty. Some in my platoon thought this was a foolish risk to take, but I hated the army’s rules and regulations so much that I preferred the danger and freedom of the jungle. I also became a devotee of the powerful Vietnamese weed I discovered there with, for the most part, my fellow black soldiers, who baptized me into a new way of thinking and seeing; of that too, later.
They finally released me at Fort Lewis, Washington, where I was made a civilian again, and I really thought going home was the end of it, the beginning of something else. What would I do now? Go back to college? I’d taken some correspondence courses in the army. There was talk with a Tennessee buddy still over there of putting together a construction company, big talk. But first I’d relax a little.
Suddenly on my own, in a khaki uniform, I took the Greyhound bus south with a duffel bag and a lot of cash and walked aimlessly around San Francisco, as if looking at everything for the first time. Suddenly I missed my companions from the army. I don’t think any of us ever reckoned with coming home. I took LSD in Santa Cruz, bused down to Los Angeles, and, after several dreamy, stoned days, crossed into Tijuana, terrified already of the country I’d just returned to. I was quite alone—no direction home. I hadn’t called my father or mother, anyone. I was happy to “disappear.” No one could get ahold of me. I didn’t want to think. All I wanted to do was party, drink, and find myself a Mexican woman, like any sailor or soldier boy. With a two-ounce bag of strong Vietnamese weed I was carrying, I was feeling no pain, top of the world, no fucking officers or sergeants to tell me what to do anymore, never again—free! And stupid. One night, after midnight, I grew depressed and bored with the seedy Tijuana scene and, gathering my few belongings, wandered back across the border into the US. What was I thinking? Did I have a screw loose? I did. I was only twenty-three.
At the near empty border crossing, an old, nervous customs agent asked me to step into the station. It must’ve been easy—I looked the part. Had I drunk too much beer? Did I not remember there were rules, even in civilian life? Within an hour I was handcuffed to a chair, being interrogated by two FBI agents who were fresh after my collaborators in this smuggling scheme I was working out of Mexico. Clearly, I should have left the damn Vietnamese weed in some footlocker in the US. But then again, I wasn’t thinking too much, and hardly knew where I was going next. Maybe I’d just keep wandering south in Mexico. I didn’t know.
They knew. Within a day or two I was processed into the downtown San Diego County Jail with a capacity of about two thousand beds, but which was now occupied by around four to five thousand mostly tough black and Hispanic kids, many of them gang members, jammed into this overcrowded space; many of them were still waiting for trial after six months inside. No money, no bail, nothing. Within a few days, I was chained to eight or nine other young guys, marched in our prison uniforms through downtown San Diego streets, eyes down to avoid the stares of the civilians on the sidewalks, ashamed, led into a courtroom where I was indicted on federal smuggling charges, facing five to twenty years.
It was a lot like my first days in Vietnam; no one told you shit. But I found out from my fellow prisoners. There were two judges: Monday/Wednesday/Friday I had a chance at three years, and with a Vietnam service record, might get parole and do no time. Tuesday/Thursday I’d get five years, which meant I could be out in three with parole. It was a cold situation, and on top of that, my court-appointed lawyer was not showing up—it’d been some six or seven days now. I barely got a mattress in a cell built for two, now holding five. Toilets weren’t working too well. The guards were icy. I hadn’t even gotten to make my one call. I wrote a note to my captors, pleading, “Vietnam vet. Just back. I’ve been gone 15 months. My family doesn’t know I’m back. Please let me make my first call.” Put the note, folded up, in a slip box attached to the cell; the guards pick it all up end of day; the guards’ faces change each shift, but nothing happens.
Prison. A faceless experience. What the new underground papers were calling “Amerika” with a K was here to be seen. Nixon hadn’t yet been inaugurated, so the War on Drugs hadn’t officially started, but I could tell many of my young cellmates, any of whom could’ve been in Vietnam, didn’t give a fuck about it: “Shit, ain’t my problem—they fuckin’ with me right here!” Though white, I felt their anger; it was pervasive, but I was scared too. Would I ever get my call? I’d still be sitting here in six months. I wrote another note.
I was figuring out a routine now—how to wash, some yoga stretching in a tiny space, don’t mess with the wrong guy, don’t use somebody’s soap bar by mistake, don’t ask anybody a question that can come back to hurt you, don’t tell anybody too much about yourself, and don’t look for compassion here, because nobody in here’s guilty. And anyway, drugs were cool. The “sickos” were on the outside, in DC, killing hundreds of people every day, bombing the shit out of them, and now incarcerating everyone who might revolt, who could lead the rebellion against them. This was truly another war I had stumbled into—a badass “civil war” at home—the corollary to our war abroad, the thing Malcolm X said about the JFK assassination, that “the chickens are coming home to roost.”
Finally the jailers allowed me to make my call. There was one number I knew by heart—my father’s. Thank God he answered, because if he hadn’t, it might’ve been days till they’d get me to a phone again. His voice, the familiar solid sound of it, gave me a burst of hope, the operator telling him he had a collect call from San Diego “from a William Stone” (that was my service name). “Will you accept the charges on this call?”
I was thinking of Dad’s favorite O. Henry story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” where some incompetent crooks kidnap a spoiled brat who no one wants back. Would the perversity in my father just say no? “Go ahead,” the operator said, and clicked me in.
“. . . Dad?”
“Kiddo, for Chrissake, where’ve you been! Two weeks ago—they told me you got out in Fort Lewis?”
Hearing his voice, I felt a surge of warm emotions. I was so relieved to know he was really there. It was his voice. There was no way to apologize for not calling. I could go on about flight availabilities, international time zones, my orders, but I just said, “Dad, listen—I’m in trouble.”
A silence. He was waiting, thinking the worst. Years later I’d try to capture this moment in the scene in Midnight Express with Billy Hayes’s father in Long Island gushing over his son in Turkey, assuring him that this disinterested slob of a Turkish lawyer would take charge now that his father was here. (Unfortunately, the actor in the film was a ham and overplayed the scene, looking to cram every bit of significance into the few moments of screen time he’d been given.)
I had to hurry. The phone in that shithouse could have cut out at any moment, and then what? Anyway, I told him where I was and why and what might happen to me, and it’d be good if he could get in touch with this “public defender” whose name and number I carefully gave him in the hope that he could reach him on the phone, because I sure couldn’t, and maybe he’d get me out on bail, because the longer I stayed in this place, the other dudes were saying, my chances were getting worse.
My dad sighed noticeably, and I could visualize his expression—really not surprised, because I think he always suspected I’d end up like this. So, what’d he say? I’ve heard it’s the most overused expression in the English language, something you think just as you see the other car coming too fast, and you know you’ve bought it.
“Oh, shit!”
My lawyer, a jolly, well-meaning fellow, who earned $1,500 upfront and $6K more on the back end, did finally show up and got me out within a day. I had to stay “clean” around San Diego, which was essentially a military town then, for almost a week while the charges against me were mysteriously processed and “dismissed in the interests of justice.” Ah, the power of money. I was extremely lucky, and when I got to New York that December, I was coiled and tight, a jungle creature, ready for anything, living 24/7 on the edge of my nerves, even when I slept. I was a hard man, harder than I’d ever been. I was so numb I couldn’t recognize it, like waking up anesthetized after an operation in a hospital. An operation that lasted fifteen months. What had really happened in Vietnam? I didn’t know one other combat vet in New York, and found myself out of my depth in a sea of civilians, rushing around, making a huge deal out of money, success, jobs, all kinds of personal shit, which to me was still petty daily stuff compared to surviving. When the media started talking about “posttraumatic stress disorder”—PTSD—I didn’t believe it. I thought it was bullshit, ’cause if it were true, there were millions of civilians running around with it. They were nuts, stressed out over nothing, but still they were suffering the same way I was. But I didn’t want pity, I didn’t want some lame excuse as a Vietnam vet to ask for extra money and all that whining crap I hated in the complainers, the groaners; there were so many of them in the army.
I was confused, in no shape to go anywhere—either to college or to start up any construction company or whatever else with a fellow vet. I’d be gripped with sudden rages when people would talk about protesting the war and Nixon, who’d just been elected and was going to continue it. I’d read about them going on in newspapers, or see them on television, and I’d be so angry at the futility of protest—frothing at the mouth, telling them to “shut up and just go fucking do Nixon! Kill the motherfucker. Get some guns and go after that whole fucking gang—the whole inner sanctum. They’re all pigs!” But no one understood me. My rage was talking to me faster than my mind. I was unhinged, and others could sense it; they avoided me. I became more isolated, more paranoid. I didn’t want to go back to college, and Yale was certainly finished with me too, and fuck them anyway! While still enlisted, I’d applied to the University of California, Santa Cruz just because it was peaceful and beautiful to look at, barefoot girls brushing down horses and all that, but they’d already turned me down as an out-of-state dropout, which was a blessing because I would’ve turned into some other kind of man if I’d gone there—maybe even a nice “California guy” with a tan and a car, UC grad you know, detached from the passions of his time.
With my combat bonuses and the extra three months I’d put in, I had significant savings, and I didn’t spend much of it on a series of cheap apartments downtown. There was a dump on East 9th Street between Avenues B and C, in those days a junkie ghetto. I painted the walls a deep emergency red—and, for good measure, the ceiling. Red for blood, red for creativity. Maybe the war had made me that way. I bought some screenplay books out of curiosity. I had an urge, a nervous reflex, really, to write again. It was, frankly, the only way I could express myself—not through music or drawing, in neither of which I’d shown any particular talent when young. Certainly the memory of writing that damn painful book that had cost me my career at Yale lingered with the taint of defeat. But screenplay writing was new, sexier, far different from the old navel-gazing novel.
So I channeled these feelings inside me as a screenplay and called it “Break”; it was about Vietnam, and it fit right in with the mood of my weird apartment. It had nothing to do with the reality of what I’d been through, which wasn’t interesting to me; it was too specific. Who cares, there were enough stories about the war on TV and in the papers. No, this was something mythic, the real thing that was going on in our culture. It was about a Jim Morrison “hero.” “Break On Through” gave me the script’s title. This was about a kid I recognized from the Doors’ “Unknown Soldier” and “The End,” who rebels against his divorced, weirdly abstracted parents living in “the City.”
“The Time is the Future. The White World has split apart, many of its young people have migrated to the Forests of the East, where they live in tribes. The reactionary White World, as in the past, has invaded the East to destroy these outlaw white races . . .”
Thus began my intro to the first scene, where Anthony, the main character, burns all his student possessions and runs away from school. Confronting his father, an “intellectual liberal out of touch with the world of action”:
FATHER: I raised a pyromaniac for a son.
ANTHONY (PAINED): What does that mean?
FATHER: It means you’re sick.
ANTHONY: I disappoint you?
FATHER: Yes.
ANTHONY (SHRUGGING): I’m sorry.
FATHER: Anthony, I love you, you’re my boy.
ANTHONY: These are words, Dad, just like your word “pyromaniac.”
Arrested and sent as a soldier to the East, Anthony is involved in a battle where the American invaders, despite all their technology, are massacred with spears, rocks, bows and arrows; he’s wounded, taken prisoner, and switches sides. He joins the jungle resistance, led by a beautiful, sexy goddess—Naomi—with whom he mates in the presence of snakes.
NAOMI: You’re not scared of snakes, are you, handsome one?
ANTHONY: Not anymore.
NAOMI: You’re not scared of me, are you, handsome one?
ANTHONY: My eyes have seen you . . . dreamt you . . . dreams.
NAOMI: Take your clothes off, dreamer . . . beautiful creatures run free. Who are you?
ANTHONY: Anthony.
Portentous dialogue, but intense to me at the time. Through Naomi, Anthony becomes conscious—a Dionysian leader who’s killed at his next encounter with the overwhelming invading force. He doesn’t die in the normal sense, and lands in a version of the Egyptian Underworld, where he’s judged by hybrid animal-like beings, and then reemerges, surprisingly, in an American prison in California full of blacks, Latinos, and rebel whites. There, fueled by his yearning for freedom, he leads a successful prison break! People in those days wanted, at all costs, to be “free.” Jim Morrison was breaking taboos and crossing all the barriers—till he died in 1971. Singing about killing his father and fucking his mother, my God. Nothing was sacred—it was all possible—we were all going to “break on through to the other side!”
Did we? Critics who police popular culture discount the ’60s with safe dismissal; you can’t believe in it too much or you’re a fool to your colleagues. But they miss the point. It was a massive breakthrough, and still is. That’s why Avatar in 2009 became the highest-grossing film of all time—with a similar, almost mystical theme of a change in thinking about our civilization. Its writer-director, Jim Cameron, though insisting the antagonist was not the American empire, was on to something big—an over-industrialized, war-motivated world that regresses into our original, primordial nature. The common man protagonist evolves his consciousness, like my hero in “Break,” but has to fight the Old World desire to exploit and, if necessary, destroy the population of this New World.
It was hard to write in that Avenue B dump. Fleet-footed robbers, mostly desperate junkies, were spotted coming down from the roof through the fire escape into my windows; more than once they emptied out my apartment, which had nothing in it anyway, not even a radio. Then a young mugger tried to rob me in the doorway of the building, but I stared at the knife in his hand like I was having a traumatic flashback and backed away, silent, horrified. He didn’t know what to do—something was off about this guy he was robbing. Another New York psycho? He cursed and walked away empty-handed (something you never see in the movies).
I was weird, vaguely on the lookout for death. I moved next into a walkup at Mott and Houston Streets with heating problems. It didn’t matter that winter, as I got used to freezing, and sometimes six inches of snow would accumulate next to my kitchen table when I left the window open. I kept writing “Break” and then started another screenplay called “Dreams of Dominique,” wanting to re-create my mother’s world as Fellini did with his wife in Juliet of the Spirits. It began with her landing in New York in ’46, then her unraveling, and finally her reconciliation with her son.
I’d so missed her when I was fifteen—at boarding school, then later, living a bachelor life with my father, so dry in my heart, like the kid in The Catcher in the Rye—where was the love I cried out for? I realized belatedly my mother had been my true lifeline, but today . . . a veil hung there between us. Now nearing fifty, my mother was getting her mojo back, living in a cozy apartment on the East Side, like an older Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She worked for almost a year on a gay friend’s successful new cosmetics line, but visiting retailers around the country selling perfume to department store buyers was not for her. The great disruptor of her life, the dark and dangerous Miles, had exploded somewhere off camera—too much fury, heat, divorce. It all conspired to destroy what was probably impossible in the first place—a love affair built on passion. Living on alimony in a new ’60s world of fashion people, artists, and party animals, she divided her life between Paris and New York. A younger lover had lately moved in with her—a gentler soul, a Harlem-raised Italian American trying to make a living as a painter and later an interior decorator, who needed Mom’s strength and financial support. And later, when Mom moved on to still other lovers—all younger, black-haired, generally Mediterranean—she remained his friend, her basic nature one of loving-kindness.
I advised her to marry one of the rare rich, straight bachelors who came to these parties she attended, but she denied them the same respect she had for my father. Some had asked, but they’d either inherited their fortunes and were hopeless drunks or were simply lacking the character of her ex-husband. As much as she admired her, she could never be a Jackie Kennedy and remarry for the money. Not to say she didn’t like money, but she had her pride, Mother—not to chase after money, not to stoop to needing it. It was supposed to be “provided”; a man, in her era, took care of a woman, and it was her responsibility to “be wanted.” With age, her outlets narrowed and her nights, in the French style, became more devoted to dressing up, going out to dinner and parties, dancing, and sex—or just an ordinary evening at home with her lover and the TV.
And the telephone. In her time on earth, my mother may well have spent a third of her waking day on phones, being kind to the hordes of people she met whom she really didn’t know. Or responding to the urgent needs of friends in trouble, seeking out the always available and sympathetic Jacqueline. I never knew her to say no to anyone, and years later, during the AIDS crisis, she gave many, many hours and days to those who needed it. I still had to struggle for her attention, and I felt, at times, like just another guest at her party—but what a party! I understood better now her intellectual limitations than when I was younger. She wasn’t really interested in history, art, literature, the things I was wrestling with; she was into people, friendship, the guts of real life. The interaction was what excited her to no end, and because of that she was a firecracker and lit many a spark in other people’s lives. As well as mine. But to be the son of such a person is not simple, and I could never satisfy her as a son or as the engine in her life. Certain mothers seek out such a quality, so in love with their boys, overprotective to the point of being destructive, that they want to be “the one” in their son’s life. My mother had too much going on in her life to limit herself to that role, so I accepted my status and cherished the times we had alone, or else, too frequently, scolded her for being who she was.
Her elegant gay friends, some quite decadent, would devour me with their words and eyes at the parties she took me to. There was a possibility—a rumor—that I might lean in that direction; after all, I was not often seen with a girl, and if so, rarely twice with the same one; sometimes I’d head off to bed with a European or South American woman closer to my mother’s age whom I’d met at one of these soirees. I was willing to go way beyond my earlier parameters as a shy adolescent, and these older women were experienced in the ways of sex and taught me how to be comfortable, at least what I could remember when I wasn’t stoned. Getting stoned was my best defense; I didn’t have to be responsible, I could hide behind the “high.”
But always there was that dark thought—Vietnam. Her friends would wonder, “Why on earth did you go?” It was a question I couldn’t answer glibly. “Seriously, Vietnam?” A disappointed look. “What are they doing in that silly war!” Yes, everyone in the world, at least in New York City, knew it was a silly war—except for the boneheaded generals straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove who were fighting it. Or those French generals sending men to be slaughtered in his World War I epic Paths of Glory. The makeup, the hair, and the peacock clothing on the gay men and all my mother’s female friends’ faces at the parties, smiling, stoned, were the stylized masks in what was now my Fellini-Kubrick universe. Years later I put some of that mood into The Doors, evoking my disorientation in a strange new world.
My father had wanted to write plays when he got out of college, like Arthur Miller. They were now stacked in a drawer in his desk—never produced. His heart, part of it, resided in that drawer. As he went to work almost every day of his life down on dark, depressing Wall Street, and later in towering corporate glass buildings in midtown with escalators and rushing people, he made money to survive, never to own, but to rent in a dog-eat-dog society. His writing ability was transferred into the esteemed Lou Stone’s Monthly Investment Letter, which was translated at its peak into more than a dozen languages, his counsel sought by wealthy clients. Of Vietnam, he wrote in 1966 in his Letter:
War is always a tragedy to those who do not survive it . . . From a cold-blooded military point-of-view, however, the war in Vietnam is not all bad, and in some respects, it has certain advantages . . . [E]very time that a ship or plane or a gun goes into action, it adds to the store of our military expertise, which will save lives in the future and lead to the development of new and improved hardware . . . [T]he lives being lost in Vietnam are not being lost in vain; they are the price required for the containment of communism, and the battle-trained veterans who survive will be the cadre of a force that very well may be needed in the years to come . . . We aren’t there to win, because there isn’t anything to win . . . [I]f it were not for this policy of resistance, or containment, the well-organized, highly-disciplined communist conspiracy would move into every place in the world where there is either economic weakness or a political vacuum, and that means most of the world.
In the latter part of his Letter, he would recommend a list of defense stocks to buy.
In May of ’67 he wrote in the same Letter, “A philosophy of personal protest is no substitute for a foreign policy; Joan Baez and Bob Dylan are no substitutes for McGeorge Bundy,” Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, adding, “Let’s keep the hippies out of Congress.”
Of course it was bitterly ironic that he had a long-haired time bomb of a son, wearing beads and amulets, in his own living room in 1969, using ghetto dialect he despised: “Wow . . . Cool . . . I can dig. What’s happenin’? Whatcha doin’?” and the ubiquitous “man” along with the hand signals. “You turned into a black man!” he once said to me. Naturally, I despised his way of thinking. I’d been in combat, my father never had, yet he never expressed interest in the details, nor did I really want to tell—because it was not something I was really proud of. He dismissed the Vietnam War as a “police action”—as the Korean War had been officially categorized by Truman’s administration earlier; after all, what were 34,000 Americans dead in Korea or 58,000 in Vietnam compared to World War II’s 417,000?—and on top of that, there was simply no progress in this war. Vietnam was “a mess,” and implicitly I was part of that “mess.” I was on the road to becoming what he always feared—“a bum.” How could he even begin to understand me? He’d been an officer at the headquarters of the “Greatest Generation,” where he could only see a “Big Picture” full of maps and projections, where war made sense, if such a thing can be said. War, to my mind, was weather, accident, confusion, human nature, the basic malfunctioning of a rifle and ammunition, and a certain brutality in that nothing ever quite worked the way you thought it would in real combat. Or as Mike Tyson aptly put it, “Everybody got a plan till they get hit in the face.”
He couldn’t begin to understand that in some ways I’d gone quite mad. I’d been a good combat soldier who could be counted on not to fold in a fight. I’d learned to hate the enemy in a professional, non-emotional way, and I was able to engage them without hesitation. I was primed, and when the monsoon rains came heavy, I could smile about it and fertilize in the moisture along with the rest of the creatures of the forest—the wetter the better. Big, ugly, slug-like insects would spread and bloat at night in the moist jungles. Leeches could grow fat around my wet groin or underarms; they liked the warm places, and I’d enjoy burning them off with the smoldering tip of my cigarette. I was twenty-two then, I shit jungle mud, I could live in a hole anywhere. Because I was READY for ANYTHING in this fucking jungle, in this life. I sleep on hair-trigger alert. I react. I am 24/7 on the edge of my nerves. Even when I sleep—which I don’t. That’s a man—a hard-nailed man, not a movie bullshit hero! There were better soldiers than me, no question—but I showed up when the shit hit the fan.
Which is why, like many guys over there, I took to dope when I could. I needed to relax. Without it, I would have snapped, done something stupid. I couldn’t have taken the pressure all the time. I needed some space outside the jungle, time with music and smoke and the laughter of those crazy black soldiers who could dance in a tribal group, snapping fingers to Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke, the Temptations, or jazz, or anything with a beat. It looked feminine, yes, their voices falsetto, but they knew how to “cool it.” I’d never interacted with black people before I went there. Occasionally at school there’d be the well-behaved athlete on a scholarship. But Vietnam was a head-on plunge into a new world, discovering people from the poorest uneducated backgrounds from the South, or cities like Chicago, who saw the world in completely different ways. Some I found alienated and alienating, even hating “honky” white people, but most became friendly if you opened to them, and would share just about everything in such a compressed situation. As time went on, I found these were the people I wanted to spend my time with, because I understood their distrust and their rebellious attitude toward “the man” and the army and “this fucking war,” which they endured like they endured most everything in the genes. It was the music that started it—and the grass naturally followed from that.
And crazy as it sounds, these men, these “heads,” we called them—as opposed to the “straights” or the “juicers”—taught me a feeling for real love, the love that exists between human beings, and that’s the most important thing any soldier can keep in war—his humanity. Without it, we’re beasts; I saw that Beast in play many times over there. And now I was learning the Beast could take a more sophisticated form in civilian life, but I could recognize it anywhere. And my father’s mind was part of that Beast, praising this military-industrial complex he’d helped build.
There were times, yes, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to extinguish this mind that condoned war as necessary. And one day out on Long Island, I actually slipped a strong tab of orange sunshine LSD into his scotch rocks to blow that mind. It was at a dinner party he’d invited me to, where I was among twelve other guests, so I couldn’t be singled out. But after his initial awkwardness when he realized he was “on something,” he surprisingly announced to the suspects around the table that, whoever had given this to him, he was actually enjoying the “trip”; after all, he’d drunk a lot of whiskey in his life, and it takes more than one trip to change a strong mind. In that regard, I was younger when I was exposed to LSD, grass, mushrooms. I was able over time to essentially reexamine and question almost everything in my life, every mental feeling and perception. Having been under my father’s strong influence, I found it was quite a change in consciousness.
In truth, my father was as much a victim as he was a perpetrator; at sixty, as a vice president at Shearson Lehman Brothers, he was struggling inside a dynamic and changing economy by trying to “stay even,” because, as he often repeated, his ’62 divorce, brought on by my mother’s extravagances, cut his knees out from under him—and eight years later, he was still in debt for the same lousy $100,000. It was like a bad dream. A hundred thousand dollars may not seem like a backbreaker these days; students run up loans of that size, and modern entrepreneurs routinely go for millions of dollars of debt. But my father came from the Depression, where, after 1929, the fear of buying anything on margin was embedded like a thorn in his fate, and like Sisyphus with his taxes and alimony, the conservative investments of an aging clientele, along with the reduction of the commissions permitted by the Stock Exchange, my poor father, as in the worst of Dickens, wore himself down without getting any closer to trimming that searing $100,000 number. It was as late as 1983, almost fourteen years later and not long before his death, that he said to me one day without much satisfaction and certainly no joy, “It’s paid off.” He sounded like a man coming out of jail after twenty years, too old now to start fresh.
Capitalism, in effect, had chewed my father up and spit him out. Despite the fact he’d made millions of dollars after forty years of work, the capitalist system of wars, greater and greater profits to meet shareholder demands, and the exploitation of “lesser” people had left him hollowed out, beaten. He finally realized the pointlessness of a Cold War that required endless amounts of weaponry when, in fact, just a fraction of it on each side was enough. Dad began to change his views as he hit his mid-sixties, when one night out of nowhere he said to me, “What’s the point of all this buildup when a Russian nuclear sub can be just off our coastline?” And then, in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was rallying the country once more into a renewed Cold War against the “Evil Empire,” my father dismissed him as “a dope” who’d ruined his once admired Republican Party.
Nor did he understand a new Wall Street that was conglomeratizing his world. His new employer, the mogul Sandy Weill, was the avatar of mixing credit card, travel, and insurance companies with brokerage firms into larger and larger entities, leaving no firm or job secure. The old Wall Street was surely dying, and with it, my father was suffering the death pangs. It was a true revolution, much more dangerous than what Roosevelt had wrought, as he once feared. His nemesis turned out to be the excesses of a capitalism he thought could be contained. But it couldn’t, and it brought, ultimately, the deepening structural crises leading to 2008 and beyond.
Yet I don’t believe it was this, the destruction of his ordered world, that most depressed him. I believe it was the failure of his marriage, because Dad, despite his sarcasm and occasional disparagement, truly wanted a strong family unit, and at that he failed. He’d failed in his relationship with his wife, my mother. Or perhaps, as he hinted, he was never meant to be a family man. Some men are not.
But who was I to point the finger of judgment? What had I done with my life? My education was spotty and not paying itself off. My experience was interesting, but my skills were blowing a boiler on a ship, handling weapons, walking and bivouacking in a jungle, rolling a joint, getting fucked up, what else? By the time I was thirty—my self-imposed deadline to succeed—I’d expected to be established, starting a career, taking care of myself. I wasn’t so sure anymore; it was going on a year now since I’d come back from the army, and I was quite lost in a spiral of feelings, writing half-baked scripts, taking LSD and grass, angel dust, and engaging in sex, a lot of lust, New York parties, random girls young and old. I was drifting.
To Dad I was the idiot son who’d never amount to much. But he’d love me nonetheless, because he’d married Mom on his hunch she’d breed strong children. To his mind, he’d lost that bet, but his natural Jewish pessimism could allow for that. By comparison, his brother’s oldest son, my cousin Jimmy, would be teaching economics at Harvard at twenty-five, and then become the youngest appointee ever to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under President Carter; and after that, he would found a large private insurance company in Massachusetts and become a multimillionaire. Next to him, I seemed pointless.
It was this same uncle, Henry, who asked me what I had for “plans.” Without any real thought, I said I was thinking about acting, which evoked a pained look from him. In the New York social whirl, there were many “actors.” It was an acceptable way of life in a city of intense pretensions. I began attending two different acting schools downtown, one teaching the stricter Stanislavski Method, the other the practical workshop-oriented HB Studio on Bank Street, where there were a variety of interesting teachers—Uta Hagen, Bill Hickey, Aaron Frankel among them. But I had a problem with my acting. To be an actor, to bring myself intensely, exhaustively into another person’s soul, was something I thought I could achieve with more insight when I wrote.
In certain ways, actors reminded me of Harry Houdini, the famous magician, who, time and again, dared death and escaped at the last moment. You transcend your own self through acting out someone else’s life. Frank Langella, with whom I worked years later, told me Laurence Olivier, when asked once to explain his motivation for acting, cut through all the bullshit and barked, “Look at me. Look at me—that’s my bloody motivation!” Meaning, there’s something childish about it all, isn’t there, and “if you’re looking at the other actor, I’ve failed.” Not a bad response, really, but I basically didn’t like relying on my expressions or my looks. I wanted to be my looks, have my own ideas, live in my body, not rent it. I had ego, but unlike a good actor, I couldn’t locate it. I didn’t know who the hell I was, and that mystery drew me inward, searching.
Maybe by connecting my own dots, I could help not just myself but others to see things they hadn’t seen before. I could, as a playwright or director, bring actors to realizations they could not find on their own. The writer can become the hand-holder of the actor’s dreams; the writer brainwashes an actor into feeling the script’s words are his own feelings. Perhaps I was being arrogant, but toward those goals I was driven to stumble with a blind and zealous faith.
My own acting, in any case, was muffled and thought-bound. I couldn’t get out of myself—fly like a bird, be free! Once I got stuck in the pompous role of Thomas Becket, my Russian-born teacher scolding me constantly, until one night I dropped LSD and stopped by the class and played the shit out of this old twelfth-century archbishop. She applauded wildly, told me I’d finally arrived at its meaning, and praised me to the class. Yet on the LSD I had no idea what I’d done. I just did it. But how could I repeat the performance? I had no clue.
Studying Chekhov, drawing upon and evoking domestic issues at that stage of my life seemed boring and bourgeois. I wanted action. Jim Morrison action, girls, sex. Sam Peckinpah was the guy. And in France, in a wholly different way, Jean-Luc Godard, no prude, was the other guy for me because he appreciated the sex and violence of cinema. In Pierrot le Fou in 1965, he could montage eight or ten shots of a burning match, a gun, a drunk American cowboy, a French chick wearing a Vietnamese rice hat, a Viet Cong flag, this, that, and a voice-over with American artillery sound effects, and you could take a metaphorical leap into Vietnam—it was stunning. What Sergei Eisenstein had done for silent films, Godard was doing with modern cinema. Luis Buñuel, in the same vein, could take an ordinary dinner party in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and turn it inside out—so that, as both participant and observer, you saw with an acid trip’s clarity the folly and irrationality of this life, which always seems, despite our best efforts, to interrupt our plans, and in case you don’t understand, the curtain comes up and there’s an audience out there laughing at your dinner party. Those were the kinds of scripts I was writing. I could not appreciate the realism and rationality of Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, or Edward Albee (whom I admired and wrote a thesis on in boarding school). But I didn’t want their realism. I’d just come back from Vietnam, and it was so intense, so far from the normal social intercourse, that civilian life was smaller to me, a farce, with people running around worried about careers, money, who loves who—who gives a shit! I was really an anarchist at this time.
Although I met a lot of girls my age, slept with a few of them, I was too strange, and I thought some of them were psychotic, I mean crazier than batshit with their neuroses, which is why I preferred older women. For instance, you’re with a girl alone, you’ve both been giving all the right signals, and although you don’t really know each other, and you’re supposed to take the initiative because you’re the guy, and you’re holding her and kissing her, and then, all of a sudden, she flips the switch and doesn’t want to go any further—just simple stuff like “Do I really want to be with this guy?”—that sense of doubt that many women project, and then, before you know it, you’re picking up on it and feeling guilty as shit, like, “Wow, am I projecting too strongly? Is she scared I’m gonna try to rape her?”
And before you know it, back to her—“Who is this guy? I’m not comfortable.”
And so forth. Everyone’s getting real paranoid, and if she’s even higher than you, she’s running out into the New York street about to get killed, screaming, “Go ’way! Leave me alone!” One time it was, “No, no, no! I don’t wanna live! I don’t wanna live!” Insane, exaggerated dialogues, or as Jim Morrison wrote, “weird scenes inside the gold mine.” Yeah, you meet strange people in the City.
People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone
A former schoolmate told me I could go to “film school” and get a college degree. For what—“going to the movies”? That seemed ridiculous because, like most everybody else in America, I never had a problem going to the movies. So almost a year after my return, in the fall of ’69, I enrolled at NYU’s School of the Arts, undergraduate, not really with a defined purpose, but because maybe there was something to this. And the GI Bill was paying about 80 percent of the tuition. I got to see numerous films and took a production course wherein we’d rotate as director-writer, cinematographer, editor, actor on 16mm black-and-white short films from one to five minutes long. The teachers were committed, serious. There was Haig Manoogian, their leader, a wisecracking, humane fiftyish New York street intellectual who always wore a tiny porkpie hat; Dean Oppenheimer, the head of the program, a majestic cultural figure; Charlie Milne, an eccentric Zen-seeker given to a day of silence each week, who ran the valued equipment department, making sure we all had fair access; and Marty Scorsese, NYU’s star graduate, then in his mid-twenties, who’d made some celebrated short films and was struggling through various stages of a low-budget feature, Who’s That Knocking on My Door? He’d soon make Mean Streets, which would become his entrée to Hollywood. Marty sported greasy hair down to his shoulders and a very fast, high-pitched, nervous New York accent. He’d generally be a mess in our morning class, as he’d stay up sometimes till dawn to watch old movies on television, because in those days before videocassettes, there were a limited number of repertory theaters in the city. I’ll never forget his spontaneous lecture on the greatness of Josef von Sternberg’s expressionistic madness in The Scarlet Empress (1934) with Marlene Dietrich. Marty clearly worshiped cinema as intensely in his way as the young protagonist did God in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and his classes were fun, punctuated by rapid-fire dialogues, irreverence at every level, but at the same time, he understood the sacred stakes we were playing for and that very few of us in these classes would succeed. I know I felt this, perhaps because I was older than most of my classmates.
At NYU there was this instinctive distrust of the people who’d been in the military and gone “over there.” I rarely volunteered to anyone that I was a vet, but some figured it out. There was no welcome home for us. It was simply in the air. The way they looked at me, I was apart. Had I killed in Vietnam? I had a vague dread of that question. Most of the students were left-wing, radical, Marxist, anarchist—and some were just out to make a buck in commercials, whatever. This was New York City, and their reactions, for the most part, were based on what would later be called “political correctness,” and their dubious judgment of me was made without knowing what I’d been through in Vietnam.
Najwa Sarkis was a striking, olive-skinned Lebanese woman with a polished, somewhat haughty British accent. Although she was raised Christian, her face belonged on a fourth-century Phoenician vase, so I ignored the accent. With holes in my jeans, stoned, insolent, pretending indifference, I met her at an uptown party my mother invited me to. She was intrigued by me, so different from the civilized crowd she was accustomed to. More important, she came to accept me as I was, this jungle animal, dangerous to myself and potentially to her. All I wanted was her warm, brown Mediterranean body. That sea was in my genes too—through France, through Odysseus. The first time we made love, all that pretentious New York veneer vanished, as we ripped each other’s clothes off like two junkyard dogs going at it. She was twenty-eight to my twenty-three and a rational woman integrated into the world with a job as the chief assistant to the Moroccan ambassador to the United Nations, with a decent salary and a rent-controlled apartment in the East 50s. She was independent of me, my father, my mother, NYU, all that had gone before, thus a new force unto herself, and she allowed me gradually—by trusting me, by loving me—to pretend once again that I could believe in the customs of New York society, circa 1969–1975.
Eventually, at her invitation, I moved uptown from my hole to her place. Incongruities persisted. I’d be walking down a New York sidewalk with Najwa in daylight when a car would suddenly backfire and I’d plunge to the pavement. She was quite slow by my standards as she looked casually for the source of the sound, then turned back, wondering where I’d gone. It took her a while to understand how much my instincts and fear controlled me.
This actually helped me in film school, where I was beginning to learn a trade, a real trade. It wasn’t writing I was learning; that had already been a part of me for as long as I could remember, since my father began assigning me twenty-five-cent weekly themes when I was seven or so. Not a bad idea; it didn’t make me want to write, but because I wanted the money, I accepted, little by little, the literary impulse he was teaching me. Only later did I realize it was a skill which I could use to make far more money than either my father or I could ever have dreamed of. Dad would say, “I’ll give you a quarter, kiddo. Write about anything you want. Make it two pages, three, just tell a story. Let’s say by Saturday?” Dad had always been a terrific bedtime storyteller when I was young. And twenty-five cents in the early ’50s was enough to buy a hamburger or a Classic Comic—“Rob Roy,” “Count of Monte Cristo,” “Ivanhoe,” “Ulysses,” “Tale of Two Cities”—which excited my imagination in ways only classic novels could; I don’t remember Jane Austen or Henry James being illustrated. I wrote several stories based on movies I’d seen of the Indian wars—a lot of killing, of course, because that was okay in the American culture. Killing was acceptable. Massacres were even better. That and money. Money was power. That’s what children learn the fastest—the meaning of Power.
Dad also infrequently took me to good movies, at least ones he wanted to see, like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), or his favorite, David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He objected to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) because of Marlon Brando’s incessant “mumbling,” which was rare in those days; no longer. But even at nine, I knew this movie was different; it set a new standard of realism in which life in my hometown was actually gritty and scary. My dad would always ask me as we were walking out of the movie house, “So kiddo, what’d you think?” I’d say something like, “I really liked it,” or not, and he’d say, “But did you notice that [this thing] was wrong, and because that happened, [this other thing] didn’t make sense?” And I’d ask, “Why doesn’t [this] [that] make sense?” And we’d go into this chess game of what made sense in a movie. My dad was logical, and he’d generally end up smiling and saying, “Well, you know, we could’ve done it better.” Without either of us realizing it, he gave me my first encouragement to be a screenwriter.
Going to film school was a different experience, because now I had a new acquired savagery from seeing it for real in Vietnam, an instinct I’d learned, and I knew in my gut that this savagery was necessary to see. To feel. To hear. Everything! Above all—the six inches in front of my face. My senses were now joined with this new thing—this 16mm camera, Bolex, Arriflex, Eclair, whatever you could get from the school equipment store—which would become my eyes and ears to record everything around me. My eyes had grown omnipresent and nervous in the jungle. They’d become 360°, ears attuned to the slightest shift in sound. You have to blend with the jungle, smell like it, see it from the inside out; you’re the snake crawling on the jungle floor, or the giant spider weaving its thirty-foot web between primeval trees. You pay attention at all times to survive in the most visceral sense of the word. In other terms, you’re a camera, and with that camera, you take the same time and space, no matter how ordinary, and tear it apart as if you’re fucking, penetrating this reality with all your senses, but primarily your eyes—and creating on film, out of pure instinct, something fresh and new. That was the thrill for me.
By the same token, I never gave up, or took for granted, my interest in writing; in fact, I was one of the few students from the production side who consistently, over the two years, attended the courses offered in screenwriting, which surprisingly at NYU were not a requirement. The European “New Wave” had killed off respect for screenwriters; writing and directing were considered two different professions. Writers were grim, wormy backroom creatures; filmmakers were dashing, bold, frontline creative; they were inventing on the day of the shoot with the actors, and screenplays were closer to treatments. After a few efforts working this way, I never really believed it, and over time, clearly the screenplay has reemerged as the equal, if not dominant, player.
During those two years, I watched many movies with this new eye, and learned as much as I could about making them. One of the first basic lessons in filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing—no exposure that can be seen; even what you see with your naked eye needs to be shaped and enhanced by the light. New York in winter was a short day, and as the sun dropped, you intensified everything to get the last shots you needed, because you couldn’t afford artificial light or coming back and shooting a second day. This condition persisted throughout my career, even on the most expensive films. Every day knowing I was chasing the sun, I’d be running from the first shots through the lunch break, avoiding, if I could, the ugly midday light, rehearsing and trying to do as much as possible to “get the day” between 4 p.m. and 6 or 7. It was always an overriding question of pacing myself to get the shots I needed. If I made a shot list of, let’s say, eighteen shots that day, under the pressure of the shooting I’d find out by 3 p.m. that I only really needed twelve—or just nine shots. The point was, I was doing some of the best work, or at least necessary work, in that last hour or two. “What do you really need to understand the scene? Not ‘want’—what do you need!” was the mantra. Marty brought to the class John Cassavetes, who’d made Shadows and now Husbands with NYU-style low budgets; he was a warm, open individual whom we deeply admired for his independence. He encouraged us to find our reasons—our need—for making films, and by way of showing us, ran acting exercises with us and assigned us different roles in which we’d improvise together. “Don’t waste time as an actor—get to the point. What do you really need from this other person in the scene? Approval? Money? Sex? Love? What?” Talk about keeping it personal, here was a man who literally sacrificed his health for his films.
Near the end of my first year, I made a short film, which I called Last Year in Vietnam. There was no dialogue, and I shot it in crude 16mm black and white with some 8mm color intercuts; I intended those to be a stand-in for the Vietnamese jungle, which I was contrasting to the black-and-white cold concrete New York streets of winter. But it worked, as I portrayed a young veteran living in New York alone, waking up on an overcast morning, still trying to adjust to civilian life. Played by me without much expression, the character evokes an aura of uncertainty and loss. Spontaneously he packs all his personal memorabilia, medals, and photographs in a bag, the idea growing that he has a problem with his past. The Vietnam photographs I used had been my first baby steps in cinema. In the last months of my tour, I’d bought a Pentax at the PX and kept it waterproofed in a plastic bag. By comparison, writing anything on paper was useless, given the amount of rain in the jungle; taking photos was the only way to keep a record.
The young vet hops the subway downtown, his gait in rhythm with a cane, his leg damaged by the kind of shrapnel that’d taken me down the second time. He boards the Staten Island Ferry, and once out on Lower New York Bay, as the music of Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia” surges through his consciousness, he literally throws the bag full of memories into the churn of the surf from the ferry’s engine, gone now, purging himself of the past. To add to the intensity, I laid Najwa’s cultured voice reading flatly in French from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which comes together in a rough sort of exorcism of the young man’s pain. It made no sense really, but it had a curious power. When the film ended after some eleven taut minutes and the projector was turned off, I steeled myself in the silence for the usual sarcasm consistent with our class’s Chinese Cultural Revolution “auto-critique,” in which no one was spared. What would my classmates say about this?
No one had yet spoken. Words become very important in moments like this. And Scorsese simply jumped all the discussion when he said, “Well—this is a filmmaker.” I’ll never forget that. “Why? Because it’s personal. You feel like the person who’s making it is living it,” he explained. “That’s why you gotta keep it close to you, make it yours.” No one bitched, not even the usual critiques of my weird mix, sound problems, nothing. In a sense, this was my coming out. It was the first affirmation I’d had in . . . years. This would be my diploma.
Marty’s sense of the “personal” was married to a rich Italian American subculture of gang brotherhood and lethal violence. My sense of the personal to date was invested in my growing up in sheltered conservative America and contradicting that with the shattering madness and violence of Vietnam. But it would still take time for my vision to mature and emerge.
When I finished film school in May 1971, there wasn’t much to celebrate. There were no jobs waiting, much less any interest in our work. A BFA degree in film meant nothing but another certificate on the wall alongside my Bronze Star. I had no illusions. Several of us went into cab driving, which was the steadiest work I could find; working the night shift from 6 p.m. to 2 or 3 a.m. allowed me to keep writing screenplays in the daytime. It paid about $30 to $40 a night with tips included, which was okay money then. With Najwa’s salary and rent-controlled apartment, we could make ends meet.
I’ll never forget my desolation when walking back crosstown from the taxi garage at two or three in the morning, buses few and far between; I’d be sparsely dressed in a sweater, fatigue jacket, and thin jeans that couldn’t stand up to the fierce blasts of cold air blowing off the Hudson right down those big-ass New York canyon walls. You could die from hypothermia right there on the empty streets and no one would care, not at that hour. My teeth chattering, I’d count the blocks to Najwa’s apartment, my little shelter in the world. After that forty-five-minute hike into the wind, I’d arrive chilled and shivering for several minutes. I’d climb quietly into her bed and embrace her warm toaster of a body. I was the toast. She would stir, and sometimes we’d make silent love.
Najwa was finding her way to love me. When things started to deepen between us, she visited her gynecologist, and he recommended I visit a doctor to check myself out. The verdict out of NYU Medical was most painful and abrupt. The doctor said I’d never have children; my sperm count was so far below normal, he didn’t think it warranted further investigation. I could have been visiting a 1950s insane asylum, asking them about depression and being told I needed a lobotomy. Were there any remedies? Not really. It’s hard for me to believe how final this verdict was, but I accepted it. Depressed, yes—“never to have a child” felt like 1984. It seemed my mother’s woes, having one child with complications, were to continue into the next generation. I attributed my shortcomings to my rough forceps birth or the operation at six that had been sold to me as an “appendectomy” but was really the removal of an undescended testicle.
But there was another possibility in this miasma: Vietnam. It was the first time I connected chemical warfare to hearing my grandfather Pépé’s stories of the gas attacks in World War I. We’d used great quantities of Dow Chemical’s “Agent Orange,” which had severely damaged the genes of Vietnamese civilians and poisoned much of their land. We’d patrolled these areas frequently, never worrying about it. The concept of Agent Orange was just then starting to be investigated as a medically liable by-product of that war. What a strange bargain, if it’d been so, that as an infantryman I did not lose my life but lost my future. I went to another doctor for a second opinion, but his prognosis was no different. My father took the news stoically, while my mother thought it was bullshit and assured me I’d have a child one day—of course, she was superstitious and had always supported me.
Most important, Najwa didn’t seem to mind, which made me wonder if she truly wanted children of her own. Not that we could afford one, at this time, but in any case Najwa adapted quickly to this conclusion and rarely mentioned having kids again. This led me to believe she took her greatest satisfaction from her embassy work and her strong connections, especially as a loving aunt and sister, to her extensive family in Lebanon.
What Najwa did want, after almost a year of living together, was to get married—or else, she was candid, we should probably break this thing up. The uncertainty for her could not continue. As I had no real prospects, feeling like an abandoned samurai in a Kurosawa picture, I agreed to marry, although I was still too young to realize the consequences. We were wedded in a small civil ceremony at City Hall, attended by her beloved boss the ambassador, his wife, my mother, hopeful, and my father, skeptical. To my mom, as much as she liked Najwa, she was never the “right one,” and to Dad, well, she was sort of a secular bus stop on the road to whatever hell I was going to.
In time I became more comfortable, my rough edges smoothing out. I was defanging. I can’t say the marriage, from my side, was built on love, but rather on comfort and caring for each other. And for much of it, I was very happy with this refined woman who was solid, more mature than me. She also appreciated the work ethic; I managed almost two original scripts a year, in addition to long story treatments. Besides my taxi driving, I found spot work here and there as a production assistant, and with the help of one of Najwa’s friends, the founder of a major trucking company, put together with two young producers a very low-budget film shot near Montreal.
Seizure, originally titled The Queen of Evil, was based on a most vivid nightmare I had, which I turned into a screenplay, in which I was a writer of supernatural tales that I also illustrated, living in a rather large old house in the countryside with a wife and young son. My guests that weekend were of different social styles and classes, an eclectic group I was comfortable with; there was nothing forced in the dream. But then evil things began to happen. A window broke. The housekeeper disappeared. The intruders began to show themselves in increasingly frightening ways, and my guests were disappearing one by one. I couldn’t do anything. In the grip of some malevolent force that in a dreamscape always seems to leave you utterly passive, I saw a gigantic dwarf figure in medieval clothing with huge, calloused hands crash through a window. There was a stunning black-haired woman who seemed to be guiding events, but she was sociable and fit right in with the guests . . . until she didn’t. Horrible scenes continued to unfold mysteriously, mostly out of sight, until I was the last one left alive except for my young son; the others, including my wife, were presumably dead. And now a choice had to be made—this woman was demanding an answer. It was either my life or my son’s. So in my dream life, I can’t tell you how ashamed I was to abandon my son there to the monsters and flee into the forest for my survival!
Not that this awful woman kept her word, either. Because her gigantic dwarf was thrashing after me in the forest, catching me, and with his tremendous grip was strangling me to death in some bog. I was gurgling, protesting, a muffled “agghhh” barely clawing its way out of my throat as I woke, terrified, in New York City at 4 a.m. Najwa was a shadowy lump next to me—or was she? Was she that black-haired woman! I jumped, startled from my side of the bed. Yes, I’d woken, but I was still stuck in this nightmare! And she was here—the malevolent woman from the dream! The Queen of Evil herself.
I couldn’t be sure. Slowly I checked. Now I was in real life, it seemed. And thank God it was Najwa next to me, not the other one. I realized it had all been a dream. But where was this cowardice coming from? What was I scared of? In the dream, the writer was bringing this fate down upon himself, his family, his friends. In the dream, he even tells one of his friends he’s dreaming the events up, but he can’t stop it—which smacks of Greek family tragedy wherein Orestes tells of his being doomed by the Furies.
It was most exciting to make this film, even if my eyes were bigger than my stomach. Najwa helped my two novice producers and I to raise funds, but after a frustrating year of chasing, we didn’t have enough money, and from that dilemma arose many problems. I learned a great deal, including not to insist that some of the actors live in the same house where we were shooting. In other words, how to avoid chaos on a movie set. It was a memorable first film experience with a wonderful bouillabaisse of actors, drawn both from the theater—Jonathan Frid (famous as Barnabas Collins in the hit TV series Dark Shadows), Annie Meacham, Roger De Koven, Louis Zorich—and from pop culture, sexy Martine Beswick, the outrageous knife-throwing French dwarf Hervé Villechaize, Warhol’s Mary Woronov, Troy Donahue (a box office name), and egomaniac Joe Sirola. I changed my title to the less corny Seizure partly because my protagonist terrifies himself into a coronary when he finds, after all he’s gone through in the dream, that it is the Queen of Evil in his bed. There is a double entendre in this title as well, because in our chaotic post-production, in a raid with a bailiff by our side, we had to legally “seize” the film back from our French Canadian director of photography, who owned the production house, and we barely escaped with the film back across the border to the US. Seizure was finally released by Cinerama in 1974 in action houses on double bills, did minor business, and, after so much hope and effort, did nothing for my career as a filmmaker.
Through another of Najwa’s friends, an important advertising executive, I lucked into a steady-paying job at a baseball sports film company promoting itself as a production house to the big Madison Avenue advertising agencies. But I was hopeless as a salesman, with no real love of advertising or the agency life, and nothing much came of it except that I kept writing, furtively, in the company’s backrooms, guilty over taking a salary. And when I was finally, politely, “let go” after almost a year, I was relieved to find myself again on the unemployment line, free of responsibility. That became my financial base whenever I qualified in those years. Down by Wall Street, standing in lines up to an hour and more in a gloomy, run-down official building with fluorescent lighting at its worst, we were treated impersonally by the weary New York State employees; it was nothing I hadn’t seen in the army, especially the lines for everything and the indifference of others, but it was definitely something I didn’t want to get too familiar with.
Exacerbating these fears, I was reading George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, based on his sour 1930s existence trying to write while slumming as a waiter, dishwasher, vagabond; being the realist he was, he made the strong and depressing point that the “workers of the world” were all snagged in this dog-eat-dog economy and could never get out of their bind, thus behaving in even more unkind and ungiving ways. Tough stuff. Orwell himself was spared only because of his past connection to a man he met from his own social class. If not for this deus ex machina, Orwell was implying, there would have been no hope.
The problems with this way of life, as any writer will tell you, was that there is no honest measure of time or effort in such a crazy dream except through rejection, and there was plenty of that. I grew a file with dozens, probably hundreds, of written turndowns, a dossier of shame, from which I drew hurt and a perverse pride in being able to take rejection. Yet my wounded ego interfered with my ability to understand the reasons for these rejections. It’s too easy to blame the buyer and not yourself. Beyond the paper world of rejection, there was also the in-person wound of being told no in face-to-face meetings—when they could be had—the hard-to-come-by lunches, the unreturned phone calls. Hope would spring up like a weed inside every word or slight quiver in tone; an eye glancing in an elevator or a lobby off a face you might know, looking for leads anywhere, anything—but without being obvious. It was, overall, humiliating, the news generally depressing, but with fantasies of succeeding getting me through the days.
Then suddenly my own deus ex machina moment appeared. One of my forty-page treatments, “The Cover-Up,” was optioned by an Italian producer, Fernando Ghia, who was dating a pretty Australian model I knew, who, without reading it, suggested he read it—kismet? Fernando, an intellectual, was partnered with the celebrated screenwriter Robert Bolt, who was one of the most admired dramatists of his generation, having created A Man for All Seasons, both play and film, and then, for David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. I’d written a story about the recent Patty Hearst kidnapping (1974), calling attention to the little-discussed fact that the leader of the abductors, a black ex-convict named Donald DeFreeze, had a criminal record and was reportedly an FBI informant, which led to all sorts of complications. Although I wasn’t politically driven in my screenplay writing, this was a good hook for a story. Could the government deliberately be doing these illegal things? True, my father had been my greatest political influence, but I was moving away from him. I’d loved Costa-Gavras’s Z as a film student in ’69, although that was about Greece. We all worshiped The Battle of Algiers (1966) at the school but still didn’t connect it to our American belly button. Peter Davis’s documentary Hearts and Minds in 1974 hit home, yet it was closely focused on Vietnam, which was still far away to most. Emile de Antonio, who’d done a wonderful documentary on the McCarthy era, was the oddball in dealing with US government madness.
Women were also being heard from, and loudly, but most of the liberals at that time—Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan—stuck to female empowerment issues, not the mendacity of the US government in domestic and foreign affairs. The outlier was Jane Fonda, whom I secretly admired for her balls, because she was challenging the government at a high level, even if she seemed to me at that time too radical.
Conspiracy films were newly in the air, such as Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and his forthcoming All the President’s Men (1976), and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975). For once my timing was right. My treatment was optioned for $5,000 against $40,000 if the film was made, and I was brought out to Los Angeles for a script conference. Bolt, as a dedicated socialist, saw the point of my treatment probably more clearly than I did—the rise of the American security state long before 9/11—and the idea that “terrorism” could be used to strengthen and monetize the state excited him. He gave this project great urgency and pushed me to flesh out the treatment into a full screenplay.
Although it was exhilarating to be working at this level, and my knowledge of screenwriting was accelerating, writing for Bolt became a baptism by fire, and the fire was constantly being quenched. With him, I was swinging back from the free form of the NYU filmmaker world to the strict screenwriting art, in which the movie is laid out in some detail on paper, so that the money people can oversee their investment more closely. You’re not writing a movie as much as submitting an architectural blueprint. I’d give Bolt pages as I went, and like the schoolteacher he’d been for many years, Robert red-penciled a great deal of it while explaining, elaborating, and often writing between the lines. He found the work “a bit careless . . . but I’ll punch it up in London for these cunts who’ll read it. It won’t be a shooting script.” The process became even more torturous with him back in the UK requesting more rewrites and more questioning. My script pages were going back and forth over the course of the next three months, but I never felt I could please Robert. In England, he always had “doubts.” Then again, he was known to take years sometimes to write a screenplay; such was The Mission, which he worked on for almost ten years. To me it became a lesson in overwriting. We’re not writing a play but making movies. We need speed and action, not too heady. When The Mission finally came out in 1986 it was brilliant, yes, sophisticated, issue-oriented, and yet it failed at the box office because it missed the element of sheer excitement that I wanted for our film.
And so “The Cover-Up” was again traversing that slow, dull passage of time that tells you there is no film, and there will be no film, and we’re really going to funerals for the dream we never lived. It was, in the end, a quality political thriller, half Bolt, half Stone, well written, recommended at the studios, but dulled by its polish, and with a glum ending, its commercial prospects weren’t appealing to financiers. A series of actors and directors turned it down. My last hope was Robert Shaw, who was achieving leading man status after Jaws, but he too passed. I was heartbroken, but used to it; the patterns of struggle and failure in life tend to repeat themselves.
I also knew a similar honesty was now required in my life with Najwa. We had to end the Lie that had become our marriage. My spirit was simply expiring; you can’t hide that. I came back from Los Angeles on what was likely my last trip for “The Cover-Up” and went straight to the apartment and told her that I couldn’t go on this way. We fought, our voices went up, both of us acting out our deeply hurt roles. Yes, Najwa would grow fiercely jealous of any woman I talked to at any party, but she also knew I’d never seriously pursued an affair with another; there’d been a tumultuous interlude in Canada with my Queen of Evil star, but that had lasted a month and, like film melodramas, had died off. The love and passion of my life, if there was to be any—that woman was still out there in the cosmos. And Najwa sensed it.
But she thought it was Los Angeles that was twisting me, that I’d been deeply hurt by this setback on “Cover-Up.” But if I stuck it out, she was sure my career would gather heat and I would succeed. She loved my talent. She’d grown to trust it. And she’d grown to love me as her husband, and when I looked around, it was so comfortable in that little apartment, my things laid out in their proper place, my writing desk, my library, watching TV together, the warmth of another’s body to sleep with at night or talk to after making love.
“Comfortable” was the killer word. In a few more years she’d be forty, I’d be thirty-five, still living in this rent-controlled apartment, no children, occasional weekends on Fire Island or in the Hamptons; maybe we’d share a summerhouse with other couples. Occasional vacations and trips back to Lebanon. And maybe I’d sell a screenplay or treatment here and there. Or if not, well, there’d be so many international people coming through New York and asking for business favors from Morocco that Najwa could potentially find us a spot in one of these ventures. With her Lebanese instincts guiding the ship, I’d sharpen my own business acumen. And one day, with fortitude and patience, perhaps we’d even be rich. Comfortable, for sure. But who was I in this? I still didn’t know. But I knew that’s how people stop believing in their dreams.
Nor was Los Angeles, which was increasingly in my sights as a route of hope, ever in consideration as a place to live for Najwa. New York was her true home, and although she was in her prime and could certainly have attracted a quality man who could take far better care of her than I, she had never come to New York looking for a sugar daddy. I believe she came to love her job more than she’d ever love a man. This sounds severe, but I think of all the strong women I’ve known working in jobs so long—thirty or more years—who moved beyond the need for a husband.
Because she was older than me, some people said I’d married my mother, which hurt me. Nobody said it out loud, of course, but I could feel it. And there was some truth to it. My mother certainly must have thought of it immediately, and I’m sure was flattered—“Oliver needs a woman like me . . . I raised him, I know what he likes! Of course, Najwa’s nothing like me, but she keeps him happy. She loves him like I loved Lou. She’s good for him.”
There’s nothing ultimately wrong with men loving their mothers, absolutely not. In fact, it’s a healthy sign. But the truth was, I’d started breaking my “jones” with my mother during those years in Vietnam. Now I was being “cared for” by my older wife, but that was okay from Mom’s point of view. The flaw was that I hadn’t grown into my own man. This I knew in my gut—that I hadn’t yet been successful as a writer because I’d failed to complete the journey I started when I went to Vietnam. I hadn’t held my own and stood alone; I’d settled for the comfort of a bourgeois marriage with a good woman who could give me a home, give me sex, share her friends, and make well-cooked fish. She had loved me in her way, but who was I really? I would never know.
As I left the apartment that night with two suitcases, it’d been almost five years I’d been sleeping here, but I’d never felt this was my home. I told Najwa I’d come back for the rest of my things and kissed her lightly on the cheek, saying as gently as I could, “Take care of yourself, Najwa. We’ll talk.” I was relieved to get out of there before something worse happened, like an emotional thunderstorm. But then she said quietly, as if she knew I wouldn’t come back this time, “Stay my friend . . . ?”
This hung there in the air; it stopped me, the tremor of the question in her voice. It was heartbreaking, because she needed my energy, my vibrations. She needed me. She loved me deeply. How could I be just “a friend”? What could I be but a bastard! Break hearts. No, not really. But I was a child of divorce, yes. Why not, it’s the way of the world. Didn’t you meet my parents? Didn’t you see this coming—that great mistake they committed when they married and begat me? I brushed one of her tears away and left her without the love I could not give. The door closed on her broken expression, and feeling coldhearted, I walked down the hall, down the stairs, and into the street, where I inhaled the first fresh breath of air that I’d had in . . . years.
I’d loved Najwa to the degree that I could, but in that blurry, constrained manner when we know we are not being honest with ourselves; you could say I didn’t understand what love was, because it’s an overused and overdramatized word, but nonetheless as powerful an explanation for the universe as we have. I read once in an Eastern text that love could be known only “by its absence.” We take away, we subtract, reduce—and there it is finally. In its simplicity, you love. No bells, no whistles, just good old love, like an old sweater . . . I didn’t know who—but I’d meet her someday.
Not surprisingly, forty years later, Najwa remains in her lovely “rent-stabilized” apartment, going to the same job she still loves. Seven, eight ambassadors later in time, it makes no difference. Najwa serves the Royal Kingdom of Morocco. And even the damn king has changed, but not Najwa, bless her. She remains very close to her family, adores her sisters, nieces, nephews. I still visit with her, not without sadness, and cherish what we can of our memories together.
Past midnight now, the Fourth of July fireworks were winding down. Hours had slipped by. The waves were lapping quietly at the Statue of Liberty’s little islet, her soft face still visible in the light of the last explosions.
“Time is the fire in which we burn,” the poet Delmore Schwartz wrote. Things had gone wrong for my mother and father; they never fit, and I too, as their sole product in temperament, was destined for divorce. It’d been a lie. So had Vietnam. So had most of my life. The Lie had infected everything, and I was still numb from it. Because I’d basically never woken up. I was so lost. I wasn’t sure of anything. In that story I’d read long ago, where was the thread Theseus had found to get out of that huge Cretan labyrinth?
With a silent nod of hope mixed with despair, I bade farewell to my goddess and headed for the uptown subway—and in that way, my Fourth of July 1976 drew to a close.