Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 42

here you’re supposed to be is some big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, with cameramen and actors and stuffed mushrooms all over the church. This is the summer of 2007, and a film based on my fourth book, Choke, is being shot on location here. In a side chapel a few steps away, Kelly Macdonald’s character is seducing Sam Rockwell’s. Plotwise, her goal is to conceive a fetus in order to puree its unborn brain and use that neural tissue to cure the dementia of Anjelica Huston’s character. All of that sacrifice is being offered to preserve the memories of one person …In real life, Kelly tells me she’s been away from home, filming projects in the United States, and hasn’t seen her husband in months. This big push is so they can get somewhat ahead, so Kelly can stay at home, she hopes, and have a real baby.

The hospital sequences are being shot in an abandoned asylum, the former Essex County Mental Hospital, a complex of thirty-five buildings covering a hundred acres. A ghost town. “Our own back lot,” says the film’s director, Clark Gregg. There are buildings to serve as police stations …buildings that look like private homes …all of them scheduled to be demolished in another month. The landscaping is overgrown, with white-tailed deer wandering the waist-high grass. Rabbits graze in this Arcadian setting, and, at dusk, fireflies hover as winking lights. Left behind are a century of hospital beds and dirty sheets, and the shabby jigsaw puzzles are beyond number.

In Hollywood jargon, everyone has warned Clark that Choke was “very E.D.” By this, they don’t mean “erectile dysfunction.” A comedy about food and death and sex? They mean that the film’s success will be very “execution dependent.” By execution, they mean how it’s told, not how it’s killed.

Jump to midnight in this mental hospital. Anjelica Huston walks toward me down a long hospital corridor, her cheeks smeared with a mask of chocolate pudding, her eyes locked on mine. “You,” she says, pointing at her face, “you did this to me!” We stand and talk while the crew sets up another shot. She tells me a strange, funny story about her father, John Huston, speaking to her a few days after his death. I won’t spoil it or steal it by retelling that story here. Kelly Macdonald talks about learning a Texas accent a few weeks ago for a film called No Country for Old Men. Before that she was working on a project in Chicago. Sam Rockwell talks about his next film, to be shot in England, about a man who lives alone on the moon.

A maze of underground tunnels connect the basements of the different hospital buildings, concrete utility tunnels, branched and dripping, lined with steam pipes. Between setups, crew members wander by flashlight through these, sending back camera-phone snapshots of butchered dogs sacrificed on subterranean altars by Satanists no longer in evidence. After a few days of shooting, everyone has a spooky story about being touched or pinched by invisible hands. This was a high-security loony bin. Meaning, if you walk through the wrong door it will lock behind you, trapping you in a deserted ward or wing with no exit. Steel bars block the windows. The walls are red brick, and your only hope is that someone might hear you screaming among the soiled mattresses and bedpans. A caterer circulates constantly, handing everyone hot fudge sundaes.

Here in this madhouse, it’s getting harder and harder to tell apart reality and make-believe. This essay I’m constantly writing and revising in my mind, I call it “A Catered Nightmare.” I write it, but it keeps crumbling under the weight of too many quirky details. A better writer, a smarter writer, would be able to find the Unified Field Theory that would tie together all of these facts. For example, someone brilliant, like Joy Williams. David Foster Wallace could nail the big lesson that’s being demonstrated, but all I can do is watch and take notes. I’m sitting on the shaggy asylum lawn eating a hamburger with my editor, Gerry Howard, while fireflies twinkle around us. The catering company is passing smoked salmon en croute garnished with sprigs of fennel. An assistant director steps up to ask if we’ll move our picnic to another spot because we’re in Sam Rockwell’s eye line during a very emotional speech. Before Sam, Heath Ledger was cast as the male lead. Before Ledger, Ryan Gosling had been cast.

Jump to New York City, to a sex shop in the West Village where I’m buying their entire stock of latex anal stimulation beads. Every movie shoot needs a wrap gift, and Clark Gregg’s original thought was to give everyone custom-made chrome Ben Wa balls, highly polished and engraved with the film’s title and the dates of principal photography, but that gesture would’ve cost half the production budget. Instead, I’ve gone with Gregg’s assistant to every sex toy shop in Manhattan. Two men buying every string of butt beads in every store …in New York that doesn’t raise an eyebrow. In the West Village shop, a middle-aged female clerk warns us, “The ones with the white cotton string are sold strictly as a novelty. You use those one time, and you’ll never get that string white again.” After that, we go to the Chelsea Kmart to buy a child’s car seat. Our car filled with sex toys and a baby seat, we go to collect Jennifer Grey, Clark Gregg’s wife, at her father, Joel Grey’s home. We’re at Starbucks and Jennifer Grey spills her vanilla latte, and I’m honestly thrilled to help clean up the mess and fetch her another. She’s that lovely and charming, but she doesn’t look like Jennifer Grey. The more of this I recount, the more I feel as if I’m on an analyst’s couch recounting the absurdities and coded symbols of a dream. William T. Vollmann would be able to decipher the hidden patterns. David Foster Wallace could decode the deeper profound message. But it’s all I can do to kneel down on the Starbucks floor and sop up vanilla latte with a paper napkin. Starstruck, I ask Sam to autograph my butt beads and he inscribes them, O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek! Sam’s character in the film suffocates himself, hoping someone will come to his rescue. I’m so stupid that I thought he made up what he wrote.

A wandering makeup artist leaves a voice mail on my phone saying, “I’m locked behind the door of a room down a hallway in the basement of a building …” She says, “Don’t ask me where. I don’t know where. Just come get me out!” A passing caterer offers me mushroom pâte baked in shells of herb-infused puff pastry.

Jump to the interior of a commercial jetliner cabin. This is a rented film set assembled in the gymnasium of the abandoned mental hospital. The cabin is filled with extras, everyone wearing headsets and directed to look engrossed in a nonexistent film supposedly being shown outside the frame of the shot. A thunderstorm shakes the building, and air traffic into Newark has been rerouted to roar low and directly overhead. Surrounding the bright oasis of set lights, the gymnasium is dark and crowded with a milling party of entertainers and investors. This celebrity audience watches the “audience” of extras who stare intently into space. The caterers pass hors d’oeuvres. Sam Rockwell wears a red satin dressing gown, more like a prizefighter’s robe, over a black mini-Speedo type of bikini, which he wears to look nude in the next scene. Dave Matthews jokes about this stripper wear. “I always thought you stuffed it, man,” he says, loud against the noise of thunder and jets, “but that’s all you in that banana hammock.”

Jump to the Sundance Film Festival, to some crowded nightclub surrounded by snowdrifts where the film’s producers are negotiating a deal with 20th Century Fox. Otherwise the shuttle buses circling through Park City are filled with people weeping openly because distributors are buying little else. The next day every phone in every Sundance theater starts to vibrate, so many that it’s the equivalent of a cell phone earthquake. The day’s screenings are effectively ruined because Heath Ledger’s body has just been found.

Jump to Switzerland, where Choke is showing at the Locarno International Film Festival, projected on a screen larger than a billboard, before an audience of seven thousand people in the medieval town square. In the past few weeks my mother has been diagnosed with lung cancer, and I’m commuting between this real-life tragedy and the media events to launch a movie about a woman dying in a hospital bed. My schedule goes like this: hospital, Switzerland, hospital, London, hospital, New York, hospital, Los Angeles. It was a coincidence in 1999 when the film of Fight Club was released and my father was shot and killed. Now Choke is being released and my mother is dying in a hospital. It’s my sister who points this out, and suggests I’ve brought a curse on our family. She’s joking, but she’s not. I do all of my crying in airplane toilets. Twice, flight attendants knock at the door, loudly asking me to return to my seat because they’ve heard the noise and assume I’m having wild sex.

During the press junket at the Beverly Hills Hilton I catch up with Anjelica Huston, who’s splitting her schedule between gala star-studded media events and—sadly, yes—her husband’s hospital bed. I keep trusting that these pieces will fall into some perfect order. If Amy Hempel were writing this, the pacing would be spot-on, with each moment juxtaposed perfectly. This account would be something beyond me parroting her style. Amy, Amy could offer some redemption. In this world of chaos, I keep hoping to wake up one morning …enlightened.

In the Swiss Alps I had no cell phone coverage, and the voice mails from my mother have accumulated: updates about her chemotherapy, her blood work, her garden. Each one ends with I love you instead of Good-bye. Instead of pressing seven to erase them, I press nine to save them for another ninety days. I can’t listen to them all before I just start pressing nine.

The next morning, room service delivers a lavish breakfast to my sumptuous penthouse suite at the Hilton, and there folded on the table next to my egg white omelet and my whole-wheat toast, no butter, and my coffee, black, no sugar, is the Sunday Los Angeles Times, and on the front page is an obituary for David Foster Wallace. Next to that are a knife …a fork …and a bud vase holding a yellow rose. Two days earlier, a few miles east of here, while I was pretending to journalists that Choke is a romantic comedy—because who ever heard of selling a romantic tragedy?—David Foster Wallace hung himself. It’s not until he’s dead, and I’m reading his obituary, that I see we have the same birthday. We were both born on February 21, 1962. Please don’t ask me if this means something. Please don’t ask me if anything makes sense.

Anjelica Huston’s husband dies.

Flash.

My mother dies. I erase the message from the trapped makeup artist and wonder if anyone ever helped her escape. Otherwise, I keep pressing nine, trying to buy the sound of my mother’s voice, her words, another three months, then another three months. Then, yet another three months.

Flash.

Every story is an experiment in collecting, organizing, and presenting details. An inventory of facts. Yes, all of this effort is being expended to preserve the memories of one person …I mean, I keep quilting together these moments I’ve loved, but as per usual I’ve failed. The heaped-up truths, they’re already starting to teeter sideways. Coincidence fatigue sets in. Pathos overload occurs, and after five pages the details shudder and topple into dust. A better architect could keep his lines plumb and distribute the stresses, but me, I can only start over:

Where you’re supposed to be is at home folding the clean laundry …

Where you’re supposed to be is feeding the dog …

The caterers are passing Thai salad rolls with peanut dipping sauce. The caterers are passing blackened tilapia topped with a sweet corn salsa. If you ask me why I keep trying, all I can say is: So far, so good.

I’m still pressing nine. I’m always pressing nine.

Where I’m at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to write down everything. But isn’t that always the impossible impulse? Don’t we always try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah’s Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?