02.28.07
Prayers for the Dead
Today a massive grey cloud hovered overhead, and all around it one could see the blue of clear skies, and, depending upon one’s frame of reference, one could look up and see the ultimate symbol of depression, or a massive flying saucer set to annihilate everything and everyone within reach…
…or…
…a great big cloud.
Just as it was dispersing, of course, was when I finally got my act together enough to go take pictures of it. What I got were some silhouetted palm trees against tufts of grey accented with hot pink. I think you can imagine.
I was on the telephone the entire time I was taking these pictures, with a friend I have known since the fifth grade. I talked about the photo-session and he talked about his new divorce. Mortality entered our conversation a couple of times — not heavily or desperately, but naturally, provoked by events in our actual lives.
Now it’s incredibly clear (and SoCal cold!) out, and the stars are twinkling, and I have returned with cookies and an electrolite drink and some kiwis (the actual fruit).
I don’t feel sad, but actually reasonably strong (weather helps me to feel real), and yet I realise that this is a good moment to reflect upon some people I have lost over the past few years, specifically via L.A.
(I’ll only go with first names, but those who know them, know them.)
The most recent was a bit over a year ago. He died in his bed in Australia, which is the country where he was born and grew up. His name is Tim, and I’ll call him Timothy out of respect.
Timothy and I met because his girlfriend-then-fiancee-then-wife Andrea and I were friends, having met via the memorial service for her father. Andrea is an adventurer, and somewhere in ‘97 or ‘98 she packed up and flew off to go explore the antipodean lands taken over by white people of European descent. In the Blue Mountains of Australia (where one my all-time fave movies, Sirens, was made; oh, the heartache that caused!), Andrea and Timothy somehow found each other. They made a sweet couple, and adored having fun. Meanwhile, I was transitioning from being a Hollywood office-slave to being a nationally syndicated cinema critic. (They kept telling me to leave the no-name company and go work for the Times; I should have heeded their advice.) My world was very, very restless, but somehow I managed to see them fairly frequently.
They were married in Australia, but I got to attend a celebration for them here. They lived in Burbank, in her father’s humble former house, on one of those weird suburban streets that look like Illinois or whatever until you reach one of the main horror-streets and notice the killer smog.
I put up with a lot of smog, actually, to be with Timothy and Andrea. They were extremely nice to me (most of the time; except when they babysat my rabbits while I was in England, and I returned late, and finances got involved, and they already had enough stress in their lives). I felt fortunate to have such cool, easygoing friends. They were really fun!
Sometimes we would eat dinner together. Sometimes we would entertain Andrea’s super-trooper mother (who had given her daughter an ornamental pillow, reading, “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”) A bit later, we would also entertain Timothy’s sweet mother, who flew up on occasion from Australia.
On Halloween, we would wander their Burbank neighborhood, where some crafty people in set design and other Hollywood magics would create the most astounding haunted houses and full-property dreamscapes. Timothy and Andrea had a somewhat iffy Hi-8 camera with an increasingly iffy battery, and they would video the zany scenarios. Somewhere on a tape in Australia there’s me in costume doing a really awkward and obnoxious Australian accent. Timothy was embarrassed by it, and thus I felt a bit of rare chagrin.
We played tennis, too — oh did we ever. This was great fun (despite the hideous smog of Burbank and sort of Los Feliz-Glendale). We really went to town at tennis. I grew up playing tennis, and considered it a great friendship ritual amongst my friends from youth, and thus took very naturally to Timothy’s enthusiasm for the game. We were fairly evenly matched: Timothy was a hard hitter, whereas I ran faster and worked on careful placement (particularly of serves). We tended to come out close to even most times.
Once in a while Andrea would also play, and they had one racquet known as “The Granny Racquet” — this made the experience funny as well as fun (we tended to trade off with the nearly useless thing).
As an indication of Timothy’s character, one time we were playing on the courts of a school in Burbank (which seemed — and seems! — vaguely dreamlike to me, like some acidic videogame planet; it’s such a weird place), and suddenly he got nailed by a green plastic soft-drink bottle: I believe it was Sprite, but it may have been Mountain Dew. The large, personal size. Some stupid kids thought throwing it at him, over the fence, while he was playing, would be “funny.”
Timothy spun. Timothy wielded his racquet — not menacingly, but authoritatively. Timothy spoke:
“Whoever threw that better watch himself,” he warned.
They didn’t throw another.
(Mind, this is in a megalopolis in which kids routinely carry firearms, particularly at the time. This made his levelheaded appraisal of the situation all the more impressive.)
When my life was totally fucking blown to hell by rotten people and I ended up having to move entirely by myself, guess who was the single, only, absolutely #1 person who helped?
Timothy. Yep. He helped me dislodge the filthy air-conditioners from the windows, and he and Andrea sold my old clothes-dryer at one of their neighborhood yard sales.
Incidentally, if I’m not speaking adequately here of Andrea, please consider the subject line. She is alive and starting over in Australia (as, I figure, are many). She’s a great woman with incredible energy. I certainly wish her well.
Andrea and Timothy first had one child together, a girl, whilst living in Burbank. Great kid. Later, in Australia, they had another child, a boy (whom I haven’t met, but figure with reasonable certainty is also a great kid). Both of their kids get to be called by all of their syllables. Lucky generation.
Both Timothy and Andrea fell ill sometime in the blur of my insane newspaper experience, and we increasingly lost track of one another. It was a wicked influenza-like experience for them, except Andrea recovered and Timothy never fully did, ever again. He was diagnosed with the unhappy c-word and spent the next few, brief years fighting it, fighting it, fighting it.
Andrea emailed reports. They’re on my old computer. It hurts even to think about re-reading them, even though she wrote almost everything with an optimistic and loving attitude. (Note what name one can find in the middle of the word “opTIMistic”!)
Timothy died in Australia, surrounded by his wife, children and mother, shortly after Christmas 2005. He had struggled a long time, and had been put through hell, and he held out — sometimes without even the use of his senses — to celebrate the holiday with his family.
And then he let go.
This was very, very strange for me, as I spent that particular holiday alone (I wasn’t asked to be anywhere) watching many Star Trek episodes. Suddenly my increasingly woebegotten friend was dead, in a place very far away, and I was helpless to do anything about it.
I wrote an intricate poem and emailed it. Definitely not good enough, but words are my business.
I reflect now upon the boy named Timothy who never knew his father, who grew up into the man called Timothy, and along the way had many adventures. He told me some of the funniest personal stories I have ever heard, too. I shan’t steal them for use here in my own space, but can say that they mostly involved unbelievable wipeouts on two-wheeled vehicles, plus one utter destruction of a kitchen floor.
Timothy also spoke of having to handle radioactive materials, during his stint in the Australian military.
When I think of him, it shall not be as a bedridden man gradually decaying far, far too young, but rather as a tall and sprightly fellow with curly locks and a natural sense of mischief and enjoyment of life, a fellow of Czech descent (which is not the first thing one thinks when one hears “Australia”) and most of all a true friend to me in a place where such entities are rarer than platinum-encrusted diamonds with ruby centres.
“How’s it going?” I would ask Timothy, when I called.
“Cruisin’ along, cruisin’ along!” he would happily reply.
*
A couple of years earlier, in 2003, I booked another flight to go to England to see someone I’ll always love, and a couple of days before I was scheduled to depart, I got a call from a crazy-ass former colleague who means well but excels at generating an uncomfortable vibe.
“Marnye’s dead!” he all but shouted through the telephone.
Frankly, I was already at wit’s end (or near it; I have more wit than most first-world nations). Although I kept working hard (harder than many could imagine; you are sooo full of shit if you think being a cinema critic is in any way “easy”), the rough hours, merciless deadlines and particularly my unbelievably horrid white-trash crackhead shitbag neighbors with their 24-7 shifts of legal-action-worthy noise were making it very difficult for me to keep my ducks in a row. (When I got to England, for instance, I slept for fourteen hours. My dear friend let me. “Sleep is sacred,” said she. I do so love her.)
I booked my flight, I started packing, and then Marnye dropped dead.
Dead!
At thirty-one!
Dead!
(Shit.)
I decided to go anyway. The news came from Phoenix, which is not a place I like, and there were no updates about what would happen. Marnye certainly didn’t care anymore, and since I knew her pretty well, I knew pretty solidly that she would have told me to fuck off and go have a nice time. The shock was real, but muted by distance, so I decided to get on that plane.
The plane was an Air New Zealand beauty with Sam and Frodo painted on the side. It was amazing. During the flight, our hemisphere experienced a total eclipse of the full moon! I watched (and snapped away at) the entire thing as we crossed the barren tundra and eventually the North Atlantic.
There was a great sadness coming along with me, but I knew that stewing in that lousy apartment wouldn’t help anything. I wrote a review of Respiro, somehow managed to retype it on the metal keys of some dubious internet-phone at Heathrow, and eventually was collected (in many ways) by my friend, in whom I have faith no matter what.
My friend had dial-up email at the time, and like any guest I hogged it a bit, which involved stretching a seemingly impossibly long telephone line from a distant room downstairs up a winding staircase and into the almost-too-far-away office.
It was on that computer, across the Atlantic, that I discovered that Marnye would be given a memorial service in a couple of days.
Let me tell you a bit about Marnye (for it would fill the memory of this server to attempt to tell you all).
First of all, Marnye was my friend.
Marnye was also the liveliest person I have ever met in my life thus far.
(That’s quite a feat, considering some of the people I have met!)
Shithead “editors” don’t like it when you point out the irony of something, but that’s why they are shitheads; it is dreadfully — almost terrifyingly — ironic that someone as lively as Marnye could ever be dead. (Shithead “editors” also fear semicolons; ha-ha; fuck you; jackasses!)
When you boil it all down, Marnye is the reason I got my job as a cinema critic with that ultimately shit company.
I didn’t know her at the time; had never met her.
Apparently something like “a couple thousand” submissions came pouring in when said shit company placed an ad looking for movie reviewers. I responded, sent samples, and thought no more about it. I know how these things go.
Marnye, however, liked my funny prose, and I was told a few times that she told her “boyfriend” (or whatever he was) to choose me. I was also told that my first editor — who is a kindly and intelligent woman and with whom no head-butting ever caused any insult or damage — wasn’t so keen on me at first, and wanted some other candidate.
I won, though.
Thanks, Marnye.
That door opened, and I strode right on through. Marnye was there the night, the following year, that I won the award that dubbed me the very best entertainment/criticism writer in greater Southern California. I still feel proud of that; I earned it.
Warren Beatty was there that night, too. Pretty funny, huh? There we all were, sitting in some fancy hotel lounge after the ceremony, with a bunch of people with authority and money and a bunch of people starving for authority and money, and some woman in a ridiculous hat, and Warren “Bulworth” Beatty.
There’s that word: Fancy. That was Marnye’s fave adjective (if I had to call it). One could say to Marnye, “I am going to go get a sandwich now, do you want anything?” and Marnye would reply, “WELL, AREN’T YOU FANCY???”
I got used to it.
Marnye and I shared several urban and suburban adventures, and — as with Timothy — it really is very difficult for me, even now, to believe that I’ll never see her again.
I also don’t mind telling you that Marnye was smokin’ hot. Our personality types did not spark even a hint of romance (which was fine, and appropriate), but I think she’d smile (and many know that smile) at me telling you that she rode around in a chassis of outrageous greatness.
I touched her hand, after she was dead. It was like cold stone. Another guy who was very, very unfairly fired by the shit company after nearly working himself into cardiac arrest to build the L.A. branch — he kissed his fingers and planted one on her forever-sleeping forehead.
Speaking of physicality, Marnye sucker-punched me once. Fucking hard. I thought for several minutes that I was going to die. This was at one of those annual local music awards routinely conducted at El Rey (the “the” seems to me quite redundant) along the Miracle Mile. I think Black Eyed Peas were among the entertainers, before many people outside of L.A. had heard of them. I wore a jacket that I still wear, and Marnye made fun of the slight shoulder-enhancements. This was after, on the staircase, apropos of absolutely nothing and without anything resembling a how-do-you-do, Marnye slugged me in the sternum with all her might.
The momentum of an ornery girl’s fist can be quite astonishing, when it greets a relatively fragile structure of bone unadorned by artificially-enhanced pectoral muscles.
I deeply hated Marnye (please do not ever take that phrase out of context) for about an hour after that. People who cause random pain (to anyone) do not garner any respect from me. (Come to think of it, “random” may be omitted from that equation.)
Clearly not everything was roses for Marnye. I cannot in good conscience say she chose her “boyfriend” well. But he did seem to want to care for her, or for whatever sadnesses made her the mess she was well before I ever met her.
I don’t really know about those sadnesses, so I won’t discuss them here. Family things. You can probably guess at some of it.
Marnye had a wicked, wicked drinking problem. That’s part of what killed her, if it wasn’t the murder weapon itself. Or perhaps it was a suicide weapon. It’s hard to know for sure.
I barely touch alcohol, and when I do it’s almost always to make other people feel comfortable, so I should add that the level of alcoholism I was observing at the time was indeed shocking, to me. Talk of how one can get drunk faster if one simply mixes vodka with Gatorade. Marnye was known to bring a flask of tequila with her to work. I wish I had slapped that damned thing out of her hand and helped her get a job as a summer-camp counsellor for kids; she would have been amazing at that.
I asked her once, in the office, about the tequila. I asked her if she liked it. She told me that she hated it — but it got her drunk the fastest.
Such a pretty woman.
So vivacious.
I ate deep-fried mozzarella sticks with Marnye once, even though I had sworn off cheese (they were, frankly, terrible, and I hope I never encounter another one; but the MSG-spiked marinara was okay, as such). I helped her stuff envelopes for the L.A. Press Club more than once, at their offices in Hollywood. I imitated lines from popular movies, to make her laugh, and she raved on and on about Almost Famous, which was — like Say Anything — one of her top fave movies of all time (she also developed a mild obsession with Vanilla Sky; consistent girl). Marnye would call me up and talk shop, Marnye would call me up and talk slop, Marnye would call me hideous names at inopportune times. One time I showed her how to get to LAX on a bus. She hated it.
We were friends.
Marnye got the bad c-word, too — and sent it into remission…but kept drinking. She had a seizure in the office in Phoenix and made jokes about it, even though it clearly hurt her. Then she stayed up late one night — and I feel that the details are not mine to divulge — and she did not get up the next morning, or ever again.
To put this into perspective beyond my relationship with her, this was a woman who was flourishing — or, in my opinion, beginning to flourish. She took over the column called “Bite Me” and essentially made it her own. It was crass, offensive, sometimes downright horrid — and allegedly it had something to do with restaurant criticism. (Compared to the other sow of a restaurant critic, it was Pulitzer material.)
Her “boyfriend” promised me promotion toward a Pulitzer, incidentally. Pants on fire.
Never listen to anyone in either journalism or “journalism” — they are so full of shit it’s unfathomable.
I think that was one aspect of Marnye’s greatness, though: She was (or appeared to be) fearless. Put her out there, watch her go: She was a one-woman, tell-it-like-it-is army. And, unlike many, she hadn’t yet been corrupted into taking herself too seriously.
I got to go on two dinner-critiques with Marnye, to The Ivy On The Shore (or whatever) and that trendy WeHo place apparently owned by Elton John (whatever it’s called). I’ll tell ya, eating with a fun person in sickeningly expensive restaurants on someone else’s dime is A-OK.
We were in the latter restaurant when Marnye noticed some bozo from Boyz II Men sitting across the room. She got him. It was impressive to behold.
In the former restaurant, Marnye kept making fun of me for enjoying how good the olive oil was.
(A different gorgeous blonde friend of mine from the previous generation taught me the restorative miracles of olive oil. She too has been a glowing illustration of health and a great inspiration. She was diagnosed with some very bad c-word only two months ago. How does one talk about this?)
Marnye and I had many, many other laughs, and never really saw eye-to-eye on things (or, it seemed that we didn’t), and that was fine. We frequently saw each other amongst groups. She had hula-hoop skills beyond comprehension. She also went out of her way to make holidays special, both with the “boyfriend” and in her own fancy way. Her mother sent her recipe cards. She was learning to use them.
I didn’t get to say any of this at her memorial service in hideous Phoenix. I sat and couldn’t find a way to stand and walk to the front and start talking. Much about journalism and “journalism” is wretched and fake, and I just couldn’t, at the time, find a way to get up there and speak a bit of the truth about how I felt.
I felt that I had lost a friend with enormous, almost incalculable, potential.
Her body is in the ground in Michigan now.
(Fuck, why couldn’t that be Madonna?)
It’s not difficult for me to reflect upon the finite existence of the person called Marnye — I only knew her for a few short years, and recall it all pretty well — but rather it’s like having only random, scattered pieces of a very elaborate puzzle: They are suggestive of a wonderful picture, but they mostly don’t fit together.
I had a choice in England: To head west on the train, into the rain, to go exploring — or to get on the coach to Heathrow and to attend my friend’s memorial service in hideous Phoenix.
Marnye probably would have been of two minds about the choice: Her ego would have told me to go party with her other friends and associates (over what literally turned out to be her dead body, although we had been told otherwise and expected no such sight); and whatever she had in the sense of a superego (or whatever) most likely would have told me (or anyone) to go off and be happy.
I chose the sadness, out of respect.
A good friend also accidentally sucked into the shit company and I boarded the same Southwest flight out of Burbank — I barely made it — and we went off to hideous Phoenix to have some shared misery with the many people who also saw a life of great potential very unceremoniously snuffed.
A while later, at a crappy bar on La Cienega in Los Angeles, many of us gathered again, to express our affection for Marnye, this time in the company of her mother (the dear). One friend who knows how to keep the salary pumpin’ to pay a big mortgage suggested that a life-size standee of Marnye be created for the party, that we could all get our photo taken with it. Seriously!
That’s how insane things get. (I’m relieved that that stupid plan never came to pass.)
This was how miraculous Marnye was, though: One time I was hoofing it up the hill of that selfsame La Cienega on a dirty-hot night after some or other headache-inducing screening: And there on an outdoor tabletop of some cafe lay Marnye’s business card. It caught my attention, I went inside, and there she was. She had already closed down the place, but very cheerfully invited me to join her and the owner for a drink and some energetic chat.
That was Marnye.
*
There have been other deaths in my life — fortunately scattered and uncommon and mostly involving distant relatives — but there was a doozie a few years earlier in my L.A. existence.
Except…that it wasn’t.
I had moved out of state — basically to depressurise after the back-to-back nerve-shreddingness of film school plus Hollywood slavery — and I’m pretty sure it was 1993, Winter, anyway. I still had some ties with film-school friends but I was rather far away and not privy to local L.A. news. It was at this time that one of my friends, over the telephone to my charming apartment that was floored entirely with cracked linoleum, joked that a casual acquaintance and associate of ours had killed his wife and daughter and was on the lam.
Or, at least, I thought that my friend was joking. At first.
One of my friend’s primary default settings is paranoia, and so his joking turned dark in that fashion: “You’re hiding him in your garage, aren’t you?”
Not only did I not have a garage, I still didn’t believe the story.
The friend-turned-insane-criminal’s name was Aziz. Once again, if you know who he was, you know who he was. He was not a close friend, but he was my friend, technically speaking. I had Easter dinner with him and his family at his house once, even though he was from Saudi Arabia and did not traditionally celebrate Easter. We all had a nice time. He and his wife actually kept ducks in their backyard in West L.A. (an area, at the time, as alien to me as Mars), and we cheerfully hid eggs in the bushes for his daugher and elder son to go seek.
It was remarkably like life.
There were no blatant or latent hints of insanity there.
If you can believe this (or even if you can’t), both parents of Aziz were even there that day, visiting for a while from Saudi Arabia. They did not speak English, not really, but they beamed and helped out and behaved like proud grandparents.
Aziz, as I was telling you, was my friend. Not a super-close friend, not a confidant, not a mentor. But I worked with him in the film school’s cinema stockroom that bore his mark and reputation as manager for a decade (I arrived at around the halfway mark), and which now is washed, apparently, clean of any memory of him.
Aziz killed his daughter and his wife. Then he vanished for a while. Then he was found by hikers, in early 1994, having shot himself to death.
The mind reels.
I certainly didn’t know Aziz as well as many other people likely did, but I was a good employee in his stockroom (where now-director John Singleton “worked” for a couple of days, before bailing), and I learned the equipment and how to maintenance it and lend it out and check it back in again. I did inventories of bulbs. I charged batteries. I learned to refer to tripods as “sticks.”
We had some fun in there. Most of the other employees and assistant managers were great company. One guy from the South was a total asshole, but this isn’t about him.
One night, Ted Lange showed up to collect equipment for his class. Another night, Wes Craven showed up. It was that sort of place.
Somehow I got a job there, and through a work-study programme, managed to earn a little extra money through my first year at the university.
Of course, anybody who remembers Aziz also remembers that he was a bit of a hellion. He didn’t really want to be a stockroom manager at a film school — not any more than many professors at a film school wish to be professors at a film school (which becomes obvious pretty quickly, in some cases). What Aziz wanted was to be a successful movie producer.
To this end, Aziz basically produced two features. One of them, Zombie High (starring an almost-still-dewy Virginia Madsen) was lensed before I arrived, but I got to ride over to the pre-Cinematheque Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, with Aziz and family, for the premiere. I thought that was hot stuff, even though the movie…er…isn’t.
The other movie was called A Natural History of Parking Lots, and this was completed in 1990, and I seem to recall Morrissey’s “Disappointed” being involved in a montage sequence. This was made by Aziz’ then-friend Everett Lewis, who continues to make films sometimes. (An earlier film by him, the bizarre static-shot chicken-obsessed movie Lazarus, I found utterly bewildering when screened inside the soon-to-be “old” Lucas building in the late ’80s.)
Anyway, although Aziz and I were never close friends, and he yelled at me more than he spoke with me, his smile and his intentions — at the time (please note) — were friendly and even playful. We’d joke about this or that, he’d put on some Tom Waits, and eventually he suggested that we write a screenplay “together” — which we did. I still have it. I basically wrote the whole thing, from a vague idea from him. It’s a mess of an adventure film, a father-son struggle he had hoped would become a vehicle for Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Nothing came of it.
I moved on, stopped working in the stockroom, only saw Aziz casually and occasionally. I watched his children (then three) growing up a bit, whenever he or Becky would bring them around. Then I graduated and moved away.
Then, a couple of years and change later, I got that phone-call. That friend isn’t much of a friend anymore, but I still feel like asking him sometimes, “You’re kidding, right?”
I cleaned some mag reels in Aziz and Becky’s garage. I entertained his kids when he would run off on an errand. And Easter dinner with the whole family — I mean, Jesus.
Aziz was working on adapting a book called The Brave into a movie when things became ugly. Eventually Johnny Depp and his brother ended up adapting the thing into a movie, which has not been released in the U.S.A.
I know nothing about where Aziz, his ex-wife and his daughter are buried (if they are buried), and nothing about where his sons have gone. They were good boys. I hope they’re coping and finding good reasons to do good things.
It’s all kind of far away now, to be honest with you — like the night that this stodgy feminist girl named Suzie and I walked right up to Burt Lancaster on campus and said hello.
The first two people considered here, however – thoughts of them bring sadness and acceptance. The third brings sadness and kind of a nightmarish feeling — which is probably why his entire reputation has been expunged from the film school (and rightfully so).
L.A. is a very, very strange and difficult place.
*
This entry is dedicated to the memory of the good things about these people, and to those who have survived them and continue to survive them.
And thank you, for letting me — this chilly, clear night — express these feelings and move on.
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