5/29/23
Newsletter #351
The Crack of Dawn
I just saw a clip of David Bowie being interviewed. He was asked if he lived in L.A. David recoiled and said something like, “Good God, no. I hate L.A. and I’d never live there.”
By 2001, I too hated L.A. and had to escape. It had been a bad year: my cat Stevie got run over, Xena was canceled, I had not only spent all of my money making the movie, If I Had a Hammer, but I had put another $100,000 on credit cards, and no distributor would even watch the film. So, after nearly a decade of directing TV, along with having made five feature films, I decided that I’d had enough. I kept thinking of the line in From Here to Eternity (1953), where Lorene (Donna Reed) finds out that Pruett (Montgomery Clift) is being mistreated by the army and says, “You must hate the army.” Pruett says, “No, I love the army.” Lorene says, “Well, the army doesn’t love you.” Pruett shrugs, “Just cause a man loves a thing, nothing says it’s got to love him back.”
In October of 2001, a couple of weeks after 9/11, I moved into a single-wide trailer a mile up the road from Bruce Campbell in Jacksonville, Oregon. The trailer sat on 7 acres of wooded land and was surrounded by 1,000 acres of BLM land. You couldn’t see another light in any direction. When I pulled up to that trailer at night, then shut off my car lights, it was disturbingly dark. I quickly installed a light on the phone pole that was next to where I parked, so I’d have a light to make it the next 50 feet to the trailer.
The trailer was just a trailer, but it had a wooden deck that was bigger than the trailer. If the deck had a roof, there would be twice as much space, and it would be cool. And it was a project that I could immediately jump into that didn’t involve movies. I got my good buddy Marvis in L.A. who was a carpenter that built movie sets to design this roof for my deck. It was made of green Phylon, which is corrugated fiberglass that allows light to pass through it, albeit a strange, greenish light. Anyway, I built the roof under Marvis’ supervision, and it turned out to be kind of cool. There was room for a table and four chairs, and being in a single-wide trailer wasn’t so bad.
When my cat Stevie got run over in L.A., my friend, Jane, who had lived in L.A. for a long time, informed me that getting run over was the inevitable end of all cats who were allowed to go outside in L.A. And since I’ll never keep a cat locked in, I wouldn’t get another cat in L.A. However, now that I was in Oregon, and there was all this land and space, why not get another cat? In fact, why not get two cats? A boy and a girl named Jack and Diane. I had it all figured out.
The Humane Society in Medford, the nearest city of any size, was located inside a pet store. They had many full-grown cats. They also had a cage with three little kittens, sisters, that had arrived the day before. One was black and white and asleep, another was calico and asleep, the third was black, awake, and meowing as loud as it could for a tiny kitten. Me and the Humane Society gal went directly to it. She said that the kittens had been abandoned in a vacant apartment. While her sisters slept, the black kitten mind-melded with me. She said, speaking in 1930s, Warner Bros. argot, “Mister, you gotta spring me and my sisters outta here. We’re trapped. It ain’t fair. We didn’t do nothin’.”
I didn’t plan on three cats, and certainly not all girl cats. Stevie was a boy and he and I got along on a boy level. What did these girls know about my problems?
I then looked at every cat they had – honestly, 50 cats – hoping for a sign. But they all seemed sad, and they all needed a home. I returned to the cage with the kittens. It’s not fair, but kittens are cuter. Two were still asleep. The third black one was on its back feet, it’s little paws around the bars, saying, “Mister, this ain’t no joke. You gotta spring us.”
So, I took the kittens. They became Alice, Anna and Bridget.
October became November and December, and it was damn cold at my little trailer, with my three little kittens. I came out in the morning with my coffee, followed by the three kittens. It was about 25-degrees and there was frost on the ground. Through the green Phylon, I could see the shadow of a nail sticking up. I picked up a hammer, then sort of halfway climbed onto the roof, with my foot braced on a nail in the porch post. I took one swing with the hammer, the nail beneath my foot gave way, and I fell from the deck roof to the cold, cold ground 8-10 feet below flat on my back. Both of my moccasins shot off my feet and went sailing in different directions.
I was certain that I had broken every bone in my body. I had just missed a jagged stump that, had I landed on it, would have impaled and killed me. I lay there, knowing that if I started to move, I would begin to realize which bones were broken.
That’s when the kittens decided it was playtime. All three kittens got on my chest and began biting me. I flopped my broken body over, then very slowly began to crawl toward the trailer, which was suddenly a long way away. And all three kittens got on my back. I made it into the trailer with the kittens aboard. As I crawled, it struck me that if I died, they would probably eat me.
C’est la vie.