8/9/23
Newsletter #422
The Crack of Dawn
One year when I was down in New Zealand making Xena, I attended their big gay pride parade with Rob Tapert, Lucy Lawless, and Lucy’s daughter, Daisy, who was six or seven (and is now in her 30s). Lucy and Rob, who were sort of the king and queen of Auckland, were set to be interviewed throughout the parade by the local TV station. Daisy and I were given these great rooftop seats and were left on our own. I am a single man who has never had children, nor have I had much to do with children. My sister has kids, but I rarely saw them because they lived in Florida, and I was in L.A. Anyway, I have no idea how to act parental, and I’ve never cared to try. I got along fine with the various kid actors I worked with, but that’s a very defined relationship – I would explain what they needed to do, then be upbeat and patient until I got it.
So, Daisy and I were sitting on the edge of a roof overlooking Karangahape Road, amongst hundreds of people. Not that it matters to this story, but it was probably 1999, and gay pride parades were a reasonably new occurrence. I lived in L.A. so I’d seen several of them, but they were a fairly recent phenomenon in New Zealand. Anyway, the floats began to slowly cruise past, several of which were sponsored by gay bars, a few of which were S&M bars. The folks on the floats were attired in every kind of black leather fetish wear, some with collars and leashes, waving around multi-colored dildos. And that’s when Daisy’s machinegun-like barrage of questions began. “What’s that guy holding?” she asked, indicating a two-foot long, fluorescent orange dildo. Well, I was entirely unprepared, had no previous training, and therefore had a very rough time. “That’s a toy,” I said. Daisy asked, “What does it do?” In a flurry of imagination I said, “Nothing, you just wave it around.” Daisy said, “That’s a very pretty girl.” I said, “I’m pretty sure that’s not a girl.” Daisy asked, “Why are those two men kissing?” I said, “I suppose they must like each other.” When the parade was over, Rob and Lucy showed up and asked if we had a good time. Daisy did, but my stomach was in a knot. I felt like I’d just supplied all of the wrong information for a seven-year-old and was now responsible for poorly shaping her views on important issues.
Around the same time, Rob, Lucy, Daisy and I were driving through downtown Auckland, and we all spotted a tall construction crane. It was set up for people to bungee jump off of it, and there were quite a few people there. Daisy went nuts, demanding that we all had to go bungee jumping, which all three of them had done before. Daisy asked me if I’d ever bungee jumped before, and I said no, I didn’t like heights. Suddenly, me going bungee jumping became Daisy’s unrelenting obsession. She harangued me. Soon, Rob and Lucy began laughing and said, “I guess you have to go bungee jumping. If you don’t, Daisy will never shut up.” The idea of me jumping off a 50-foot crane was both insane and impossible, but nevertheless, I began to sweat and slightly panic because the three of them had ganged up on me, chanting some shit like, “You have to jump, you have to jump,” while Rob made a turn and was actually heading there.
I politely begged off for the twenty-seventh time, but I was right at the edge of losing my patience. I didn’t have kids then, I don’t have kids now, and the idea that I was somehow required to acquiesce to the demands of a seven-year-old—and perform a 50-foot bungee jump—seemed like the height of stupidity, but it was being forced on me. Lucy said, “I guess you have to bungee jump. Daisy always gets what she wants, sooner or later.”
Well, not this time she didn’t. I lost it, and I don’t know where this nutty idea came from. I proclaimed, “If I have to jump, then all of us are smoking a joint first, and that includes Daisy.” I took a bag of weed and rolling papers out of my pocket—pot was illegal back then—and began rolling a joint. I said, “Daisy, you’re going to love smoking marijuana, we adults can’t get enough of it.” Rob and Lucy were horrified and asked, “What are you doing?” I said, “Rolling a joint. The only possible way that I’m bungee jumping is if I smoke this joint with Daisy first. You don’t mind, do you?” Lucy said, “She’s seven years old.” I said, “So what? You have to let her smoke this joint with me or I’m not jumping. Get it?” Both Rob and Lucy said, “Then you’re not jumping.” I said, “Exactly,” and put the weed away. We drove past the goddam crane. Daisy didn’t know what was happening. “Aren’t we going bungee jumping? And Josh said that I could smoke a joint. I wanna smoke a joint.” Rob was pissed off and said, “He’s wrong. He’s always wrong.”
But of course, I was right, and I didn’t have to bungee jump.
These Crack of Dawn newsletters are making my life just fly by. No sooner have I finished one, then I’m writing the next one. For whatever it’s worth, the previous 421 newsletters equal 736 single-spaced pages, comprising 335,000 words. That’s longer than any of Dostoyevsky’s books, but not as long as Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Manuscript pages are double-spaced, so this tome would be about 1,400-pages.
When I was in jail, the book cart would come by every three or four days (pushed by James Whitmore), bearing its paltry selection of the most beat-up paperback books on earth. It only stayed for a few minutes, and whatever you chose you were stuck with for at least three days. One time, using all of my powers of logic, I chose the book strictly by length. The longest book on the cart was Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard, and it was probably 1,200-pages, which is as big as a paperback can be. Two pages into the book I realized that I had made an enormous mistake. Mr. Hubbard’s prose is so bloody awful that I never made it past page two. Given the choice between reading Battlefield Earth or staring at the wall, I chose the wall. The moral of the story is that sheer length is no indicator of quality. Still, I’ve never written anything that was 1,400-pages long before, and some part of me is thrilled.
Guten Tag.
Well, I guess I've read 1,400 pages, which means you are a far better writer than L. Ron Hubbard. I wonder if Daisy remembers that day. I have a feeling it was formative!