WRESTLING ELEPHANTS

By Jamie Brisick

Amid Chaparral and Coyotes: Anna Ehrgott, Sagebrush Bags

As If Bringing Water To Parched Lips

"We'd been kissing all day—all summer—kisses tasting of different shades of lip gloss and too many Cokes. The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed, perhaps setting barns on fire somewhere in Indiana. The beach that had been so crowded was deserted as if there was a curfew. Only the bodies of lovers remained, visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield, a few of them moaning, waiting for the gulls to pick them clean.

On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we'd repeatedly smeared over each other's bodies. When your bikini top fell away, my hands caught your breasts, memorizing their delicate weight, my palms cupped as if bringing water to parched lips."

          —Stuart Dybek in "We Didn't"

April 23, 2014

Stephen Gaghan: Writer, Director, Rider of Waves

48-year-old Stephen Gaghan is responsible for some monster work. He wrote the screenplay for “Traffic,” which won him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000. He wrote and directed “Syriana,” which won George Clooney an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2005. He is credited as one of the forerunners of “hyperlink cinema,” a non-/multi-linear approach exemplified by the above films. He is presently writing a screenplay based on the Malcolm Gladwell book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
 
Gaghan lives on the west side of Los Angeles and surfs often at a quiet private break a stone’s toss from the chaos of Malibu Point. I would love to describe his style of dress, his mannerisms, the sound of his voice, but we’ve never actually met. At the time this piece was due he was in the SW of France, riding summer swells, watching Dane Reynolds spin magic, then off to Toronto for the film festival. We did this interview the modern way: over email.
 
Tell me about your upbringing and how you came to writing.
 
I was raised in Kentucky, in an old house with lots of books. My parents were big readers. And backgammon players. Basically they'd just sit around reading and drinking and smoking and playing backgammon. I think at one point my mother owed my father a couple hundred thousand dollars from backgammon losses. She got even in a massive double-or-nothing play and eventually went ahead by a bit. I remember very clearly my mother making my father pay up. But mainly they would read and it was a big event on Friday night or whatever when we'd all get to go to my dad's study to turn on the one television in the house for “Wall Street Week.” So we read books and talked about books and recommended books to each other. I can't remember who it was who said, "Writers are readers moved to emulation," maybe it was Faulkner, but whoever said it, it's true.
 
When did you start writing screenplays? Was it a steadily upward trajectory, or did you get your ass kicked in the beginning?
 
I never really considered writing movies growing up. It just didn't occur to me. I didn't know anyone who did it, anyone who went west of the Mississippi River. It was all a giant mystery to me. But I loved “The Simpsons.” I remember exactly where I was when the pilot episode aired, the one where they adopt the dog from the greyhound track at Christmas. And I had an idea in the back of my mind that if push came to shove I could probably do that, write like that. I didn't know any “Simpsons” writers at that point, but I just knew deep inside that I looked at the world the same way those people did and that I could dredge up the same type of comedy from my own experience. I wrote a spec “Simpsons” and almost got hired on the show. In fact, I did get hired but then the exec producer was fired or quit or something and it fell through. But by that time I'd moved to LA and had too much pride to go back east with my tail between my legs. I just stuck it out in what I call “The Years of 1,000 Rejections.” Rejection in Hollywood is very confusing, by the way, because it goes like this: "We love your script. We LOVE your writing. You are brilliant. BRILLIANT. This is GENIUS writing. GENIUS. Don't know how you do it. WE LOVE YOU." And then nothing happens. So it's very confusing and takes a while, years it turns out, to parse. I was rejected by everyone from “Red Shoe Diaries” (responding to some poems and a short story I showed them, insert Israeli accent here, "You are a clever boy, but what do you know about love?") and from “Baywatch Nights” (not even real “Baywatch” but the spinoff. Here's the entire rejection, over the phone, "How did you get this number? No, seriously, how did you get this number?").
 
What got you interested in the War on Drugs? 
 
The truth is I'd done about 19 years of intense personal research into the subject. I mean I was a world expert on, um, let's call it the consumer and interdiction side of things. And I'd been kicking around writing all sorts of stuff. “NYPD Blue.” “American Gothic.” A couple films, "Rules of Engagement" and "Havoc." And I had a general meeting with an exec at Fox 2000, Alex Gartner, who asked me if I'd been thinking of anything specific. I said, “Yeah, I'd like to write a satire on the military, like ‘Catch-22.’” And he said, "We have a deal with a director who's talking about something similar." And he sent me to meet Ed Zwick. I told him my idea and he said, "Interesting. I was thinking about doing the War on Drugs." I said, "That's a better idea." Through a total miracle he got me a deal at Fox to begin researching the subject. I basically disappeared down a rabbit hole for about 12 months, researching in D/C., going to the Drug Czar's office, the Pentagon, etc, and learning about the War on Drugs. Around the same time I was winding down my plucky personal research odyssey from the consumer side of things, and the two crossing yet diverging vectors left me full of ideas and sort of clear-headed. I also had a huge writing block. Basically, I used to work like this: I'd get a job or assignment and a deadline. Let's say it was 8 weeks out. So for the first 6 weeks, I'd be off drinking and running around and whatnot, and then about two weeks out I'd start thinking, uh-oh, you're running out of time. Then there'd be a week left and I'd say, "Impossible, it's too late. Can't be done. Better call and quit and return the money..." and then with maybe four days left, I'd say, "Well, you didn't call and didn't give the money back and you're a total fraud so you better just write something with this remaining time and turn it in and who the hell cares what happens." And then I'd work around the clock and somehow it would work out. But now I'd removed the whole binging/disappearing aspect to my work-performance and had nothing in the quiver to replace it with. I was just adrift. Ultimately, I shared this whole, "I've actually written nothing" truth with Steven Soderbergh and he was incredibly helpful.
 
You won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. What did that feel like?
 
I never put too much stock in awards, probably because I'd never actually won one. I mean basically I was All-State in soccer a couple years in high school and then nothing much good happened for about 15 years. So I was pretty inexperienced with awards and award season and all that kind of thing. I'd lucked into a writing Emmy with David Milch but the Oscar thing was just out of the blue and really nuts. In hindsight I realize that at the time one tends to believe that one deserves it more than just recognizing the blind luck quotient necessary to any film getting made, much less being made well, then being discovered by an audience, and finally revered by an audience. I mean, I thought, of course this is happening. I love the film, “Traffic.” In hindsight it's easier to see how many things broke our way, how lucky it was to have Soderbergh at the absolute peak of his inventiveness, how lucky to find that subject (thank you, Ed) at that time in my life, in that time (election year, Cold War winding down), etc. and etc. and etc. In my twenties I thought, oh this will happen all the time, this is normal, but it's really not. It takes luck to recognize your subject and have the opportunity to swing for the fences inside that subject, luck to have found collaborators like Ed and Steven. And by luck, I mean great reps—it was David Kanter who sent me in to meet with Alex Gartner, it was Alex who said, “Well here's a guy without a single feature script to his credit, but let's send him to meet our director”… on and on … it's just preposterous all the things that went my way. And of course I worked very hard ultimately.
 
What got you interested in petroleum politics and the oil industry?
 
It was Osama Bin Laden's first statements after the 9-11 bombings. He said, and you may not remember, because later he gave a bunch of contradictory reasons, but the first explanation was, "Get your planes out of the Holy Land." And I thought, “what planes? what Holy Land?" It turned out it was air force bases near Mecca, I guess. But an enormous event had happened and I didn't have any knowledge with which to frame the event. I recognized this and wanted to learn what was going on. Why did we have planes in the Holy Land? Why was this bearded trust fund kid so angry about it. I wanted to understand why 50 years of foreign policy was being tossed aside. I could feel the ship America making a hard, sharp turn, and I just wanted to understand what was happening. So I started reading and talking to people. Then Soderbergh sent me a book by Bob Baer and asked if I could make any sense of it. I read it and it was about finding out who did the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. And in the book, which is fascinating, there's one part where Bob writes that he'd come back from being Iraq Bureau Chief for the CIA and he couldn't get a meeting at the NSC because of being "lined up behind all the oil lobbyists." So I got together with Bob and asked him what he meant by this. That lunch, with Jennifer Fox and Bob, began the 4.5-year journey that resulted in “Syriana.”
 
Tell me about your research process with “Syriana.”
 
I spent a lot of time in the Middle East and again in D.C. Bob Baer called me up and asked, "So you really want to learn how the Middle East works?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Meet my Saturday in Nice." And I said, "Nice, France?" And he said, "Yep. It's August. It's hot in the Gulf. Everybody who can make a decision is in the South of France." We met with heads of state, arms dealers, foreign ministers, heads of secret police, terrorists, and every stripe of person in between. Then we went to Beirut. And the Persian Gulf. We were in Paris together. And London. We went to the “Oilman of the Year” event. We had all sorts of adventures in the Bekaa Valley, Damascus, the Western Desert, other places. It was like living a T.E. Lawrence book.
 
Was writing/directing a great revelation, as in having more control of your vision?
 
Writing and directing a film are two ends of the same job. The job is making a movie. When you're writing, you face the void, the something-from-nothing business. You have to make a million decisions—start here, it's about this, contextualize how, theme, theme, theme... And then directing is much more narrow. Ten thousand binary questions—this or this? This or this? This color or that color? This place or that place, this car or that car, this extra or that extra... SO you start the process extra wide, lens all the way open, and you work it all the way through to where you're picking the song for the trailer. Same job, just different parts of the same job, writing then directing. Then of course in editing you write it all over again. But somehow through it all, if you're lucky, you come back to the earliest inspiration, the original something-from-nothing moment, the reason you wanted to do it or were interested in the first place. For me it was, "What is a foreign policy, what is the role of the USA in the world?"
 
When your writing is flowing, what kind of headspace are you in?
 
Writing is the great mystery. I have no idea where it comes from. When it's going (which is really rare) it just goes, and time stops, and suddenly there are pages and pages and I'm sort of empty-feeling and you look at it and wonder if it's any good. Usually, when it comes from that zoned-out place of no thinking, no ego, no results, it's pretty interesting. It's that logical, connect-the-dots type of writing that has to be carefully looked at…because it's usually not true at all.
 
What do you look for in the projects you take on?
 
Ideas come from all sorts of places. But they have to be sifted against time. The best idea in the world on a Friday may look absolutely ludicrous on Monday. But over time the good ones stick, sometimes seemingly uninteresting things take on power over time, as other things start to stick to them. For instance, I've been thinking about Telco deregulation for a long, long time. I think it's an interesting idea for a film, that somewhere in there, in all the ins and outs of what happened, how the bill passed, what it's meant for the world, there's a great story, but I have no idea how to do it. I haven't found the way in. Something is still missing. Usually that's a human/relatable aspect that is undeniable, that has to be told. So I can read and think about something for years and years and then suddenly, bang, there's a simple story, and all the other ideas, points, twists, stories just fly to it like metal shavings to magnet and they stick and you start to have the shape of something real, but it's a long, messy, not very logical process that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.
 
The solitude and authorial god-ishness of writing as compared to the teamwork/collaborative aspects of directing, being on set. Talk to me.
 
As I said earlier, writing and directing feel like opposite ends of the same job. To me it feels like to earn the fun social/traveling/public component of filmmaking, the part where you actually get to collaborate with a great actor and make something, the fun of that is earned by the long, lonely, painful writing time. So as you narrow in the decision process from ‘anything is possible’ to the very concrete—"he carries that gun, drives that car, wears that size suit, walks with exactly that limp, from this injury..."—you move from total isolation to a fun, social milieu. People, in a way, are the reward for writing well.
 
Tell me about “Blink” and how it came to be.
 
I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, sitting in Cafe Gitane in NYC. Then I got to know Malcolm. Then we were both sitting there when Leonardo DiCaprio came in. And he said, “We should cook something up.” And it all just came about serendipitously. I'm still working on the script. It's been a loonnnggggg process, but I believe a good film will eventually come from it.
 
What are you reading right now?
 
I was just on a total hot streak with reading. I read three great books in a row. I read "The Flamethrowers" by Rachel Kushner, "All There Is" by James Salter, and then "Eleven Days" by Lea Carpenter. These books all had the effect of making me want to write. That's the great gift. Same thing with a film I caught on the plane yesterday—“Beginners,” the Mike Mills film. My wife turned me onto this great band, Hooded Fang. I feel lucky to live in a place and time where there's so much good stuff coming out, in so many different forms, and it's almost all instantly accessible. Maybe that's the thing about growing up in Kentucky in the time just before cable television. I used to wake up early and wait for cartoons and before the cartoons would come crop reports and before the crop reports it was just white noise on the TV, those grey/white spots vibrating. I'd sit there eating cereal from the box waiting for the guy to drone the prices of sorghum and whatnot. They asked Mary McCarthy a long time ago why so many writers came from the south and midwest and she said, “It's because you grow up watching the planes fly by overhead and the trains go by without stopping and you wonder where the hell is everybody going.”
 
Who are your heroes?
 
I admire those people who seem to be doing exactly what they're meant to do, who manage to make all the systems fit to their vision. The Uncompromised, let's call them. There are very few of them in film, but seem to be more in other walks of life, but maybe that's the ‘grass is greener’ syndrome. For instance, just recently, I was at the Wavegarden in Spain surfing with my friend Takuji Masuda early in the morning. And the next two people to show up were Dane Reynolds and Craig Anderson. And then they surfed. And as I watched them I spoke with Dane's girlfriend and she was talking about their last few weeks. They were in Japan and here and there and in Europe, just traveling around, promoting a film, surfing. And I watched that guy surf the Wavegarden, just ripping it with a quality that truly seemed to come from some other planet—I mean, Dane doesn't look overtly like an athlete. He's not all ripped and eating protein shakes with an entourage. He shows up, stretches a couple times by touching his toes and then he goes out and surfs better than any human alive. And there's a quality to him, an ineffable THIS IS ME, DOING EXACTLY WHAT I'M MEANT TO DO, HOW I DO IT quality to him that seems real and true and is obviously super compelling to marketers and whatnot, but starts by being basically real. I happened to witness it in the early morning in rural Spain, where he showed up just to surf the artificial wave because he'd done it before and not been that happy with how he surfed it, so he was back, to do it better, and he did. And he did it for himself alone. And I got to see it. And it reminded me to look at parts of my life and hold them to that same standard of integrity, integrity in the sense of: Does this feel right to me or am I talking myself into it for some other reason? There's a freedom that is instantly recognizable in those who are in that zone of doing their thing in their way, whether it's in surfing or filmmaking or music or whatever.
 
How did you get into surfing?
 
I rented a house with some people in Malibu. I stayed out during the week. From the window I could see people surfing. One day, I woke up and said, “Why am I not surfing?” I rented a 9-0 Zuma Jay board and a wetsuit and spent three days in the white water. The third day I got one on the shoulder. Rode it all the way to the beach, jumped up and down in waist-deep water. When I paddled back out a guy I knew said, "Now you know the meaning of the word ‘stoke.’" But this moment occurred around the time I quit drinking. And when you quit something that has occupied so much time, has taken up literally almost two full workweeks every week, suddenly you have a ton of free time on your hands. It's like you walk around just having no idea what to do with all that time, you aren't hungover or staying up all night or chasing girls or whatever form it takes, and suddenly you're just standing around blinking in the sunlight saying, "I need a hobby or something."
 
What role does surfing play in your life?
 
Well, when I get the time to get out everyday, it's pretty much all I want to do. A lot of the time life intervenes and I lose that edge so when I go back out, I'm so crappy, I just get really down. Still, any time in the water is usually good time, and I've never yet regretted a session, but I wish it was more integrated into my life. It's pretty common, I suppose, but when you learn a sport when you're 5 years old, like I did with tennis or soccer, you never really lose it—I will always be able to hit a forehand that looks like a forehand; but when you pick up a sport in your late, late twenties, it's really hard to make it look right. And when I sit out a while from surfing, when I go back, it's just so wrong. It's insanely frustrating. I would give anything to have been raised on an ocean instead of on a clay tennis court in Kentucky, but there's really no going back. Ideally, I'd have a house right on a break and be able to go out for quick 40-minute sessions whenever it looks good. Still, we take surf trips and have a ton of fun. We were just in SW France, in Bidart and Guethary, and had an amazing time hitting all the beachbreaks, caught a great day at Parlimentia. There's just nothing better.
 
Do you follow surfing, as in the contests and the culture?
 
I follow surfing in a strange way, in that I want to make a film or something out of the world. I think about it a lot and have tried a bunch of ways in. I feel like maybe I finally have the right way to go about it. Also, I love sports stories so I'm always tracking the ups and downs of the pros, their personal lives, backstories, where they came from, what it's like for them. And also how they try to monetize what was at one point, for all of them, a great love. It's tough to monetize love. It changes it completely. I went through this with writing. I love good writing so much, have derived so much pleasure from it, but once you turn pro, you never read or watch a film the same way again.
 
What do you do when you want to get away from work?
 
I have to be on the water, pushing myself, trying to snap a turn I never could make before, or being in the water with guys who are so much better than I... I get to surf with people like Danny Fuller or Dan Ross every once and again, and watching those guys turn a little nothing wave into an absolute work of art, it just blows my mind, again and again, it never fails... Thinking about it a bit, there's a quality to surfing that's absolutely analogous to writing... when you're really doing it, when it's going well, in the zone or whatever lame phrase tries to capture it, time just stops and all the crushing self-awareness goes away, and everything feels so right, composed, infinite, and it all just stretches out, and it's all over in an instant and you have no idea how you did it or even what just happened... but it's the best feeling in the world... so good in fact that you can spend your
entire life chasing it.
 
 
 
 
*This piece appeared in Saturdays #003. Photo by Stephen's wife, Minnie Mortimer
 

April 21, 2014

From The Depths We Cry To Thee

“My love for you is eternal,” he said, sliding the razor down her calf.

They did this often on Sunday afternoons: eat a heavy, languorous lunch, drink a bottle or two of wine, fall into a shower/bath that would carry on for over an hour. They took turns washing each other, one standing, the other sitting. His big treat was shaving her legs.

“Eternal and gushing and sometimes almost too much to contain,” he continued, “but I’ve come to realize that it’s really me in love with you that I love. I love who I am with you.” He squeezed a dollop of shaving cream into his palm, smeared it on her other calf, shaved a perfect stripe from her knee down to her ankle. “You’re the greatest carnival mirror this clown could ever ask for.”

April 20, 2014

The Holy Fuckness of It All, 7

When Molly went to Paris that spring I put her in touch with Brigitte. They met for lunch in Le Marais and, according to Molly's postcard, sung my praises. What sort of praises I have no idea. When Molly returned to LA she abruptly broke it off between us.

My work in film led to a six-month gig building a miniature of Stonehenge on a giant property in the Hollywood Hills. It was soul-cleansing, satisfying work, the studying of Neolithic history, the digging of ditches, the hoisting of ten-foot-tall stones with a crane.

The owner of the property, a billionaire (a non-disclosure agreement forbids me to say anything more), put me up in one of his "spare" homes, a beachfront cottage on the northern end of Malibu. I went to AA meetings in Point Dume, NA meetings in Santa Monica. On weekends I rode my mountain bike in Sycamore Canyon.

One cool November afternoon a black limousine climbed the steep driveway and pulled up a few feet from where my crew and I were working. The driver stepped out and opened the door. Out poured first a tinny, work-in-progress version of Madonna's "Like A Version" from the stereo, and then Madonna herself. She wore black Converse All-Stars, black fishnets, raggedy high-cut jeans shorts, a lacy black bra, a faded black Ramones T-shirt, and about a dozen crucifixes around her neck. Her wrists were wrapped in black bangles and her hair had that mussy JGF (Just Got Fucked) look. She had some sort of hickey on the side of her face.

She introduced herself, said she was a friend of __________'s. She glanced over the site. "I saw the real Stonehenge for the first time just last month," she said. From behind her ear she pulled out a joint. She lit it, took a slow, deep drag, and passed it to me.

It was only after three or four hits that I realized I'd just ended 22 months of sobriety.

April 14, 2014

The Holy Fuckness of It All, 6

I wonder what my time with Cicciolina did to my nervous system. I wonder if there’s a point of no return that, once crossed, renders those simple, perfect pleasures—the full eye contact, the gasping ‘I love you’s, the heads nestled into chests, the touching pinkies—unsatisfactory. I wonder if those threesomes and coke-fueled orgies, that whole depraved year-and-a-half of emotionless fucking, may have created an irreparable disconnect between love and sex.

Things were good with Molly. She was between films but she never let up, six hours of French immersion a day—Camus, Genet, Balzac, Foucault, Sartre, Le Clezio literally creating a sag in her book shelf. I was working on “The Color of Money,” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. There was a barroom brawl scene that never made the final cut. We had a couple dozen bottles of Jack Daniels. Not real ones, but the movie kind. You can smash them over someone’s head and they crush softly, as if made of sugar. I brought one home, set it on the nightstand. For about a month I just looked at it, smelled it. It looked stately, like honey.

One night Molly and I were laying in bed reading. I turned to her. “Here’s how it’s going to go,” I said. “At 5pm tomorrow I’m going to enter the house (she’d given me keys, a three-bedroom Craftsman in Los Feliz). I’m going to walk into the kitchen, grab a Hansen’s mandarin lime soda, and head toward the bedroom. As I’m walking down the hall you’re going to sneak up behind me and smash me over the head with this (I passed her the JD bottle). I’m going to fall in a heap, pass out. You’re going to shimmy me on to the bed, which will be covered in plastic, a fresh pad of butter on a plate set right here (I pointed to her nightstand). You’re going to tie me up, blindfold me, and leave me alone for 24 hours. When you return, when you peel off my blindfold, I want you and your girlfriend Moon lying on either side of me.

Molly complied. The three of us had a good time. Dare I say it might have brought us closer.

A few months and a few scenes later I found an isolated cul de sac in Bel Air that was dark, tree-shrouded, no street lights. The pavement ran into a springy chain link fence. We were sitting at the table eating dinner. Johnny Hallyday's "Rock'n Slow" played on the stereo. "Here's how it's going to go," I told her. "We're going to drive up there at 2 in the morning. Along the way we're going to get in a fight. You're going to order me out of the car. I'm going to walk toward the fence, and as I near it you're going to gun the car at me, ram me right up against it, then back up and do it again. Then you're going to screech off and leave me there."

Things were never the same between us.

April 13, 2014

The Holy Fuckness of It All, 5

Cicciolina moved in with Koons. I, heartbroken and even deeper in debt, moved into a shitty little apartment in a shitty little neighborhood in Hollywood known as "Little Beirut." I got a job assisting a production designer friend. The scene where John Bender crawls through the ceiling in "The Breakfast Club," I built that space! It was on-set during the making of the film that I met Molly Ringwald.
 
Like me, Molly had been through a heavy bout of partying (unlike me, she hadn't driven her partner's milk white '65 T-Bird into a tree off Mulholland Drive). We hit up AA meetings—before and after work, at lunch, on weekends. Molly had just over a year, I was nearing six months. She was rigorously studying French lit, reading through Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," from "Swann's Way" right through to "Time Regained." Over languorous picnics in Griffith Park I quizzed her with a French 3 phrase book. We had fun together.
 
One night we saw the movie "Repo Man" at the Nuart, went for hot dogs at Pink's, and shared our first kiss at a red light at Melrose and Highland in her black BMW convertible, the sky splashed with stars. We went to Helena's, got a quiet table in the back, and drank ginger ale and smoked cloves and stared into each other's eyes until they kicked us out
of the place.
 
From that night on we were inseparable.

April 9, 2014

The Holy Fuckness of It All, 4

Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac--they did wonders for my mood. My paranoia ceased. My appetite exploded. I ate two carne asada burritos and three fish tacos in a sitting at Poquito Mas on Cahuenga. But my sex drive vanished. Weeks went by without so much as a rim job or a cream pie between my Cicciolina and me. And any lover of a porn star knows that the job does not dull desire, it inflames it. I was waiting for the night she'd never come home, and arrive in the morning beelining for the shower with traces of John or Ron or Rocco in her hair. Who knew she'd drop me for an ex-commodities broker?

April 8, 2014

The Holy Fuckness of It All, 3

In July 1981, "Carne Bollente" (Hot Meat), starring Cicciolina and John Holmes, premiered to great acclaim at the Pussycat Theater in Los Angeles. The after party at On The Rox lasted almost three days. Harry Dean Stanton and Amber Lynn; Dennis Hopper and Annie Sprinkle; Marlon Brando and Duchess de Sade; John Belushi, Divine, and a luded-out Marilyn Chambers—the unlikely hookups, happening on couches, in corners, under tables, were comical. With the exception of a 45-minute visit to the restroom, Chi-chi was by my side the entire time. I was so proud of my girl, the toast of the entire porn industry.

But my feelings changed over the course of the next month. The film had a sold-out run, i.e., virtually everyone I knew saw it. 

One afternoon I went for a drink at my local bar. My buddies greeted me with fits of laughter. Indian Joe stood up. “You fu—“ He chortled, keeled over, could barely get the words out. "You fucking Cicciolina," he said so the whole bar could hear it. "You fucking Cicciolina is like throwing a hot dog down a hallway!”

They bellowed and high-fived and patted backs.

I trembled. I couldn't sleep at night. It felt like I'd swallowed five nails.

I tried Ashtanga yoga, Transcendental Meditation, solo walks in Rustic Canyon. I read A Course In Miracles, the Kama Sutra, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I dabbled in Scientology, prayed at the Agape church off Alvarado. I sobbed on the couch of Dr. Harold Moss, therapist-to-the-porn-stars.

That was when the real trouble began.

April 8, 2014

The Holy Fuckness of It All, 2

Our breakup made headlines in Le Monde and Le Figaro. We sold the apartment on Rue Passy. Brigitte moved to St. Tropez and started her foundation and I, heartbroken and heavily in debt, rented a little fisherman's cottage in Ravelo, on the Amalfi coast. I was sure it was going to be the toughest summer of my life. I had no idea I was being set-up when a friend invited me to a dinner party and I found myself seated next to Italy's hottest adult film star. Chi-chi and I hit it off immediately. We rode through the night in her white Dino and stayed in her Milano flat for a couple weeks, leaving the bed only for food, drink, provisions. We melded beautifully. Then came the work call she'd been waiting for. We moved into a '50s two-bedroom home with a pool off Laurel Canyon. Chi-chi knew she was onto something big. It was not easy to watch her go off to work everyday with men twice, three times my size. But I was a believer.

April 8, 2014

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