Which I did.
I said goodbye, limped back to my car, and drove to the Metropole. The tenants were gathered in the lobby, sitting on sofas and chairs around the television set, and I got my keys from Earl, the man at the desk. He was reading an old paperback book by Raymond Chandler, and we talked, briefly, about Raymond Chandler and drinking oneself to death, and then I walked up to my room on the third floor. It had a bed and a dresser and a chicken-wire ceiling stretched across the yellow partition walls. I’d bought the script of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and I lay back on the thin mattress, my foot elevated on the metal bedstead, my head on a folded pillow, and I was holding the book, but instead of reading the book, I was thinking about Jane.
In the course of my life I’d fallen in love a number of times. Falling in love with a person was one thing, the flirtation and attraction were all familiar to me, but being in love with a person, that was something I hadn’t had much luck with. Which was why I’d come to Los Angeles. Which was why I was intrigued by Scott. Which was why, the next day, he picked me up in front of the Metropole and took me to the place where he was going to change who he was.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of his blue Honda hatchback, the floorboard filled with papers and metallic wrappers, driving with him to a job he had, a birthday party in Eagle Rock. He was dressed up in a Steve Martin suit, telling me about a certain song he’d been hearing in his head that answered a question I’d asked about his theory of being Steve. That’s what he called it. He told me the crucial part of what he did was noticing, not just his thoughts, but the attitude behind those thoughts.
He was saying things I knew I would never remember, so I pulled out my recorder.
“You have thoughts, right?” he said. “But do you notice them?”
I was fiddling with my earplug headphones, trying to get the volume right.
“I do,” he said. “If I’m going to be Steve Martin, I better know which thoughts are his and which are mine. Or else people will know I’m faking.”
I looked up. “You are faking.”
“Good point,” he said, and he reached over and took a digital music player from the glove compartment. He was steering the car with one hand, and with his other hand he was holding his music player, searching his song collection, trying to find a certain song as a way to explain what it was to be another person.
“It’s not thought,” he said. “It’s pre thought.” He was telling me this, gesturing to me as a way of explaining, but because he was driving the car, his gestures were abbreviated. And when he said, “We all have attitudes,” I said, “By ‘we’ you mean. .”
“Everybody.” He made a gesture of possibility. “Every second a million thoughts are zipping through our brains; we either like them, or we hate them, whatever. We don’t notice how they’re creating us.”
I told him I thought I knew what he was talking about, and I would have been a little more attentive, except now he was asking me to steer the car.
“Take the wheel.”
So I put my hand on the steering wheel, and while I was steering the car, he was searching for this one particular song he wanted, a Bob Marley version of a certain Beatles song. He had one earplug in his ear and he was holding the other one to me, which I put in my ear, and when he found the song, he played it, and this led to another song he had to play for me, a Jefferson Airplane song from the sixties, which led to a Joni Mitchell song, which reminded me of Jane. Not that Jane looked like Joni Mitchell, but in my mind I was making the connection. And then he found — and played for me — a particular recording of a certain Burmese monk.
Although we were on the freeway, and the steering was fairly straightforward, I was having a little trouble doing several things at once. I was listening to him in one ear, listening to his music in the other ear, trying to record what he was saying, and also steering the car. Not only that, but because he had his foot on the gas pedal, I was having to tell him to slow down or speed up, and since he was the one who knew where we were going, even though he was scanning the songs in his collection, he was giving me directions. So I was glad when he took back the wheel and pulled onto an off-ramp that led to the area of town we were going.
The house was at the top of a hill, and we parked down from the house and walked together — he as Steve Martin, me as me — past a security guard, through a gate, and into an expansive yard. Scott had his special arrow in his hand, the one he would put on his head that would seem to go through his head, “the crowd pleaser,” he called it. He was wearing a flower, from a neighbor’s wildflower garden, in his lapel.
About twenty-five kids were scattered around the backyard pool area, and the minute they saw him they dropped their inflatable toys and guns and ran to him. Obviously they’d been told a clown was coming, but when they got close enough to see that he wasn’t actually a clown, not the kind of clown they were counting on, I could see the disappointment in their unwrinkled faces.
There were girls and boys, racially and ethnically mixed, and I noticed they weren’t all overweight. It was a birthday party for one of them, one of the Mexican kids, who was eight. They were all about eight, and they took one look at Scott, who was looking like Steve Martin, and they didn’t understand. They knew what a clown was, and this man, who was supposed to be a clown, looked like the parents they were hoping to escape from. They knew enough to know that clowns had big noses and baggy pants, and although I’m sure Scott could sense the disappointment, he persisted. This was his job, and so he started in doing a few funny bits, walking funny and talking funny. “Early Steve Martin,” he called it. I would almost have called it “desperate Steve Martin” because his interpretation of Steve Martin was unrecognized except by the adults. They were all standing near the house, holding drinks, either smiling or laughing, but the kids were just watching. They hadn’t run away, but it was clear he had a tough crowd.
And that’s when Scott squatted down and spoke to the kids, face to face. I was getting my microphone ready, so I didn’t see when he fell on the ground — a pratfall, I suppose — and I didn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but some of the kids started giggling and touching each other on the head, and touching Scott’s head, becoming comfortable with this new thing that was neither adult nor child. And not quite a clown. What he was doing was being something they didn’t have. He was an adult who was also one of them. Not exactly one of them, but something like a friend. Their rich parents were clearly not friends, but this funny man with the white hair was silly, and silly was the same as vulnerable, and vulnerable was what they felt most of the time, living in an adult world they knew almost nothing about.
People who have the gift of letting go of themselves enjoy the gift because, by letting go of who they are, they can afford to let go of what doesn’t work. And the trick, it seemed to me, is to have something waiting, another self or another way of being, something, so that in the moment of letting go, in the sensation of that sense of nothingness, there’s something to hold on to.
I walked past the pool filled with brightly colored flotation devices, and I stood by the house, near a sliding glass door, with the other adults. I stood, watching Scott, and watching my expectations of what was possible dissolve. It wasn’t about weightlessness; it was very down-to-earth. The Steve Martin shtick was integrated, not only into his actions but into his attitude, and I could see that in being with the kids he was completely connected to them. In spite of their initial skepticism, and the implicit ridicule of that, he persevered, and where before the Steve Martin look-alike mask had seemed pathetic to me, now it seemed like a pretty good alternative, and instead of judging him, now I wanted, at least momentarily, to be him.