Jack was slow to answer, his breathing strained, muscles jumping in his cheeks, but at last he sagged, and his face lost its tension, and he said, “I remember, Buddy.”
Buddy nodded, secure, and tapped Jack’s arm again. Then he turned away, crossing toward the liquor cabinet, saying, “You won a big case today, Dad. Want a little drink to celebrate?”
“Yes,” Jack said. He hadn’t yet moved.
Buddy opened the liquor cabinet and held up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “On the rocks, or straight up?”
At last, Jack moved. He crossed the room, saying, “Don’t wrap it, I’ll drink it here.” Taking the bottle from Buddy’s hand, he removed the top, threw it away behind himself, put the bottle to his mouth, leaned his head back, and chugalugged.
“That was when I started hitting the bottle pretty heavy.”
O’Connor looks at me, as though not sure whether to believe what I’m saying. “You mean,” he asks, “you weren’t a drinker before your second marriage broke up?”
“I was a social drinker,” I tell him, and shrug. “Like anybody else.” (Hey, I just shrugged there and didn’t fall over! I’m getting better, health is returning, I can feel it. Once again, I survive the Temple of Doom.) “But after Lorraine left,” I continue, “I wasn’t a social drinker, I was a drinker. And it was beginning to affect my work.”
Flashback 19
The antiques-store set was wide but shallow with an old glass-paned door leading to a minimal sidewalk set at the right end, and smaller, darker wooden door leading out of the left end to nowhere but the rest of the soundstage. The effect in the film would be of a deep narrow dark shop, crammed with all sorts of curios.
Facing this set broadside were the usual crew and equipment. The director, a florid stocky bald man in a bush jacket, sat on a tall canvas-backed stool beside the camera. “Quiet,” he said, quietly.
“Quiet!” called an AD.
“Quiet!” called a further-off AD.
“Rolling,” murmured the director.
“Rolling!” called the first AD.
“Rolling!” screamed the further-off AD.
Nothing happened.
The director looked sardonic and long-suffering. Shifting position on his stool, he raised his voice a bit and called, “We’re rolling, Jack. That’s your cue.”
Still nothing happened.
The director looked as sardonic, but even more long-suffering. Speaking generally, to ADs, grips, best boys, gaffers, script girls, whoever might know anything of use, he said, “Jack? Is he back there?”
No one spoke. A general awful embarrassment rose from the assembled company like shimmering heat waves. The director, masterfully combining deference with irritation in his voice, called, “Jack? We are rolling now, Jack.”
The front door of the antiques shop burst open, slamming back against the set wall. Jack reeled in, off balance, the door having weighed less than it looked so that he’d given it a little too much push when he’d opened it, and then he’d tried to overcompensate in the other direction, and now all he was trying to do was stay on his feet.
His waving arms sent a candelabra flying toward the camera, bouncing on the floor at the director’s feet. Next, a stuffed owl was knocked the other way off a crowded shelf, taking a kerosene lantern along with a crash and a clatter.
The sudden noise startled Jack just as he was getting his equilibrium back, and he staggered sideways into a row of porcelain beer steins, sending them into and through a display of old doll furniture. Lunging away from all that, Jack became entangled with an old wooden rocking chair, fought manfully to free himself from the thing, and only succeeded by reducing the rocking chair to kindling, some of which swept nearby shelves clean of apothecary bottles, tea sets, samovars, and stereopticons.
Each move Jack made caused a separate and distinct crash, smash, thunk, tinkle, thud, bang, crumple, snap, jingle, gong, crack, and/or pit-a-pat, and every noise made Jack try again to correct his course by making another move. Thus, by an irregular series of tattoos, detonations, and dying falls, he crossed the set from right to left. Never quite toppling over, never quite getting his balance, never quite managing to just stand still, Jack swept like the angel of death across the antiques shop set, leaving hurricane news footage in his wake.
At the far end of the set, he brought up against the interior door, which was not in fact a working door at all, so that he didn’t pass through it but merely brought up hard against it, with force enough to make the whole set tremble. Recoiling from this encounter, he reeled back through his previous carnage to the middle of the set, where at last he managed to come to something like a stop; though he trembled all over, like a race horse after the meet.
And he wasn’t quite finished yet. Turning to say something to the director, raising one expressive hand, index finger upthrust, he lost his balance yet again. This time, he tottered backward, feet fumbling and stumbling with the shards and shreds of his previous passage, until he reached the wall of the set. Here he flung his arms out to the sides as though crucified and leaned back against the wall, which gave way, the whole canvas rear wall of the set slowly falling over, Jack riding it down backward, arms outspread, an expression of harried but mild surprise on his face as he and the wall went completely over and landed with a mighty whoosh and great puffs of dust.
No one said a word. A final clink was heard from somewhere. The dust slowly settled. And then the director spoke. “Cut,” he said.
“But I didn’t care, not then. As long as I was drunk, I just thought life was one big party.”
Flashback 20
Another transformation had come to the living room of the house in Malibu. The books and bookcases were gone, as though they had never been. The furniture, pushed back against the walls, was scruffier, showing signs of hard wear. Five television sets in various parts of the room were all switched on, but the sounds they might have been making were impossible to hear because the room was jammed with partygoers: a young and hedonistic crowd, laughing and shouting, scoffing down the bottomless supply of liquor and the endlessly refilled side table of finger foods. Jack reeled among his guests, a glazed look in his eyes and a glazed smile on his face. He held a quart bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label by the neck and paused from time to time to knock back a slug.
Buddy moved toward Jack through the partygoers. He was sober, neatly dressed in pale sports jacket and open-necked shirt, and in his eyes was a faint expression of disapproval of the scene swirling around him. That expression disappeared when he reached the sozzled Jack, to be replaced by his usual look of aggressive and self-confident comradeship. Never had the familial similarity between these two been less noticeable;.Buddy was trim and neat, clearly in good physical shape, while Jack was getting jowly, his body sagging within his rumpled clothing. The parallels between them had become obscured by their very different ways of caring for themselves.
“Hey, Buddy!” Jack called, seeing his oldest friend, turning to stagger toward him. “Hey, my Buddy!”
“Listen, Dad,” Buddy said, low and confidential, “could I have the car?”
“Sure, Buddy.” Jack frisked himself with uncertain gestures, switching the bottle from hand to hand, until he found a set of car keys, which he handed over.
Buddy nodded, pocketing the keys, but said, “No, Dad, I meant could I have the car.”