Greenlights Page 13

  After we wrapped filming, I continued canoeing rivers, only now I was ready to row the highways of the United States, so I bought a 1996 GMC Savana van and tricked it out to suit my fancies. I gutted the interior except for the two front captain chairs, and installed a custom-made console with a hideaway cooler and drain, a PA system like I had in my high school truck, and a Rode NT1-A shock-mounted microphone on the end of a bendable arm connected to a cassette recorder that was mounted into the ceiling above the driver’s seat so I could make high-end voice recordings while driving down the road. Many have been transcribed and are in this book. I spent ten grand on an Alpine amp, Tancredi equalizer, and Focal ES speakers for a top-end vintage sound system, fixed a leopard-skin couch-bed in the back, and drilled a hole in the floor to fit an oil funnel so I could take a pee without having to pull over. I named that van “Cosmo,” and Ms. Hud and I hit the road.

  I’ve never cared much for destinations.

  The idea of landing is too finite for my imagination and sense of song.

  Give me a direction and a sixteen-lane highway

  with room to swerve and explore along the way.

  Like jazz, I prefer to see life as a river.

  * * *

  After a few months traversing the States and either sleeping on that leopard-skin bed or in a motel, Ms. Hud and I decided we were ready to commit to being road dogs, so we upgraded, purchased a twenty-eight-foot Airstream International CCD, hooked it up to the back of Cosmo, and towed our new home on the road behind us.

  Now fully self-sufficient, Ms. Hud and I became what the trailer world calls “full-timers.” We carved trails from Manitoba to Guatemala and forty-eight of the forty-nine reachable United States of America in between. Our compass? Wherever we wanted to go. Our schedule? Whenever we wanted to go there. Roger Clemens is pitching in New York three days from now? That’s a three-day drive from Albuquerque, New Mexico, so we’ll head out in the morning and make the game. There’s a Cult concert in Detroit the next night? Perfect, we’ll swing by for that the day after Clemens takes the bump.

  I also took my meetings with film directors on the road. For instance, if I was in Utah and headed east, I would schedule my guest to fly into Boulder, Colorado, the next morning and pick them up at the local airport. Then we would drive together and discuss the project for the next seven hours until I dropped them off at the airport in Lincoln, Nebraska, for their flight home. Behind the steering wheel has always been my favorite seat, and driving the highways of America has always been my ideal office.

  We went on location to Rhode Island where I got to work with Steven Spielberg on Amistad, a film about a slave revolt aboard a Spanish schooner in 1839 and a case that reached the Supreme Court and became notable in the abolition movement. I also made The Newton Boys with my old friend who gave me my first shot in this business, Richard Linklater. It was about an outlaw gang of brothers who were the most successful train and bank robbers in history. The man I portrayed was “Willis Newton,” who was from my hometown of Uvalde, Texas. One of the originators of outlaw logic, he’d rather shoot the lock than use a key any day.

  Ms. Hud and I enjoyed boondocking and the trailer park life, especially the people we met and observed along the way. For me, this was Acting and Storytelling 101, a front-row seat to real characters in real life. It was live, not Memorex; behavior, not attitude. I wrote in my diary and recorded in my mic daily.

  Trailer parks are full of renegades, runaways, professional clowns, rock band guitarists, down on their luckers, wildlife lovers, 4:00 p.m. cocktailers, book readers, retired couples, single mothers, unicyclers, inventors, patteners, gardeners, dreamers, lost souls, hippies, motorheads, meth cookers, million milers, and iron your own suit at 6:00 a.m.’ers. One thing they all appreciate is minding their own business, and you minding yours.

  “If the door’s shut, don’t come knockin,” is one of the first rules of trailer park livin. Sure, I heard “Matthew McConaughey’s staying in the park” many times, but after a few waves and head-high howdys, everyone always respected my privacy, because for the most part everyone honored trailer park rules. When they didn’t, the rest of the park let them know.

  On the other hand, if you did wanna meet people, in the words of Bobby “Thin Lizzy” Robinson at the La-Z-Daze Mobile Home Park in Quartzsite, Arizona, Just open the hood of your truck, plenty of people’ll come to help ya.

  Ms. Hud and I took our time on the road and went where we pleased when we wanted to, keepin the shiny side high, the rubber side low, and if you ever get in a rush just leave early, just like Robby “Cricket” McKenzie told us when we were pulling out of a creek-side trailer park in Gadsden, Alabama.

  * * *

  On one film shoot Ms. Hud and I settled into the trailer park on the Squamish Nation Indian reserve just south of the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver, Canada. The chief of the reservation, Mike Hunt (yes, that was his name), and I soon became buddies. Livin on the river, the Squamish were adept fishermen. But they’d become particularly efficient at the art of catching coho salmon. Instead of venturing out in their canoes with bait and hooks, they now walked into the shallow stream and simply lined up an alley of stones leading into the open entrance of an abandoned shopping cart from the local supermarket. It wasn’t much of a sport, none at all really, but it was highly reliable. I would cook beef rib-eye steaks on the outdoor grill of my Airstream and trade them for coho salmon freshly captured in the steel baskets on wheels.

  One day a paparazzo moved into the trailer park looking to snap pictures of me. Chief Hunt and his brothers went to him and told him he was not welcome on the reservation.

  “Why?” the paparazzo asked.

  “Because, we are a tribe here, and you are making one of our brothers uncomfortable.”

  “Well, too bad,” the paparazzo defended, “I pay my rent and this is a free country!”

  “Not on this reservation, it’s not.”

  Chief Hunt and his brothers escorted the guy off the reservation that night. Not only did I never see him again, he never saw me—he didn’t get a single photo.

  Six weeks later, when I was done filming and packing up to leave, Chief Mike and his brothers gave me a parting gift, a hand-carved canoe paddle engraved with the Squamish Nation’s thunderbird symbol.

  “The paddle is what gives the Squamish Nation its direction on the water,” Chief Hunt said. “May this one be your compass and watch over you on your travels, brother Matthew.”

  From that day on I have affectionately called my twenty-eight-foot International CCD Airstream “the Canoe.”

  Greenlight.

  * * *

  It was just after sundown somewhere along the Clark Fork River in western Montana.

  I’d been driving since eight that morning, so I was pretty tired and looking for a trailer park to stretch, rest, and catch the last Pac-12 college football game on my satellite TV. With the last town too far behind me and the next one fifty miles ahead, I was in the middle of nowhere when I saw a campground sign in my headlights on the right. I immediately slowed down and took the dark dirt road off the highway.

  I drove down the pitch-black pine-tree-lined trail until the path was no more. I stopped, looked around—no one, no facilities, nothing. Ms. Hud and I got out of Cosmo, the Canoe hitched behind us, to suss out the situation and look for a clue. Nothing. Then, through the pine forest, about forty yards farther into the woods I saw the small radiating orange ebb-and-flow ember of a cigarette being smoked. I killed the ignition, locked the doors, and with Ms. Hud at my side, headed for the glow.

  On approach, I noticed a figure in an all-white chef’s uniform, smoking, leaning against the wall, left leg straight, right knee bent, reminding me of my brother Pat back at high school. As soon as I got within earshot, the figure asked, “Lookin for a spot?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “with an open southern sky
for my satellite dish.”

  Without a nudge in his stance or a pause in his puff, he motioned his head high and right. “Talk to Ed at the bar, he’ll set you up.”

  Ms. Hud and I headed in that direction and came to a large hardwood door in the side of the same massive barnlike structure the chef was leaning against. I opened it and a wave of light, music, and revelry came blaring out. It was a tavern, and it was Saturday night. With thick enough walls to not know it until you were in it, the place was packed, hopping.

  We stepped inside and looked for the bar when the big brown welcoming eyes of a Cheyenne barmaid bounced up and introduced herself.

  “Hi, I’m Asha, come on in, anything I can get you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m lookin for Ed.”

  She nodded across the room. “That’s him behind the bar over there.”

  I glanced up to a busy bar and then to the back of the balding, long gray-haired head behind it. “Thanks, Asha.”

  “Sure, need anything lemme know,” she said, winking as she danced back into the fray.

  Ms. Hud at my heel, we crossed to the bar.

  “Hey, Ed?!” I raised my voice to get his attention over the hubbub.

  “Yeah, whaddaya want?!” Ed yelled from a beer tap, barely glancing over his shoulder.

  Busy serving the local crowd what he already knew they wanted, Ed wasn’t looking for any new business tonight. He stayed with his pour.

  Ed had an epileptic tic, where his face contorted and his tongue stretched out of his mouth without his choosing, but his condition had obviously done nothing to dampen his superiority as this saloon’s concierge.

  “A spot for my trailer with an open southern sky!” I yelled across the bar.

  “A what in the sky?!” he squawked, finally turning to see who this uninvited wahoo was already asking for things that weren’t on the menu.

  “A spot with an open southern sky,” I pointed, “so my satellite dish can get reception for the nine o’clock football game.”

  Now crossing to serve that beer he’d just poured, he glanced my way on his way by and said, “Nope.”

  “Hey, you Matthew McConaughey?” a voice to my left drunkenly asked.

  Making sure to stake my ground and not appear to be an easy prey for their night’s entertainment,*4 I answered in a semi-smartass way, “For twenty-nine years,” I said. “Why?”

  Too drunk to catch my dis, a big smile came across the guy’s face and he said, “Shi-iit, I knew it!”

  He grabbed my hand and shook it.

  “I’m Sam, sit down and lemme buy you a drink, introduce you to my uncle Dave. He’s in the shitter right now, be back in a minute.”

  I decided this place looked more fun than a football game, and since they weren’t offering a southern sky anyway, I obliged.

  “Lemme take my dog for a walk and set up my trailer, be back in thirty.”

  I left the bar to walk out when I heard a voice bark from the bar, “That’ll be eleven bucks! Take any spot you want, they’re all open.” It was Ed.

  Thirty minutes later I walked back in and bellied up to the bar between Sam and his uncle Dave.

  “What’re ya drinkin, Matthew?”

  “Double Cuervo on the rocks,” I said loud enough for Ed to hear, but he didn’t.

  “Hey, sugar,” Sam said to Asha, who was passing by, “give my good friend Matthew here a triple Cuervo on the rocks, will ya, sweetie?”

  “Sure thing, Sam, and you know my name’s Asha, so quit bein afraid to call me by it,” she said with a wink.

  I looked around the place. Everybody was smiling, flirting, finishing dinner, taking shots, dancing, and playing slot machines. They’d all been here before, it seemed, and most of them for years, especially Sam.

  “Hey, honeybun, get us another round, will ya,” he flirted to another passing barmaid later.

  “Three more over here, baby doll!” he said to another the next time.

  I noticed that each time he called them by a general term of endearment, they each then asked him to call them by their own names instead. The girls were not threatened; they were not concerned with gender politics. If anything, they showed affection for him.

  Between rounds four and five, Sam got up to go to the restroom. I asked his uncle Dave, who had been quietly sitting on the other side of me the entire night, “What’s with Sam calling every barmaid ‘sweetie,’ ‘honey,’ ‘baby,’ or ‘sugar,’ and every barmaid asking him to call her by her name instead?”

  Uncle Dave took a sincere swig before looking me in the eye and giving me his answer.

  “Sam lost his first and only wife two weeks after they were married six years ago, and after six years of comin in here with him six nights a week, he still don’t remember any of the barmaids’ names. Hasn’t remembered or been able to say any woman’s name since. He can’t.”

  Around 3:00 a.m., with the bar thinned out but the party far from over, I was rolling dice against the wall with a dozen of the late-night patrons. Josie, the tavern’s hotel manager, was thirty-five years old, had crooked teeth, a receding hairline, a pair of 34-inch-waist Dickey pants leather belted around her 26-inch midsection, a loyal black Labrador by her side, and a thirteen-month-old son sleeping in the baby carriage on the floor next to her—all credit to a one-night stand she had a little over two years back when she was traveling through here just like me and met a dude named Jack in this very bar, where they proceeded to head to his hotel room and shag up for the night. When she woke up the next morning, Jack was gone but his black Lab was still bedside, so she “hung around the place for a while,” and a couple months later she found out she was pregnant. Tonight, Josie was “rollin the dice for a new set of tires cus last month I drove eight miles on the flat one and ruined the other three.”

  Then there was Donnie, an organic mushroom farmer who was currently livin in a cabin with Donna. The drunker he got, the more sentimental and concerned he got about all the locals “thinkin he’s sleepin with Donna.” “D and D,” everyone kept teasing them. You see, Donna was married, but her man had to take a drilling job in Alaska, where he’d been working for the last year. She admitted she thought about shaggin up with Donnie because “He’s a man, and I’m a woman,” but said, “I’m just helping him out cus he don’t have a place to stay and I got an extra room.” Donna had two master’s degrees, but “degrees don’t get you too far in Montana,” she said. “I work at the Humane Society fifty miles from here in Missoula all day then bartend here at night.” Then she showed me the hair she’d been growing on her legs and armpits since August. “Gettin ready for winter,” she said.

  Bill and Susie had been married twenty-two years and ran a bar fifteen miles up the road that never paid for itself, so they retired from working altogether. Susie swore that being the mother to Bill’s two teenage sons from his previous marriage was a lot harder than making that bar stay open. Bill said that Montana’s greatest export is its kids. Primary education was excellent, and most parents were good ones, but since it was so hard to make a livin in this state, all the kids leave to find work. “But once they make enough money to get by, they all move back home, cus there’s nothin like Montana.”

  Glad they didn’t have a spot with an open southern sky.

  Greenlight.

  * * *

  One of the great freedoms of trailer life is that you can hitch up, leave, and find a new backyard whenever you want. Chase down sporting events, concerts, boondock in the desert, wake up to a grizzly bear out your window on an Idaho river morning, hike through the Antelope Valley of Utah, meet people like I did in Montana, or get a Port Authority escort through Times Square in New York City, but you also need a place to get your mail. I especially liked the Golden, Colorado, summers and the Austin, Texas, autumns, so I got a P.O. box at a park in each one. These two destinations served as “home bases”
for me, two addresses where Ms. Hud and I would stop and stay awhile, read my mail, hardwire to city amps and water, hang out with old friends, and plan our next adventure.

  White Collar Prayers

  Ever been to a Baptist church in the Deep South?

  They pray real prayers.

  They pray for things they need.

  God, if I’m sick bring me a doctor.

  God, if I’m sued bring me a lawyer.

  God, if I’m cold bring me a blanket.

  God, if I’m hungry bring me some food.

  Blue Collar Prayers.

  Then there’s the privileged pray-ers.

  They pray fake prayers.

  They pray for things they want.

  God, help me win this game.

  God, make momma buy me that dress.

  God, get me an Oscar nomination.

  God, let me get that yacht.

  White Collar Prayers.

  We need to quit asking God to answer these types of prayers.

  He’s busy,

  trying to get a new set of tires.

  *1 Sides are a miniature version of the scripted scene for the day.

  *2 Grilled cow heart—the perfect first meal in a developing country. It’ll get you sick early in the trip so you get sick less, later.

  *3 Uh-Huh was an album my brother Pat turned me on to in 1983. My favorite tune on the album, “Pink Houses,” has always been the most archetypal song about America for me—a song about generations, faith, and dreams lost and found, it was paramount in shaping the kind of patriot I was and am.

  *4 Sometimes I have to set immediate boundaries or people will take advantage of my time—signatures, pictures, phone calls to their second aunt’s babysitter who is a “big fan.” In this particular instance, everybody was loose and I was on their territory, so I chose to set the precedent early that I was not there for show-and-tell. If I would have amiably answered, “Yeah, how’d you know?,” I would have opened the floodgates to be treated like a show pony. By giving the cutting answer I did, I let Sam, and everyone in earshot, immediately know that I was not there tonight for their entertainment. I had to give em a little yellow light so I could have my green.