Greenlights Read online

  Dad dropped the bottle of Heinz, relaxed out of his matador pose, and wiped the blood dripping from his nose with his forearm.

  Still facing off, weapons down, they stared at each other for a moment, Mom thumbing the ketchup from her wet eyes, Dad just standing there letting the blood drip from his nose down his chest. Seconds later, they moved toward each other and met in an animal embrace. They dropped to their knees, then to the bloody, ketchup-covered linoleum kitchen floor…and made love. A red light turned green.

  This is how my parents communicated.

  This is why Mom handed Dad an invite to their own wedding and said, “You got twenty-four hours to decide, lemme know.”

  This is why my mom and dad were married three times and divorced twice—to each other.

  This is why my dad broke Mom’s middle finger to get it out of his face four separate times.

  This is how my mom and dad loved each other.

  the golden rule and everything in moderation

  Two adages, often solicited as general rules for life.

  There’s a loophole in each.

  Sometimes people don’t want to do what you want to do.

  And one man’s appetite is another’s indigestion.

  * * *

  The McConaughey clan migrated from Ireland to Liverpool, England, to Little Rock, West Virginia, and New Orleans. There is no royalty in our past. There is, however, a lot of cattle thieving, riverboat gambling, and an Al Capone bodyguard.

  Dad is from Patterson, Mississippi, but grew up and felt most at home in Morgan City, Louisiana.

  Mom’s from Altoona, Pennsylvania, but always said she was from Trenton, New Jersey, because “who’d wanna be from a place called Altoona?”

  I have two brothers. The oldest, Michael, has been going by “Rooster” for forty years now because even if he goes to sleep at 4:00 a.m. he always wakes at sunrise. When he turned ten, he wanted a little brother for his birthday present, so Mom and Dad adopted my brother Pat from the Methodist home in Dallas, in 1963. Every year Mom and Dad offered to take Pat to meet his birth parents. He declined until he turned nineteen and took them up on their offer. Mom and Dad arranged the meeting and the three of them drove to the home of Pat’s birth parents in Dallas. Parked curbside, Mom and Dad waited in the car while Pat rang the doorbell and went inside. Two minutes later Pat walked out of their house and jumped into the back seat.

  “What happened?” they asked him.

  “I just wanted to see if my dad was bald cus my hair’s thinning.”

  * * *

  Me, I was an accident. Mom and Dad had been trying to make a baby for years to no avail, so Mom thought I was a tumor until the fifth month of pregnancy. Dad went to the bar instead of the hospital the day I was born, because he suspected I wasn’t his anyway.

  But I was.

  I got my first ass whupping for answering to “Matt” on the kindergarten playground (“You weren’t named after a doormat!” Mom screamed), my second for saying “I hate you” to my brother, my third for saying “I can’t,” and my fourth for telling a lie about a stolen pizza.

  I got my mouth washed out with soap for saying “shit,” “damn,” and “fuck,” but I only ever got in real trouble for the using or doing of the words that could harm me. Words that hurt. The words that helped engineer who I am because they were more than just words; they were expectations and consequences. They were values.

  My parents taught me that I was named my name for a reason.

  They taught me not to hate.

  To never say I can’t.

  To never lie.

  Greenlight.

  * * *

  My parents didn’t hope we would follow their rules, they expected us to. A denied expectation hurts more than a denied hope, while a fulfilled hope makes us happier than a fulfilled expectation. Hope’s got a higher return on happiness and less debit on denial, it’s just not as measurable. My parents measured.

  And while I am not advocating for physical punishment as a consequence, I do know that there are a lot of things I didn’t do as a kid that I shouldn’t have done, because I didn’t want to get my ass whupped. I also know that I did a lot of things as a kid that I should have done, because I wanted my parents’ praise and adulation. Consequences, they work both ways.

  I come from a loving family. We may not have always liked each other, but we always loved each other. We hug and kiss and wrestle and fight. We don’t hold a grudge.

  I come from a long line of rule breakers. Outlaw libertarians who vote red down the line because they believe it’ll keep fewer outlaws from trespassin on their territory.

  I come from a family of disciplinarians where you better follow the rules, until you’re man enough to break em. Where you did what Mom and Dad said “because I said so,” and if you didn’t, you didn’t get grounded, you got the belt or a backhand “because it gets your attention quicker and doesn’t take away your most precious resource, time.” I come from a family who took you across town to your favorite cheeseburger-and-milkshake joint to celebrate your lesson learned immediately following your corporal correction. I come from a family that might penalize you for breaking the rules, but definitely punished you for getting caught. Slightly calloused on the surface, we know that what tickles us often bruises others—because we deal with or deny it, we’re the last to cry uncle to bad luck.

  It’s a philosophy that has made me a hustler in both senses of the word. I work hard and I like to grift. It’s a philosophy that’s also led to some great stories.

  * * *

  Like a good southern boy should, I’ll start with my mom. She’s a true baller, living proof that the value of denial depends on one’s level of commitment to it. She’s beat two types of cancer on nothing more than aspirin and denial. She’s a woman that says “I’m gonna” before she can, “I would” before she could, and “I’ll be there” before she’s invited. Fiercely loyal to convenience and controversy, she’s always had an adversarial relationship with context and consideration, because they ask permission. She might not be the smartest person in the room but she ain’t crying.

  She’s eighty-eight now, and seldom do I go to bed after her or wake up before her. Her curfew when she was growing up was when she danced holes big enough in the feet of her pantyhose that they came up around her ankles.

  Nobody forgives themselves quicker than she does and therefore she carries zero stress. I once asked her if she ever went to bed with any regrets. She quickly told me, “Every night, son. I just forget em by the time I wake up.” She always told us, “Don’t walk into a place like you wanna buy it, walk in like you own it.” Obviously, her favorite word in the English language is yes.

  In 1977, Mom entered me in the “Little Mr. Texas” contest in Bandera, Texas.

  I won a big trophy.

  My mom framed this picture and put it on the kitchen wall.

  Every morning when I came to breakfast she’d gesture to it and say, “Look at you, winner, Little Mr. Texas, 1977.”

  Last year I came across the picture in her scrapbook when something caught my eye. Curious, I zoomed in on the nameplate on the trophy. It said “Runner-Up.”

  I called the queen of relativity, my mom, and said, “Mom, all my life you told me that I was Little Mr. Texas but I was really runner-up?” And she said, “No, the kid who won it, his family had a lot more money than us and they bought him a fancy three-piece suit for the contest. We call that cheatin. No, you’re Little Mr. Texas.”

  * * *

  Then, in 1982, I entered the seventh-grade poetry contest. The night before the deadline, I showed my poem to Mom.

  “Not bad, keep working,” she said.

  I headed back to my room to work on the next draft.

  A couple hours later, happy with my progress, I took my poem to Mom again.

  Sh
e read it. Said nothing.

  “Well, what do you think?” I asked

  She didn’t answer. Instead she opened up a hardcover book to a premarked page, put it in front of me, pointed, and said, “What do you think of that?”

  “if all that I would want to do,

  would be to sit and talk to you…

  would you listen?”

  It was from a poem by Ann Ashford.

  “I like it,” I said. “Why?”

  “Then write that,” Mom said.

  “Write this? What do you mean?”

  “Do you understand it?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “If you like it and you understand it, then it’s yours.”

  “But it’s not really mine, Mom, it’s Ann Ashford’s.”

  “Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah, it’s like when someone you love just wants to sit and talk with you.”

  “Exactly. So if you like it, and you understand it, and it means something to you, it’s yours…write that.”

  “And sign my name to it?”

  Yes.

  I did.

  And I won the seventh-grade poetry contest.

  My mom had no upbringing, and since she didn’t like her life growing up, to survive, she denied it and constructed her own. She’s always believed that if you understand something, then you own it, you can sign your name to it, take credit for it, live by it, sell it, and win medals for it. Plagiarism? “Shit, they’ll probably never find out and if they do all they can do is blame you and take your medal back, so fuck em,” she says.

  Obviously my mom was prepping me to be an actor long before it became my vocation.

  Greenlight.

  Knowin the truth, seein the truth, and tellin the truth,

  are all different experiences.

  * * *

  While Mom taught us audacious existentialism, Dad taught us common sense. He was a man who valued sirs and ma’ams, discipline, loyalty, persistence, work ethic, humility, rites of passage, respect of women, and making enough money to secure your family. He also painted; took ballet; played for the Green Bay Packers; loved to roll the dice, chase Ponzi schemes, win something instead of buying it; and dreamed of opening a gumbo shack on the beach in Florida if he could ever “hit a lick” big enough to retire.

  Deconstructing to construct his three sons, Dad respected yellow lights, and he made sure we learned the fundamentals before we expressed our individualism. To use a football term, he taught us to block and tackle before we could play wideout.

  It was clear who the man of the house was and if any of his three boys wanted to challenge that notion, “You know where to find me,” he’d say. We feared him. Not because he ever hurt or abused us but because he was our father. We looked up to him. He was above the law and government, and he didn’t suffer fools, unless you admitted to being one. A bear of a man with a soft spot for the underdog and the helpless, he had a rowdy wit about the world and himself. “I’d rather lose money havin fun than make money being bored,” he’d say. He was also a proud man, and if you gave him a second chance, he’d never forget it. One time in the late ’80s, after a banker declined a loan to bail him out of debt, he said, “Now you can shut that door on me or we can walk through it together.” He got the loan and they walked through it. He loved to host a party, drink beer, and tell stories, and he was a hand at all three.

  His eldest son was Mike. He had more to do with raising Mike than Pat or me because one, Mike was his first, and two, Dad had to work from the road more often later in life. Mike was a confident, scrappy, hardworking, savvy guy, with a hippie heart full of compassion for the runts of the world. Cool under pressure, with the pain threshold of a badger, he’s the first person you’d want with you when the going got tough. “He’s survived so many near deaths,” Mom always said about him. “You and Pat need prayin for, with Mike it don’t matter.”

  Raised on a reverence for the Old Testament, we were a religious family, but it wasn’t all fire and brimstone. No, the more merciful teachings of Jesus also had their place in our parents’ principles.

  * * *

  When Mike was in high school, he started to grow long hair. It grew long enough that the coach of his football team, Jim Caldwell, asked him to get it cut. My dad agreed, but Mike refused.

  Driving Mike to school the next day, my dad said, “You look like a hippie, son, and if you don’t cut your hair, Coach’s gonna cut you from the team.”

  “I don’t care, Pop, it’s my hair and if he wants to cut me from the team, then he can cut me, I’m not cutting my hair.”

  “Now, son, listen to me now, quit being stubborn and just cut your damn hair.”

  Indignant, Mike said, “No sir, Dad. I’m not doing it.”

  “Son, I’m tellin you—”

  “Well, Jesus had long hair too!” Mike blurted.

  Quiet. Playing the religious card was a crafty move and Mike knew it might have sealed the deal in his favor. Dad, in silence, just continued to drive.

  Just as they were about to arrive at the school entrance, Mike believing his “Jesus” tactic had worked, Dad hit the gas and sped by.

  “What the hell, Dad, what are you doin?” Mike asked.

  Dad proceeded to drive eight miles past Mike’s school, not saying a word. Suddenly he pulled off to the side of the road, leaned over and opened the passenger door, pushed my brother out the door, and said, “Yeah, well, Jesus walked everywhere, too, boy!”

  My brother was late for school that day. Not only because my dad dropped him off eight miles from it, but because he stopped by the barbershop on his way there.

  * * *

  Dad had worked his way up from a Texaco gas station manager, to pipe hauler, to pipe salesman in a local company called Gensco. He was a damn good pipe salesman. He got Mike a job selling pipe at Gensco as well. My brother became a great pipe salesman, and quickly. In less than a year, at twenty-two years of age, Mike was the top salesman in the company. The boss put him on their biggest account: a buyer named Don Knowles. Dad was truly proud of Mike, but Mike was still his son.

  We had an old wooden barn in the back of our house by the dirt alleyway where Dad kept an unloaded eighteen-wheeler from his pipe-hauling days. It was a Saturday night.

  “Let’s drink some beer and throw knives in the barn tonight, son,” Dad told Mike.

  “Sure, Pop, see you there around sundown.”

  Around ten o’clock, and after quite a few beers, Dad finally bellied up, “Let’s go roll some pipe like we used to, son, it’s been a while.”

  “Rollin pipe” is when you take an unloaded eighteen-wheeler to someone else’s pipe yard, load their pipe on it, drive away, and steal it. Dad and Mike used to do it on certain Saturday nights back when Dad was hauling.

  “Whose pipe you wanna roll, Pop?”

  Dad squared off at Mike and said, “Don Knowles.”

  Oh shit.

  “Nah, Dad, I’m not doin that. I just got Don Knowles’s account, you know that.”

  “I do know that. I got you that job at Gensco, boy; you wouldn’t have that account if it wasn’t for me. Where’s your loyalty lie, son? With your old man or Don fuckin Knowles?!”

  “Now, Dad, you know that ain’t fair.”

  “What ain’t fair, boy?! You too good now to roll pipe with your old man like we used to? Huh? You too big-time now, boy?!”

  Oh shit.

  “Now, Dad, easy…”

  Dad took off his shirt. “No, let’s see how big-time you are now, boy. You think you’re man enough not to listen to your old man? You gonna have to whup him to prove it.”

  “Now, Dad, I don’t wanna—”

  Whop! Dad walloped an open-palmed right hand across Mike’s face. Mike stumbled a step back, then straightened up and started rolli
ng up his sleeves.

  “So this is how it’s gonna be?” Mike said.

  “Yep, this is how it’s gonna be, c’mon, boy.”

  Dad was six four, 265 pounds. Mike was five ten, 180.

  Oh shit.

  Dad, now crouched, stepped in with a right hook across Mike’s jaw. Mike went down. Dad stalked toward him.

  On the ground, gathering himself, Mike saw a five-foot 2 x 4 lying on the ground next to him.

  Just as Dad came in for another blow, Mike grabbed that 2 x 4 and baseball-bat swung it across the right side of Dad’s head.

  Dad stumbled back, sincerely dazed but still on his feet.

  “Now stop it, Dad! I don’t wanna fight you and I ain’t stealin Don Knowles’s pipe tonight!”

  Dad, bleeding from his ears, turned and leveled Mike with another right hook.

  “Like hell you’re not, boy,” he said as he prowled in on his son on the ground.

  With the 2 x 4 out of distance and Dad bearing down on him again, Mike grabbed a hand full of sandy gravel from the ground and slung it across Dad’s face, blinding him.

  Dad stumbled back, struggling to get his bearings.

  “That’s enough, Pop! It’s over!

  But it wasn’t. Unable to see, Dad lunged toward Mike’s voice. Mike easily sidestepped him.

  “That’s enough, Dad!”

  Dad, now a blind groveling bear with bleeding ears, came at Mike again.

  “Where are you, boy? Where’s my son who won’t roll Don Knowles’s pipe with his old man?”