It Chooses You (7 page)

Miranda: Was it too easy?

Andrew: Too easy. It could’ve been harder. They don’t try to teach you, because they think you won’t be able to pick up the information they’re giving you.

Miranda: Do you know why you’re in Special Ed?

Andrew: No. I’ve been in it since 2000.

Miranda: So… since you were eight.

Andrew: Yeah. They just gave me my paperwork, and on the paper it says it’s because I’m slow in remembering.

Miranda: Is that true?

Andrew: It says supposedly when I’m in class I’m daydreaming. I guess the teacher must think that because I don’t really talk to people in my classes, because I don’t know them. I just sit there and do my work and I don’t talk to nobody. I guess the teacher must think I daydream because I’m not interacting with other people.

Miranda: What do you wish you’d learned more about?

Andrew: Probably science. In my science class we weren’t able to do experiments. If you give some of the Special Ed kids a knife or something, they’ll play around, and I guess they didn’t really trust all of us so they’d rather not give us materials to be able to do experiments and stuff. I kind of got mad at that part. We weren’t able to do experiments where the other kids would do projects and stuff. We never had the chance to do that.

Miranda: And you would’ve been so good at biology and —

Andrew: All that stuff. It’s crazy.

Miranda: It’s making me mad.

Andrew: It made me mad.

Miranda: Not many people your age build a whole pond and keep everything alive. I wonder how much your college will look at those papers or if you can get kind of a fresh start.

Andrew: They’re going to look at them. My counselor, she told me to turn in all that information to Special Ed services or something like that.

Miranda: It seems like it could be just as easy to be a park ranger or something like that as to work on airplanes — I mean, if you had the choice.

Andrew: I don’t know, because people say it’s hard. And I’m not really good with all that stuff. When I want to do something I want to know that I can accomplish it, but if I start thinking that in the long run it’s going to be super hard, I kind of take a step back.

Miranda: Well, especially if you’ve had people telling you that you’re not good at that, it’s a hard thing to learn to finish. At least you’re almost an adult — there are some good things about that. In high school you don’t have any real rights, but at least in college…

Andrew: Yeah. It’s all on me now.

It was tempting to jump in with some advice — I was about two seconds away from offering him an internship at my brother’s workplace, restoring wetlands. But it seemed be a tendency of mine to look for each person’s problem and then overlook all the other things about them. So I tried to see what else he was, besides lost in the system. Andrew was a little angry, but more than that, he was proud. So I changed my approach; I said the opposite of what I felt, and it was more true.

Miranda: So we caught you at a kind of exciting time in your life.

Andrew: Yeah, pretty much at a good time.

Miranda: This is corny, but you’re kind of like the tadpole about to transform.

Andrew: Yeah. It’s true.

Miranda: You’re one of the big ones that have only a couple weeks left.

Andrew: You could say that, a tadpole.

For a moment I could feel time the way he felt it — it was endless. It didn’t really matter that his dreams of wildlife were in the opposite direction from the airplane hangar where he was headed, because there was time for multiple lives. Everything could still happen, so no decision could be very wrong.

That was exactly the opposite of how I was feeling now, at thirty-five. I drove home from Paramount feeling ancient, like the characters in my script

Sophie: We’ll be forty in five years.

Jason: Forty is almost fifty, and after fifty the rest is just loose change.

Sophie: Loose change?

Jason: Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.

I knew this wasn’t really true, but that was the paralyzing sensation. There wasn’t time to make mistakes anymore, or to do things without knowing why. And each thing I made had to be more impossibly challenging than the last, which was hair-raising, since I had been out of my depths from the very start.

The first thing I ever made professionally — that is, for the ostensible public — was a play about my correspondence with a man in prison. I started writing to Franko C. Jones when I was fourteen. I’d found his address in (where else?) the classifieds, in a section that doesn’t seem to exist anymore called “Prison Pen Pals.” When I was younger, my dad had read
The Minds of Billy Milligan
to me before bed, the true story of a robber and rapist with multiple personality disorder (my father’s preference was to read me books that he himself was interested in). So my sympathy for imprisoned men was sort of a family tradition; I may even have written my first letter to Franko because I wanted to do something my dad would think was interesting. But then I kept writing to him for three years, every week.

The gap between a thirty-eight-year-old murderer serving his eighteenth year in Florence, Arizona, and a sixteen-year-old prep-school student in Berkeley, California, is lyrical in scale, like the size of the ocean or outer space. Bridging it seemed like one of the few things I could do that might be holy or transcendent. I’ve been trying for so long now, for decades, to lift the lid a little bit, to see under the edge of life and somehow catch it in the act —“it” being not God (because the word
God
asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder) but something along those lines. We wrote about grades, prison riots (Franko tape-recorded the sounds of one), my friends (Johanna, Jenni), his friends (Lefty, One-Eye), and everything else in our lives, except for sex, which I said at the start was off-limits.

I wrote the play because I couldn’t explain the relationship; conversations about it ended badly and I longed to be understood on a grand scale. I put a casting call in the free weekly newspaper, and I held auditions in a reggae club. I cast a drug-and-alcohol counselor in his thirties as Franko, and the character based on me was played by a Latina woman in her early twenties named Xotchil. (I thought I would be taken more seriously as a director if I didn’t also act in it — something I keep forgetting these days.) We practiced in my attic and performed the play,
The Lifers
, at 924 Gilman Street, a punk club. I rented chairs from a church and sat in them with my friends and family and my family’s friends and a few bewildered punk rockers. Together we watched this enactment of my improbable friendship and its clumsy spiritual yearning. I was so electrified with simultaneous shame and pride that two-thirds of the way through the play I got out of my seat and crept up to the side of the stage. I’m not sure what I planned to do from there — perhaps stop the show or redirect it as it happened. The drug-and-alcohol counselor gave me a hard look from the stage and I slunk back to my seat. I would simply have to endure it.

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Movies are the only thing I make that puts me at the mercy of financiers, which is partly why I make other things too. Writing is free, and I can rehearse a performance in my living room; it may turn out that no one wants to publish the book or present the performance, but at least I’m not waiting for permission to make the thing. Having a screenplay and no money to make it would almost be worse than not having a screenplay and maintaining the dream of being wanted. At times it seemed that I was only pretending the script wasn’t finished, to save face, to give myself some sense of control. And on a more superstitious level, I secretly believed I would get financing when I had completed my vision quest, learned the thing I needed to know. The gods were at the edges of their seats, hoping I would do everything right so they could reward me.

I had been avoiding Beverly because Vista, on the map, seemed dangerously far away. But I was becoming more intrepid, or else my time was seeming less valuable. If, worst-case scenario, I couldn’t find my way home from Vista, I could just live there. So I called Brigitte and Alfred and we set out in the morning. In between the towns and cities in California are straw-covered hills that sometimes burst into flames. Beverly lived on one of these brown hills, which made sense; you could keep a suitcase or a jacket in the city, but Bengal leopard babies would need more room.

The road was dirt, the house was surrounded by abandoned furniture and equipment, and Beverly, who met us in the lawn, was painfully lacerated. She had told me on the phone that she didn’t want her face photographed because she’d just had an accident involving a shovel. The wounds were still spinning their scabs.

Beverly: Come on, I’ll take you in the house and show you the cats first, and then we’ll go from there. You know what this is?

She pointed to something on the wall. It had eyes.

Miranda: Yes.

Beverly: What? What is it?

Miranda: That’s the butt of something.

Beverly: Yes — very good! Excellent!

Miranda: Of what, though?