Johnny Hangtime (4 page)

W
e wrapped up
New York Nightmare
at the end of August. The studio was thrilled, because Roland finished the movie on time and under budget. Mom was thrilled because I came away with just a few bumps and bruises.

Mom and I stayed in New York for a few days so I could see the sights of the city without having to jump off them. Also, Ricky Corvette's lawyer asked me and Mom to stop by his office before we went back to California.

The law offices of Pazan, Rothman, and Gavin were really fancy. I didn't even want to sit on the chairs in the waiting room, because they looked like they belonged in a museum or something.

After a few minutes, Mom and I were ushered into Barry Rothman's office. There were pictures of Ricky Corvette all over the walls. Barry Rothman was a big man with silvery hair. While he shook my hand and asked me how the movie went, I wondered why he really wanted to see me.

“Johnny, you've been doing Ricky Corvette's stunts for three years now,” he finally said. “I'd like to go over a few things in your contract, if you're agreeable.”

“We'll look it over,” Mom said. She had on her serious, don't-mess-with-us face.

My contract with Ricky Corvette specified certain “dangerous” activities I wasn't allowed to do in my spare time. For instance, I couldn't go bungee jumping or snowboarding. The reason was that if I were to get injured and put out of action, I wouldn't be able to take Ricky's place in a movie, and it would damage his career. So my contract had a long list of activities I wasn't allowed to participate in….

Parachuting. Firing a gun or shooting a bow and arrow. I wasn't allowed to go to dances or rock concerts, because somebody might jump off the stage and land on me. I wasn't allowed to be within ten yards of a trampoline for the same reason. I couldn't take gym class at school. I couldn't go mountain climbing.

Most important, fighting was strictly prohibited. If I got into a fight with anybody, my contract with Ricky Corvette would be terminated immediately.

“Just a few more things,” the lawyer said, handing me and Mom a sheet of paper.

The paper said that from now on I was required to wear a seat belt any time I was in a moving vehicle. No problem, I do that anyway. It also said I would need to get written permission from Ricky's lawyer before I traveled by helicopter or airplane. Fair enough. Finally, it said I was not allowed to go on escalators, motorcycles, minibikes, wooden bridges, rope bridges, seesaws, monkey bars, or swings.

“I know it's kind of silly,” the lawyer chuckled as he handed me a pen. “But it's for your own protection, Johnny. You can never be too safe.”

“Are you sure you want to sign that?” Mom asked. “I mean, you won't even be able to go on an
escalator
anymore.”

“I'll take the stairs, Mom,” I said, as I signed the contract and handed it to her to co-sign.

 

Then it was back to California and back to school. I was excited about starting eighth grade in September.

 

I'm sure Ricky Corvette and Augusta Wind have private tutors, but I've always attended public school. We don't have the money for private school or private tutors. I do my stunts on weekends, vacations, and sometimes after school. Every so often, I get to take a day off from school to do a stunt.

On the first day of English class, as always, everybody had to write a composition about what they did over summer vacation.

That's what I would have
liked
to write. But I couldn't. Too bad too, because it would have really blown the rest of the class away.

The problem is, my contract with Ricky Corvette
also
states very clearly that I'm not allowed to
tell
anybody I'm a stuntkid.

Ricky, like a lot of movie stars, wants the public to believe
he
does all the dangerous stuff in his movies
himself
. He needs it to protect his image, I suppose.

If the public ever found out that all Ricky Corvette did was lie on the ground and moan, “Oh, my leg!” people might stop going to see his movies. His career would be over. And if anybody found out that
I
was the one who spilled the beans, I'd never get to do another stunt for Ricky again.

So I have to keep my mouth shut. Only me and Mom know the truth, plus some people in the movie industry. There is always a “closed set” on Ricky's movies, so word doesn't get around that he doesn't actually do any stunts. The general public thinks Ricky Corvette is a rough, tough “action hero.”

What a joke! In reality, Ricky Corvette is such a wimp that he's afraid to cross the street without his mommy. And he's such a klutz, he can barely walk without tripping over his own feet.

 

I was at my locker, at the end of that first day of school, when I noticed a kid staring at me from a few lockers away. I didn't look up.

“Hey kid,” the kid asked, “what's your name?”

“Johnny Thyme.”

He was a big kid, bigger than me. He must have been new to school. I didn't recognize him. He had a crew cut and was wearing a heavy-metal T-shirt. He stuck out his hand for me to shake and I stuck out mine.

“Boris Bonner,” he said. “Nice to meet ya.”

As he said it, Boris tightened his grip on my hand. I tried to pull away, but he held on tight. Then he began squeezing.

I didn't want to let him know it hurt. I squeezed back, but it was clear that he was stronger than me. Boris looked into my eyes, searching for fear. I fought to pretend he wasn't hurting me. He was crushing the bones of my knuckles together. I thought about shouting or kicking him, but that would have been admitting defeat.

Just as the pain was becoming unbearable, he released my hand.

“So Johnny Thyme,” Boris said with a grin, “how come you weren't in gym with the rest of the class?”

“I have asthma,” I lied. I couldn't tell him my contract with Ricky Corvette prohibited me from taking gym class.

“Bummer,” Boris Bonner muttered. He was about to walk away, but then he came back and put his face about a foot from mine. He had bad breath. “Hey, Thyme. You got a dollar on you?”

I had a couple of dollars in my pocket, but I didn't particularly want to give one to Boris Bonner. Then again, I didn't particularly want to turn him down either. He looked like the kind of kid who wanted to start a fight for the stupidest reason. And the last thing I needed was to get in a fight.

Maybe he just wants to
borrow
a dollar, I figured. He didn't
say
that, but maybe that's what he meant. He'll give me the dollar back tomorrow. By just giving him a lousy buck, I figured, I would get him out of my face. I pulled a bill out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“That's a good boy,” he said, and walked down the hall. Right away, I wished I hadn't given him the dollar.

 

Back when I was ten, keeping my stunt work to myself wasn't a big deal. Nobody ever asked what I did after school or on weekends, and I didn't tell. If a kid invited me over to his house to play and
I had to shoot a movie that day, I just told him I had a dentist appointment or had to visit a relative or something.

In the last couple of years, though, things have changed. Kids notice everything now. This really pretty girl in my class invited me to a school dance last year. I couldn't tell her that I wasn't allowed to go to dances. After I turned her down with some lame excuse, I guess she told everybody, because the next day, a lot of kids looked at me like I was weird.

It has made things difficult for me. When a group of guys would pick up a football at recess and start throwing it around, I'd pretend I didn't see them so they wouldn't invite me to play. When kids would gather in the playground before school and start talking about what they were going to do over the weekend, I couldn't tell them the truth—that I would be having a fistfight on top of a speeding train, for instance. I'd say I had to visit my grandmother, or some other boring thing I wouldn't actually be doing. Kids must have thought I was boring too. I suppose that's why I pretty much stayed by myself.

I'm proud of my stunt work. I wish I could brag about it. But sometimes I regret that I ever got started stunting in the first place.

I
was ten when it all started. Dad had just had the accident at Niagara Falls and I was going out of my mind at home. I had always been a daredevil, but Dad was always around to supervise me. When Mom caught me jumping off the garage one day, she was pretty upset. I could understand it. She had just lost her husband and she didn't want anything to happen to me.

Mom suggested I take up gymnastics. I guess she thought that if I got into a sport, I might get some of that energy out of my system. Maybe I wouldn't follow in Dad's footsteps.

I had seen gymnastics on TV during the Olympics, and it looked pretty cool. I gave it a try for a month or so. But somehow, vaulting off a pommel horse didn't give me the same rush that I got from vaulting off the garage. It just didn't make my endorphins kick in, I guess.

Mom tried to get me interested in team sports after that, but I never really liked them. I mean, look at baseball. The national
pastime, they call it. What a lame game. You wait like an hour between pitches for something to happen while everybody stands around spitting and scratching themselves.

Most sports are the same, it seems to me. They're just a simulation of warfare—two teams trying to push their opponents across a battlefield and score a goal on them. Soccer—run up and down a field kicking a ball. Hockey—skate up and down a rink pushing a puck. Basketball—run up and down a court dribbling a ball. Football—run up and down a field knocking each other over. They were all the same as far as I was concerned, and I just wasn't into them.

“How about bowling?” Mom asked one day when I was moping around after school. “You don't run up and down a field in bowling.”

“Bowling?” I asked, incredulously. “That has got to be the all-time most boring sport in the world, Mom! You roll a ball down an alley to knock down pins. Snooze! I mean, if you could lie on a skateboard and roll down the alley to see how many pins you could knock down with your
head, that
would be cool.”

Mom looked at me with the worried expression she always gets when I remind her of Dad. A few weeks later, she made me go see a “counselor.”

That's what she called him. I'm sure she was afraid that if she used the word
psychologist
, I might weird out. To Mom's generation, I think, going to see a psychologist meant you must be crazy or something is horribly wrong with you. These days, lots of kids see them and everybody's pretty cool about it. Going to a shrink didn't bother me at all.

 

Mom couldn't really afford the psychologist, but she thought it was important to figure out why I had this compulsion to do dangerous things all the time.

Dr. Carreon was a nice enough guy. He didn't have me lie down on a couch or anything. He just asked me to tell him about the situation, so I told him how much I loved jumping off things.

“Why do you think you need to play with danger like this, Johnny?” Dr. Carreon asked.

“I don't know,” I replied. “It's fun, I guess.”

“It's fun, yes. But perhaps there are other reasons. Things are not always what they seem on the surface. Sometimes people have very unusual reasons for doing the things they do.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“For example, some kids in your school probably wear unusual clothing, or they get tattoos or pierce parts of their body. I suspect that many of these kids do that not because they like it, but because they hope to draw attention to themselves. It's an attention-getting device.”

“I don't care if anybody's watching me.”

“Then you obviously don't do it to get attention,” Dr. Carreon said. “Maybe you simply have a Type T personality.”

“What's that?”

“A Type T person is a natural risk taker. Some scientists believe risk taking is part of the American personality. People like George Washington, Lewis and Clark, and Amelia Earhart were probably Type Ts. They became national heroes because they took chances. But previous generations had to take risks every day. They had to worry about wild animals eating them. They had to worry about diseases like polio and influenza killing them. They had to worry about global wars. These days, life has become so comfortable that we don't face many challenges. Type T people want to find out what their limitations are. So they go in for extreme sports. They become gamblers. Or they risk their savings on the stock market. Or…maybe they become stuntmen.”

“Hmmm,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.

Dr. Carreon waited nearly a minute before posing the next question.

“Your father was a stuntman, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And he died performing a stunt?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel about that, Johnny?”

“Bad.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“He went over Niagara Falls in a boat that was supposed to turn into a plane. It never did.”

“But how did it make you
feel
?” he pressed.

“Awful.”

“Perhaps there is a genetic component,” Dr. Carreon mused. “Your father may have passed on a thrill-seeking gene that controls the flow of certain chemicals in the brain.”

“Maybe,” I replied. So what if he did? I couldn't do anything about my genes.

“Or perhaps you're angry about your father's death and you channel that anger through self-destructive acts. On the other hand, you may be angry with
yourself
, believing you were somehow responsible for your father's accident. Maybe—just maybe—you have a death wish. Maybe your father did too. There could be any number of reasons why you do these things. I think we should explore this more tomorrow, Johnny.”

What a crock, I thought when I left his office. I knew perfectly well why I liked doing dangerous things. It
felt
good!

When you're doing a stunt, time stands still for an instant. You don't think about your parents, your friends, your problems.
Nothing else matters. It just gives me some internal satisfaction and makes me feel alive. I like a challenge. I like to move fast. I like the feeling of wind rushing by me. I didn't need a psychologist to tell me that.

I gave the receptionist an envelope from Mom. I had checked, and there were five twenty-dollar bills inside.
A hundred bucks!
That was probably more money than Mom made all day. I vowed that I wouldn't go back to Dr. Carreon.

 

I don't steal. I don't smoke or drink or take drugs. But the next day I did a bad thing. I took the second $100 Mom gave me to pay Dr. Carreon and bought a pair of in-line skates with it.

Somebody had posted a notice on the bulletin board of the local supermarket. A guy was selling a brand-new pair of top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art skates worth $400. My size. Aluminum frame. Removable brake. Built-in shock absorbers. Eighty-millimeter wheels. Triple-density foam liner. The guy had broken his leg and wouldn't be needing the skates. He asked for $100, and I snapped them up.

After school the next day I was scheduled to see Dr. Carreon again. Instead, I went to this skate park in Venice, California, near where we live. It had lots of ramps, verts, half pipes, rails, and all kinds of cool stuff to jump over.

I had skated plenty of times before, but I never had a good pair of skates. I started doing some tricks, thinking the whole time that it was better therapy than talking with Dr. Carreon. I was eating the place up, really catching some big air, and noticed the other kids were watching me.

The next day I went to the skate park after school again. It wasn't very crowded yet so I pretty much had the place to myself. I
had just ollied off the twelve-foot half pipe and went into an alley-oop hobo. That's when you spin 180 degrees and then jump on a rail backward. It's really hard to do, and you shouldn't even try it unless you're either really good or have a total lack of common sense.

I grinded down the rail, did a quick grab, bumped some stairs, and attempted a fishbrain. I didn't quite pull it off, and rag-dolled into the dirt.

 

When I looked up, there were two guys standing over me. One of them was a bald guy with a ponytail. That was the first time I met Roland Rivers.

“Rude, dude,” Roland said in his British accent. “You must be a real hammerhead.”

I'm always suspicious of grown-ups who try to talk the talk. “Thanks,” was all I said, and started to skate away.

“May I rap with you for a moment, young man?” Roland asked.

“I don't talk to strangers,” I replied.

“Smart boy,” Roland said, handing me his business card. “Then allow me to introduce myself so we won't be strangers. My name is Roland Rivers, and I'm directing a film up the street. This is my assistant, Roger. Ever think of getting into movies?”

“Can't act,” I said.

“Don't have to,” Roland replied. “Can you do a back flip?”

I couldn't resist showing off a little. I skated over to an open area where there was a three-foot ramp and flipped head over heels. I'd done it plenty of times before. Then I skated back to him.

“Awesome!” he said, applauding. “You like things fast, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you skate off the roof of a building?”

“Depends on the building.”

“Out of a plane?”

“Maybe.”

“Is it because you like excitement,” Roland asked, “or are you just a fool?”

I looked at him. I wasn't sure if it was a serious question or a put-down.

“I like the excitement,” I said, meeting his gaze.

“Did anybody ever tell you that you look a lot like Ricky Corvette?”

“Yeah, a few people.”

Ricky Corvette hadn't made any movies at that point, but I had seen the TV show he was on. It was really awful, but a lot of seven-year-old kids thought it was cool. I
did
look a little like Ricky.

“Ricky has a part in a skating film I'm directing,” Roland went on. “It's his first film. One scene calls for him to skate up a ramp and do a back flip.”

“So?”

“I have just one problem—Ricky Corvette can't skate.”

“So what's he doing in a skating movie?” I asked.

“America thinks he's cute.”

“And you want me to skate in his place?”

“I already have a youngster skating for him,” Roland said. “But the boy can't do a back flip. Maybe you could do it for him.”

“Why should I?”

“I'll pay you $100.”

“In real money?”

“Of course.”

“Let's see it,” I said. I still didn't trust Roland at that point.

Roland pulled out his wallet, peeled off a hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to me.

Back then, when I was ten, $100 was a lot of money to me. I'd never had a job. Never earned any money on my own. I'd never
seen
a hundred-dollar bill. I liked the look of it.

“What about your mom and dad?” Roland asked. “Are they going to be okay with this?”

“Don't have a dad,” I said. “My mom won't care.”

The second part was a lie, of course. But holding the bill in my hand made me feel better about buying the in-line skates with the $100 Mom had given me to pay Dr. Carreon.

I walked down the street with Roland to a big soundstage. I had never been on a movie set before, and it was pretty cool, seeing all those people and cameras and lights. Roland introduced me to Ricky Corvette, who I could tell right away was a jerk.

I did the back flip and was done in five minutes. Roland walked me out.

“There's more work like that if you want it,” he said. “Why don't you come by tomorrow around the same time?”

“Okay.”

“Hey, what's your name, son?”

“Johnny Thyme.”

“Thyme?” Roland asked. “Are you any relation to Joe Thyme, the great stuntman?”

“He's…he was my dad.”

“I'm sorry,” Roland said. “It was terrible what happened at Niagara Falls. Your dad was perhaps the bravest stuntman who ever lived. He was an idol of mine. I always wished I'd get the chance to direct a film with him in it someday.”

“Guess you'll have to settle for me instead.”

“If you've got half the guts your father had, you'll go far.”

I went back the next day and did a hand plant in front of
Roland's cameras. That's when you go upside down on a ramp in a handstand on a skateboard. It's also called an invert. Roland gave me another $100 and asked me to come back the following day. I did, and performed a 360 kick flip into a backside royale for him. Roland said there would be plenty more work like that, if I wanted it.

I could hardly believe it. Roland was paying me to do what I liked to do for the fun of it. I was having the time of my life.

 

At the end of that week, Mom called Dr. Carreon to ask him how I was doing in my therapy. He told her I hadn't shown up since the first appointment.

Mom was pretty PO'd, but I was ready for her. I gave her the $400 she had given me to pay Dr. Carreon, plus $400 more. I told her honestly how I'd earned the extra money.

“Instead of you paying all this money to a psychologist,” I explained, “I'll give it back to
you
, and more. I promise I'll stop jumping off the garage and doing crazy stuff around the house, Mom. Please let me keep doing this.
Please
?”

Mom thought it over for a long time. When she let out a sigh, I knew I had won the argument.

And that's how I got my start doing stunts for Ricky Corvette.