Hella Nation - Evan Wright [147]
By May, Dollard was ready to call it quits. He voluntarily entered Impact House, a live-in, highly regimented rehab in Pasadena.
ALWAYS THE TRUTH
IN EARLY JUNE 2005, I see Dollard after his departure from Impact House. Friends have helped him move into an apartment on Sunset Boulevard, where he is staging a comeback. Outside his window the dome of the ArcLight Cinemas appears to be melting in a liquid sunset. Inside, the air-conditioning blasts. It’s on because Dollard actually abhors cigarettes: the smell, the taste, the ruinous effects on the lungs—everything about cigarettes, except, of course, smoking them. He paces beneath the ceiling vents, chain-smoking and discussing his newfound sobriety. “I had this realization about my drug use,” he tells me. “Until my last binge, I held on to the idea that I could just drop out for a day or two and do drugs. I would have this James Bond fantasy where I’m in, like, the Mondrian [hotel], drinking martinis and shit with beautiful women, then having, like, great coked-out sex.” He laughs. “But I always seem to end up, like, homeless within a matter of hours.”
Dollard has acquired his new, post-agent look: crew cut, Marine Corps fatigues, the haggard, unshaven face. The cataract is just starting to appear over his right eye. He looks wrecked, but Dollard insists he has never felt better, saying, “I wasted twenty years of my life on the narcotic of being a Hollywood agent. Iraq gave me a shot at redemption, but I didn’t realize it, dude, until it was almost too late.”
Dollard is full of new morality. “Ultimately, you realize that the purpose of life isn’t just to take from it whatever you can get,” he says, bending over the stove to light another cigarette on the gas flame. “You can’t spend your life as a sexual libertine and end up being at peace.” He walks up to me and points to my chest. “We were not just born to be sexual pirates.”
I ask if he is involved in outpatient therapy or going to AA meetings. “I’ve just been through a war,” he says. “How can I sit around listening to a bunch of grown men whine about their fucked-up childhoods? I’m part of something bigger than myself—the war, the conservative cause. I can’t get loaded anymore.”
Dollard shares a profound discovery he’s recently made. “I’m a warrior, dude. I am of the class of people whose role has been genetically determined to be protectors. My role is to fight the battle against Islamic fundamentalist fascism.”
There are people in Dollard’s life who believe he’s gone completely out of his mind. His mother believes that at a minimum he may be bipolar. His third wife, Alicia, offers a blunter assessment: “I think he brain-damaged himself in one of those last drug runs.”
Exhibit A in her argument that he has gone mad is Dollard’s recent announcement that he is terminating his relationship with Soderbergh. “Pat owned ten percent of Steven Soderbergh, and he goes and fires him,” Alicia says. “How crazy is that?”
Dollard tells me, “I’m a director now. A director can’t represent a director.”
His future lies in 243 hourlong videocassettes piled on the floor in the corner. There is no furniture, just wall-to-wall white carpet and a sleeping bag. Dollard can’t afford a computer yet on which to edit his tapes. What keeps him motivated is a tattered Iraqi flag tacked to the wall, signed by Marines and inscribed, “Always the truth.” I later ask Captain Brian Iglesias, who signed the flag, about the inscription. He answers, “‘Always the truth,’ because the truth is what Pat Dollard champions.”
Most people in Dollard’s life have written him off. Yet for an industry where relationships are reputed to be calculated solely on the basis of self-interest, loyalists remain, from Soderbergh—who