Hella Nation - Evan Wright [157]
Dollard turns to me. “We’re friends against all probability. When we met at Impact, we were a gangbanger and a Hollywood agent. It was funny because Josiah came from this hard prison culture and yet he became my vassal. Everyone thought he was my bitch.”
“I wasn’t his bitch, eh?” Josiah clarifies.
“Josiah,” Dollard explains, “in the sense that I was your friend and protector, you were my bitch.”
“I wasn’t your fucking bitch.” Josiah’s face darkens.
“Josiah, you are my lieutenant. I am the general.” Dollard gestures to the apartment. “Someday, you will inherit everything.”
Josiah continues to brood. Dollard shoots me a frustrated look, then hits upon something guaranteed to lift Josiah from his funk. “Josiah,” Dollard says. “Tell Evan about the helicopter.”
Josiah snaps to, laughing. “When I was tweaked out staying at motels, and I knew some bitch was on her way over, I’d take my clothes off,” he recounts. “When she comes to the door, I open it swinging my dick like a helicopter.”
ON FIRE WITH SOBRIETY
SEPTEMBER 19, 2005. I accompany Dollard to a screening of his film for a small company seeking content for outlets like Spike TV. Dollard meets the head of the firm’s film division—a tall, wiry, cerebral-seeming man whom Dollard nicknames “Spock”—in a spacious Beverly Hills suite. A few minutes into the screening, things start to go badly when Spock leaps from his couch to turn down the obscenity-laden soundtrack. “They can hear this outside,” he says.
Dollard immediately jumps from his seat and twists the volume up. To my astonishment, the two go back and forth like this until Spock finally has enough. He hits the pause button and stands blocking the equipment from any more interference from Dollard. “This is great,” Spock says through a tight grin, “but I’m having trouble getting my head around it.”
“This is cinéma vérité,” Dollard says, standing up, beginning to rant. I time Dollard on my watch. He talks for twelve straight minutes. The cords on his neck pop out. Spit flies. By the end of the tirade he paces, talking about whores in Iraq, robbing pharmacies, liberals, Valium. He finally sputters to a stop.
Spock breaks the silence. “I don’t even know how we could market this.”
“I don’t want you to market it,” Dollard yells. “I don’t want an audience talked into watching this by marketing tricks. Fuck that.”
Spock shakes Dollard’s hand. “The thing is, I totally respect you as an artist.”
Careening down Wilshire Boulevard minutes later, Dollard grouses, “He turned my shit off. You do not tell the artist to turn his shit off early.” Then his face brightens with inspiration. “Let’s take ten grand, go to Las Vegas, get a bunch of hookers and blow, and have fun for a few days.”
“What makes you think you’d be able to stop?” I ask.
“What we’ll do is hire a couple of big niggers to shut us down at the end of five days and put us in suitcases and bring us home.”
Dollard catches me writing down the word “nigger” in my notes.
“I can say that word,” he says. “I’m half Puerto Rican, and if I’m Puerto Rican, then I’m a nigger. End of story.”
He also insists for the record that he has no desire to actually get high, that he is merely joking. “The fact is Josiah and I are on fire with sobriety.”
MEGAN
IT SEEMS THE GODS do favor Pat Dollard. Mike Simpson informs him that the HBO executives who saw the film in L.A. have recommended it to the head of the documentary division in New York, Sheila Nevins, arguably the single most influential person in America in the realm of documentary. The plan is for Dollard to fly to New York for a screening.
After sharing this news with me, Dollard says, “I called Megan”—his fourth wife, who left him a year ago. “I told her I’m going to be getting eight million bucks. I told her I’d pay her ten grand if she’d come over here and suck my dick.”
“Calling me up and saying disgusting things like that to me is Pat’s idea of a joke,” Megan tells me when we meet a few days later. She is twenty-five, tall and blond, and speaks in a silky