Hella Nation - Evan Wright [160]
I tell Josiah I don’t get the relationship between the number 316 and Jesus.
“‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,’” Josiah says, quoting the Scriptures. “John 3:16.”
“Have you guys been smoking meth?” I ask.
“Yeah, I ain’t going to lie,” Josiah answers. “Pat’s fucked up. He’s fucking psychotic, fucking psycho, fucking, a fucking weirdo. We all are, you know?”
Dollard phones minutes after Josiah hangs up. Unlike Josiah, Dollard sounds supremely relaxed, groggy, maybe a little drunk. He informs me that he was unable to fly to New York because he has fallen in love with Sunshine. “She has a golden heart,” he tells me.
There is a complication. Sunshine is Josiah’s girlfriend, one who, at times, meant a great deal to him. “This is rough for Josiah,” Dollard says. “She came here to see him and . . .” He whispers, “What happened between us had to happen. She’s the one.”
I ask him why he skipped his meeting in New York, and he cuts me off. “Dude, I can’t talk right now. I’m having my dick sucked.”
NO REDEMPTION
AUTO FOCUS, the film that Dollard produced and Paul Schrader directed, is about Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s self-destruction through his addiction to sex as well as the murky homoeroticism of his relationship with a hanger-on who films Crane’s exploits with women and ultimately beats him to death with a camera tripod. The film did not do well at the box office, but Schrader remains pleased with his collaboration with Dollard. “He wasn’t scared about doing stuff that may offend people,” Schrader tells me. “I knew that if we did something warped, he would get it.” Despite its lackluster reception, Schrader believes the film stands as a pure story, unencumbered by hack studio convention, which he attributes in part to Dollard’s influence. “Pat was attracted to the idea that we just weren’t going to redeem or glorify our main character. That this was the story of the life of an extremist, what happens if you release the reins on a normal powerful passion and let the horse run. Will you achieve some kind of balance, or will it break you apart?”
Unlike the fictionalization of Bob Crane’s life in Auto Focus, Dollard since I have known him has been obsessed with redemption. This was the whole point of going to Iraq. While I’m not totally surprised that he has apparently gone out on a bender, I hadn’t expected he would so casually skip the all-important meeting with Nevins. As a practical matter it also seems potentially dangerous to be having sex with the girlfriend of a violent felon.
Josiah phones after delivering the film to Nevins’s apartment. “There I was, eh, in this rich bitch’s apartment,” Josiah says. “These broads were fucking all into me, saying how handsome I am. They thought me and Pat were gay. I was all ‘Wait, I know I’m fucking fine, eh? But that doesn’t mean I have to be gay and shit.’” Josiah states for the record, “Gay is not my position.”
I ask Josiah what’s going on with Dollard and his girlfriend. “He’s fucking fucking her,” he says. Josiah admits this was initially hard for him to take. He and Sunshine have known each other for several years. “Then I got busted and went to prison and she wrote me, giving me hope, ’cause she was the only broad there for me,” Josiah says.
He confides, “I don’t even know why she still talks to me after all of the bad shit I did to her.” He explains, “You know what it’s like, eh? You’re with your homeys, and she starts talking to me, and I say, ‘Hey, check this out, bitch, you shut the fuck up. When I’m talking you just sit there and shut the fuck up.’” Once he arranged