Hella Nation - Evan Wright [161]
But when Sunshine, who hadn’t seen Josiah in months, showed up at Dollard’s apartment several days ago, she turned the tables. She refused to have sex with him and, as Josiah saw it, was trying to make him jealous by flirting with Dollard. “It hurt, eh, ’cause I fucking love that girl.”
About this time, Josiah says, he and Dollard, then Sunshine, began smoking meth. Soon, Dollard advised Josiah on the best way to handle the situation with Sunshine. Josiah says, “Pat told me she was trying to play a game on me.” Dollard gave Josiah a pep talk to remind him who he is: “I’m the pimp. I’m the one that plays the games. She thinks she’s playing me? I’ll use her to my fucking advantage. So I pimped her out.” Josiah laughs. “Last night he gave me five grand. She got fucked, and I got paid.”
When I later speak with Dollard, he laughs off the notion that he talked Josiah into pimping his girlfriend to him. “The fact is,” Dollard says, “Josiah can’t stop watching her fuck me.” Dollard informs me that Josiah filmed him as he had sex with his girlfriend.
I point out to Dollard that he has now entered the realm of Auto Focus. He says, “The difference is, in Auto Focus the girls Bob Crane was fucking were just girls, but Josiah’s filming me fucking the love of his life.” Dollard laughs. “People get killed over this.”
THREE DAYS
MIKE SIMPSON PHONES ME in the midst of this to ask how my story on Dollard is going. I don’t want to divulge anything that will screw up Dollard’s prospects at William Morris. Moreover, there’s something so strangely decent about Mike Simpson, so at odds with Dollard’s portrayals of agents as whoremongering, borderline white-collar criminals, I’m at a loss to say anything. I tell him Pat is certainly an interesting subject. “We’re hearing such good things about his project at Showtime and now HBO,” Simpson says, sounding pleased. “Pat is really coming into his own as a filmmaker.”
On an unseasonably hot October afternoon Dollard invites me to his apartment to show me something. Josiah greets me outside the door. He asks if I’ve come alone. Dollard is afraid I might have brought his mother. Ever since the first time his family had the police take him to the psych ward, he’s grown wary. (As he once told me, “They figured out they could pick up the phone, and, boom, I’m in a mental hospital. It fucking sucks, dude.”) I assure Josiah I’ve come alone.
The apartment is a rat’s nest. One couch is overturned. Cigarette butts are burned into the carpet. Tear-gas grenades—part of an arms cache Dollard hoped to acquire to launch his anti-jihadi network—are scattered on the floor. The bathroom looks like someone skinned a deer in it: everything is covered in tufts of hair and blood from Dollard’s effort to cut off the beard that grew during the past couple of weeks.
Dollard enters in shorts and sandals, drinking vodka and cranberry juice from a plastic cup. “I’m tapering down,” he says. “This is medicine.”
Gesturing to the wrecked apartment, Dollard attempts a joke. “I go on a drug binge for ten days, and when I come out of it I find out my agents have done less work than I have.”
Dollard boasts he has just completed a new film that he plans to send to Sheila Nevins. “This is the woman who is the grande dame of interesting, weird documentaries. Part of what I am trying to sell them is that I am a madman—this, quote, insane genius.”
“It’s called Three Days,” says Josiah, kneeling at the coffee table and playing with a large hunting knife.
Dollard says, “I want to send Three Days to Sheila as an explanation as to why I missed my meeting with her.” He adds that Three Days may be one of the greatest films ever made, whose meaning is, well . . . I just have to watch it.
I sit on the tiny bed in the editing room. Josiah is next to me, his hunting knife now