It Chooses You - Miranda July [22]
Miranda:
Yeah, well, it was really great.
Ron:
It’s been a pleasure.
We silently walk-ran to the elevator and Alfred hit the down button repeatedly until the elevator doors opened. Ron couldn’t help but remind me a little of Franko, my prison pen pal – or at least I was reminded of how much I gave Franko the benefit of the doubt. I focused on what was charming and tender about him and I never thought very hard about the person he killed. Who was I to judge? I was so young then that I couldn’t presume murder wasn’t in my future too. It seemed unlikely, but so did everything.
Twenty years later I was warier. Ron felt like a cold spot in the universe, a place that just wasn’t going to warm up. There was still a small piece of me that wanted to be the only one who believed in him, the one he spared, but more than anything I wanted to grab the hand of myself at sixteen, and the hand of my future daughter, and run.
After I interviewed Ron, I had a meeting with an actor who had read my script and was considering the role of Marshall. It was Don Johnson, from Miami Vice. As usual, I was early, so I drove around and got lost, which made me late, as usual. I parked on the street and then walked up to a big gate and pressed a button that alerted a video camera. I waved and then tried to say something about how he didn’t need to open the gate all the way because I wasn’t driving in. I held up my hands to the camera to indicate the width of my body. The gate began rolling open, I slipped through, but it kept opening. Even after I was seated inside across from Don, in his den, I could still hear the gate opening. And then it reversed direction and started the long journey home.
Don was good-looking and very solid, the way men often become in their fifties. Sometimes men with this kind of body ask you to punch them; that didn’t happen this time. We talked about meditation and Buddhism. I couldn’t remember if he’d had any drug problems, but I hoped he had come to meditation through recovery. It’s always a relief to me when someone is in recovery; it automatically gives us something to talk about. Not that I’m in recovery, specifically, but I relate to the feeling of trying and failing and trying again. People who have been through rehab are used to talking about this – they’re required to.
Don and I talked about being present and the elusiveness of “now,” and then he praised the talents of his son for a while, which predictably moved me to tears. To keep from crying, I had to do the trick where you contract your butt into a tiny fist and mentally repeat the words fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. We discussed the script, and I suggested he audition for the part, which is the one thing you’re never supposed to say in these meetings – apparently it’s insulting, which I always forget. So the meeting was suddenly over. He walked me out, the gate opened, and it was still opening when I drove away.
I moved to Portland, Oregon, when I was twenty. Portland was the hometown of Gary Gilmore, the murderer Norman Mailer wrote about in The Executioner’s Song. I’d read that book when I was fifteen, so I’d been thinking about Portland’s dark side for a long time, but that wasn’t why I’d moved there. I wanted to be part of the Northwest Riot Grrrl revolution and closer to my girlfriend. Still, if that didn’t work out, I knew the underworld would be waiting for me.
I found a job in the classifieds, working for Pop-A-Lock, as a car-door unlocker. The job interview was conducted at a Denny’s, and I was trained in a dump filled with wrecked cars covered with blood and hair and biohazard stickers. I wore a big red vest and a beeper on my belt. I was on call twenty-four hours a day, serving the entire tri-county region. The customers usually looked dismayed to see such an unmanly person come to their rescue, and it often took me upward of an hour to get the door open, but I always succeeded eventually (“bind and jiggle” was the trick). I sang Pop-A-Lock’s praises right up until the very moment I quit, at which point I admitted it was one