The best day: part 4

Pat was an awesome guy. We became really good friends. He smoked like a chimney, he was mainly a comedian but he was playing Killer Joe in this play – the terrifying hired killer who infiltrates this family. He was amazing. Killer Joe is the one who discovers that Sharla has been betraying them all and he punishes her in the most brutal and humiliating way possible. Onstage. He and I didn’t know each other at all when we started rehearsal so doing that scene was quite an odd thing. I remember the first time we really did it – in rehearsal. He stood over me, I was on my knees – it’s a very violent scene … I started weeping – but he kept going, as he should … It’s the part. Killer Joe has no conscience. Well, he probably has more of a conscience than Sharla does – but his is a rough frontier brand of justice. You fuck with me, bitch? I’ll bring you to your knees. Tears didn’t move him. Pleading for your life didn’t move him. It was a tough scene and I never got used to doing it. Which was why it was good. Sharla thinks she has gotten away with it. And, like a cobra stalking its prey, Killer Joe waits, waits, waits … and then, in one devastating moment, strikes. And Pat – who was a tough guy, the kind of guy I really relate to – he’s like all the men in my family – tough but with a heart of gold – had to put aside his own sense of compassion and reticence in order to do the scene. You know the kind of guy who knows his own strength? And so he is even more responsible about using that strength? Pat was that guy. So the first time we really HIT the moment with the scene – the first time we really clicked into it in rehearsal – was inTENSE. I was crying, begging for mercy, he was choking me, and laughing evilly in my face, and I was fighting him, but he was holding me down … Awful. To not be able to get away. You know, we went there. The director then called out from the dark, “Okay, stop …” We both stopped. I wiped my tears off, but I was curled up on the floor – Pat, with the gentleness of a father, with the kindness of a good good man, reached his hand down to me, and helped me stand up. He had this strange ashamed look on his face, but we both knew we had nailed the moment. That was the moment. His hands, which had been around my neck, were suddenly soft and manly – firm and kind – He held his arm around my waist, and said, in a kind of shy amused way, “This is a very strange sensation …” It was like he faced his own capacity for violence … That’s the beauty of acting in those moments. You get to act out the stuff you suppress as an upstanding citizen of society. We all have violence in us. Most of us do not act on it. Pat’s a tough dude, man – you do not want to get in a fight with Pat – but like I said: he knows that, and so he holds back. He’s responsible with himself. I loved Pat.

Pat was only a couple years older than Michael but he took on a kind of older brother thing with Michael. They’re still friends. It doesn’t surprise me at all. There was none of that posturing competitive shit between them (well, there was at one specific moment … but that had to do with me, so it doesn’t count) – They didn’t beat their breasts like gorillas, or try to be alpha male. They just were buddies. They cracked each other up. They complemented each other.

I give you this background merely as a set-up for the following photo.

Michael, like I said, had never had a sip of alcohol before that day. This is Michael after one glass of wine. I laugh out loud looking at it today. And look at Pat, being patient with Michael, who apparently is reaching out – in order to say some deeply drunken and profound thing.

Part 5