I say, “Me too.”
What scared me the most was how much he looked like me.
How much I looked like him.
*
Stories end every day, every year, every second, only, when they end, things start to begin as well.
I don’t want to sound clichéd, I don’t want to sound overly obnoxious or as if I’m spewing the same bullshit that every second man does. The point is, when one door closes, thirty windows open.
You just have to choose which one you’re gonna leap through.
That’s why when I write this, I’m choosing which windows to close, how to end it. I’ve been in that room, that bloodstained, shit-stained one in my head for too long now, and I need to draw a close.
I’ve scoured too hard, cleaned too much and my fingers have wrinkled up from the effort, my knees and palms bruised from kneeling, scrubbing, doesn’t matter though, coz my life’s still going, things still happening and so as much as I clean out my head, it doesn’t matter yet, coz the glass in the window is still shattered, and the first gust of wind is going to blow a potted plant over. Soil and branches and withering stems seep through the cracks in the floorboards.
Point is, maybe there is no end yet.
Or maybe, just maybe, this is the end.
There’s this analogy about a burning candle.
You should know this shit, because it’s fucking redundant, comes in that handbook new parents get on the page between eating vegetables and if-the-wind-blows-your-face-will-stick-that-way. It talks about effort, consistency, eternal flames and smouldering embers and fuck if I know; to me it’s always been a matter of burning up and burning out.
That’s probably the difference, right? Why I’ll never have kids, I can’t sugar-coat this shit.
What I’m getting at is that the candle burns out, and all that’s left is a pile of wax and a stale, stagnant little wick in the middle; last guy standing in a no-man’s land of endings, of finishing touches, and I wrote ‘Grace’, finished it, published it, and that fucking little wick was me.
I was left knee-deep in aftermaths, in consequences. Not all of them were bad, but I’d be lying to say I didn’t regret publishing something that was so much a part of me, selling off my history like it’s a stocktake sale at my conscience.
Half-price on all my regrets.
Rolling Stone approached me last month, wanting me to sit for an interview, talk about the novel’s honeymoon period, and I said it wasn’t something I thought I’d be able to do. It’s fine for me to lay my heart in a printing press; it’s another to put it in the palm of someone else’s hand. ‘Grace’ was always the words I could never say, and the thought of talking into a tape-recorder about it makes my stomach acids work overtime, makes too much of me ache.
I told them as much, and they asked me to write the article myself. Initially the ‘no’ was an easy reply, burnt on the tip of my tongue, but Ryan seemed to think writing it would be good for me, Loretta thought good for my career. I’d talk more about it, but the fact that you’re reading this is like placing a bet on the race you already know the outcome of.
It’s been seven months since ‘Grace’ was published, since it hit the shelves, and I wouldn’t say that she took the world by storm, but she found her feet, staggered through it, so she probably deserves credit enough for that.
Did the success surprise you?
That’s one of the questions the magazine wants me to answer.
So, in a word: no.
It surprised me that so many people gave a shit, the success in itself though, that didn’t shock me at all. Fame breeds egotism, celebrity dresses me for self-indulgence, so when people lined up to buy ‘Grace’, I was less surprised than I was self-conscious.
Insecure. Maybe that’s a better word. Revolted is better again, when I realised what I’d published. My tell-all in the hands of anyone willing to listen, a glorified tabloid story, I don’t know. I’m not nearly over-dramatic enough to say that the thought of people reading it killed me, but it bred nausea beneath my cheeks, into my chest and I choked on the Chinese whispers that got back to me.
Shit like somebody else had written it, that I’d never lived it, that I’d made it all up.
You might want to stop reading if that’s your rumour of choice. Keep your grand delusions. I wish I could keep mine.
I wrote it.
I didn’t make it up.
You give more credit than what’s due. I’m not that creative.
I haven’t addressed the question. I’m sorry, my tongue (fingers), they get away from me sometimes.
Did the success of ‘Grace’ surprise you?
No.
What did surprise me was how many people asked me ‘what now’? ‘What next?’ People wanted more, and isn’t that a trait America has in spades? More, bigger, better, richer, hotter, just, just more and I never have an answer that satisfies. People want the in-betweens that I could never tell them, the details I could never remember. I have to keep some things to myself.
The other day a woman told me the ending didn’t satisfy her. What do I say to that?
She asked me about Catherine’s childhood, my mother’s death, my life with Ryan, Loretta, Jon.
And I said, “yeah, what about it?”
What about them?
These people are characters to the men I sign autographs for, ideas to the women and it’s strange to come home at the end of the day, to the heroes of my novel, to have unintentionally thrust the spotlight on people who never asked for it. To anyone I mentioned at all in my book; Audrey, Monique, Pete, Loretta, Ryan.
I’m sorry.
You deserved better than what I wrote.
You all did.
Maybe I need another question.
What is the most asked about element of the novel? Character or discourse?
Fuck. I sort of answered this already.
People ask me how accurate ‘Grace’ is. I said it before; I’m not creative enough to write myself new friends, enemies, lovers. But just for the record, I’m a much bigger asshole in real life. I’ve never been able to stifle the part of me that wants people to see the assets rather than the flaws. The parts of me that are as smooth as the day I bought them, rather than the parts that crack at the corners, break in the middle. The parts where the warranties have expired and I’m left trying to glue the pieces back together.
That’s probably a flaw in itself, that inability to accept, to embrace, but I’m a product of a plastic-surgery generation, where if you’ve got the cash to slip underneath the table, you can buy yourself perfection. Iron out the wrinkles, wash away the freckles, be that cookie-cut human-being that Vogue tells you is perfect.
After all, this is a society that promotes bigger as better in anything but the waistline. That tells women how to look and men how to act. There’s nothing new, original, unique, not in this world. No one can totally escape the constraints of their childhood, of their genes, of the world as it builds itself around us, as it builds us, and I could never escape my mother or Catherine or Vegas, not in the ways that I wanted to.
And neither could Catherine. She’s become a centrefold for every social fuck-up to beat off too, every angry teen to aspire to, and that’s never what I intended when I wrote ‘Grace’.
I wanted people to see me for what I was, and Catherine was a part of that story, dominated it in ways that she shouldn’t have, and maybe that isn’t surprising at all. I’ve always been the least interesting part of my life, no matter how many awards line my shelves, or how many times E! plays my True Hollywood Story.
Do I visit her often? Not as much as I should, but I do. I try. Normally when I’m feeling nostalgic, when the pressure of being something, anything, eats at my nerve cells and I need to see what would happen if I just caved to it all. Catherine’s still the cover girl in the magazine of forfeiting life, of redundancy, of misplaced affections, and it’s easy to see her for what she is, now more than ever.
‘Grace’ wasn’t the exploration of self I’d desired; it was a eulogy for my sister, my mother.
I used to wonder, not long after Catherine died, that if I dug her up, would she be more or less than what she was when she was alive?
What I’m getting at is nothing about Catherine is something to want. Not in yourself and not in the people you love. By the time we buried her, she’d been dead for years, and that’s the way I remember her, above all else.
What about Ryan?
What about him?
I’m sorry, there’s only so much I can say. Parts of my heart are still tucked beneath my sleeve, instead of dripping out underneath it, and Ryan and my right now is one of those.
We’re happy.
I will always have more trouble giving away those moments that mend me, than I will the ones that break me.
What next?
I don’t know. I’ve always been an actor, first and foremost, and to dismiss that part of my life is to commend the writer in me that doesn’t deserve it.
I didn’t write ‘Grace’, I threw it up. Held my hands to my mouth and let it dribble through my fingers, print itself on the paper, and to everyone who wants me to continue it, I’m sorry. ‘Grace’, she exhausted me, broke me in ways I don’t think I will ever understand and she’s earned her place on the best-seller’s shelf, but she hasn’t begged for a sequel, doesn’t still nag at me in the evenings, pull at my pant legs. She was a lover that I let go, a drug that I recovered from, and for the year it took me to write her, she was an addiction, a necessity, but she’s not anymore and I’m glad.
She’s a confession, and the world played her, my jury, my priest, my audience.
And now she’s muttered her finishing whispers, taken her grand finale bow.
That’s all she wrote.
I’m done.
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