Chapter Thirty Eight
Linda had no knowledge of show business whatsoever. She didn't follow or pay attention to it. She went to movies and watched some TV but her mind and priorities were elsewhere.
For instance, she didn't know who Roger Moore was. Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Whoopi Goldberg and Meryl Streep could just as easily be partners in a law firm as far as she was concerned.
Nor did she understand acting. To her, what she saw on the screen was real. There was no trickery...she acknowledged special effects...but the acting wasn't acting...it was reality.
She had a major problem with my first scene in Bartel’s Not For Publication.
My first line was "Will you quit it, Barbara? We'll be leaving in about 5 minutes."
While preparing my character I mentioned the script didn't give me any idea what Barbara was doing to irritate me.
I mused she might be kissing my ear or neck or something and Linda lit up: "I don't want anyone kissing you in that movie!"
"I don't know if she's kissing me or not. I was just trying to figure out what could be happening and that's one of the possibilities. And anyway, I have to do what the director wants. That's why he hired me", I explained.
"I don't care. I don't want you kissing or anyone kissing you", she said dead seriously.
This was a big deal to her and she didn't have the foggiest clue as to what an actor might be called on to do for his craft.
I tried my best to explain it wasn't really a love kiss, it was an acting kiss and that it didn't mean anything at all. It was a part of the movie.
She wasn't having any of it. The problem was never resolved but she was highly relieved when I told her there had been no kissing; that, in fact, the actress had simply been nagging me to leave.
That was an indication that, over time, this relationship might be in trouble.
Lesson: Never do porno.
There was another problem we had as well. I wasn't pulling my own weight in the income department. We'd discussed this situation over and over again in the beginning of our relationship and she'd been aware of, and agreed, the monetary input from my side wouldn't be as regular as hers since I didn't earn money on a weekly or monthly basis.
My income came in spurts. I might have $2,000 outstanding for work performed but it might come in $100 at a time over a period of several weeks, or months even.
In the end we amicably agreed to move apart but keep the relationship alive. We'd been living outside Houston in Clear Lake, about a mile from NASA's Houston Space Center...as in "Houston, we have a problem”.
I found a place in town closer to the recording studios and my agents' offices but it was 27 miles from Clear Lake, 45 minutes by freeway.
When we’d started dating I told her the only rule I really had was “don't betray me”.
If it happens all bets are off. I promised I'd be true to her and expected the same.
On New Year's Eve, 1984 Linda and I celebrated with a dinner theatre production of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
At midnight we kissed and danced and blew noisemakers and celebrated the arrival of another year.
Later, back at my place and after having greeted the New Year in a more supine way; I don’t know why, but I casually asked her, "Have you ever been to bed with anyone else besides me since we've been going together?"
It just came out as if someone pushed a button that makes you say those words aloud.
After a pause came, "I always hoped you'd never ask me that"
I just looked at her.
I was speechless. Stunned.
She explained she'd met a man in San Francisco at one of the many seminars she attended at IBM's expense.
In so much as I was allowed to know, her job involved writing software programs for the space shuttles of the next decade.
She went to various programming seminars around the country to keep up with the latest developments in "artificial intelligence". She was being groomed by IBM.
More precisely, she was going to be one of IBM's experts on "expert systems".
But she could tell me about this man in San Francisco. She said she was sorry she'd gone with him but "he just loved sex so much. It just happened".
Now, sexually, Linda is an interesting being. She has the ability to get intensely lubricated, a trait I found to be an extreme turn on.
When we first started dating she drank a lot of black russians: a woman after my own heart. Evidently when she was drunk she didn't care about her elevated moisture. But sober it bothered her no end; and, at the most intimate of moments, without warning, she would get out of bed, go into the bathroom and dry herself out!
Then she would return and complain that it hurt when I entered her, which she always encouraged me to do.
She would hear none of my pleas to leave herself wet for me and yet continued to complain.
I asked her if she dried herself out for her West Coast lover and she said it didn't matter with him, she wasn't going to see him after that anyway.
The meaning of that statement completely escaped me.
The next morning she returned to Clear Lake and I returned to celibacy.
We tried to patch it up a couple of times but it never took.
Lesson: At least always break up after sex.
Houston is a big city, the largest in Texas, fourth in the States, but it never lost sight of its roots.
Dallas, on the other hand, never wanted to acknowledge its roots.
There's plenty bullshit in Texas. The difference is Dallas believes its own bullshit while Houston admits it's bullshitting you and everyone has a good laugh.
Dallas thinks it's a sophisticated, enlightened city...yet it imports all its sophistication and enlightenment. It sets it somewhere for all to see and says "See here how sophisticated we are? Look at this here big enlightened looking thing. Aint' it somethin'?"
Houston says, "Watch where you're steppin' neighbor. Gotchure boots on?"
I was really comfortable there, and now my career was beginning to seem more like an actual career: I was working fairly constantly. I wasn't making the money I thought I was capable of but I was earning it considerably more regularly than I had during the previous two years in Dallas.
I found it ironic I’d spent two years in Dallas trying to get work and then, shortly after moving to Houston, was called back up to work in Bartel’s film.
I was being booked to voice more and more commercials and to narrate or appear in industrial films. I was also auditioning for more television shows and feature films.
My role in Not For Publication led to a part in The Streets of America, the story of Covenant House --the shelter for teenagers run by the Catholics.
At the time the film was being cast, the scandal of the first black Miss America Vanessa Williams' posing nude in fetish attire with another woman had been the talk of the land, and it led to her resignation of the title and the launching of her lucrative career in showbusiness.
Each actor being considered for roles in the film were asked, "Is there anything in your past which might embarrass the Catholic Church?"
I said no. If I wasn’t embarrassed, they shouldn’t be.
The film was produced by Gannett Communications (USA Today, billboards, etc.) and I played a hardened but sympathetic reporter who'd seen what happens to kids on the streets.
As is often the case, there was turmoil in the hierarchy of the Covenant's management and the film never saw the light of day. It may have run on an obscure cable channel somewhere; but I never saw any residuals for my work, so I assume it never did.
While I was in Austin I had shot a film called Fast Money about marijuana dealing in Texas. My character used his pants store as a front for dealing the weed.
At the time I was also playing Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at the Gaslight Theatre. The theatre was one of several semi¬-professional houses in Austin; admirably run by one Michelle Jorochy.
Over several years, he managed to put on hit after critical hit while running the theater at a definite loss.
He pulled the audiences and the critical acclaim, but he had an extremely high overhead due to his downtown location.
Now, it was a Saturday, and we'd spent most of the day shooting an interior scene: a meeting with my supplier to iron out some details and discuss a shipment. We got that in the can and I knocked off to make an 8 o'clock curtain. After the show a driver was there to hustle me back to the set to shoot another meeting around the pool where I get to try the weed, supposedly.
The shoot lasted until around three in the morning and when we were wrapped, Judy, the girl I'd been dating for a few weeks, and I, went back to my place to sleep and...
The next day she asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t quite understand her and she asked “If you could do any show on TV what would you like to do?”
For some reason I said “Dallas”. Looking back I think I wanted to show the city I’d grown up in and had so much trouble finding work in, that I was indeed “good enough”.
She was a school teacher. I’d had serious feelings for her for awhile but we were never much more than friends.
Two years later she popped up in the crowd watching the filming on the "Dallas" set. She smiled at me but didn't speak.
I didn't recognize her right away but I told her she looked like a woman I once knew in Austin.
The director called me back to the scene and Judy disappeared into the Dallas summer afternoon.
Lesson: Your friends might help you in ways you’ll never know.
Of all the places I lived in Texas I think Austin was the most nourishing for my soul and Houston was the most nourishing for my career. I seemed to just take off in both places. I was in the recording studios three and four times a week. I was getting called for more Film and TV auditions.
The area was becoming very production-friendly to companies wishing to come in and film their projects there.
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