Key Grip: A Memoir of Endless Consequences: A Memoir of Endless Consequences – Award-Winning Essays: A Journey Through Film, Fathers, and Self-Discovery - Softcover

Smith, Dustin Beall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 054705369X ISBN 13: 9780547053691

Verlag: Mariner Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A key grip, Dustin Beall Smith explains in this award-winning memoir, is the person on a film set who supervises the rigging of lights, set wall construction, dolly shots, stunt preparation, and more. Smith worked in the film industry throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. For him, “fame by association”—with iconic stars including Sly Stallone, Susan Sarandon, and Robert De Niro—was just one of the seductive drugs fueling his high-octane days on the set.

The intertwined stories in Key Grip resurrect memories of how his father’s impossibly ordered life became a goad for Smith’s own reckless journey to manhood. Its trajectory includes a stint as a pioneering sport-parachuting instructor in the late 1950s—a young man’s dream job that taught Smith how to hide sheer animal fear behind male bravado. Much later, as a committed writer and unredeemed seeker in his fifties, Smith lights out cross-country for what turns out to be a brave, existentially failed—and very funny—attempt at a Lakota vision quest.

Beautifully told, reminiscent of both Robert Bly and Ian Frazier, Key Grip is a fascinating record of the fault lines of one man’s life.

Dustin Beall Smith’s Key Grip won the 2007 Bakeless Prize for nonfiction, awarded by the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and judged by Terry Tempest Williams. Smith has lived in New York City for over forty years and teaches writing at Gettysburg College.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dustin Beall Smith’s Key Grip won the 2007 Bakeless Prize for nonfiction, awarded by the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and judged by Terry Tempest Williams. Smith teaches at Gettysburg College and lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Starting at the Bottom Again

In 1996, as I neared the end of my time in the film business, I began to notice
an unusual preponderance of twenty-somethings running around movie sets,
barking "Quiet!" and "Rolling!" and "Freeze!" the way prison guards yell at
convicts during a lockdown. As they positioned themselves for a scramble up
what they obviously had been taught was some kind of industry pyramid, I
could detect nothing in their expressions that admitted to ignorance or
suggested curiosity. This made me, at age fifty-six, with experience to share
and things to teach, feel invisible.
I was ready for something new.
One day, on the set of a movie called Cop Land, I encountered a
fellow whom I will call here "Arturo Has No Past." Arturo's features and skin
color suggested he might be Filipino; he wore his shiny black hair in two
shoulder-length braids. He worked as a loader in the camera department. I
had noticed him scurrying on and off the set, lugging lens cases, and
delivering fresh film magazines as needed. He was a union member in his
midthirties, but he behaved like an intern — moving too fast in tight spaces
and garnering more attention with his overly earnest behavior than his
position on the pyramid warranted.
I first spoke to Arturo outside the sheriff's office set, where we had
spent the whole of that August morning filming a heated scene between
Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone. I was feeling a little deranged, having
been caged for six hours in a ten-by-ten-foot office with two megastars who
were consciously cultivating their rhinoceros-like personas. The stars'
combined coterie of makeup artists, hairdressers, wardrobe specialists,
bodyguards, and sycophantic studio executives had been sucking up most of
the available oxygen. I had been fantasizing about shotgunning Sly Stallone
and simply running out the door into some new future. The last thing I wanted
to see, when I stepped outside for a bottle of water, was Arturo sitting on the
plastic ice chest, chatting up a pretty extra.
"Get up," I said, jerking my thumb at him. Arturo leapt to his feet,
opened the cooler, and grabbed an Evian. He uncapped it and offered me the
bottle.
"Hoka hey," he said.
Having recently read about the famous Sioux warrior Crazy Horse,
I recognized this to be a Native American greeting.
"Hoka hey," I said to Arturo, raising the bottle of Evian in
salutation.
It is perhaps proof of my hunger for something new that I stood
there in the shade, contentedly drinking water with pigtailed Arturo, whom I
figured I had misjudged and now took to be a Lakota Indian (which would
explain, I thought, his undisguised earnestness, if not his Filipino features
and his Italian first name). I listened while Arturo entertained the pretty extra
with stories of skydiving. By his own account he had made about 150 free-fall
jumps. After describing the exhilaration of a long free fall, he turned to me
and suggested, somewhat patronizingly, that maybe I would like to try
jumping. I told him that I had already made well over six hundred jumps back
in the early 1960s, before going to college. "I used to teach the sport, back in
the day," I said, winking at the pretty extra.
Arturo had pretended not to be impressed. But over the course of
a few days, my skydiving credentials kept us talking and eventually gave me
an opening to pump him for information about his people.
On days when I gave Arturo a ride from our New Jersey location
back into the city, where we both lived, I would bug him to tell me about
Lakota rituals and life on the reservation. Arturo's answers, always slightly
mysterious and tinged with an inexplicable reticence, intrigued the hell out of
me. He was not entirely forthcoming about his Native identity, as if somehow
the information he held so close to his chest was meant only for privileged
ears. I was a sucker for such innuendo — anything to relieve the stifling
boredom of a movie set. But I also had a genuine curiosity about the Lakota
people, and I soon learned that Arturo's father was a medicine man on the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and his grandmother was a
medicine woman.
I began to see an opening into a new world, but I did not yet know
what kind of opening and what kind of new world.
One evening, as we approached the inbound tollbooths on the
George Washington Bridge, Arturo showed me the still-raw-looking scars on
his pectoral muscles, where his pierced flesh had ripped as he broke free
from the tree of life during a ceremonial sun dance presided over by his
father. He talked of completing a prayer ritual called hanblecheya, which
translates as "crying for a dream" and is popularly known as a vision quest.
The ritual, he explained, involved being taken "up the hill" by his medicine
man father and being made to sit alone on a blanket in the wilderness for four
days and nights, without food or water. I had read about that practice in
Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt, years ago. But that was back in the
mid-1970s, when I was dabbling in spiritual things like pyramids, pendulums,
crystals, and the writings of Carlos Castaneda and Emanuel Swedenborg. I
had forgotten all about hanblecheya, but the ritual snapped back at me now
with a new meaning. Suddenly it seemed quite compelling, even within reach.
"That's what I want to do," I told Arturo. "I want to go on a
hanblecheya."
"Then you will," he said.
"I want to meet your father," I said. "I want him to take me up the
hill."
"That can be arranged," said Arturo.
"When?" I asked.
"When it's time." Arturo folded his arms across his chest and shut
his eyes, managing to mimic the iconic stubbornness of a cigar-store Indian
and avoid paying the bridge toll at the same time.

Cop Land wrapped in October. Although Arturo and I lived two blocks from
each other in Manhattan and had figured out we even frequented the same
corner restaurant on Broadway, I did not see or talk to him again for months.
The new year came. I took work on a morose TV series called New York
Undercover. During location filming in back alleys, jail cells, and dingy piano
bars, I kept fantasizing about being led up the hill by Arturo's wise old
medicine-man father. I envisioned him saying prayers over me and leaving me
to sit on a blanket in a treeless area that looked like the high desert in
California. I pictured visitations by coyotes, mountain lions, and snakes, and
wondered if they would speak to me, as I had heard that animal spirits speak
to seekers of wisdom. While it all seemed slightly ridiculous, I found myself
returning to the imagined scene again and again, the way other people might
daydream about a vacation at the golf course in Augusta. I felt drawn to it
magnetically, as if I were putting myself in the way of a fast-approaching
event that was meant to be.
By March, however, the fantasy had begun to fade from repeated
exposure.
In early April, I ran into Arturo at the post office on 83rd
Street. "Hoka hey," I said. "When am I going up the hill?"
"Never ask me that again," he said. "Never. If it's meant to be, it
will be." He made a sign with his right hand that seemed ridiculously imitative
of the "How!" gesture in old Hollywood westerns. Then he turned and walked
away. Even as a child I had found that gesture off-putting and wooden. I
began to wonder about Arturo.
When the month of May went by without a word from him, I wrote
him off as a charlatan and made tentative plans to take a July vacation in
Mexico with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mariner Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 054705369X
• ISBN 13: 9780547053691
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: HarperCollins Publishers, Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland