I've been watching a video I made yesterday, a compilation of film footage and still photos, highlights of my career as a showman. I should say sadistic lunatic. A truly incredible list of crimes. I threw pies in people's faces, dumped buckets of paint on their heads, made them slip and fall, set them on fire, had a dwarf use a slingshot to shoot a marble at a showgirl's butt on stage. I forced a perfectly respectable, capable cinematographer to use a single bare lightbulb in a ceiling fixture. I bellowed at a dignified senior producer in a swish West End restaurant and demanded a four man crew, two cameras instead of one, and when I got to the concert, I bullied and berated the group's manager to let my people walk on stage with the headliner. I've told people to their faces that they had no talent, give it up, don't even try. The number and depth of my egregious financial sins were too many to count or weigh.
I've been incredibly cruel to women in intimate circumstances, demanded pregnancy, threw away their innocence and dignity, sent them through studio gates to deliver a screenplay, dress for maximum pleasure, watch me flirt with another chick.
Some of my stunts were preposterously vain, challenging top executives who had the power to crush me. I routinely manipulated friends and colleagues, family members, decent folks who admired me and wished me success. I think I drove my father insane with distress and shame. I was snotty with a Federal district judge and forced his hand two or three times. I told a distinguished, well known philosopher that he was full of shit in front of other guests on my patio. "I've written twenty-two books!" he bellowed in rage. I laughed him.
Worse, much worse -- I think that some hundreds of people, maybe thousands were moved by ideas that I promulgated. I put my hand on the lever of history. No sense of humility.
I hope and trust that I'm nearing the end of life, alone and shunned for ample cause, which is more or less fair and square. You know what I learned? I'm a fucking idiot, not to be trusted with a bag of chocolate donuts and cheese and onion sandwiches. No sense of restraint. We get exactly what we deserve in the bathroom at 4 o'clock in the morning.
OMFG, I just remembered! -- in a 1982 filmed comedy sketch, I had a bad tempered dinner patron at a fake restaurant berate a young black waiter, grab him by the necktie and shove his face in a bowl of cold noodle soup. "Okay, I'll heat it up right away, sir," he begged contritely with noodles hanging off his fake mustache. The title of the sketch was Winning Through Viciousness. I didn't write it, but I staged it and directed it. The black kid did a brilliant job, and I was astounded, exclaimed to my cast and crew how brave an actor he was.
People always did as I asked, high and low, around the world. I've called doctors to come in the middle of the night to sew up an attempted suicide off the record, Russian bodyguards to assault a village at dawn. I persuaded traffic cops to let me go after chasing me for miles.
Jeez. What a long strange trip it's been, made a million mistakes, published a million words, took a million liberties in the name of art, the highest form of pleasure known to man. I faced killers and aristocrats and people who were eleven times smarter than I was, held my own, bent them to my purpose or told them to fuck off.
Why? -- because we live but once. I lived.
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