Roland
ROLAND
“ L et’s talk about Life or Death ,” Adam prompts me.
I was expecting him to open our first formal interview on a different note. Doesn’t he want to hear about my childhood? Now that we’ve made ourselves comfortable in my study, him scribbling away at his Moleskine in the burgundy easy chair, me inside the record player speakers, we could really dig into my life story.
I could tell him about going to Hobby Lobby with Mama to get decorations for the lackluster polyester costumes the school’s theater department provided. We bought striped suspenders for George Gibbs, a pin for Tony Kirby’s lapel, and gold lamé for the hem of Romeo’s cape. She spent long afternoons rehearsing with me under the gazebo at Central City Park so that we didn’t disturb patients at my dad’s home practice. She didn’t want me shouting, “Pop! I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” in an echoey old house with thin walls, not with Dad’s office right off the entryway.
“Shouldn’t we start at the beginning?” I ask Adam. “Have me tell you about being a Georgia boy with a big dream and a dirty secret? That’s how I’d like the book to open.”
We should probably write about those early gay feelings: the crush I had on my childhood friend Steven, the heartbreak of his mom saying I couldn’t sleep over anymore, not because I had done anything wrong, but because we were spending “too much time together.” That phrase—“too much”—was how I understood my difference before I ever had access to a word like “gay.” There was something excessive about me. Something only a mother could love, apparently. My dad, a well-off doctor in a blue-collar town, was already painfully self-conscious about his own masculinity, and I didn’t make his chest seem any hairier.
But Adam shrugs it off. “Respectfully, Roland,” he says, “every celebrity memoir begins with all of that boring childhood stuff—‘my dad was a roofer, my mom was a drunk, my brother picked on me’—and it’s never very interesting. It’s not that it’s not important; it’s just not very good. Everybody’s got parents, not everybody has been on TV. So, tell me about Life or Death first. Any interesting stories?”
Does he understand what we’re doing here? I have one last chance to put my story in my own words. I want people to finally know me. I didn’t fly him out here to preserve the kind of cheap showbiz anecdotes I’d share on The Tonight Show . For the world to understand who I am, we have to share where I came from; no one needs to hear about a soapy hospital drama I barely remember doing anyway.
“You want to start the book with Life or Death ?”
“Maybe not there, but I’m looking for a hook in the middle of your life. I think the book should open in medias res.”
“In medias res?” I ask. Just because he dresses like a grad student doesn’t mean he has to talk like one.
“It’s a Latin term,” he says, and if I still had eyes, I would roll them. “It means ‘in the midst of things.’ Basically, you start the story in the middle. We show you at a hinge point and then rewind to reveal how you got there.”
“So, it’s like the record-scratch moment at the start of a movie,” I clarify. “When the voice-over kicks in: ‘You’re probably wondering how I got here …’ Isn’t that gimmicky?”
“Just humor me,” Adam says. “We’ll talk about what you want to talk about later.”
It’s only been a day since I had my accountant wire over the money, and Adam has already spent it on a spine. I almost have to admire it. But I’m not going to accept “just because.” I hired him to execute my vision.
“I’m trying to figure out your logic,” I tell him. “We’ve got limited time here. I want to be sure you get the important stuff. Can’t you just cobble together a Life or Death chapter from the interviews I’ve already given in the press?”
I knew Adam was talented, but I wasn’t expecting him to be this stubborn. He’s here to translate what I say into pretty sentences, not to be the architect of my story.
“Sometimes unexpected things might be important,” Adam says, laying his pen down in the fold of his notebook. “The middle of a story is where all the good stuff happens.”
“Well, I can assure you that Life or Death doesn’t matter.”
Adam lets out an exasperated laugh. He’s as frustrated by the impasse as I am. “When was the last time you wrote a memoir, Roland?” he says, gallingly.
“I’ve been a bit busy, Adam. You know, just acting in some of the biggest movies ever made . What have you been up to?”
I think I’m just parrying, giving back as good as I get, but I notice the corners of his mouth curling down at my question. Perhaps I hit a nerve. The years since his debut have clearly been unkind to him. But if he is hurt, he tries to disguise it with a sip of water, only to have a little bit dribble down his chin. He dabs at it with his shirt collar.
“Yes, acting,” he says, setting his glass back down on its coaster. “That’s what I want to talk about. Life or Death . Tell me something about it. Anything.”
Of all the moments in my storied career to choose from, he picked my least favorite. But if it will shut him up, we can get this out of the way.
“ Life or Death wasn’t acting,” I tell him. “I just had to look hot in scrubs. Hospital dramas are mind-numbing slop for idiots.”
Adam leans forward in his chair, ready to make a mile out of the inch I gave him. “America didn’t think so. It was the biggest thing on TV for years. Number one in its time slot. You won a bunch of Emmys for it.”
I’ve been trying to gauge how familiar he is with my work. He at least appears to know the top lines: my breakout role in Life or Death , then a bunch of general audience box office hits, and finally Crash Street , the franchise that paid for this house and everything in it. Over breakfast this morning—a protein bar he found in the cupboard—he mentioned a lot of my movies from the late nineties and aughts. I only heard some of what he was saying, because even a few bites of flavorless whey were apparently enough to send me off into one of those rapturous reveries. I do remember him noting that his favorite movie of mine is that Grisham knockoff where I was the lawyer for the woman convicted of murdering her husband— First Degree , I think it was called—but it’s obvious his knowledge of my most recent work is thin at best. I suppose I wasn’t expecting an overeducated gay guy to be a Crash fan. That works in my favor, anyway. The less we say about Crash the better. The whole point of this exercise is so people don’t remember me as some action-movie sellout. Recency bias is almost impossible to overcome in this business. This book needs to cement me as a layered and complex figure, not the cardboard cutout they saw at the multiplex.
“What can I tell you about Life or Death ?” I muse aloud. “That show took such cheap shortcuts to make the viewers cry. If the audience liked a character, we gave them cancer. If we cast a cute kid? Cancer. A couple gets married? Double cancer! I built my career off it, but do I respect the people who watched it? Absolutely not.”
“And we can print that in your memoir?” Adam asks, clearly holding back laughter. “I can write, ‘ Life or Death was a dumb show for dumb people …’?”
“ I can say whatever I want about Life or Death ,” I tell him, trying to reinforce the fact that this is my project, not his. “The whole experience was about as memorable as waiting tables. I showed up, hit my mark, and said my lines. Occasionally, for a laugh, I’d read all the fan letters women sent me. Talk about barking up the wrong tree.”
If I hadn’t realized I was gay during college, my time on Life or Death made it clear: Every lovelorn lady in America wanted to marry the beautiful young Dr. Richards. They mailed me unhinged messages on perfumed stationery, a few pairs of underwear, and once, a wedding ring. The underwear, I threw out. The ring, I sent back. The attention meant nothing to me; I cared more about the veiled come-ons from men on set.
“I’m just surprised you think so little of Life or Death ,” Adam says, jotting something down in his notebook. “I watched it after school with my mom sometimes. You looked hot in scrubs, for sure, but you were also really good in it. It was clear even then your star power was too big for TV.”
“Thank you.”
Finally, he manages to say something kind. I’ve got a lot of money stockpiled, but at a rate of one compliment every $50,000, even I would go bankrupt. Though I suppose he’s a welcome change from all the fawning entertainment reporters at press junkets who spend their precious few minutes gushing about how much they love me. I just want Adam to start asking me questions I actually care about.
“Do you really think the Crash Street movies were more sophisticated, though?” he continues. “Aren’t they as lowest common denominator as a hospital drama, just in a different way?”
Is he trying to play good cop and bad cop all by himself? I don’t want to focus on Crash Street , far from it, but he’s hit one of my pet peeves. I wish I could erase them from my résumé, but they aren’t totally vacuous. They were way more dramatically compelling than all that emergency room nonsense. Are the Crash movies big and loud and stupid? Yes, of course. But they’ve made billions of dollars for a reason.
“They’re not Linklater films,” I tell him. “But you can’t deny Crash Street means something to people. At its heart, it’s a father-son story.”
“A father-son story between … Tad and Crag Dynamite?” Adam asks, with a pointed pause.
“Look, I don’t want to talk about Crash Street ! This book isn’t about Crash Street ! You’re the one who brought it up.”
Adam pauses to write something else in his notebook and I’m starting to feel more psychoanalyzed than interviewed. Salt Lake City Sodomite was so moving, but I’m wondering if he really has the chops for this. His strategy, if he has one, is all over the place, hopping from subject to subject, poking and prodding seemingly at random. Was I wrong to hire him? Should I have had Matt send me some hack who would just take the money and write down what I dictate?
“What do you want to talk about?” Adam says, as he finishes scribbling his cryptic note.
We could start over and talk about “all of that boring childhood stuff,” as Adam phrased it. But I’m not in the mood anymore. I’d rather he just eat something so that I can have another ecstatic dream and forget this conversation ever happened. We’ll have to order out. Another protein bar isn’t going to cut it.
“Isn’t it almost lunchtime?” I ask him.