Epilogue
In the end, Kai and I both squeak out nominations for Independent Spirit Awards, but we get shut out of the big prizes, not least because we don’t play the game.
Ellen is our publicist by then, not the studio’s anymore, and she revels in telling the studio, No.
No, they meant it when they said no campaign.
Andy Warhol Never Gets Old keeps chugging along, eventually making over one hundred million in global box office.
The trades call it the most profitable movie of the year, and even though most of that profit goes to the producers and Matthew, a bit of it trickles down to us, enough that with the Star Catcher money Mom didn’t spend, I can get a little bungalow in West Hollywood.
Matthew doesn’t win many awards, but he gets nominated for all of them.
On one late-night show after his Oscar nod, he says, “I always wanted to make stuff that people would actually watch, but it turns out you can make films people watch and films where nothing blows up.” He is always careful to extend credit to us, to say what geniuses we are, and even once mentions how much we sacrificed in the process, without acknowledging who made us the sacrifice.
In Vancouver, I start going to therapy and eventually Kai and I do some therapy together.
In one of our first sessions, Kai cries while telling me all about the stuff that actually happened with him and the teacher and the testimony he had to give, and he throws up in the middle of it, and the therapist says, “You don’t have to say anything that makes you feel unsafe,” and Kai says, “You don’t understand.
There’s no going back. You don’t get to feel safe again. ”
And that’s the truth of being an adult, I guess, insofar as we are adults.
We’ve both had the kind of childhood where you learn too soon that you aren’t safe, that you never were, that the people tasked with protecting you can’t, or won’t, because they want something more from you than mere love, which is all children really have to offer.
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I start clashing with Brian Arawas almost the moment we begin rehearsing—he wants an Agrippah vastly more dismissive of Gavinth than I think the script calls for—but I make his movie anyway, because that’s the job, and in spite of it all, I enjoy the job.
Acting against Kai is thrilling, although we are now part of a bigger cast, a proper ensemble, which dilutes the experience a little bit.
There is quite a lot of acting in front of a green screen, with markers attached to our faces to trace facial expressions so that we can be CGI’ed into other worlds, and to some extent other bodies.
I like the work, though. I always like to work.
It’s still too much of how I measure my worth, but at least now I know that when I conflate my career with my self, I’m doing both a disservice.
Then comes March of 2020, and the movie gets shut down. The world changes, and Hollywood changes.
When they send us home from the movie, Kai and I initially stay in my little bungalow, but we get cabin fever, so we drive halfway across the country and rent a place in Indianapolis, just a few blocks away from his parents.
The house backs up to a paved trail, so we can run every morning together and be outside, and it’s close to this huge cemetery called Crown Hill, where you can walk for miles with plenty of social distance.
Some mornings while I drink my coffee, deer show up in our backyard.
I sort of fall in love with Indianapolis despite myself.
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I like Kai’s parents a lot—more than he does, really—and they love me, too.
His mother starts calling me her third kid, and I don’t mind it.
By the time the movie starts up again with daily Covid tests, I’m sad to leave Indianapolis, but in the end home is as much who you’re with as where you are, and I’m with him.
On our Andromeda junket, we stick together. Kai politely says, “Next question” whenever asked about his abuse, and I answer questions about my mom with a boilerplate that’s true, but not especially intimate. The junket is even longer than the Warhol one—three continents—but we survive it.
That’s the wonder of it all. You survive. It’s a dirty lie that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or that everything happens for a reason, but this much is true: You survive.
The miracle of love is that Kai loved the Juniper he met in that Pittsburgh hotel, and he also loves this me.
The miracle of love is that yes, I am here and you are there, but the door is ajar.
We get through that door with empathy, with imagining, with acting.
We play our way through it with music and dance and art.
We break down the door with love. We love others until they can love themselves, until we can love ourselves.
And all along the way, the future remains yours, ineluctably and irrevocably.
You can cling to that future, as long as you need to, until with work and with time the future becomes present and the present past. You survive, and you survive, until one day, you survived.