Happiness Is For Idiots

It was my mother's mantra in the house of horrors where she remorselessly tortured three siblings until each was old enough to beat it the hell out of there. Happiness is for idiots. She was like a woodpecker perched on one's ear tapping away at one's head. "Only idiots are happy" was the single variant of the theme. If that woman's corpse ever undergoes autopsy (she's currently approaching 101), the doctor will discover a venom sack instead of a heart. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," you say? All I can say in return is that you weren't there when missiles were airborne and the weapon du jour was whatever object was closest to hand. It wasn't easy, folks. It was not easy. It's taken a lifetime.

Normally, when I wake up in the morning I have two first thoughts 1). Oh, good, I'm still alive, and 2). Coffee! One morning (already many decades into my life) I woke up to something new, a feeling  which was like the feeling I imagine Gatsby might  have had while he was under the summer sun in that elegant swimming pool, dozing on his rubber raft. The instant before the bullet entered Gatsby's brain, that very instant for him could well have been sublime, his last thought, one without anger or anguish, might well have been of Daisy's adoring face. Lenny, from Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", suits this trope as well. The very instant Lenny is awash in the fantasy of the farm they will someday have, of the rabbits he will raise, that very instant George puts a bullet in the back of his dear friend's head. Lenny dies happy. George will never be. Yet, his act is an act of love. And the act that eventually gets Gatsby killed is also an act of love. Anyone see a lesson somewhere in this?

History is needed here: for most of my writing life I credited my anger for my success. The best work, I believed, came from heartfelt pain and a core of righteous fury fueling my hero's and heroine's journeys as they pummeled their way to ultimate victory. Revenge! "How sweet it is" as Jacky Gleason used to say when threatening to put Alice on the moon. Of course, he never did nor ever would. We wouldn't have watched otherwise. Come on. What is the lesson here, and how did I miss it for so long?

More history: I was fortunate enough to sell my first film script before I'd ever set foot in Hollywood, a script titled, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney". It brought with it a three picture deal at Universal. My radar tells me that it would not work the same way these days, probably, would not work at all, period. I'd never been to film school, had never taken a course in screenwriting, improvised the form, balked at watching the Academy Awards, was only minimally taken with the medium unlike most of my peers, and told a love story set in a coal mining town in West Virginia in the 20's. Try and sell that one today. You'd get laughed out of somebody's office is my guess, or tossed out. It took me a long time to realize how fortunate I'd been. I was unconscious until friends brought it to my attention. Hard to believe the naivete, right? I have my lapses. Have had.

I was still living in New York working at becoming a paid playwright (as if) when the phone rang and a secretary told me that Jennings Lang was coming to New York and wanted to meet with me (We'd never yet spoken) at Universal on Park Avenue. All I knew about the man was that he bought my script, signed me up, and set me free of my day job. A meeting? Sure, right there.

Yes, I was impressed. The halls and offices were so thickly carpeted that all the sound was muffled. There were no footfalls. There was a hush over everything. It had the feel of a sanctum in which important decisions were made but sedately and out of sight of commoners. You heard nothing. Contrast this with the last time I was in a "major office" in Beverly Hills waiting for a meeting to begin. Clickety click. Clickety click. High heels on marble. Nice. Sexy. But not reassuring at all.

OK. So, my meeting with Jennings Lang. It was reassuring (I said I was naive.). Jennings was respectful  and  impressive, so I gradually gained the confidence to open my mouth. We'd gotten to talking about the action elements in my script, and I patted myself on the back for writing such riveting sequences. The future would be full of them. No doubt. Bread and butter. Yo! "Hold on a minute," interrupted Jennings, "I didn't buy your script for the action. I bought it for the love story." The love story! Geez! The mystery of my life and career is why it took me so long to arrive at the truth. In geological time it seems as if it only just happened.

But that morning I'm talking about, the one that began all this, that morning I woke up and I was happy. How did I know, not being used to such a thing, that this was happiness? I didn't at first, but, since I believe in evolution, I knew something was different, yet  it felt pretty good, and what I really wanted was to get to my desk  in the mountains and write. I didn't have to fight it. There was little struggle. I thought of a book, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".  A momentary spasm. Happiness? I actually began to feel that I was finally where I was supposed to be, and I did not want to be anywhere else. "I am Writer; Hear me roar!" It's about goddamn time, bub! You do what you do because it is what you do, and it's gotta get done. You've jettisoned the gumption trap, amigo. Now, get with it. Zen and the art, or, as the Marines say, "Just do it". It doesn't need to come from solely a place of anger. It can come from someplace softer. It can come from love, too. Both the love and the anger come from the same deep well anyway.

My current fervent hope is that my Ivy League friends don't heave when they read this.