Beauty Parlor Bomber

by Jerry Stahl

Brooding actor Benicio del Toro packs his conversations like artist Joseph Cornell packed his little boxes, elevating digression to high art. But can the volatile thespian be packaged into the bad-boy star Hollywood so desperately wants? Leading roles in three major films this season might provide the answer...

Her wheelchair sporting "Jew Power" and "Shalom, Motherfucker!" decals, the one-legged blue-hair rolls up Beverly Boulevard with a gleam in her eye and what looks like a bamboo shiv waving heinously in her gnarled fist.

"I know who you are!" she shrieks, like some rest-home avenging angel. Outdoor patrons at the Authentic Cafe - among them yours truly and Benicio del Toro - let their javas hover mid-slurp as the she-demon on wheels approaches. We are, as it happens, in LA's Fairfax District, home to legions of feisty, septuagenarian Semites. But even here, where muumuu'd grandmas have been known to inflict walker wounds for the crime of cutting in front of them at the Canter's deli counter, the shrieking seniorette has stopped conversation and struck fear in the hearts of a dozen-and-a-half sidewalk diners.

Well, a dozen-and-a-half minus one, since Benicio, displaying the drop-dead cool that's rendered him Hepscat Supreme in everything from The Usual Suspects and The Way of the Gun to Traffic and Snatch has aimed his smoothest Island Lothario grin at the ranting amputee and waved her over.

Our Lady of the X-Rated Wheelchair careens closer, and del Toro leans in for the kill.

"I know who you are, too," he whispers in the unplaceably intriguing accent that's had film buffs claiming he was everything from Mexican to French to Basque with a sexy cleft palate. "You're the girl who told Brando to take a flying fuck in '52, right? You're the one who dances with Cary Grant at the Mocambo. You broke all their hearts, didn't you, baby? You made Sinatra weep!"

And suddenly, as if her nerve ends were swathed in honey, the wild-eyed Yiddish mama calms all the way down, blushes deeply, and reaches for the actor's hand. "How did you know," she giggles coquettishly, tilting her Medusa's head. "Are you one of my fans?"

"The biggest," booms Benicio in the full-frontal mumble of Usual Suspect Fred Fenster. "I flew in from Reno 'cause I knew you'd be coming by!"

By now, everyone senses it's safe to start chomping again, and our demented crone, as happy as a bride with blood on the bedsheets, puts down her shiv, which turns out to be - go figure - a death's-head back scratcher, and backs away to resume her wanton journey west on Beverly. The scene plays out like Kosher Fellini, and Senor del Toro shrugs it off with the elan of a man who has handled worse.

"I've been surrounded by madness my whole life,"he declares, deftly popping the business end of a red pepper into his gullet. "Take my grandfather. He came from a family of eleven, and they were all cops, and he was completely paranoid. No matter where we were - a bus, his living room, walking around - he was always telling you not to talk so loud. He thought they were listening..... He never said who, but they were out there, man. At night, too, wherever he slept he had tomove the bed away fromt he walls. So they couldn't get him. You'd make a noise after ten o'clock and BAM, he'd hit you in the head with a stick. He was insane, my father was insane, and after my mother died, when I was nine, my whole life got weird and insane. Madness don't bother me, man. Madness I know how to deal with."

As the actor speaks, his new girlfriend, now propped on her wheelchair in the middle of Beverly Boulevard, affixes a fake leg the size of a fire extinguisher to the stump of her thigh. It looks, for one kidney-clenching second, as though she may be wheeling her way back - no doubt to ask her beau to rumba. But at the last moment she veers south, toward a dumpster. Benicio blows her a kiss and smiles contentedly. It is, as you might, say, a del Toro moment.

Indeed. At this peculiar instant, our man's expression - those hooded, leonine eyes like twin slits over a smile as soft as an altar boy's - captures the peculiar bifurcation at the heart of the Benicio mystique. Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio up for three days and force-fed steroids, then morphed into Robert Mitchum. Each extreme - pretty-boy yin and badass yang - can be discerned in the graceful yet menacing figure slouched over his Santa Fe salad, mulling on art and life.

Styling lace-up black boots, sans socks, below fucked-up flared jeans and an original Crosby, Stills, and Nash tour shirt - purple with flying saucers sailing over minarets - the pride of Puerto Rico manages to be suave, hardcore, and earnest at the same time. Not that he gives a shit.

"You know, I love characters like that. People on the fringe,"he announces, before drifting intoan extended silence. BdT is a master of impromptu silence. He slips into himself as easily as another man reaches into his pocket for cigarettes. By way of luring him back, I state the obvious. "I imagine you've felt like an outsider yourself, moving from Puerto Rico to a small town in Pennsylvania...."

"Well, yeah, it was a bit of a culture shock," he replies, taking the bait. "Where I lived, in San Juan, there were ghettos on three sides and the ocean on the other. It was kind of like Times Square. In the '70s San Juan was cool, 'cause you had New Yorkers comin' down, bringing their attitude. Me and my friends used to sneak into strip clubs, you know, and they'd let us hang in the back. Those girls were nice, man. Sometimes they'd let you sit in their lap.

Here he breaks into a little half-smile, no doubt awash in memories of ten-year-old titty-bar visits.

"Before we moved, man, I was really into the Rolling Stones. So for me, coming to America was, like, a chance to see the Stones! They were on tour for Tattoo You, and I knew, somehow, that if I came here I'd get to see them. That was a big thing. Plus, I play a lot of basketball, and beina jock made it easier to fit in. I was a jock who listened to the Stones. And I was constantly in trouble.

"Even before I left Puerto Rico, I was just always doing crazy shit. Like one time, after school, I threw a smoke bomb into a beauty parlor. The fat lady who owned the place waddled out, and she was so mad she grabbed me by the shirt. I remember I had my dad's shirt no that day, and it just stretched, you know? So I'm standing in the middle of the street, and this lady's screaming at me, pulling on this big shirt, and a friend of mine is on the other side, and he's pulling me in the other direction, and finally, some slick guy drives by in a silver Cadillac and yells out the window, 'Lose the shirt!' And I think, 'Yeah!' So I just rip off my old man's shirt and run my ass home. 'Lose the shirt.' There's a lesson there, right?"

"No doubt," I mutter, reflecting on my own history of shirtless, near-death beauty-parlor adventures.

"Same thing in America," he confides. "Trouble all the fucking time. I went to this prep school, Mercersburg Academy, and my best friend was a kid named John Garrett. John was smart, but he was bad, man. He was descended from Pat Garrett, the guy who shot Billy the Kid. Then one day we found out that Pat shot Billy in the back. I mean, think about that, man. That is fucking wild."

It is. But what's even wilder is that we've been talking for hours - maybe weeks - when I realize that I haven't even asked the guy about acting yet. Jesus! I can feel that first trickle of celebscribe flop sweat on the back of my neck when yet another female, this one slim, young, beautiful, and two-legged, sidles up to our table. The interview has somehow moved back inside the restaurant, where Benicio, God bless him, has lit up a cigarette - the LA equivalent of dropping your pants and taking a dump on the table - and the management has begun to scurry around in rank despair at what to do. On the one hand, they've got a bona fide movie star in the joint - good for business! On the other, well, he's blowing demon smoke, and diners are scattering like fire ants after a blast of Raid

In the midst of this weirdness, the twentyish stranger, a starry-eyed Shirley Temple with a pierced bellybutton, has glommed onto the ex-beauty-parlor bomber. "I just have to tell you, I love your work,"she gushes, leaning so close her curls tumble into Benicio's double espresso. (The man, by his own admission, is a full-bore caffeine slave.) "I more than love it, I super-love it!"

"You do? That's great," he pipes up. "So you got a car?"
"Um... a car? Yeah. I have one."
This, clearly, is not the response the model-y young thing anticipated.
"Gimmie the keys," says Benicio, as if it's the most normal thing in the world.
"The keys?"
"Yeah, gimmie the keys. I'll drive it down to Tijuana, get you a good paint job, some new upholstery, the works."
At this point, our visitor is struggling mightily to keep her smile perky, but fear curdles the corners of her lips. The color seems to drain from her face.
"Well, I... I don't need... I mean, I've seen you drive," she counters gamely, "when you were going to Vegas. So, uh, I don't think so...."
Benicio says nothing. He just keeps beaming those hooded peepers at her, a dada panther toying with a wide-eyed mouse.
"Fear and Loathing's, l-like, my f-favorite m-movie," the girl manages to sputter, feeling behind her for the door. "I m-mean, in the whole world. Ever!"
More cryptic benevolence from Benicio, and suddenly she blurts: "My name's Treena!"
Del Toro offers her a smile, "That's a real nice name."
There's a nervous giggle, before Treena finds her voice again. "I... I have to go," she insists, fighting the kind of magnetism that keeps postcards from falling off refridgerators. "I really do...."
"Well, then, good-bye Treena."

Visibly dazed, she staggers off, no doubt to slump in her newly unpainted, unreupholstered Volvo and cry, or hyperventilate, or call all her friends and tell them she's in love for the first time and it's very, very confusing.
"Christ," I mumble, trying not to sound like a complete mook, "you must get a lot of that, huh? Being a famous actor and all."
"Hey man, I got laid before I was an actor. I always got laid. But no one comes up and says I love Fear and Loathing except certain girls between 13 and 21, and I can spot 'em a mile away. They got problems at home," he adds, stubbing out his ciggy after the manager, trying to be cool, reminds him that if he doesn't, they could close down her restaurant, fine her thousands of dollars, maybe send her to jail.... Or something to that effect. It's all lost in the surreal haze of moment-to-moment life on Planet Benicio. Which makes this as good a time as any to ask about his craft.
"You mean acting? That was my brother's idea,"he confesses, sweeping ash into his hand and swooping it into a salad plate. "I got out of high school, and I was scared. I didn't know what to do. I just knew I didn't want to keep doing the kind of crappy jobs I'd done all my life. My father kept a farm, you know, and I shoveled a lot of pig shit. Sometimes I had to clip the horns off the bulls, too. Man, I can tell you they don't like having their horns clipped off."

Neither do I. But back to acting....

"Oh yeah, well, stuff happened, this and that, and I ended up with a scholarship to Stella Adler. But even now, you know, it's a struggle. It takes a while to find out what the fuck you're doing. You have to find your voice. I found mine doing the movie Fearless. Before that, all I did was scream and punch. But during that movie I had a conversation with a painter friend of mine that woke me up. He said, 'You have to know yourself. You have to know, in your heart, that you're doing this because you want to be the best... Otherwise, why bother?' And so I flew back to San Francisco, where they were shooting, and I went balls-out. I threw everything I had on the table. I even went to a thrift shop and got the kind of clothes I thought my character would wear. I just said fuck it, give it everything, and if you go down, you'll go down swinging."
"So what happened?"
"I got fired."
His shrug is eloquent.
"The director freaked out. Same thing on my next movie, Swimming With Sharks. On Sharks, I had three days, you know, and they wanted to fire me on the second day. The director kept screaming, 'He's playing it like a fag! He's stoned! I don't know what he's doing!' My agent was called in, and she's like, 'We can't go on like this. Every movie you work on, it's a nightmare.' And that kind of shit just keeps happening. I do the thing I want to do, and they freak, because if you believe in what you're doing, and you're not like everybody else, they're like, 'This guy is too far out. This is too weird.' That's how it is for me. It's been like that all the way up to yesterday."

From here, with prodding, he launches reluctantly into the saga of Fear and Loathing, marching out the mordant details of his fights with Terry Gilliam. The director, apparently, was less than thrilled with Benicio's up-from-the-toes performance as Oscar Acosta (Dr Gonzo), Hunter Thompson's bloated and loaded Samoan sidekick.

"On that one, man, I ended up in the hospital three times. See, Hunter told me how Oscar used to put cigarettes out on his arm. So in one scene, we're in the elevator, and I said fuck it, I'm gonna do it.... They come in for a close-up, and I fucking shove the cigarette right in. You can almost hear the flesh sizzle. And I did that in eleven takes.... I'd already cracked a finger bone chopping oranges in the hotel-room scene. So when I roll in to the hospital, man, I don't look good. I got the mustache, I'm heavy, I got this crazy hair.... The doctors don't even believe I'm an actor. They think I'm just some fucking maniac. Finally the producer had to come down and tell 'em..."

I kind of hate myself, but having watched the picture the night before, I have to ask. "You know, man, maybe those ten years on smack destroyed my memory, but I don't remember seeing that scene in the movie...."
"You wouldn't have," he says matter-of-factly. "They cut it out."

A laconic sigh, and when he continues, his casual manner's been cranked up a notch. "That one was a fight all the way, but fuck it, I don't care! 'Cause I still remember when I saw Raging Bull for the first time, and it blew the back of my head off. I didn't know that kind of thing even existed. And I always remember that. I'm always gonna go that way. Always...."

Were we in a movie, the camera would zero in on the glint in his eyes. If this isn't life or death, it's as close as you can get without using a gun for punctuation.

"I do independent films, OK? They're not these big-money things. With independents, it's always 'Fuck the actor, he doesn't want to do it, we'll get someone else.' I made more doing two days on an ad for some store in New York than I made on my last three films. H&M clothes. They wanted me to stand there and say, 'I feel pretty.' I didn't love doing it, but it took care of me for a long time. I'm not complaining. I don't have a family; what do I need a lot of money for? I got my freedom. I live in a one-bedroom pad full of books. I go out, I have a few people I hang with, I do what I want. But mostly I like to spend time alone. That's the thing about Los Angeles. You can isolate yourself in a second.

Not exactly the E! Network version of a young hunk's lifestyle, but maybe that's the point. Beneath the criminal glamour, the seething machismo, and the screen-singeing charisma of his cinema self, there beats the heart of a hope-to-die artist. And right now he's wearing it on the sleeve of his CS&N jersey.

"Sometimes I watch movies, or stare off, but mostly, I read.... I never opened a book when I was a kid, so now there are a million writers I'm into. Like, I really dug Nausea by Sartre, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood Another novel I really love is City of Night by John Rechy. Fucking amazing. And Bukowski turned me on to Dostoevsky. You ever check out The Gambler? It's the best book on addiction ever written."

Talking lit, del Toro's joy is palpable. He's like a one-starving man still amazed at all the steaks in the deep freeze. Until, out of nowhere, he half-leaps out of his chair and, for one savage moment, I think we're going to arm wrestle - "Fuck this, now it's time to interview you. Yeah! I wanna know who you read, who your influences are. C'mon, I read Permanent Midnight, man. Give it up...."

Well, what the hell? This whole session skidded off the rails hours ago. Might as well keep rolling. He grabs the notebook and, faced with the wrath of Benicio, I start babbling that, for me, it's not about the books people wrote, it's not aboutthe music they made or the paintings they cranked out. Or not just.... It's about how they lived. Guys like Lenny Bruce or Miles, outre characters like Francis Bacon or Charles Mingus, Burroughs or Jean Genet, they found a way - however fucked up and insane it might have looked to Mr and Mrs Front Porch - they found a way to thrive outside the mainstream, to express what they had to express on their own terms. Sometimes they had to pay for the privilege, like Lenny, but they didn't cave. Their art is an extension of the reality they created. Their reality was an extension of their art - which is, I think, as precise a description of the high-octane artiste in front of me as any other.

Halfway into my soliloquy, Benicio raises his eyes from the notebook. But his expression is hard to read. He's either been taking notes or writing "Jerry Stahl is a pretentious asshole." Maybe both....

And without thinking, by way of wrapping things up - our lunch has lurched from noon 'til dusk - I hear myself ask what he'd be doing if he weren't acting. To my surprise, Benicio lights up like it's the one question he's been waiting for. But before he replies, he rips out his Top Ten page and slaps it in my hand.

"What I would like to be is a trucker, man. Twenty years from now, you'll take out this paper, and you'll show it to your grandchildren, and they'll go, 'Who wrote this, Gramps?' And you'll be like, 'That was Benicio del Toro. He used to be an actor, a long time ago. But one day he just walked away. He became a trucker. And now, I don't know. He's just out there. Somewhere on the highway. Nobody knows. He's just gone...."

"I'm gonna give you my Top Tens, man. Right now!" declares the former beauty-parlor bomber. And watching him hunker down with pen and paper, it hits me: The book I'd like to read is Benicio del Toro's, the lowdown on his own twisted, celluloid-strewn path from San Juan to small-town Pennsylvania to Hollywood. "I don't want to be one of those guys, man," he responds. "I don't wanna be another prick that's gonna write something 'cause he thinks he has something to say...." That cleared up, he then lays out the genius motherfuckers who had something to say to him.

BOOKS
1 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
2 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
3 The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4 Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta
5 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
6 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway
7 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
8 City of Night by John Rechy
9 Legs by William Kennedy
10 Movie Monsters by Dennis Gifford

FILMS
1 Creature From The Black Lagoon directed by Jack Arnold
2 Andrei Rublev directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
3 Taxi Driver directed by Martin Scorcese
4 Memories of Underdevelopment directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea
5 Papillion directed by Franklin J Schaffner
6 The Unholy Three directed by Tod Browning
7 The Three of the Wooden Clogs directed by Ermanno Oimi
8 This Strange Passion directed by Luis Bunuel
9 Battle of Algiers directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
10 The Lusty Men directed by Nicholas Ray

ALBUMS
1 Exile on Main Street - Rolling Stones
2 Darkness on the Edge of Town - Bruce Springsteen
3 Sandinista! - Clash
4 Desire - Bob Dylan
5 Electric Ladyland - Jimi Hendrix
6 Who's Next - The Who
7 Blue Mask - Lou Reed
8 Lotus Carlos - Santana
9 461 Ocean Boulevard - Eric Clapton
10 Revolver - The Beatles




Thanks to Going Down Swinging for the pics!

Black Book