THE DIVINITY OF PERFORMANCE

Back in 1992, when I was hanging out with Jack Black (I cradle-robbed him.  He was 20, on the rise, not yet a household name. I was 24.  We met doing a play at Magic Theater in San Francisco.  I loved the bejeezus out of him then, and still do) we flew with a clutch of our friends from the Actor’s Gang — Tim Robbin’s theater company in LA - to New York to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly in Sam Shepard’s True West, on Broadway. 

It was like a heavyweight boxing event. Hoffman was Hoffmanning hard.  He employed a deep Southern drawl for the role, and a kind of bowlegged, Texas physicality.  It was part of our love for culture, to make our pilgrimage there, and watch these fine actors sweat through the ego duel the play shakes out of them.  John C. Reilly is always capable, but seeing Hoffman live was a like watching a whirling dervish.  Jack had gotten me into Sufi literature and the Italian actress/mystic Eleonora Duse, and Hoffman seemed to be entirely absorbed in the role to the point where his ego dissolved entirely, and all that was left in him was a ball of hot white light. 

Years later I would hang out with Hoffman for several nights at the bar behind Vassar, at a New York Stage and Film summer session.  He was screamingly funny.  He had just made Boogie Nights, and made me nearly wet my pants telling me the story of how much he hated the bourgeois messaging of the Tom Cruise film “Jerry McGuire.” 

Years later still,  I would hang out with Hoffman backstage at a Tenacious D concert.  We talked about how he got all the dramatic roles and Jack got all the funny roles, and how they should trade careers occasionally, since Hoffman was actually hysterically funny and Jack, nobody really knew, was actually a powerhouse of a dramatic actor, when he shifted gears.  

Still later, I would run into Phil on the street, because we both lived in the West Village.  He recognized me a couple of times; we chatted at the local cafe. 

Then one day I ran into Phil, again in the West Village.  He was standing alone outside his apartment smoking a cigarette.  He was untucked and shaggy and pale, and didn’t recognize me at all.  His nose was caked with green snot like someone had packed it into his face with a pastry knife - like a neglected little kid.  We spoke for a couple of minutes; he was really out of it.   Not long afterward, he died. I was so glad I had gotten the rare chance to see his enormous talent effloresce onstage before his fragile life slipped away.

Later the same week as the play, Jack took our little clique to the party after the New York premiere of  “The Player,” a Robert Altman film that starred Tim Robbins and pretty much everyone else in Hollywood besides, because it was about a Hollywood agent/power-broker, and more or less everyone in Hollywood played themselves .

The party, in some giant rooftop sports bar shut down to the public, was like a Hollywood fever dream.  Every single face besides mine was trilling and radiant with the additive light of mass recognition .  It wasn’t just the exhaustive cast of the film; it felt like everyone I had ever seen on film was at this party.  The entire fucking A-list, with their colossal electromagnetic auras all overlapping each other.  And they were all so weird looking in person. 

The female stars especially looked like cartoons of Betty Boop or stills of Nancy Reagan:  giant, oversized heads, tiny stick bodies, no bigger than that of eleven year olds. Wynona Ryder looked like a Charms Blo-Pop.  Julie Delpy’s head seemed to be the size of a manhole cover.  It was like doing mescaline while falling asleep under a copy of US Magazine. 

(At one point, I swear to God - Jack spotted a basketball player whose name I don’t know, and said to our friend Bob, “I should go up and tell him he plays tenacious D!”  — meaning Defense, and I always have wondered if his hallowed band name wasn’t born that night).

I was at a table with Jack and our friends singing something to Jack (we used to sing all the time, to the general annoyance of others) and the actor Richard E. Grant walked up to me and jokingly asked if I was drunk.  

“Oh,”  I said, wracking my brain.  “You’re THAT GUY,” I said, saying the dumbest thing you can say to an actor if you want them to feel good about themselves. He rolled his eyes and slunked off.  I went on singing. 

When I got back to where I was staying that night, I cried my eyes out.  I bawled pitifully from a deep hole in my stomach, because something in me knew I’d never be in that room again.  That was the apex of all rooms with celebrities in it - A-listers crawling all over each other as far as the eye could see —  and unless I won an Oscar, I knew I’d never see that many stars all at the same time again.  And I kind of knew right at that moment: I wasn’t ever winning an Oscar. 

(I kind of always wondered if I maybe would, up to then.) 

Jack and I dated for around a year, then we called it off and remained pals.  He was in LA, I was in San Francisco; it made sense.  Most of our relationship consisted of singing on the phone, and him pretending to be River Phoenix, who he used to tease me about because he knew I loved him. “Heeyyy Cintraaa…” he’d say in a kind of hippy Phoenix drawl.  “I got you this hoooorse, I thought you might like to riiide it.” 

Living in New York was incredible for watching Jack’s professional progress, which thundered across the world like Genghis Khan. One day I watched a bus roll by with his giant face on it, holding hands with Gwyneth Paltrow in “Shallow Hal.” This was how I found out he had made the leap from comic sidekick to leading man.  It was stupefying how huge he was becoming. 

The most striking incident of Jack’s eventual Godhood happened when I was walking out of my accountant’s office on 34th street, and suddenly there was Nacho Libre, seventy feet tall, wearing a cape on a billowing poster strapped to the front of Madison Square Garden.  

It’s not every ex-beau that I’d feel proud to see that large.  But Jack was always meant to stand astride the entertainment industry like a great colossus. He has always been a mystic, a supernova, a conduit for raw human joy.  

I saluted him, then walked down into the subway. 

These days I console myself with the thought:  Goddammit, literature may have shit the bed…but at the end of the day,  I slept with Kung Fu Panda. This means I WIN.  

(If you can see Tenacious D before you die….DO IT!  Jack’s a live angel! ) 

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Artwork: “Hanuman,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2022