In the 70s my father got laid off from his job driving a truck. He worked for this place that sold various gases, not gasoline but like hydrogen and nitrogen and shit like that. It was called Airco. I was was wicked into the hydrogen tank, it looked like the Hindenburg. He went from Airco to working for Hollywood, like whenever they shot a movie in Boston they had to use the Union. So my father spent his days either drunk in the trailer or driving equipment or celebrities around. He had one of the celebrities, this gay man named Brad Davis. My father's way of saying Brad was gay was saying, "He sucked a prick." I literally have never heard my father say Jewish, he's only ever said Shylock. My father was a Teamster so they had to hire him. He worked on the movies Coma, The Brink's Job, Small Circle of Friends, he worked on fucking Starting Over with Burt Renoylds. Imagine drinking beers with Burt Reynolds. My father met this guy on one of the movies who was in charge of special effects. He got hired and had to go to the Phillipines, he had been hired to work on a movie called Apocalypse Now. This was years before it came out but our plan was to see it whenever they released it because the special effects guy was my father's friend.
For years I was obsessed with seeing this movie. When the ads came on tv I I could not wait. The fact that it was rated 'R' was apparently ignored. So when it came out in 1979 we all went. It was like a fucking family outing. No one had any idea about the movie at all. I was 9 years old. I remember the poster had an awesome painting of the river that they go up in the movie.
You know there are no credits in the movie, not in the begining or the end. When we went to see it we went to this theater in Boston. It was ancient and called The Cheri. It had a fucking curtain over the screen and everything. When we walked in they handed us a play bill. We read it when we were sitting down and waiting for the movie. The only thing we had known about the movie was that Marlon Brando was in it, my mother loved him. He was a skinny, beautiful young man to us. We saw that the movie also had Robert Duvall in it. To us he had been Tom Hagen in The Godfather and Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Fucking cool guy. So we were psyched he was in it.
The lights went down and the room became silent. The curtain slowly came across the screen as the song "The End" by The Doors started playing. Fucking cool. I thought that rock and roll was too rebelious to listen to, then I'm hearing live Doors and then the jungle catches fire. It was unbelievable. Then all that weird shit happens where Martin Sheen is naked and drunk in his room punching shit. Weird. I remember being totally freaked out by it. Then he goes to some general's room and gets the mission Hans Solo answers the door and we were all psyched as hell because we love him.
Later on in the movie he is reading about Colonel Kurtz and he says, "Why the fuck would he do that?" I remember thinking, "There's a way of saying the f word that I didn't know about, I thought you only said 'fuck you'" The idea of saying 'why the fuck?' was totally new to me.
I could go on about this movie forever. For another ten pages, easy but I will take mercy on you and kinda stop there. I have to say though at the end when they are sacrificing the buffalo I remember thinking, 'this could not be any worse'. I remember when we left the theater we got in the car and drove home in total silence. The only thing my mother would say was, "I can't believe how fat Marlon Brando got." None of us had any idea of what we were seeing. I remember getting home and trying to play with my army guys, I remember not wanting to and getting into not wanting to play war at all. I didn't speak for 2 days.
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