Institute for RDJ Studies ❱ Reading List
May God Bless and Keep Robert Downey Jr
Esquire, February 2007, by Scott Raab
Grinning prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss, forty-one years ancient, Robert Downey Jr.'s ripe and ready for his close-up.
Start in tight, Downey's puss full frame, like so: his creased Valentine of a face has some puff and scarification on it, some overtorqued, Dakar Rally, desert-of-the-soul mileage, but he's still hustling, still shape-shifting, still a man's man and a ladies' man, still a wanking matinee idol, liquid-brown boyish-shy eyes a-wobble, warm voice twanging from hoarse Jew's-harp burble to wheezing, pennywhistle laugh in a finger snap. Words—thousands upon thousands of words—burst yawping from him, seemingly unfiltered and unbidden, overflowing an instrumental self whose sole means of control is a steady-Eddie self-surrender, hugging shores of work, Wing Chun kung fu, and love. Grinning prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss, forty-one years ancient, Robert Downey's ripe and ready for his close-up.
Or maybe open in Playa Vista, inside the 315,000-square-foot wood hangar-turned-soundstage where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose and Jon Favreau is getting ready to direct the first of what everyone hopes will be an Iron Man trilogy. Swoop down from the laminate rafters to a human figure prone in a burren of painted Styrofoam caves. Stippled with muscle, roped with veins, gravely wounded, his pulsing diopter of a heart is a prop master's bauble, faint with ebbing life. He's Tony Stark—a lone warrior facing an ancient evil, blahblahblah, as the Invincible Iron Man ... starring—pan up-body to the paintwisted visage—R. D. Jr.
Or just let Downey himself rip this joint:
"Lemme tell ya what's happenin'," says Downey, "'cuz I just figured it the fuck out. We're going to the Chateau—we'll go in the lobby there. We gotta be up the street in a couple hours. This gives us time—time that we require."
What's happening is that Downey's behind the wheel of this butter-fresh Mercedes—a newfangled silver E-Class sedan, a "lawyer's mistress's car," he calls it—inching east along Sunset Boulevard. "Complemented by a 6.3-liter engine. Thus, the E63. I like it 'cuz it reminds me of my dear sister, Allyson, born in 1963. It was her birthday a couple days ago. Who'da fucking thought—me and my sister, these wayward souls, wind up with—"
He's looking at me as a car cuts us off, and I reflexively reach for the wheel as he hits the brakes and the spring-loaded Buddha on the dashboard starts bobbling madly. He waves off my apology—Downey, not Buddha. Buddha can go fuck himself.
"I want you to feel completely free to let all your codependent neuroses out," he tells me. "You can grab the wheel, you can ask me if my tummy hurts, you can give me a foot rub later, anything. Enmeshment is really okay in small doses."
Small doses? A dab of Downey—trust me—would fill this magazine cover to cover. Which makes a couple of hours sitting and talking at the Chateau Marmont perfect; we have only met, and I've brought—just in case conversation lags—my carefully researched notes.
"Me too," he says.
You have notes? "I do, yeah. I actually already printed out the article if you'd like to read it. It really went great."
But I'm worried about the lead. I need to redo the lead.
"You don't need a lead," Downey purrs. "Dude, the lead's about to happen."
We'll get to the Chateau, but, please, glance back up at that lead paragraph—I won't ask you to do this again, I swear—and note the phrase "prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss." This is an allusion, of course, to the fact that out of all the big-name shitbags in the history of Hollywood—not just dime-a-dozen addicts, either, fucking murderers—Robert Downey Jr. may hold the record for doing hard-time time, a solid year in state prison plus some shorter stretches here and there. That's part of what it took for him to get where he is now—sober, working, remarried, present and accounted for as a daddy—but he's sick and tired of being sick and tired of being defined by it.
The first time I spoke with Downey was on the phone a couple of days before I flew to L. A. "This is little Bobby Downey," he said by way of introduction, and when I told him then that I couldn't avoid touching on his tabloid history, he sighed. "'It's all you talk about in the press junkets,'" he said, mocking Earnest Journalist." 'But you've never talked to us about it'—and they go back and flash the jailhouse pictures. Okay, I get it—it's still there—and then something just broke, like, three months ago, where people stopped asking. It became about more interesting things.
Iron Man is kind of a definitive—something so possibly two-dimensional and vapid and pointless in the bigger scope of life—but it points to a dividing line between me being identified as one thing which I'll always be and me being identified as another thing which I'll always be—someone who came out here to fucking make movies and I didn't wanna be a busboy anymore."
Maybe he's right, although Iron Man won't be out before May 2008, and there is no story in any language about li'l Bobby that doesn't devote significant space to the more sordid aspects of his past. But the more salient point—the here-and-now truth of the matter—is that, fancy allusions aside, the guy sitting out on the Chateau veranda with my tape recorder resting on his chest and the Camel straight dangling from his pillowy lips is more than the sum of his rap and call sheets.
For one thing, he just yanked the butts out of a zippered gray man-purse, where they nestle with a kaleidoscope of herbal supplements, oils, lotions, potions, and vitamins.
Camel straights?
"Yeah. There's a million fucking ways I can go with that. First thing is, I was told by the cosmos night before last, 'We gotcha from here—you don't have to do any of the shit you're doing that's your story.' You know, 'I was fucking hard-timin' and here's my straights'—that whole thing?"
But you're that guy, no?
"I am that guy, but I'm also not the fucking story. I'm not the story just 'cuz the story really happened. But when it really comes down to it, I just want a lot of fucking nicotine. I want it butch"—and he smacks a fist into a palm. "The other thing is, they stand out from all the other packs. They're all this size, and this one's like, boom! This is the short dog. This to me is the .25 caliber in your boot that you're gonna use."
Downey's story comes in every flavor but linear. Daddy— "Senior," Downey calls him—was an underground sixties filmmaker whose limited renown peaked in 1969 with Putney Swope, Mama was an actress, Junior was born in Greenwich Village in 1965 and began acting and drugging while he was still in short pants. As for further explication, Buddha can go fuck himself.
"You wanna know the timeline, dude?"
I do. Because I don't know the timeline.
"Neither. Do. Fucking. I."
So. No formal training as an actor, then?
"No, I had it better. I had my dad hanging out with the coolest, smartest, maverick fucking weirdos of the twentieth century in New York. I used to fall asleep listening to my dad's poker games, and they were only playing poker so that they could riff on lines and put-downs. So I heard this rhythm—it'd be quiet and then someone would hit it and they'd all fucking lose it, and it was like winning the pot wasn't about the chips. That, to me, used to be the most comforting feeling going to sleep at night, just hearing that. This is what men are supposed to do—this two-layered thing—and it's about wit and repartee and a lot of sarcasm.
"That's the hustle. I didn't come out here to figure out if I could be in some Lorimar pilot. I didn't even know what a fucking pilot season was. I just knew that I'd been raised in this, but it didn't feel like movies were something that you went away to do or this organized thing. It's a hustle. I got some fucking juice, man, I got some tools, I got some hustle. I learned some shit. I learned shit on the streets. It was providence, dude, and proximity to where I could get my grift on. You come out here, and all of a sudden some hot dark-haired chick named Amber is driving a green Fiat 128-4—driving stick. Dude, seeing a seventeen-year-old girl driving stick shift, and she's driving you down Sunset Boulevard to go make out by the water? I'm like, I'm never going back anywhere. Why the fuck would I go back to New York? This is fucking gypsy heaven, dude—there's a million suckers out here.
"Why did it serve me to become a really good actor? 'Cuz if there were times that maybe you didn't really wanna go home, then how do you extend your stay after the midnight show of Rocky Horror's over? You better be the guy who they think would be fun to bring to the next fucking spot. And it's really only a coupla things, but it's how do you harmonize those and do you know when to pull back and how do you really hit it, how do you not be too inundating, how do you play status to the person who's really the point guy—"
The waitress places his double nonfat cappuccino on the wrought-iron table between us.
"Do you like it?" she asks.
"I like it," he says.
"Would you lahk to have it in your hand?" she drawls. "I foamed it myself."
Downey picks up the drawl. "Do you lahk it?" he says, returning serve, and he laughs. Gently.
"I was trying out my best vocals for you," she smiles, and sashays back inside the hotel.
"That's the other thing," Downey says. "Now, like going into my fucking fifth decade—"
Robert, you're forty-one. Don't be such a drama queen.
"Oh, believe me," he scowls, "I'm continually put on point about that."
Sorry.
"I tend to bring out the codependent element in anyone I'm in close proximity to. I can have the yoga teacher come to the door, and if I don't answer it, and he's waiting outside for me, he goes, 'I thought you were fucking dead.'"
Team Downey?
"It is, dude. It's Team Downey. But it's Team Esoterica—kung fu, therapy. It's like I am surrounded like an MIT prodigy with teams and squads of experts and supporters. Some of it's some real grassroots shit, but it's that thing of, How much support do you need? What kind and for how long?
"Susan"—that'd be Mrs. Junior, a film exec who met Downey in 2003 and married him in August 2005—"and I copped to it last night. How much support do I need? Uh, tons? Unless I finally get to that place where all the cylinders are firing and she's in London for the weekend and I'm wearing a pair of fucking boxer shorts and finger painting mandalas and, like, singing three-part harmonies to some kind of Paul Buckmaster arrangement weirdo-classical thing, and I look up and I go, 'Who the fuck am I? This is what I really like to do.'
"I'm not an actor. It's my day job, and I learned how to hustle it really good, and I have a love for it, and I get it, but I don't know what I'm doing. This is what I really like to do: I like to tweak around and make a fucking matte. I like to walk around like I'm in some sort of arts-and-crafts netherworld workshop. It's not mysterious, 'cuz it's usually the same three or four things, but it's this hands-on meditation on—I don't even wanna say creation—but on, like, feedback. That's what it is—instant fucking visual, auditory feedback."
Downey has to pee now, which gives me the chance to put a couple of things on the record. First, a fact: A hundred monkeys with a hundred tape recorders can spend a hundred years doing celebrity profiles and never catch a wave like this. Codependent, schmodependent—I put the plug in the jug and tossed the stash in the trash in 1994, so I know that every drunk and junkie has exactly the same time in sobriety: today. And Downey knows it, too. But today—out on this pillared veranda, with water trickling in some fountain hidden back in the shade and birds twittering in the bushes and Robert Downey Jr. alive and well and riffing—today's nothing short of an everyday kind of miracle, fleshy, low-hung, and slobbering delicious.
Beyond this—beyond the taste of today—forget about it.
"I'm not here to promote fucking anything," Downey nods, speaking of miracles. "I don't really understand what happened, but I'm okay with it. I know things changed, but I don't fuckin'—I can't hit my ass with both hands trying to figure this mystery. I just know that it winds up coming back to all that old-time religion stuff, except you add science and physics and all of a sudden faith. Faith moves mountains, and I go, 'Fuck, yeah.'
"That's what I was talking about with Susan last night, and we just wound up having one of those talks where we talked about what we're scared of, about how we're really feeling, about every little fucking thing where we felt we weren't listening to each other—and we're just fucking weeping together outta left field because we hadn't had enough contact. Contact isn't 'I'll fucking see you in the morning and at night and we talk during the day.' That's just fucking proximity. What's the Cosa Nostra element? What do we share that you can't get from anyone else but me? And to be that vulnerable, for her to say, 'Nobody sees me like this,' and for me to admit, not 'I wouldn't be okay without you,' but 'I wouldn't be where I am if we hadn't met, and I'm okay now'—that's huge.
"And the funny thing was—seconds and inches, dude—I swear to God, we woke up this morning, and again she was the hottest fucking chick I ever saw. It was just like the first time I took her hand in the cigar bar in Montreal, 'cuz she had a headache, and I had to get my hands on her anyway, and I was like squeezing her between the thumb and the forefinger, going like, Man, she's got really long hands for a girl who's not very tall—it reminds me of an Egyptian cartouche. Guys say, 'Did she really like me?' but I'm thinking about the fucking hand-to-arm ratio—wow."
By this time, Downey's laughing so hard, he can barely catch his breath.
"Dude, I don't mean to be too basal, but I always think about, maybe it'll make my dick seem bigger if they have little hands and they're wrapping 'em around, but I might also feel like I'm getting a hand job from a fucking mouse, which, worse things could happen, but I'd rather get a hand job from a squid than a mouse. Which is the essence of what I'm trying to say today." Just then, a little bird lands on the edge of our table, close to a big bowl of fruit Downey summoned on his way back from peeing.
"Really?" Downey asks the bird. "You like fruity berries? Lemme give you a choice. Here's the whole palate." And he takes a slice of strawberry and lays it on the table near the bird, who eyes him and the slice and decides not just yet. Or maybe he'd rather have an unfiltered Camel.
"How cool is that? In New York that would be a pigeon—a fucking rabid pigeon, with one leg, coming and falling over on its side and fucking yakking up everything it was trying to bring back to its kids."
You know he's crazy. I know he's crazy. He knows he's crazy.
Onscreen, over the course of twenty years and dozens of movies, Downey, whatever his character, is a bolt of human lightning, the most labile and accessible unacting actor alive. His physical gifts are stunning. His work in 1992's Chaplin was uncanny, and even in his fifth decade, he's lithe, fluid, panther-quick. But it's his rogue tongue and seemingly unmediated heartspring that make it almost impossible not to like him. Everything boils over; nothing is repressed. Intense, exhilarating—all artifice, yet done so well it feels like life.
Off-duty ... well, what is acting anyway if not trying to be alive in the moment? And what do you do when you're trying to get back your acting career, your reputation, and your bankroll—Downey has done ten films since 2005—and some dude sidles up to do a cover story about you?
"Essentially," says Downey, back in the car to visit a small clothing designer's showroom up Sunset, "I decided to welcome you into the arms of Morpheus without manufacturing some sort of fucking White House-y thing of how I'd like it to seem."
Great. But nobody, I add, is ever crazy enough to do that. "If you have this false sense, this thing where you've compartmentalized who you really are, as opposed to how you allow yourself—like you can fucking control it—to be perceived by the public to begin with, then there's something to fear. Because then you're imagining you're going to control the flow of a fucking river."
Buddha —bald-headed, squinch-eyed, red-lipped— nods. The right side of his saffron robe is sort of slipping off the shoulder, I see now, and his bulging earlobes quiver. I'm starting to like him. Buddha, not Downey. Downey I love. "Your move, Outlander!" he shouts into traffic, and cackles.
The clothes place is where the nice ladies put rose petals —crystallized rose petals— in your sparkling water and refer to Robert as "Linda's muse," Linda being the designer and inventor of a line of clothing she calls "luxury eco," spun of bamboo and seaweed and wood pulp and sasawashi leaf.
Sasawashi?
"It's L. A., bro," Downey says. "Get into it. I'm not fazed if I hear sasawashi."
Sasawashi turns out to be the leaf that sushi's rolled with, and the clothes turn out to be lacy and frilly and sheer and gossamer gorgeous—and that's just the men's line.
"This is so fabulous," Downey coos, copping a pinkish-gold shirt patterned in a shiny, froggy green. It's diaphanous, with sleeves nearly down to his knuckles. "If you guys don't mind, I'm gonna shower with this on—a little bird-bathing—to see how it feels."
Instead, he tries on a plaid organic-poplin jacket and comes out of the dressing room looking positively feral—with maybe just a smidge of minced Mizrahi—as the costume designer for Iron Man arrives with her assistant and her dog, Hunter.
"Isn't that the oldest dog in Hollywood?" Downey asks.
"She kept her girlish figure," says one of the clothes ladies.
"I'm very careful about that," the costume designer says. "She was on a raw diet for most of her life, and then when she started getting older and couldn't handle that much protein, now she gets the juice pulp from the juicer every morning mixed in her food—living enzymes."
"I need to take a bunch of herbs," Downey says, heading for where he left his purse on a table out back with the rose-petal water. "I'm gonna smoke a Camel non-filter in my sustainable T-shirt."
He looks good—Downey, not Hunter. He's lifting five days a week, taking pharmaceutical creatine to plumpen the muscle, and his upper body, front and back, is ten years younger than his face—smooth, hairless, blue veined, and rippling—and by Jove, I think maybe I've lingered too long in this witches' den of nancy-hip couture.
You look buff, I tell Downey, fairly certain that I have never before used the word buff in any form or setting in my entire life.
"Yeah," he says. "It's going up, too. I'm on swoll status."
You're Iron Man.
"I am Iron Man. Now, what kind of Iron Man do I wanna be? The Daniel Craig, someone-just-packed-clay-on-my-shoulders-and-chest thing is played out. So I'd rather go a little more Enter the Dragon style."
Either way, there's a whole cult of comic-book dorks who aren't gonna let you off easy.
"No, the geek closet has swung wide open. Dude, I'm running into guys—some Fortune 500 guy at some thing, and all of a sudden he unloosens his fucking Prada and goes, 'Dude, when fucking Tony Stark came back in the second incarnation and the Mandarin and dadadada'—and I'm goin', Wow, this is no joke.
"Here's how insane life gets—I'm doing a fucking biopic? It's the same pressure as Chaplin, except there's no reference. You're creating the reference. So again the hustle is, How do I write a line between doing something that wasn't expected and how do I trust my brother, Jon Favreau, and how do we have this fucking thing happen where we are both the guy—because to me, that's a movie, when the director and the lead guy create this third thing that is the character.
"Between where he's at and where I'm at, and the fact that he pushed for me and that panned out—because I was not on anyone's A-list for this part; why would I be? I came in and aced a screen test and was throwing heat all day long. I prepped myself into such a tizzy. I whipped myself into a fucking fury, to where the entire house, everybody backed off, like, Oh, okay, fucking Shaman Boy's back, it's rain-dance central. I refused to lose this part to anything or anyone. I hadn't felt that way since Chaplin. The only time I've screen-tested since Chaplin was for Iron Man.
"Why am I the guy for this job? Because the story is the most duplicitous and conflicted of all the Marvel characters, because he's really just a guy who gets put in an extraordinary set of circumstances—partially due to his own character defects and partially due to his lineage—and you can pick a fucking million Joseph Campbell myths and look 'em up, but none of them apply more to me, and there's nothing I could bring more to than this job and this story."
Back inside, the costume designer's explaining why she can't explain why she may or may not be able to use some luxury eco clothes for Iron Man. "We have a whole massive part of our movie where he becomes sort of a POW, and the people who capture him give him clothes, so perhaps we could create something perfect. I'm not supposed to say much. I can't give you any more information. Truly, he"—she means Shaman Boy—"and I will be assassinated."
Which, it turns out, is not so far from the truth.
"I have an Airsoft assault rifle in the trunk," Downey tells me as we roll on to Iron Man HQ, "so I don't want you to be surprised if I descend on the production office like a sniper—'cuz we're going from Earth Mother into Butchathon."
Planet Butch is unfazed by Downey's attack—nobody bats a fucking eye, frankly—but the atmosphere is quickly engulfed by a gaseous cloud reeking of corporate tension when the alien life-form with him hauls out a tape recorder and a digital camera.
"Is this supposed to be a natural conversation?"
Jon Favreau asks. "Because with cameras and tape recorders and reporters, it's hard to be natural."
Favreau, bless him, does not seem pleased to be saying this.
He is but a simple director/actor/writer, a flannel-shirted honeybear in nominal charge of a Marvel Comics-financed film project with a somewhat star-crossed history —Iron Man has ricocheted around Hollywood for years— and a dweeb brigade locked in vicious online debate over possible casting, villain selection, story line, and hero-suit design. Now, with shooting starting in mere weeks, his office walls are flush with hush-hush body-armor sketches, and only his wife and God know what nerdgasmic revelations lay in the black-and-white-marbled composition book on his desk.
No photos, little chat, and all the inchoate dread and paranoia a couple hundred million can buy. But this much—without fear of finding my spicy tuna roll dosed with polonium-210—I can tell you: Unless Favreau's prop master can gin up a CGI catheter, Iron Man will piss into a bent-glass carafe, so that Downey won't need to be extracted from his armor every time he has to whiz on the job.
Also this: When we—Downey, me, and Downey's sidekick, Jimmy, a gruff young roughneck who hails from the capital of Butch, Pittsburgh, and has a Steelers logo tattooed on the skin above his heart, "my brother," Downey says, "my Secret Service, the guy who'd fucking take the bullet"—duck into Downey's wee on-set office to wolf a take-out lunch and I decline the ginger ale on the grounds that soda makes me fart, Iron Man takes it as a personal challenge.
"Go for it, dude," he roars. "Dude, I'll fucking match you thunderclap for thunderclap. I'm chambering one up myself." On the way home, as the Mercedes' windows glide up and down, Buddha weeps.
Downey House sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in a staid, plush, peaceable west Los Angeles neighborhood called Brentwood. It's strange in the same wealthy way that nearby Bel Air and Beverly Hills are strange—no human being who is not a maid, gardener, nanny, or garbage collector is ever manifest—but Brentwood is almost completely devoid of hip, chic, fizz, or glitz.
"I swear to God," Downey says, sitting in his kitchen, "I've been quoted as saying if I ever wind up as a forty-somethin', remarried, marketable, big-action-movie dad of a teenager in a cul-de-sac in Brentwood, please run up behind me and pop two in my head—do me a favor." There's a hand-lettered sign taped high above the sink—THE RULES ARE THE TOOLS—and, close by, a photo of Mr. and Mrs. Junior with Laura and George W. Bush at the White House. A countertop holds an espresso maker the size of Mount Vesuvius. The missus is still at work, and Downey's thirteen-year-old son, Indio, is at his mom's—that's Downey's ex-wife, actress-singer-model Deborah Falconer.
Jimmy Butch is here, and Christine, the "titular head of this whole fucking Team Clown we got going here."
"Should we have one of our business-therapy sessions so Scott can see how fucking sick we all are?" Downey asks. "I just wanna break the ice here."
And he farts once, short and sharp.
"That's fucking nothin'," he says. "I can clear out this whole floor."
Not bad for an overture, I say, unrolling a bassoon note of my own. "Dude, that was literally like an orchestral blip. That wasn't even the warm-up. That was like the fucking oboist's double reed hit the floor."
But truth is elsewhere. Downey's colon is ready to conduct.
"For reference," he shouts as he bolts the kitchen, "you may photograph whatever you like, except this three-coil steamer I'm about to fucking drop in Christine's office."
"Don't!" she screams. "There's a whole house—go in the yoga room."
Too late.
"Ohhhh," Christine moans. Then she gathers herself and yells, "Leave the fan on."
Back from toileting, Downey fires up the espresso maker and hands me two chapters of his memoir-in-progress. Good stuff—wiseass, trippy, dwelling mainly on the misadventures of Jailhouse Jim—and he's reading a second copy along with me on the marble kitchen island, orally annotating as the pages unfold.
"There was this one guy in county jail, all he did was abuse everyone who came by—male, female, CO, doctor. 'Goddamn mind-midget,' 'Hey, Cunt-suela.' I'm next door to this guy and I'm hearing him. It got to where they did a cell extraction—they pop him in the cell, they come out, and this fucker, I love him to this day, he was an amputee. He had one leg. He was so hell-bent, he was standing on one foot sixteen hours a day just to tell everyone what a piece of shit they were. That fucking guy had moxie."
This all fits perfectly in tone with the Wall of Shame, which is Downeyspeak for a family bulletin board hung on another kitchen wall, thumbtacked with layers of self-mocking photos, mainly of Downey—kung-fu Downey with a shiner, sad sack in stir, dewy Brat Pack bouffant-coiffed Bob with old-old flame Sarah Jessica Parker—but Downey's writing, to be blunt, feels unfelt.
If you're gonna write a book, dude, you maybe oughta get more real with it.
"I don't know if I can," he says. "And that's probably part of the reason I stopped and got a little scared."
Exactamundo. Gimme some scorch, Little Bobby. Less soft-shoe, more fear. Some grim, tortured-spirit-behind-the-light-'n'-lively-veneer—
"Could I also have a chapter where I talk about the seventh ray of the ninth configuration and start using, like, 'magnificent'—kind of an Eckhart thing—that, too? I'd love to have the cover actually be me in a long, flowing robe—a jeweled robe—where I'm writing as an ascended master."
How can you not love this silly, laughing, wheezing, buzzing, tap-dancing motherfuck?
"You know what'd be the best, dude? I'm standing there and there's literally sunlight coming out of my ass."
You're on no meds?
"No meds. Look, Ma—no meds. Dude, that's a great chapter. That's genius. I gotta hit this whole thing about the bipolar. They called me up and said, 'Hi, we're from the Bipolar Association and you—' 'But I'm not.' 'Well, you've said—' 'No! I haven't said shit. Dr. Malibusian said,' and they go, 'Well, it's been written, so we're going to quote it.'
"Is it all right if I weigh in here? Because although I can say sometimes I wanna shop a lot and sometimes I just wanna watch ESPN and jerk off and eat ice cream, I'm not fucking depressed or manic. I've been told I was an axis 2.94 disorder, but the guy I was seeing didn't know I was smoking crack in his bathroom. You can't make a diagnosis until somebody's fucking sober."
Never used needles?
"No."
Black-tar heroin? And crack?
"Well, first of all, it was 11 years ago, right around this time of year, and someone said, 'We're smoking some, ah, some, ah—whaddya call it?—opium.' And I was like, 'Oh, that sounds really fucking Boehme.' But, of course, that first time it was opium. The second time, it looked like opium. Looked the same, smelled the same, a little dirtier, not quite as pristine a buzz, and by the time three weeks later, when I woke up, thought I had a flu, and took one hit on it, I looked up and said, 'Great. So now we're junkies. This is fucking great.' Six months later, I catch my first case ever of getting pulled over—and that was after unabashedly partying to my fucking heart's content for the first ten-plus years I was out here.
"I was always the guy who was like, No heroin, no crack. But it doesn't matter if you go ten years without doing it. Because on that 3,651st day, it's your fucking turn, joker. First time someone took the powder outta the house and accidentally left a rock there—that's the problem. Hang around the barbershop, you're gonna get a haircut.
"At that point it was like, Uhhhh, will someone just tie my shoelaces together, 'cuz I'm fucked now, and I knew it and proved it rapidly. Because once you're doing those things together, it's time to get arrested."
Then, if you're an honest-to-Buddha addict, it's time to get clean, fuck up, and get arrested again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Time to tell everybody who ever believed in you, loved you, and gave you another chance—including the judge—to get fucked. Time to lose the wife, lose the kid, lose the gig. Time to go from personage to punch line.
"I'm Retread Fred, serial relapser. That's the story."
Yep, that's the story. But that story isn't him; hell, it's not even this story.
In this story, the most flatulent actor of his generation swings by the next noon, and it's off to the races again. We hit a deli in Beverly Hills for a long nosh with an old pal of his, and on the way back to the car, Downey ducks into a soap shop to drop a quick $700 on gifts. He's hobbling like a man with a large pole up his butt, stiff from this morning's kung-fu sparring, stuck in a phase his sifu calls "tasting the cup of bitters."
"In essence," he explains, "every single thing you do is wrong, even though you're doing everything right—because you're not really there with the other person. It's just amazing. It's so hard to show up for a process that's so simple in its complexity—and this goes for getting clean, this goes for showing up for a relationship, this goes for chasing your dreams—" Oy. Me, I'm sore from listening. Exhausted. Shitfaced, whirling drunk on a bottomless cup of Downey.
Look, I say, you've given me three cover stories already.
"We need ten," he says. No. What I need is an ending.
This story ends late that night in Brentwood. Quietly.
This story ends with Mrs. Junior—her long-fingered hands are lovely indeed, and so's the rest of her—and dark-eyed Indio and Little Bobby wolfing some Thai, a little Saturday-night-in-the-cul-de-sac curry, delivered piping hot.
This story ends with two fat albums of wedding photos of the beaming summer day that Jailhouse Jim, Retread Fred, Tiptoe Terry, Half-Measures Hal, Steady Eddie, and Susie Q, a savvy Jewish girl from Chicagoland by way of the USC film program and obviously in no need of any hand-lettered reminder about rules and tools, all tied the knot.
This story ends with Iron Man, still sore from his cup of bitters, curling up on the couch under some kind of new-age Zen healing wrap to watch Helen Mirren in The Queen with the missus.
This story ends with Shaman Boy and the Young Master—with Robert Downey Jr. and Indio, with a forty-one-year-old man and his thirteen-year-old boy—facing each other in silhouette down a shadowed hallway.
They stand clasped, each one's head on the other's shoulder, without words or distance between them. Only their hands move, trading rhythm in turn, drumming love in call and answer upon each other's back. The beat flows and ebbs, crackling in the dark, numinous.
I don't know how long it goes, don't know what it may mean, don't know if Downey is wet-eyed or grinning. I know that he is finally silent, finally beyond words. 