Читать книгу DYING TO MAKE A FILM - Sir Ray Mann - Страница 3

The year is 1986 and I’m 23. Three hours after hanging out in Havana, Cuba, we climb back into the speedboat and it roars across the Atlantic. We hit speeds of up to 75 miles per hour, bouncing high above the surface, headed for the Bahamas. I think about my life, my acting career, the new movie that I’m going to write, produce and direct myself. But just fifteen minutes into the ride, the driver shuts off the engines and the boat slowly comes to a dead stop. The driver and William suddenly brandish guns and point them directly at me. My friend Ricardo jumps up. “Whoa! What’s up with the guns?”

“Shut up,” William barks. He’s the leader, and he’s drunk and has a crazy look in his eyes. Then he turns to me. “You a cop?”

Confused and terrified, I put my hands up. “Are you crazy? No, I’m not a cop!”

“Get in the water.”

I almost laugh; I can’t tell if William is serious or not. We’re miles from land. Ricardo tries to say something, but William points his finger at him, silencing my friend.

I look down at the churning water and then up at William and his gun. “This is bullshit,” I say. “I’m not a cop. I’m not getting into that water.” And then I turn to Ricardo who has gotten me involved with the job: “What kind of bullshit is this?”

Ricardo just stares back. I can tell he’s just as surprised by all this as I am. But he doesn’t have two guns pointed at his chest. I do. The cold Atlantic below sloshes against the side of our boat. Its bottom is invisible. There’s no way I’m getting in that water.

“I’d rather you shoot me than jump in there,” I say to William. I am serious. I’m a terrible swimmer; I almost drowned in summer camp as a boy. William puts the barrel of his gun inches away from my face: “That won’t be a problem.”

I know this guy is just trying to break me, to see if I can be trusted, but I also know this guy is crazy. And I’m crazy, too, for hooking up with these people. William’s eyes focus and grow as cold as ice. He’s going to shoot me, I think. What can I do? I could scream, but to whom? I’m in the middle of the damn Atlantic Ocean with a Colombian drug lord and one of his henchmen, both of whom work for the infamous Pablo Escobar. They have guns pointed at my face, calling me a cop. If I get out of this alive, the thought suddenly comes to me that no one will believe this story. This is right out of a Hollywood movie, and I’m the star and this is my close-up.

No, this is all very real. The drifting boat. The blank horizon. The guns. This is not a movie and I don’t know if I’m going to live or die.

William steadies his aim, and I do the only thing I can do: I jump in the water. It’s freezing and a shock runs up my body. Immediately, I swim over to the boat and cling to its side.

“Are you DEA?” William growls, keeping the gun on me.

The cold water crashes against my face. “What makes you think I’m a cop?” He doesn’t respond for a moment, and then says, “Let go of the boat.”

I look at Ricardo who nods quickly, and after I take a deep breath to summon whatever confidence I still have left, I let go. I immediately struggle to stay afloat. No one speaks for fifteen seconds. Treading water couldn’t be more difficult, and my left leg is soon ravaged by a strong, needling cramp. I grab the side of the boat again.

“I have a cramp,” I whimper through coughs. “I can’t hold on much longer.”

“Come on!” Ricardo screams at William. “Let him in! He’s not a cop!”

The driver suddenly stands and points over my head. Quietly, he says, “Sharks.”

I immediately piss myself at the word. Shark. Shark. I don’t want to, but I twist around to see two shark fins twenty feet away. They’re making their way towards the boat, towards me.

“Those are dolphins,” William laughs.

“Bullshit!” Ricardo screams. “Those are sharks!”

I can’t speak. I can’t do anything but stare at the two gray fins carving through the surface of the water.

William leans down over the side of the boat. Again, he asks if I’m a cop.

“I’m not a cop!” I shout. My voice doesn’t sound like my voice. Maybe this is a movie. It’s all so surreal. Is this really happening to me?

“Come on!” Ricardo begs. “I vouched for him. He’s not a cop! There’s no way Ray’s a cop!”

The fins separate left and right, and they keep heading towards me. Then they disappear underwater. Above my head, I hear William tell Ricardo he better be right.

Any second, I think, any second William and Ricardo are going to grab me by my arms and pull me back into the boat, but then something bumps up against my side. I’m afraid to look down because I know what it was that bumped me. Another cramp attacks my left leg, right above the other cramp, and I go under with salt water rushing into my mouth and nose.

Underwater, I see the two sharks circling me. They’re long and gray and I watch their big black eyes. I try to swim upwards, but the cramps intensify and I can’t reach the surface. I bob there like a piece of meat, and I know that’s what I look like to these two sharks.

An invisible hand suddenly grabs my hair and another grabs my shirt, and seconds later I’m rising above the water, gasping, waiting for a shark to pull me back down and never let go. Ricardo and William struggle together to pull me into the boat. The wait is over; one of the sharks rises out of the water just behind me. William screams. Ricardo and the driver scream. They rip me backwards and the shark slams down its jaws, biting the heel of my left sneaker, and then disappears with my shoe.

Inside the boat I’m in shock, freezing, cramping, out of breath. Did that just happen?

William kneels down and I can feel his warm breath on my cheek. “No hard feelings,” he says. “It’s just hard to trust anybody these days.”

The driver starts the boat and we take off, and I pass out.

***

I was born at Mercer County Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 21^st, 1958, at around 10:30 pm. My mother Alice Mann almost died during labor. She often describes how she was in a beautiful valley during the worst of the complications, and when she finally came through my father William Mann Sr. stood there by her side and said, “Welcome back.”

My neighborhood had a mixture of different races, which I loved. There were blacks, Irish, Germans, Italians; you name them and we had them. My father seemed to know everyone, and everyone seemed to know him and his reputation. He was a feared man in the city of Trenton, about 6 feet tall and weighing over 200 pounds, part Irish, part German, with quick and powerful fists. On the streets, my father was known as “Big Red.” No one faced him and went away standing. He would fight his friends, his enemies, strangers and the police. I thought of him as a man’s man, and I loved the guy. But he made too many enemies, and my mom, my siblings, and I lived in fear that one day someone would get the better of him, sneaking up from behind because they were too afraid to approach him head-on. My dad never did hit my mother, but he sure did make a lot of noise around the house when he came home from his favorite watering hole, a place called the Hi-Hat.

My parents had five children, and I was the second from the youngest. I learned one thing at an early age from my father: “Never be afraid of anyone.” I never was, so I fought often, and most of the time I took on the biggest guys in the crowd just like my dad did. If I couldn’t beat them, well it was okay because I had the backing of my oldest brother, Willie Jr., my brother Clarence who was a year older than me, and my old sister Debbie. Any one of these three would come to my aid at the drop of a hat, and they would never lose.

Clarence deftly inherited my father’s punching power and quickness, but he was a peaceful guy until he had to fight. Willie Jr. was more of a ladies’ man and less of a fighter, and his intelligence was unmatched. When he was young, Willie Jr. was tested, and my mother was told that her oldest son was, in fact, a genius. But make no mistake; if someone messed with my family, Willie Jr. was in their face. Debbie was not one to be played with, either, and I often thought that if she drank, she would be a female carbon copy of my dad.

One day Willie Jr. and some friends were going to form a group called the Junior Black Panthers, modeled after the radical group from the 60s and 70s, and my father hit the roof when he heard the news. My father beat Willie Jr., and then paid a visit to some of his friends. As the oldest child, Willie Jr. got the brunt of my father’s anger, but he also received the love a first child normally gets.

For me as a boy, life in Trenton was great, but I never knew the pain and suffering my mom and Willie Jr. endured from my father. I didn’t see all the things that went on around me, but I understood early on that all was not well in our house. As each winter season rolled around, my mother would say that one day they would move away from the bitter cold New Jersey snow and move south to Florida where she always dreamed of living.

I never thought that day would actually come. To me, winters in Trenton were both fun and exciting. Some of my closest friends were the Murphy boys who lived next door: four boys living alone with their father after their mother ran off with another man. Clarence Murphy Jr., whom we nicknamed “Snuffy,” was the oldest, and then there was David, Richard, and the youngest, Phillip. We played a lot of street ball and ran around the neighborhood and often went down to the creek, to the woods, and to the farmer’s field. Trenton was like our own 500-acre farm, and I had great times with the Murphy boys.

But inside our home, life was not all that fun and exciting. Many times my dad would be out at a bar or with one of his girlfriends, and our electricity would be cut off. When this happened, my mother grabbed the broom and methodically tapped the electrical wiring running from the street pole to our house, and she somehow got the lights working again. I never really learned how she did it, but it was what needed to be done to survive. There were many times we couldn’t locate my father to get some much-needed money, so my mother would scrape together a few dollars from her pocketbook and send us about a mile to Mary’s store on Pennington Road to buy a can of Pork ’N Beans and a pack of hot dogs. This was our standby meal, and thank God for it because it fed us for many years, and to this day I still love my Pork ‘N Beans and hot dogs.

My mother grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana during Segregation in the ’30s and ’40s as the oldest of nine kids. She often said she didn’t really have a childhood because it was spent taking care of her siblings. When my mother did have time, she played basketball and other sports in school, and she was very good. Combining my mother and father’s athleticism, my siblings and I had a natural love for sports, and we played most of them all, like basketball, baseball, football, swimming and soccer.

My two older brothers were my heroes, and I followed them like shadows. I had to be just like Willie and Clarence. But I was more mischievous than them, and I was always getting myself into some kind of trouble. The Good Lord must have put two angels in charge of me, and I’m sure they were overworked. I had big, bright hazel eyes with specks of blue and green. My eyes came from my father’s German and Irish roots, and in my neighborhood, a little black boy with those kinds of features stood out. Anytime there would be some kind of trouble in the neighborhood, my parents always asked one question: “Did he have big Hazel eyes?” Ninety-nine percent of the time the answer came back “Yes.” I can’t tell you how many times my eyes got me caught, but if I were smarter back then I would have worn sunglasses all the time.

One day while on my way to school, I was walking across a newly landscaped baseball field. For no reason, I began to rip up the freshly laid pieces of the grass sod and threw them into the air until they broke apart. It felt good at that moment—being a stupid kid doing stupid things—but fifteen seconds later I spotted a police car fast approaching the field. It kicked up a long cloud of dust as it made its way directly towards me. There was no place to run because I was in an open field, so I just dropped the sod and froze in my tracks and waited for the outcome.

The police car pulled almost right up to the toes of my shoes and out stepped two plainclothes detectives. The driver motioned for me to walk to the car, and when I got to the car they just opened up the rear door and told me to get in. They immediately drove off, asking me why I was destroying the property; my answer was that I was having a little fun. They told me that I had just committed a crime and that I was being taken to the Ewing Township jail for booking. One of the detectives then asked me my name, and when I told him the detectives looked at each other and just nodded their heads as if they knew me.

At the station, they made me sit on a bench, and I sat there for about two hours until Sergeant Dick Masterson walked in. The tall man walked directly over to me and said, “Let’s go.”

Sergeant Masterson knew my father somehow, either back from when they were boys or from the streets, I never found out, but I often stopped over at his house to say hi to him and his wife. Once in the car, Sergeant Masterson told me how wrong it was for me to have ripped up the baseball field like that. He then explained that it was city property and that my parents may have to pay the city back for what I destroyed. He said that he might be able to convince the two detectives not to press charges against me. I was relieved, but didn’t know how the detectives knew to call Sergeant Masterson, and I thought it better not to ask. The sergeant took me back to his house where his wife made some lunch, and afterwards the man gave me a stern warning not to do anything like that again. I promised that I would be a good boy from there on out. Mrs. Masterson packed a few sweet goodies for me and I went my way. My father and mother never mentioned anything about that incident to me, and so they must not have ever heard about it, because I’m sure I would have been in some very serious trouble.

My father didn’t beat us. That job was left to my mother. She had a favorite bush on the side of the house that grew the biggest, longest branches that were perfect for her to use as “Rods of Correction.” I hated those bushes, and even today when I see them in Los Angeles, I have to just shake my head and shudder. When I talk to my mom about those things now we just laugh, but it sure wasn’t funny back then because my mom meant business. She had five kids to raise, and from her experience in helping raise her brothers and sisters, she knew just what to do.

As a young boy, I don’t know what it was about birds, but I just seemed to love them. I would climb up into the trees to look at the baby birds in their nests, and sometimes I would take the baby birds out of the trees and then try to put them back without the mother bird missing them. My family teased me for my obsession with birds, but it all came to an end one nice summer day when I climbed the pine tree in our back yard. The day before I had heard the chirps of baby birds coming from its top branches and I was determined to find them.

I climbed high up into the tree and found them about fifteen feet up, very well hidden in a nest. The birds were doves, my favorite kind because they were not aggressive and the mothers would never attack you. Somehow when I went to pick the baby birds up out of the nest I lost my footing and went crashing to the ground. I hit the ground so hard it knocked the wind out of me for about a minute.

I thought I was going to die. No one knew where I was and I couldn’t scream for help. Finally after almost passing out, I forced some air in me. I checked myself out, and to my amazement I had no broken bones or anything, and after about thirty seconds I was up and walking again. After that day, I left birds alone.

During the summers, my mother signed my brother Clarence and me up for camp. The camp provided lots of fun activities, and one was to go swimming at Trenton State College, which was located just on the other side of the woods west of our camp grounds. My mother and my next-door neighbor Mrs. Murphy had both taken part-time jobs at the college in the cafeteria, and often I would slip away from the camp group to visit my mother in the kitchen where she’d slip me a little food

I didn’t know how to swim and I was too ashamed to tell anyone who didn’t already know. It seemed all the other kids were good swimmers and I thought that they would pick on me if I revealed the truth. I told the counselors I could swim, and this little lie would come back to haunt me.

The pool at Trenton State College was an indoor Olympic-size pool. On our first day, the camp counselors told everyone to go ahead and jump into the pool, so like a fool, that’s what I did. I started off in the shallow end and then I made my way down to the deep end not knowing that the pool bottom was about to drop. I realized it too late, and went straight to the bottom, from 5 feet to about 9 feet. I was drowning. I was drowning and no one was paying any attention to

I struggled to get to the surface but went back under, taking in what seemed to be gallons of water. I motioned for help, but no one came. Frantically I did whatever came to me, and I decided to stay under water with the little air I had in my lungs and just swim to the side of the pool, and it worked. I got one hand on the poolside and pulled my way up out of the water, gasping for air.

I crawled out of the pool and made my way to the locker room and sat down to catch my breath. It seemed as if God’s angels had lifted me up again. I didn’t tell anyone about that incident for many years; summer was too much fun and all my friends were there so I could not risk my parents pulling me away from it all

My father continued on with his drunken ways, never fully realizing the damage he was doing to his family. His extramarital affairs produced several children. My mother was a strong Christian woman, and she said she put up with it to keep the family unit together

Lots of people would often visit our house just to hang out. We had a nice house on a good piece of land with apple and pear trees, grape vines and more. It was a laid-back place with plenty of shade. Men popped over to see my dad and just hang out, including some Italian guys who my mother would later tell us when we were older were from one of the New Jersey crime families. “Good Fellas.”

One of these guys, Jimmy Testa, a good friend of our family, had gone to school with my mother in Trenton and he was the baseball coach of the little league team that my brother Willie played on. His boy Jimmy Jr. was also on the team and we knew his wife and daughter. We all loved Jimmy Sr. and his family. He reminded me of the actor Robert De Niro, but with a case of bad acne. Years later after we left Trenton we heard that Jimmy Sr. was killed in prison. We didn’t know the circumstances, but I came to understand that Jimmy Sr. was a mob guy. My mother was devastated to learn about the death of an old friend

In the summer of 1972, my mother had had enough. My father was still drinking and fighting and womanizing, and he told my mom to get out and don’t come back. And she did just that. She packed up what little items she could gather and told my father she was taking the two youngest kids with her for now, which was my brother Louis and me. She said she would send for the three oldest kids when she got settled. She knew the older ones could look out for each other, but as for Louis and me, she knew that we couldn’t survive in Trenton without her. Her plan was to head south to Georgia for a few months and stay with her aunt and uncle, then head down to Florida. That night we boarded a train and headed out of Trenton, and as it slowly pulled out of the station I waved goodbye to Jersey.