Читать книгу DYING TO MAKE A FILM - Sir Ray Mann - Страница 5

In Los Angeles I stayed with my brother’s friend Levi at a boarding house near downtown. I slept on the sofa in Levi’s room. There was one single bathroom upstairs that all the tenants shared. The owner of the place was an old black woman named Momma Betty, or Momma as we called her, and she always talked about how she used to work for the LAPD as a policewoman. We never knew if the story was true, but we often went downstairs to her apartment and listened to her stories.

Levi was also into acting, and so the both of us searched for a good acting school we could afford. We found a place over on Pico and Vermont called the “Inner City Cultural Center” that was a performing arts school that taught dance, singing, and drama. Not only did the place have a few successful TV and film actors teaching classes like Debbie Allen and Glynn Turman, but it was also a great place to hang out. We spent a lot of time there even when we weren’t acting; it sort of became a home away from home.

I picked up a nonpaying job over at Trade Tec College and taught karate a couple of times a week to women on campus who had been harassed. In my class I met a nice-looking black woman with a big afro named Betty Wilcox. She studied business, and after a few classes we began to talk a bit more and then we had lunch together. Within a week, we were going steady. At first, I wasn’t really romantically interested in Betty, but I was lonely and in need of female companionship. Betty and I went out for about four months and decided to get married; it was a crazy idea because I was only 18 and didn’t know crap about life.

We got married downtown at one of those little quick wedding chapels, and a week later we got an apartment in Los Angeles. My friend JC flew out to see me for a couple of days, and he could not believe that I had gotten married so fast, particularly to someone who seemed to him to be the wrong woman. All the time JC was visiting, Betty and I were at each other’s throats about one thing or another. JC flew back to Florida, and within two weeks Betty and I moved to another apartment out in Long Beach. We were just not getting along. Betty had a bad alcohol problem—one of her co-workers at the Carson City Hall would call me at home and tell me that Betty came to work drunk five days a week. I also suspected that she was cheating on me, and this would be confirmed later. I got Betty into AA for alcohol treatment, but she quit almost immediately and kept up her normal routine. I had had enough, and after being married for just under a year, I filed for divorce. It was time to get out.

While all this was happening, I read the newspaper one morning and I saw an article that stated that the wedding chapel where we got married was an illegal operation and gave out bogus marriage licenses. I couldn’t believe it. We were never officially married! But just to be sure, I filed a “Summary Dissolution” for couples who had been married under one year and wanted to separate.

Betty moved out and I got myself another apartment, and soon I found a film agent on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Earnestine McClendon was one of the only few black agents in the business at that time. She sent me on a few auditions for TV commercials and one for a film, but that was about it. The work was coming so slow that I had to find some temp work, and after a few odd jobs, I picked up a full-time job as a graveyard-shift security guard at a mall.

While I waited for my acting career to take off, I met a new tenant at my apartment complex by the name of Reverend Jones. He reminded me of Bill Cosby, but with a white beard. Reverend Jones and I would talk at the complex about the Bible, and as we got to know each other better I would stay over at his place late just to have a one-on-one Bible study. We did that for about a year and it really opened up my mind about who God was and what God expected of me as a person. Reverend Jones suggested that we both save a little money by moving in together, and so I moved in and we studied the Bible seven days a week. Soon, we started a church in his little apartment called Mount Sinai. We got some of the tenants at the apartment to attend, and it was a great feeling. Reverend Jones also helped out some troubled youths in the neighborhood; they would stop by and he would feed them and preach the Bible.

One of the youths Reverend helped was a 14-year-old kid named David who was half Mexican and half white. He looked like a young John Belushi. David lived with his alcoholic mother, but he often ended up sleeping at our place. David could be wild at times, like the time I had to stop him from sniffing car gasoline to get high. But he was a good guy who was generous with the few things he had.

About this time I met another girl at the apartment complex named Pam who had just gone through some personal relationship problems. She invited me to go her church over in Gardena and I jumped at the chance. That Sunday we drove out to Gardena in her car to a little church called Christian Apogee Church. The place was in a little corner building that the church was renting out, and the pastor was a lady by the name of Audra. I had heard that Audra was a member of the mega church called Crenshaw Christian Center in Inglewood, but it was rumored that she left to form her own church after some inner-church problems. I thought the service was very good and felt at home because my mom had always taken us to small churches like that where there were about twenty-five people in attendance.

During the service I spotted a young girl sitting up front who looked to be of mixed race. I thought she was very pretty with her golden brown hair, but I was too shy to introduce myself, and so I just watched her throughout the whole service. After the service Pam took me up to meet the pastor and I found myself standing right next to the girl. I heard someone call her Laura from across the church, and just like that I had a name to go with that pretty face. As I shook the hand of the Pastor and turned to walk away I found myself standing eye-to-eye with Laura.

I smiled and she smiled back and I could also see Pam eyeing the both of us—it appeared that Pam was a little jealous, because her attitude quickly changed towards me. Pam never asked me to go to that church again with her, so a couple of Sundays later I got David to go with me. We sat in the back, and right away I spotted Laura sitting next to the same lady she was sitting next to before. I told David that we needed to get closer to Laura, so we moved to the seat right behind her, and as we sat down Laura slightly turned around and smiled at me. She gave me butterflies, and from the way she looked at me I could tell that there was a definite connection between us.

But Laura looked so young, a fact that bothered me. I thought that she could be maybe sixteen or seventeen. I also began to suspect that the woman sitting next to Laura was her mother. After the service I told David that we had to hang around because I just had to find out how old she was, and so I walked over and formally introduced myself. She smiled and introduced herself and then her mother. I introduced David. Laura’s mother was then called away and as soon as she excused herself, Laura and I began to talk. I asked her how long she had been coming to this church, I asked her where she was from, and then I asked her how old she was; she gave a big smile. “Seventeen” she replied and my heart almost dropped to the floor. I was 21 and she was underage. She then said that she would be eighteen in about six months. Well, that made me feel a little better. Then I thought to myself that it might be worth the gamble. After all, she was very pretty and a church-going girl. I asked her if I could have her phone number and to my shock she gave it to me. I then asked her if she had a boyfriend and she said no.

After getting her phone number I was so excited that I hurried out of the church without saying good bye to anyone. I was in love and it felt so good. I never saw Pam at that church again; I guess she had started to like me and when she saw that I had eyes for Laura she decided to just stay away. I did see her at the apartment complex from time to time and I also helped her move to another apartment closer to the beach. After that, I only saw Pam a couple more times and then we just lost touch with each other.

Laura and I called each other almost six or seven times a day, and I would see her on Sundays at church. Soon I started going to her house maybe four times a week. I got to know Laura’s mother and her older sister Leslie very well. Laura’s father and mother were divorced so it was just the three of them living there. I liked both Laura’s mother and father and they treated me with respect. Laura went to a private school in Los Angeles called Immaculate Heart where she played basketball. She was pretty good and I spent a lot of time at her school games with her mother and sister. We also went to a lot of basketball games at the University of Southern California where Laura’s sister Leslie attended. We were all big fans, and for me it was the best of times. When Laura graduated I took her to her high school prom; we went to Disneyland and had the reception at the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. On the night I picked Laura up from her house her mother joked that I was rocking the cradle because Laura was only seventeen.

Laura, a future congresswomen, could be very wild at times, even to a dangerous extent. One day I picked her up at her house and was taking her to Long Beach for lunch, but as we were driving down the freeway, Laura slammed her foot down on my foot over the gas pedal. As the car lunged forward down the highway and I tried to control it, she said, “You have to learn how to live a little fast.” Laura laughed and wouldn’t take her foot off of mine even though we were starting to weave into other lanes. We hit 90 mph and I told her to move her foot because we were going to crash, but she just kept laughing and called me scaredy cat. I yelled for her to move her foot and she finally did, and then she crawled into the back seat and said that I should learn how to have some fun. I told her that there was no fun in crashing and dying and I wasn’t going to leave Earth that way. She didn’t speak to me for about ten minutes.

Growing up in Florida as a teen I had met some people who always talked world politics and international affairs, and I would sit often with them at a local gas station where they would gather, drink tea, and talk about Israel, Lebanon, and the other countries. These people were from different parts of the world, but we all gathered at a certain time of the day to talk politics. I loved it. As a teen I knew the names of the major Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian politicians, plus those in the rest of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. One of the things I loved about Laura was that she was always ready to hear what I had to say about politics. If we were together at a basketball game and I started to talk about politics, Laura would tell her mother and sister to be quiet because I was talking. Laura would look me in the eyes and soak in everything I was saying about politics and she was a great listener. I guess I could give myself a little credit for putting the political bug in her ear.

At that time in our lives Laura and I were young Christians who were on fire for Christ, and we would spend a great majority of our life either in church, at Christian conventions, or at a Bible study at someone’s house. We felt that the Lord was really working in our lives, and I can truly say that Laura had a love for serving the lord.

One day a lady visiting Reverend Jones handed me a book called I Believe in Visions, written by Pastor Kenneth Hagan Jr. That book really opened my eyes and my faith; a few weeks after finishing the book I heard on the radio that Kenneth Hagan was coming to the Long Beach Arena. I called Laura and invited her to come with me. The next night I had a dream—this was 1980, and up until this time I had never had a dream which related to God or the church—but in this dream I was shown the inside of the Long Beach Arena, a place I had never been. I was standing in a long line on what appeared to be the north side of the arena, just to the right of center stage where Kenneth Hagan was laying hands on attendees before him. I was in the line which was heading to the stage, and in the dream it seemed it was being made clear to me where I was to stand and which way I was to go. I could see very clearly the paint color and the scratches on the wall; it was as if God wanted me to see where I would be or where he was going to put me and I knew it the moment I woke up. I knew what it meant and what God was showing me. Without a doubt, I knew where the dream came from, but I had other ideas. I wanted to go to the convention, but I was not going to get in line and go up on stage.

I called Laura and told her that I wasn’t going to the convention and she got upset. A week later, I reluctantly gave in to Laura’s constant phone calls about the convention and went when the time came. Once inside the arena, I made sure that we went to the south side of the arena. I was going to do everything in my power to prove that dream wrong. The ushers gave out some kind of raffle ticket, or at least that’s what I thought they were, and I took one for the both of us. We climbed the bleacher seats to about midway to the top and sat down. I said in my mind I guess that dream’s not coming true after all, and I settled back and waited for Kenneth Hagan to come out on stage.

As the crowd settled into their seats, one of the ushers made an announcement from the stage and asked that all those attendees who got a raffle ticket in their hands please come down from their seats. I looked at Laura and smiled and said, “Okay, I’ll be right back. Maybe I won a prize.”

As I got down to the bottom, I quickly turned to the opposite side of the arena that was to my right, but the usher grabbed my arm and told me to go the other way, towards the north side. An usher placed me in a line at the exact same spot as in my dream, and I saw the paint color and scratches. At that moment one of the assistants onstage announced that Kenneth Hagan was tired from the earlier convention that day and needed to rest, and that Pastor Frederick K. Price would be filling in for him tonight.

As the line moved up to the stage the ushers revealed what was happening. They said that all of those who had gotten tickets when they came in would be prayed for and have hands laid on them and they could receive the Holy Spirit and be saved. My jaw dropped as I looked upward towards where Laura was seated. For the first time in my life I had consistently tried to go against God’s plan and I had lost. I went onstage and received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, but old Ray still had one more act of resistance up his sleeve. I could see that everyone else who had gone up on stage before me had fallen down once the pastor laid hands on him or her. I said to myself out loud that I wasn’t going to fall down, no matter what, so when I got up onstage and Pastor Price got ready to lay his hands on me, I planted my feet strongly on the floor, absolutely determined not to go down. But the next thing I knew the ushers were helping me get up off the floor.

In the car on the way to dropping Laura off, I revealed the dream to her and what I had tried to do to keep it from becoming a reality, and she just smiled and said, “God is wonderful.” I kissed Laura in her driveway and watched her go in, and then drove off.

During my drive home my thoughts were only about the dream and the events that followed it. A couple of weeks later Laura and I went to a Bible study at a pastor’s house and I brought David along with me. Once at the Bible study the pastor began to give divine messages concerning our lives in the future, and she looked at Laura and said something to the effect that she would be someone of influence, and then she looked at me and said that I would be likened unto Moses. Everyone almost stopped breathing for a moment and looked at me; Laura nudged me in my side with her elbow and said, “Wow.”

The pastor told David he would be an evangelist, and David said there was no way that would happen because he had other plans for his life, and being an evangelist one not one of them.

A few weeks later Laura got an invitation to try out for the Women’s Olympic basketball team. She began to practice hard at the gym, and she and I would play some pickup games a couple times a week. When the tryouts came, Laura flew to Colorado very excited. Her heart was set on making that team and we were all behind her, but she fell short and returned home to Los Angeles very sad.

A few months later Laura and I had a minor disagreement inside the USC basketball gym, after which I walked away and told her the relationship was over. She never called me and I never called her. To my surprise, it really was over. I then made plans to move out of Reverend Jones’ place, I really needed privacy and found a little place over in East LA above a church. I still couldn’t shake the dream and the Long Beach Arena event; all I knew was that there was a change inside of me and it felt good. My major goal was to immerse myself fully into my acting and hopefully get a break. It was time to move on, time to knock down the doors of Hollywood. After all, this was the reason I came west and I had to focus. Now I had to become a star.

The little room above the church was infested with roaches. The pastor of the church made it a point with me that it was important that I attend church downstairs because after all, this was one of the reasons she let me have the room. It seemed to me back then that she was running some kind of cult church because the people who stayed there in the rooms above the church were almost worshiping her in a way. I knew how we were supposed look up to pastors and all that, but sometimes I would go downstairs with my friend Larry who also lived in one of the rooms and when we visited her in her little house, some of her church members would be washing her feet, combing her hair, dressing her, cooking for her, and so on.

I just found it kind of strange that all of this was going on. There were a lot of broken families living in some of those rooms. It was right about the same time that Jim Jones killed all those people from his church in Guyana. Some of the people in this church had lost family members, and I would see these people sitting around at the pastor’s feet in her house, never smiling, never really looking anyone in the face. Most of the time they kept their heads down to the floor as they sat around the pastor. I asked my friend Larry one night when we were downstairs visiting the pastor what was wrong with these people who always sit at the pastor’s feet and never smile. I figured in my mind that if they were Christians and they knew the Lord then they should smile a little sometimes. Larry finally pulled me to the side one evening and told me that these were relatives of some of the people who got killed with Jim Jones down in Guyana. It became very clear to me then; these people were in mourning for their loved ones. At that point, I did feel a little guilty for questioning the church, the pastor, and the people who hung out around there. This was the first time in my life that I was finding God and the church on my own without my mother, so all the things that were going on around me, as far as the church was concerned, were new territory. But I had just had my own in counter with God, and I needed to be sure this place really had God in it. Although I was a young Christian, I still knew the stories of how people in the church took their eyes off of God and began to focus on the pastor and got lost. It can happen before you know it.

A few days later Larry and I got into a big fight over his ex-girlfriend Rachel; they had broken up at the church and she asked me to give her and her kids a ride home. This didn’t sit well with Larry, and Rachel asked me to stay over for a while and have some dinner. It had already gotten dark outside, and as we were sitting at the table talking, she heard a noise outside of the window near the dining room.

She jumped up and said, “Oh my God, it’s Larry spying on me!” She was afraid of him and felt he would do something to hurt her. I started to get concerned myself because I knew he was really in love with her and I didn’t want him to think I was trying to make a move on her. I really liked her kids, and I thought we were all friends, but after hearing him outside the window and seeing the fear on her face, I started to feel a little out of place.

The next thing we heard was a knock on the door. Rachel was afraid to open it, so I went to the door and slowly looked out, and sure enough it was Larry looking me dead cold in the eyes like I had committed a cardinal sin by being in the house without him. He pushed me out of the way and charged directly towards Rachel. Her kids got scared as he argued with her, asking her why she had me sitting at her table. He then turned to me and told me that I was trying to take his woman. I simply turned towards the door and walked out and got into my sky-blue 1968 Chrysler New Yorker and drove off into the East LA night.

Later that night, Larry knocked on my door. I asked who it was and nobody answered. I got my pistol from under my bed and asked again who it was. This time I heard Larry’s voice saying, “Me, Larry.”

I put the pistol to my side and opened the door ever so slightly with the door chain still attached.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He just told me that I was in the wrong for hanging around his girl and that he knows I was trying to get her. He was in no mood to hear what I had to say. And just as quick as he knocked on my door, he walked away.

The next morning I got up and went down stairs and one of the church girls outside told me that Larry was moving out that day. I saw Larry hop into a strange car with his clothing and drive off. He looked back at me from the rear window as I came down the sidewalk in front of the church. He didn’t wave or anything, just turned back around, and that was it.

I felt sorry for Larry; he had known my big brother Willie Jr. back in Florida and had become a friend of mine when I met him in drama school. It just seemed shallow that he would let this thing with Rachel come between us, but what could I do? Back in Florida, I knew his mom, his sisters, his brother, and his stepfather, but he let a girl come between us. I guess stranger things happen, don’t they?

At that moment I decided to start writing a script that I always wanted to write. It would be a script that I would direct and star in, and over the next twenty days, I only knocked out some ten pages. I titled it Young Star, a story about a young kid who has dreams about going to Hollywood and becoming a big star.

The writer’s block didn’t go away, so I put the script down until I could get my flow going again. In the meantime, I hooked back up with my first girl in California: Betty. She would come over and hang out and sometimes stay the night, and during a conversation one night Betty asked me if I would like to go back to Florida with her.I told her that Florida was my second home and that I was starting to miss it, and yes, I was thinking just today that I would like to go back and see my friends and family. Betty said, “Well, let’s go!”

I was having a hard time finding a good job and getting acting work in Los Angeles, and she wasn’t getting along with her family, so going back to Florida seemed like the right idea at the right time. The next day, I made arrangements to sell my New Yorker at bottom price, the dealer making out like a bandit on the car. I then let the church pastor know of my intentions, and within five days Betty and I were on a plane heading for Fort Lauderdale. I had been away from home some three years; I had left for LA with a dream, a one-way plane ticket, and seventeen dollars in my pocket. I hadn’t yet achieved that dream, but I was still going strong.