chevy chase drives alone

I'm sweating. It's appropriate. It's nothing new. Everyone reaches a certain pitch, you know? We're all tuned differently, but we can all get there.

I can't stop driving in circles on Martha's Vineyard, thinking about Farley.

Really, could it have gone worse? Not so much having been cut down in his prime as having bowled through every conceivable barrier life presented and then looked for more, and found nothing. Wall, doorway, ceiling--both real and metaphorical--were smashed. There wasn't anything left for him to knock down. In the face of his energy, life had finally retreated at his feet, bowed its head, and sat there, obedient. Once that happens, who to talk to?

There are times when you can actually observe yourself. They're rare, but they happen. I'm not sure if the frequency of these times is inversely proportional to your level of notoriety, if the fame impinges on your ability to contextualize your own life, or if everyone has the same problem and fame is simply an excuse. Whatever the case, I can see myself now. I can see my tiny car zooming along, chasing its own headlights, thinking about Chris Farley, and it all seems so much smaller than it actually is. Chris Farley! An American folk hero, and he came to me for spinal advice. Spinal advice.

"Christ, Chris! When you throw yourself around, how are you staying safe? What kind of precautions are you taking when you rip through a Styrofoam wall onto backstage concrete?"

"Precautions, Chevy?"

Sure, I partied with him. We all did. Once, he carried me up a set of stairs, plopped me at the top, and fell back down, like a Sequoia, completely blind to what might be in his way. You can't imagine the sound. And the laughs.

Picture yourself flying through the air. You're cutting through it like a scythe, slicing through the fabric of the universe. Anything--and I mean anything--that comes in your way is vanquished, no match for whatever the supernatural force is that's fueling you. Even your past, all the things you'd ever want to forget or defeat, cowers.

This isn't happening at a great height; you're actually only a few feet above the earth. Which makes it all the more enjoyable, because you can actually relate your greatness to other people. They do not melt into abstraction. They stay present. They are participating in your triumph.

You're up there, and there's not even the hint of any downward curve, not even the mention of a parabola anywhere near your person. In fact, if you stop thinking and hold your breath, and pay very close attention, you may still be moving up. The only readily available equivalent image I can conjure up to assist you here is Michael Jordan, splayed out across time, which he's made take the form of air; his endeavor has moved beyond being a battle with gravity, it's become a battle with history. And you're him. And you're winning. In fact, you've won. (If the image feels slightly used, it's only because it's so powerful.)

That's the best and only way I can describe myself in 1976. I had won.

The God's honest truth, though, is that that feeling never leaves. Once you've had it, it's in you. People talk about the problem of getting there, that it leaves you searching for that high again, but it's not about the high--it's about self-confidence. Drugs, sex, etc. aren't a search, but a dulling, whether conscious or subconscious, of the knowledge that the universe can be controlled.

For the most part, I've learned to let the stories people tell about my life, both the real and the imagined, wash over me. It's like standing with your ankles in the surf; the first waves scar the sand with the imprints of your feet, but each subsequent swell is doomed to do less damage. Those first few grooves drop you down a bit, and never completely go away, but they end up helping you--no one can ever hurt you that way again.

Except for the stories about John.

Whose greatest rival isn't his greatest ally? His greatest asset? It might strike as armchair psychology, but the truth is that I never would have pushed myself the way I did if I hadn't had a threat as strong as John, as...medieval as John. He was the only one who ever scared me--later, maybe Billy gave me doubts--but when it was all first happening, it was John who gripped me. Everyone else was stars. He and I were constellations. His eyes would go so wild.

I'll admit it: he's the only one I ever wanted to make laugh. Because when I did, it meant I'd won. It's the same reason I stopped laughing when he performed: I knew if I gave him the slightest bit of notice I thought he was funny, was doing good work, it would not only pump him up, but also bring me down.

But not because he simply would have been funnier than me; actually, I knew if he knew I thought he was funny, he would stop trying so hard. And then I, in turn, would stop giving it my all. In a way, I was punishing myself into greatness by punishing him. I was withholding, from both of us. It was a brutal dance.

I didn't attend John's funeral, so this is the first time I'll have visited his grave. At the time, I was in the middle of shooting Modern Problems and said I couldn't make it. The excuse was convenient because I didn't want to be there. It would have confused things. For everyone.

Now that I'm finally here on Martha's Vineyard, for the first time, I suppose I'm less confused about a few things. But I'm somehow even more confused by the fact that what we were fighting over was a couple of jokes: pratfalls, one-liners, accents, etc.

Maybe, though, it's actually people we were fighting over.

I'm sticking to a plastic chair in a motel in Olympia, inhaling bites of terrible, bland Thai food in the midst of a frustration that's prompted not as much by the lack of taste or the overabundance of general heat and humidity, as by the terrible television I'm cycling through. I'll watch for thirty seconds, tentatively settle in to whatever's being presented, and then something will set me off--the pitch of the laugh track, an awkward-looking physical joke--into a fitful bout of remote mashing until I find something that's not a commercial. Rinse and repeat.

But then? But then Letterman comes on. What a fucking nut. What a ballsy toothpick of a man. The smartest guy on the desert island.

Is that even a metaphor? It's one I'm using, anyway. Chalk it up to the humidity.

When they put a briefcase full of money in front of you, you have to listen. And you have to understand that on top of the money, the early 90s were not the kindest of years to me. I wasn't yet an elder statesman, like I am now, and the sense that I could resurrect whatever it was that I had once had was all but gone. I was nationless.

But I wasn't dead. We don't die, we just feel dead. I truly thought I had something left to give. There's this sense that I'm an absolute robot, but it's not true--I have empathy.

At the same time, goodness knows why they did what they did. Thought of me, I mean. I never rehearsed. Or anything.

Time moves much slower on television than you would ever imagine. Minutes smear long, gaps in entertainment don't feel like momentary pinches, but rather like brandings--the audience holds the burning iron to your flesh. And then they hold it there some more. You sweat as you smile.

I was in so over my head.

i am not simply a gag.

Actor Dennis Hopper said after a guest appearance that Chase was feeling the pressure. "God, he is so nervous. I feel sorry for him," Hopper said. "He picks up a glass and he is shaking. . . . He has to relax."

there wasn't anything else he could have said. believe me, i know.

One of the only times I was happy after 1981 was riding shotgun with Dennis Hopper down to Santa Monica, to buy big waffle cones of chocolate chip ice cream and watch hobby surfers. There was a tiny shop on the boardwalk he swore by (I can't remember who tipped him to it, but I want to say it was Martin Sheen), and the college girls working there always did a perfect job of pretending not to recognize us. Faint smiles rippled over their faces each time we stepped into line, but they limited sharing their excitement with each other to barely perceptible eyebrow raises and sideways glances.

At first, we ventured there because leaving Hollywood made us feel free. But we kept returning because they were excited to see us and yet were good enough to play along with our charade, and we recognized that that gave us something deeper than simple freedom: an ultimately more enjoyable sense of calm. For that stroke of dignity, we always tipped them well.

In fact, we used to tip exorbitant sums--sometimes twenty or thirty dollars for three dollars worth of ice cream. It got to be a sort of game between Dennis and me, to the point where we'd bring the girls valuable items in lieu of cash. I remember I found two mismatched diamond earrings days after one of my Papeete Pool Parties; I threw them in my pocket and used them as a tip. Dennis once brought a painting he'd done.

This arms race of generosity culminated in us buying them a puppy. It was actually my idea--I told Dennis about it one day while he was driving me back to my house. He was ecstatic, immediately in; he laughed like a waterfall. When we recounted the story later, I'd let him run with it and claim the idea as his own. His initial response was so honest that even I knew it wasn't worth butting heads over the credit.

The day we delivered the puppy, I walked up to the counter and asked for the usual, and the girl at the counter--who was working alone that afternoon--took our order and retreated to the back. When she returned, she was wearing the mismatched set of earrings I'd left some weeks before. It was a nice touch. I watched them dangle as she scooped the ice cream onto two sugar cones.

When it came time to pay, I reached into my pockets, but...came up with nothing. Seemingly surprised, I performed an in-depth search of all my pockets, and again found no money. Feigning that I was all empty, I looked at Dennis, who responded that he didn't have any cash either. Then, after making a show of his mock embarrassment, he disappeared around the corner of the shack to escape. The girl knew we were joking, but had opened her mouth and was about to let it slide anyway, when Dennis reappeared with the puppy. It was a fuzzy, black Cocker Spaniel. The girl's face lit up.

Later, we sat on the hood of his car and talked about renting a long white boat and traveling to Mexico, with Coppolla, for as long as we could all manage. It was a shared dream we'd happened upon during one of our outings, and we always managed to come back to it. We'd explored all the angles a thousand times over, but that day, it somehow felt new again to sit there and hash out the well-worn angles for an hour while we watched people attempt to stand up and ride the ocean. I hate to admit it, but I must've whistled Sloop John B. We reached a comfort.

For the rest of the summer, every time we'd come by the shack, the dog would be there, waiting for us along with the girls. They named her Easy Rider, which Dennis and I both liked.

July bled into August, and the dream of the boat trip faded in the face of real life. The ice cream trips likewise started petering out, finally ending for good when Dennis left to work on Rumble Fish. Then I left to work on the first Vacation movie, which was really the beginning of the end.

I'd run into him at parties, catch a glimpse of him in the middle of late-night scenes. In that world, when women were around him, their eyes seemed to be screaming, but somehow excited in their fear.

I liked him, nonetheless. We shared a respite. They're few and far between for us.

i don't believe in snl.

i don't believe in lorne michaels.

I drive alone. Down a dark strip of highway stretched straight ahead, an asphalt runner rug below a curving mist. The mist a simmering grey vine, twisting like a stubborn holdout of hair on the craggy battlefield of an aging comedian’s once-proud scalp. The hairline of this comedian something previously cherished, now long gone and avoided; a metaphor for his career. If you want to get cute.

I could be somewhere outside Ipswich. I could be in Michigan. I could be in Texas, swallowed and stuck in its gut, surfing this way and that on giant slicks of oil. I could also be approaching a bridge in Oregon, which I am.

But where I am doesn’t really matter right now—what matters is that I drive alone but I am not alone. My companion is sleeping, but it will awake. It will wipe its eyes, and it will look in the rear-view. And, as it always does, it will laugh at what it sees. At itself. At me.

The end result of a lifetime of well-timed falls, improvised twists, purposeful flubs, deadpan flirting, and the purest of snow-white cocaines is that I can now think only of how much more there could have been. Trapped in a cruel Groundhog Day, I play scenes over and over in my head, wondering how it all went wrong, until I'm too exhausted even to sleep.

But my mental retreads amount to nothing, save for a slapstick version of Sisyphus, starring me circa 1991. In a life full of questionable career moves, it's my worst, most painful role--the gag is only on me. Brief moments of respite, such as this, serve only to remind of how weary I truly am. And then, the cycle repeats.