When the Rooftops of Your Mind Come Falling Down

The screenplay for “Falling Down” was a reaction to a lot of things. It is difficult to be specific about interior motivations, especially if they are buried back at the beginning of a long process of bringing clarity to a mental soup concocted of the past and present, the personal and public. What follows are a few of the images and thoughts that assailed me at the beginning and that I still find relevant, now that the journey is over.

In Los Angeles, a few years back, a big-rig trucker suddenly started ramming cars from behind and running them off the road. The story caught my imagination. I figured he got cut off by one too many four-seater tin-mobiles and suddenly had the revelation that there was no reason in a finite universe why a 10-ton truck had to put up with it. He must have known at some point that he wasn’t going to get away with it, but he went ahead anyway. What thought processes did he go through?

Back East, around the same time, a trio went off on a three-state crime spree, leaving behind a trail a mile wide, like a red arrow scrawled on a map. They left their modus operandi flapping in the breeze along with their car idling in the parking lot of who knows how many convenience stores. They didn’t bother with masks, just pulled their guns out, grabbed the money, shot anybody who protested and headed down the road to their next port of call. I wondered, “Did they feel omnipotent, or was it that they just didn’t care?”

It was during this period, within a couple of years of each other, that my parents died. I had the strange sensation that the room I was sitting in had had its roof torn off and suddenly there was nothing over me. I realized I’d been carrying them around in my mind like a strong, secure roof over a vulnerable, young child. The fact that I was no longer young and they were no longer strong didn’t matter. It was an illusion but a roof is a roof, illusory or otherwise. It offers comfort and security. The idea came to me that it was the same feeling I had toward “the law of the land.”

I have this feeling that all police officers are older than I am. I can’t help it. I don’t care if it’s a fresh-faced kid who got out of the academy a week ago and has never pulled a gun on anything but a pistol range. I still relate to the officer as some kind of surrogate parent who is going to scold me for playing too roughly on the furniture. I still feel safe on the streets of L.A., not the smartest feeling to have. I can’t help it. I have to consciously remind myself that the law of the land is not a great big roof, floating in the sky, protecting me. I know that’s an illusion. I know there are never enough cops and those there are can’t be everywhere at once and bells don’t go off every time an infraction happens.

*

Building respect for the law in the minds of the citizenry has always been more cost-effective than building jails. We rely on this. I think that’s why judges wear robes like ministers of God and police are given uniforms designed to impress. These are illusory uprights, constructed of pure faith, supporting rooftops of the mind, somewhat like “Peter Pan,” Act III, where Tinkerbell is dying, her light fading. Peter Pan, played by a woman in her 40s in green tights and rubber ears, comes down to the footlights and pleads for unconditional faith to save the life of her tiny friend, portrayed by a follow-spot operated by a 60-year-old stagehand. All the kids in the audience respond with heartfelt squeals. It’s not as easy for grown-ups.

My dad, for example, believed in his uniform. He put 17 years into the U.S. Navy, making seven trips to Guadalcanal in a ship that survived a near-miss by a Japanese kamikaze. But in the late ‘50s he was passed over for higher rank. America didn’t need him anymore. He felt a little betrayed, like a promise had been broken. He’d been willing to lay it all on the line. That kamikaze could easily have slammed into that ship and, in the end, he’d been tossed out on his can, too young to retire, too old to start over.

Everybody reacts to having their roof torn off in different ways. My dad drank too much and swatted his wife and kids around. It wasn’t that he was a bad man. It was accepted behavior then and he struck out in flashes of uncontrollable temper and then felt bad. It could have been worse. My friend Timmy’s dad was a cold SOB who would wail on Timmy regularly with a belt. He was the kind who did it in the name of “discipline,” letting the poor kid know it was coming and then giving it to him but good. He probably told himself it would hold Timmy in good stead, making him a better man in the long run. That line of reasoning is still alive and well.

We are all angry. We all want to strike out but we also all want to feel good about it. We want to feel justified in our anger even if it’s some poor kid we’re smacking around. All too often, lately, when that anger comes, there’s a gun accessible and what once was a black eye is now a dead body. It’s hard to check tomorrow’s weather without running across a story of a “disgruntled someone-or-other” who “ran amok.” No place is safe anymore, not even the hospitals where they patch up the victims.

Everyone reacts differently to rooftops of the mind coming down. They come down like puffs of smoke, silently. It could happen to the person sitting next to you in traffic and you wouldn’t hear it. That wouldn’t lessen the reality of its destruction, or of what is left above: the starry, scary sky of absolute freedom. When my parents died I felt, buried way down below the sorrow and fear, a secret, guilty feeling: The commander was gone, he was through giving orders. I was free.