Hollywood Park Quotes
"We were never young. We were just too afraid of ourselves."
"Goodnight canyon. Goodnight mountain. Goodnight building. Goodnight stars."
"They call me 'Son.' Pronounced 'Suuuuuun' in a low baritone."
"There’s a land that I see where the children are free."
"I’ve never left the School, which is what everyone calls this place."
"You can sleep in the car. And when you wake up, you’ll be at Grandma and Grandpa’s house."
"That’s what she calls it: 'Frank, dear, will you refill my Dutch?'"
"We don’t know if that’s true because we don’t know if anything is true like space travel or Martians or the tooth fairy or Reaganomics."
"Bullets explode if you hit them with a hammer, there is no Santa Claus, do not cry in front of other boys."
"I feel a crowding, like my body is not my own."
"I’m just too small next to this mountain of reasons."
"That’s the power of a dad, I think. Your own private pit bull, your own private genie, your own private Zeus."
"But then sometimes I forget and I get mad. I want to run away. I’m scared and I’m sad. I have nowhere to put it."
"Every drunk knows he’s got a problem, but the drink is his God and his mistress."
"It’s good you’re here with your mom. It’s better that way ’cause he knows what he’s doing better ’n I do."
"You’ve got to hit ’em hard. That’s the whole point."
"It’s strange how that happens. Someone puts a kid in your life and next thing you know you’re like a…"
"We’re alone and it is winter and we are cold."
"I thought maybe I dreamed her up but there she is on the other end of that phone, 'shacked up' with my dad somewhere near the ocean on the other side of the mountains a million miles away."
"How about some cocoa? But not that sugar-free shit your mom buys. I got the good stuff."
"I carry the day with me in the back of my head, repeating the things he said over and over again."
"We care about the taste of salt in our mouths, the white foam in our hair, the soft waves as they pour over us."
"I see him standing next to Bonnie at the end of the hallway. He’s got a goofy smile and she’s decked out in a long purple dress."
"I drink my cocoa and try not to think about the bunnies, about the queasiness in my stomach."
"Perhaps it’s that we’re too busy to fight or because we can forget about the house on Breys Avenue or the fact that in Synanon we were alone and didn’t even know what an F-A-M-I-L-Y was."
"At the AA meetings, people say you can feel God when you walk through the woods, that he’s everywhere."
"All the true badasses are either dead or in prison."
"We needed money, so what else could we do? We ran numbers, smuggled drugs, stole some cars. You know, your basic nonsense."
"I never shot no one. But I been shot at a bunch of times. It was never that much money, just enough to get by."
"Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die."
"You ever hear Fats Domino or the Big Bopper? Now those were songs."
"It’s important to build trust with an employer," he says, telling us about his secret to success in the jam business.
"Anyone can apply for a job from the phone book or an ad in the newspaper. Do you get that? Are you with me?"
"But the thing people don’t understand about seeking employment is that the most important thing is trust."
"No one should ever ask for a job. Never look for work. Never…"
"You ask them questions about their business. What is the bottom line? What is the most important thing in the jam business?"
"Because no one ever asks them about their business and that makes them feel important."
"You just ask them these sorts of things and then shut up and let them talk."
"Anyway, when you’re done you can ask for introductions again. And this time they might say yes to hiring you because now they trust you. Make sense?"
"Isn’t that lying?" "No. It can be true that day."
"Don’t you ever talk to your mother like that again! You hear me?!"
"This is my house! I can act how I want! Big man! Big fucking man you are!"
"He needs to learn you can’t talk to your mother that way. You owe her an apology."
"I don’t have much in my life, but take it, it’s yours,"
"He’s lost control, Gerry. You can’t let him act like this."
"Those poor people, schlepping all across the desert covered in schmutz…"
"I know he’s unlovable, you don’t have to tell me,"
"You’re really gonna leave me? How can you leave me? You’re my son. You’re mine. Mine."
"You need a fucking attitude adjustment! You hear me?!"
"Fuck you and your cars and houses and 2.2 kids. Fuck you and your job at Hughes Aircraft building bombs for the government."
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
"It’s strange to feel so lonely. The point was to not feel lonely, to be among the men."
"We are here together and we will always be. Nothing can ever change that. Not even death can take it away. That’s what it means to be an F-A-M-I-L-Y."
"There are just so many stories my mother tells herself, illusions she believes, understandings that pad her life, for the same reason they pad the walls at the state hospital: to take away the sharp edges."
"I wish I could tell him. But there’s no way to give voice to this thing in me, this contradiction, the pride and the anger, the confusion and shame, the thing driving me forward that I love this man who I don’t want to be and I feel trapped by his choices to either abandon him or abandon my future."
"It’s an odd feeling because I’m aware that I’ve always known it. It’s just never been said out loud, in plain words: she lives in a different world, a different reality, one she has altered to make life easier."
"And being a Jollett man, the very thing that made me feel dangerous and cool, like I could flout all rules and conventions, suddenly felt like a liability and college—for a Jollett man whose uncles, brother and father had all been addicts who’d gone to jail—was nothing but a pipe dream."
"What is a son? What is a father? What are we to each other now?"
"I don’t know what to tell you. That’s abuse."
"Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
"Makes sense to me. Situations get too difficult sometimes and so it’s better to just move on down the road."
"It’s good that you came to see me. I really needed your help."
"I’m surprised by how quickly she turns from victim to prosecutor."
"You’re gonna have to accept that your trauma caused him trauma."
"We are at the Elks Lodge in Palm Springs. I remember this. I used to sit and listen to speeches about the future in rooms just like this, in another lifetime, when I had a future."
"I splash water on my face, sit down at my keyboard with my guitar and write a song about it. I don’t leave my apartment for three days."
"I have friends in this room. People who want to help. Everyone here knows what you’re going through because we’ve been through it too."
"I miss being a son, sitting in the sun with a racing form making jokes, eating corned beef sandwiches and feeling calm."
"I don’t know where to begin, so I guess I’ll just begin by saying drinking was never fun for me."
"The truth is the shame of it, of knowing I could’ve done better by him, it was really hard to live with."
"He looks up at me and asks, 'Don’t you have a show to play?'"
"So I immediately decide to ignore my proper role as journalist, my fear that he might be offended if I do, and just ask him about that Secret, how he writes songs."
"It's a wonderful feeling to be able to live a dream."
"And still you can’t change, to write it in a song, in thorough detail, aware, awake, viewing it from up close and from far away, drenched in metaphor and irony, and still you can’t change."
"Maybe I’ll just walk into the sea alone, carrying these broken pieces with me."
"Change is slow. Change is slow. Change is slow. And it takes a long time to feel like I know myself, to understand the landscape in my mind, to see the ways I acted out of fear, to understand the instinctual panics I felt and calm them."
"It's not easy. I get depressed. I get anxious about it. I learn to just sit with it, that the thing Dad always told me about acceptance and heartache was true: 'Sometimes you just have to sit on your hands and hurt.'"
"The faint sound of water echoes up from a fountain in the courtyard."
"It was uncomfortable and it took years and it was the only way to change."
"It’s more a fierce sense that I am not important, that I would instantly give my life for theirs."
"We are a family and that means we need each other."
"The crossing of physical boundaries can lead to tremendous shame in adulthood and a tendency to put up with unwanted touching and sexual advances."
"Children of narcissists learn their feelings don’t matter to the narcissistic parent."
"So a piece of you always feels like you did it too. There is a sense of feeling marked, cursed, destined to walk the earth like a fundamentally flawed object."
"He smiles and closes his eyes. I want him to imagine the day, because I know he can’t be there."