Against all odds

Rachel Ward’s Laura-ish portrait from Sharky’s Machine

I know she's a tracker, any scarlet would back her
They say she's a chooser, but I just can’t refuse her
She was just there, but then she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

She’s been down in the dunes and she’s dealt with the goons
Now she drinks from the bitter cup, I’m trying to get her to give it up
She was just here, I fear she can’t be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

It’s long, long when she’s gone, I get weary holding on
Now I’m coldly fading fast, I don’t think I’m gonna last
Very much longer

“She’s stoned” said the Swede, and the moon calf agreed
I’m like a viper in shock with my eyes in the clock
She was just there somewhere and here I am again
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

— Robbie Robertson, “Chest Fever”

Janet was born in 1950 but died just three or four years ago, her death likely precipitated by alcoholism and drug addiction. I can’t say for certain, as she and I parted ways sometime in 1980, the year the Johnnie Walker wisdom officially took over, stunting my ability to behave in public. Shortly after, I’d be dribbling in a rehab while Janet moved on to dangerous ground. Her actions included drug dealing, and excessive DWIs got her a cell at Riker’s Island. Her legacy includes an estranged son who must be pushing forty by now, and a daughter she conceived much later in life (mercifully raised by others), with Janet’s first cousin the father. That last one shocked me not so much for the ill-advised lineage as for the pregnancy itself, for she once assured me her tubes had been tied long before we met.

    Such a fabrication was fairly common for this denizen of Cloud 9, who possessed a politician’s knack for making the imaginary seem true. She suited my need for a fanciful world as I grappled with a reality that felt tenuous and harsh. It should come as no surprise that she was indeed my first love, her beauty, cynical wit and drunkard’s magnetism intoxicating me to the core. Of the physical end, she compared herself to the 1940s actress Ann Sheridan, and also to Bette Davis. She resembled neither.

    Nor did she look like Rachel Ward, which brings us to why I’m navigating my way down this rickety, Caligari-esque memory lane. A recent post at Starlet Showcase offered images of Rachel in the Burt Reynolds movie Sharky’s Machine (1981) which stirred up some ghosts, because the actress — essentially forgotten today — was also in After Dark, My Sweet (1990). This sleepy adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel I’ve never read found no audience upon its release except for those miscreants hip to its boozy SoCal élan. Rachel played Fay, and Jason Patric portrayed an ex-boxer/mental patient named Collie. The two of them, their manner, overall appearance, wardrobe, speech and lifestyle look as if it were all patterned after my interpretation of Janet and what passed for our ‘relationship.’

After Dark, My Sweet trailer

    Fay is introduced sitting in a bar at mid-afternoon, wearing denim cut-offs, flip flops and a loose shirt. She’s also wearing a hat, which we’ll pretend doesn’t exist, because Janet never wore hats except for an old navy blue wool cap in the dead of winter. But the rest of it was Janet’s trademark attire, and you could usually find her in some dive during daylight hours conversing with beefy, blank-eyed bartenders who fed her vodka gimlets, mostly on the house. She’d do her laundry on Thursdays, when I’d meet her at a small pub adjacent to the village laundromat. We’d nosh on salty snacks, swill tap beer and watch The Gong Show. Under these murky conditions, even the Unknown Comic can seem a fount of expert timing and wit.

    Janet and Rachel shared long, slender legs with flush, smooth knees, “legs that go all the way up to her ass” to use the barfly’s parlance. In the movie trailer above, there’s a fleeting shot of Rachel’s tush which has more bounce and shape than Janet’s, whose was small and flat thanks to an overindulgence of amphetamines. But Rachel’s walk is almost identical to Janet’s, and the line, “You really believe there could be a you-and-me?” strikes a chilling chord. Janet never allowed for the future — she laughed at me when I proposed marriage — while her past was sharply divided between silly inebriated stunts and dark emotional turmoil. She attempted to live squarely in the moment by drinking, reading or going to a lot of movies (we saw The Last Waltz at least half a dozen times at the Ziegfeld), and when those defenses would crumble she’d keep reality at bay by switching from beer to vodka, a guaranteed blackout, a waking unconsciousness that I was no stranger to myself.

    Our (mis)adventures took us far and wide, psychologically if not geographically. We grew into hybrids of the Susan Tyrrell and Stacy Keach characters of Fat City (1972), alternating barstool wit with exaggerated reactions, barbed tongues wagging away until pass out time. We never knew how frightened we were or how unloved we felt, our defects so intrinsic and deeply guarded as to ward off any new pain. You can sense these things in Rachel again, as the desperate housewife yearning for an orgasm in The Good Wife (1986), director Ken Cameron’s uneasy blend of David Lean-ish epic with Zalman King-style eroticism. Unfortunately, Janet and I never approached sex like normal people. It became as entangled as our skewed logic. There was nakedness, touching, penetration…yet I still don’t know if we ever made love or really had sex.

    As the 1970s faded, the ‘80s tossed us into opposite corners of the universe. I became unstable and transformed into a hurtful beast, damaging everything and everyone around me, a veritable blueprint for Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980). Janet wisely backed away. Our last exchanges were two sketchy phone conversations and an arrangement to meet in front of a movie theater in the town I’d relocated to. I stood outside waiting for her, but the hours passed and she never showed. A day or two later I thought, was she looking over at me from a parked car across the road? Who knows? I never saw or spoke to her again.

The end credits of Against All Odds

    When she hit her peak in Hollywood, Rachel Ward was top-billed over Jeff Bridges and James Woods in Against All Odds (1984), Taylor Hackford’s uneven reworking of Out of the Past (1947). The end credits clip offered above is awash in the kind of gooey sentimentality frowned upon by cynics and intellectuals (pseudo and real) who surrounded me in my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps uneasy (embarrassed?) by the camera recording her in one pregnant take, Rachel searches for a focal point. It ends on a freeze frame, that cliché holdover from the ‘70s. At one time I dismissed the Phil Collins song as slick, superficial tripe, but now it addresses things I can relate to, the mourning for people and time lost for good, of love without heat, a distant memory:

So take a look at me now, there’s just an empty space
And there’s nothing left here to remind me,
Just the memory of your face
Take a look at me now, there’s just an empty space
And you coming back to me is against all odds
and that’s what I’ve got to face