HEAVEN CAN WAIT AND HELL'S TOO FAR AGO

The Real Cool World.

Well, I think I'm losing my mind, this time
This time I'm losing my mind, that's right
Said I think I'm losing my mind, this time
This time, I'm losing my mind

- The Beastie Boys

When I was thirteen, I went on a date to see Cool World. Have you ever heard of Ralph Bakshi? At that time, I had zero understanding.

While I’m not trying to pitch my young self as some saccharine-sweet, innocent Mormon-type with a tie and a bike helmet who thought anything that might be put in cartoon form came from the white bread, vacuum-formed, oversized Disney VHS box collection, I had, in fact, already seen Oh Wicked Wanda in stolen Penthouse magazines + Aeon Flux on MTV. So, with confidence, I can say that I confirmed at a ripe young age that in some darker area of the spectrum, animated characters were most likely fucking, smoking drugs, and up to the type of shit that would have immediately stopped someone’s little old grandmother’s heart.

With that said, Cool World was still an anomaly that summer, and I was lightyears away from bridging the auteurs’ connection to Fritz the Cat. There was live action in it, but it presented itself as inaccessible to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit crowd, a film I had felt too old for even at 10. For me, the term “age-appropriate” never really applied. Still, all the Cool World ads around town for the animated Kim Basinger vehicle looked borderline Triple X. It was the kind of thing you caught a glimpse of through the saloon doors at the local mom-and-pop video store down Ventura Blvd, not wheat pasted up all around L.A.

At the time, I had been riding high off my Coke commercial checks and a supporting role in a high-profile AFI film directed by Ross Marks with a script penned by Mark Medoff, who brought us Children of a Lesser God. My agent was highly motivated by my uptick and had me sweating it out after summer school in endless auditions at nearly every major studio in Hollywood. It was a slugfest against all the other young teens and pre-teens just hoping to land a role playing a wisecracking skateboarding sidekick to Arnold Schwarzenegger or worse - something about the internet or information superhighway that implemented virtual reality goggles into a third-act battle with some ponytail-clad evil fuck who hacked mainframes to undermine a dystopian society even further.

It was the age of Emilio Estevez and Rene Rousso’s cyberpunk moment called Freejack. I had a front-row ticket to the dawn of The Lawnmower Man and its straight-to-video imitators. Sacrificial monkeys spun on gyro spheres, accessing vast 10-gigabyte storage landscapes in Cyberspace while the CD roms got loaded into the bean counters’ box office dreams. And maybe the antidote for all of it was Holli Would, Cool World’s PG 13 borderline porno ingenue, straddling the D in our beloved sign—an idea devised by Paramount’s crack marketing team.

In my downtime, I had spent that summer making out with my first girlfriend, Ashley, in the back of the communal gym that no one ever went to at her dad’s apartment complex. It sat on the downslope of the hill just below Heffner’s Playboy high rise on Sunset Blvd. And when we weren’t making out there or listening to The Beastie Boys, we were devising plans of other more exotic places that we could make out.

Cool World was playing on La Cienaga behind the Rexall Drugs in the multiplex at the Beverly Connection. In hindsight, I think it spoke to both of us for obvious hormonal reasons while we thumbed the Weekly. We walked down the hill from Alta Loma in the blazing heat to catch the 2 pm show. She lied to her dad and said she was going alone because he had still not vetted me. I was avoidant because he had played football almost professionally and wound up in some Mexican or Puerto Rican minor league before getting into medicine. He looked like a Viking, according to the photos I had covertly seen in the apartment while he was at work. Someone I didn’t want to anger, much less have a sit-down conversation about my intentions with his precious daughter.

We walked because it was that horrible moment when you’re trying to figure it all out. You have no car yet, but you need one. Consistent bad timing until you finally make it to sixteen. After the mile walk, I couldn’t have been happier to get inside the air-conditioned theater. I guess the studio's millions spent on marketing didn’t work and might have been used better in an incinerator. The theater was dead empty on the opening Friday, and I soon found out why.

The opening credits rolled.

And we tried. We did try to give it a chance, but Cool World was shockingly fucked up even out of the gate for two members of the quick-cutting music video generation. You could tell it was expensive, you couldn’t get a handle on what was happening, and it looked cheap. With my on-set experience, I could almost feel the sandbags and grip tape holding up the forced perspective sets. At the same time, the cartoons were abrasively loud when they yelled at the people, but strangely, it never felt like any of the subtext or innuendo fused as intended. Maybe I was missing something? Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne, and newcomer Brad Pitt were established people I had seen in other things, but it had all gone south, and from my seat, the hype machine couldn’t save it.

So we just gave up, surrendered, and turned our attention back on each other. As we kissed, maybe the beautiful chaos and rough rhythms of Cool World were working their magic in the subconscious, taking our young relationship and knowledge of each other from first base into new territory. There was a new level of intensity building. Going all the way seemed the only option now, even if we were just two kids watching a film in the third row of our local multiplex.

As we made that silent agreement, her father and stepmother, who had laid their trap and had been staking us both out since the coming attractions, violently interrupted us. They had been more than hip to knowing when their daughter was lying. It was a real jarring shock to the system. A moment I’m not entirely sure that I’ve ever or will ever get over.

Her father angrily stared me down, took her by the arm, and escorted her out of Cool World forever.