LaLa Lockdown: Richard Gere Finally Tried It.
Richard Gere refuses to wash his face with anything, but a bar of Irish Spring Soap. The strong minty scent seems to reset him in a way that he cannot find through his profession or his family. A cleansing of his past, of his future, of his present. He milks the process, lathering the bar in his hands for sometimes as much as ten minutes before gently applying it on to his damp face. To touch the skin of his nose after an Irish Spring scrub, is to touch the buttock of Christ: taut and properly round, but dry as the scorched earth upon which Jesus cursed humanity. Can I get an amen?
Richard is full of little rituals like this. It helps him keep track of himself outside of the roles he plays. He wears different colored socks on each foot, has an active MySpace account full of duck lip 2004 selfies, and would have gages in his ears if his wife allowed it. Some of these dated idiosyncrasies sound immature, as though he was an unoriginal high schooler bidding for an identity. Those adolescent ribbons of insecurity are still wound around his heart, somehow the squeezing tightness helps make him an incredible, vulnerable actor, always quietly bursting open on screen. Unlike many creepy men of his generation, though you need to have the narcissism of a great white to get to his level of stardom, Richard’s success always comes with some sort of fleeting cosmic awareness that gets him laid a lot and also makes him a good person.
He’s up again at 3:00 am. Not because he is worried about Covid necessarily, but it seems like the trauma of the last year is unraveling something inside him that is begging to be noticed. Like a majorly out of tune banjo playing behind the heavier hitters of the jam band, Richards world has become out of sync, discordant and he is in many ways looking for some sort of back door.
“Everyone gets the blues.” He says to himself after a raw rubbing of the Irish spring. This is the fourth time tonight. Peels of his skin collect on his pillow like daisy petals, but it’s simply not helping. The Abyss is swallowing him. Not a metaphoric abyss, but the film, THE ABYSS (1989) by James Cameron of which he didn’t even get an audition for and that still really bugs him.
He clicks the light to his bathroom off, the light dims in a slow, sensuous wealthy person way, as not to shock his dark eyes. Richard hated his eyes growing up, thinking they were too squinty and mean. He smiles a lot because he thinks too often his eyes look somehow poisoned by contempt. He recognized that Matt Dillon has a similar thing. Eyes that seem to want to make out or eyes that read as absent and evil, full of uncalled for road rage.
Gere walks through his beautifully stocked kitchen in his lofty, sprawling Soho townhouse, and takes a carton of egg whites from his fridge and gulps it down. Male actors from his generation are still dutiful about the Atkins diet no matter how many people it’s killed and Gere is no exception, plus he loves raw eggs. His mom was addicted to sloe gin fizzes growing up and he delighted in drinking the left over egg whites that she hadn’t shaken up into a foam. He berates himself as he drinks the egg whites, knowing that it might make him sick.
“Salmonella is bad, but Covid is also bad.” His thoughts are like this recently, they lack any density and he wonders if he is locked out of the more insightful folds of his brain forever. He throws the carton of egg whites across the room, missing the garbage can. In fact there is no garbage can, the trash is well disguised in a shiny white cabinet next to the gigantically, chic and unnecessary oven. His surroundings feel too nice for him. He feels like a rat living in his own palace... a rat or a gerbil even. He pauses. “Gerbil.” He had sworn never to say that word out loud ever again.
Richard gazes at the empty street outside his house that is lined with art galleries and tiny lingerie shops that no one has gone into even before the pandemic. “You live in New York for the life, and this pandemic has taken the life out of the streets.” Another paper thin thought. He runs his hands through his iconic silver white hair, with the perfect ratio of curl to thickness. “My hair feels all...gerbil.” He surprises himself this time.
The rumor from the early 90s flash backs to him like Nam. One minute he’s slobbering all over his Americana perfection, Cindy Crawford, at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the next- a press release is sent out that Richard Gere had a gerbilectomy. To be true to the tale, reports went out that Gere had inserted a gerbil inside a condom into his asshole using a cardboard tube. Once the gerbil was suffocating inside him, Gere was tickled by the death spasms of the gerbil, giving him pleasure. It was a rumor possibly started by Sylvester Stallone who hated Gere and also, gerbils. Though he says, he likes some gerbils now. To each his own. Ah, Sylvester. He really does not make it easy to love him. We actually don’t have to love him.
Yet, Richard can’t help but look back at this perplexing incident from his Buddhist point of view and contemplate it as though it was an odd, but thoughtful gift from a distant relative. “What did it actually mean? What did the universe want me to understand?” Something foreign washes over him, a new desire to really find out what it all really meant.
The next day Gere ventures to the nearest pet store. With sunglasses and a mask on, you can barely tell it’s him, but his height and cashmere pea coat give him away to his neighbors who glance at him while crossing the street with urgency-desperate for guidance from such a trust worthy public figure. Little do they know, Gere’s plan, as he marches toward the gerbil tank. He picks one that he thinks is the smallest. The pet store owner scratches his head as Gere leaves without buying food or a cage for it. “Probably going up that man’s butt.” The pet store owner wisely states.
The gerbil sits patiently on the glossy granite of the kitchen counter, waiting as Gere scrubs his face. The Irish Spring is really helping his stress, the part chemical aroma swarms his nostrils and stings those damn eyes of his. He pulls out a pack of ancient lamb hyde condoms, the only remnant he keeps from his time shtooping Cindy.
As Buddhist as possible he forces the gerbil inside him, a somehow very easy thing for him to do. Gere proudly has “lax tush”, he has mentioned it on The View and his interview with Michelle Obama. He stands waiting for something to happen. He feels like his awful character in LOOKING FOR MISTER GOODBAR (1977) who (SPOILERS!) brutally kills Diane Keaton. Goodbar is one of his first film roles and it left a scar in him. He could always see the evil somewhere inside himself after that. It scared him to know every human has access to those dark parts.
The gerbil kicked around a bit, Gere felt some pressure, but nothing to write his family about. After a few more seconds, he gently removed the gerbil. Thank god he was still alive. Richard scrubbed the gerbil with his Irish Spring and cut some carrots up for the poor guy. The black eyes of the gerbil shined with sweet delight as it ate and Richard saw himself in those beady, innocent, black holes.
