The Godfather: A Nurse's Descent Into Hell and Back

Never put beer in yuh Suddern Comfut, Fanooch . . .

 F   oreseeing the fate of a teenage boy—an imminent death six months before it would happen—was difficult.

Then, watching him die over twelve hours, his gasping breaths, his family around him holding an oxygen mask near his face, his ignorant physicians assuming he had no discomfort, his heart that took nine minutes to stop once he had stopped breathing, his family weeping once they knew he was gone, washing his body, and taking him to the morgue, was enough to send me into an abyss I almost did not get pulled out of.

Following my return from the morgue and the end of my twelve hour shift, I decided not to call in sick for my second job working for a nursing agency. My next shift would begin a mere four hours later and I traveled out to another hospital in the dead of winter to look after more dying patients. 

I was not trying to be a hero; in hindsight, I was so angry, so distraught, so unsupported and yet so numb, that I was trying to destroy myself. I was exhausted and could not sleep and when I arrived home the next morning after a ninety-minute icy drive, I began drinking: my drinks of choice, Southern Comfort and beer and my choice of movies to accompany my bender to Hell: The Godfather series.

There are several scenes in each of The Godfather films which make my heart pound and melt all at the same time. I was interested to see how these scenes would affect me lubed up on booze and rage.

In The Godfather, the first film in the series, a still innocent Michael goes to see his father in the hospital after an assassination attempt. When he realizes the Don is vulnerable, Michael makes a choice. He leans over towards his Dad—who looks in bad, bad shape, with a nasogastric tube coming out of his nose and a blood transfusion running in his arm—and says, "I'm with you now" as he holds his hand. The Don sheds a tear and then a new Michael is born. 

Many years ago, before he died of a blood clot, my father in law, an Italian born in the boot, large in stature with huge baseball-glove-sized hands, had a massive heart attack. 

He needed to be rushed to emergency surgery, and his family—a clueless bunch that would give Dr. Phil enough shows to last a year—was not present to sign the consent to allow the surgeons to perform open heart surgery and "perhaps" save his life. 

I was there in the empty corridor as the surgeon approached me with a subdued look on his face. "Would he want the surgery?" he asked, as my pop-in-law was unconscious at the time.

"Yes" I said, and I signed the consent. 

Three weeks later, he survived and was to be extubated. Once again I was present for the monumental step which meant that perhaps, this once bull of a man, could finally breathe on his own. The respiratory therapist pulled the tube out of his throat, and he breathed, asking for a glass of water. He looked at me, I held his hand and said "You almost died, but you're okay now," and he shed a tear. 

Watching this scene again, as the booze kept flowing, I did not feel rage but a source of comfort that I had done something good, something right. The next scene unfolded, and I continued to drink. 

The hours kept going by and all of the sudden, I realized I had not slept a wink in two days. After The Godfather I became more and more angry, threatening to quit my job in an email to my head nurse if I didn't get some support. 

She called me, then a doctor called me and said the boy did not feel any pain or discomfort when he gasped for breath—in a scene that looked like it was out of a zombie film. (At one point he did not breathe for 90 seconds, I thought he had passed, so did his family, then he let out an enormous sigh that sounded like a balloon being deflated; he still had hours left to go.)

This doctor was not even at his bedside when he died. How could she know what the boy was feeling? I became more and more angry and I knew that tomorrow I would see the boy again, this time in his coffin. 

It was eleven a.m. now, just a few hours away from the boy's funeral. I kept drinking and moved on to Godfather II and still had not slept for three days.

Somewhere in my blurred reality of booze, insomnia and severe restlessness, I had managed to get fired from my second job with the nursing agency. It seems they were unhappy with a hungover nurse's performance when he refused to poke an 88-year-old dying man with a needle to check his blood glucose—a completely useless test that a doctor forgot to cancel in light of the man's near-death state precipitated by a long battle with cancer. 

Despite not having to trek out in the middle of the night, I took the firing rather personally and continued to drink and not sleep. In Godfather II, a young Vito Corleone gets let go from his bakery/ fruit store job so that the Black Hand's cousin can take his place. Vito's boss feels bad and starts crying when he breaks the bad news to young Vito. 

But Vito won't accept a parting gift of a food basket from his boss, nor will he let his boss take the blame for being forced to let him go. Instead, he takes it like a man and with Nino Rota's stirring score playing in the background, he brings home a beautiful pear for his wife who he kisses at the dinner table, he is happy with seemingly no regret, no anger, and no self-pity. With my head spinning after I chugged down another belt of my favorite 40-proof drink, I said to my wife—who was clearly worried about my state of mind—"Now there's a real man!" and headed out with my friend Gerry to the boy's funeral, loaded.

The funeral home was packed, standing room only. There were many of us there.

Physiotherapists, occupational therapists and other nurses who had looked after our tragically departed patient held back tears when the eulogy was read. I became more and more angry when I realized that there was not one doctor in the crowd.

When I arrived home, I continued to drink, becoming more and more loud as the booze began to flow easier and easier. I still had not slept and was getting a second wind, just in time for the rooftop scene in Godfather II. 

During a neighborhood fiesta, brilliantly directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Vito follows the Black Hand as a rousing waltz is playing in the streets. I stood up, glass of booze in one hand, fake conductor's wand in the other and began screaming the waltz, note for note in what sounded to me like perfect pitch. It was entirely euphoric! For the first time in three days I felt good as Vito blasted the Black Hand in the face and he fell to the ground. Then, in celebration, I pounded back a few more drinks. 

That night, I still hadn't slept and I hardly remember Godfather III except for one scene. In the end, Michael is sitting in a chair alone, remembering all the women he loved. He remembers dancing with his daughter, I have a daughter. He remembers dancing with his wife, I have a wife. And then, to Carmine Coppola's brilliant and peaceful score, he dies.

I slept that night, after what seemed like a trip to Hell. My wife said I kept waking up yelling gibberish, saying "I did the best I could" over and over again. In the weeks that followed, I continued to drink, I was still in pain, until one day my daughter said, "Daddy, you drink too much." Then I quit. 

I am better now. I exercise and I try to look at the good things I have and try like hell not to lose them: a wife, a kid, a house, a dog and cat, and a few Volkswagens in my driveway. 

I still have insomnia but, without fail, there is one set of films which always comfort me and help me to fall asleep. 

In some strange way, Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films saved me and comforted me when no one else could and for that, I am forever grateful to one of the best filmmakers of all time.

Locke, a Lesson for Filmmakers Everywhere

I see . . .  dinosaurs . . .

 T  ired of sequels with big budgets, big actors, cgi-filled scenes with ultra slow-motion photography, 3-D special effects and a story that flows worse than the orgasmic experience one gets while reading the ingredients on the back of a cereal box? Have I got a movie for you!

Take "Bane" from Batman (Tom Hardy), stick him in a moving BMW X5 for 90 minutes and equip him with nothing but his brain, his psyche, and a blue-tooth and what do you get? Movie magic.

Ivan Locke is a construction foreman who is in charge of the biggest concrete pour in Birmingham's history and it is the night before the concrete is to be pumped. A worker with a terrific reputation, he is expected to be there, at the work-site, at 5:25 am, to make sure everything goes according to plan so that construction on a massive 200,000 metric ton building can continue. There's just one problem—Locke's past.

We have all done things we are ashamed of. Most of us run from them, as fast as we can, and we don't look back, unless we are forced to. Not so with our friend Locke. With the exacting mind of an engineer, he thinks there is a solution to every problem and the worst thing one can do is to show weakness and run away. What he has done is not as important as the practical choices he makes to try and rectify the situation.

Despite being filmed almost entirely in a car, Locke's writer/director Steven Knight creates an incredible amount of tension as his main character receives and makes one harrowing phone-call after another in an attempt to deal with his past, the pour, his job, his co-workers, his father, his family, his wife, his kids and a soccer game, as he drives along the highway slowly teetering on the brink of insanity. Tom Hardy is brilliant as he rationalizes his thoughts and organizes them in surgical fashion, justifying them with forceful conviction, trying to find a way to fix his world as it comes crashing down around him. 

There are no other visible actors in the film, only their voices, yet still, we can imagine what each and every one of them look like and feel. No special effects, no complicated story, just a man we can all identify with and root for.

Michael Bay (Transformers 1,2,3), George Miller (Mad Max 1,2,3,4), Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park 2), J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, Star Wars), are you watching? This is how you make a movie! 

Locke should be shown to film students everywhere, now, before it's too late! Because if I have to be exposed to more horseshit sequels and remakes, I'm never going to the movies again! 

Catch this on Flexnit.

Boys With Toys: Why Some Men Never Grew Up

Luke . . . I am your FATHER

 T   hose of us with children, if they're like me, start planning ahead before the children are actually born. These days, we tend to know almost from the first sonogram whether or not it's going to be a girl or a boy, and we start thinking about things like how we're going to bond with little Emily or little Johnny.

When I knew that I was going to be a father, but didn’t know whether my first-born would be a boy or a girl, I started fantasizing about things I would be most likely to need for the little tyke.

Emily would probably want to read "soft" books like Dr. Seuss, while Johnny would probably like Tintin. Emily would want to play with . . . uh . . Barbie? Now why on earth would I think that? No one plays with Barbie any more; isn't it more like Care Bears these days?

(A little checking reveals that Care Bears came and went in the early 80s; it shows how in touch I am with contemporary reality.)

But I knew what Johnny would be playing with: Good old G.I. Joe. Because that's what I played with.

Joe Is Born

At the dawn of history, meaning my childhood, G.I. Joe was born. There are various lines of reasoning as to why there ever was a necessity to create a doll that glorified the military.

"The original motivation for Hasbro to make G.I. Joe was to cash in on the 'Razor & Blade' concept pioneered by Mattel for Barbie, but use it for a boys' toy line," says David Malin, a regular at the action figure website onesixthwarriors.com. 

"The razor & blade concept is simple; just as you continually need to buy new blades for a razor, Mattel wanted customers to continually buy new outfits and accessories (blades) for Barbie (the razor)."

"The reason they chose to make military figures was not because the designers had served in WWII, but because the military seemed to be the most masculine theme possible, which was deemed important when they were basically trying to sell dolls to boys."

The manufacturer's photo . . . my photo

In fact, it was not G.I. Joe that broke the ground for plastic dolls; it was Barbie, who made her first appearance in 1959. According to Wikipedia, "Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles. At the time, most children's toy dolls were representations of infants.

Realizing that there could be a gap in the market, Handler suggested the idea of an adult-bodied doll to her husband Elliot, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. He was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel's directors."

Well, we all know what happened to the record company executive who, upon hearing the Beatles for the first time, said "Guitar bands are on the way out."

So in fact it was a toy for girls that paved the way for a doll for boys. However, the word "doll" was taboo; the toy company had to market their doll in a most manly fashion to separate it from the stigma of being a doll—which, as everyone knew at the time, only girls played with.

Typical vintage G.I. Joe collection

So they stripped "doll" from any reference to the toy. Instead, it was a "figure." Indeed, it was not just a "figure," it was an "action figure," and that is what they are called–even if they're just representations of film stars—to this day.

I was thrilled that there were suddenly these honking big, well-muscled men dolls that could be accessorized—the only vaguely militaristic action figures that had hitherto been available were small plastic two-inch-tall soldiers that would later be featured in the Pixar movie Toy Story.

Malin reminisces: "You could find them in every dime store in the country. Some manufacturers made them in two colours, such as one set green and one set grey, so they could be packaged together as the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys.' The thing was, much of the time, no matter what the colour, the figures were exactly the same!"

But now these would be consigned to the back of the toy box. Make way for Joe!

The Collector

I was the perfect demographic for G.I Joe sales—a small boy whose father had been a warrior against Hitler in World War II. Back then, a G.I. Joe cost about $4 (around $35 in today's market). And you couldn't just have one. The earliest models were crude but attractive dolls that could be manipulated, posed, and had numerous accessories such as rifles, helmets and even miniature vehicles—all eminently collectible and absolutely nothing like a Barbie.

I distinctly recall buying the "Action Pilot" version at a gift shop at Beirut airport, in Lebanon. He would join my travelling circus, since I took my Joes everywhere I went.

Blitzway's Arnie Kim works on Mark Hamill

`

I accumulated a final collection of six G.I. Joes and Action Men (the British version, made by Palitoy): soldiers, sailors, scuba divers and pilots, all with their accompanying paraphernalia and costumes. They formed an incredible world of action and drama—I would play with them for hours on end, imagining nasty Nazis and epic battles and taut adventures as only a small boy can conjure from his overactive prefrontal cortex.

And then suddenly, adolescence came hurtling in and girls and cigarettes became my main preoccupation.

It was with not a little shock, and a lot of horror, as I surveyed the G.I. Joe scene in around 2001. Vintage figures were being traded on sites like eBay for astronomical sums of money; certainly nothing I could afford at the time. They were being graded for condition on a ten-point scale, ferchrissakes!

This only made me want them more. Now it was imperative that I collect them for myself, not just my son.

I decided that buying the vintage figures for their collectible value was nonsense. Since my childhood, dozens of manufacturers whose names were unfamiliar to me had blossomed, and now action figures were not limited to just military dolls.

Blitzway's Bruce Lee, by Arnie Kim

Rise Of The Machined

My first "grownup" action figure was a Roy Batty replicant figure from the movie Blade Runner. I was staggered at the $99 price—after all, the last time I had bought an action figure it had cost in the neighbourhood of $4. But the marketing blurb assured me that only 500 of this particular figure were being produced—and should have included a sale for a suspension bridge in Hunan province.

From there I discovered other manufacturers and a much larger selection of figures. This was becoming big business, and Chinese factories were being retooled to churn out the next "Sergeant Kurt Wormitz" and "Star Wars Stormtrooper."

Over the next decade or so the offerings became more and more abundant. It was clear that my contemporaries—men who had been born at roughly the same time as me and who had grown up in the 60s and 70s—were having a huge influence on the toy market as they sought to recapture those magical days of their youth.

And these memories did not include video games.

G.I. Jerry Bruckheimer

Movies had attacked the action figure market.

As 2007 came and went, it was apparent that the action figure scene was including as many pop culture icons as it was military figures. Companies would become known for their individual specialties: 3rdReich.us became the wellspring of Wermacht figures, and even—heresy of heresies—war criminals like Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler and even the Beast of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich (no, human lampshades were not offered as accessories. But the Chinese manufacturers exhibit no scruples when it comes to their accurate portrayal of these vintage thugs).

Other companies began offering actors and actresses, sometimes licensed and sometimes not.

"It's just a guess on my part," says One-Sixth Warrior David Malin, "but I'd estimate that about 30% of today's action figures are historical-based (including real world or military figures), and 70% are pop culture-based (from movies, TV, video games, or comics). 

My First Serious Figure (of the adult age)

"There's also some blurring of the lines when it comes to the historical/pop culture categories; there have been some figures (unlicensed) from a few companies that made WWII figures that greatly resemble characters from both the movie Saving Private Ryan and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Dam did a series of Navy SEAL figures that were based (unlicensed, of course) on characters from the movie Tears of the Sun.

"Hot Toys has done figures of Michael Jackson (in costumes from his music videos) and of James Dean; both could be considered as combining the historical/pop culture categories. 

"Also, a few years ago, Dragon in Dreams made a figure of Gen. George S. Patton; but instead of using the the likeness of the actual Patton, they opted to use a likeness of actor George C. Scott, who won the Oscar for playing the General in the movie Patton. I could provide even more examples, but I think you get the idea."

When asked about the shift from toy to action figure to the next generation, Davinator, another regular from One-Sixth Warriors, has a one-word answer: "Movies."

This figure goes for over $1,000 on eBay

Indeed, these days a military action figure is pretty likely to be based on an actor portraying a military figure, such as the two figures I collected from the movie Enemy At The Gates, both Ed Harris and Jude Law lookalikes. However since they are unlicensed, the names "Ed Harris" and "Jude Law" are not mentioned in the packaging; instead they are "Sniper Major Koenig" and "Sniper Vasily Zaitsev," both of whose actual namesakes are safely dead.

Plastobscene
Today my hobby is threatening to spiral out of control. The figures are getting so good that I just have to have them.

Nowadays it's not just the Boys Who Want Toys who are getting serious—the Boys Who Make The Toys are getting serious. The designers are now superstar artists in their own right. The figures they create are sometimes hand painted by the designers themselves and are sometimes almost indistinguishable from the actual people they represent—stunning portraits in miniature plastic.

Al Pacino leaps out of the screen and is on my shelf next to Toshiro Mifune. I'm not even a Marilyn Monroe fan but even I recognize that the latest figure is no longer an action figure, but an action statue—she's not even posable, for dog's sake! But she becomes a voodoo chile version of the living goddess—perhaps she will actually sing "Happy Birthday Mr. President" to my rapt throng of admiring action figures one night while I'm fast asleep.

Blitzway's Marilyn. $361, with shipping

I know that both Young Steve Jobs (Legend Toys, $199.00 with shipping and custom case modelled after the Apple II) and Old Steve Jobs (Legend Toys, $199.00 with shipping, but a tad more on eBay) along with Carlito Brigante ($Don'tAsk with shipping) and Sicherheitsdienst Oberleutnant Christoph ($199 with shipping) and Brad Pitt With Bicycle (French Resistance fighter "Pierre!"—$299.00 with shipping) will be clapping their well-manicured plastic hands (gripping version or non-gripping version) as Marilyn serenades them from the third shelf from the bottom.

Future, Tense

I sit, lonely, as my Boys stare silently from their shelves. My son will never play with them. He's lost in an iPhone world of texting and tweeting and Facecrap and other digital detritus. I will not press upon him this curious and solitary hobby that no one understands except the legion of men who grew up at the same time I did.

And what will I do with those original six G.I. Joes that are now worth around $2,000 each, and the authentic Jeep that came with them now worth around $5,000 in good condition?

I'll say a silent prayer over their plastic memories, because, one day about forty-three years ago, I summoned all my boys, put them all in their jeep and blowtorched them with a spray can and a lighter, setting them to roll away in a blaze of acrid black smoke across the terrace in a dramatic Last Ride to Hell.