FRESH YARN presents:

I Blame Dennis Hopper
By Illeana Douglas

I blame Dennis Hopper. He's the reason we became poor. It was 1969 and the movie Easy Rider had come out. It was changing people's lives. It certainly changed mine. My father had an epiphany while watching Easy Rider. He started coming home from work, and when I say work, I mean high paying, high level, white collar work, and saying things like, "He knows what it's all about, man," meaning Dennis Hopper, or, "We've become too materialistic, man!"

My sole dreams as a child involved adding to my Madame Alexander doll collection, or getting an Easy Bake Oven. So when my father tore my brother's Hot Wheels set from his screaming hands and shouted, "We don't promote plastic in this house. Not anymore!" I was terrified.

"Mom, what does materialistic mean?" I asked, as I watched my father stuff orange Hot Wheels track in the garbage.

It meant we were rich. I didn't even know we were rich until we became poor, and we became poor because of Dennis Hopper.

"Kids," Dad said enthusiastically one afternoon, "I go to work every day and you know what it means? It's just more garbage cans, man! I mean we started out with one garbage can, and then we had two garbage cans, and now we're up to three garbage cans, man! So I've quit my job and we're all going to be hippies!"

To reflect his independence, he bought a gigantic American flag like they had in Easy Rider. He wanted to hang it down the front of our house, but my mother wouldn't let him, so he bought a gigantic poster of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding their choppers and hung it in the living room instead. He started to grow a mustache. Coping with my father growing a mustache and talking like Dennis Hopper had been bad enough but now he had quit his job and we were all going to be hippies.

The theme song in Easy Rider was "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf. My father played "Born to Be Wild" incessantly on the stereo. I don't remember any other songs on that Steppenwolf album. Were there any other songs on that album? And, so, with "Born to Be Wild" blaring in the background, my father explained his next epiphany to us.

"Kids," he said, "We're going to live off the land! Support ourselves. Start a commune, chickens, goats, this is what it's all about, man! Born to be Wild!!!!"

I blame Dennis Hopper for making me hate that song.

I guess I could have gotten some kind of job. You know, if this were the turn of the century or a Dickens novel. I was four. My brothers were five and six. I did have one job. I became pretty good at rolling joints. Those tiny fingers did the trick for all the hippies that started invading our house. They'd listen to the Beatles Revolution, shout, "This is what it's all about, man," and then they'd come in the kitchen and ask my mother what there was to eat.

At first it was a challenge for my father to even find some hippies. You have to remember there was no hippie handbook at the time to guide people. Eventually my father found a hippie, and brought him home for dinner. Tom was the first hippie I ever saw. He had long hair, aviator sunglasses and rode a chopper like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Are you surprised? Tom didn't work either, so he and my father became fast friends. They'd get in Tom's orange van with another hippie named Annette and go to peace rallies together.

My father went to so many peace rallies I thought that was his work. Of course I also thought he invented Earth Day.

Tom got my father off Steppenwolf by turning him on to Neil Young and Bob Dylan so I do credit him with that.

My mother seemed pretty accepting of Tom. I only remember her admonishing him once. They were in the kitchen and she was cooking, and Tom kept saying, "It's so beautiful, man." And my mother said, "I don't need to take drugs to see it's beautiful, Tom", and then she made Tom and my father a lovely dinner.

Annette was friends with Jane, who then brought her boyfriend, Michael, who was friends with Mark, the one who chased my father around with an axe after a bad acid trip.

Anyway, one day my mother and I came home from shopping, and there were a hundred hippies in our house. My mother started frantically searching for my brother. She found him upstairs with a scary looking dude smoking a joint and teaching him how to play the guitar. "Look, Mom. He taught me!" That was it for her. No more hippies in the house.

So my father built a commune on our property called The Studio. There were goats, chickens, and lots of female college students making pottery and smoking pot. There was a lot of free love. Well, it wasn't exactly free. Turns out free love is expensive! Being a carefree hippie is not cheap, and the ease with which we slipped from being rich and privileged to poor and on welfare was swift.

The hippie girls at The Studio wore ponchos. I wanted a poncho but my mother said we couldn't afford it. It was the first time I had ever heard her use that expression. It didn't sound good. "We're poor now. We can't afford it," she said. It was like an official news bulletin my mother kept repeating. "We're poor now. We can't afford it. We're going to have to keep the thermostat at 68 degrees." "We can't afford it. We're poor now, we're going to have to sell the car." She sold our brand new Buick Skylark convertible and got a used Volkswagen bug and it was official. The last vestige of middle class, the Buick, was gone. The bug -- genuine poor hippie transpo.

There were other changes.

My mother belonged to the garden club. Once a month they met at our house. The other housewives looked down their noses at our new lifestyle so she quit. "They were a bunch of snobs anyway," she said. I was mortified. I loved the garden club. A bunch of wealthy snobby women talking about hydrangeas. And they all smelled like Chanel Number 5. Hippies didn't smell like Chanel No. 5 that's for sure.

Just as my father had changed, now my mother was changing. Into an Italian Catholic drill sergeant. "Time," she'd yell out in the morning. My mother started standing outside the bathroom door and timing how long we were running the hot water.

"That's too long Illeana," she'd say through the door. "We can't afford it any more. We're poor, remember?" It became her favorite expression. My father's favorite expression was, "Where's my herb?"

One day my father unscrewed every chandelier in the house and sold them at auction. He needed money for the commune. My mother said, "I look up at the ceiling where my lights used to be and all I see are wires."

This was soon followed by, in no particular order, the sale of our china, silver, furniture, a first edition of Moby Dick, my horse, more furniture, more china, etc.

My mother took it in stride. She started taking classes at night, and eventually got a teaching job to support us all. I used to watch her drive down the driveway in her Volkswagen bug on the way to school. My father bought an ambulance and painted it yellow. It was covered with flowers and had a giant American flag painted on the side. You know -- a yellow ambulance -- to fit the instruments for the band he started.

I blame Dennis Hopper for that band.

On Wednesdays we used to have to go to Stop and Shop and get the free day-old bread they threw away. Sometimes there were donuts. I hid in the car when my mother got them, but they tasted pretty good back home. One morning I was getting ready for school and she cheerfully yelled upstairs to me, "Peanut butter or jelly?"

I only became a vegetarian because I never saw any meat as a child. "It's too expensive, we can't afford it. We're poor now, remember? Have a donut."

My mother loved being poor. I think it finally gave her an identity. Apparently that we were living through the Great Depression. I didn't get it. We were once rich. I remember that. And we were living in Connecticut. You can't be poor in Connecticut! It's like a law or something. I had friends, rich friends, who thought we were still rich, and as I got older it was becoming harder and harder to keep the truth from them.

One day Elspeth Higgins asked me at the bus stop, "Um... isn't your dad the guy that drives around town with goats in his car?"

"Yeah, that's him."

"Um... Why do you have goats?"

"Oh look, there's the bus. Let's get on."

We couldn't afford an antenna for the television so I missed the greatest social debate of the '70s. No, not Watergate. The other, better debate. The Which is Better, The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch Debate. With no antenna, we could only get one channel -- CBS. So when all the other kids were asking, "What do you like better, The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family?" I was like, "Hey, did anyone see Cannon last night? Man, he's so... He couldn't catch that bad guy. What about Barnaby Jones?? Anybody? Anybody?"

I desperately wanted to go out for band but a clarinet was "too expensive. We can't afford it," so I had to get a recorder instead. You try learning "Eleanor Rigby" on the recorder. You feel poor.

God damn you Dennis Hopper!

At night, bundled in my blankets, sweaters and knit cap, I would curse you. You took my father away from me. We could have been bonding around the time I graduated high school. Poring over brochures, and deciding which Ivy League school I'd go to. Instead I spent time at a local bar watching his band 40 Acres and a Mule perform. They did a lot of Stones covers… and were mostly stoned. We couldn't afford to send me to college, but I can do a mean rendition of "Angie"!

Eventually I accepted the truth. The family that God had chosen for me to live with was poor. One day rich relatives would call and ask me to come live with them.

In the meantime, I'd help my mother shop even if it meant the shame of buying things with food stamps. It wasn't the food stamps so much. It was the third degree every time we used them. Food stamps had just been invented, and they were for poor people. We had chosen to be poor! It was a difficult concept to explain. My mother not accepting why chicken wasn't on the government approved list but Hamburger Helper was didn't help our cause. "I can buy Hamburger Helper but I can't buy a fresh chicken?" "I can buy fish sticks but I can't buy a piece of fish?"

Oh well. We were poor, but we were happy. Whoever invented that phrase needs to be confronted in an intervention because denial is a river in Egypt. I never found that expression to be true. We were poor but we were like a circus! Or we were poor but we were happy-sad-happy-sad-happy-sad-happy-sad was more like it. That being said, it was never boring -- having dodged the rut of an upper middle class life for the sheer excitement of childhood filled with Hell's Angels, Black Panthers, and police officers.

Also, not many people can brag and say they saw a Grateful Dead concert as a toddler.

There's a lot of drama associated with being poor. It's probably why I became an actress. Being poor and being an actress go hand-in-hand. I was already starving. So I just had to become an artist. I decided to move to New York. I found a cheap one-bedroom apartment. Unfortunately there were three other girls already living in it, but I moved in anyway.

We were so poor that -- you know that store Crate and Barrel? It was actually based on our apartment. It was made entirely of crates and barrels. It's true. I remember once we ran out of toilet paper and my roommate brought home this industrial size roll of toilet paper she had stolen from the Actors Equity lounge. A gigantic wheel. Like a wheel of Gouda cheese only it was toilet paper.

We couldn't afford to turn the gas on so we cooked things in a coffee percolator. Boiled eggs, hot dogs, long tall food worked the best. Times were lean and I did some things I'm not proud of. The sex for food program was probably one of those things. "Sure, I'll go out with you. Is there food involved?" And one year I'm pretty sure I lived on popcorn.

I was fired from my job at Macy's for sitting. I was hungry and tired and so I sat down. I got fired for that. Then at Christmas I got a job at Saks Fifth Avenue. All I had to do was cart around an Estee Lauder Blockbuster Makeup Kit. It was perfect for me because I was very lazy and hated to work. Don't tell me I'm not my father's daughter!

On the 12th day of Christmas, or something like that, I was holding my Blockbuster, and it was heavy. It had like 50 shades of eye shadow in it, and ten hideous shades of coral lipstick. They were playing this Phillip Glass version of "Hark How the Bells," and I started feeling dizzy. I hadn't had any breakfast. I was still poor remember. People were coming towards me and moving away, and coming towards me and moving away, like fish. All to this Phillip Glass Christmas music. I don't know about you, but listening to Phillip Glass music makes me feel like I'm guilty of a crime. Dum-da-da-dum-Dum-da-da-dum. Dum-da-da-Dum.

I only had a dollar and my break was coming up and I was debating whether I should spend 50 cents on a cup of coffee, or the hot chocolate for 75 cents, and that would be like a whole meal. Then I'd skip lunch and have that apple for dinner. I mean these are the kind of things you debate when you're poor. The Christmas music was very hypnotizing, and I started to daydream, and I remember thinking maybe that's the reason poor people are so lazy. It's because they're starving and too exhausted to work! I mean I'm debating whether hot chocolate is a meal or not!

I heard this clatter as my Estee Lauder Blockbuster hit the ground. Salmon lipsticks rolled everywhere. I was so hungry that I had fainted on the floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, where just an hour before, I had sprayed Kitty Carlyle Hart with perfume. I even made her laugh when I said, "Come on down, the Lauder's fine."

Now, lying on the floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, I prayed that Kitty Carlyle Hart had seen me faint. She would take pity on me, and buy me lunch, and then she'd invite me to live with her in her Park Avenue Apartment. There I would live the rich life I was supposed to have lived, and over tea and crumpets, we'd laugh about my poor hippie childhood and how Dennis Hopper had ruined my entire life.

When I looked up I only saw my supervisor, Vicky, standing over me hissing, "What's the matter with you? Are you on drugs? Get up!"

I blame Dennis Hopper for what happened next.

Before Vicky fired me, she sent me to the basement to wrap like 100 Blockbusters for rich Estee Lauder customers like Cindy Adams and Barbara Walters. Bitter and still light-headed, I thought it would be funny to scrawl "Merry Christmas from a Saks Satan Worshipper!" inside all the pre-addressed cards. I want to apologize to anyone who got one. Mystery solved, Barbara. It was me.

All around me poor, shall we say "ethnic" types, stole gifts from stock to give to their girlfriends. They were poor after all, and didn't know any better. That's why I took a 50-dollar Chloe perfume set. I didn't care that it was stolen. It made me feel special. I vowed to myself that one day I wouldn't have to steal expensive things to feel special. When I was a rich and famous actress, people would give them to me in the form of gift baskets.

Oh. Here's the thing. This is what I really blame Dennis Hopper for.

Even when I finally started making money, even when I was rich -- I still felt poor. I remember coming to LA for my first time and I was invited to this big premiere, and at the after-party I was stuffing my face, and the director of the film came up to me and said, "Have you ever met James Woods?"

And I said, "Free food, did you see? There's free food. Nobody's eating it."

"Yeah, Illeana. Tell Jimmy Woods that story you told me. He'll love it."

I was holding this cracker with a huge amount of goat cheese on it, and I didn't want to waste it so I thought OK. I'll tell James Woods the story, and then I'll eat my cheese and cracker. So I meet him, I tell the story, and he laughs. Then James Woods starts telling a story, so I go to eat my cheese and cracker, and I see that the cheese is gone. It's just a cracker. And I'm looking around like, where did my cheese go?

So James Woods gets to the end of his story but he sees that I'm not laughing so he says, "Don't you get it? You don't get it," and starts to tell me the story again.

That's when I see that my goat cheese has landed on James Woods' really expensive suede loafer.

He gets to the punch line, and I'm laughing like, "Oh, now I get it," and I panic, and I just throw the cracker so he won't see it.

So then the actor Fred Ward joins us and starts telling a story. Suddenly James Woods looks down at his shoe and says, "Where the fuck did that come from?"

I'm trying really hard to follow Fred Ward's story, but I can see James Woods in his mind putting it together -- you know, I mean he's smart. He went to MIT. I see him recreating the series of events in his mind that have led to goat cheese landing on his shoe. Like a Brian De Palma movie sequence, he starts slowly turning his head toward me. But before he can accuse me, I scream, "It came from the book depository! I mean… it was me. I think I did that, Mr.Woods." I totally ruined Fred Ward's story.

I blame Dennis Hopper for that too.

So James Woods is trying to get this goat cheese off his $600-dollar Armani loafers, and I say, "Yeah, you know, in my country when you admire someone, you just hurl goat cheese at them." Silence.

"I mean I could pay for them, Mr. Woods." Fred Ward just stared at me.

You know that classic James Woods sort of half-snarl, half-smile? It was burned into my memory bank. Shame imprint. Career over. Dennis Hopper.

And then it happened. I got cast in a movie with Dennis Hopper.

I couldn't wait to meet him and tell him how he'd ruined my life, and ask him for all the money I felt he owed me. On our first day of shooting, I'm on the way to set of this very low budget film, and the production assistant who was driving me and only getting about 50 dollars a day, and hadn't eaten or slept in a while fainted at the wheel of the car and smashed into the back of another car causing a three-car pile-up. My head slammed into the dashboard. I soon learned the production hadn't been able to afford to give the PA a walkie-talkie, so I had to walk the 10 blocks to the set to tell them that we'd been in this car accident.

I'm walking down Park Avenue, holding my head, and I get to the set. Now I'm really dizzy, and my head is killing me, so I lie down on the ground. The 1st AD is asking me if I'm going to be able to work today. Low Budget, remember.

And I said, "I don't know. I mean my head really hurts." I closed my eyes to try to stop the spinning. There was a lot of noise, and everyone was talking. And then I heard this voice and it sounded like my father and I thought Oh my God. I'm dying and my Dennis Hopper-like life is flashing before my eyes. Then I realized, wait, that's really Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper the iconic figure who had changed my life. Dennis Hopper from the movies, and Easy Rider, is talking about me! He's calling my name!

I opened my eyes, but I could only make out his silhouette bathed in white light standing above me. I remember saying, "I'm fine, I just can't look at the light," and then I started to cry.

And Dennis Hopper said, "Don't cry. You're going to be OK."

And I said, "No, I'm crying because my father saw Easy Rider when I was a kid and it changed his life and now we're going to be in a movie together and it's a miracle!"

I could not stop crying. And Dennis Hopper put his hand on my shoulder, and said to me, "Illeana, you've had a concussion. You know what that means? It means your brain moved inside your head. It's not supposed to do that!"

He may have even said, "man." I'm not sure. I was still crying. But then I started laughing, too.

Dennis Hopper was right of course. Your brain is not supposed to move inside your head. But still. It was a miracle.

To get to meet the person that had changed your destiny. And as I looked up at Dennis Hopper bathed in white light, I had an epiphany too.

I started to think about all the other miracles that had happened to me because we were poor. Like if I had grown up rich, I wouldn't have become an actress. I would probably be working in advertising, which is what my guidance counselor advised me to do because I seemed "creative."

Or, how once, when I was in New York, I went to the bank to withdraw my last 20 bucks and I found a full bag of groceries that someone had left behind. Sausages. Cheeses. We ate for a week! It was a miracle.

Or, the time I found a hundred dollar bill on the street where the prostitutes turned tricks. I looked down and there was a hundred dollar bill. Just lying there on the sidewalk. It was a miracle. I bought two tickets to Dreamgirls, and took my best friend. I'll never forget that night. We're sill best friends.

Or, how when we were poor, my mother could always get four sandwiches out of one can of tuna. Four sandwiches! I mean how did she do that? It was a miracle!

The Studio -- the commune my father started -- is long since gone, but the dreams and ideals that came from it are with me still. I love my parents, and look back on my hippie childhood with great fondness. That's definitely a miracle!

God Bless you Dennis Hopper. You saved me from the good life.

I ended up with the better life after all. In my heart I'm a bit of a rebel. A little bit too artsy. A hippie chick for sure. Question authority! Challenge the system! This is what it's all about, man!! Don't blame me. Blame Dennis Hopper.

©All material is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without permission