The final days of Dennis Hopper

Arts & Entertainment, Uncategorized — By Paul Fitzgerald on July 26, 2010 at 7:51 pm

By Emma Clarkson

If you wanted to understand Dennis Hopper late in his life, after five decades of fighting the system, firing up revolutions and invoking dark nightmares onscreen, all you had to do was look at his home in Venice, California.

That it looked like no other home — a weird warehouse set among decrepit craftsman beach houses — was to be expected. That he kept a handgun and loose rounds in his sock drawer upstairs — you’d be almost disappointed if they weren’t there. The property’s most unexpected feature wasn’t the multimillion-dollar art collection or the pool, but the white picket fence in front of the main house, a sign of a man proud of his neatly kept compound, placed there either sincerely or ironically as a jab at the stereotype of American family life.

Hopper built this home, an industrial, open-plan loft with rooms connected by a maze of metal catwalks, in the late Eighties, when he was engineering his comeback as a villain in Blue Velvet. When he turned 56, he brought his future wife — his fifth — to live in the house. Hopper had met Victoria Duffy, a slim, 24-year-old hostess, at a restaurant a week after his fourth divorce, from ballet dancer Katherine LaNasa. Though he was leaving behind a young son, Henry, Hopper’s reputation for vicious intensity and offscreen menace seemed to be a thing of the past. Now, he took his tea with lemon and honey, wore Hugo Boss suits, and steered clear of drugs and alcohol, except for pot. He also spent long afternoons playing golf with his close friend Jack Nicholson. “Hoppy was very slow when he golfed, very specific,” says Nicholson. “He was a tremendous physical specimen.”

Hopper still rode motorcycles, but these days the stoner hippie rebel of Easy Rider went on leisurely road trips with a gang of friends who called themselves the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, including Lauren Hutton, Jeremy Irons and Laurence Fishburne. They would fly to a country where the Guggenheim Museum was staging a promotion — Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Spain — and spend several days riding BMW bikes to the event, trailed by vehicles carrying their gear. He even voted for George W Bush twice — partly because it was the contrarian thing for a Hollywood actor to do, and Hopper always needed to do the contrarian thing.

Over the years, Hopper added to his house in Venice, buying two Frank Gehry studios next door and building another structure to form a sort of ragtag compound. He worked constantly, shooting 25 films in the past decade. But even pushing himself as hard as he could, he couldn’t seem to follow up on the promise of his early years, coming up in the old studio system during the Fifties, when he seemed destined to become an icon like Paul Newman or a flickering meteor like James Dean. Instead, after taking one of the most extreme chemical and artistic detours in Hollywood history, Hopper became, in comfortable old age, something more unexpected than any of his previous incarnations: a dependable, workaday actor and respected art collector. He considered himself, in his final years, a failure: “I never felt I played the great part. I never felt that I have directed the great movie. And I can’t say that it’s anybody’s fault but my own.”

Nine years ago, Hopper was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but it didn’t really slow him down until his condition worsened in 2008. As he began to deal emotionally with the little time he had left, he turned sentimental and looked to the past. Hopper did not always have a great relationship with his older kids, especially his first child, Marin, who was five years older than his then wife. Now that he was sick, he wanted his children close to him, and he was in possession of a home large enough to accommodate everyone. When Marin, a former editor at Elle magazine, began having marital problems, he invited her to move into one of the houses on his compound. He also provided a cottage for his teenage son, Henry, a painter of Jackson Pollock-esque drip art who was recently cast in a Gus Van Sant movie. “These kids hadn’t been close to Dennis since he left their mothers,” recalls a family friend. “They were toddlers then. All they wanted was to be in the centre of his life again.”

In 2008, before he began filming the TV show Crash in New Mexico, Hopper learned that his cancer had metastasised. As his prognosis worsened, he became increasingly angry and vulnerable, and some of the old demons seemed to kick loose. Most of his rage was directed at Victoria. “You’re a human garbage can!” she recalls him yelling. “I can dump anything on you!” In another fight, he told her that she had “caused” his cancer, but insisted that he didn’t want to get divorced. “I will never let you leave me,” he told her. (Before his death, Hopper denied making the statements.) As the marriage deteriorated, life in the compound began to resemble a scene from King Lear, with some of Hopper’s heirs eavesdropping on each other in the open-plan house while jockeying for position with the dying patriarch. Hopper and his camp were soon casting Victoria as a gold-digging psycho, while Victoria’s allies put the blame squarely on his kids.

“As sick as it sounds, Marin and Henry liked having Dennis beat up emotionally on Victoria,” says a friend. “They wanted their dad back, the out-of-control dad that never gave them enough attention when they were growing up. Now, they wanted to control him.”

Decadent, rebellious, self-indulgent and deeply interested in creating a mythology that would outlive him, Hopper represented both the menace and the allure of the eternal fighter. The mental image that Nicholson says he will always have of his friend is one of raw will: Hopper running at full tilt, “screaming, unstoppable”. In his 1971 song The Pilgrim, Kris Kristofferson sang of Hopper, among others, as a “walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,/taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home”. He will always be remembered for the triumph of Easy Rider, which kicked off a golden age of American cinema in 1969. “It seems like Dennis invented the language of the Sixties when you hear him say, ‘Hey, maaaaan,’ in an interview, or even in True Romance,” says Val Kilmer, a longtime friend of Hopper’s. “That twinkle in his eye was as movie star as it gets. That grin and the way he looked away, then slashed you back with a laser-like look, then a quick nod. He practised that a lot, you could tell. Actors practise the stuff that works on people. And he worked on people.”

At the beginning, he was a heartland kid. Hopper was born in 1936, between the world wars, in the cowboy town of Dodge City, Kansas, where he spent a sombre childhood on a farm in the wheat fields. His mother earned his mistrust early by keeping an important secret: shortly after his father left for World War II, when Hopper was five, she told him that he had been killed in battle, even though she knew he was working as a spy in Asia. He reappeared at the close of the war, a phantom at their doorstep. “Dennis had major mommy issues,” says a source close to Hopper.

He consoled himself at the movies. “I remember the loneliness of holding your pillow and thinking it’s Elizabeth Taylor or Leslie Caron, and not being able to tell anyone,” he recalled. “The only way I thought I could stop being unhappy and lonely was to become an artist — so creative and beautiful that everyone would say, ‘Wow.’”

In 1950, Hopper’s family moved to San Diego, hoping to treat his younger brother’s asthma with sea air. At his new high school, Hopper fell in love with acting, though his parents didn’t approve. His home life, he recalled later, was “a nightmare — everybody neurotic, because they weren’t doing what they wanted to do, and yelling at me when I wanted to be creative, because creative people ended up in bars”. In 1954, Hopper moved to Hollywood, where he quickly landed the small part of Goon, a teen gang member, in Rebel Without a Cause.

On the set, Hopper grew to idolise James Dean, who introduced him to method acting and drugs. “Jimmy and I were into peyote and grass when it was still something you couldn’t even mention to your closest buddies,” recalled Hopper, who kept a pan of peyote bubbling on the stove “like it was a pot of coffee”. Following Dean’s lead, he focused on being a troublemaker. One night, Hopper filled a bathtub with champagne in preparation for an orgy with Natalie Wood, but when she sat down in the bath, she started screaming and had to be taken to casualty. “It burned her pussy,” Hopper said. “Set her on fucking fire.”

Hopper experienced Dean’s death in 1955 as the “most personal tragedy in my life”. The best way he knew to honour his friend was to take on the mantle of delinquency, dissidence and self-destruction. “The light that always shined through Dennis was James Dean,” says gallery owner Tony Shafrazi, who served as best man at two of Hopper’s weddings. Within two years, Hopper found himself blackballed in Hollywood after a fight with director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas. For the next decade, he lived in exile, enrolling in the Actors Studio in New York and marching with Martin Luther King Jr from Selma to Montgomery.

He also picked up photography, which became one of his life’s passions. His first published photo was the cover art for Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep — Mountain High, and he took some of the early photos of artists such as Neil Young and the Grateful Dead. Friends nicknamed him ‘The Tourist’ for the camera he often wore around his neck. “Hoppy was always more of a visual than a verbal guy,” recalls Nicholson. The art collection that Hopper started in those years would grow to be almost as impressive as his film legacy: at Andy Warhol’s first pop-art show, in 1962, he bought one of the artist’s very first Campbell’s soup-can prints for $75. “Some people went to the beach, some people went to play tennis,” Hopper said. “I was a gallery bum.”

Hopper might never have come back to Hollywood had he not married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of uber-agent Leland Hayward and a close friend of Jane Fonda, in 1961. Hopper was still persona non grata at the studios, but he was able to get some work in biker B-movies alongside Jane’s brother Peter. In 1967, Hopper and Fonda starred together in The Trip, a Roger Corman schlock opus about LSD written by Nicholson, who hadn’t yet made it into the mainstream. “Dennis was supposed to be the lead in the first play I ever did,” recalls Nicholson. “But he went to Mexico to learn bullfighting instead, so I was pretty happy when our paths crossed again.” Hopper and Fonda even went into the desert at one point and shot the acid sequences themselves.

There was little indication that Hopper and Fonda’s next biker movie, Easy Rider, would transcend the genre. With Hopper attached to direct and star in the movie, they could barely scrape together $360,000 in financing. As they were preparing the film, Hopper got arrested for smoking pot on the Sunset Strip. Early casting hit a snag as well: Rip Torn, originally cast in Nicholson’s part of an ACLU lawyer in a Texas drunk tank, dropped out after Hopper threatened him with a steak knife at a New York restaurant. In the late Nineties, Hopper, not above embroidering a story to shed a more flattering light on himself, was forced to pay Torn $475,000 in damages after he claimed on The Tonight Show that Torn was the one who pulled the knife on him.

Easy Rider, which would go on to make $50m, changed the game of Hollywood film-making by proving that art movies made for young audiences by young directors could generate big profits. But Hopper was too difficult a personality to cash in on the revolution he helped launch. He was 33 years old, a countercultural icon and the hottest new director in Hollywood. Even Charles Manson was a fan, asking Hopper to star in a movie of his life. But the accolades weren’t enough for Hopper: in later years he began to insist that he had written Easy Rider himself, although the screenplay credit is shared by Hopper, Fonda and Terry Southern. “Twenty-seven years later, Dennis tried to get me to sign a declaration that he and he alone wrote the screenplay for Easy Rider,” Fonda writes in his memoir, Don’t Tell Dad. “One can imagine the love-hate relationship I’ve had with him all this time.”

The film also ruined Hopper’s first marriage. As his fame grew, he became abusive to Hayward, breaking her nose in one fight. She walked out on him with Marin, then five years old. “When we got divorced, I probably could have gone for half his cut from Easy Rider,” Hayward said later. “But I refused to take a nickel from him, because I didn’t want him coming after me with a shotgun and shooting me.”

In 1970, Hopper married Michelle Phillips, of The Mamas & The Papas, for eight days. “Seven of those days were pretty good,” he said later. “The eighth day was the bad one.” In a possibly apocryphal story, Hopper tied her to a radiator so she wouldn’t leave him. “What am I going to do?” he asked her when she left. “Have you thought about suicide?” she replied.

Hopper could have coasted on the success of Easy Rider for years, but his next move proved to be his undoing: he decided to direct and star in The Last Movie, a pet project about a stuntman who stays on the set of a Hollywood western after it finishes shooting in Peru. He built the set 14,000ft above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, shipping in Hollywood stars such as Fonda and hiring hundreds of Indians as extras. It was impossible to keep the drugs and orgies on the set quiet, because Hopper invited reporters from seemingly every magazine in the US to visit him in Peru. To edit the 37 hours of film he had shot, Hopper set up shop in a sprawling ranch house in Taos, New Mexico, surrounded by a cult of writers, druggies and hippie mystics.

The Last Movie won the Venice Film Festival, but it closed quickly in the US. “I overestimated my audience,” Hopper said, crushed by the rejection. “What they really wanted was 1940-opiate kind of movies where they didn’t have to do a whole lot of thinking — what Spielberg and Lucas came up with.” He was never again able to direct anything on such a grand scale.

“That’s one of the sad things, to me,” says Nicholson. “Hoppy was a great director, in my opinion, and his acting career was totally impressive — he survived so many not-so-great movies. But it’s a tough gig, being a director. You’ve got to make money, that’s part of the ball game.”

Cast out of Hollywood for a second time, Hopper descended into darkness. He was furious at himself for blowing his big opportunity. For the next 12 years he spent much of his time in Taos, drinking half a gallon of rum a day, snorting coke and riding around town on a chopper with a gun slung across his back. A rotating cast of bands and artists visited his ranch, from T Bone Burnett to Robby Romero, and Hopper shot off guns at his home day and night. He had a child, Ruthanna, with his third wife, actress Daria Halprin, but the marriage rapidly disintegrated. “It was during our marriage that Dennis had some of his most difficult years with alcoholism and drug abuse,” Halprin recalls. “Our marriage suffered tremendously.”

The only work available to Hopper were roles that played on his drug addiction, like the crazy photojournalist in Apocalypse Now. Even though he reportedly threw a flaming mattress out of the hotel one night — his girlfriend at the time was sighted with a black eye the next day — he wasn’t the oddest duck on that notoriously bizarre set: that award probably goes to Marlon Brando, who insisted on filming their scenes together on separate nights, because he didn’t like Hopper. But much of the crew loved him, even with his addictions. “All of his performance was improvisational,” recalls Laurence Fishburne, who plays a young soldier in the film. “It was stunning, the stream of consciousness coming out of him. I was just a kid, 15 years old, but I was blown away by his ability. He didn’t pay much attention to me, but I shadowed him for a while, because I thought, ‘Here’s a guy who’s free; here’s a guy who’s really free.’”

In 1983, Hopper finally hit rock bottom. He was in Mexico, playing the head of the DEA, ironically enough, in the long-forgotten movie Jungle Fever, when he suddenly wandered into the streets of Cuernavaca naked and raving. Two stuntmen from the film were dispatched to take him to the airport and fly him home before he ruined the production. On the plane, he thought he saw flames on the wing, and tried to open the emergency hatch. After a couple of tries in rehab and a stay in a mental ward, he finally got sober, and immediately started looking for another comeback.

Hopper called David Lynch and begged to be cast in Blue Velvet in the role of Frank Booth, the terrifying sadist who inhales an amyl-nitrate mix through a face mask he carries in his pocket. “That’s the way you would have seen Dennis behaving any number of nights in the Sixties,” Hayward has said. Hopper knew the role was made for him. “I’ve got to play this part,” he told Lynch, “because I am Frank.”

As he approached his 70s, Hopper no longer devoted himself to making great films. He signed up for a Super Mario Bros movie, the voice on a GPS recording, a lousy NBC Pentagon drama. He didn’t even mind taking a paycheck from Ameriprise, an investment service, for a series of TV commercials. The obsessions that had claimed Hopper for decades — the drugs, the drinking, the violence — had been replaced by his passion for collecting art. Almost every room of his home in Venice was hung with museum-quality paintings. “I once sat down with him at a table in his studio, and he was using a Damien Hirst skull as a paperweight,” says a friend. His collection included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Rauschenberg, David Salle, Keith Haring and a large portrait of him by Julian Schnabel. “I painted it for him when Rip Torn was making all that trouble with lawsuits, because he was down and I wanted to cheer him up,” says Schnabel.

Hopper had never got over the loss of his first collection, which he had been forced to hand over to Hayward in his divorce, years earlier. To make some money, she promptly turned around and sold much of it, including his prized Warhol soup can, the value of which he had recognised years before it became iconic. According to a source close to Hopper, that original collection could have been worth $200m today. His final collection was once appraised at $16m, but those familiar with it say it could be worth as much as $300m. Now, in Hopper’s last months, the question of who would control it — along with a valuable collection of his own photographs — took increasing precedence in his mind.

Victoria, the daughter of a psychologist and a neurologist in Boston, may have been a hostess when she met Hopper, but by the end of his life she had become a sophisticated Hollywood wife. With her clever eye for art, she helped hang shows of his photos and attended business meetings with him. But a few years before he died, their personal relationship began to deteriorate. He was, she later recalled, “wildly funny on good days, a towering inferno on bad”. Although he did not physically abuse her, she says he warned that “something bad is going to happen to you, and you won’t see it coming”, an allegation Hopper denied. Even so, after 14 years of marriage, she made the decision to support him through his illness. She also knew that, under the terms of their prenuptial agreement, she stood to walk away with nothing if they divorced.

But her patience was wearing thin. In his final years, Hopper still enjoyed his guns and drugs, although in smaller quantities. He kept a loaded shotgun in the house, as well as the pistol in his bedroom. Last October, when he went to get the weapons after hearing some firecrackers outside, he flipped out when he discovered that Victoria had turned them in to the Santa Monica police. She also flew off the handle at his son Henry, accusing him of leaving Hopper’s pot lying around in a room where Galen, their six-year-old daughter, liked to play. At the end of his life, Hopper was smoking as much as $700 a week of medical marijuana. Hopper doted on Galen; even Victoria admits in court documents that he “loves Galen deeply and likes to watch TV with her”. But that didn’t stop him from taking his son’s side in the argument. “Dennis could never be the authority figure, which is part of why the world loves him,” says a source close to Hopper. “He just wanted to be the pal, to be loved by his kids.”

As Hopper and Victoria’s fights escalated, Marin and Henry rushed to their father’s defence. As they saw it, Victoria was creating an unnecessary disturbance in their dad’s few remaining days. “Victoria has made my father’s life a living hell,” Henry later alleged in court documents. Feeling outnumbered, Victoria invited her mother to stay at the compound — a move that infuriated Hopper. “My kids all have rights to this property,” he seethed. “Your mother does not have rights.”

Hopper loved art because it was a refuge for him, a way of communicating with others offscreen, something that he admitted could be difficult for him. Sadly, his art collection would end up destroying his family. Last July, deciding that it was time to put Victoria in her place, Hopper removed her as a director of his art trust, replacing her with Marin. Three months later, while he was in Europe promoting a book of his photographs, Victoria met with his business manager and grew suspicious that Hopper had changed his will. Afterward, she insisted that Hopper accompany her to therapy to discuss the estate plan, but he refused. “Victoria wants Dennis’s money,” says a friend of the family. “She saw that art collection as a way to catapult herself into being a celebrity in the art world, and because she was going to be denied control of it, she went crazy.”

In the prenup, Victoria was supposed to get 25 per cent of Hopper’s estate, plus a quarter of his $1m life-insurance policy — but only if they were still married and living together at the time of his death. Galen was supposed to receive an additional 15 per cent of everything he had, with the remainder split among his other children. The problem with the prenup is that when it was written, Hopper’s compound in Venice included only the house with the metal front and a small studio. Now, it had sprawled to include five separate homes. And who was to say that Victoria wasn’t residing on the property if she simply packed up and moved into one of the new buildings on the property?

Before Victoria took such a dramatic step, she decided to confront Hopper a few weeks before Christmas about changes to the will. The next day, she came home to find that he had left the compound — Marin had moved him into the Beverly Hills Hotel. In court papers, Victoria implies that she moved Hopper to stop him from changing his mind about the will, but Marin said his doctor advised that he leave to escape the stress at home.

While Hopper was gone, Victoria took advantage of his absence. She hired a former assistant on poor terms with Hopper to help her remove several dozen pieces of art she claimed had been given to her as gifts, including sculptures by Robert Graham and a Banksy piece titled In the Future Everyone Will Be Anonymous for 15 Minutes. Hopper valued the combined works at $1.5m.

Two days later, Victoria took Galen and left for Boston to visit her mother — or that, at least, was the first story. “Then she said she had to leave because someone was trying to kill her and put sugar in her [petrol] tank,” Marin claims in court papers. “Then she said she was anorexic and she would have a heart attack if she stayed.” While Victoria was away, her enemies seized the opportunity to smear her: a tabloid paper implied she was “stepping out” with a Democratic strategist who lived in Boston, an accusation she vehemently denies.

Hopper lost his mind. A deal was struck to provide for Victoria, but she accused his children of standing in the way of a settlement. “Perhaps something has happened in Hopper’s mind, which makes him seek our destitution,” she says in court papers. “It is possible, but perhaps it is just the wishes of others.”

Hopper’s kids insist they were only protecting their father. “To claim my father is . . . under the influence of his children (who are with him in his time of need) is appalling to me,” Henry says in court documents. “We are here to serve him and support him. We are not here to exploit him in any way.” A friend of the children denies virtually every allegation Victoria has made. “Any creator of psychodrama is Victoria,” he says. “Everyone was very copacetic until she started acting like a fucking nightmare. She is the one who made the decision to change the family dynamic. Victoria is such a devious control freak she would never let any of the children be with Dennis — she didn’t want anybody else to have his attention.”

In January, Victoria finally moved out of the big house with Galen, taking up residence in one of the Gehry cottages that Hopper used as an art studio. But the fighting continued to escalate. The studio, which Galen called “the camp house”, had little furniture except for a queen-sized bed and a sectional couch. But when Victoria asked Hopper for $30,000 to buy additional furniture, he refused. “I’ll give her a bed,” he reportedly said. “But she wants $30,000 for the furniture? Please.” The camp house wasn’t set up to support full-time residents — there wasn’t enough power to have the heat and lights on at the same time — but when Victoria tried to fix it, Hopper’s lawyer sent her a letter explaining that she had “damaged a Frank Gehry-designed house (most famous architect in the world) by putting in unnecessary ventilation for reasons that none of us understand”. Victoria and Hopper had never merged bank accounts, and he had cut her credit-card limits to $5,000. She had not had a paying job in 18 years; a friend recalls her running around LA telling everyone she was broke.

Two days after she moved into the camp house, Victoria claims, Hopper served her divorce papers in front of their six-year-old daughter. Their last conversation was brief. “I expressed to him that I will always love him for the years we spent together, and for our beautiful daughter we share,” she says in court documents. “He responded: ‘Get the fuck out.’”

After they separated, Hopper tried to strip away more of Victoria’s dignity. He secured an agreement preventing her from coming within 10ft of him and his kids on the compound. The court awarded Victoria $12,000 a month in spousal and child support, but he refused to sit for depositions in the divorce case. Victoria became incensed, insisting that he wasn’t too sick to testify. She also filed a police report about the Banksy sculpture, which she claimed was stolen from the garage in the camp house.

But she was wrong about how sick he was. In April, Hopper took all of his children to Taos for one last trip, to show them where he wanted to be buried. He would have liked to have died in Taos, which he called his “heart home”, but he knew he couldn’t — he wanted to be near Galen, who was with Victoria in Los Angeles. He also began working with Schnabel on a large retrospective of his own artwork, to be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in July. “I thought it would resuscitate Dennis in a way, and bring him back to life,” says Schnabel. “He was very involved in collating a lot of this information, and I thought that his body would just get better as he’s doing this. Maybe that was just wishful thinking, you know?”

In his final weeks, Hopper decided to distance himself from the divorce entirely. He had asked a family friend, the Coca-Cola heir Alex Hitz, to deal with the press, and he let it drift out of his mind. The night Hopper died, on May 29, he was with his children. He lay in his bed and said Henry’s name twice. “He was so proud of Henry’s acting,” says his friend Shafrazi. “Then his eyes shifted to something in front of him ahead, and he was gone.” The children’s friends immediately filled the home with food and laughter, and invited those closest to Hopper to board a private plane for the funeral in Taos a few days later. But his youngest child did not attend the ceremony: Hopper had refused to let Victoria come, and she didn’t want Galen to go through the stress of her father’s funeral without her mother present.

Late in his life, on one of his road trips with the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, Hopper was touched when his friend Laurence Fishburne confessed that he felt intimidated by the art world. “Let me walk you through the museum,” Hopper suggested. “Let me show you what this is about.” Leading Fishburne through the quiet galleries, Hopper explained the process in poignant terms. “These paintings, all these pieces in the museum, are your friends, and you’re coming to visit your friends,” he said. “And if there’s somebody in here that you don’t like, you don’t have to spend time with them.”

It was the same at the funeral. According to a source close to Hopper, Victoria wasn’t the only one who wasn’t invited: Hopper’s children had a list of people who were banned from paying their respects, including his former literary agent and a photographer he had long been close to. But for those who did attend, it marked the passing of a legend. In an adobe church depicted in paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Hopper’s brother read The Pilgrim, Kristofferson’s ode to his lonely and contentious friend. There was a lot of laughter and crying. Then Hopper was laid to rest on sacred Indian land. As his body was lowered into the ground, mourners heard a final, furious roar. “There was a whole lot of bikers lined up,” says Nicholson. “And when they set their engines off, that set me off too.”

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