I've been crowing of late that China is home to me now and that I don't miss the States period--except for baseball, a car and an open highway, and New Orleans, of course. Then along comes an e-mail from David Sheffield. David has been a crucial element in my life for most of my life. In the e-mail, David, one of the most talented writers I've ever known, included a couple of photographs of him and his grandson fishing off Islamorada, in the Florida Keys, that undulating spit of sand and coral separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico.
That hit home, hard. You see, David and I call the Mississippi Gulf Coast home, although neither of us have lived there for decades; our roots and families are still there. And so is mother Gulf. She was literally our front yard and infinite playground growing up. David graduated from Biloxi High School, the "big school" in the "big town" just across the small bay from sleepy little Ocean Springs, the fishing and summer-resort village where I grew up. Linda, my first wifeof some 31 years, had a bit of a crush on David when they were classmates at Biloxi High. Shortly thereafter, David and I became life-long best friends and comrades in art as we finished our under-graduate degrees in Theatre together at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1972.
I went on to do many things that most of you know about; David went on to be a staff writer and soon the head writer for "Saturday Night Live" in partnership with Barry Blaustein in the early eighties. There, these two very white boys created the characters and riffs that Eddie Murphy then made very special, catapulting the three of them into major feature films within only a few years.
David and Barry wrote Coming to America, Boomerang, The Nutty Professor and The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, among other hugely successful films. David's and Barry's films have grossed well over a billion dollars US. Hence the title of this post. It was also the title of an article I was commissioned to write for one of the major men's magazines in America, but had to shelve when Eddie had a change of mind.
I spent the decade before coming to China living and writing in Los Angeles and saw a lot of David, his equally brilliant screenwriter and twin brother, Buddy Sheffield, and amazingly enough about a dozen other close friends who came together tightly in the Theatre Department of the University of Southern Mississippi in a span of about five years, from the late 60's to the early 70's. As incredible as it seems given the odds, this was the beginning of the core of the now celebrated "Hollywood Mississippi Mafia"; each of us, in our own fashion, becoming successful in one of the most competitive of competitive worlds, "the Biz." Check out another one of my dearest brothers over three decades, M.C. Gainey, at great "depth," in the film Sideways.
That decade in "Hollywood" surrounded by all of the souls with whom I'd first really learned to make "art" was unimaginably rich and life-altering--and it isn't over, in today's world of art it is so much easier to stay connected. I am still registered to vote in Malibu; that is where I sent my futile, still darkly recent in mind, absentee participation in contemporary American politics.
But, in truth, I have never been "homesick" during our now almost three years living in China; China is "home" and will be for some time to come. Then I saw the photos above and below of David and his grandson Austin fishing in the waters that forever roil and dazzle and stretch both of our lives and imaginations, the very imaginations that made us the truly lucky ones in life, the ones whose dreams came true.
My dreams began in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and then led me far and wide. And that is where they will lead me back in the end, to begin an ending.
David is the laughing, semi-bearded dude in the shades with the sailfish in hand in the picture above. David's grandson, Austin, is the proud youngster with the barracuda in the picture below. David commented that both fish were released back into their own depths shortly after their takes were in the can.
