Dave mentioned my name, and they asked him to send an audition tape. Instead, Dave insisted that they meet me in person. It was the first big role I’d been up for in a while, but I had no experience playing James Bond–style supervillains. I was desperate to get the part, so I went to a pet store, bought a big bunny, and took it to the audition. I did the entire Bigg Bunny scene sitting in a chair, stroking the rabbit.
It was a gamble, but the casting agents loved the courage it took and ended up giving me the part. The writers even incorporated a bunny into the script. It was more proof that only your mother thinks you’re special; to all other people, you look the same as everyone else unless you make the effort to stand out—and that effort is always worth it.
I kept the bunny and took it home as a reminder of this lesson.
Fool’s Gold was a seventy-million-dollar tropical action movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. When I arrived in Australia, the producers gave me a rental car, keys to an apartment, and a sheet with call times. They then informed me that people drive on the opposite side of the road in Australia. But because I wasn’t the star, the rest was up to me: to be professional, show up on time, kill the material, and make the director, Andy Tennant, feel that I had a future in the business. I’d been given another chance.
Being so far away from home for three months, I missed my family—even Torrei. So she came out with Heaven, and in the paradise of coastal Queensland, Australia, she told me she had bad news.
My bunny rabbit, my lucky reminder to always be different, was dead. She’d killed Little Bigg Bunny, though she said she didn’t know how it had happened. I figured that they’d probably gotten into an argument because he was tired of eating carrots at home and wanted to go outside to hunt for wild carrots.
Outside of that, though, we got along the whole time. I felt like things were turning around: my movie career was starting up again. Torrei and I weren’t fighting. Heaven was growing into a beautiful girl. And Na’im, who was house-sitting for us, decided to move to Los Angeles permanently.
Then my brother called in a panic.
70
* * *
THERE ARE NO WORDS TO SUMMARIZE THIS ONE
“Look, man, Mom told me not to tell you this,” my brother began. I braced myself for something painful. “She’s sick.”
I could feel myself getting ill as I heard the words. “How sick?”
“Real sick. She didn’t want you to find out, because she knows this movie is big for you and you wouldn’t have done it if you knew how bad it was.”
“How bad is that?”
“As bad as a death sentence. If you don’t come home soon, the next time you’ll probably see Mom is in the grave. I’m sorry for telling you this so late, but if you’re mad you gotta deal with it, because those were her wishes.”
It felt like the world stopped spinning. I drifted in and out as he continued: “Ovarian cancer . . . a year ago . . . I only found out by accident . . . family . . . when . . . Kev? Kev?”
“I’ll be on the next plane home.”
As soon as I hung up, I explained the situation to the producers. Fortunately, Bigg Bunny wasn’t in a lot of scenes that week, so they were able to adjust the schedule and let me go home for a few days.
My brother picked me up at the airport and told me that Mom was refusing to get treatment. She believed in God’s will, he reported, and if God wanted her to get healthy, she’d get better. And if God wanted to take her in the same way her own mother had died of ovarian cancer, she’d get sicker. “I’ll let God handle it,” she kept telling him.
I felt all my childhood frustration rise to the surface as he went on about Mom’s stubbornness. If God really wanted to handle those things Himself, without human participation, then he wouldn’t have created doctors.
Kenneth pulled into the driveway of my mom’s house and I ran inside. My heart broke when I saw her. She was sitting in an armchair, and her stomach was so swollen that she looked pregnant. She was in a lot of pain and wasn’t even able to go to the bathroom.
“I didn’t want you to know,” she said softly. “It’s wonderful that you’re out there doing your thing. My little Kevin! You’ve made me so happy.”
Tears filled my eyes. I asked her if she could please go to a hospital—not for herself, but for me and Kenneth, so we would know we’d done all we could—and thankfully, she agreed.
We took her to Temple University Hospital, the same place my brother and I were born, and she began chemotherapy. But she was unhappy there. She’d built her life around working hard, being around loved ones, and participating in her church community. Here, everything seemed cold and clinical and far from God. You weren’t seen as a soul on your way to paradise, just as a chart on a clipboard.
“These people don’t want me here,” she insisted. “Take me home!”
With the money from Fool’s Gold, I was able to set her up at home with a hospital bed and around-the-clock nursing. When possible, we had a doctor come in and do treatments at her bedside.
The day I was flying back to Australia, my brother called: “You gotta come back over to the house.”
“Why?”
“There’s a bird in the basement.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me: There’s a bird in the basement!”
“Oh my God, I’ll be right there!”
When we were young, Mom had filled our heads with dozens of superstitions. One was about splitting a pole being bad luck, and another was that if a bird flies into the house, it was a sign of death.
When I arrived at the house, I asked for clarification. “If a bird gets into the house but you catch it and take it outside, does that mean that you got death out of the house too?”
“Well, if you can get the bird,” my cousin Shirrel answered. Evidently, they’d all tried.
“If that’s all it takes, we’ll go get that bird right now. Get his ass out the house, and Mom will be okay.”
Kenneth and I went downstairs. The bird was huge: It really looked like death.
My brother was armed with a mop; I had a broom. The plan was to swat and chase the beast out of the basement. Kenneth swung the mop at it, and it swooped in my direction. I dropped the broom and went running up the steps so fast I fell at the top.
However, a true hero never gives up. I bravely picked up the phone and called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to come get the bird. “That still counts, right?” I asked Shirrel afterward.
Not long after I returned to Australia, I was speaking with my dad on the phone, and he told me he’d gotten “what they call a pap-something” and found out he had lung cancer. Where my mom didn’t like getting treatment and kept saying “I’ll leave it up to God,” my dad wanted every treatment available and kept saying “God, why me?”
I was able to take a few more days off, so I flew back to Philadelphia to visit my folks. I was worried I was going to lose them both, until I spoke to my father’s doctor, who explained to my relief that even though Dad was talking like he was gonna die any day, he was going to pull through just fine.