A man I typically regard as immortal turns 55 today, and I finally type up this piece as something of a public display of affection. He is a jewel in Hollywood’s crown, gaudy and rare and authentic, and I love him so. I would not die for him, unless it was very dramatic.

The following was performed at Chicago’s Write Club on January 16, 2018 as part of a “Passive v. Aggressive” bout. Reader, she won. It’s been a minute and the world has changed but I still believe every word and love him all the same.

Nic Cage/Reader, Bakery AU 250k cw: major character death

Nicolas Cage was offered the roles of Aragorn, Neo, and Clark Kent. Put a pin in this fact. Deposit one dollar into that account and we’ll check on the interest in five minutes.

Aggressive is a dirty word in medicine; it means catching, spreading, consuming. The sort of thing you fight rather than treat, aggressive is a death knell. I work in medicine, but in the way that Janine is a Ghostbuster or Prince Charles is a politician: I just pick up the phone. I sometimes schedule plastic surgeries and patients constantly ask me medical questions, and I legally have to say, “gosh! I don’t really know anything about that medicine stuff. Can I interest you in Botox?”

I used to be an actor, and now every day I get to act like I know what a blepharoplasty is. Live your dreams!

One patient will not stop emailing me questions, no matter how I insist to him that I am just a bag of rocks with Outlook calendar privileges. He always signs his emails “King Regards,” instead of kind. And he sends multiple emails a day. An hour.

He emails me this week: So do you do aggressive liposuction or conservative liposuction? King Regards. His notes and his king regards are pinging my inbox so often that I now imagine him as a loud little toad with a copper crown, slapping away at a very small keyboard. King regards sounds like he’s flipping me off in calligraphy.

I’m not a doctor so I ask one. “Hey, do we do aggressive, or conservative lipo?”

He says, “we don’t use those terms. We do what is safe. Who’s asking?”

Why, just a pushy little toad king in velvet sweatpants for whom, via email, I am grand vizier, I do not tell the surgeon, because he has too many letters after his name to need this in his day.

I email the toad: Together with the patient and their primary care team, we choose a procedure that is safe.

Reply, instantly: Safe means conservative. I don’t think it’s worth it to put any energy into some big production that’s safe but doesn’t change anything, do you? King Regards.

I remind him: Unfortunately I am not a doctor able to provide any medical advice to you.

Reply, instantly, if not negative five seconds from now: Doesn’t matter. Safe won’t stick. King Regards.

And the king of the toady teens vanished, back to inbox hell or wherever it is they raise the babies who treat email like a messenger app, like we didn’t go through eight layers of T-9 hell and touchtone phones and codebreakers and party lines and express-fuckin-ponies for him to be able to send me twenty separate emails in less than the amount of time it would take to wax seal one missive from his majesty, the toad.

But bless his little heart, he doesn’t want to live in that toad’s body anymore. He doesn’t-want that real bad.

And that I understand. This is no small effort. To change one’s self is aggressive. It has to be, when you need it to survive. I’ve been there.

Because sometimes you think: in this one small corner of my house I don’t have to be the doormat. This could change, and I want it. And you stand there, and you take that stand.

But safe won’t stick. So what then?

Most all procedures look aggressive to me. But “before” and “after” imply that “during” was a cataclysm. You must earn the after. Toad was simply putting in the work.

They use the word “flap” liberally in my business, because precious You are simply a fatal quilt of parts in a very expensive, HIPAA-compliant Build-a-Bear workshop, with slightly more blood than the branch at Woodfield Mall.

(Sidebar: there is not as much blood in your body as you might think. It’s a little less than two small car wash buckets at the high school marching band fundraiser wet dream that Quentin Tarantino is having RIGHT NOW. And returning,)

During aggressive surgeries, humans have whole sections of their bodies lopped off or sucked out or puffed up and sewn, sewn, sewn, flap by flap. They say the body is a temple but it’s more like a couple of adjoining suites in the motel with bibles chained into the drawers. It’s not the fucking Waldorf, and you sure as hell don’t know just how weird it is in there until you’re elbow deep. And more importantly, sometimes it’s not even the right room. Sometimes the keys don’t work, the carpets are crawling, and you can’t sleep for the noise in your brain knocking on the walls, haunting this place you’re supposed to inhabit. Safe won’t stick, and for some, safe hasn’t been on the menu for years. You can’t afford half-measures when your house is collapsing around you, infested, on fire. You cannot live there.

What will it take?

You don’t up your multi-vitamins from Never to Sometimes and expect a full-body health exorcism. You don’t send one letter to Congress and expect it to be louder than gun money.

You don’t hire Tobey Maguire for a Nicolas Cage job.

A Man™

What would he have you do? Relapsing a toxic relationship, what would Nic Cage do? Choking on a nowhere job, what would Nic Cage do? Trapped in a body that doesn’t fit, what would Nic Cage do?

Pull the pin from that earlier thought: Neo, Clark Kent, Aragorn, son of Arathorn, rightful king of men. He could have had them all. We could have had those films.

He didn’t, and we don’t. Why?

Not one of you who knows of Nic Cage says, “ah yes, the subtle nuance of Adaptation, the lingering notes of melancholy and a mastery of craft.” No. That’s never the first thing you say. Nic Cage is the champagne of beers. You remember him yelling something, throwing something, wearing a wig that would test the very limits of Suspending Disbelief if the scale were set by Muppets.

But you remember that because he is so good at it. You have a great time. You — dare I say it — enjoy his work. He doesn’t care that you do, or don’t.

But he knows. Nic Cage is out here, breaking and entering, annihilating realism, burning down houses and dying on every hill. Nic Cage is, by definition, no half-measure. He already owns a gravesite in New Orleans’ oldest cemetery and it is not so much a tomb as it is a kiddie-pool sized pyramid with the phrase OMNIA AB UNO emblazoned across the front because Nicolas Cage isn’t even going to die half-assed.

AS IF YOU NEEDED EVIDENCE TO BELIEVE IT, THOUGH.

Imagine a world where Nicolas Cage is beautiful, blameless Jay Gatsby, and Willy Wonka, and Hannibal Lector, and Harry Potter, and Are you there God? It’s me, Nicolas Cage. You don’t want to imagine that, and you don’t have to. Because Nic Cage for being aggressively capital B-Bad, is not aggressively reckless; he is the king of self-ownership. Do you think rotten tomatoes bother Nic Cage? He sits on a throne of thrown produce. For God’s Sake: He took Ghost Rider over Iron Man. He made the choice that was right for him, for his art, his path. He always does. He never plays safe. Nic Cage does Nic Cage better than anyone in the world, in history, ad eternum.

The casting executive on Breakfast Club called Nic Cage and said, I paraphrase, “you’re asking for too much money. Absolutely not. Don’t you know you’re Nicolas Cage?”

And Nicolas Cage responded, “Don’t you know I’m Nicolas Cage? King regards!”

Don’t take from this roundabout Thought Garden I’m passing off as a curated bouquet that our timeline dodged some kind of cultural bullet. Nic Cage is the one holding the gun. He has weaponized his energy, sharpened his personal brand of versatile acting magic to an irreplaceable needle’s point. When you need Nicolas Cage, you can’t stomach a substitution. There can be only one. And he doesn’t always choose rage: he can be unbearably soft, unrelentingly affable, kind to the point of hostility. It turns out you can weaponize the most beautiful things on this earth, choosing militant, impermeable joy like a no-man’s land for cynicism. Aggressively choosing your own happiness is sometimes much harder than the alternative. Going big or going home in a world that leans away sometimes lands you back at home anyway after a long walk of shame, and that’s a terribly scary risk when you’re putting your whole vulnerable self on the line. It is easier to pick Iron Man than Ghost Rider. Nicolas Cage is teaching us, with every frame, how to aggressively choose ourselves over all else. I want to do to my whole emotional person what Nicolas Cage does to any script that gives him a big enough sword.

(Orinoco Flow plays softly in the background)

Growth is aggressive. Progress is aggressive. You have to ask everything of yourself to be aggressive if you want to make, do, or change, and you have to hope others will meet you there. If you’re putting everything on the line, there’s no game to play if others won’t ante up. They’ll understand, eventually. It may be the twentieth email, the fifteenth flop, an uncountable tripping hazard, but you get back up and they will eventually understand what it is you are doing, you are doing for yourself.

I am not a doctor, but it is my professional opinion having taken the hypocritical oath that you absolutely should cut the whole thing up, the whole of your play dough humanity, because it will harden and crumble if you don’t constantly reshape. Edit viciously, accept changes, suture and stitch the parts of you that are most efficient to your super-soldier Nic Cage Best Version You because you are needed on the front lines. To die on a hill doesn’t just mean to throw yourself into a cause; you do so for all to see. You do it big, on screens across America, like Nic, because safe won’t stick.

If you have to send a thousand emails to rebuild your beautiful house from nothing but ash, do it.

Do it before home becomes a pyramid in New Orleans. Choose Ghost Rider like your life depends on it, because it does. Someone, everyone, eventually, will see you.

The view from that hill is glorious.

King regards,