![]() ![]() He is explaining why he almost never gives interviews. Kilmer's friendly ranch hand (a fortyish woman named Pam Sawyer) has just given me a plateful of Mexican food I don't really want, so Val is eating it for me. There seem to be a lot of hoofed animals on this ranch, and many of them are dead. We are surrounded by unfinished wood and books about trout fishing, and an African kudu head hangs on the wall. We are now sitting in his lodge, which is more rustic than I anticipated. ![]() "I've never been that comfortable talking about myself, or about acting," the forty-five-year-old Kilmer says. He parks next to my rental car I roll down the window. I see a man driving toward me on a camouflaged ATV four-wheeler, and the man looks like a cross between Jeff Bridges and Thomas Haden Church, which means that this is the man I am looking for. Eventually, I cross a wooden bridge and park the vehicle. I expect the residence to be near the entrance, but it is not I drive at least two miles on a gravel road. There is a pause, and then he says, "Someone will meet you at the bridge!" The gate swings open and I drive through. When an anonymous male voice finally responds to my desperate pleas for service, it is mechanical and terse: "Who are you meeting? What is this regarding?" I tell him I am a reporter, and that I am here to see Val Kilmer, and that Mr. I locate an intercom phone outside the gate, but most of the numbers don't work. This, I suppose, is where the buffalo roam (and where roaming rates apply). There is no one around for miles, the sky is huge, and my cell phone no longer works. When I arrive in New Mexico's capital city, I discover that Kilmer's ranch is still another thirty minutes away, and the directions on how to get there are a little confusing it takes me forty-five minutes before I find the gate to his property. This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice. The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is mildly Zen there are road signs that say, GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST. It is actually outside Santa Fe, which is seventy-three miles away. Curiously, the ranch is not outside Albuquerque (which I assumed would be the case, particularly since Val himself suggested I fly into the Albuquerque airport). I was now told to rent a car and drive to the ranch myself. However, when I arrived in Albuquerque this afternoon, the plans changed again. Instead I was instructed to fly to New Mexico, where someone would pick me up at the Albuquerque airport and drive me to Kilmer's six-thousand-acre ranch. ![]() Late last night, these plans changed entirely. Twenty-four hours ago, I was preparing to fly to Los Angeles to conduct this interview this was because Val was supposedly leaving for Switzerland (for four months) on April 3. I have been talking to Kilmer for approximately three minutes it's 5:20 P.M. ![]() He says he named one of these remaining ungulates James Brown because it likes to spin around in circles and looks like the kind of beast who might beat up his wife. Val Kilmer tells me he used to own a dozen buffalo, but now he's down to a pair. There was almost no separation between the people and the animals." There was such a relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian-the Indians would eat them, live inside their pelts, use every part of the body. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm part Cherokee. "Obviously, we are not seeing these particular buffalo at their most noble of moments," Kil-mer says, "but I still like looking at them. He stomps his right hoof, turns 180 degrees, and defecates in our general direction. A fifteen-hundred-pound bull stares back at us, bored and tired. "I liked looking at them when I was a kid, and I like looking at them now." The buffalo are behind a fence, twenty-five feet away. "I just like looking at them," Val Kilmer tells me as we stare at his two bison. Is he the most advanced actor of our time? He has portrayed Jim Morrison, Willem de Kooning, John Holmes, and Batman. He's Cindy Crawford's ex and Bob Dylan's pal. He's a Christian Scientist and a collector of reference books. ![]()
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