The Battle of Los Angeles Part 6: LA Woman

  This is not a love story. 

            When the rewrite money ran out and THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY didn’t sell I realized I had to get a real job type job. I wanted something which would allow me to have days free to go on meetings and write, so I applied at a liquor store in West Hollywood, across the street from Fuse Entertainment. The liquor store was somewhat ironically a drug free work place. Even though my cocaine days were behind me, I was still a regular weed smoker so I needed to find a solution. I asked myself “What would George Costanza do?” I figured he’d get some clean piss. Well, as luck would have it, Maloney didn’t party and he might love SEINFELD as much as me. So, when I asked if I could use his ‘sample’ for some sitcomesque hijinks, his exact response was “My heart and bladder are full.” I walked into the testing facility with two small squeeze bottles of Maloney’s pee tucked into my pants, one behind my belt buckle at my waist, one tucked underneath my junk, held securely in place by snug boxer briefs. Every sign in the testing facility was in Korean, but I eventually found the office. They asked me to have a seat and wait and I lowered myself gingerly so as not to smash the bottle full of another man’s urine I had secretly tucked under my balls. They called me up and a guy went into the bathroom with me. He ushered me to a stall and showed me the fill line on the cup. I had to use both bottles. He left the stall, I unzipped my pants, removed the bottles and squeezed the sample into the cups. The noise sounded exactly like I was peeing into them, but the splash-back was not easy to control. “I got it all over my hands!” I screamed. “It happens,” the orderly replied before I vigorously washed up. That night, my friend Michael’s band was playing at the Wiltern, which was a short walk from my Koreatown studio, so some people came over to pregame and a buddy ended up crashing on my couch cuz he was too drunk to drive. When I woke up, he was gone but I had an apologetic text from him.  He had drunkenly pissed all over my couch. On no other day in my life have I had to handle so much of my friends’ urine. 

            Let’s check in for a second, Dear Reader.  If you’re thinking something like ‘that was kind of a graphic and gross story and Nathan sure was self-destructive in it,’ you’re right.  You also should be aware that, in terms of this entry, the above story is about as tame as things are going to get. So, if you were squeamish or put off by my Tinkle Tale, there’s a whole Internet out there for you to explore and I won’t feel bad if you stop reading this section of it. 

            When I started at the liquor store I met a girl. And listen, if you are that girl, thanks for reading, but please know that you don’t have to read this story. I’m gonna talk about a time that was really difficult for both of us, and if you’d rather not relive it, I won’t feel bad, Shithead. Also, for any other women reading this entry and thinking it might be about you, a good way to know for sure is if you were offended just now when I called you Shithead, you are not the woman I’m talking about. She was Shithead, I was Butt Toucher or Booger Breath. We were not mature. For the purposes of this entry, I’m gonna call her Tank Girl in the hopes it will make up for naming the story of our disaster after a fucking Doors song. 

 

Tank Girl was a foul-mouthed, tattooed ginger with a quick sense of humor, extensive knowledge of beers, wines and spirits and a great ass, so I never had a choice in the matter, I was going to fall in love toward her, but this is not a love story. In those first few weeks together, she was my biggest help in the liquor store, telling me where bottles were, how things operated and who was a hard worker and who wasn’t. We were both hard workers and were tasked with setting up a holiday display. I’ve never had so much fun at work. We giggled and gave each other shit as we stocked shelves with eggnog mix and peppermint liqueur chocolates. “Why is this like the funnest thing in the world?” she asked, our faces red from laughing. If anyone gave me shit about my albinism, Tank Girl had my back. When a douche bag customer once badmouthed me, she told him to get the fuck out of her store.  When another asked what my deal was, she accidentally dropped his bottle of Pinot, spilling red wine all over his white shoes. It turned out her parents were legally blind, so she could help me see things while I drove, like when we went to In N Out together on our lunch breaks. We smoked cigarettes after our shifts and she talked to me about how much she liked riding her fixed gear bicycle and got me into riding a bike, which I hadn't done since the sixth grade. I thought we were meant to be together. Obviously, she had a boyfriend. He was a Heavy Metal Dude who grew up in the same part of Virginia as me and went to a rival high school, a high school where many of the fuck-heads I went to middle school with ended up going. My body could not hold all the jealousy and resentment I felt toward him. You know this part of the story: she complained about him to me and I listened and nodded along, playing the role of the sweet guy, waiting, hoping, praying (perhaps preying? I’m so fucking clever) they’d break up.  

 

            Tank Girl didn’t come to my 30th birthday party because she was back home in Michigan. That night, hanging at the bar, waiting for the rest of my friends to show up, I reached my hand into the seat cushions and felt something odd. I pulled out a small red pill with a devil on it. Never one to pass up an adventure, I took the pill. As it turned out, it was ecstasy and I had one of the best birthdays I can remember, from what I can remember. After that experience, I got it in my head that I needed to take more chances in my life. When Tank Girl got back from Michigan a few days after my birthday, she called me and said she was dumping her boyfriend. “You can stay with me,” I heard myself saying.  

 

            I knew, obviously, that I was being opportunistic, but I was trying very hard not to be a total dirt bag. She had nowhere else to turn, so Tank Girl moved some things in and stayed at my place for a couple weeks or maybe a month, sleeping on the new couch I’d made my pee pal buy me. It was all very platonic and very, very domestic. Tank Girl felt bad for imposing, so she cooked meals for us and every time I came home from work she’d cleaned my apartment. I didn’t try anything physical or romantic, I tried to give her space. Eventually, she found an apartment over on Vermont. It was an enormous studio they could’ve called a micro-loft and it was only $700 a month. We moved her clothes in, then I drove her up to Burbank to get the rest of her stuff from Heavy Metal Dude. It was surreal to share a pizza with him while taking a break from carrying Tank Girl’s stuff from his apartment to my car. We talked about the shooting that took place at my high school when I was a senior. I was honestly expecting to fight him, but he was pretty cool, all things considered. As we loaded her stuff into her new apartment, we got a sense of the building. Every other tenant in the building spoke Spanish and many of the tenants were families of four or more, all living in the same size large studio Tank Girl was renting. The elevator looked like if a prison cell and an outhouse had a miscarriage. She painted her new place and used her tax refund to buy some Ikea furniture. She found a couch in the hallway and took it into her apartment. A couple days after she moved into her own place, we made out for the first time. A week later we slept together. We had real chemistry, like a fountain full of pennies and a crackling bolt of lightning.

            Let’s talk about sex, baby, let’s talk about you and me, let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be without getting too graphic or NSFW.  While I had dated some sexually liberated women, I had never slept with anyone who liked rough sex and it was sometimes very fun and sometimes very, very confusing. It had never occurred to me to spit on or slap someone I was sleeping with, but these are things I was asked to do to someone I thought I loved at the time. Given the muddling of pleasure and pain, I couldn’t tell sounds of joy from sounds of suffering, especially when the suffering supposedly brought joy. It became difficult to distinguish good pain from bad and Tank Girl seemed turned on by aggression, which I’d always been told was unattractive. The entirety of our relationship existed in this murky gray area, lacking any clarity or definition. To be completely honest, I wasn’t ready for any of it.  

            Even though Tank Girl was vocal about not wanting a relationship or boyfriend, I thought I could find a way to convince her of otherwise. By sheer force of my own charisma, sexual prowess, wit or wisdom, I thought I could make her love me the way I needed her to love me, a way she was not capable of or interested in loving me at the time. Just like writing, I thought I could make something real out of nothing. If this notion sounds romantic to you, it absolutely should not. This is not a love story. It felt romantic to me at the time, but that’s not at all what was happening. I was playing White Knight, but I needed Tank Girl way more than she needed me. I think I knew I had ‘seen the moment of my greatness flicker’ in terms of Hollywood and I thought Tank Girl would, could and should save me. I’m embarrassed to say, I saw her then as my prize. Meeting THE ONE felt like the only thing that could make up for the failure of not selling a script, The Love of My Life could make all my sadness seem worth it, so I projected all kinds of feelings onto this poor girl who was just looking for some security while she figured out her life, her sexuality, what she wanted and how to get it. I don’t want to call my behavior abusive, but that’s probably what I’d call it if someone else behaved as I was behaving, so that’s probably what it was. I continued to try to enforce my will on our relationship, tried to control things and blatantly ignored Tank Girl’s warnings and requests about keeping my emotional distance. I thought the world owed me something. Soon, I'd get just what I deserved. 

 The unit that became available in Tank Girl’s building was bigger and cheaper than my current apartment. Back during My Hollywood Romance, I enjoyed going across the street to get laid, so I thought I’d love just walking downstairs. The Tony Orlando song "Knock Three Times" was on the playlist at work. It's about a guy starting a relationship with the girl who lives below him and every time it played over the loudspeakers, Tank Girl and I smiled at each other.  We joked about the living situation being great, we joked about it being awful. Somehow, I convinced myself it was smart to move into the same building as the woman I was sleeping with even though she was vocal about not wanting to be my girlfriend. Then again, after I moved in, one night Tank Girl knocked on my door wearing make-up and a long jacket with nothing underneath. That was as good as it ever got, though. A week later, bug bites appeared on her legs. Turned out the couch she brought into her apartment from the building’s hallway was lousy with them. We didn’t know what to do. We put all her clothes in the laundry, threw the couch out, wrapped her bed up in plastic wrap so the bugs in there couldn’t escape and she moved into my apartment upstairs.  

            This is not a love story but our stuff looked so fucking cute together and I LOVED paying $350 a month in rent, even if we had roaches. We slept in the same bed. We worked together. She taught me how to ride a bike in the streets. California changed the rules for who was eligible for a medical marijuana prescription and I needed to get a CA Drivers License. The requirements for driving with my bioptic telescopic lenses vary by state and California's were a little stricter than Virginia's, so I did not qualify to drive there. I sold my car and she helped me pick out a bike I still ride. I rode all over LA and truly felt free for maybe the first time I can remember. There’s no better way to traverse the streets of LA than on a bicycle, unless you have a meeting to attend at which you can’t be sweaty. We bought groceries and she taught me how to eat better and budget. I lost weight and have never been hotter. I turned down all kinds of action from customers at the liquor store. We had people over for game night and they said we sure didn’t seem like just friends. A week after she moved in we went to lunch at Denny’s because it was close and we both hated ourselves. We came back to find her cat meowing and our apartment in disarray. The thieves stole both my laptops, my backup USB drive with all my files, my electric razor, my iPod, Tank Girl’s digital camera, all my nice watches, a case full of guitar pedals I was keeping safe for Michael, my buddy from the band, and I can’t even remember what else. Every script I’d ever written was gone. Every novel, ever document, journal entry, false start, every outline, every piece of brainstorming, it was all gone. Pictures from grad school, pictures from college, pictures from years of my life vanished. 80 gigs of music disappeared forever, some of which was stuff from friends’ bands that I literally cannot replace. “For a minute there, I lost myself.” I’d turned down renter’s insurance the week before we were robbed.

 

            After that I was anxious all the time. The night of the robbery I went to sleep and found the tool they’d used to break into our apartment in our bed. Worse, my entire career had been pilfered. Worst, I knew the truth about me and Tank Girl. I knew we had the semblance of a happy relationship, but deep inside myself, I knew this arrangement wasn’t what she wanted and was built on rotten supports. She’d dumped Heavy Metal Dude to find freedom; instead, she was trapped with a guy she didn’t want to be with again. Word got around work that we were dating, even though we were explicitly not dating, and management brought us in to discuss the situation, as if paying us $8 an hour entitled the company to any say in our sex lives. We said nothing was going on between us, but when Tank Girl said it, she meant it. I kept thinking we would one day just work out, kept hoping she’d have some awakening and love me the same way I thought I loved her. That’s what would’ve happened in a movie. But this is not a love story.

My best friend’s wedding was coming up in October and I’d said Tank Girl was coming with me, but this started to become a bone of contention for us. “I don’t want to have to explain our relationship to everyone,” she said. I thought I’d convince her anyway. I went to Virginia for a different friend’s wedding in May and Tank Girl went out for drinks with Katie in LA. I texted Katie, asking her to try to find some subtle way to tell Tank Girl I loved her. But I was drunk, so the text had typos. Katie showed it to Tank Girl, looking for clarity in what I might have been trying to say. Tank Girl must’ve figured it out because our relationship was never the same after I got back to LA. That probably sounds tragic until you consider I hooked up with a girl in Virginia at the wedding. After all, Tank Girl and I weren’t dating. Have you ever wondered what your life might be like if you were just a little bit better looking?  Thanks to the weight I’d lost riding my bike around LA, I got to find out. I’ve never been hotter. Because I was getting laid regularly, I was a charismatic blond guy with the confidence to talk to just about any girl. My albinism was not a factor at all and when it was, I used it to my advantage.  “Got a little albino in you?  Want some?” 

            “What’s the worst news I could give you?” Tank Girl said to me maybe two weeks after I got back from the wedding.

            “You’re pregnant?” I joked. 

            But she wasn’t smiling. She had taken a couple of tests over the last few days, hiding the boxes and results in Jack in the Box wrappers before throwing them in the trashcan. I’ll spare you the specifics, but it was decidedly my fault she got pregnant. For about a week we considered keeping it but Planned Parenthood was literally a block up the street and we called each other Shithead and Butt Toucher, what the fuck would we have done with a baby? She made the appointment. Meanwhile, in Northern California, my uncle got blackout drunk and fell in his bathroom, cutting himself up badly. My mom thought it would be a good idea for all of us to go up there and see him, just to let him know we cared about and loved him, hoping he’d sober up, trying to make something real out of nothing. On July 4, Tank Girl and I stood on the roof of our building and watched fireworks crackle and sparkle around the city. My flight was July 5. My trip was terrible. I got back July 7 or 8. On July 9 it was done, which, I suppose, is a pretty glib and convenient way for me to describe an abortion procedure which was not performed on my body. Three days later we took LA’s public transit subway system to a sushi joint in little Tokyo. Tank Girl returned from the bathroom pallid. “I’m bleeding.  Like… a lot.” We stopped at every other stop between downtown and the Santa Monica and Vermont station so Tank Girl could find a bathroom in which to clean up. She left a trail as we ran down Vermont to our apartment and then ran down the hall. She rinsed herself off in the bathtub and we both burst out laughing because there seemed no other way to respond.

            A couple weeks later, I threw her a surprise birthday party, arranging for some friends we shared and some friends of hers from work to meet at a sushi restaurant and surprise her. It seemed sweet of me the same way saccharin seems sweet until you learn it causes cancer. I’ve told you a million times this isn’t a love story. I hoped Tank Girl would enjoy her birthday, but I hoped more we’d start sleeping together again. She seemed happy to see everyone but me. Whatever we were was breathing its last breaths. Michael’s new band came through town and we let them crash at our place. Tank Girl made them all breakfast and they all stared at her ass the whole time. One of the guys in the band I didn’t know that well said he needed to go meet women wherever I went to meet women and I told him Tank Girl wasn’t my girlfriend. He seemed as confused by the situation as me. One day, I came home from work and I just decided it was time to deal with the fact it was over. I couldn’t even tell you why I picked that day, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were July 27. I sat in the kitchen by myself, smoking cigarettes while Tank Girl sat on the couch in the living room, waiting for me to come out. “Everything all right in there?” she dared me to bring it up. She was as ready as I was stop trying to make something fake real. The fight was so bad I stormed out of my own apartment and smoked so many cigarettes I almost threw up. But neither of us had anywhere to go, so even though we weren’t sleeping together anymore, we still lived together. We set up some ground rules, like no sleeping in the same bed. It was probably the worst six or eight weeks of my life and I remember next to none of it. It was like if Ernest Hemingway or Charles Bukowski wrote that movie THE BREAK UP.  One night, my buddy Jordan remarked to me, “Man, Nate, I always knew you were tough, but watching you go through this? Shit man. I’d be thinking about killing myself. You’re a tough motherfucker.”

            I went home to Virginia for two weeks for my best friend’s bachelor party and wedding while Tank Girl moved out. She’d found a place with some girls from work. She found a new job, too. In Virginia, I slept around to make myself feel better; after all, I’d never been hotter. But it didn’t really work and my confidence was waning. When I got back to LA, I opened the door and Tank Girl’s stuff was gone. Her key was on the carpet, having been slid under the door. Our place looked so empty with just my things. I didn’t make things as easy on her as Heavy Metal Dude had made them. I hassled her friends about what she was up to or who she was seeing. One day, she called, hoping to get access to my apartment to pick up a couple things she’d forgotten. I sat against the wall smoking cigarettes, the shades drawn, and acted like I wasn’t home. I was living in the same apartment we’d shared, sleeping in the bed we’d shared, riding the bike she helped me pick out all over town and working at the liquor store where we met. Even though she was gone, she was Everywhere. I tried to write myself out of it but nothing sold. Maloney and I started a podcast about the industry, which at least took my mind off my misery a few hours a week. I tried to create other relationships at work but they all blew up in my face. I have never been more helpless. I was so helpless, I didn’t even know I was helpless, I was devoid of help. After six months of misery, I’d gained back most of the weight and I started vaguely applying myself at work and was pretty quickly promoted to Shift Manager at a different store. But the store was in Glendale and it wasn’t as fun as the West Hollywood location, plus it was a much longer bike ride, uphill both ways. When the email came asking if I wanted to come teach one class, I thought about it for half a day and agreed to try it. There was no other way to stop feeling as bad as I felt except to leave town.

Most Hollywood stories start out with a character arriving at a shitty apartment and end up with the character living in some sunny place with a view of the Hollywood Sign. My LA story was the opposite, which I suppose is very George Costanza of me. When I returned to LA three years later, I finally came to understand why things had gone so wrong. 



Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 7: 101...   

The Battle of Los Angeles Part 5: I Wish...

There are 1,200 players on the expanded rosters of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball. In the NFL, there are 1,696 players on the 32 teams. In the NHL things get a bit more confusing as teams have rosters of active players and contracted players, but we’ll use the contracted players number, which is about 1,500 total players. There are 450 players in the NBA (and about 9 million tattoos). All told, there are roughly 4,846 professional athletes in the four major sports in the United States. By comparison, in 2005, the year I enrolled in the MFA program for Writing for Screen and Television at USC, 4,566 Writers reported earnings through the Writer’s Guild of America, with 3,259 reporting earnings from TV and 1,940 reporting earnings from feature film writing. Some writers made money from both TV and film and some writers made money from news writing, but you get the picture. It’s an elite class.  In 2015, 5,159 Writers reported earnings through the Writer’s Guild of America, with 4,129 reporting earnings from TV and 1,799 reporting earnings from feature film writing. I think if I’d known these statistics in 2005, I might not have applied to USC. The sheer improbability of my success would have scared me away from trying to write. But the truth is I never once thought about how hard it might be to become a successful professional screenwriter, which is probably why I’ve spent the last 10 years not becoming one. 

I wanted to be a Big Deal. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly. It’s not like I arrived at USC with a bunch of ideas for series or scripts, or even a clear image of my future in the industry, or even any semblance of any plan at all. I just knew screenwriting was glamorous and I’d been accepted to the most prestigious screenwriting program in the world so things will take of themselves. I’m talented and reasonably charming. I honestly thought it would be easy.

I wrote dark, comedic shorts, a broad comedic heist feature (KNOCKING OFF), a HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER spec and a spec of THE OFFICE. I was very interested in being funny and thought I could get paid doing it. Then two things happened: I took Jeff Melvoin's one-hour drama class my second year and I joined a Writer's Group. Melvoin's class was the best course I've ever taken and he's my favorite screenwriting professor I ever had. When I teach writing classes now, Jeff is the man I try to emulate. It had never occurred to me to do one-hour drama, but in Jeff Melvoin, I saw the type of writer I wanted to become. He was Harvard-educated yet had worked on REMINGTON STEELE. There were not many people in our USC class doing one-hour drama. The only people I remember with that specific goal at the time were Katie, Ryan, the guy I almost got in a fight with the first night we met who has gone on to have a great career, and a woman who has since gone on to be nominated for a WGA writing award for RECTIFY. Given my short story and playwright experience from college, one-hour drama seemed like something I could do. Plus, I wrote an SVU for Melvoin’s class and really understood the logic of a procedural. I liked the idea of having to go into work every day working in TV (as opposed to writing from home with features) and the money was good. There was less competition at the time in one-hour and I could modify my skills to fit the form. One-hour drama made sense.
     It was in this same Semester I was asked to join a Writer’s Group. Seven of the most talented white men in our program were forming a group and I couldn’t believe they wanted me as the eighth. As it turned out, not all of them did want me. “Conscientious Mike” Maloney was a vocal opponent of my inclusion. We’d never really spoken and we’re similarly-inclined to disdain, so I get it. Despite the way our friendship began, Ryan vehemently argued for my inclusion in the group. “He’s sharp and gives great notes. You need a guy like that,” I was later told he said. I love that dude. Anyway, I couldn’t believe these guys wanted me in their group. I was (and remain) awed by their fucking talents. Because of my writer’s group, I tell all my students they should form writers’ groups with the people who intimidate them. Wanting to live up to the abilities of those writers made me work harder, made me learn to be a sharper reader and giver of notes and made me a much better writer. (Just good enough to teach, it turns out). But those guys also scared the shit out of me because they were (are) WAY fucking funnier than I ever thought I could be, and I thought I was plenty funny. But their comedic minds were quicker, I felt out of sync and their jokes were always so much sharper and more creative than mine that I just gave up on trying to compete. Sometimes I think I made the right choice giving up writing sitcoms because I'm not really that funny and sometimes I think this was the biggest chicken-shit move of my entire fucking life. In my more narcissistic moments I feel like the Pete Best of sitcom writing. But that's bullshit. It was a conscious choice to focus on drama because I thought it was a faster track to the Big Time. Like Dexter on the drums, Ryan was always a much better writer than I was (am), but I knew he respected my talent (and I his) and was thrilled to have an identity in my writer’s group that didn't bring with it the burden of having to be funny around much funnier people. I buckled down.  I wrote a lot. I worked hard. My writing improved. It turned out Maloney and I were much too similar to ever like each other upon first meeting, but we became close friends and eventually writing partners.  

I didn’t attend my graduation from USC because the academics were never a challenge for me and graduating from the program was not my goal in having attended. Simply being awarded the MFA was not the reason I’d packed up and come out West. There were people at USC who made it look easy. One of my closest friends and writer’s group members left the program early because he and his writing partner got work with NBC; he just sold a show to Fox. Another friend sold the script he wrote his first year of film school a couple days after graduation; a few years later I heard he turned down the job rewriting THE NEVERENDING STORY. After graduation, the competition among USC grads really heated up, at least in my head. Rumors swirled about who had landed representation and who was closing deals. Jealousy reared its ugly head, particularly in those early days after graduation when people were signing with managers and I wasn’t and I still thought having a manager meant anything about a person’s career prospects, abilities or value to the industry. At the time, I’d say my peers’ success filled me with a mix of 25% jealousy and 75% white hot panic. This jealousy was somewhat diminished by the fact that everyone I know who had success from USC was obscenely talented, worked hard and absolutely deserved it. And the panic was good motivation. Angst and envy kept me working, hoping I could write something good enough to get noticed. The fast track was up ahead, if only I could find the exit. Everything I wanted, which again was nothing specific, felt like it was two or three good phone calls away. Write on. This is your year! Good work always gets noticed. All it takes is the right script and the right reps. “I’m a driver, I’m a winner.  Things are gonna change, I can feel it!”

About a month after graduation Katie and her boyfriend were out of town so I had the place to myself. I was going to get stoned and watch THE WIRE, but first I went to the gym. Back in my kitchen, stone cold sober, making a salad, I tried to use a serrated knife to remove the pit from an avocado and instead put the knife through my left middle finger. Blood poured everywhere. I pulled the knife out and, looking at the damage, quickly realized I could not stop the bleeding. I didn’t know where the hospital was and I drove a stick shift, which is impossible to drive with one hand, so I called 911. The paramedics bandaged my middle finger in thick white gauze, like a Mickey Mouse glove, and told me to go to the emergency room. Since I didn’t know where the hospital was, I asked them to take me. The paramedics had to secure me to a chair for the journey in the ambulance. Though I could walk, they strapped me into a wheelchair and rolled me downstairs, out into the courtyard in front of my building and into the ambulance, my left hand raised, middle finger extended the entire time. At the hospital, everyone had a good chuckle and I took 20 stitches. In the following days, I had shooting nerve pains in my hand. I went for a follow-up and learned I’d severed a nerve while making a salad. I needed to have surgery and physical therapy. Insurance ended up not covering either because they didn’t think the surgery was an emergency; for them to cover it, I would have had to fly home to Virginia. Even with physical therapy, my hand has never been the same. I had to re-learn to touch type with nine fingers just so I could keep writing. 

Fuse Entertainment, a management and production company located in West Hollywood, had launched the careers of several USC graduates in classes before mine so I became obsessed with becoming a Fuse client. They read two of my pilots and liked them, then read my thesis, a satirical feature comedy script about spoiled assholes (AMERICAN IDLE) and one of the head guys over there loved it so much, he talked to me about it on the phone for 45 minutes before telling me he couldn’t sell it so he wasn’t going to sign me. The script was just too mean-spirited, he said. I probably should’ve queried more representation but in trying to sell my too-mean-spirited novel in New York, I’d accumulated a hefty stack of rejection letters from queries and my ego just couldn’t take it. Plus, I had an MFA from USC. I’d gone there to be part of the USC Mafia. My network was supposed to make things happen for me.

Typing with nine fingers, I wrote a script about consultants which, through a friend in my writer’s group, got to two assistants at William Morris Endeavor who were starting a production company. Through them, I developed and wrote a one-hour drama called LOADED about stock traders who lived life to the extreme. It was AMERICAN PSYCHO meets ENTOURAGE and it’s still one of the coolest things I’ve ever written. Around this same time, my friend who sold his film school script right after graduating let me know his agent had quit ICM (or been fired, depending on who you ask) and was starting a management company and looking for clients. I sent my work over and waited to hear. Through working with the WME contacts, I had one of the head TV Lit agents at WME packaging LOADED for us, which meant he was trying to get WME actors to be in it so we could sell it to a cable channel. My buddy’s band, the one which gave us access to B-list parties, was also repped at WME, I’d been read by their mailroom and had great coverage written about me - I had a lot of people there in my corner for a hot minute. They messengered over a copy of my script with the head of TV Lit’s handwritten notes inside. A few days later, I signed with the manager. I got the phone call as I was cleaning out the apartment I shared with Katie, just before we moved out so she and her boyfriend at the time Sean, who was in my writer’s group, could get their own place. Like a movie, I was scrubbing down the windowsill in our living room when a phone call came that I thought would change my life, just like it was supposed to happen. “Are you kidding me?” my manager screamed into the phone, reacting to the ending of LOADED, where the Boy Scout hedge fund manager is revealed to be the psychopath who kidnaps women and drinks their blood, the real-life vampire everyone’s been whispering about for the previous 64 pages. “Are you fucking kidding me? This is so awesome.”

But then the WME assistants bailed because they had a reality show about monstrous beach people in New Jersey to produce. With them gone, the WME lit agent drifted away because it had been a much easier project to champion when they were gonna do the work. What had been my dream team of representation soon became me and a manager who I started to realize signed me because he thought he could make an easy buck (which is actually the same reason most managers sign clients, I came to learn). He didn’t have the TV lit contacts to get me the meetings I needed to pursue one-hour drama. My script went from being packaged at WME to doing nothing for me. I went on one meeting based on that script through my manager and the guys I met with couldn’t believe it was the only meeting I’d taken. The manager didn’t have the network for me to get staffed and I didn’t have the clarity to see his flaws (or mine). Nor did I have the balls to fire him because I thought having a manager was a mile marker on the road to success. I think the script could have done a lot more for me, could’ve gotten me staffed, could’ve sold even, if I’d had different reps at the time, but getting a manager had been such a painful, rejection-filled process, I didn’t see it then. I just thought I was hot shit. I had a manager and that meant I was better than people who didn’t. I had someone who could sell my work. I was close, I thought, I just had to listen to my manager’s advice, write diligently and get it done. 

Through a referral from Maloney, I got a job on a web series called THE SCARY CITY that was on the front page of Variety for having $5.8 Million in funding from Sony. They had a full set in Glendale with trailers for writing, post and Producers and they’d buy us lunch everyday. My first day of work was the day Obama was elected and there was more than a little reason for hope. My boss was an ambitious, petite Japanese woman who had been behind the smash hit LONELYGIRL15 and said “namsang?” as she belittled the writing staff, taking great pride regaling me with the stupidity of my own work. It took me three weeks to realize “namsang” was her saying “Know what I’m saying?” She was abusive and horrible but so are most Hollywood bosses, right? I got to break story as part of a writing staff and this collaborative art, though not quite as free as musical collaborative expression, was extremely rewarding. For about two weeks, I was having the time of my life breaking story with the two other writers. Then, my boss took off for Japan suddenly and I was asked to help track page views for the web series and put together a report on viewership for the investors. This was in the early days of web streaming and for some reason we didn’t want to use YouTube, so we had our own video player for the series. When I looked at viewership I came to realize the show’s websites’ streaming video compression rate was off, so videos took forever to load. Because of this technical error, and because the series was run by a madwoman, after two months, we had less than 2,000 views. Sony pulled their funding. The show went bankrupt and bounced two paychecks. Our boss hadn’t ‘gone’ to Japan, she had fled to Japan. The producers remaining offered us computers from the office or furniture from the set instead of the money they owed us. My manager told me to take an iMac and a couch, but I held out for the four-grand cash, which obviously I never got. (Fun fact: one of my fellow writers on this series was nominated for an Emmy for writing on BETTER CALL SAUL, the other is one of The Fine Bros).

Through teaming up with Maloney, we got a couple hired gun positions where we were paid good, minor league money to rewrite other people’s scripts. Maloney’s personal story was going through many of the same beats as my own and he was really one of my only sources of emotional support during this time. We were both bush leaguers, practicing, dreaming, hoping for a shot at the Bigs. We didn’t ride around on a beat up old bus but we did drive around in Maloney’s Civic and eat at diners. Even though we never wrote anything personal or ‘real’ together, it was nice to collaborate with Maloney because it made writing a less lonely affair. He was also great at seeing the ridiculousness of the industry. We still laugh about the producer who told us he was working on ‘something that will revolutionize the internet.’ Still waiting on that revolution to come.

Given my manager had more contacts in feature films and given feature writing was where Maloney and I were having minor league success, I decided to write a feature, even though I thought my skill set and interests at the time were in TV and there were more jobs in that medium. I created this cartoonish adventure character named Hemingway Barnes, sort of an Indiana Jones meets Austin Powers kind of dude. All told, I wrote 19 drafts of the script about Hemingway, which was called THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.  In the file folder for the script, there were over 270 documents of brainstorming, rejected outlines and false leads. For 10 straight months, I thought about nothing else. My manager kept me working with tales of sales. “What kind of beamer are you gonna get when we sell this thing?” “You know, this is the only script I’m taking out this year?” Eventually, we got the script ready, got an agent at a boutique agency to sign on with us and we went wide with the script.

To go wide with a script means it gets sent to everyone in town. My manager and agent sent it to like 40 production companies. Development assistants and executives then read the script and, if they like it and think they can make money from it, they can agree to take it to a studio. When a production company takes a project to a studio, they are saying they like it enough to shepherd it through the process of being produced. Knowing the production company will support the idea, the studio then determines if they are going to buy the project. Some production companies will like the script but not take it to a studio. In these instances, the writer will often meet with the production company for what’s called a general meeting. The purpose of generals is basically a meet and greet, it’s a chance for the writer to introduce him or herself and give the industry a sense of what he or she is about. The production companies are looking for new ideas, or, in some instances, looking to hire writers to develop projects. Huge production companies took us to major studios. Di Bonaventura took it to Paramount, Polymorphic took it to Warner Bros, Montecito took it to Sony, Gunn Films took it to Disney.  We also went in to New Regency and Dreamworks. This was the Big Leagues. It was basically like waiting to hear if I’d be drafted.

Having a script out wide is the single most anxiety-producing experience I have ever endured, including the time I had a gun pulled on me buying cocaine in New York and (so far) being an expecting father with a wife in the third trimester of pregnancy (though as the due date approaches my anxiety is skyrocketing so fatherhood may yet prove to be more nervous an endeavor than screenwriting). The script went out on a Tuesday and we soon knew companies were taking it to studios, which was cause for an enormous amount of hope. We went into the weekend knowing the President of Dreamworks was reading the script and mulling it over. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat, except when I ate EVERYTHING IN THE FUCKING WORLD. I spent the time glued to my phone, constantly hoping for a call that would change my life. Halfway through workouts at the gym, I’d double back to the locker room to check if anyone had called or there were any updates on my script on TrackingBoard, a website which tracked the progress of spec scripts. Remember being single and meeting someone you really liked and hoping they’d contact you?  Imagine that uncertainty and anticipation, but times a million and with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. All my goals were a phone call away. One phone call could validate the decision to uproot my life and move to Los Angeles, one phone call could launch me into career stardom. One phone call and suddenly I wouldn’t be Nathan DeWitt, Albino failed musician and struggling screenwriter, I’d be Nathan DeWitt, Screenwriter. My entire identity and self-worth were riding on this phone call.

The extent to which Screenwriting had consumed my life at the time cannot be overstated. I didn’t have a job and when I did work, it was freelance copywriting I did from the office I set up in my kitchen. When the WGA went on strike five months after I graduated USC, I went and picketed, donating time and energy for their cause even though I wasn’t a member. I didn’t have hobbies except the band, which was in its death throes by the time my script was going out. I played golf with Maloney once a week, but that was only a couple hours. Those were valuable, fun times and it was great to have someone with whom to commiserate. But, in general, things got to a point where the industry and our lack of success in it was pretty much all I talked about with Maloney or any of my other friends. I didn’t have a love interest, so I entertained relationships with girls back in Virginia, never committing to romance out West until later, and that west coast romance would go so bad I'd almost need to be committed. I didn’t even decorate my fucking apartment. I wasn’t actively pursuing or involved in anything besides screenwriting. I thought this was focus. I’d come to LA to be a star but found myself a black hole, the light of my life consumed by the absence of my own career. On THE WIRE, Lester Freemon describes a life to the flawed protagonist Jimmy McNulty thusly: “A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come.”  I couldn’t have gotten a life-changing phone call back then because I had no life to change.    

I went on 20 or 30 general meetings, met a lot of great and interesting people and cute, smart girls, but I didn’t sell the script. Through these meetings, I did some development work, which is the industry way of saying I brainstormed with executives for long stretches of time, wrote outlines and drafts, and in exchange was paid no money. It's standard practice in the world of feature films. Even though television was becoming popular, I doubled down on feature writing because it was what my representation knew best and I had a reputation in features thanks to my script and the meetings. Though a disastrous affair began to siphon away my writing energy, I wrote three more feature scripts with the intent of quick sales. One my manager hated so much we stopped working together. The next, my agent, who had changed companies and now become my manager, took to WME but we couldn’t get any traction. The third was a total piece of shit attempt to sell out and prompted my buddy Jordan from my writer’s group to get me drunk, ply me with Arby’s and blow and try to set me straight. On July 27, 2011, he got me loaded and said I needed to stop chasing the market and write something true. It was 18 years to the day after Siamese Dream was released. And you wanna hear something even spookier? It was literally the next morning, hungover, on a bus from Jordan’s place in Santa Monica to my shithole studio on Vermont that I got an email asking if I could teach Screenwriting 101 at a college in Chicago in a month. The email was from Kristyn, a classmate and friend from USC who had left LA to teach and was having the time of her life. My network was making things happen for me, but not the way I thought it would. Then again, nothing in LA went as I thought it would. Hollywood is the only industry where someone’s “Manager” is also their employee. The beach is only 7 miles away but it takes over an hour to get there. 

Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 6: LA Woman...

The Battle of Los Angeles Part 4: Bangin’ on those Bongos like a Chimpanzee

          I’ve been playing music in bands since I was 15. All through high school, I was in punk and blues bands and I got a varsity letter for being the drummer of the school’s jazz ensemble my senior year. By no means was I the most talented member of any of these groups. Some of the people I played with would go on to be professional musicians, including my friend Michael who played guitar in jazz band and whose band was in Rolling Stone when I decided to apply to USC and move to LA. In all these groups, I experienced the unique, intimate connection which comes when one plays music with other people. The players connect in a manner which is difficult to articulate in words and virtually impossible for someone who doesn’t engage in collaborative art to understand. To quote The Loving Spoonful, “it’s like trying to tell a stranger ‘bout rock and roll.”  Maybe if you’ve done improv you get it, or maybe if you were part of a choreographed dance team. Maybe. A profound metaphysical connection happens among the players of a band as they jam, write music and perform. With no one have I ever felt a stronger metaphysical musical connection than with my friend Gary. 

I bought the drum set I brought to LA on Criagslist. It was a random Saturday morning and I was browsing the instruments for sale section when I saw a post from an angry mother. She had bought a high-end Tama Starclassic kit for her son on the assumption his grades would improve. Well, when report cards came out, they had not improved, so she was interested in selling it ASAP as a means of punishment. I paid $600 for a kit which retailed for $1,800. It sounded even better than the deal I got. 

When I arrived in LA, I set the kit up in my bedroom with muted pads. I could practice at any time of day and Katie wouldn’t hear a note. While the bedroom was great for me to practice in alone, Gary and I obviously couldn’t jam there. As luck would have it, he was in another band at the time and they had a rehearsal space downtown. Gary picked me up and we went to play. I had to be very careful with the kit at the rehearsal space because we were using it without the drummer’s permission. It was in this downtown rehearsal studio Gary and I birthed our LA band, which would be known by several different names, but in those early days was called Gun Show. 

After a few jam sessions downtown, Gary and I had written two songs. Well, Gary had written two songs which I improved with drum parts and suggested changes to the arrangement, as was our writing process. This was in the days of MySpace and the feeling was that if we could get our music recorded and posted up there, we might be able to find the bass player and second guitarist we wanted to round out our sound, then we could start to play gigs, build a following and eventually end up opening for Michael’s band and/or with our pictures in Rolling Stone. At the time, neither of us knew how to record digitally so we had to find a studio where we could lay some tracks. As luck would have it, our buddy Dexter, another friend from high school working to make music his career, had gotten into digital recording and could put the tracks down for us. The only problem was Dexter was back in Virginia.  

            Over the holidays, I went home and Gary flew back East. Looking back, I like that we flew back to where we first started playing together to record for the first time. Gary and I laid down the two tracks at Dexter’s house and it was awesome. It was especially meaningful to record with Dexter for two reasons. One, we recorded at Dexter’s parents’ house, where I had sat in on rehearsals when I was younger, watching Dexter and the rest of my friends play music in bands I wasn’t in. Two, Dexter had been playing drums since he was a little kid and he was the person who kept me practicing. It didn’t matter how many hours I spent improving, Dexter was always better. Watching him drum taught me how to drum and made me work harder. It was so cool to lay those first two tracks with him. He even said he was impressed with my playing and I felt like maybe Gary and I had a shot at being successful.  

            I pity anyone who rode in my car the January after we recorded our two songs because they are all I listened to, all month long. Gary had played both guitars and bass, and he sang on the tracks. I played drums and helped with arrangement. The music was good and the songwriting was stellar. A lack of talent was never our problem. We knew we had to add more members to round out our sound and we knew we needed our own rehearsal space. We found a spot on Hollywood Boulevard where we could split a lockout room for $500 a month. I moved my gear in and we set up shop there. The acoustics were terrible, there was no elevator for loading and unloading gear and the parking situation was a nightmare, the sounds of other bands playing bled into the halls and even into our room, but we had our own space in Hollywood. We stopped having band practice and started rehearsing.  

            For a while, it was just me and Gary. He’d pick me up and we’d go rehearse. We made half-ass attempts to find other musicians, but I was in grad school, Gary had a day job and we were both pretty lazy when it came to our music. Through grad school, I met a guy named John who also played music and seemed like he’d be a good fit for the band. Though he was a guitarist, we convinced him to play bass for us. With John, we now had a trio and, after months of rehearsals and songwriting, we had a full enough sound to take to the stage.  

            Our first show was, appropriately enough, at a venue called The Cocaine. Well, to call it a ‘venue’ is generous since it was a Chinese restaurant that became a place bands played at night.  “The Cocaine” wasn’t even on a real sign, it was hand-written on a piece of paper taped to the door. By this time, we were calling ourselves Bellevue Arms after an apartment building in LA where Gary had lived when he first moved to town. We had a pretty good turnout of people John and I knew from grad school and friends of Gary’s. The band played okay. I remember one of my cymbal stands fell over during our last song; but, aside from that, the show went well. As a band, we decided we needed to record more songs and get our MySpace page in order.  

            Our ‘studio’ consisted of GarageBand run on a MacBook and two Shure 57 mics. We had to record all the instruments separately because of sound bleeding and a lack of mics, which meant I had to lay drum tracks by myself, completely by memory. We pointed the two mics at the drum kit to capture sound and I played the songs alone, with Gary and John listening in, playing along silently on their instruments to make sure I made no mistakes. I cannot express to you how hard it is to play the drum parts of a song at perfect tempo without hearing that song at all. But I did it.  

            Gary being the most spiritually awake member of the band at the time, and the member most responsible for our creative output, he didn’t want to record his guitar parts or vocal tracks in our stifling, cramped, dark lockout in Hollywood. As luck would have it, his friend Melinda was house sitting for her boss in Silverlake. Gary recorded the guitars and vocals in this inspiring, tree-lined hillside abode. It was at this same house where we took some band photos. The only thing I remember about the photoshoot was that both John and I were violently ill. I cannot for the life of me remember why the shoot was so urgent we had to do it while we were sick, but that’s just how things felt at the time. It felt urgent for us to get more music on MySpace. It felt urgent for us to play more shows. Foolish as it may appear in hindsight, I had a genuine feeling this band, which was now called The Gravelights, could be something and that Big Things were going to happen for us. (This feeling was probably just anxiety, Los Angeles runs on the stuff). 

            The first ‘real’ show The Gravelights played was also our last. It was at a venue called Safari Sam’s on Sunset, which is now closed. They had a real sign but it was a bringer show, which meant we had to bring at least 30 people or we wouldn’t get paid. Gary was anxious and high-strung, John was drunk and a bit aloof and I still feel like we played great. From my perspective, I’d never played a venue where the drums sounded so good and I made absolutely no mistakes in playing my parts. People were genuinely impressed with the songwriting, musicianship and lyrics. Numerous people remarked we were the best ‘my friend’s band’ they’d ever seen. A couple sexual escapades aside, this show was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like a rock star. 28 people came to see us so we didn’t get paid.  

            After that, it all fell apart. Tensions had been rising between John and Gary and I ended up feeling like I was five years old again going through my parents’ divorce. John complained to me about Gary; Gary complained to me about John; I got drunk and high and told them each what I thought they wanted to hear, the same way I’d been handling my divorced parents for the last few years. Eventually, John quit but Gary and I had been working up the nerve to fire him. (Fire him from a band where none of us ever got paid). When Gary lost his job, I talked him into working hard for the band. I bought some mics and a USB interface that would allow us to record 8 channels at once. This meant we could elaborately mic the drums and should have meant I could play to a backing track, but we could never quite figure it out. I ended up having to play the parts alone again, but this time I at least had a click track in my ear to help me keep tempo. We recorded everything we had written, planning to release an album called “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.”  

            I had never recorded music in this manner before and it changed the way I heard music forever. Hearing the instruments individually layered on top of one another altered my perception. I cannot listen to guitar based songs today without remembering these recording sessions and thinking about Gary and how our collaboration literally changed the way I hear one of the most important art forms in my life. I choose not to remember how hard things got making those recordings. I choose not to think about how Gary and I got angry with each other and how our friendship almost fell apart. I choose not to think about my pettiness and the day I deleted him as a friend on MySpace. I choose not to think about how frustrated I am we never finished recording those songs. At the time, Gary said he was ‘just not in the right headspace to focus on the band,’ which bothered me until the day I left LA. That day, literally my last night in town, I sat with Gary on the porch of the place he shared with Melinda, who was now his girlfriend, and listened as he expressed frustrations about the singer in a new band, a band that is better than The Gravelights and should have made it, whatever that means. The singer, Gary said, was feeling ‘like he wasn’t in the right headspace to focus on the band,’ and I laughed and laughed, knowing Gary was feeling the same helpless frustrations I had felt two years prior. The upside of collaborative art is it involves working with other people; this is also its downside.   

            After Gary and my recording sessions fizzled, I looked to play with other people in LA. I auditioned for a couple of bands and was told I didn’t have the right look. To my credit, I never punched anyone who said that to me, but man did I want to. My albinism was thrown in my face again and again and again as a reason not to include me in an art form, the quality of which is based solely on the sound produced by its players. But because I didn’t have the look of some skinny, dark-haired dude in Interpol I wasn’t cool enough in the eyes of these superficial ingrates and there was nothing I could do about it. To the surprise of no one, nothing ever became of any of the bands who turned me away because of my albinism.  

I played with this punk chick who loved X (the band) and wasn’t that talented but wrote songs so good I still catch myself humming them even though I don’t remember her name. Through her, I met this awesome bass player who was also from Virginia. He had some of the same musical tastes as us. He loved both Idlewild (Gary’s favorite band at the time) and The Makers (my favorite band at the time), which is statistically impossible, so I arranged a jam session for the three of us, hoping to reignite The Gravelights. I played poorly and Gary seemed disinterested. There was no connection. After that, Gary and I got rid of the lockout. We had other things going on. He was still looking for work and my tire fire of a writing career was about to get burning. I sold the mics and recording gear and eventually I sold my drums for the same $600 I paid for them. Gary and I played one other time together, but it was as the hired gun rhythm section for one of our friend Michael’s new projects. We played one show two weeks before I left LA.  Maybe 20 people showed up.  We played fine. Hired guns who didn’t get paid.  To quote Fiona Apple, “Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key.”  Gary and I are still friends, which is what actually matters. 

Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 5: I Wish... 

The Battle of Los Angeles Part 3: California Knows How to Party

Early in my fourth year of college at Virginia I spent more money at Buddhist Biker Bar in October than I spent on rent and I started to realize I probably wasn’t prepared for life in The Real World. Staying in school felt like a smart move so I looked into graduate writing programs, since getting drunk and telling stories was basically what I learned in college. I applied to MFA Fiction programs at Columbia, Iowa, UC Irvine and UVA and I applied to USC’s MFA Screenwriting program. These schools are the most prestigious and elite MFA writing programs in the world. I was wait-listed at UC Irvine and USC; evidently, despite being East Coast raised and educated, my style and voice still resonated out West. I didn’t know it at the time, but waiting to hear back from these graduate programs was actually great preparation for my career as a screenwriter after (eventually) finishing USC. I spent every single day staring at my phone, hoping for a call that would change my life. It never came. I was ultimately not admitted to either program that year.

Three years later, when I decided I had to go to grad school to get away from the tedium and oppression of working for my Dad, I mostly considered, applied to and interviewed for top-tier MBA programs. But I couldn’t shake the thought of applying to USC again. Then I saw one of my best friends’ pictures in Rolling Stone magazine as the bass player in one of their “10 Bands to Watch.” I was standing in a Walgreen’s visiting my girlfriend at the time in Chicago and I thought to myself, “Michael doesn’t get to be more successful an entertainer than me,” so I applied to USC. I went to graduate school and pursued a career in screenwriting because of an imaginary competition I was engaged in with one of my closest friends. I was wait-listed. I developed a good rapport with the Assistant in the MFA office and she emailed me a few weeks later saying I should expect an information packet soon. “It’s not bad news,” she clarified and I knew I’d been accepted. I was the only person in my Dad’s house when I got the email and I screamed so loud my voice shook the foundations and rattled the walls like an earthquake. It’s the closest I hope to ever come to knowing what it feels like to get out of prison.

When I drove to Los Angeles later that summer, the only things I brought with me were my clothes, my computer and my drums. My friend Gary and I had played music together in high school but lost touch after college. We reconnected thanks to Michael’s band being in Rolling Stone. Gary lived in LA too and we planned to start a band when I came out. The drive was long but I was excited so I did it in three days by myself. The navigation system I bought crapped out as soon as I entered California, so I had to find my way to my apartment in Miracle Mile with printed MapQuest directions and a whole lot of squinting. Driving in Los Angeles proved difficult and was complicated by the fact my driving glasses, with their protruding telescopic lens, didn’t allow me to also use sunglasses. There was little I could do about the glare and nothing I could do about the traffic and erratic driving of Angelinos.

When I arrived, I met Katie in person, who was also admitted to USC and whom I had met via an online message board our MFA cohort had started. Sometimes in life, things just work out. That’s how I feel about meeting Katie. Katie is smart, funny, cool and we have similar interests, including television without commercials, alcohol and talking about why everybody else is so fucking stupid. We got along well from the moment we met each other and we lived together for almost three years. Katie and I struck up a deal where, in exchange for the bigger room and private bathroom in our place, she would drive us both to school anytime we were both going. This was very helpful in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. I was so overwhelmed with a new city, a new industry and making new friends that any little bit of diminished responsibility was a godsend. Being able to stare out the window and get my bearings while Katie dealt with the anxiety of driving us to school was helpful. But being easy to live with also made it easy to take Katie for granted. To be honest, I was too self-absorbed to appreciate what a gift it was to live with her at the time.  (Spoiler Alert: Self-absorption is a prevalent theme in any LA story and, as you'll read, mine is no exception). That August, Katie and I lived together for three weeks in a new city before meeting anyone else from our program, so it feels like my friendship with her predates graduate school. While I’d become closer to members of our MFA class, there is no other member with whom I can imagine having lived. She’s the best roommate I’ve ever had and one of my Top 10 Favorite People in the Whole Wide World.

When our USC MFA cohort met up for the first time at a bar, I soon realized my albinism was going to be my defining characteristic within this new social group. In my peer group back home, I’d known most of them for over 10 years, so they had a decade of experiences with me, each of which gave them a sense of my identity beyond my white skin and bad eyes. But to these new friends looking for a quick way to define me, using my albinism was an easy shortcut. I was not at all comfortable with it and picked a fight with a guy in our class named Ryan that first night at a bar. Better to be known as the asshole than the albino, I guess. Our confrontation had nothing to do with my albinism and everything to do with the fact I was an agro borderline alcoholic jackass. In a hilarious twist of fate, because our last names are next to each other alphabetically, Ryan was the only other MFA student with whom I had every single class that first semester. We soon developed a friendship based on mutual admiration for one another’s talent.

Looking back, I was terrified and I had no coping skills. The only way I knew how to deal with fear was to deny my feelings and get drunk. Not feeling my feelings was a full time job. I couldn’t admit fear or weakness at all because, to me, showing weakness was a sign of… well, weakness. It was a slippery slope. To admit I was self-conscious about my albinism was to admit other people had sway over my life and feelings. To admit driving in LA scared me was to admit I was susceptible to fear. That certainly didn’t sound like Me. To admit how intimidated I was by the talents of my peers meant first admitting my peers were also my competition for screenwriting work. Worse, their very existence meant I wasn’t that unique, I wasn’t Special, Entitled to Succeed or Destined for Greatness. None of that was comfortable for me to think about and I wouldn’t let myself feel any of it.  Truthfully, I was just another talented writer, trying to do his best and that was a major source of unacknowledged Dread. Like many people, I was too self-absorbed to be self-aware. Rather than face any of these insecurities or talk, write, think, admit or feel honestly about any of my feelings, I elected to escape, which was significantly more fun at the time.  

I hadn’t smoked weed in almost three years before moving to Los Angeles. I remember one night early on I split a blunt rolled in a grape-flavored wrapper (who knew such things existed!) with some people as we drove up La Brea and arrived at the Cat and Fiddle so high I couldn’t stand-up. Katie took care of me while I sat on the curb, trying not to fall into oblivion. Despite the helplessness of this experience, weed soon became a mainstay. Mandatory for sleep, mandatory for the creative process, mandatory for recovering from terrible hangovers. As luck would have it, in LA weed was as powerful as it was plentiful. I was buying a bong when the kid at the head shop asked me if I had my weed card. I said I couldn’t get it because I didn’t have a California Driver’s License and he said he knew a doctor who could get me one with a Passport. I got my medical marijuana card from a Doctor’s office above a Popeye’s Chicken on Vine and soon had access to the best weed I’d ever smoke, purchased legally, like I was buying scotch, the way it should be everywhere. The dispensary had probably 30 different strands, sorted by price and varietal. Plus, there were edibles: brownies, cookies and lollipops, weed tea, breath spray and lip balm. Eventually, the state changed their laws and my Passport was no longer a valid form of identification so I lost direct access, but for about two years, I was like a teenager in a weed store. While most people associate smoking weed with diminished ambitions, that was not my experience. Weed helped me recognize the relative lack of importance of my own ego and see the interconnectedness of all living things. The downside was it made me anti-social. Few things in the world could compete with the entertainment value of me getting stoned and traveling around the infinite corridors of my own imagination, so I ended up isolating myself a lot under the guise of being creative when I should have been out networking and meeting anyone who could get my career going or my stuff made.

There had been opportunities to network, but I was also isolating myself because going out was never quite as fun as advertised. Thanks to my buddy’s band’s success, I had entrée into some B list LA hot spots. VIP access to clubs and private parties. Backstage access at KROQ shows. Shows in Vegas.  Green Room at Kimmel. We hung out with a lot of beautiful and glamorous people. I once remarked “Who’s that fat chick by the bar?” not recognizing Khloe Kardashian. When I saw George Clooney at a club, it was exactly what I hoped his life would be like: he sat in the middle of 25 of the prettiest women I’ve ever seen, basically holding court. We saw Matthew Perry, Sarah Silverman, Jonah Hill, Hillary Duff – seems awesome, right? I should have felt so cool, right?  I just felt how much I didn’t fit in. The skin of my arms was blinding when reflecting strobe lights. I felt eyes on me in all the worst ways, except when nobody paid any attention to me at all. “How’d he get in here?” I swear I heard people whispering about me. When I asked my friends about it though, they said they didn’t hear anything, which made sense since I was probably having auditory hallucinations from the cocaine.

Except for my 25^th birthday in Vegas, I hadn’t partied in over three years before moving to Los Angeles. When I lived in New York, I’d developed a taste for booger sugar and, given my unacknowledged insecurities and self-loathing, this taste became an appetite in LA. It didn’t help that my LA dealer remains one of the most efficiently and effectively run business enterprises to which I’ve ever borne witness. It didn’t matter where I was in the city, if I called him, he was there within half an hour to deliver the envelope. Pink Dot can’t even make that claim. Honest to goodness, I hope he opens a legitimate business because that guy was a real go getter with an entrepreneurial spirit. Cocaine was a sexy drug. Chopping up the rails and vacuuming them up, I felt like some awesome character in some awesome movie. I never thought about how GOODFELLAS ends with a rolled up twenty to my nose, a numb face and drip running down the back of my throat. Key bumps in alleys, bathrooms or taxis, lines in WeHo, lines in Hollywood. It became impossible to go out without it. ‘Always be holding and never beholden.’ One night, we were partying with some luminaries and some working writers and someone remarked, “Man, that albino guy does a lot of cocaine.” Better to be an addict than an albino, I guess.  I don’t mean to glamorize these drug experiences, but they did feel glamorous at the time. Well, not the hangovers. See, part of cocaine’s appeal is it releases an insane dopamine rush in the brain. Once the drug wears off, there’s no way for your brain to continue producing dopamine at the same levels, so there’s naturally a crash the next day. Days after heavy cocaine use were spent sullen and on the verge of tears, feeling guilty and so depressed. But the hangovers weren’t even the worst part. The worst part about regularly doing cocaine was all the stupid conversations I got myself into. I eventually came to realize cocaine put me in situations where I was ‘yes anding’ idiots for hours, nodding along as they talked through clenched or twitching jaws about their business ideas or script projects or whatever the fuck else was racing through their feeble brains and flying out their flapping mouths. I started to realize the bullshit cocaine exposed me to was almost worse than the damage the drug was doing to my body. I also recognized I was doing too much and it was time to stop. My solution was to isolate myself and go out less, which worked to get me off hard drugs, but ultimately impeded me from meeting people who could further my career. 

I recognize now I was just insecure and spiritually adrift. I was earnestly trying to pursue a career as an artist for the first time in my life and I wasn’t sure I had the chops to make it work, but I was certain I couldn’t admit this uncertainty to myself. I’d come to LA for a fresh start but was not at all prepared or cognizant of the challenges and growth this new beginning would demand from me. I didn’t want to feel what I was feeling, so I tried to act like I loved Hollywood and USC, like I ‘could sail through the changin’ ocean tides, handle the seasons of my life,’ the stresses of school and pursuing a career in the industry. But, the truth is, I was scared shitless and I didn’t know how to begin admitting that to anyone. I felt completely awkward, out of place and drugs helped me ignore the fear, if only briefly.

I know I’m supposed to say I wouldn’t do it all again but I don’t know if that’s true. I wouldn’t do it all now, that’s for sure. If there were some magic self-awareness pill I could've taken to help me see things clearer back then, I might have taken it.  Maybe. But, I didn’t know any other way to do it at the time. “When you’re young, you get sad and you get high,” says Ryan Adams. Besides, drugs were never my problem, they were the symptom, at least that’s what I pay my therapists to tell me now.  


Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 4: Bangin' on those Bongos Like a Chimpanzee...