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 25th 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.
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 25th 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...
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