The Battle of Los Angeles Part 8: The Next Episode

            When I lived in LA, my entire identity and sense of value in myself were tied up in selling a script and I wasn’t alone. People there think they are on the verge of being discovered at any time. They’re like flakes of gold, hoping the sun will catch them and shine a light so bright upon them they become a star, even though most of them aren’t even popular in their hometowns. Someone once said to me, “Google me in six months,” and she meant it. I did. All I found was her Facebook page and a YouTube Channel with no hits. Still, the Hollywood insecurity was contagious and trying to ignore it or overcompensate for it made me the worst kind of person. I needed small, petty victories to make myself feel superior, like taking solace in my USC MFA, winning at bar trivia, or correcting other peoples’ grammar. These little superiorities gave me quick-hit ego boosts, but did virtually nothing to bolster my waning self-confidence or truly make me feel at ease. Honestly, this constant need to be better than everybody else, in some small, often insignificant way, kept me alienated and closed off from other people. 

            I thought the entertainment industry needed me and my genius, but teaching screenwriting has demonstrated again and again and again that I am not unique and I am decidedly not a genius. There are a thousand other people just like me; I know because I’ve taught like 800 of them. Talented writers are a dime a dozen. I’ve taught mes, I’ve taught Maloneys, I’ve taught Katies, I’ve taught Jordans, I’ve taught Ryans, I’ve taught Toms, I’ve taught Seans. I thought I got the opportunity to write for a living and maybe write some big league scripts because I was special or gifted, but the truth is I got those opportunities because I was lucky. I was so fortunate to go to USC, it was a blessing to get to spend my 20s going after what I truly wanted with all my heart, soul and energy. I learned there’s such a thing as trying too hard. Maybe things didn’t turn out as I scripted, but I got to play the game. Seeing the sheer volume of people trying to do what I was trying to do has made me realize how grateful I am to have had the opportunities I had, let alone the successes. 99% of people who try screenwriting will not achieve the things I achieved and that shouldn’t make me feel superior, it should make me feel so, so thankful.

            I hadn’t had a script professionally read in two or three years. But I learned to make things, and actually produced a web series and a sitcom pilot, none of which turned out as well as I hoped. But I’ve kept learning, I’ve kept thinking and I’ve kept writing. Sometimes it’s been scripts, sometimes it’s been short stories, sometimes it was a novelization of THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.  Turns out I function way better when I’m working on something creative, whether it’s for a manager, for money, or just for myself. Like Gary and John need to keep playing music, I need to keep writing, no matter how small the audience. It’s not to get noticed, it’s not to make money, it’s to keep myself sane. Writing is the purpose of my writing. I write because I don't know how else to make sense of the world and I think it affords my best chance of being accepting of a place and accepted in a place I don't completely believe in or understand. 

 That said, with my wife pregnant and seeing some friends have Big League success, I still yearned for success in Hollywood. To that end, I did an autopsy on my screenwriting career. I read old scripts with new eyes and asked new people to read old scripts. It was a much more embarrassing experience than I expected, sorting through my past shortcomings. I thought the industry was wrong to ignore my screenplays, but turns out the flaws in my scripts are glaringly obvious and there are perfectly good reasons why those scripts didn’t do for me what I hoped they would do. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but the gist of my weaknesses as a screenwriter are probably the gist of my weaknesses as a man: I don’t write empathetic characters and I focus too much on words and too little on emotional intentions. I would also add that Screenwriting is storytelling in scenes, not prose. The form impedes some of my talents, I think, because I can’t use linguistic magic to say what I mean as I have in this blog, I have to use moments and characters and intentions. Producing things helped me realize this shortcoming and understand the differences between prose writing and telling a story in moments. With a new understanding of my weaknesses as a screenwriter, I considered new ideas and projects to undertake. But I didn’t have anything I wanted to write. 

            Then completely out of the blue, on the way to teach class, I got a Facebook message from my old agent. He is at a new job at a big management/ production company, a company way bigger than Fuse ever was, and he wanted to know if I still had THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY because he thought it would be a good vehicle to package at his company, which has a ton of A-list comic talent as clients. We are reworking the script and going to try to package it there, sell it and get it made. In the wake of working on this project, a new string of screenplay ideas emerged, which is great, since in Hollywood you’re only as valuable as your next idea. But I don’t have any illusions about this project selling or those other scripts somehow changing my life. Obviously, I hope it sells. I hope it sells for a shitload, becomes a franchise and I get to move back to LA. But I don’t need it to do any of those things. I don’t need to be in LA to be happy. I don’t even need to sell a script. I have a life, a wife and a daughter I love already in Chicago. Selling a screenplay would just be icing on the cake. Honestly, I’m just happy I get to play the game.  
Further Reading: BFD

The Battle of Los Angeles Part 7: 101

Memory is a funny thing.  In the last entry, I wrote that it was three years before I returned to LA.  That’s wrong, it was only two. 

            I break my headphones on the flight in so when I arrive, I’m only hearing things in mono, which is probably not as good of a metaphor as I want it to be but is definitely indicative of the limited perspective I had prior to this trip. The line for rental cars is like the line for Space Mountain and I think, for the first time, about how lucky I was to have lived here. Look at all these people who flew to Los Angeles just to spend a couple of days here, basking in the sun-soaked luster. It’ll be 75 and sunny every single day I’m here. I think I’m in town to collaborate on a script with Maloney, but when I pull out of the rental car agency in my shitty white Kia, “Cleaning out my Closet” by Eminem comes on the radio.  LA knows the real reason I’m back, even if I don’t get it yet.  I take my usual shortcut up from the airport, cutting across Jefferson and taking Hauser up to Miracle Mile where I stop and buy toiletries at the same Ralph’s where I used to get groceries when I lived with Katie, eat lunch at Baja Freeh across Wilshire from my old gym in the E! building and generally kill some time. Back in the Kia, I hear the Howard Stern interview with Jerry Seinfeld where Jerry talks about how he turned down 110 million dollars for a 10^th season of SEINFELD and says he never did it for the money. I go to the liquor store where I met Tank Girl and don’t expect to know anyone who works there but almost immediately I see Andre, who fills me in on new management and changes in the store and lets me use his employee discount to buy West Coast beers, which back in 2013 weren’t as readily available in Chicago as they are now.

            At Gary and Melinda’s place in Silverlake I chill with Melinda and her cousin and wait for Gary to get home from work. The last time I saw Gary and Melinda was a year ago when they drove up to Sausalito to spend a couple days with me after my uncle finally drank himself to death. That trip was obviously strained and strange and was complicated by seeing THE DARK KNIGHT RISES the day after the mass shooting in a Colorado theater. But when Gary gets home it’s all LA sunshine and sativa and it’s so great to catch up with him. We’re both doing well, being responsible, diminishing our egos and coming to have more reasonable understanding of what we can and cannot expect from the world. We’ve shed the skin of our 20s, the layer of bullshit everybody wears at that age to try to make themselves appear to be who they think they should be instead of realizing they are who they are and they’re awesome. Gary’s new band is going well and we swap stories until Maloney shows up and we all go to dinner at the Red Lion. Though I’d also seen Maloney on that same sad Sausalito trip, my family trauma is the furthest thing from my mind as we eat sausages and I get drunk like old times but not Drunk like old times. Leaving the bar, we walk through the LA sunset and nostalgia washes over me and I feel an intense longing to live here again. Chicago is great but it doesn’t have sunsets or friends like these. Back at Gary’s I get a text from an awesome chick inviting me to meet her at a bar. You’re so LA today, LA. She says she’s drunk, which I interpret to mean I can get laid but I’m feeling too vulnerable and full of beer and sausage for a casual hook-up so we make plans to grab a drink the next night and I hang out with my friends and watch Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episodes I’ve seen before. Someday I’ll write a blog entry about all the times I should’ve gotten laid but didn’t, but right now the internet doesn’t have enough storage space to hold all these tales of not getting tail.

            In the morning, Gary and I walk around the Silverlake Reservoir and I go buy groceries, thinking I’ll use the kitchens in the houses where I’m staying to cook meals instead of eating out for 11 straight days. Almost immediately after getting back from the grocery store, my friend Tom picks me up and we go to lunch. The restaurant specializes in deep dish pizza and when the waitress learns I’m visiting from Chicago she tries to convince me to get it, but I end up with a wrap or some California bullshit. Tom is one of the most effortlessly funny people I know and it’s great to see him. I tell him about my uncle and he tells me a sad story about his wife. I tell him about how my aunt, my uncle’s sister, killed herself on my mom’s birthday and he tells me a story about his grandpa dying. If I wanted to drag the lunch into a depression spiral and be King of the Bummers, I could have gone on about my mom being diagnosed with cancer six weeks after her sister killed herself, but Tom’s got the kind of optimism that comes from being born and raised in Southern California and it’s contagious. Despite having a tough year, Tom reminds me, “Everybody has a thousand reasons to be happy,” which is something I still think about when I want to warm my icy East Coast heart.  When you grow up in LA, whatever happens today, tomorrow is another sunny day. (You can have those lyrics, btw).

            I take the 101 from Silverlake to Studio City to meet up with Maloney at the house he’s watching for what is supposed to be the first of five days of serious writing. The place is very LA, in that it was recently remodeled and there’s a 5 Series BMW in the driveway. Maloney and I have talked via phone and gotten ourselves excited about the idea of writing a TV show about a father and his 13-year-old son solving mysteries. The premise is that the dad and the kid’s mom are divorced and dad is a private investigator with custody of his son on weekends. On these weekends, the two team up to solve cases. (You cannot have this TV show, btw). We’ve done some brainstorming work and emailed outlines back and forth but within ten minutes of sitting down we’ve blown up the idea and talked ourselves out of doing it at all. I’m livid and feel abandoned, but Maloney seems really depressed. His personal story went through many of the same beats as mine before he left LA. He, too, is just visiting now. We never get to see each other, so even though I kind of resent him for torpedoing the idea, I shut the fuck up about it and we go get some Zankou Chicken. That’s what friends are for. He asks me about the woman I want to marry and I halfheartedly describe the woman I’m meeting for drinks because if this trip isn’t going to be about writing now maybe it can be about her. I take the 101 back down to Gary’s. He and Melinda are out of town and I have their beautiful Silverlake apartment to myself for the weekend. I take a cab to meet the girl at Ye Old Rustic Inn in Los Feliz because I’m gonna have a couple of beers and I’m driving without my driving glasses and the combination of alcohol, darkness and blindness seems like a recipe for getting me killed. She’s late and when she does show up she’s hungover and withdrawn. Whatever chance I had to get laid 19 hours ago is gone. We have a beer and some junk food to help her hangover and I offer to walk her home just to get her alone and she replies, “I see what you’re doing.” She was always way smarter than me. She waits with me for the cab and we say we’ll hang out again but we don’t. 

Back alone at Gary and Melinda’s, I get stoned to the bejesus and listen to Rumours on vinyl, which is an odd choice since I think I hate Fleetwood Mac. As the strumming chords of “Second Hand News” fill the apartment, something inside me shifts and releases. I let go. My heart and spirit open. For the first time in all my trips to Los Angeles, I listen to something other than the chattering of my own brain. I’m not longer hearing just mono. Then when “Dreams” begins every emotion I didn’t feel in the six years I lived in this gilded city pours out of me like a goddamn tsunami. I double over and weep uncontrollably, like a wounded, dying animal. Down on all fours, shaking, quivering, sobbing ‘listening carefully to the sound of my loneliness like a heartbeat driving me mad in the stillness of the memory of what I had, and what I lost.’ Teary eyed, bleary eyed, I look at a painting above the couch, hanging on a wall I helped Gary paint when he and Melinda first moved in here and the painting moves, then looks like a city at night in the rain, then shifts again to new shapes and colors, indistinct but still imbued with meanings I understand but cannot convey in words. The Pandora’s Box of my emotions is thrown open. Stevie Nicks is a goddamn witch. “Never Going Back Again” feels twee the way a Wes Anderson movie feels twee and I find myself looking around Gary and Melinda’s apartment and I feel like I’m on the set of an indie TV show on which I used to be a regular but my character was killed off. From every angle, their place is a picture. It pulses and peeps with life and creativity and verve and I haven’t felt those things in my life in two years. Their house is a place of love and I feel love’s absence in my heart in a way I’ve never experienced. “Don’t Stop” and “Go Your Own Way” break me from wistfulness and instill me with a new sense of purpose. I make the choice to learn to produce my own material, I make the choice to return to writing from the perspective of a producer in the most idyllic Ayn Randian sense of the word. I make the choice to innovate and make things instead of continuing firing off spec scripts, trafficking in the business of unproduced work, of ideas never seen to fruition. I vow to take ownership of my life. Later this summer I’ll read a book about the making of Rumours and learn Fleetwood Mac were on some fantastic cocaine when they wrote these songs. The rush is contagious. I find “Songbird” so beautiful my wife and I walk down the aisle to it at our wedding three years later. By the time I get to “Gold Dust Woman,” I’m out of tears. ‘It’s over now and I need to figure out how to pick up the pieces and go home.’

The weekend is quiet. I jog around the Reservoir and do calisthenics in the park. Back at the house I drink coffee and listen to records and the traffic passing by the window sounds like waves lapping against the shore and I’m in love with Los Angeles in a whole new way. I go to dinner with Maloney and our buddy Ryan, who is doing great with his career and sobriety, but eats something that doesn’t agree with him and hurls in the bushes in front of the restaurant. I go home and watch LA Story, wake up and run around the Reservoir, then watch LA Story again because I fell asleep watching it last night and I think it has something to teach me about what my life is not. I clean up, pack my bags and take the 101 up to Studio City where Maloney shows me the ten-year old’s room I’ll be crashing in and the pictures of Matt Barkley I’ll be sleeping next to at the house he’s watching. We go to dinner and I have cold tacos and a warm margarita, we come back and watch The Watch but I don’t see much of it because I’m making plans to meet Tank Girl the next day.  

Tank Girl’s new place is near Valley Village and as I drive over from Studio City, I realize she lives across the street from Gary’s old apartment. Her place is small and cute, just like Tank Girl. She has a new computer, a new man and she’s sober. She’s been taking classes at the Academy of Art. It’s great to see how well she’s doing. We planned to spend the day downtown, at the gun range shooting paper zombie targets but when we get there, the gun range is closed, which is an almost too-perfect metaphor for our relationship. Instead, we go get sushi at a place in Little Tokyo. Neither of us mentions that we’ve been here before and we sit facing opposite directions of the way we sat on that bloody day, the last time we ate here. Sometimes life is a little over-written. After lunch, we try the gun range again but it’s still closed. On the drive back up the 101, she rolls me a couple joints that look like cigarettes –she always rolled the best joints. I say goodbye and nothing more, like a goddamn Hemingway story.

Maloney and I go play team trivia at Red Lion. Ryan bails on us and Jordan shows up late. I drink an entire boot of beer, smoke some cigarettes, do some drugs and can’t understand why Ryan, who is sober now, didn’t want to come out. Back at the house, feeling guilty, I smoke some weed and send Tank Girl a Facebook message telling her how great it was to see her, how cool it is she’s doing so well and how valuable our relationship is to me. I tell her how much I appreciate all the things she taught me about biking in the city, tricks I still use. I tell her how much I appreciate all the ways she helped me learn to take care of myself, whether it was meals to cook or realizing I need to nurture myself with exposure to art. I utilize lessons this woman taught me every single day of my life. I tell her I love her, but not in an ‘I want to date you’ way. It’s probably the most honest I’ve ever been with her. In the morning, she writes me back thanking me and we agree to have lunch again before I leave.

I wake up feeling sluggish so Maloney and I go run wind sprints in the park and, me being me, I go too hard on the first run and tweak my hammy. I limp through some more sprints but my heart’s not in it. Maloney and I go play golf at the par 3 course in Los Feliz and grab lunch at a place called Mindy’s with great muffins. Despite going to all our old haunts, he still seems haunted, distraught and distant. I feel like I’m spending time with an open wound.

Back at the house we get cleaned up and he drives us to go pick up Katie for dinner. When Katie adopted her dog, I went with her to bring him home and, because Stevie Nicks unlocked all my stupid, wimpy emotions, it breaks my fucking heart when Ollie doesn’t recognize me. All my friends who stayed in LA got gorgeous and Katie is no exception. In the car, I ask her how things are with her boyfriend and she lets out a barely audible “good.” Maloney parks right by the old rehearsal space Gary and I shared on Hollywood, on a street where we’d each gotten a ton of parking tickets. Dinner is at some gourmet burger place that won’t let Maloney make any substitutions to his burger. You’re so LA, LA. Katie gets a beer and I get some girlie drink and I don’t think we break eye contact the entire meal. Maloney later remarks that he felt like he wasn’t even there. After dinner, we go to Amoeba Music to browse around. Katie and I are in the used DVD section talking TV and I ask her what shows I should have my TV class watch and I almost pass out because suddenly all the boy/girl stuff that was never an issue between us for the three years we lived together or the eight years we’ve been fiends, suddenly it’s all I can fucking think about or feel and, in that moment on that evening, I love Katie in a visceral, let’s destroy a perfectly good friendship sort of way. Thanks for nothing, Stevie Nicks! Back at the car, Maloney has a parking ticket. We drop Katie off and I hug her goodbye. I cry a little on the way home, staring out the window at the city that passed me by passing by.

I pull myself together and three former students come to pick me up. We end up at a bar in the Valley where Gary and I used to play trivia and hope to get noticed by women as smart, funny and good-looking as the women I find myself sitting with. The waitress cards us all and when I go to the bathroom, she hits on me aggressively. Having seen me with three good-looking women, she rightfully assumes I’m awesome. Hollywood is all about perceived heat. Like I said, I was too emotional for a casual hook up and when the internet gets more storage capacity, I’ll write a blog post about all the times I should’ve gotten laid but didn’t. Back with the former students, I hear horror stories about other professors, gossip about students and they get me to play MASH, which is around the time I realize I should not be hanging out with 23-year-old girls anymore. They drop me off, I smoke some pot and cry myself to sleep. 

In the morning, Maloney and I meet Ryan at Tom’s house in Whittier and we all go to a Mexican restaurant where I get a ginger carrot smoothie and a pork burrito. It’s one of the most LA meals I can imagine. We see THE HEAT and it’s super offensive to people with albinism, but I ate a bunch of weed goldfish so I barely feel anything, let alone offended. That night, we have dinner with a few former USC folks, including Jordan and our friend Chris, who is older and had kids by the time he started at USC. It was great to see everyone; but Jordan, who is waiting to hear if Comedy Central is going to pick up his pilot, is manic and he has the kind of personality that turns anxiety into charisma, so he dominates the entire meal. I feel like I’m not even there. I entertain the thought of texting one of the students but instead I get some frozen yogurt and watch some bullshit on TV. The spicy chicken from dinner gives me the runs.

It’s July 4 and the plan is to meet Katie, her boyfriend and some other folks at a fish fry in Echo Park where John, the bassist from The Gravelights, is performing a solo show. It kind of bothers me that both John and Gary are still playing music and I am not, but then again, you can’t play drums by yourself. Katie calls early and says her boyfriend can’t make it so she needs a ride. Maloney, god bless him, agrees to pick her up. The place we are going has the same name it did when I lived in LA, but it has a new location. Again, the metaphor is too perfect. At the venue, there are country and rock bands playing and fish and chips but they keep having to change the oil so the line for fish is stupid long.  We drink cold Tecate. At one point, I get Katie a cup of water and feel very boyfriendy – the whole day I have such a school boy crush on her so I don’t feel relaxed around her at all anymore. I keep my distance. Jordan shows up with some preposterously handsome Australian comedian. The bands are okay. The people are LA. I remember why I don’t live here anymore. It’s good to see John. I smoke one of the joints Tank Girl rolled and everyone is impressed with both the quality of the roll and the quality of the weed. We had planned to go meet Gary and Melinda at their friend Phil’s, but Gary texts that they’re out of beer and the cat is missing, so it’s not a great scene. Instead, we go to House of Pies. After we drop Katie off, I text her that we should stay in touch and I tell her she should visit Chicago. Maloney and I watch Independence Day and I’m glad he’s heading back to the Bay Area and I’m going to Orange County in the morning. I need a vacation from this vacation.

It’s a four-freeway trip to go see my friend Lexi but it’s worth it. My fourth year of college, she dated one of my roommates and, though he and I no longer speak because he flooded my New York apartment and never reimbursed me for the damages, Lexi and I remain great friends. She and her husband Archie have a beautiful house and an amazing daughter. Lexi and I shoot the shit. We take the baby to the beach and I stick my feet in the ocean. At the playground, I’m elated to learn I still have the upper body strength to do the monkey bars with no feet. When Archie gets home from work, he takes the kid and Lexi and I drive in the same beater Mitsubishi she had in college to get tacos. She chain smokes away from her daughter and we have two margaritas apiece in the five minutes while they make our food. Lexi has an MBA from Wharton, works for a hedge fund but is otherwise the same as she was in college, she just has real responsibilities now. It’s nice to see one of my friends as an adult. Back at the house, I spend time with Sophie and she’s so much fun, marriage and kids start to seem like something I want. This experience is the realest I have felt on the whole trip. They give Sophie a bath and she craps in the tub but to my astonishment, nobody yells or swears, they just handle it. I’ve never seen parenting done this way. I realize what one needs in this life is a partner, someone to love unconditionally and be loved by unconditionally, someone to make a baby with and take that baby while you go get margaritas with an old friend, someone to help you clean crap out of a bathtub without getting upset. That and a shitload of cash. The bed in their guest room is more comfortable than the kid’s bed and couches I’ve crashed on so far and I listen to Rumours as I fall asleep, suddenly wanting a family in a way I never, ever have before. Stevie Nicks is a goddamn witch.    

            I go for a walk in the morning and hear neighborhood kids practicing drums in their garages. Back at the house, every single, single lady who was going to attend Lexi and Archie’s noon barbecue has cancelled. But that’s okay, I don’t live here. I shuck corn and smoke cigarettes. One of the guests at the party turns out to be this guy who I met a few years ago at the Orange Country Fair and he might be higher than any person I’ve ever seen in my extended experience around stoners. Though I feel like a thirteenth wheel among all these couples, the company is lovely. Everybody has kids and money. The contrast between these people and my LA friends of the same age is astonishing. These people feel like adults, whereas everyone I know in LA, myself included, still feels like a high schooler or maybe a college student. Case in point, I have to drink some water and a coffee to sober up for the drive back up there. I miss my exit and end up getting gas in a pretty rough neighborhood before finding my way to Jordan’s.

In addition to waiting to hear if his pilot is going to get picked up, Jordan is writing a feature script for which he’s getting paid, so things in his life have never been better, which is probably why he’s so goddamn anxious.  His live-in girlfriend is in Texas, having another of the dozen surgeries she needs to recover from falling on a concrete floor and shattering her jaw, so it’s just me and him. His place, like Gary and Melinda’s or Lexi and Archie’s, is full of love and I realize I need to meet a woman in Chicago with whom I can build a life. Jordan and I shoot the shit and I help him with the script. I say this without any sense of arrogance or exaggeration, as a pure statement of objective reality: I give the best notes. We drink beers and do drugs and he stays in to get some work done and I walk to a sushi place to meet a bunch of other people before Katie’s boyfriend’s birthday party. But it’s a farther walk than I expect, warm out and I show up sweaty from the drugs. Ryan and John are at the restaurant, along with Tom and his wife Elena and Tom’s sister Emily. It’s good to see everyone and I don’t even think about how this is the sushi place Tank Girl and I used to order from on paydays when we worked at the liquor store next door. We head over to the Formosa, a few doors down. Being there again leaves me feeling like I’m unstuck in time. In Grad school, the vintage West Hollywood bar was the epicenter of USC MFA Screenwriting social events, a place where I’d been black out drunk and coked to the bejesus more times than I can count. I see old friends and catch up. It’s so great to see everyone, even the people from grad school I wasn’t actively friends with are welcome sites and I wish I were in a better mood but I’m feeling edgy and uncomfortable seeing Katie with her boyfriend. I talk to anyone who will listen, old friends, working writers, strangers. I talk to a KROQ DJ who has heard of Gary’s new band and really admires the guitar playing, Gary’s guitar playing. I’m trying to be jovial and calm, but my mask of sociability is threatening to slip because I’m feeling the old Hollywood insecurity, feeling all the ways these people have what I think I want. I’m not in a band this DJ loves, I don’t write for Shondaland shows like half the people here, I feel every inch of the 2,000 miles I live away from Hollywood, I feel every second of the two years since I moved away. It’s a welcome site when Jordan shows up with cigarettes. After last call, as he drives us back to his place, I overcompensate for my insecurities the way I always do: by talking mad shit about people. I vent my frustrations and I really value the fact Jordan is the kind of person I can say literally anything in front of, no matter how rude or offensive. But all the ways I can trash these people don’t make me feel any better about myself. ‘It’s over now. Do I know how to pick up the pieces and go home?’

            I wake up in Jordan’s guest room/ office and I gotta piss like a race horse but when I go to open the door, it’s one of those old types of knobs and I pull the whole thing off, trapping myself in the room. I knock loud on the door but it’s 6am and Jordan is out cold. Frantic, I look around, considering hopping out the second-story window until I see the big plastic cup I filled with water the night before. I have to guzzle the water to make room for me to pee in the cup. Relieved, I try to find a tool in the room which will allow me to open the door and pour the warm cup of urine into the toilet. I fiddle so loud trying to fix it that Jordan wakes up and lets me out. He doesn’t notice the cup. I go to the bathroom, Jordan goes back to bed and I wash every dirty dish in the house, partially as a thank you for letting me crash there and partially because I pissed in one of his cups.

I’m having a smoke out back when my dad calls and I worry somebody died because my dad never calls. Turns out everyone is fine, except my dad. My sister had taken time off work to help my mom through the agonizing chemo and radiation process and my dad had made the hollow offer people make when someone has cancer, saying, “Let me know if you need anything,” while offering nothing specific as help. Following this offer, my mom asked him to pay for my sister to go to some expensive-ass spa for a few days because the thing she needed most was to relax. I don’t know the kind of help my dad expected to give, but paying for this relaxation was not it. He was offended. Even though I wasn’t part of the situation, he was calling me to bitch about it. “There’s no playbook for what to do when your ex-wife has cancer, D!” he says even though there are literally thousands of books about dealing with what happens when someone gets cancer. As a born and raised Southern Californian, my dad has the same kind of optimism as Tom, though he lacks Tom’s compassion. My dad prefers a sunny day and a cloudless blue sky and somebody having cancer is a dark rain cloud, an obstacle to his denial-induced optimism. Though he can overcome any physical obstacle, my dad isn’t great at dealing with emotional obstacles. Essentially, the purpose of his call is to yell at me for the fact my mom has cancer and he isn’t equipped to deal with it emotionally, but he doesn’t even know himself well enough to say this or think this. I talk him down and it feels like a million other times we’ve spoken but not had a conversation. I hang up and smoke another cigarette and miss the adults in Orange County and even the baby who crapped in the tub. 

At Noon I wake Jordan up and we go to a liquor store and I get some beer and he gets whiskey and coke. We have some drinks and watch Vice on HBO and later I go meet Tank Girl for lunch at the new liquor store she’s managing. The store has a bar upstairs and we get to hang out, smoking cigars and eating gyros. It’s the most fun we’ve had hanging out since before we slept together and it’s so great to be just her friend. We hug each other and say I love yous and if I never see her again I want that day to be how I remember her forever.

            It takes me over twenty minutes to find parking back at Jordan’s so I tell Katie she has to drive us to dinner. She picks me up and riding in her car feels comfortable, just like it did when we first lived together back when we both first moved to LA. It’s a different car but it still smells like Katie’s car. Dinner is at a Mexican place. I have a beer and get carded, the gay waiter vaguely flirts with me and tells me I’m young. Katie orders a Diet Coke the waiter forgets and I remind him to bring it for her. We get bean dip and enormous burritos because we’re hungover and she talks about her love of television and vents her frustrations about the boyfriend, about student loan debt, about her lack of a writing career. Her love of TV is my love of TV, her frustrations are my frustrations. I can see myself in the mirror behind her while we eat. I know I love her, but I don’t know what kind of love and I’m not going to say a goddamn thing about it because it doesn’t matter. I’ve ruined too many friendships trying to barrel through boundaries and I don’t know what I really want. More to the point, my life is 2,000 miles away from this woman and this city now and I leave tomorrow. I hug Katie goodbye and touch her hair and if I were a poet, I might write a poem about the moment, but I’m not a poet, I’m a storyteller and my LA Story is over. A year later, Katie and her boyfriend come to Chicago and we go to dinner with my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and writing this today in my office/ nursery I know I made the right decision even though that’s not how it would happen in a movie. But my life isn’t a movie, it’s a real life, and it shouldn’t have taken me 33 years to figure that out.

            In the morning, I wake up and deflate the air mattress. I fold my blankets up so they are as small as possible because I think this is what it means to be a good houseguest. Jordan’s out cold and we said our goodbyes last night. I can’t close the door to his house without locking it, so I leave the keys under his mat and head down Santa Monica to Gary’s in Silverlake. It’s hard to see in the morning LA sun as I drive east, into the blinding light. At Western I realize I left my iPhone at Jordan’s, so I double back and use the keys I left under the mat to let myself in. After looking everywhere, I find the phone lodged between the cushions of his couch and I take a moment to notice how lucky I am. This is the exact kind of situation that would have been a disaster for me back when I lived in LA. Back then, I would have been locked out and I never would have found the phone, but the world is kinder to me now that I don’t live in LA. Or maybe I’m just paying more attention to things besides the chattering of my own brain. Maybe I’m not hearing things in mono anymore. 

            Gary and I walk the Reservoir with Melinda and their dog, who barks at me but soon grows to love me. Gary goes to work and Melinda and I watch a movie that I like but can’t remember the name of. She tells me I did the right thing not telling Katie how I feel if I don’t know how I feel. “Plus, I don’t live here anymore,” I remind her, trusting myself for the first time in a while. 

            I use GPS to find the rental car return lot and the first place my iPhone takes me is a Marriot by the Airport where I can’t return the car and realize I’m running out of gas. I call the place to get the address and finally find it literally running on fumes. I roll into the lot in neutral and coast into the drop-off lane. I throw the car in park, grab my bags and get on the shuttle. At the airport, there’s some malfunction with the PA system and it won’t stop beeping and broadcasting intermittent feedback. The airline gives us all drink vouchers to make up for it. I put on new headphones and listen to Rumours. My flight leaves on time and, nearly four years after this trip, I’m still basking in the catharsis I found in these 11 days. 

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