Thoughts and Prayers

 

I'm not a person who prays.  But I was raised in the church.  When I prayed, I never thought I was talking to god.  I always interpreted prayer as me trying to cultivate the godliness or holiness innate in me, the inner divinity present in all human beings.  When I prayed, I was asking for god-like patience, seeking some version of the calmness and compassion Jesus embodies in biblical stories, longing for some holy-spiritesque omniscience.  What I was never doing in prayer was looking for some heavenly force to solve my worldly problems for me.  .  

In the wake of every mass shooting, people from rank and file Americans to our elected leaders are quick to send "thoughts and prayers."  But then nobody does anything.  They act like they've put in their call to The Man Upstairs and thus done all they can do.  But these are not heavenly problems. These massacres are happening here, on earth, in our country, almost every day.  No holy spirit is coming to stop them.  Smokey the Bear famously said "Only you can prevent forest fires."  Only we can prevent mass shootings.  

 

But we don't. 

We're too traumatized.  We're so traumatized, we become complacent, and then it happens again and the cycle repeats.  There's shock and exasperation and calls for prayers and then nobody does anything.  The trauma is omnipresent. 

Like climate change, the problem seems too big to solve.  It's easy to blame guns.  It's easy to blame mental health issues,  It's easy to blame neglectful parenting.  It's easy to blame a lack of security at the school, theater, nightclub, university student union or concert venue.  The Blame Game is a great way to sidestep the issue at hand.  As long as it's someone else's fault, there's nothing I can do to fix it.  If they aren't my fault, they aren't my responsibility.  Oh well, better get on with my life and quietly pray these atrocities won't happen to me or my loved ones.  It's hard to think of a position less Christ-like than shrugging your shoulders, pointing a finger and saying 'it ain't my fault." 

The reality is these are complicated tragedies, with many root causes interwoven in the frayed fabric of our society.  We need to cultivate the god-like omnipotence in ourselves to say 'enough is enough."  We need to act in the here and now.   We need to look at mental healthcare reform, we need to look at our parental tactics, we need to look at our relationship to guns.  No plea to a higher power is going to take away these tragedies.  Only we can prevent mass shootings. 

Working with My Grandpa

 

It’s hard to think about the concept of work without thinking about my grandpa. I would describe work as engaging in activity which is challenging and rewarding.  My grandpa certainly did that.  He worked repairing powerlines while getting his BA and MBA from Pepperdine, then plied his education making savvy investments in the stock market and his children’s companies.  He was born on a farm in Arkansas during the Great Depression and died a millionaire living in Las Vegas and he did it by working his ass off. 

 

It’s hard to think about the concept of working over without thinking about my grandpa.  I would describe working over as excessively beating someone physically. Grandpa fathered four kids while he was working and getting his degrees. I teach college and see how hard my students who are also parents work. I had an MFA student bring her newborn to class and excuse herself periodically to nurse in the back of the room. That wasn’t my grandpa. Raising the kids was grandma’s job. Grandpa had 'real' work to do.  That meant that once he was done hitting the books, that’s when he’d start hitting my dad. As a child, the number one thing I knew about grandpa was that he hit his kids.  A lot.  Like, it honestly took self-restraint to keep his abuse out of the opening paragraph, that’s how ingrained my sense of my grandpa as a known abuser is in my psyche. It was the stuff you bristle at in old books.  Beatings with hands, fists, belts and tree branches. The story was that dad’s best friend from high school became a doctor because of all the time he spent repairing my dad’s face as a teenager. The specifics of the stories involving my aunts varied in detail but were consistent in their capacity to horrify. These were not dark family secrets, these were the subject of conversations with my father as we strolled around the mall during his Tuesday visitations after my mom divorced my dad because he was abusive. My dad claimed to have made peace with grandpa because at 17 he worked the old man over.  It seemed almost magical, almost heroic of my dad to escape.  And it was.  My father kept us safe from grandpa in palpable, observable ways. 

 

After my grandmother divorced him, I think grandpa tried to make up for his behavior in the ways he knew how to apply his gifts.  When he visited us back east, grandpa was always doing home repairs.  I helped him install ceiling fans and demolish walls at my dad’s first house in Virginia.  He taught me many things I use in home repairs today at my first home.  Helping him in the garage as a kid, I cut my hand and started to cry.  Grandpa grabbed me and said, “You don’t cry from physical pain.  You cry if your friend dies, you cry if somebody hurts your feelings, but you don’t cry from no injury.”   After falling while working as a lineman, grandpa was sending out cover letters and resumes, looking for safer work.  In them, grandpa described himself and his work ethic as “The Colossus of Rhodes.”  While I can’t speak to the job market in the early 1980s, it’s hard to imagine employers seeking a large concrete statue of the Greek sun god Helios.  Grandpa was far more impressive a worker than he was with metaphors. Those are more my thing. I’d say the trauma my grandfather inflicted certainly hangs ominously over this family like a solid, inanimate structure, casting a long, dark shadow.

 

It’s hard to think of the concept of working through without thinking about my grandpa.  I would describe working through as the process of clarifying and amplifying your own personal interpretations of reality, past and present (but mostly past).  Grandpa certainly amplified his own version of reality, which is probably the biggest thing we have in common. We’re both happy to share our opinion, even if it makes us look like an asshole.  Grandpa is the only family member on that side to ever mention my albinism, when he remarked of my daughter, “I sure am glad the albinism gene didn’t show up.” It was kind of dickish, but I appreciated that he even said anything. Most people on that side of the family shy away from uncomfortable conversations by pretending everything is fine. 

 

But I think there’s value in honestly and openly working through my experience of this man.  It’s been challenging and rewarding to try to reconcile my feelings surrounding the death of an abusive person I happened to love very much because he was always pretty nice to me, even if he scared the crap out of me. I try to honor my grandpa by giving my best in my own work. I’m a workaholic, in that I try to mostly engage in activities which I find challenging and rewarding. That includes my career, but also hobbies and constructively participating in my family.  Marriage is a rewarding challenge.  I find raising my daughter to be the single most challenging and rewarding activity I have ever pursued.  All this hits different now that I have kids and see how fragile they are. I cannot fathom intentionally harming my children.  It hurts my feelings that nobody did the work of protecting my dad and aunts when they were kids, so even by grandpa’s rules, it’s okay to cry about it. 

BFD

I tend to think people get the kids they deserve.  Or, put another way, I tend to think people get children specifically meant to teach them a needed lesson or lessons about life.  Based on purely anecdotal evidence, it sure seems like children often provide challenges which are oddly specific opportunities for their parents to grow.  For example, a hyper-masculine dad ends up with an effeminate son, or a mother who never takes medicine because she thinks she’s invincible might have a daughter who suffers a severe childhood illness, or maybe a dad who mocked people with disabilities ends up with a son with Cerebral Palsy. Some parents learn the lessons their children can teach them and some don’t.  In my family, my mom was the smartest person in every single room she entered prior to my birth; my brilliance is a challenge to her intellectual superiority, which is a big source of pride for my mom. My dad was an athlete to whom sports matter more than anything; my relative ineptitude at sports and visual disability are challenges to his sense of pride in his own physicality. Because of this theory, my biggest concern upon learning my wife was pregnant was whether the baby would have albinism because I had not really considered my albinism’s impact on my life.

I’d just finished the math, figuring out we had the cash to both move and get married in the same weekend when my wife handed me the pregnancy test she’d taken as a minor precaution, “There’s no way I’m pregnant.  It’ll relieve my anxiety,” she said.  The word YES was bigger and clearer than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.  The relief of our financial stability lasted less than two seconds before my mind became plagued with uncertainty and fear. Based on my relationship history and theories about the types of kids people get, I was certain our first child would be a girl. Raising a daughter seemed like the next logical step in completing my journey from misogynist to feminist.  I was also willing to bet I’d have a child with albinism.  At one point, I caught some of my wife’s anxiety and convinced myself we were having conjoined twin girls with albinism. We’d know more after the sonogram, which I thought we were getting immediately since 100% of my experience with sonograms comes from the television show FRIENDS.   

            As it turned out, we didn’t see anything at our first sonogram because our baby was the size of a seed.  We heard one loud, thundering heartbeat though, banging like a drumroll, building anticipation for a moment which was still eight months away. It wasn’t until 4 months in that we actually saw The Happiest Accident in grainy shades of black and white. The doctors said we were having a baby girl and she was developing perfectly. The geneticist explained if my wife didn’t have the albinism gene, we would 100% not have a daughter with albinism.  However, if my wife carried the albinism gene too, our daughter had a 50/50 chance of being born with albinism. There is presently no test for the albinism gene, we had to wait. Anticipation is jet fuel for anxiety, so I knew I needed a project.   

            As a DeWitt, I’m predisposed to convert anxiety into work, so I set out to write this blog with the intention of figuring out how much of my identity is encompassed by myalbinism. It’s been as fun an illuminating as I’d hoped. As I continued to write entries and think about my own battles with albinism and my upbringing and the challenges it afforded, both related to my albinism and not, my fears regarding my daughter’s pigmentation began to wane. The truth of the matter is my experiences as a person with albinism aren’t that big of a deal, at least not as an adult. I have limitations because of my vision, but everyone has limitations because of their physicality. I know almost no one who can dunk a basketball.  My psychological issues come not from an absence of pigment, but from my parents’ other genetic shortcomings and predispositions and, to a small extent, from their responses to my albinism, as well as their responses to the other challenges of parenthood.  That to say, were I born without albinism, I’d still be plenty fucked up.  My spiritual issues stem from the human condition.  If I had full vision and pigmentation, I’d still have frustrations, limitations and I’d still be mocked at times because these are basic human experiences which all of us share because sometimes people are dicks. After writing this blog and hearing from so many of you, I’ve come to understand my albinism doesn’t make me as unique as I always thought it did. I’m not an individual snowflake, I’m not even particularly special. In that regard, this blog has provided both humility and tremendous existential relief. 

            As the due date got closer, my wife’s pregnancy got more complicated. There were issues with her blood sugar, there were issues with her blood pressure.  We went to the hospital several times before our due date because she was having contractions or her blood pressure was too high.  Her pregnancy became dangerous enough we had to stop using the midwife model and go see an OB-GYN.  It was a hard moment when one of the midwives we’d never met before told us we could not come back to the group. It was like breaking up with someone via a surrogate, which is a great business idea by the way, a surrogate for dumping people. The OB practice was two men and two women and they couldn’t tell us which doctor would deliver the baby. The women were articulate, polished and sharp.  Both men were aloof, one never tied his left shoe and you could smell the other’s cologne from thirty feet away. Anxieties mounted to the point writing a blog could no longer calm them.      

            I went to every appointment during my wife’s pregnancy except one on a Monday at which she was supposed to be there 15 minutes for a routine blood pressure check.  Of course, it was the one appointment I didn’t go to where things became urgent.  I was on an elliptical trainer at the gym, getting a cardio session in before heading to school to begin the first week of Spring Quarter classes when my wife called and said her blood pressure was high and the OB wouldn’t let her leave the hospital.  I had to grab all our things and meet her there.  I got off the elliptical, came home, showered, packed up and took my first ever Lyft to the hospital.

            At the hospital, my wife was in a gown but we had to wait for her to be admitted.  The plan was to medically induce labor.  The nurses said it would take at least a day and probably two or three days, but that we’d be staying at the hospital the whole time. I had to cancel my entire first week of classes.  They moved us to our room, a lavish space with all the medical equipment my wife would need and a roll away bed for me. Honestly, the room our child was to be born in was much nicer than the room in the bed and breakfast in Northern Michigan in which she was conceived.  The doctors gave my wife the induction drug and we waited.  Neither of us slept.  We listened to FRIENDS episodes on our phone and I went to get us Au Bon Pain because the small eatery I hadn’t seen since I lived in Boston 17 years ago was the only non-hospital food near the hospital. At about 3am, they gave her another course of drugs.  At 9am, they started talking about administering an epidural because things were getting close.  The epidural lady, some relic of the byzantine era, administered it and there were immediately complications.  My wife felt half her body go cold and numb and she started bleeding. She stood up and there were huge chunks of blood and tissue under her. Another nurse couldn’t find the fetal heart rate but didn’t want to announce it and make everyone panic, but she struggled to hide her anxiety at not being able to find a pulse. Based on the amount of blood and tissue my wife lost, the decision was made to do an emergency C-section.  Within a minute, Dr. Cologne rushed my wife out of our room and into the OR, leaving me behind.  I tried to follow and was told I couldn’t go in without scrubs.  “Then get me some fucking scrubs,” I hissed, calmly letting the staff know my wardrobe requirements. 

            Once I was scrubbed in, I still couldn’t enter the OR because things were too hectic.  I paced in the hall, crying, listening, trying to remember to breathe.  In a room next to ours, a nurse stuck her head out and said, “I need someone to catch.” For a moment, because of my scrubs and glasses, she looked at me incredulously like ‘doc, get the hell in here!’ Most of the nurses and medical staff on the floor were in with my wife.  If this were a movie, I’d have gone over and helped deliver someone else’s baby.  I thought about it for a moment.  But this isn’t a movie and I was too concerned with my wife and her emergency surgery to bother trying to be someone else’s hero. Other nurses rushed to help. 

            When they finally let me into the OR there were probably a dozen people in the small room and there was so much blood on the floor I almost passed out.  I saw a baby being wiped down by nurses, screaming, a tuft of dark hair on her head. I immediately turned to my wife, who had four different people probing around her abdomen.  She was vomiting and sweaty, but she was breathing. I squeezed her hand and told her she was doing great and that the baby was healthy.  We both cried. The doctors didn’t have time to do an instrument count before surgery, so after sewing my wife up, they had to do an X Ray to make sure they didn’t leave anything like forceps or a scalpel inside her body. The doctors gave me our baby but they wouldn’t let me leave the OR because there was too much blood on the floor and they thought I’d slip and fall. Eventually they mopped up and let me take the baby out of the room and she immediately crapped on my arm. She had hairy shoulders so I knew she was mine. 

            Shortly, my wife was wheeled in to join us.  She was cold from the blood loss so they packed her with blankets. It would be a full two weeks before anyone acknowledged there are very few genuine emergencies in obstetrics, and my wife had just survived one. My wife’s placenta had ruptured- that’s what all the bloody tissue was from.  All told, it was seven minutes from the administering of the epidural to the removal of the baby, who is perfect.  My wife was recovering well.  And I wasn’t scared of being a dad anymore.  In fact, I wasn’t scared of anything.  It was like shock treatment. Nothing will ever be scarier than being in that hallway, not knowing what was happening with my wife and daughter. I made it through that, I can make it through anything.

            We still had no idea how dangerous my wife’s experience had been when they moved us to recovery and the itch to go home started to grow.  Recovery was a nightmare because all day long nurses and other medical staff kept popping into the room because they needed different things from mom or baby.  One nurse who weighed the baby wanted to touch my white hair.  I remember thinking it was a good thing we were in a hospital because I was gonna rip this dummy’s head clean off.  But I just smiled and stooped down so she could touch it. Another nurse had to take blood from our baby’s feet.  She poked her with a needle and dabbed blood on a piece of paper while our baby screamed bloody murder.  I glared at the nurse and she assured me “it’s for a state form,” which was the wrong argument to make to a former libertarian and a guy who still thinks the state can go fuck itself in its present form.  I fantasized about cutting the nurse into pieces and hiding her in the bio-medical waste bag in the recovery room bathroom but before I could club her and drag her back there, she finished taking my baby’s blood for the government and generously let me assuage my screaming, two-day-old daughter. After the bloodletting they allowed us to leave. Don’t tell the hospital but my wife drove herself home.  See, her car has too many blind spots for me to drive it safely.  We’d later learn her blood pressure issue, preeclampsia, meant she was at risk for seizures.  She wasn’t supposed to drive for six weeks.  Oops.  My wife is a badass, that’s a big part of why she’s my wife. 

            When we brought our baby into our apartment, the shift in my identity was almost instantaneous. If my identity were a pie chart, it’d be 100% Dad. Nothing else mattered. There was no room for my albinism. For a moment, there was no other me.  In the 15 weeks I’ve been a Dad, parts of me have returned because I quickly recognized the need for an identity which has facets. I’m a husband, I’m a father, I’m a writer, I’m a professor, I’m a labor leader, I’m a jogger, I’m a wise-ass, I’m a lover and a fighter, and yeah, I’m a person with albinism. But my albinism is a small sliver of the pie chart of my identity, and it grows smaller every day Beatrix Fiona DeWitt gets bigger.  She’s the BFD, my albinism isn’t. 

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. 

Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 8: The Next Episode... 

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. 



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