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 5: I Wish...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Amuse-douche

            As “foodie” culture becomes more ubiquitous, restaurant menus are getting more elaborate, which often means the print on them is stylized and small.  Restaurants themselves are also getting darker, which feels counter-intuitive.  You think they’d want good lighting since every idiot in America takes pictures of their food now.  But, no. There’s even a restaurant in San Francisco called Opaque where you literally eat in the dark.  The absence of vision is meant to enhance the flavor of the food.  While I’ve never dined at Opaque, thanks to small menu print, dim ambient lighting and my being legally blind, I’ve been to plenty of restaurants where I was in the dark about what I ordered.  

            Fancy restaurants were probably starting to get darker before the late 90s, but my family couldn’t afford to eat in them, so I had no idea. Growing up, we ate out at chain dining spots like Chili’s or Bertucci’s, places with bright overhead table lights and menus written in 12-point font.  Legal Seafood at the rich people mall was the closest we got to a white linen restaurant.  Even there, the lighting was low and the typeface on the menus was very, very small. I remember having to hold a candle up to the menu to see the fine print. One time, years later when my family could afford to eat a steakhouse called Charlie Palmer, which looks out on the Capitol Building in Washington DC, my sister, who also has albinism, used the candle technique I pioneered to see the small-print of her menu and she set it on fire.  Fortunately, the waiter had already brought us our waters. As we started going to nicer restaurants, the smallness of the menu print became a more common problem and there weren’t always candles, which I understood after my sister’s menu went up in flames. When there weren’t candles and no amount of my squinting could make sense of the blurry, miniscule print in front of me, I could only order from the Specials menu because the waiter had said those dishes out loud. I shudder to think how many truly amazing meals I've missed out on because I couldn't see the full menu. Such a tragedy.    

            As I gained more independence and started living on my own, I ate out at fast food restaurants more often.  Reading the menus at these places was even more challenging than white linen restaurants.  At most fast food joints or take-out places like the ones in the cities where I went to college and grad school, the menu is up on the wall.  Though the typeface on these menus is (I'm told) larger, I still can't see the print.  Candles and squinting were no help and I didn’t want to ask to go behind the counter so I could see the menu up close. It wasn't so bad when I would eat with a friend because I could ask him or her to read me the menu. But when a friend wasn't around and I didn't want to ask anybody (for reasons which will become clear), I again was limited to whatever promotion the restaurant was running. Though these places didn’t have waiters to read me the Specials, the ads on the door for the Spicy Sriracha Grilled Chicken or the Spicy Sriracha Italian BMT for $5 or the Spicy Sriracha Ice Cream Sundae were usually big enough and bright enough to be seen from two blocks away, so I never went hungry.  Some of these restaurants also did take-out. That usually meant they had a printed menu I could hold up close, so I didn’t have to rely on my exceptionally poor distance vision. When there wasn’t a special on the door, a friend with me, or a menu I could read, I had to ask a stranger for help. This was always my least favorite option. Maybe you don't think it would be a problem to ask a person for help seeing something, but I’m here to tell you, it’s a nightmare.

            Admittedly, some of why it’s ‘a nightmare’ is my own psychology. I don’t like to ask for help because I don’t often need it and there are times in my history when I needed it and help wasn’t given.  As a product of this disappointment and my own ego, I pride myself on being (mostly) self-reliant.  Honestly, I don’t have much practice asking for assistance so I feel awkward doing it.  I’m not comfortable admitting weakness or that I need other people. I do not like to feel vulnerable or less than. I also have been let down by many people who were supposed to take care of me, so I don’t trust them all that much. In No Exit, Sartre wrote “hell is other people” and I often agree.  Maybe you think this mild misanthropy is ugly or unwarranted, but this opinion did not form in a vacuum.  In fact, it formed in fast food restaurants asking jackasses for help.  

            Imagine for a moment you see a person on crutches struggling to make it down the street. Her face grimaces as she propels herself forward, herky-jerky, beads of sweat streaking her forehead. Imagine walking up to this person who is obviously struggling to navigate the world with a handicap and saying, “Guess it's time to get a wheelchair, huh?”  It's such a selfish, rude, hurtful and ridiculous thing to say, you probably can't even imagine yourself, or anyone else, behaving in such a head-up-their-own-ass manner.  No one would have the audacity to tell a person with a disability how to better cope with that disability, besides maybe a doctor specializing in that particular condition or another person affected by the same disability, right?   Right???   That’s gotta be right, right? 

Now imagine you're at a Potbelly sandwich shop and a super handsome albino dude (me) turns to you and says, “Hi. I can't see the menu, do you mind telling me what vegan sandwiches they have?”  Rather than answering this simple, straightforward question, imagine you instead say to this person, “Guess it's time for a new prescription.” Or, maybe you won't eat Potbelly because it's lunchtime and they have those annoying performers singing folk versions of 90s grunge songs and you're smarter than to try to eat with that noise. Totally get it, couldn’t agree more. So, imagine you're at a Chinese buffet place, and that same handsome-as-fuck albino dude (again, me) is squinting at the small print on their takeout menu, holding it an inch from his face, eyes narrowed, weak with hunger, straining to barely make out the fading, miniscule typeface. Imagine saying to this gorgeous squinting struggler, “You gotta get some new glasses, buddy.”  It would be insane, right?  To tell a person with a disability you don’t have how to better cope with their disability would be an insane, self-centered thing for a person to do, whether the disabled person is in a wheelchair, using hearing aids or wearing glasses.  Still, people say things like this to me every six weeks or so.  The setting isn’t always restaurants, but the dialogue’s always the same:

“Need to get those eyes checked.”

“Time for new specs.”

“When was your last eye appointment?”

“Damn, you blind?” 

"Someone needs a new eye doctor."

“Surprised glasses that thick don’t work better.” 

“Quick, how many fingers?” It’s ALWAYS two, by the way.  I find it ironic people flash the peace sign after committing what I consider to be an act of war against me. 

Truthfully, this unsolicited medical advice and commentary about my disability from people who are far too stupid to be doctors is the hardest aspect about being an adult with albinism now that I’m married.  I believe I’m good enough, I believe I’m complete, but I’m often faced with the reality these sentiments are untrue.  Objectively speaking, I am genetically flawed. The way I see the world is literally inaccurate and limited. In the jungle, I’d be tiger food. I suppose there’s some beauty to being aware of this reality, some strength in the self-awareness that comes from knowing my limitations and weaknesses.  But that doesn’t do much for me since this reality is often expressed by imbeciles, who belittle me simply because their eyes can focus light properly and mine cannot. Never mind all the other ways I’m exceptional, I have albinism, so in their perfect eyes, they see me as inferior. 

It’s the kind of thing I thought I’d outgrow.  It gets better, right?  But stares on the school bus became stares on the city bus.  Whispers in the library became whispers at Starbucks.  Comments in the lunch line of the cafeteria became comments in the lunch line at Chipotle.  They don't happen as often as they used to, which only makes it more jarring when the comments come.  Regardless of my career success, financial stability, spiritual maturation and growing family, every few weeks I’m reminded that I’m not good enough and the message of my worthlessness is delivered by fools.  It’s probably more tragic than the meals I missed not seeing the menu, but I try not to think about it.  

Like my search for dog poo, my denial is helped by my iPhone. If I'm going to a fast food or takeout place, I can look up the menu on the internet while I wait in line for my tray of Spicy Sriracha slop. If the place isn't online, I can take a picture of the menu on the wall then use the zoom feature to magnify the photo so I can read my options in crystal HD clarity. If the restaurant is dark, I turn on the flashlight. I don’t need your eyes anymore; I have my iPhone.  And Siri never tells me it's time to get new glasses, except when she reminds me about optometry appointments, which I guess is okay.   

Further Reading: The Battle of Los Angeles: Part One