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 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 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...

The Battle of Los Angeles Part 2: Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

My Dad was 27 when my parents got divorced in April 1985. I can’t imagine how strange it must have been for a California Boy who intended to play baseball or be a sports broadcaster for a living to find himself in Virginia mowing lawns, separated from his wife and family, struggling to figure out what to do with himself and how to stay in his albino kids’ lives with the obstacles he’d made a mess of the marriage, had no emotional skill set and his entire family – sisters, parents, grandparents, closest friends – were all back in Southern California. It must have been so lonely. No wonder he had so many girlfriends.  

He also took us back to LA regularly. Every single summer from as early as I can remember, we flew to LA for 10 days or two weeks of fun in (spite of) the sun. I can remember the joy I felt on these flights as we approached Los Angeles. We descended below the cloud line and the enormous, sprawling city became visible – the hills, the concrete freeways, all the cars. The colors were so different than Virginia. Though I had lived there only a year as an infant, it was a place that felt like home. Long before Phantom Planet used the classic line from an old tune in the theme song for THE OC, I can remember humming to myself, “California here I come, right back where I started from,” and fighting back tears almost every single time we touched down at LAX. Landing was immediately followed by spending two hours in LA traffic as we drove up to Reseda, Sylmar or Thousand Oaks. But I didn’t mind. There was something in Los Angeles that always excited me and the warm, dry air felt like a hug from someone familiar and loving. 

The great thing about vacations in LA was we had family with whom we could stay. My Dad is the oldest of four and his three younger sisters were elated to see and spoil my sister and me. My Aunt Jana dated a guy who I thought owned a candy store. I would later learn it was a liquor store, but it was all the same to me with my mouth full of Sugar Babies. She had a house with a pool and a BMW with a sunroof, and she ran her own business with my Aunt Julie. The two of them were 1980s Valley Girls and I thought they were the coolest. They took us everywhere. Disneyland. Magic Mountain. Universal Studios. I remember we drove down to Sea World in San Diego while I sat in the back of Julie’s Suzuki Sidekick, hiding under a blanket the whole time to avoid sunburn. My Aunt Caren was studying at UCLA at the time, so we saw her more sparingly until she graduated and we got older, but when she was a contestant on the game show PRESS YOUR LUCK she gave a shout out to my sister and me (though we didn’t call it that back then), which felt very Hollywood and glamorous. My grandparents were divorced, but we managed to spend at least a night at my Grandma’s apartment complex, which had a pool, or my Grandpa’s house with his hot tub and guns. On these trips it was also pretty standard for my dad to take a day to go hang out with his buddies.  On these days he’d drive down to Newport Beach to spend time with his friends (cold beers and women in and out of bikinis) and we’d spend time with my Aunts or Grandparents alone. From these parentless moments, the idea grew for me to visit LA by myself sometime.  

I know I went to LA two different times during the summer by myself, one in 1992 and one for sure in 1993. But it was 25 years ago and somehow these two separate trips as an unaccompanied minor have blurred into one experience in my memory. These trips were my first ever experience flying alone and the first time I got a taste of Los Angeles without my parents. Flying alone as a child with albinism was not much different from flying alone as a child without albinism. I had to register as an Unaccompanied Minor, wear a red and white striped button so people knew I was a kid by myself, and the airline employees took special care in looking after me. I flew from Dulles to LAX and was scheduled to stay with my Aunt Jana. During my time with Jana, I got to look after her daughters and take us all to Universal Studios. I was basically babysitting, but it didn’t really feel like work. One of my Dad’s best friends had two sons who were about my age. Their Dad had gone to high school with my Dad and, in fact, their Grandmother had gone to high school with my Grandmother.  Their Grandma graciously invited me to stay with them in San Diego. They had an enormous beach house, the backyard of which backed up to the Pacific Ocean. We ate sushi, I rode in a Benz and sat on the balcony watching the sunset over the ocean and Southern California felt like anything but a hellscape.  

The young lady who regularly babysat my cousins was named Jerry Lee.  She had a Honda, a brother with special needs and, to that point, she was the coolest chick I’d ever met.  She was 16, she wore flannel, had piercings and she listened to KROQ.  She was edgy and funny and bore a striking resemblance to all the women I would later fall in love with (and the woman I’d marry). We heard a brand new song called “Cherub Rock” on KROQ and I told her I liked it so she played me Gish.  Turned out The Smashing Pumpkins were her favorite band and she was excited for their new record, Siamese Dream, which was released on July 27, 1993, two days after I returned to Virginia from that trip. I rode my bike to the Kemp Mill Records and bought the CD the day it came out. (I liked it, but never as much as that first time I heard that song with that girl).  I was all awkward and gawky with Jerry Lee (and pretty much every girl after).  With no experience talking to girls, I dressed up nicely the last night I knew I’d see her and tried to make things feel like what dates looked like in movies. I think I even cooked her dinner to the extent I was able when I was 13 (ramen).  She was sweet about it and made it a point to call me on the day I left town to say goodbye to me and tell me she thought I was cool. I’ve always wondered what happened to her.  My Grandmother, who knew Jerry Lee’s parents, said she ‘stopped listening to her parents and became a real jerk,’ which Grandma probably thought was a bad thing but kinda sounded awesome to me. Though we’d return to LA again a few times when I was in high school, I never saw Jerry Lee again. 

As I got older, these trips changed.  I wanted to do more adult things, like drive with the music loud or go see rock shows, but my little brothers and sisters and my younger cousins meant we continued to do family friendly stuff on our trips out West. When I was 17 and looking at colleges, we toured Pepperdine in Malibu and my dad basically laughed at the idea of my attending, even though my paternal Grandfather got his MBA there. While the drive to attend Pepperdine was by no means pressing, my desire to return to Los Angeles was beginning to grow.  

“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West and my spirit is crying for leaving” is a line from Led Zeppelin, but it also applies to me and Los Angeles. By the time I was 17, Los Angeles was a magical place. Any of the dangers the environment posed for me as a person with albinism seemed inconsequential to me. Besides, I was 17, so bravado like 99% of my identity.  Plus, I kinda made it point to not think about my albinism. LA was a place of boundless possibility, of optimism, of opulence. The term “Lifestyle” was invented in California and I can understand why. The people who hosted me had swimming pools, marble showers, gyms in their homes and drove German cars. Their neighbors were Janet Jackson or I was babysitting while they went to the premiere of THE FUGITIVE.  My aunt’s lighting company did installations at Disneyland and at theaters throughout the country. Los Angeles was glamorous. It was a place that became an idea: a glimmering beacon of possibility.  Los Angeles became a Promised Land.  Never mind the earthquakes and smog, the scorching sun the drought or the traffic, Los Angeles was a place for limitless optimism in the face of objective reality.  I knew at some point I’d eventually live there. I didn't know how hard living there would be. 

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

The Battle of Los Angeles Part 1: To Live and Die in LA

Greetings White Noise Fan(s?),

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post.  There’s a lot of life happening.  I’ve also been working on something long form, the first segment of which is below.  There will be posts all month. Enjoy! 

 -Nate

The Battle of Los Angeles  

To steal Jimmy Breslin’s line about New York City in Spike Lee’s underappreciated SUMMER OF SAM (1998) and apply it to Los Angeles, LA is a city that I love and hate both equally. All of the posts this month will be about my lifelong Battle with the City of Los Angeles as a person with albinism and aspirations. 

Part 1: To Live & Die in LA

I was born at Henry Mayo Newhall hospital in Valencia, California, 34 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. I was one of the first babies born in the new hospital on January 14, 1980 at 5:12am and I was the first baby any of the medical professionals involved in my birth had ever seen with albinism, as far as I remember.

As a person with albinism, my skin lacks melanin pigment. Consequently, I’m extremely susceptible to sunburn. The frequency of sunny days in Los Angeles, coupled with the low angle of the sun, make Southern California a particularly challenging natural environment for me.  My skin’s sensitivity to ultraviolet rays is matched by my eyes’ sensitivity to bright lights, so the warm California sun was a major setback in that regard too. As a person with albinism, Los Angeles is probably the fourth most dangerous place in America I could’ve been born.   

Here are the Top 6 Most Dangerous Places a Person with Albinism can be Born in the US, according to me and the research I haven’t done:

6. Alaska.  Too dark in the winter, too bright in the summer. Personally, I’d be mistaken for a polar bear and shot on site.

5. Alabama.  It’s sunny and the people seem dim. 

4. Los Angeles/ Southern California.  I know LA, Orange County and San Diego are technically different but it’s all one enormous urban and suburban sprawl so I’m grouping it all together.

3. Hawaii.  The high average daily temperature and low angle of the sun make this tropical paradise anything but heavenly to a person with albinism. Plus, the fact it’s an island probably limits the quality of eye care professionals and available resources. 

2. Texas.  This state is sunny and hot, there are more tigers per capita than anywhere else in the world and everybody’s armed. 

1. Florida.  Not only is the sun low, bright and hot, but you’re surrounded by gators, rising oceans, pythons and people from Florida. 

These statistics I did look up:  In 1980, it didn’t rain a drop in Los Angeles from May 22 to December 3. Over 60% of the days that year were more clear than cloudy. The average temperature was between 73 and 78 degrees, with a few spikes over 90 degrees, including one on June 28 and one on December 30. While to most, these statistics paint a picture of a sun-soaked paradise, for a person with albinism, they paint a picture of a dangerous, sun-scorched hellscape. Los Angeles was a blinding ray of sunshine, just waiting to burn me alive.  

For all the grief I give them and the ways I don’t hesitate to call out their shortcomings, my parents understood the extraordinary dangers Los Angeles posed for their newborn with albinism.  It must have felt urgent to them, to get me out of there.  They understood what a misfit I was for the environment.  My mom applied for a transfer at Boeing and we moved to Seattle, Washington, where we never, ever saw the sun because it rained all the time.  Then her work took her to Virginia, to the opposite coast, practically as far away from Los Angeles as one could be.  

Despite the dangers Los Angeles posed for me as a person with albinism, I’d be return many times.  

Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 2: Vacation, All I Ever Wanted...