Memory
is a funny thing. In the last entry, I
wrote that it was three years before I returned to LA. That’s wrong, it was only two.
I break my headphones on the flight
in so when I arrive, I’m only hearing things in mono, which is probably not as
good of a metaphor as I want it to be but is definitely indicative of the limited
perspective I had prior to this trip. The line for rental cars is like the line
for Space Mountain and I think, for the first time, about how lucky I was to
have lived here. Look at all these people who flew to Los Angeles just to spend
a couple of days here, basking in the sun-soaked luster. It’ll be 75 and sunny
every single day I’m here. I think I’m in town to collaborate on a script with
Maloney, but when I pull out of the rental car agency in my shitty white Kia,
“Cleaning out my Closet” by Eminem comes on the radio. LA knows the real reason I’m back, even if I
don’t get it yet. I take my usual
shortcut up from the airport, cutting across Jefferson and taking Hauser up to
Miracle Mile where I stop and buy toiletries at the same Ralph’s where I used
to get groceries when I lived with Katie, eat lunch at Baja Freeh across
Wilshire from my old gym in the E! building and generally kill some time. Back
in the Kia, I hear the Howard Stern interview with Jerry Seinfeld where Jerry talks
about how he turned down 110 million dollars for a 10th season of
SEINFELD and says he never did it for the money. I go to the liquor store where
I met Tank Girl and don’t expect to know anyone who works there but almost
immediately I see Andre, who fills me in on new management and changes in the
store and lets me use his employee discount to buy West Coast beers, which back
in 2013 weren’t as readily available in Chicago as they are now.
At Gary and Melinda’s place in
Silverlake I chill with Melinda and her cousin and wait for Gary to get home
from work. The last time I saw Gary and Melinda was a year ago when they drove
up to Sausalito to spend a couple days with me after my uncle finally drank
himself to death. That trip was obviously strained and strange and was
complicated by seeing THE DARK KNIGHT RISES the day after the mass shooting in
a Colorado theater. But when Gary gets home it’s all LA sunshine and sativa and
it’s so great to catch up with him. We’re both doing well, being responsible,
diminishing our egos and coming to have more reasonable understanding of what
we can and cannot expect from the world. We’ve shed the skin of our 20s, the
layer of bullshit everybody wears at that age to try to make themselves appear
to be who they think they should be instead of realizing they are who they are
and they’re awesome. Gary’s new band is going well and we swap stories until
Maloney shows up and we all go to dinner at the Red Lion. Though I’d also seen
Maloney on that same sad Sausalito trip, my family trauma is the furthest thing
from my mind as we eat sausages and I get drunk like old times but not Drunk
like old times. Leaving the bar, we walk through the LA sunset and nostalgia
washes over me and I feel an intense longing to live here again. Chicago is
great but it doesn’t have sunsets or friends like these. Back at Gary’s I get a
text from an awesome chick inviting me to meet her at a bar. You’re so LA
today, LA. She says she’s drunk, which I interpret to mean I can get laid but
I’m feeling too vulnerable and full of beer and sausage for a casual hook-up so
we make plans to grab a drink the next night and I hang out with my friends and
watch Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episodes I’ve seen before. Someday I’ll
write a blog entry about all the times I should’ve gotten laid but didn’t, but
right now the internet doesn’t have enough storage space to hold all these
tales of not getting tail.
In the morning, Gary and I walk
around the Silverlake Reservoir and I go buy groceries, thinking I’ll use the
kitchens in the houses where I’m staying to cook meals instead of eating out
for 11 straight days. Almost immediately after getting back from the grocery
store, my friend Tom picks me up and we go to lunch. The restaurant specializes
in deep dish pizza and when the waitress learns I’m visiting from Chicago she
tries to convince me to get it, but I end up with a wrap or some California
bullshit. Tom is one of the most effortlessly funny people I know and it’s
great to see him. I tell him about my uncle and he tells me a sad story about
his wife. I tell him about how my aunt, my uncle’s sister, killed herself on my
mom’s birthday and he tells me a story about his grandpa dying. If I wanted to
drag the lunch into a depression spiral and be King of the Bummers, I could
have gone on about my mom being diagnosed with cancer six weeks after her
sister killed herself, but Tom’s got the kind of optimism that comes from being
born and raised in Southern California and it’s contagious. Despite having a
tough year, Tom reminds me, “Everybody has a thousand reasons to be happy,”
which is something I still think about when I want to warm my icy East Coast
heart. When you grow up in LA, whatever
happens today, tomorrow is another sunny day. (You can have those lyrics, btw).
I take the 101 from Silverlake to
Studio City to meet up with Maloney at the house he’s watching for what is
supposed to be the first of five days of serious writing. The place is very LA,
in that it was recently remodeled and there’s a 5 Series BMW in the driveway.
Maloney and I have talked via phone and gotten ourselves excited about the idea
of writing a TV show about a father and his 13-year-old son solving mysteries.
The premise is that the dad and the kid’s mom are divorced and dad is a private
investigator with custody of his son on weekends. On these weekends, the two team
up to solve cases. (You cannot have this TV show, btw). We’ve done some
brainstorming work and emailed outlines back and forth but within ten minutes
of sitting down we’ve blown up the idea and talked ourselves out of doing it at
all. I’m livid and feel abandoned, but Maloney seems really depressed. His personal
story went through many of the same beats as mine before he left LA. He, too,
is just visiting now. We never get to see each other, so even though I kind of
resent him for torpedoing the idea, I shut the fuck up about it and we go get
some Zankou Chicken. That’s what friends are for. He asks me about the woman I
want to marry and I halfheartedly describe the woman I’m meeting for drinks
because if this trip isn’t going to be about writing now maybe it can be about
her. I take the 101 back down to Gary’s. He and Melinda are out of town and I
have their beautiful Silverlake apartment to myself for the weekend. I take a
cab to meet the girl at Ye Old Rustic Inn in Los Feliz because I’m gonna have a
couple of beers and I’m driving without my driving glasses and the combination
of alcohol, darkness and blindness seems like a recipe for getting me killed. She’s
late and when she does show up she’s hungover and withdrawn. Whatever chance I
had to get laid 19 hours ago is gone. We have a beer and some junk food to help
her hangover and I offer to walk her home just to get her alone and she
replies, “I see what you’re doing.” She was always way smarter than me. She
waits with me for the cab and we say we’ll hang out again but we don’t.
Back alone at Gary and Melinda’s, I get stoned to the
bejesus and listen to Rumours on vinyl, which is an odd choice since I think I
hate Fleetwood Mac. As the strumming chords of “Second Hand News” fill the
apartment, something inside me shifts and releases. I let go. My heart and spirit
open. For the first time in all my trips to Los Angeles, I listen to something
other than the chattering of my own brain. I’m not longer hearing just mono. Then
when “Dreams” begins every emotion I didn’t feel in the six years I lived in
this gilded city pours out of me like a goddamn tsunami. I double over and weep
uncontrollably, like a wounded, dying animal. Down on all fours, shaking,
quivering, sobbing ‘listening carefully to the sound of my loneliness like a
heartbeat driving me mad in the stillness of the memory of what I had, and what
I lost.’ Teary eyed, bleary eyed, I look at a painting above the couch, hanging
on a wall I helped Gary paint when he and Melinda first moved in here and the
painting moves, then looks like a city at night in the rain, then shifts again
to new shapes and colors, indistinct but still imbued with meanings I
understand but cannot convey in words. The Pandora’s Box of my emotions is
thrown open. Stevie Nicks is a goddamn witch. “Never Going Back Again” feels
twee the way a Wes Anderson movie feels twee and I find myself looking around
Gary and Melinda’s apartment and I feel like I’m on the set of an indie TV show
on which I used to be a regular but my character was killed off. From every
angle, their place is a picture. It pulses and peeps with life and creativity
and verve and I haven’t felt those things in my life in two years. Their house
is a place of love and I feel love’s absence in my heart in a way I’ve never
experienced. “Don’t Stop” and “Go Your Own Way” break me from wistfulness and
instill me with a new sense of purpose. I make the choice to learn to produce
my own material, I make the choice to return to writing from the perspective of
a producer in the most idyllic Ayn Randian sense of the word. I make the choice
to innovate and make things instead of continuing firing off spec scripts,
trafficking in the business of unproduced work, of ideas never seen to
fruition. I vow to take ownership of my life. Later this summer I’ll read a
book about the making of Rumours and learn Fleetwood Mac were on some fantastic
cocaine when they wrote these songs. The rush is contagious. I find “Songbird”
so beautiful my wife and I walk down the aisle to it at our wedding three years
later. By the time I get to “Gold Dust Woman,” I’m out of tears. ‘It’s over now
and I need to figure out how to pick up the pieces and go home.’
The weekend is quiet. I jog around the Reservoir and do
calisthenics in the park. Back at the house I drink coffee and listen to
records and the traffic passing by the window sounds like waves lapping against
the shore and I’m in love with Los Angeles in a whole new way. I go to dinner
with Maloney and our buddy Ryan, who is doing great with his career and
sobriety, but eats something that doesn’t agree with him and hurls in the
bushes in front of the restaurant. I go home and watch LA Story, wake up and
run around the Reservoir, then watch LA Story again because I fell asleep
watching it last night and I think it has something to teach me about what my
life is not. I clean up, pack my bags and take the 101 up to Studio City where
Maloney shows me the ten-year old’s room I’ll be crashing in and the pictures
of Matt Barkley I’ll be sleeping next to at the house he’s watching. We go to
dinner and I have cold tacos and a warm margarita, we come back and watch The
Watch but I don’t see much of it because I’m making plans to meet Tank Girl the
next day.
Tank Girl’s new place is near Valley Village and as I drive
over from Studio City, I realize she lives across the street from Gary’s old
apartment. Her place is small and cute, just like Tank Girl. She has a new
computer, a new man and she’s sober. She’s been taking classes at the Academy
of Art. It’s great to see how well she’s doing. We planned to spend the day downtown,
at the gun range shooting paper zombie targets but when we get there, the gun
range is closed, which is an almost too-perfect metaphor for our relationship.
Instead, we go get sushi at a place in Little Tokyo. Neither of us mentions
that we’ve been here before and we sit facing opposite directions of the way we
sat on that bloody day, the last time we ate here. Sometimes life is a little
over-written. After lunch, we try the gun range again but it’s still closed. On
the drive back up the 101, she rolls me a couple joints that look like
cigarettes –she always rolled the best joints. I say goodbye and nothing more,
like a goddamn Hemingway story.
Maloney and I go play team trivia at Red Lion. Ryan bails on
us and Jordan shows up late. I drink an entire boot of beer, smoke some
cigarettes, do some drugs and can’t understand why Ryan, who is sober now,
didn’t want to come out. Back at the house, feeling guilty, I smoke some weed
and send Tank Girl a Facebook message telling her how great it was to see her,
how cool it is she’s doing so well and how valuable our relationship is to me.
I tell her how much I appreciate all the things she taught me about biking in
the city, tricks I still use. I tell her how much I appreciate all the ways she
helped me learn to take care of myself, whether it was meals to cook or
realizing I need to nurture myself with exposure to art. I utilize lessons this
woman taught me every single day of my life. I tell her I love her, but not in
an ‘I want to date you’ way. It’s probably the most honest I’ve ever been with
her. In the morning, she writes me back thanking me and we agree to have lunch
again before I leave.
I wake up feeling sluggish so Maloney and I go run wind
sprints in the park and, me being me, I go too hard on the first run and tweak
my hammy. I limp through some more sprints but my heart’s not in it. Maloney
and I go play golf at the par 3 course in Los Feliz and grab lunch at a place
called Mindy’s with great muffins. Despite going to all our old haunts, he
still seems haunted, distraught and distant. I feel like I’m spending time with
an open wound.
Back at the house we get cleaned up and he drives us to go
pick up Katie for dinner. When Katie adopted her dog, I went with her to bring
him home and, because Stevie Nicks unlocked all my stupid, wimpy emotions, it
breaks my fucking heart when Ollie doesn’t recognize me. All my friends who
stayed in LA got gorgeous and Katie is no exception. In the car, I ask her how
things are with her boyfriend and she lets out a barely audible “good.” Maloney
parks right by the old rehearsal space Gary and I shared on Hollywood, on a
street where we’d each gotten a ton of parking tickets. Dinner is at some
gourmet burger place that won’t let Maloney make any substitutions to his
burger. You’re so LA, LA. Katie gets a beer and I get some girlie drink and I
don’t think we break eye contact the entire meal. Maloney later remarks that he
felt like he wasn’t even there. After dinner, we go to Amoeba Music to browse
around. Katie and I are in the used DVD section talking TV and I ask her what
shows I should have my TV class watch and I almost pass out because suddenly
all the boy/girl stuff that was never an issue between us for the three years
we lived together or the eight years we’ve been fiends, suddenly it’s all I can
fucking think about or feel and, in that moment on that evening, I love Katie
in a visceral, let’s destroy a perfectly good friendship sort of way. Thanks for nothing, Stevie
Nicks! Back at the car, Maloney has a parking ticket. We drop Katie off and I
hug her goodbye. I cry a little on the way home, staring out the window at the
city that passed me by passing by.
I pull myself together and three former students come to
pick me up. We end up at a bar in the Valley where Gary and I used to play trivia
and hope to get noticed by women as smart, funny and good-looking as the women
I find myself sitting with. The waitress cards us all and when I go to the
bathroom, she hits on me aggressively. Having seen me with three good-looking
women, she rightfully assumes I’m awesome. Hollywood is all about perceived
heat. Like I said, I was too emotional for a casual hook up and when the
internet gets more storage capacity, I’ll write a blog post about all the times
I should’ve gotten laid but didn’t. Back with the former students, I hear
horror stories about other professors, gossip about students and they get me to
play MASH, which is around the time I realize I should not be hanging out with
23-year-old girls anymore. They drop me off, I smoke some pot and cry myself to
sleep.
In the morning, Maloney and I meet Ryan at Tom’s house in
Whittier and we all go to a Mexican restaurant where I get a ginger carrot
smoothie and a pork burrito. It’s one of the most LA meals I can imagine. We
see THE HEAT and it’s super offensive to people with albinism, but I ate a
bunch of weed goldfish so I barely feel anything, let alone offended. That
night, we have dinner with a few former USC folks, including Jordan and our
friend Chris, who is older and had kids by the time he started at USC. It was
great to see everyone; but Jordan, who is waiting to hear if Comedy Central is
going to pick up his pilot, is manic and he has the kind of personality that
turns anxiety into charisma, so he dominates the entire meal. I feel like I’m
not even there. I entertain the thought of texting one of the students but
instead I get some frozen yogurt and watch some bullshit on TV. The spicy
chicken from dinner gives me the runs.
It’s July 4 and the plan is to meet Katie, her boyfriend and
some other folks at a fish fry in Echo Park where John, the bassist from The
Gravelights, is performing a solo show. It kind of bothers me that both John
and Gary are still playing music and I am not, but then again, you can’t play
drums by yourself. Katie calls early and says her boyfriend can’t make it so
she needs a ride. Maloney, god bless him, agrees to pick her up. The place we
are going has the same name it did when I lived in LA, but it has a new
location. Again, the metaphor is too perfect. At the venue, there are country
and rock bands playing and fish and chips but they keep having to change the
oil so the line for fish is stupid long.
We drink cold Tecate. At one point, I get Katie a cup of water and feel very
boyfriendy – the whole day I have such a school boy crush on her so I don’t
feel relaxed around her at all anymore. I keep my distance. Jordan shows up
with some preposterously handsome Australian comedian. The bands are okay. The
people are LA. I remember why I don’t live here anymore. It’s good to see John.
I smoke one of the joints Tank Girl rolled and everyone is impressed with both
the quality of the roll and the quality of the weed. We had planned to go meet
Gary and Melinda at their friend Phil’s, but Gary texts that they’re out of
beer and the cat is missing, so it’s not a great scene. Instead, we go to House
of Pies. After we drop Katie off, I text her that we should stay in touch and I
tell her she should visit Chicago. Maloney and I watch Independence Day and I’m
glad he’s heading back to the Bay Area and I’m going to Orange County in the
morning. I need a vacation from this vacation.
It’s a four-freeway trip to go see my friend Lexi but it’s
worth it. My fourth year of college, she dated one of my roommates and, though
he and I no longer speak because he flooded my New York apartment and never
reimbursed me for the damages, Lexi and I remain great friends. She and her
husband Archie have a beautiful house and an amazing daughter. Lexi and I shoot
the shit. We take the baby to the beach and I stick my feet in the ocean. At
the playground, I’m elated to learn I still have the upper body strength to do
the monkey bars with no feet. When Archie gets home from work, he takes the kid
and Lexi and I drive in the same beater Mitsubishi she had in college to get tacos.
She chain smokes away from her daughter and we have two margaritas apiece in
the five minutes while they make our food. Lexi has an MBA from Wharton, works
for a hedge fund but is otherwise the same as she was in college, she just has
real responsibilities now. It’s nice to see one of my friends as an adult. Back
at the house, I spend time with Sophie and she’s so much fun, marriage and kids
start to seem like something I want. This experience is the realest I have felt
on the whole trip. They give Sophie a bath and she craps in the tub but to my
astonishment, nobody yells or swears, they just handle it. I’ve never seen
parenting done this way. I realize what one needs in this life is a partner,
someone to love unconditionally and be loved by unconditionally, someone to
make a baby with and take that baby while you go get margaritas with an old
friend, someone to help you clean crap out of a bathtub without getting upset.
That and a shitload of cash. The bed in their guest room is more comfortable
than the kid’s bed and couches I’ve crashed on so far and I listen to Rumours
as I fall asleep, suddenly wanting a family in a way I never, ever have before.
Stevie Nicks is a goddamn witch.
I go for a walk in the morning and
hear neighborhood kids practicing drums in their garages. Back at the house,
every single, single lady who was going to attend Lexi and Archie’s noon
barbecue has cancelled. But that’s okay, I don’t live here. I shuck corn and
smoke cigarettes. One of the guests at the party turns out to be this guy who I
met a few years ago at the Orange Country Fair and he might be higher than any
person I’ve ever seen in my extended experience around stoners. Though I feel
like a thirteenth wheel among all these couples, the company is lovely.
Everybody has kids and money. The contrast between these people and my LA
friends of the same age is astonishing. These people feel like adults, whereas
everyone I know in LA, myself included, still feels like a high schooler or
maybe a college student. Case in point, I have to drink some water and a coffee
to sober up for the drive back up there. I miss my exit and end up getting gas
in a pretty rough neighborhood before finding my way to Jordan’s.
In addition to waiting to hear if his pilot is going to get
picked up, Jordan is writing a feature script for which he’s getting paid, so
things in his life have never been better, which is probably why he’s so
goddamn anxious. His live-in girlfriend
is in Texas, having another of the dozen surgeries she needs to recover from
falling on a concrete floor and shattering her jaw, so it’s just me and him.
His place, like Gary and Melinda’s or Lexi and Archie’s, is full of love and I
realize I need to meet a woman in Chicago with whom I can build a life. Jordan
and I shoot the shit and I help him with the script. I say this without any
sense of arrogance or exaggeration, as a pure statement of objective reality: I
give the best notes. We drink beers and do drugs and he stays in to get some
work done and I walk to a sushi place to meet a bunch of other people before Katie’s
boyfriend’s birthday party. But it’s a farther walk than I expect, warm out and
I show up sweaty from the drugs. Ryan and John are at the restaurant, along
with Tom and his wife Elena and Tom’s sister Emily. It’s good to see everyone
and I don’t even think about how this is the sushi place Tank Girl and I used
to order from on paydays when we worked at the liquor store next door. We head
over to the Formosa, a few doors down. Being there again leaves me feeling like
I’m unstuck in time. In Grad school, the vintage West Hollywood bar was the
epicenter of USC MFA Screenwriting social events, a place where I’d been black
out drunk and coked to the bejesus more times than I can count. I see old
friends and catch up. It’s so great to see everyone, even the people from grad
school I wasn’t actively friends with are welcome sites and I wish I were in a
better mood but I’m feeling edgy and uncomfortable seeing Katie with her
boyfriend. I talk to anyone who will listen, old friends, working writers,
strangers. I talk to a KROQ DJ who has heard of Gary’s new band and really
admires the guitar playing, Gary’s guitar playing. I’m trying to be jovial and
calm, but my mask of sociability is threatening to slip because I’m feeling the
old Hollywood insecurity, feeling all the ways these people have what I think I
want. I’m not in a band this DJ loves, I don’t write for Shondaland shows like
half the people here, I feel every inch of the 2,000 miles I live away from
Hollywood, I feel every second of the two years since I moved away. It’s a
welcome site when Jordan shows up with cigarettes. After last call, as he
drives us back to his place, I overcompensate for my insecurities the way I
always do: by talking mad shit about people. I vent my frustrations and I
really value the fact Jordan is the kind of person I can say literally anything
in front of, no matter how rude or offensive. But all the ways I can trash
these people don’t make me feel any better about myself. ‘It’s over now. Do I
know how to pick up the pieces and go home?’
I wake up in Jordan’s guest room/
office and I gotta piss like a race horse but when I go to open the door, it’s
one of those old types of knobs and I pull the whole thing off, trapping myself
in the room. I knock loud on the door but it’s 6am and Jordan is out cold.
Frantic, I look around, considering hopping out the second-story window until I
see the big plastic cup I filled with water the night before. I have to guzzle
the water to make room for me to pee in the cup. Relieved, I try to find a tool
in the room which will allow me to open the door and pour the warm cup of urine
into the toilet. I fiddle so loud trying to fix it that Jordan wakes up and
lets me out. He doesn’t notice the cup. I go to the bathroom, Jordan goes back
to bed and I wash every dirty dish in the house, partially as a thank you for
letting me crash there and partially because I pissed in one of his cups.
I’m having a smoke out back when my dad calls and I worry
somebody died because my dad never calls. Turns out everyone is fine, except my
dad. My sister had taken time off work to help my mom through the agonizing
chemo and radiation process and my dad had made the hollow offer people make
when someone has cancer, saying, “Let me know if you need anything,” while offering
nothing specific as help. Following this offer, my mom asked him to pay for my
sister to go to some expensive-ass spa for a few days because the thing she
needed most was to relax. I don’t know the kind of help my dad expected to
give, but paying for this relaxation was not it. He was offended. Even though I
wasn’t part of the situation, he was calling me to bitch about it. “There’s no
playbook for what to do when your ex-wife has cancer, D!” he says even though
there are literally thousands of books about dealing with what happens when
someone gets cancer. As a born and raised Southern Californian, my dad has the
same kind of optimism as Tom, though he lacks Tom’s compassion. My dad prefers
a sunny day and a cloudless blue sky and somebody having cancer is a dark rain
cloud, an obstacle to his denial-induced optimism. Though he can overcome any
physical obstacle, my dad isn’t great at dealing with emotional obstacles.
Essentially, the purpose of his call is to yell at me for the fact my mom has
cancer and he isn’t equipped to deal with it emotionally, but he doesn’t even
know himself well enough to say this or think this. I talk him down and it
feels like a million other times we’ve spoken but not had a conversation. I
hang up and smoke another cigarette and miss the adults in Orange County and
even the baby who crapped in the tub.
At Noon I wake Jordan up and we go to a liquor store and I
get some beer and he gets whiskey and coke. We have some drinks and watch Vice
on HBO and later I go meet Tank Girl for lunch at the new liquor store she’s
managing. The store has a bar upstairs and we get to hang out, smoking cigars
and eating gyros. It’s the most fun we’ve had hanging out since before we slept
together and it’s so great to be just her friend. We hug each other and say I
love yous and if I never see her again I want that day to be how I remember her
forever.
It takes me over twenty minutes to
find parking back at Jordan’s so I tell Katie she has to drive us to dinner.
She picks me up and riding in her car feels comfortable, just like it did when
we first lived together back when we both first moved to LA. It’s a different
car but it still smells like Katie’s car. Dinner is at a Mexican place. I have
a beer and get carded, the gay waiter vaguely flirts with me and tells me I’m
young. Katie orders a Diet Coke the waiter forgets and I remind him to bring it
for her. We get bean dip and enormous burritos because we’re hungover and she
talks about her love of television and vents her frustrations about the
boyfriend, about student loan debt, about her lack of a writing career. Her
love of TV is my love of TV, her frustrations are my frustrations. I can see
myself in the mirror behind her while we eat. I know I love her, but I don’t
know what kind of love and I’m not going to say a goddamn thing about it because
it doesn’t matter. I’ve ruined too many friendships trying to barrel through
boundaries and I don’t know what I really want. More to the point, my life is
2,000 miles away from this woman and this city now and I leave tomorrow. I hug
Katie goodbye and touch her hair and if I were a poet, I might write a poem
about the moment, but I’m not a poet, I’m a storyteller and my LA Story is
over. A year later, Katie and her boyfriend come to Chicago and we go to dinner
with my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and writing this today in my office/
nursery I know I made the right decision even though that’s not how it would
happen in a movie. But my life isn’t a movie, it’s a real life, and it
shouldn’t have taken me 33 years to figure that out.
In the morning, I wake up and
deflate the air mattress. I fold my blankets up so they are as small as
possible because I think this is what it means to be a good houseguest.
Jordan’s out cold and we said our goodbyes last night. I can’t close the door
to his house without locking it, so I leave the keys under his mat and head
down Santa Monica to Gary’s in Silverlake. It’s hard to see in the morning LA
sun as I drive east, into the blinding light. At Western I realize I left my
iPhone at Jordan’s, so I double back and use the keys I left under the mat to
let myself in. After looking everywhere, I find the phone lodged between the
cushions of his couch and I take a moment to notice how lucky I am. This is the
exact kind of situation that would have been a disaster for me back when I
lived in LA. Back then, I would have been locked out and I never would have
found the phone, but the world is kinder to me now that I don’t live in LA. Or
maybe I’m just paying more attention to things besides the chattering of my own
brain. Maybe I’m not hearing things in mono anymore.
Gary and I walk the Reservoir with
Melinda and their dog, who barks at me but soon grows to love me. Gary goes to
work and Melinda and I watch a movie that I like but can’t remember the name
of. She tells me I did the right thing not telling Katie how I feel if I don’t
know how I feel. “Plus, I don’t live here anymore,” I remind her, trusting
myself for the first time in a while.
I use GPS to find the rental car
return lot and the first place my iPhone takes me is a Marriot by the Airport
where I can’t return the car and realize I’m running out of gas. I call the
place to get the address and finally find it literally running on fumes. I roll
into the lot in neutral and coast into the drop-off lane. I throw the car in
park, grab my bags and get on the shuttle. At the airport, there’s some
malfunction with the PA system and it won’t stop beeping and broadcasting
intermittent feedback. The airline gives us all drink vouchers to make up for
it. I put on new headphones and listen to Rumours. My flight leaves on time and,
nearly four years after this trip, I’m still basking in the catharsis I found
in these 11 days.
