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 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.

Amuse-douche

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Need to get those eyes checked.”

“Time for new specs.”

“When was your last eye appointment?”

“Damn, you blind?” 

"Someone needs a new eye doctor."

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading: The Battle of Los Angeles: Part One

Vision Teachers and Vocations

I went to elementary school in the Fairfax County Public Schools system, which I recognize now was integral to my success.  FCPS is among the best public school systems in the country, probably because it’s just outside the Nation’s Capital and is a county flooded with tax dollars from wealthy residents.  In addition to the wonderful teachers I mentioned in The Eggshell Egghead, I also had one-on-one instruction from low-vision specialists who met with me once a week.  These specialists provided a wide array of training, both scholastic and vocational, which helped equip me with the skills necessary to take care of myself.  

Syd Wharton was a kindly middle-aged man whose body weight fluctuated by more than 90 pounds in either direction during his tenure as my vision teacher.  Remember how Oprah Winfrey couldn’t pick a body type in the 80s and 90s and seemed to balloon up and shrink down almost overnight?  Syd was the same way, sometimes svelte, sometimes enormous.  Given his struggles with body weight, it probably won’t surprise you to learn Syd was big into computers.  Syd understood the importance of technology, so he made sure I knew how to touch type by the time I was eight.  He taught me how to use software, including early versions of MS Word and dictation programs.  He also taught me how to use an abacus, an ancient type of calculator which uses beads for counting and has not come back into use since technology is not cyclical. The instruction I received on technologies which were still emerging proved incredibly helpful.  Because of Syd Wharton, I was comfortable working on computers before computers took over the world.  

In addition to the weekly visits with Syd, a couple of times a year I received mobility and vocational training.  In these instances, a different teacher would show me how to get around the world, usually a woman with a last name I can’t even begin to guess how to spell – it sounded like an eastern European sneeze.  Her first name was Caroline and she was very kind.  She taught me how to look both ways when crossing the street, find a crosswalk and read crossing signals.  When I was older, she took me to the mall and taught me how to find my way around by using the mall directory and reading signs, skills which translate to airports, hospitals and casinos, or any other large building which is difficult to navigate.  At the time I thought it was weird, but the most-used piece of information I remember learning on these vocational lessons was how to find a public restroom.  I don’t know if my vision teacher had a personal problem or she was just way ahead of the game on the idea that everybody poops, but an integral part of my lessons was learning how to find a bathroom in public. For the uninitiated, restrooms are usually near water fountains or restaurants, for example, and if you can find the women’s room, the men’s room is probably close.  My vocational education wasn’t all outdated arithmetic technologies and public bathrooms though; as I got older, these vision teachers also helped me find a job.  

My Dad had been telling me to get a job since the first grade, so when I was 14 and the opportunity presented itself to work, I took it, even though I was only paid $3.70 an hour.  The opportunity came via my vision teachers and it allowed me to work at the Dunn Loring Center, a school for the blind.  I was there during the summer, so I had little interaction with blind students.  Instead, I did administrative support work for the County’s staff of vision teachers.  I did mailroom duties, answered the phones, got lunch, photocopied and assembled large print textbooks and novels. I got to test an early version of Dragon Dictate dictation software and rate the effectiveness of various magnifying glasses and telescopes, the types of low-vision aides the state had been providing for me since I was young.  The ten hours a week I worked felt like an eternity, mostly because there were only about six hours of actual work to do each week. I had to kill four hours a week on my own in an office before the internet existed.  I walked laps around the school, let my imagination wander and sat in the bathroom just staring at the door of the stall to kill the time.    

When I was 16 I was eligible for job placement through my low-vision vocational teacher.  Caroline set me up with the opportunity to be some executive’s assistant but when I went to the interview his handwriting was so small and illegible we both agreed I’d be a terrible fit for the job, which consisted largely of transcribing his chicken scratch.  Instead, I ended up landing a cushy summer gig processing catalogue orders for the Government Services Administration. I took phone orders for government agencies which needed new office supplies, copy toner and toilet paper and made $17 an hour, which to a 17-year-old in 1997 was all the money in the world. In fact, I wouldn’t make $17 an hour again for another 14 years.   

These early work experiences provided by my vision teachers equipped me with on-the-job training and other tools necessary to have the self-confidence it required to enter the job market and find work on my own. During the school year, I got a job as a part-time janitor at my church on Tuesdays and Sunday afternoons.  Very early in my cleaning career, my vision was an obstacle because one of the Sunday School teachers didn’t think I’d done a good enough job. What I saw as clean, the Sunday School Teacher saw as dirty, which was probably true of more than just her classroom.  In any event, this experience taught me how to inspect things closer and that my standards weren’t always good enough.  Overall, my lack of eyesight was a gift as a janitor though. See, many of my custodial duties involved dealing with grossness, like trash and all the exciting things we flush down a toilet. When dealing with these elements of the job, the fact I couldn’t see the disgustingness of what I had to mop up or scrub down was a definite plus.  I also worked at a video store, where my vision was a bit of a setback when it came time to shelve tapes because I couldn’t always read the titles from afar; but, I almost never had to touch feces, except when customers rented FORREST GUMP.    

In high school, I also babysat a boy with Down syndrome and I felt comfortable around kids, so during college I babysat my younger brothers and sisters, who ranged in age from newborn Luke to preteen Matt with Brianna in between.  I was a steal at $12 an hour and working with my brothers and sisters was good in the sense that it connected me to my family and it was incredibly effective birth control. I also tried to work at a big DoD contractor called SAIC for a summer as an intern, but even the $16 an hour wasn’t enough to keep me there. On the third day of my employment, we did an off-site team building exercise during which every single member of my department burst out crying.  After two weeks working in a cubicle, I understood why. My team was insufferable. Everyone worked at a snail’s pace until it was discovered I had a zeal for getting the job done and then they started giving me all their work. I could do a week’s worth of this one guy Alan’s tasks in about two hours and when I tried to explain how to use the computer program SAP to be more productive, he scolded me for working too hard. I loved quitting that job.  While these jobs were fine during college, my limited work experience was terrible when it came time to find a job after I graduated.  I had no relevant experience in any field and my only long-term employer had been my Dad.  

When I moved to New York after college to sell a novel I thought was a comedy but was too dark to be funny, I picked up all kinds of jobs. I worked as a bar back, which was a challenge because a big part of the job was going around and grabbing people’s empty mugs and glasses. Well, in a dark and crowded East Village dive bar, I couldn’t tell when a glass was empty or full so I ended up trying to clear away unfinished cocktails more than a few times. I also got my Real Estate License and worked as a real estate agent, showing units and leasing properties as Real Estate Nate.  This experience was akin to running my own business and gave me my first sense of being truly self-employed.  I met a ton of interesting people and saw some gorgeous apartments and some total dumps. I made decent money and had keys to a lot of vacant units around downtown, which gave me access to a ton of clean, private bathrooms in Manhattan. 

After New York, my Dad gave me a job at his company, which was generous of him and gave my life some much needed structure.  During my tenure at his company, I was proactive in asking for new duties and learned a bunch of marketable skills like bookkeeping and inventory management.  Nonetheless, after 18 months of landscape maintenance I was bored intellectually and creatively.  More importantly, I felt trapped.  Other employers did not think my work experience in college was valid partially because I worked for my Dad and I feared my work experience in my 20s would be seen the same way.  If I didn’t make a change, and fast, working for my father was going to be the only career option available to me and I didn’t want to be in my late 20s and still living off paychecks signed by my Daddy. I was raised to take ownership and accountability for myself and my own happiness.  Having worked on my own and worked for my father, I vastly preferred the former.  Jobs are hard enough without adding a layer of family bullshit to everything.  So, I split town and went to graduate school.

During grad school, I was an intern at several production companies and NBC, all of which were great jobs and none of which were impacted by my poor eyesight or albinism. Although, my own personal myopia kept me from accepting a job offer to be an assistant at NBC because I didn’t think I’d enjoy being a suit.  In hindsight, though, I should’ve taken this job as I’d make an extraordinary television executive.  But, at the time, I thought myself an artist.  My subsequent work as a screenwriter and freelance writer, while not as steady or lucrative as the NBC gig would have been, was also not at all impacted by my condition, except as I expressed in Wrong Man for the Job.  When I took work at a liquor store to make ends meet, my poor eyesight was a minor setback because I couldn’t always see labels, prices or IDs and my albinism was sometimes noticed or mocked by customers.  But I had allies.  One time, some jackass asked my work best friend Mac, “Hey, what’s up with that Albino weirdo?” so she ‘accidentally’ dropped a bottle of wine, shattering it and spraying Cabernet all over this asshole’s shoes and pants. 

When I came to teach college, I didn’t expect my albinism to be a setback and, in most ways, it has not been. I rarely take time to think of my teaching as paying forward the work of my teachers, vision or otherwise; however, when I do think of my work in these terms, I find my eyes get misty and my heart gets warm. Although, since I’ve been teaching my weight fluctuates 20 pounds in either direction during the school year.  As an adjunct professor, even though I’m often the smartest person in the room, I’m also the lowest rung on the higher education ladder.  As such, I’m in a position where I am overworked, marginalized and under-appreciated.  For no reason other than my adjunct faculty status, I’ve been taken off committees I’d served on since their inception, I’ve been asked to leave faculty meetings and a panel at a conference I helped create has been taken from me and given to a full-time faculty member.  I sometimes wonder if I intentionally put myself in a position where I’d be overlooked and undervalued or if that’s just how the life works and we find places for ourselves which resemble situations we recognize.  The indignities I’ve endured as an adjunct professor have nothing to do with my albinism and everything to do with the flawed nature of the higher education system in this country. The reality of life as an Adjunct Professor is one of little institutional support, development or encouragement.  Disappointed with the treatment of adjunct faculty at the university where I teach the bulk of my classes, I have taken ownership of my situation and I’m now Chair of a first-of-its-kind Committee charged with improving working conditions for Adjunct Faculty. While the work of this committee is helping me feel empowered, the reality of life as an adjunct is most like life as a real estate agent: I need to think of myself as a business to be successful.  To that end, I’ve begun working for myself, acting as a freelance educator, teaching multiple courses at multiple institutions. Thankfully, the vocational and technological skills my vision teachers equipped me with, coupled with my own work experience and ambition, have prepared me to succeed in a changing job market. These teachers couldn't improve my eyesight, but they certainly helped focus my vision, allowing me to function in the world with a greater sense of clarity.  

The Perils of Eye Sex When You're Legally Blind

I took health and human sexuality in elementary, junior and high school and they taught us a lot about the normalcy of boners, how lady parts work and how to avoid making a baby, but they didn’t teach us anything about eye sex.  They didn’t even mention it!  A Tribe Called Quest said, “Bust a nut inside your eye to show you where I come from,” but I’m pretty sure that’s not about eye sex in the traditional sense.  Truthfully, I didn’t know what eye sex was until I was 16 and my friend Michael’s normally-sighted older sister explained to me that sometimes two strangers who have sexual chemistry will lock eyes and look at one another lustfully.  My friend’s older sister made eye sex sound like both a lot of fun and a necessary and frequent aspect of dating. This instant ocular intimacy, she said, could happen anywhere. It happened at the gym, in her classes at college, at Starbucks and obviously at parties and bars, where eye sex was often a great segue to the kinds of sex we learned about in health class and had seen simulated on Cinemax. She said it was a great way to meet strangers and feel good about yourself.  It opened doors, could lead to a relationship and, in her experience, eye sex had definitely led to some of the best hook ups of her life. In my experience though, eye sex has been a disaster, mostly because I'm legally blind.   

While there is much debate about who originally said “eyes are the window to the soul” the universal truth of this statement is not debated.  As human beings, biologically there are many emotional and physical cues our vision helps us process and many of these cues come from reading the eyes of other people. A person’s eyes provide information about what they are thinking, what they are feeling and what they might do next. In the NFL, a free safety knows where the quarterback is going to throw the ball because he can read his eyes from 30 yards away.  In discussions in my classroom, a normally-sighted student knows when to lighten up on her criticism of another student’s writing because, from 20 feet away, she can see in his eyes that the critiques are making him anxious.  At a poker table, a gambler knows his opponent is bluffing because he can see the dishonesty in her eyes from five or six feet away.  I’m aware and in awe of these abilities because they are completely foreign to me.  For me to be able to see someone’s eyes well enough to read them, that person needs to be less than three feet from me, any further than that and their eyes are imperceptible oval blurs from which I glean nothing.  However, since I was not raised to be bound by my disability, I haven’t let the fact I can’t see anything keep me from trying to have eye sex, just like most guys don’t let the fact we have no idea what we’re doing in bed keep us from trying to have sex.  

One time at a dark and crowded rock and roll show in Boston I could feel someone’s eyes on me.  Feeling people staring at me was nothing new, but this girl’s gaze felt curious in a positive way, as opposed to the usual slack-jawed gawking of drunken assholes. There was something hungry and carnal in the manner I thought she was eyeing me, though she was on the opposite side of the room. From my vantage point, this chick looked like a punk rock Katie Holmes, so I smiled in her direction and, keeping my eyes on her, approached.  She smiled back and I felt warm and understood the appeal of eye sex for a nanosecond before my leg slammed into something metal and I tripped and fell flat on my face. My eyes were so focused on Punk Rock Katie Holmes I stumbled over a person in a wheelchair who I had not seen.

In my early 30s, walking down a Chicago street around Christmas time, I could’ve sworn a sexy, sophisticated older woman was making eyes at me from down the block. With a smug smile on my face, I approached her, beaming.  Then she seemed to stop moving and I thought for sure she was waiting for me.  I straightened my scarf and adjusted my hat, staring at the red velvet cocktail dress it looked like she was wearing and letting my imagination fill in the details of her body, which I could not fully see yet. In my mind, this woman was shapely and gorgeous and this was the start of a beautiful relationship. As I approached, my love interest revealed herself to be a large red Christmas bow tied to a wrought iron gate.      

Since I’m legally blind and cannot see everything, my imagination fills in the details of what I can’t see with what it wants to see. Most people engage in some version of this same practice, often seeing things in other people which are not really there, particularly early in relationships.  For me, though, I sometimes see things which aren't there in extreme and literal ways. From afar, my first instinct is almost always to assume people are good looking.  I think because most of the people I truly see in full detail and clarity are on enormous movie screens or my 4K UltraHD TV, I tend to I imagine the world is a much more beautiful place than it actually is, which probably seems ironic given my curmudgeonly disposition.  Almost every person in Los Angeles seemed stunning to me, for example; though, even my normally sighted friends had trouble telling cute hipster chicks from homeless people when they were more than 50 feet away.  From across the street, most people in Chicago are model gorgeous simply because they are well-dressed. As I get closer to these imagined beautiful people the image gradually clarifies and sharpens, eventually rendering the truth. But there have been plenty of times when I fell madly in love with a woman across the street only to eventually realize she was not interested, not attractive and sometimes she wasn’t even a human woman.  In college, my friend Michael observed my tendency to think women were prettier than they are.  As a good friend, he took it upon himself to function as my eyes, steering me away from women he thought were ugly.  The only problem with this strategy was Michael’s standards of beauty were so insanely high that a girl had to look like she just stepped out of the pages of Vogue for him to think she was attractive. Thanks to Michael though, I ended up making out and striking out with a lot of girls who were way out of my league.

In grad school, I met my friend Jordan.  He’s the kind of guy who walks into a bar and has had eye sex with seven different women before ordering his first beer.  He’s one of the best pick-up artists I've ever seen and he's probably had sex with more women than I’ve talked to. Given his broad range of experience with broads, Jordan offered a really interesting perspective on sex and vision.  “One insanely magical thing about human beings,” he said, “is that everyone is beautiful when you’re two inches from their face.” Thanks in part to Jordan, I stopped caring so much what people look like and learned to value inner beauty because he’s right, everyone is beautiful when you let yourself see them up close. 

When I turned to internet dating, sites like OKCupid and Tinder helped eliminate the perils of eye sex, but even on a date, my inability to read a person’s eyes was a setback.  I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was establishing chemistry so I went in for a kiss only to realize I'd misread the signals and get rejected.  I'm so happy to be done with dating.  Though, I should point out that just as blind people sometimes develop extraordinary hearing abilities to compensate for their lack of eyesight, according to my wife, who is beautiful inside and out, I developed extraordinary abilities of touch to compensate for my bad eyes.  Turns out poor eyesight doesn’t matter much once the lights are off.

Further Reading: Amuse-Douche

My Hollywood Romance

To me, everyone in Los Angeles seemed really tan, wealthy and obsessed with the entertainment industry. It made me completely insecure. My fair skin didn't glisten in the sun like the throngs of olive-skinned gorgeous people walking down Melrose. My Jetta was beat to shit, not glimmering like the Porsches on Santa Monica. I was living a relatively meager grad school existence compared to the fabulous life I thought I should be living. I was 27 and I thought I needed to meet someone who was a little more Hollywood. I was certain this relationship would cement my identity as the rising writing superstar I knew myself to be. My whole life, I thought if I met the right girl, everything would be easy. Jane was not that girl. (nor is that her real name).

It was like a movie. We'd had a few grad school courses together and she'd even used my apartment to film a short for one of her classes. On the shoot, during a break, we were both in my roommate Katie's bedroom, sitting on the bed, chatting and I was pretty sure I felt a spark. However, I had a girlfriend at the time. But, when my girlfriend and I finally broke up, texting Jane was one of my first forays back into the world of dating. She seemed perfect. She was from the Midwest, had gone to Duke, she was in the prestigious Producing Program at USC and she lived a block away from me. Jane looked like if Claire Danes and Kirsten Dunst had a daughter with none of her mothers' sexual charisma. She wasn't just smart and pretty, she was rich too. Her grandfather had invented the sealed air compressor, which you will find on every refrigerator ever made, so Jane had a trust fund, drove a Beamer and lived in the same complex where they filmed MTV's THE HILLS. She was perfect for me, and not just because all I had to do was walk across the street to get laid.

In Act Two, we went to The Sundance Film Festival together, watched indie movies and snuggled. We stopped by Vegas on the drive home and stayed at the Venetian. For her birthday, we went to the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills where we saw Sylvester Stallone; though, to be fair, all I saw was a wrinkled leather cushion. She interned at Paramount Vantage and I got to meet her on the Paramount Lot a few times, which was a dream come true, except for the night her boss was introduced to me and, because of my white hair, assumed I was Jane's dad. While this moment was humiliating, Jane's connection to Paramount Vantage meant we got to go to their Oscars Party on Rodeo, get hammered on amazing Cabernet and watch BABEL take home the statue. We assumed we'd be a Hollywood Power Couple. She'd produce things I wrote. We would take over the city. It was us against the world. I thought I might be in love. My writing was improving considerably and I even quit smoking cigarettes when I was around her. But the third act twist was coming and, like everything else in Hollywood, beneath the glossy surface, this relationship proved to be empty, meaningless and pretty dark.

One night, we were talking about maybe getting married, imagining the wedding. We were talking about maybe having kids some day. During this romantic daydreaming, holding each other on her couch, Jane, who I would remind you is a fair-skinned ginger herself, had the audacity to say to me, “Of course, we'd have to talk to a doctor and see if there's something he could do to make sure our kids don't have albinism.” The anger I have from this is still visceral and white-hot. I want to say I spat in her fucking face and stormed out of there. I love women, would see that behavior as abusive and am still so angry I want spitting to be how this all ended. Even now, writing this essay, almost ten years removed from this event, I'm so angry about it I want to have screamed. I want to trash her in this essay. I want to talk about how she got a D in calculus like a moron and barely made it out of Duke, I want to talk about what spoiled, condescending whining wimps her dad and brothers were, I want to talk about how terrible she was in bed, or her hoarding habits and obnoxious fucking cats. I'm still so angry about this now because, in the moment, I said and did absolutely nothing. I just took it. If I remember correctly, we had some awkward rough sex and I dumped her two days later.

There was no talk of a sequel. We spoke once after that. In spite of her proximity, there were no backslides, no booty calls, no drunken “You Up?” texts. She met me on the corner to drop off some stuff I'd left at her place, I eventually mailed back her Netflix DVD's and that was the last I ever saw her. There was no contact whatsoever, not until a couple years later. Katie, the roommate whose bed Jane and I had sat on when there was first a spark between us, had moved in with her boyfriend Sean, who was also in my Writer's Group. One Sunday at Writer's Group, Sean let me know he had seen Jane. Apparently she and her fiance had moved into Katie and Sean's building. Jane's new fiance's name was also Nathan (that's his real name!) and I had a chuckle. But I doubled over laughing when Sean told me Jane had gained like 50 pounds.

I wanted a Hollywood Romance and I got just that: a superficial relationship full of gorgeous settings and predictable twists that was over relatively quickly. Turns out I met someone as empty as my aspirations and values at the time. While this experience was painful, the lessons from it have stayed with me. Jane wasn't the first girl with a trust fund I dated, but she was the last. A string of lower-class girls followed, then I dated a series of women without college degrees until finally meeting my wife, who is educated, level-headed, pragmatic and by the way adores my albinism and doesn't care one way or the other if the daughter we're having in April pops out albino. While I'll probably always be angry at her, I don't bear Jane any ill will. Honestly I'm happy for her because I know there's always something the doctors can do about how fat she got.

Further Reading:  Red, White and Blue