The Battle of Los Angeles Part 8: The Next Episode

            When I lived in LA, my entire identity and sense of value in myself were tied up in selling a script and I wasn’t alone. People there think they are on the verge of being discovered at any time. They’re like flakes of gold, hoping the sun will catch them and shine a light so bright upon them they become a star, even though most of them aren’t even popular in their hometowns. Someone once said to me, “Google me in six months,” and she meant it. I did. All I found was her Facebook page and a YouTube Channel with no hits. Still, the Hollywood insecurity was contagious and trying to ignore it or overcompensate for it made me the worst kind of person. I needed small, petty victories to make myself feel superior, like taking solace in my USC MFA, winning at bar trivia, or correcting other peoples’ grammar. These little superiorities gave me quick-hit ego boosts, but did virtually nothing to bolster my waning self-confidence or truly make me feel at ease. Honestly, this constant need to be better than everybody else, in some small, often insignificant way, kept me alienated and closed off from other people. 

            I thought the entertainment industry needed me and my genius, but teaching screenwriting has demonstrated again and again and again that I am not unique and I am decidedly not a genius. There are a thousand other people just like me; I know because I’ve taught like 800 of them. Talented writers are a dime a dozen. I’ve taught mes, I’ve taught Maloneys, I’ve taught Katies, I’ve taught Jordans, I’ve taught Ryans, I’ve taught Toms, I’ve taught Seans. I thought I got the opportunity to write for a living and maybe write some big league scripts because I was special or gifted, but the truth is I got those opportunities because I was lucky. I was so fortunate to go to USC, it was a blessing to get to spend my 20s going after what I truly wanted with all my heart, soul and energy. I learned there’s such a thing as trying too hard. Maybe things didn’t turn out as I scripted, but I got to play the game. Seeing the sheer volume of people trying to do what I was trying to do has made me realize how grateful I am to have had the opportunities I had, let alone the successes. 99% of people who try screenwriting will not achieve the things I achieved and that shouldn’t make me feel superior, it should make me feel so, so thankful.

            I hadn’t had a script professionally read in two or three years. But I learned to make things, and actually produced a web series and a sitcom pilot, none of which turned out as well as I hoped. But I’ve kept learning, I’ve kept thinking and I’ve kept writing. Sometimes it’s been scripts, sometimes it’s been short stories, sometimes it was a novelization of THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.  Turns out I function way better when I’m working on something creative, whether it’s for a manager, for money, or just for myself. Like Gary and John need to keep playing music, I need to keep writing, no matter how small the audience. It’s not to get noticed, it’s not to make money, it’s to keep myself sane. Writing is the purpose of my writing. I write because I don't know how else to make sense of the world and I think it affords my best chance of being accepting of a place and accepted in a place I don't completely believe in or understand. 

 That said, with my wife pregnant and seeing some friends have Big League success, I still yearned for success in Hollywood. To that end, I did an autopsy on my screenwriting career. I read old scripts with new eyes and asked new people to read old scripts. It was a much more embarrassing experience than I expected, sorting through my past shortcomings. I thought the industry was wrong to ignore my screenplays, but turns out the flaws in my scripts are glaringly obvious and there are perfectly good reasons why those scripts didn’t do for me what I hoped they would do. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but the gist of my weaknesses as a screenwriter are probably the gist of my weaknesses as a man: I don’t write empathetic characters and I focus too much on words and too little on emotional intentions. I would also add that Screenwriting is storytelling in scenes, not prose. The form impedes some of my talents, I think, because I can’t use linguistic magic to say what I mean as I have in this blog, I have to use moments and characters and intentions. Producing things helped me realize this shortcoming and understand the differences between prose writing and telling a story in moments. With a new understanding of my weaknesses as a screenwriter, I considered new ideas and projects to undertake. But I didn’t have anything I wanted to write. 

            Then completely out of the blue, on the way to teach class, I got a Facebook message from my old agent. He is at a new job at a big management/ production company, a company way bigger than Fuse ever was, and he wanted to know if I still had THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY because he thought it would be a good vehicle to package at his company, which has a ton of A-list comic talent as clients. We are reworking the script and going to try to package it there, sell it and get it made. In the wake of working on this project, a new string of screenplay ideas emerged, which is great, since in Hollywood you’re only as valuable as your next idea. But I don’t have any illusions about this project selling or those other scripts somehow changing my life. Obviously, I hope it sells. I hope it sells for a shitload, becomes a franchise and I get to move back to LA. But I don’t need it to do any of those things. I don’t need to be in LA to be happy. I don’t even need to sell a script. I have a life, a wife and a daughter I love already in Chicago. Selling a screenplay would just be icing on the cake. Honestly, I’m just happy I get to play the game.  
Further Reading: BFD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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.

Fun with Balls and Sticks

From the ages of 6-10 I was a dominant soccer player. I played fullback and sweeper and got to take all our goal kicks. My nickname was Big Foot. The teams on which I played were consistently competitive for the league championship, winning one, and I was widely (and rightfully) regarded as the best defensive player on the team, if not in the entire league. When I broke my foot helping a drunk asshole build a deck in fourth grade I stopped playing soccer and started playing basketball. In one game, I scored 16 of my team's 32 points like an 11 year-old albino Charles Barkley. That season our team came in second place in the league and I was voted an All-Star by the coaches of the other teams. I also used to play my neighbor at tennis. He went on to play in college, but I remember owning him when we were eight. Then everybody hit puberty and I was suddenly the blind kid.

It seemed like it happened overnight. Elementary school ended, and with it recess sessions dominating tag football, soccer or three-on-three basketball. I still played in club leagues, but suddenly the kids in these leagues were as strong as me or stronger, and balls were flying at my face way faster than before. I got through the horrors of eighth grade imagining myself becoming a lineman on the football team in high school, but when I went to my doctor to get the mandatory physical, she wouldn't sign the form. She thought my vision was too much of a liability and I'd get myself killed. I remember storming out of her office and sitting in my mother's car, sobbing. It was the first time I can remember feeling what it's like to know I would not get something I really, really wanted. At that point I realized the car was running.  My mom had inadvertently left the keys in the ignition with the car turned on the entire time we were at the doctor. If I wasn't gonna get brain damage from football, I'd inherit it. While I remember being disappointed at the time, in hindsight, which is 20/20 even though I'm legally blind, the doctor was totally right: football would have been way too dangerous. Plus I don't think my high school football team won a single game in the four years I attended, so it was probably better I was left out.

The primary dynamic of most competitive sports involves balls coming at you, so I thought maybe I could play a sport without a ball, like wrestling. But even that involved balls coming at me, so I considered a sport where at least the ball stood still. My grandfather took me golfing when I was six. We were near the green and I had a wedge. He asked me to put the ball as close to the hole as I could. I chipped within an inch and Pop told me to grab my putter and put it in the hole. I looked at him, furious, and said, “If you wanted the ball in the hole, why didn't you just ask me to do that the first time?” When I was eight we went to the Greenbriar resort for a family vacation and I stepped out onto the driving range and bombed a 3 wood dead straight, 180 yards consistently. Or, at least that's what people told me. While the ball isn't coming at you in golf, it really helps if you can see where it goes. Unless I'm in close pitching, as soon as the ball leaves the face of the club, I lose sight of it completely. Still, golf was a sport much safer than soccer, basketball or football. Or so I thought.

I was 15 and at an age when my dad and I were struggling to connect. He had recently started a landscape maintenance company and was on his way to becoming an extremely successful businessman. I was really into punk rock and the fact I smoked cigarettes and nobody in my family knew. We went out to play a round of 18, the first full round in my life. I don't know who was supposed to remember to remind me to put on sunscreen, but it didn't happen. For five hours we played in the scorching Virginia August heat. If I remember right, I shot pretty well. But that didn't matter. When I got home and looked in the mirror, I realized something was very, very wrong because my face was redder than the surface of Mars. When I woke up, I had second degree sunburns on my arms, neck and ears. With these blisters oozing and aching, I went to a dermatologist who prescribed this stuff called Silvadane. I smeared the white paste onto the burns and it turned purple-black as it soothed the damaged skin. It smelled terrible, rotten but also metallic. It seemed to help, though. My mom said she wanted to bring my dad up on child abuse charges; instead, she just reminded me of this sunburn every single time I saw my dad for the next two years.

After that, my interest in playing sports became largely passive. (Admittedly, the secret smoking may have played a role in this). I'd play basketball with my friends, I played IM soccer in college and I played par 3 golf when I lived in LA, but I'm much less engaged in athletics today. Instead, I got really into playing music. Sophomore year of high school I started playing the drums, which ended up being perfect, since drums are the most athletic instrument around. The movements were most like basketball, the way I had to use all four limbs and stay in sync with the other players; but it also took hand strength like a big league pitcher, toughness like a hockey player and the ferocity of an outside linebacker to practice and become a solid drummer. Senior year of high school, I played in the school Jazz ensemble and received a varsity letter for achievement in band. We even won second place in a band competition. Granted, we won second place in a contest involving three total bands, but that's still more than the football team ever won. Playing the drums, I got to be sweaty and coordinated and strong and I almost never had to worry about sunburn or balls flying at my face. (Almost never).