I met you in San Diego to the sound of Arcade Fire and Shakespeare under the eucalyptus trees.
Part of me still believes our first days together will be the best I will ever have: Writing by day and performing at night; a 30 waist with an iPod shuffle clipped to the belt loop; my ten-speed Peugeot splitting lanes up University Avenue as dusk gathered its pink tinder in the west an hour before curtain.
I think of those early years now as I write this in the small one-room East Hollywood apartment that I promised would be merely our temporary lodging but somehow became the ten-year home we shared and from whose threshold I now bid you farewell to welcome another decade. I would not have designed it this way, but here we are. Life does not shy away from surprises. Nor did you.
I count my inventory on the carpet stains…
We drove North out of San Diego expecting to move back east. But over a drink in my old midtown haunt that now no longer exists you urged me to remain in California. The day we arrived back in my Los Angeles hometown for good an idea that would change my life broke open onto loose leaf the way nothing else ever has, still to this day.
I put on an apron and we worked overnight shifts at a diner in Hollywood slinging hash to drunks and chasing them up Cahuenga at 4am when they tried to run out on the bill. We took the studio apartment in East Hollywood with the popcorn ceilings for a song and within two months we got a nice phone call which invited us to a rehearsal room in Cleveland where I could take my turn at the wheel as Romeo. We did the show again in Boise where the sun would set just as I stepped out from stage left to find Juliet on her balcony.
When we got back to Los Angeles the play we’d written earned us the ego-raising hazing ritual of the couch-and-water tour. Our play opened in West Hollywood at a 50 seat theatre. The Hollywood Reporter said some nice things, but we were back to that small room with the bad carpet looking at the popcorn ceilings for ways to keep the lights on and the wolf from the door.
You took a gig writing poems on a 1936 Remington typewriter in a tent at the Coachella Music Festival. You took a job at a bar in Hollywood that didn’t cater to drunks. We always walked the mile and a half to work even though we had a car. On the slow nights, we’d scribble on napkins. They were mostly slow nights and we preferred it that way. More Shakespeare called and you left the bar again and lived for a summer in a cabin with a lake view.
You booked your first TV pitch that year. But it would take another year before anything would start and then another year before it would fail. Then you landed your first feature pitch. Again, it would take another year for anything to begin.
That’s what they never told you: harder than the writing, harder than the hustle, was how difficult it would be to summon patience in the face of slow, brutal uncertainty.
(Were you trying to teach me something there?)
In between the waiting, we gathered stains on the carpet. We wore our apron and cleared tables at weddings and taught Shakespeare under industrial lighting. We took our coffee cans to the CoinStar to buy Christmas gifts and we tried to love the people we were lucky enough to meet, mostly stumbling, mostly flailing.
One time I’d paid off my credit card balance in expectation of a paycheck that a day later I learned would never arrive. I didn’t sleep and by dawn I was dry heaving into my girlfriend’s toilet.
Some of the shit we had to swallow.
In the between, we doubled the size of our theater. We tore down sets and built new ones. My plays would visit big cities and little towns. I would try to go to all the openings if I could, once landing in Prague just before curtain, bleary-eyed and wild. There was no real money and there was no promise of more forthcoming. But the love in all those rooms was exactly what I’d bargained for when I signed up for this strange strange way.
When it was gracious enough to come, the work took me from taking notes at a Chabad Shabbat in a Crown Heights synagogue to Sunrise at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. To do the work I stayed in motels with wasps in the shower and suites at the St. Regis. I got used to seeing sunrise over descent into Hong Kong and my friend’s couch in Brooklyn and the post office on Congress Avenue in Austin. I rode a motorbike all over an island in the Gulf of Thailand, and I sweated up I-5 in August with a busted AC to make an evening rehearsal in San Francisco.
But we always went back to the little room in East Hollywood that we once got for a song. Never quite earning enough for long enough to justify an upgrade. The coins clinked in the coffee jars. The popcorn ceilings spun silken webs in the corners. My furniture, all second hand, wove a story of friends who offered me their pieces when they moved up or moved on: The desk, from a musician; the couch from an actress and mother; a hutch my father built in the 70s. The carpet got older and there was always another method of brewing coffee to learn that would contribute to the stains. The keyboard would click and the songs would go out into the world, occasionally surviving atmospheric incineration.
In the betweens we pitched tents in Joshua Tree. We rediscovered yoga and the Dodgers. We ran a streak of 950 days in a row of daily meditation before finally forgetting once during the pandemic. We turned the whiskey tumbler upside down on the bar top one day when we recognized the hurt we were trying to inflict and the erosion of spirit behind the numbness and hangovers. That particular glass remains dry today.
We grew our hair like a merman in hopes that it might take a piece of the sea with us whenever we came up for air.
And in the betweens…
I stood best man for a best friend.
Officiated the wedding of my oldest friend.
Greeted my niece with a poem.
Read for my grandfather at his memorial.
Became a crisis counselor. One night per week I’d pour a pot of tea and try to be a beacon of empathy for anyone calling from the ledge.
All the writing, all the shit and glory… it was practice for these moments.
In the last month of my thirties I kept a notebook next to my bed to recover my dreams. I run a planchette over the half-waking scrawl…
In one, I retrieved a dog I’d lost.
In another, I stood on a Chicago dock as a massive steam ship took off at a hundred miles per hour across Lake Michigan. The ropes from the ship sifted through my hands and fell into the water as it sped away.
The next. A box in the corner. Inside: a build-it-yourself piano.
And then, with no context, “To her left sleeps her husband, to her right, a gun.”
In another, I played a demented game of hide-and-seek with a cast from a play where the game was to try to kill each other.
In one of the most recent entries I was leaving my childhood home for the last time, but I was an adult. I fell into the fetal position by the rear tire of our Chevrolet Suburban because I didn’t want to have to go.
My dentist tells me I clench my teeth at night.
My regrets of the past ten years are that for the big things, I thought I was never ready, or didn’t deserve them. Usually, I was wrong. I could’ve done with a little less self-doubt, and a lot less self-punishment. The disappointments I blamed myself for dominoed onto too many who I wish I was kinder towards. I’m grateful to those who still helped walk me home anyway.
Just as when I took my little place in East Hollywood for a song, when you cross a threshold you do not yet know what it will ask of you. I’ve learned that you can expect the road to appear and disappear as seasons wash and then mar and then reveal the way again. But above all, if you do not carry love with you, you will not find it when you arrive.
Perhaps I would not have designed it this way with the small room with the stains in the carpet, but what the hell do I know? As far as I can tell this is my first time doing this thing.
So as I wake up on the dawn of my forty-first year, a new moon in the sky, the year of the mighty metal ox rearing its head, with half an idea plucked out somewhere in the cloud, and a ukulele in my trunk waiting to meet the sting of salt air on the central coast, I am grateful for my popcorn ceilings.
They always held me, as they always held the rain.
