April 3, 2012

It is the eve of my birthday.  Tomorrow I will be officially, unequivocally, physically and mentally unable to bear children.  Oh I am sure doctors would say there are possibly a few stray eggs left down there, swimming around still hoping for their big break, but it’s like I said to my Aspiring Actor boyfriend, you are too old, give it up.  Luckily, I have prepared myself for this day, for the past three years I have been telling myself that it is not the end of the world if I do not have a child. It sucks, but the world will still go on, I will not die.  It’s funny because I still feel around 34.  I think I look about 36, but I feel exactly 34 years old.  Old enough not to drink so much tequila that I puke out of car doors, but young enough to do a shot of tequila and make out with a stranger every once in a while.  My life this past year has been filled with a strange and unbelievable calm the likes of which I have never experienced, having lived a life of tumult and pain since before I can remember.  I always thought if I had such a year, a year with very little pain, a year with only an almost imperceptible undercurrent of ambient noise and nothing else, I would achieve great things.  Finally, I would publish my novel, sell the television rights, spend my days fielding emails from ex-friends wanting to reconcile and I would fall in love with the type of man who does not tolerate drama in his life of any kind.  A quiet and strong man who wants to sit on various docks discussing books and our favorite plays and who would scoff at the chaos that plagued me in years past would decide he loves me for my solitary nature. 

None of this happened really, I barely remember the past year.  I was recovering from the kind of grief that stops you in your tracks and takes your breath away for a whole year.  Grief such as this is incurable: it is a lifelong affliction much like the MS that litters my spinal cord and brain.  I did, however, finally find a way to live with the grief, not survive as I was doing for the first six months, barely breathing, plodding to work and home as if my feet were stuck in buckets of ice, I found a way to breathe out after long last and here I am, on the eve of my birthday, living with my grief a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, thinking that now that I have that pesky pressure to birth babies out of the way, maybe now I will do something with my life.

Doing something with my life, of course, means to finish the novel for which I have a book deal that has now most likely expired, but the book, or books in me have not expired, book deal or not, they are in there clamoring to get out, begging me like the periodical well-meaning emails I get from friends every once in a while asking when my next column will magically appear online.  I don’t just want to finish my novel, which has been written in many forms for years, I want it to be great, to honor all of the books I have ever read, so many thousands of books that have helped me through a hellish childhood and a confusing and sad adulthood.  I know it won’t be great on every page, my substandard education and proclivity for crippling procrastination will prevent that kind of brilliance: I would be happy if it were great just for a second, a line here or there and a small whisper of the story that has been writing itself inside my head for years, I need to write it all down and so I shall. 

My story begins many years ago, in a quaint Vermont town, there were eight of us then, six tiny children only a year apart in age, and my college professor Dad and outspoken Mom, living in house after house, crammed two or three to a bedroom back in the glory days of no seat belt laws right around the time my older sister fell out of the car and onto a curb where she sat for an hour before we even realized she was gone.  My Mom had a bad car accident around that time, and legend has it that had she not dropped my little sister at my Aunt’s house just before, my sister would have died.  My Mom was lucky to have survived that car accident, she said she recited the alphabet over and over as they had taught her to do in nursing school to avoid falling asleep.  I was six years old, too young to realize that my parents’ marriage was falling apart, but apparently old enough to be taken to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE which was being shown in my Dad’s film class.  This was later used in the divorce, a phrase we kids liked to toss around, such as “Did you know Mom had an affair with Dad’s best friend? That was used in the divorce.”  I was standing on the stairs in our new Massachusetts house when my Dad told us he was leaving for good.  It was the house with rats, and I shared a room there with my younger and older sister.  I don’t know how I knew at that young age what it meant for my Dad to say he was moving away never to return, but I will remember where I was standing when he told us for the rest of my life. 

My Dad moved to Boston and began teaching high school English.  He took up with a college student who wore her hair in a massive curly mane.  He ditched his tiny MG for an even more impractical motorcycle.  It was blue with dull sparkles and I saw much of Boston as a small kid on the back of that motorcycle.  My Mom made fun of his new girlfriend as often as she could, asking us if she would want a Barbie doll for her birthday, and apparently ignoring the child psychologists who were emerging in the 70’s to say that perhaps talking ill of your ex-spouse was damaging to your children.  Every other weekend my Dad would make the two hour drive from Boston to pick up one of us to come spend the weekend with him. My Mom liked fixing up old houses, or maybe we just couldn’t afford anything other than decrepit old houses on her nurse’s salary, and one day a man with a long pony tail came to our door looking for his lost dog.  He said he was a carpenter of sorts, and my Mom married him soon after.  Never underestimate the value of a man who could do his own indoor plumbing and wiring she would say, and we moved out to an old house 3.2 miles down a dirt road in Western Massachusetts.  She apparently, however, had underestimated his earning potential, and we were dirt poor for my entire childhood.  The house had 220 acres, an old barn, and very little else.  We had no heat, sparse running water, and no money for groceries or bills.  So we planted a vegetable garden and my Mom bought some chickens, cows, pigs and various other animals to help feed our large family, as she soon had two more kids to bring our tribe to the grand total of ten. 

Our family made up a good portion of our tiny school, and we had to wear free lunch badges around our necks as if the handmade clothes and mismatched socks were not enough of a beacon to tell the world we were poor.  Beyond the paltry income my Mom made as a school nurse at a school for delinquent children, my Mom was woefully bad at her finances, and it was the norm around our house to be told after a meal that we had to get up as she was selling the table to pay some bills.  I have known for as long as I can remember how much everything cost, and I don’t ever remember complaining about the frost on the inside of the window pane in the room I shared with my little sister, or the chores that started at 5 AM and lasted until well after midnight every day.  We were not allowed to complain, there was no television in our house for years, and when we got one there were strict rules concerning its use, and my Mom had a penchant for yelling at us for a record-setting eighteen hours a day.  What eight children living on a farm in the country could possibly have done to deserve that length of yelling I could not say.  Once in Junior High School I skipped the bus home to go to a video arcade and took the bus that left an hour later.  I told my Mom I had to go to the library and then made the mistake of bragging about it to my older sister, who promptly used the information to garner some much-needed favor from my Mom.  That was the only thing I ever did as a child that could have been considered disobedient, but we were yelled at constantly.  My Mom called these bouts of screaming “lectures” as in, “If you would clean the bathroom like I showed you, I wouldn’t have to lecture you for five hours,” but it is quite possible we were all the victims of systematic and soul scorching verbal abuse on a daily basis.  Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe I guess. 

Every year on my birthday, my Mom calls to tell me the story of the day I was born.  I am not sure, after eight children, my Mom remembers the day I was born.  I picture her more like the woman in Monty Python, standing at the sink washing dishes as babies fall out from under her skirt.  She does not remember our childhood the way the rest of us do.  She remembers what she calls, “the good times, the laughs.” I don’t remember ever laughing as a child. I actually remember being in the back of our car once as a child and laughing and being sharply admonished to “calm down.”  My sisters and brothers and I used to sit around and wonder aloud why my Mom had so many children when she clearly hated us all.  It might have been the Irish Catholic in her, or it might have been that she kept trying until she had one that she liked.  She could tolerate my older sister, the one who was a year older than I, and that same sister was my step-father’s favorite.  The rest of us annoyed her for a plethora of reasons: we were weak, we cried too much, we argued too much, we were too stubborn, or too talkative.  When we got older those reasons increased exponentially, we wanted to wear makeup, talk on the phone to our friends, we had learned to talk back or we didn’t talk back enough.  So one by one, we ran away from home to go live with my Dad who was now a college professor in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.  We left a sprawling, well-decorated thanks to my Mom’s atrocious spending habits, house on 220 acres of land to go and live in a small townhouse right near a Budweiser plant in the fast food capital of the world.  That’s how much we all hated my mother.  My older sister never left, as she was the only one my Mom could halfway stand, and the eldest, my brother also never left until college, probably because he knew the rest of us would fall apart without him. 

I left when I was sixteen.  I was allowed to be a camp counselor for a month at a small summer camp in New Hampshire.  I had a boyfriend I had only seen outside of school once, and although we had moved from the farmhouse in rural Massachusetts to a small town in New Hampshire that was closer to civilization, we were still in the boondocks and not allowed to leave the house for anything other than school and a few choice extra-curricular activities.  Three of my sisters went before me, including my younger sister who had run away that same summer.  I told my Mom to pick me up from camp on a specific date, and had my Aunt, my Dad’s sister, pick me up the day before and drive me to the airport to go to Ohio.  I called my Mom from Ohio and she feigned shock although it was her fourth such call. 

My Mom actually fought over custody of me with my Dad in court and came to Ohio for the court date, but at that age they just make you go to court and choose the parent you want to live with and so I did, and so my Mom lost out on the hundred dollars a month my Dad had to pay her for child support for me.  I know she counted on that money, and I felt badly for leaving my little brothers whom I had helped to raise, but the thought of living on a paved road a few miles from the high school was just too enticing to me.  The high school in Ohio was a paradise compared to our last schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  There were different buildings for different subjects and a swimming pool and a whole theater annex which soon became my favorite spot in the school. I told my Mom I ran away to go to a better school, but I left because I was convinced at that point that my Mom hated me and would be relieved I was gone.  To this day she tells me that my leaving was one of the hardest things she ever had to go through, topping two divorces, raising eight children on 32 thousand dollars a year, and getting leukemia.  I don’t know if she says the same thing to my other sisters who left, probably not because most of them were tossed back and forth between Ohio and New Hampshire as my Dad couldn’t handle their wild and rebellious behavior. 

I was neither wild, nor rebellious as a child.  Mine was a quiet anger, a deep wrenching sorrow that manifested in hours of sobbing curled up in the bathtub with the door locked, the only door in our house with a little hook and eye.  I would not normally be allowed such precious time to myself, but it was my job to clean the bathroom and so I spent a part of that time crying, and a bigger part of that time being lambasted for crying as my Mom would listen at the door trying to hear the scratching of a scrub brush against the bathtub.  It enraged her when we cried, it was a sign of weakness she often reminded us, and growing up it was the worst of my offenses in a household littered with small infractions. 

My eldest sister received the brunt of my Mom’s anger, she possessed all the qualities in a person my Mom despised:  she was crafty and devious, and sobbed uncontrollably when my Mom would yell.  I was second in line, saved only by the fact that I had a generous and loving spirit, and was good with my little brothers.  The third most hated was the sister who was two years older than me. She was the third child and she was the most outspoken and stubborn of us all.  When she was little she was chubby, although angelic with her white blonde hair and icy blue eyes.  We used to call her Big Mama, and her claim to fame was the time she stood at the top of our stairs and bellowed: “I AM SENSITIVE!!”  She and my Mom butted heads all the time, and my Mom’s wary respect of her strong nature soon gave way to dangerous confrontations when my sister became a teenager.  She was one of the sisters bounced back and forth from Ohio, and she was the first of us to call Child Protective Services, an organization of which we were all well aware but most of us were too afraid to dial their number. 

The sister born just before me was definitely the favorite of the family.  Funny, beautiful and confident, my Mom had little with which to find fault in her.  My Ex-Boyfriend says she is the most stunning in a group of five gorgeous sisters and I tend to agree.  I didn’t hate her for being my Mom’s favorite, or for being the only girl to have her own room and a Barbie doll, she was my favorite too, and still is to this day.  She had the same hard life I did growing up, her room was not heated and her chores were plentiful and she had to use the same tiny cold shower everyone else did in the morning before the school bus arrived to drive us the hour it would take to get to our school.  Her chores were harder than mine, as my Mom regarded her as more sturdy, so she was tasked with things like mowing the acres of grass with an old rickety lawnmower you had to push through weeds as tall as our front door.  My little sister was also fairly well tolerated, as the baby of the family before my little brothers came along, although my Mom’s idea of special treatment when we were growing up simply meant she got to go to the hospital when her skin was chewed through by swarms of black flies and the rest of us had to throw up all night at home.

My little brothers had an entirely different upbringing than the six of us.  My eldest brother was in charge of all the kids, a daunting task for even the most skilled of caregivers, but my little brothers were born beginning when I was eleven and it was only a few years after I left home that my Mom finally decided to move into town, into a house with hot water and electric heat.  Although I am sure they had to deal with tirades and emotional battery, at least they were warm at night.  By the time they were teenagers, my Mom had met her third husband, a German Republican, and she lived in a gorgeous house with an in-ground pool and a ski tow rope in a tiny town in New Hampshire.  Although my Mom had campaigned for the likes of Gary Hart, who had stayed at our house before his campaign went belly up, she became fervently Republican, and ran for State Senator in New Hampshire and won by 12 votes.  I went to visit her while I was in college and I was amazed by the different life my little brothers were leading.  The house was huge, but true to form my Mom could not afford such a house, so it doubled as a bed and breakfast and my brothers still did not have the house to themselves. 

My youngest brother got married a few months ago in Monterey, California and most of my family attended.  My stubborn and sensitive older sister did not choose to subject herself to the tortures of our family dynamic, but everyone else was there, including my Stepfather and his family, a generous and kind Massachusetts family who had welcomed my Mom and her six children into their homes many a weekend when I was growing up.  My Mom, who has not behaved properly at more than a few family events in our adult years, conducted herself with guarded civility, and it was the first time in my life I saw that even my little brothers were not unscathed by her as there was tension between my Mom and the Groom, so much so I do not know when they will speak again.  Everyone else in my family lives far from my mother, and although she has softened considerably in her older years, nobody talks to her very often, and we are all grateful that her third husband takes care of her as we are a cold and distant bunch, but nobody quite has the heart to be outright mean to her.  

My Dad remains the favored parent for most of us, a fun-loving guy whose liberal use of the word “love” when we were little is much appreciated even now.  My entire childhood I remember my Mom saying the word “love” as it applies to me only once. I was holding my littlest brother in my arms right after he was born and she said, speaking to him, “We love her don’t we?”  If I wasn’t so cold sitting on that antique wooden rocking chair during a blizzard that dumped twelve feet of snow right at our doorstep I would have maybe even smiled that day, and I remember having to check around me to see if she was referring to one of my many brothers and sisters standing behind me.  Many of my sisters and brothers are parents themselves now, loving and kind parents although carefully protected in their own worlds from our sometimes vicious family. 

Today is the last day I would have been able to have a child of my own.  And I am positive if I had had my own child I would have showered that child with all the love and electric heat and hot water and television he or she could have handled, rearing a wild, spoiled child who was allowed to laugh and cry to his or hers heart’s content.  My child would have had anything he or she wanted, would have been warm and loved and spoiled beyond belief.   Except of course Aunts and Uncles or Grandparents on my side with whom to have Thanksgiving Dinner as our family doesn't gather for the holidays, or ever really, except for a wedding every decade or so, at which it is not uncommon for my Mom to brandish a weapon or to feign hysterical blindness.  If everything happens for a reason, maybe things that don't happen don't happen for a reason as well.  I would have felt like a failure if I wasn't able to give my child all the things I couldn't have growing up, and since we had nothing, that means my child would have had to have everything, an impossible task.  I will spend my birthday tomorrow by myself at the beach which is better than curled up in a ball in my bathtub and that's good enough for me. 

January 25, 2012

Things to Do:

1. Become athletic.

2. Learn to paddleboard.

3. Have sex with someone, anyone.


Nobody ever talks about the bliss of falling out of love. It is an unbelievably freeing feeling, finally, as the stranglehold of worship and longing eases up ever so slightly. But this euphoria of getting over someone is rarely glorified in poetry or song: the poet describes the ache of a broken heart rather than the happiness one feels when one’s heart is set free. I am currently experiencing such joy, as I quietly slide out of the grip of a six year semi-romance with a half-boyfriend. I suppose he was my boyfriend for more than half of that time, but he was always only partly there, with one foot out the door and his eyes peeled for a prettier, younger girl – someone with financial stability, I suppose, and without a penchant for half-truths. So here I stand, on the precipice of things to come. I will now go back to longing for unspecified companionship. I have found that it hurts less to wish for more general things.

When I was in high school I wanted to be an actress. I had no talent, was only moderately cute, and my voice went up about ten octaves when I acted. Nevertheless, I was somehow given the chance to star in a production of Crimes of the Heart. One of the girls from the play died a few years ago, and I believe the last remaining VHS copy of the tape of that performance died with her, thankfully. I eventually gave up my dreams of stardom for the less glamorous world of backstage, and fell in love with the idea of becoming a Director. I liked the idea of being the only female in a male driven world, and I was happy to hand the job of starlet over to the likes of Michelle Pukey, who had an angelic face and the personality of a soggy magazine. It has been a few decades since high school, and next week I will finally be given my shot at the spotlight as I star in an episode of reality television posing as a customer of an illicit website. Aside from the fact that my mother would disown me if she ever found out about it, I can’t see how this brief foray into playacting will harm me. It seems to actually be a natural progression of things, as I spent most of my last relationship making things up, and my younger self spent a brief time dabbling in the seedy world of sexual perversions. It feels fitting that I should wrap up my life of sin with a national television show devoted to my fabricated wonton ways. And then I shall move on, from unrequited love and life’s rotten underbelly and emerge a new person, less interesting to be sure, but wholesome and pure as I enter the next chapter of my soon-to-be boring life.

Apart from my upcoming television debut and the demise of my long-dead relationship, life has been quiet for me. I have spent the last year and a half hiding out in a sleepy beach town like Salman Rushdie in the 90’s. The sound of a ringing phone began to startle me as I morphed from socialite to shut-in, and I think my new look now becomes me – I have not worn lip gloss in 17 months and I own two pair of Uggs, the brown snakeskin ones being the only vestige of the days of my fashionable past. I have written many apologetic emails to ex-friends, and hung on to my ex-boyfriend for dear life, my past patterns doomed to repeat as I once again found myself in a platonic relationship that lasted exactly two years longer than it should have. So I used my ill-gotten reality show earnings to re-carpet my apartment and vowed that the day after the Super Bowl I will stop hanging out with my non-boyfriend. A fitting date for a new beginning, actually, because the new carpet means no more stain in the middle of my living room from puking my guts out after last year’s drunken Super Bowl festivities. I have begun to write again, pages of a screenplay that might only make me laugh, and this silly diary which began years ago as a chronicle of my days as a Hollywood Development Girl, or, maybe not of MY days, but those of a burnt-out slightly amoral version of me, and I stopped abruptly when I realized this girl had become me, or I had become her, and I needed to regroup. All good writing happens in the editing, I have heard, and perhaps this is the way for good living too. So I have edited out, slowly, the most interesting parts of my life, and maybe out of sheer boredom brilliance will emerge, or, at least, some good.

I have not been completely quiet out here at the beach, there were a few sightings of the old d-girl, as I attempted to stalk a boy I kept seeing at the park, but that ended too when I almost side-swiped his car and simultaneously realized he was not at all cute, rather just nearby. My life has not been without drama, either, I am sad to report, as I have had a falling out with yet another sister, and I lost my appendix along the way, which apparently we do not need, but I have the tiny scars on my stomach to forever remind me of its once superfluous presence. So, scarred and sister-less, I sit on my new carpet trying to write a scintillating column about a frankly un-scintillating life, and I have to resist the temptation to stir up trouble just so I have something to write about. My heart still aches from the death of the love of my life, and I can only open my laptop again, at long last, because the urge to write about him has subsided, and besides, he will be memorialized on the reality show next week as I used his death as an excuse to frequent the website of ill-repute.

Nine years ago I was living in New York City, and I decided to make my yearly pilgrimage to Los Angeles: I never called it a move, I would just come for a few months here and there, and then run back to my boyfriend in New York when I had pissed through enough friendships out here with my big mouth and self-destructive nature. That summer I discovered cocaine, and I can thankfully say this phase only lasted four months and I have barely done any drugs since then. I did, however, pick up a liking of Ambien during that time, and have been on it ever since. That is one of the perks of having a degenerative disease of the nervous system: they will give me any drugs I want. Ambien is yet another old friend I have recently left behind, finally, and although I spend many nights staring up at my ceiling fan, it feels good to be substance and poisonous friend- free at long last.

So what kind of diary will this be, you might be wondering, if I am not on drugs, I don’t work in Hollywood anymore, and I am free of relationship and friendship drama? I have no idea is my answer. All I can say is, there is a lot of empty space here now, and plenty of room for things to happen. Big things: a book, a television series, a movie, who knows… I might even have sex eventually, and all of my potential suitors out there will be frightened to hear I just might write about it.

All of this housecleaning is not to say I don’t miss my old way of life. I miss Ambien, and the Sarah’s, and wallowing in the victimhood of the disenfranchised pseudo-girlfriend. I miss having sex, and I miss someone loving me enough to yell at me. I miss Hollywood, but not my ex-boss who fired me the day I got diagnosed with M.S. Come to think of it, I don’t miss eating pickles wrapped in American cheese in the middle of the night on Ambien, and the Sarah’s hate my guts, and I am still in full non-relationship wallow until after the Super Bowl. I don’t miss condoms and drinks with short agents who are trying to sleep with me, and I am still mad that the guy who looked like an Alien told me he was going surfing the day after we slept together and he would call me when he got home and to this day, years later, has yet to call me. So maybe in losing everything I simply got rid of everything bad, and all that is left is a bright and airy beach apartment with new carpeting and all the room in the world for better things to happen to me. It is possible this column will no longer be the bitter musings of a burnt out Development Girl, but rather the exultations of a Regular Girl who just keeps having strange and wonderful things happen to her every day.

You never know. It could happen.

March 3, 2011

Things to Do:

1. Hire a police escort, preferably a cute one.
2. Change identity, move to Paris.
3. Stay home on St. Patrick’s Day. Nothing good comes of these Holidays.

My Dead Ex-Boyfriend would not want me to write about shit. He would not want me to write about a dumb crush I have on a guy whose dogs I have spoken to once, and he would not want me to belabor the point in a morbid fashion that I miss him. He knows I miss him, I tell him this when he comes to me in every single one of my dreams. He would want me to write about real shit, but some things are hard to write about because I am always culpable, and I am never just a victim, and the Dead-Ex would mitigate this, by telling me I did not bring this on myself. However, in this instance, the story I am about to tell is all me, I did this, and it was a mistake, and for this, they will likely find my mutilated body washed up in the Playa Inlet: I let back into my life my ex-Boss, the one who sexually harassed me. He is British, and he is brilliant, and he taught me how to write notes on scripts, but he is also crazy and he thinks he has been in love with me for years, even though when we met he was dating a very powerful Development Girl. At the time, I was new to Hollywood, two years older than him, but an assistant nonetheless, and I resisted his advances, although the friends of his girlfriend would contend differently. West Coast Sarah and I would go out with him on occasion, and he would overtly lust after me, but I spent my high school years escaping the advances of men to the point the boys would write “frigid” on my locker, so I was adept at avoiding the cagey Brit, and I let Sarah spy on my tracking website as a thank you for taking care that I was not raped by my new boss.

It has been a few years. I have moved back and forth across the country twice, and somehow, miraculously, kept in touch with the British, surly man who had professed his love for me when I was a lowly assistant at his company, to the peril of both of our jobs. I moved on, and so did he and somehow, we stayed friends. But not the kind of friends you have in real life, just Hollywood friends having lunch every few years and talking about sleeping together but wisely, not. A few years ago I had just such a lunch with him, and he was getting married. He still expressed interest in me, and that was the last I heard from him save for one email stating that he had sold a huge screenplay with a big Star attached, the same Big Star for whom I catered a New Year’s Eve party when I was still poor and struggling. A few months ago, I got a call from the brooding Brit, in the middle of the night, his voice foggy, he misses me, wants to see me…. The next day I emailed him innocently, sure lets have lunch, and he sent back a picture of a lovely little one year old baby. Apparently, however, his marriage was ending, and he said I am the girl of his dreams. I have been through this before, men loving the girl I used to be but not the girl I am now. My history with these guys, any guys other than my Dead Ex, is pathetically small, but I agree to a lunch because I respect the Brit’s standing in our fucked up little community, and the lunch started with nice pasta and ended with him chasing me around a coffee table at his house. Somehow I managed to escape unscathed but the damage had been done, he loves me now, real love, even though I am a new person, I am no longer fabulous or successful or fast-moving, and his obsession grows anyway. I don’t see him for months afterwards, but I bask in the glow of feeling pretty enough to be stalked, and then finally I agree to go out with him for Valentine’s Day.

I am not justifying this decision. It was a bad decision. This man is nuts, he is a documented stalker, there were letters written at my old job from the President of our company, and from the Brit as mandated by the company, a therapist was hired for him, and apologies were made. I got another job and nobody sued anyone, situation averted… yet now, as one of a series of bad decisions clouded by the death of my Ex, I have agreed to go on a real date with him. I have no idea how I thought this would play out in any way other than weird, and destructive. There were lots of warning signs leading up to this date that I should have been aware of: he would get angry at me every other day for not seeing him since our lunch, for not “liking” his Facebook posts, for not changing my status (is there a Facebook status that states: being stalked? I was not aware). But now we have plans for Valentine’s Day, and I have nobody to tell me how asinine this is, so I went.

For the big date, I dressed in my floppiest fashionable sweater, knowing he wanted to see my boobs so purposely hiding them, and didn’t even shower. I drove myself so I would have a getaway and when I arrived it was shockingly banal. He had bought me a nice designer bracelet, expensive chocolates and had secured us a table at a very posh restaurant surely booked well in advance for this day. During dinner he was nothing but cordial and witty, and we talked about Development Days, and I felt like I was having dinner with an old friend. We went back to his place, which was next to the restaurant, and watched Jeopardy, and he let me go home, not even a lap around the coffee table for old time’s sakes. I left optimistic. Maybe he had changed. Maybe we could date and get to know each other like normal people. But I was wrong. Nobody normal wants to date me, it seems. The calls started coming in the next day, one after another, he was angry with me, even after a heartfelt thank you from me for his uncharacteristic show of restraint the night before. But he wanted more. At first he just wanted to be recognized as my boyfriend (as if anyone else cares) but then he just kept calling and emailing and texting over and over. I finally told him it wasn’t going to work out between us, this crazy kind of passion was flattering the hell out of me, but I am not frigid, or a lesbian as he quickly accused, I am simply scared of insane people being one myself. For some reason this enraged him, and he lost it completely. I am hesitant to write what happened next lest I embarrass him and lest he decides to bludgeon me to death, but I suppose it has gone beyond that already. It is possible my Ex-Boss will come to my little Beach Apartment and murder me, and it will be my fault. Who goes out on a date with her Ex-Boss who used to sexually harass her? I deserve to die.

So the moody Brit who used to make interns cry and who inspired hatred amongst his peers at my old company because of his biting criticisms and sullen ways, has been rejected by me for once and for all, and now the barrage of horrible emails, texts, and phone calls begin. I had no idea what was in store for me. Emails of such vitriol I have not heard since Sarah days: I am an old cripple who writes a lame blog, I am an ex-whore who caused her own MS, I need a cane – oh and, here is a website for canes, which I will apparently need just about when men stop looking at me, and I am a gold digger who only liked him when I thought he had money… According to this man who has pledged his love for me for years to anyone who would listen, I am now a lesbian loser and all alone in the world. Oh he had some valid points, he is a smart guy, as he points out: he placed second in his entrance exam at Oxford. He is smart and mean, and his barbs hurt. He has decided I caused my own MS due to my whoring days in my twenties, which would not be so far off base, except I was not actually a whore in my twenties, not for lack of trying but the hand job house I was planning on joining got busted by the police the day the Madam was taking me to Hollywood Boulevard to pick me out a new wardrobe. The Brit has been keeping close track of my stories, however, and did not leave a stone unturned: my blog is morbid, get over the Dead Ex already, my family is embarrassed of me, my sister hates me, he was careful to eviscerate me on every level, and then, after a night of a hundred emails, he sends me a kiss and says I can make it all go away if I just change my relationship status on Facebook.

I am single, it’s true, but I am not such a pathetic loser that I will be intimidated into dating someone. I did want the abuse to stop, but blocking him from my phone and email seemed easier than entering into a relationship with a certified nut job. I can take the abuse, I grew up berated, but I am sad to lose a friend that has been so hard to keep over the years. And an intelligent friend, albeit troubled. I should have handled this differently, not gone over to his house, not gone out with him for Valentine’s Day, but I wanted to go on a date because I can’t remember the last date I have been on, and I will admit to enjoying attention from Hollywood’s most hated ex-executive. I suppose I was just amazed that anyone wanted to date me at all, and the fact that it was someone who had been formally reprimanded in the past for liking me made it all even more enticing. In the end, however, I treated him unfairly, strung him along just like the Editor of our School Newspaper in High School who put signs on my locker asking me to the Prom – it was back when Moonlighting was on the air, and he cut out pictures of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepard and put them on my locker with little balloons coming out of their mouths begging me to say yes, and I waited a full month to answer him because I was afraid of men back then, and I guess maybe I still am.

So now my phone is once again quiet, no drunken messages from a pissed off Brit, no late night chats with my now Dead-Ex, and no date for next Valentine’s Day, although I have plenty of time to dredge up old skeletons from my closet if things get too boring. I should probably be a little more scared about the sleeping Giant from England who is awake and extremely angry, but I am not sure I would mind if he came to my house and hit me over the head with my own laptop or something, at least I would get more readers for my blog, and if there is a Heaven I can just go hang out with my Dead Ex, who is surely bent over a magazine at some seedy Celestial bar. It would be so nice to see him.

February 18, 2011

Things to Do:

1. Hire a Publicist
2. Get a Makeover and free up time for the Book Tour.
3. Prepare for the Onslaught of Fame.

Because I grew up eating no processed foods, only able to eat food from our garden or slaughtered animals, I always thought the machines that dispensed things like turkey or ham sandwiches were the best invention known to mankind. I wanted one of those stale, pinkish treats that did not exist in nature because, frankly, I was tired of nature. Living on 220 acres of nothing but trees and a cross-country ski path that led from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, there was no shortage of God’s creations around: five or six dogs, a few cats (if they did not crawl into our car’s engine to keep warm and burn to death when my Mom turned the car on), twenty-one chickens, two horses and two ponies (very stubborn, one with a hematoma), a black sheep, three pigs named ham, bacon and sausage, a cow named Bubba (who once went to the bathroom all over the inside of my Step-Father’s Land Cruiser) and, for two weeks, a cockatoo named Jose Feliciano that got eaten by our old cat Tiger. We had a huge garden, and grew things like rhubarb for pies, and zucchini, of which there was a seemingly endless supply, and for dessert we would pick wild berries and, if we were really lucky my Mom would whip some fresh cream she would skim off of fresh cow’s milk to top them off. When I ran away from home to go live with my Dad in Ohio at the age of sixteen, I wanted nothing to do with nature, or anything healthy or fresh – I was still scarred from my Mom’s health food kick in the seventies that included dinners like refried tofu and carob cakes on our birthdays. Columbus, Ohio, the fast-food capital of the world, was the perfect place for me, and when I called my Mom to tell her I had left camp a day early to fly to Ohio to live in a town house with my Dad, I am pretty sure her gasp of shock was because she did not want her offspring living in any structure built after the 1800’s.

I wasn’t able to escape God’s Creatures forever though, because when I was in college my boyfriend and I inherited two tiny Boxer puppies after his Dad died of lung cancer, and suddenly we were living in an illegal sublet in Stuyvesant Town on the lower East Side of Manhattan with two dogs, something frowned upon severely by the Stuyvesant Town Gestapo, who had already banged down our door on several occasions to try and evict us, foiled only by my insistence that I was not in fact living there, but just the maid and that the tenant would, always, be home shortly. I was only 20 years old, and I did not want dogs. I didn’t want dog hair on my Marc Jacobs silk sweaters, but I loved my boyfriend, so we moved to an apartment that allowed animals, a little dump in Hell’s Kitchen with a patio, and soon those little puppies turned into eighty pound dogs that took up more room in our little full size bed than me, and I spent years in bed with my boyfriend and two dogs, curled up in a little corner with my feet hanging off so those dogs, who were brothers and best friends, could be comfortable.

One night, fourteen years later, I was out with my cousin, and I came home a little drunk and very tired, and as I kicked off my heels I saw that one of the dogs had died on the floor of our apartment. I called my boyfriend and he left his bartending job and came home and wrapped the dog in a blanket and took him to an animal hospital where they could properly dispose of him. The other dog stood patiently at our apartment door waiting for his brother to come home for three months. Once in a while he would let out a small whimper, but mostly he was just quietly waiting as he had no knowledge of death, so for him, it was just a matter of time before his brother came bounding through the doorway. We got a cabin in Vermont that summer because I had a book deal and wanted to finish my novel, and the surviving dog got to go with me. We thought he would love the open fields and refreshing little lake, but he had lost the use of his back legs by then, and he waited at the cabin door for his brother just like he had waited for him back in New York. A few months later, he died. I feel like that dog sometimes, as the bright sun shines through my balcony window and I can smell the ocean air on a quiet Sunday at the beach. Now that my Ex-Boyfriend has died, I don’t want to go run through the fields or jump off the dock into the cool lake water. I just want my best friend to come home.

Unlike my dear departed dog, unfortunately, I am smart enough to know my ex is not coming home, although he visits my dreams almost every night. It’s weird to be haunted by him in this way, because in real life he was never the type to hang around, I was always the hanger, I am quite sure I have been the source of many a nightmare for him over the years. I guess this is the Universe paying me back. In an attempt to regain my sanity, as apparently I am still here, I sent my ex-friend the East Coast Sarah a message in case she, like my old dog, is somehow waiting for me to walk through her front door and all these years our signals just got crossed. She has not written me back, not this time or the other ten times I have contacted her since she abruptly severed our ties a few years ago. It’s funny I should choose East Coast Sarah to fixate on right now as I think about past pets , because I remember the time she decided she had had enough of her fluffy white cat Audrey and she let her right out her front door in the middle of New York City. My Dead Ex did not like East Coast Sarah, he was much more a fan of West Coast Sarah, which makes sense because West Coast Sarah was a good person, and East Coast Sarah was not. There were lots of people in my life that my Dead Ex did not like, including the Angry Indian, but I don’t hold grudges like that, my life does not exist in such rigid circles of virtue. I wish I could hold a grudge, savor a little resentment, it might make life a little easier and might stop me from sending embarrassing messages to ex-friends that will never get returned.

As much as I would like to just sit and think about my past, stalk ex-friends, and obsess over Dead Ex-Boyfriends, life for me is starting to creep forward, ever-so-slightly, and I am excited to start compiling a list of new things to regret in the future. I have finished the revision of my novel, which I sold a few years back and then turned in just as my Editor got fired for publishing a book that was basically a justification for murder, the OJ Simpson Book. I could have found a new Editor back then, I suppose, but I am a head case, plain and simple and well-documented by three states, so I sat on a stack of pages for a few years, and now it seems some of my references are dated. I spent the last few months, when I was not plagued by terrorizing nightmares featuring one Dead Ex, updating locations and rounding out my story, which has played out in real life just as it should in a novel: I grew into a better person, things ended and new things began, and the central theme of moral uncertainty was reinforced and then resolved. I should not say yet how things turn out, but I am satisfied that above all else, I got what was coming to me.

Life after finishing my book is requiring a bit of an adjustment. Although my heroine’s life ends, for the time being, wrapped in a tidy bundle, I always thought my real life would ultimately be a love story, because I have spent most of my adult life in some sort state of tortured love, but I find myself single and not even interested in one evening with a member of the opposite sex. My conversation with the Beach Guy revolved mostly around his dogs, and we parted knowing little more about each other than our proclivity for larger animals as opposed to the little yappy dogs seen peeking out of ladies’ purses on Rodeo Drive. I am not sure who I am outside of innocent flirting, manic bouts of random sex, and years of deep and desperate, soul-melding love. Everything for me seems to have changed so drastically I am having a hard time recognizing myself at all. My apartment is clean and spacious, a vast change from the cramped, smoke-filled, dog hair laden, sunless pit I lived in in New York. My phone barely rings anymore, a far cry from the forty phone calls a day I would get from my now Dead Ex. I have finished a novel, again, but this time it is less a jumble of self-conscious journal entries and more a real book that can be purchased in a store. My life is more legitimate, and this grounded, solitary existence free from psychosis and mania seems more suited for the trappings of my old life: a serious boyfriend, a couple of high-maintenance dogs, a real career, but somehow I have none of these things. There is a lot of empty space right now and I am curious to see what will fill that space – will my book be a best-seller and high-rated television show? Will my next love be someone who appreciates my crazy family and who convinces me to love animals again? It’s a barn-burner, and I am not going to give away the ending but I have a feeling things are going to start to get a lot more exciting around here.

February 10, 2011

Things to Do:

1.  Replace WGA Screeners with Elmo DVD's.
2.  Use the back of old scripts as coloring paper.
3.  Teach the kid to read on old buck slips.

It’s been six and a half months since the love of my life died, and it feels like a minute has gone by, time has stood still for me, my worst nightmare has come true, the ultimate abandonment, but somehow I get out of bed in the morning, brush my teeth, and sigh myself through each day. I have always felt lonely and sad, and no matter how many people surround me, there has been a slight panic and tightness in my chest even as I say a breezy goodbye to a lunch date. Now, the universe mocks me, as if to say: “This is real loss, this is despair, this is what it feels like to be alone and the rest of your life has been an overreaction: now is the true meaning of sad….” My worst self feels a small sense of relief, as horrible as that sounds, because my moral compass is gone, and nobody is checking up on me as I have random, meaningless sex and do other things normally reserved for college years, and I don’t have to explain myself to that caring soul on the East Coast. I have done some things my Dead Ex would have been proud of since he died, I begrudgingly admit, such as spending countless hours revising my novel that has been paid for and never published, and I am skinny as a rail and my gaunt face is finally finding its crooked balance, but mostly I have spent the last half of a year flailing around helplessly, making mistakes and hoping against all hope that there is no afterlife or any way for him to witness my downward spiral from under the snap pea leaf or through the eyes of a baby robin.


As much as I want to just squander away the rest of my days in the soothing embrace of victimhood, or the haze of wine and prescription medication, I cannot because, alas, there is a guy. A really cute guy with blondish curly hair and blue sweatpants with two red stripes running down the sides who walks his two biggish dogs on the beach every morning and every early evening, and not knowing him at all, save for a friendly wave every day, seems to be reason enough to blow dry my hair and change out of my Dead Ex’s double XL wool sweater every so often into a small tee shirt that shows off the new tiny waist I have acquired from the Grief Diet. This guy, who I have seen every day since I moved to the beach last May, and who, for all I know, could be married, gay or boring, is my reason for living right now. I refuse to talk to this guy because I find happiness in not knowing anything about him, just as I find some solace in the fact that I have no idea where my Dead Ex is right now. Hopefully my Dead Ex is languishing between some tall stacks of rare books somewhere, and the Beach Guy is single and has a penchant for skinny girls with sunken eyes who haven’t slept for months. For now, I am happy to leave these questions unanswered.


I don’t remember much of the Super Bowl this year. As part of the grim pact I've made with myself, I continued my pattern of self-destruction on that day by getting blind drunk and throwing up all over my shabby grey beach carpeting. I don’t know how long I can sustain this dedication to blatant misbehavior, however, because I’m not stuck in some shitty marriage, Multiple Sclerosis has not yet put me in a wheelchair, and I am not currently so sickly in love I can’t breathe without the presence of another person. Try as I might to create chaos around me so that I can fill the space left by my Dead Ex with the clamor of false emergencies, things at the beach are quiet right now. My Non-Boyfriend is now officially just an Ex, after being my boyfriend for an unimpressive amount of time: my second official Ex-Boyfriend ever, and the only one who is still alive. I wish I could say I left that situation reasonably and with behavior appropriate to my age, but I was just left, one day, at long last, for good, and six and a half months ago that would have left me crippled with remorse, but now, comparatively, it seems silly to even cry about. He is not dead. He simply chose to be without me, opted out of my vise-like psychic stranglehold and he now lives in a chic bachelor pad far from the beach and all of my hysterics. I don’t blame him. I would leave me too, with a nice little note telling me what a sweet girl I am and how I will miss my cooking and going to the movies on Saturdays. And then I would check up on me once or twice a year in between ski trips and happy hour chicken wings. It was nice having someone around for a while, and I will miss him, but I am not sure romance between two people should feel so similar to the relationship between a Prison Warden and a Prisoner. My Ex-Non-Boyfriend is free from jail, his penance completed, his debt to society paid. I hope for his sake that he never looks back.


My job as a writer’s assistant has also become a casualty of the tumult of the past half year. My complete lack of tact and the ability to navigate office politics came to a boiling point at the Holidays when, emboldened by my new feeling of independence, and fueled by the need for extra income caused by such grief purchases as a new-ish car, I asked for a raise via email and in a haughty tone, and my boss promptly fired me. And then, the strangest thing happened. My family, which has been the subject of reams and reams of pages written by me of stories of neglect and abandonment, suddenly came through for me. There were emails sent around, even between my parents who have not spoken in years, expressions of concern and offers of help, and money was sent and gratefully received by me, and I was able to keep my beach apartment without the help of my always generous but now Dead Ex, and I am left with little to complain about.  I have a new job as a Nanny to a little boy just down the street, a few friends who hung in there through the maelstrom, and more emotional freedom than I have had in decades. I am not giving up on Development, or being a D-Girl, I couldn’t if I wanted to as it is now part of my DNA, and I still write notes for people on the side, read scripts, and help set up projects for friends.  One does not leave Development forever, it seems, but it's a burn-out career, and I will be the first to admit that right now, I just can't hack it.

I'm sure I will go back to the Hollywood machine at some point, but I need a break, I need to lie down and take a small nap like the toddler now entrusted to my care, because my heart is broken and my head is tired, and I don’t have the energy to care about movies that may or may not ever get made or scripts that need stronger second acts. I can't stomach one more drinks with a horny agent, or one more breakfast with a hungry intern.  I need peace, which apparently, right now, comes for me in the unlikely form of an unruly two year old. I have no idea why I chose this job, which seems so far removed from the glamorous world of movie-making that took me so many years to master, but maybe it’s because I wanted something, anything, new in my life.  I was looking for something that wasn’t going to die or choose skiing over me, or that I wasn’t going to lose because of a self-entitled email. I just wanted to spend my days, for a little while, with someone who is starting fresh, who holds my hand with feverish optimism and maybe some of that newness will rub off on me and I can start all over again: a smart, well-spoken girl who is good at studio notes and finding viable projects and who won’t crumble from a sideways look. 

As I'm walking home from my new job today, the sunset along the water is unspeakably pretty and I feel guilty admiring it knowing that my Ex will never again see those particular hues.  I think about all the kids graduating soon from USC and UCLA who would kill to have reached executive level in the world of Development, and all the writers who would do anything for a book deal with one of the top publishers in the country, and I am overwhelmed with an unexpected feeling of hopefulness and gratitude.  As I turn the corner to head up the hill towards my apartment, I see the Beach Guy taking his usual route towards the ocean with his two dogs and I take a deep breath, cross the street, give him my signature crooked smile and, for the first time, I lean over and stop to pet one of his dogs.  He smiles back and pets the other dog with a ring-less hand and for the first time in over a half year, my smile turns into a grin and there is no sadness behind my simple, "Hello."

You.

There was a point
at which my Nothing
became Something
you were that point -
you taught me to fly,
then helped me Soar
and then let go
only when you knew
I was more than just
Something.
I could be Anything.

I have never really written a word until today. I had written a blog, but you hated that word. I had written some screenplays and other things but you wanted me to be more than words on a computer screen, or a movie never made. You wanted my words to live longer than us, I realize that now: you wanted to walk into your favorite place: a bookstore, or for someone, anyone, to walk into a bookstore, one day, and pick up something I had written, it’s all you ever wanted for me, and so now I will finally really write, for you.

I met you when I had just turned nineteen years old. I didn’t know what love was, I didn’t even know that I had fallen in love, or what it felt like to fall in love, because it happened so fast and it was nothing like the books I had read: there was no searching or wondering, there was no courting or grand passages written about the quiet grace of your features or the allure of my lovely madness: we met, and then we were just in love. I was a sad girl when you met me, I have always been sad, and you loved that sadness for some reason, maybe because you were sad too, and we were both funny about it so that made it okay, I guess. I was just a kid, back then, and you were a grown man, I had just started my life and you were half-way through with yours, only we didn’t know that at the time, and I don’t know that we would have done anything differently if we had known, because we couldn’t have loved any longer and harder than we did, our love never ended even though it should have, many times.

You told me once you wished there was a word stronger than love, because it just didn’t seem to be enough to describe how you felt for me, and I knew exactly what you meant. It was almost too much for me to bear, someone who had never been loved, who had spent most of her life curled up in a little ball hoping for just one peaceful minute; wishing for just a moment to not feel hated and yelled at like I had been for as far back as I could remember, and then suddenly to be loved by a man who was larger than life to me, who knew everything, it was overwhelming and swallowed me whole in one big gulp, it happened just like that. And then there was that day when we left the Antique baseball hat for the waitress on the Lower East Side as a tip because she told us she would pay hundreds of dollars for it, that it was a collectors item and we just left it there for her, a tip for a thirteen dollar meal, and that was the day I knew I would love you forever, and forever has just ended for you, and it was true, I loved you for your forever, and it was all because of that hat and the way you uncurled me from my ball and taught me everything.

And then decades passed. A few decades went by like a trip to the movies on a Saturday afternoon, a trip to our favorite Art House Theater in Lincoln Square, maybe a burger afterwards and a sleepy cab ride home with the New York Times under your arm and your head on my shoulder, and then it was all over, the best movie I have ever seen, it had everything: it started with a hat and looped and rolled through years of turbulence and fierce passion, and then years of devoted friendship that turned two people into family, and somehow, brilliantly, the Director, or Writer, managed to turn this average story about a little brown-haired girl in her first year of college and her first time in a big city, and a man with gold-rimmed glasses whose slightly enlarged proboscis was always in a book, two kids who met working at a bar and fell in love, into the story of something stronger than just love, and friendship, and family: it was a story about the meaning of Everything, it was a movie about all that matters, and now it’s over but it changed my life just like every great book I have ever read, that’s how much our story soars.

It was only a few decades, that went by too fast, but this was your lifetime, it turns out, and when you said only weeks ago that you would love me forever, you were telling me the truth because you always told me the truth, you would never lie or let me feel like I was going to be forgotten, that was your gift, you found me and you never let me go just like you promised so many years ago, and you always kept your promises to me. I might have moved away a few times so you could go be in love with a few other women you also met working in a bar, because that’s what you did, although you should have done so much more, you were so smart and your writing was magnificent, but you wanted me to be the writer, you always wanted everything for me because you really did love me more than yourself. I might have moved away but I also came back and we loved again, even stronger this time because our love was just stronger than the plain old regular love you had found and thrown away to have another chance with me.

I might have moved away yet again, years later, right after we had decided to get married, and after all we did not get married because you were never one for paperwork, but that didn’t stop our word stronger than love, it made it grow, if that was even possible, because we became free from relationship pressures, and we became real friends, but not just the kind of friends that always show up or never forget your birthday: the kind of friends that would have done anything for each other for no other reason than, we knew the other would do the same. So our friendship became family just because, again, there is no other word stronger than friendship, and I knew I was your whole family when I watched your parents die, one by one, and you were left with only me, a brother who went away, and a few barmaids that came and went, and so I kept on loving you because of that hat but now because of so much more, you saved my life, more than once, nothing mattered when the Buildings Fell in NY that day except to get to each other, and we kept living that way and that’s why I saw you a week before you died, we had never been apart, really, until now.

So now there is Now. You were preparing me for this, I just know it, our daily talks were never superficial, you were trying to teach me to be more than just this, and I know you want me to fill the world with words because they were the only thing you believed in, and I want to do this for you, because of that time you told me I had more courage than you, that you could not bare your soul on the page as I can, and I know with this you were setting me free to see what I could do on my own.  And I was on my own, for eighteen years before I met you so I know I can live without you but I have a feeling you somehow managed to grow inside of me, and maybe that’s why our love was stronger than love, you were growing in there all along and so that’s helpful to know as I bash my head repeatedly into the walls of my apartment hoping the fresh stain of blood will cover up where you had last touched that wall only weeks ago, and you wrote me that text just after you left town telling me how much you loved me and how happy you were that I am living at the beach and asking what will you do without me. Well, now you will never have to be without me because you are inside me like the pages of a book, a complicated, highly intelligent book about a paradox of a person who was at once wildly social and also almost a hermit who loved to hide in a cabin in the woods under a pile of blankets.  But you never hid from me: and I was the only one who never lost you for a second and that makes me as happy as I can be on a day such a this – a You-less Day, when I sit down and finally really write, just like you always wanted me to do.

There is one memory that sticks out so prominently in my brain that I am almost certain it is You in there, popping your head out once in a while to make sure I am still paying attention to the world, and that memory is not just twenty three Holidays together, or the day in the canoe at the cabin in Vermont when you told me after sixteen years you were"over the hump" and ready to marry me.  No this memory is a car ride with you, one of many, and not the one in which you talked me out of believing in God, but the other one, in which we listened to Dire Straits Making Movies hundreds of times over, and while there was still light I read aloud to you, as you drove, from the pages of Harper’s or the New Yorker, we were driving to Kansas to see our old friend, and we got in a fight along the way and broke up for the thousandth time, which did not stick, for the record, and for those keeping score: it never stuck, not to this day, we were never apart. On that trip you told me you were not scared of death: we brought this up because there was a huge tornado headed our way, but we were still young then, and in later years you became more scared, but only because you wanted to make sure I would always be okay, that’s all you cared about anymore, and it filled your life and gave you purpose, and I didn’t mind because I have always felt all alone on this Earth and it was nice to know there was someone out there looking out for me.

So now there is Now, and no more You, and I am Something, and it all means Everything. But for some reason I feel as naïve as that farm girl who moved to Manhattan to go to college and fell in love with the one person in my life who I just knew would never leave me, and now you are gone and I am not sure what comes next.  I shouldn't be so scared, I should be prepared for all of this, I have all of your lesson plans, you were a diligent teacher, and there was no experience between us from which I did not learn something. I learned whether something was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, I learned from you every second, so now maybe I know Everything, just like you did when I met you, but the point to this all is that I have to get it into that bookstore or it all meant nothing, and all those years we struggled to pay our bills and you slung drinks over the bar to make sure I was taken care of, especially after I got sick and you still wanted me to write because you knew there was something inside both of us and somehow you knew I was the only one who had a chance of getting it out there. I shouldn't be so lonely because there is You in there, talking to me, telling me to care about others and always leave big tips especially for tired bartenders who have worked a long shift.  But I am lonely, and scared, and sad and there needs to be a word bigger and stronger than "loss" because that just doesn't seem to encompass the hole in the middle of my heart where you have always been.  But as your favorite writer, Samuel Beckett, once said, I can't go on, I'll go on. So now, I have to write it all down, for you, because books were not the only thing you believed in: you believed in me.

I will write now, for you.

June 29, 2010

Things to Do:

1. End the Book.
2. Stop writing.
3. Just Be Quiet.

I have been struggling lately to write, because I am not sure anymore what being a writer means for me specifically, and what it means to the people around me. Am I a chronicler of events, I wonder, is it merely the case that I write down what happens around me, or is it inevitable my perspective on things pervade my every sentence? If this is the case, should I simply stop writing, because that seems to be the only way not to hurt anyone? I remember Nelly the Billionaire’s Daughter once told me that I have a “snake tongue”. And she was right, for all her histrionics and fits of rage (and there I go again, instigating my point of view as I try to retell events) she had a moment of clarity: I do have a gift for being able to reduce a person not only to tears, but also causing them to reevaluate their entire character, just because I know how to spin a phrase. People like Nelly, unarmed as I am with the weapons of language and heightened perception, fall prey to my barbs and I’m left wondering why I have lost so many friends; why someone as kind as I am has a list of enemies that would rival only that of Hitler or Bin Laden, and it’s all because I can write, so I have been thinking perhaps its time to put down my pen and quiet the snake tongue for once and for all.

What sparked this recent bout of self-loathing was the fact that my older sister, the one of the white-blonde hair and watery blue eyes, lost her mind last week, and I am not sure, but her downward spiral might have been sparked by a mention of her in my column a few weeks ago. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I rarely ever mean to hurt anyone, but that is beside the point, because I brought her up, and her troubled past with her children, and she sent me a message after she read it, fuming that I had characterized her actions as some sort of abandonment of her children years ago, and I was mildly surprised because I was there, at the time, and there is no other way to recount what happened. I was merely speaking the words out loud, telling the story as it had occurred, even conscious of handling it gently, and it’s as if just reading the words sent her into a tailspin – multiple emails followed, as I quickly backtracked and apologized, and things settled, even seemed loving and sisterly and I glowed into that evening thinking my writing had brought me closer to a sibling I had not communicated with in years.

A week later, my sister lost her mind. Quite literally, and seemingly sparked by some incident with her husband, who was the Best Man in my other sister’s Wedding From Hell (at which my Mother had threatened my Dad’s life and there were fist fights and champagne thrown in faces, police called and ambulances summoned), but I am left to wonder if my snake tongue has struck again, and if my role as The One in Our Family Who Writes it All Down has landed my sister in a mental hospital. It’s a bone-chilling thought, and as I question my part in her breakdown and my self-anointment as Narrator and begin to see myself as someone who is now not just recounting, but possibly causing events to spin out of control around me, the strangest thing is happening to me: I find myself unable to not write about the events of my sister’s past week. Sense needs to be made of it all, and I realize I am the writer's equivalent of the Inmate Running the Asylum but there is no way to leave this out of My Story: the tale must be told. And then, perhaps, I will finally write the two words that need to be written the most right now, because there has to be calm in all this lunacy, there has to be a way to quiet the demons that swirl in and out of my life and the lives of the people around me, and the only way to end it might be to simply write, for once and for all: The End.

Last week began with a series of almost giddy phone calls between family members as there was Big News to be Dispersed: my sister, it seemed, the one who hasn’t spoken to many of us in years, was getting a divorce, and we tried, for all our broken ways of dealing with hardship, to rally around her: calls were made to lawyers, plans were hatched regarding her two small children and a possible custody battle: everyone was gentle and kind, because my family is full of heart and my sister was, at long last, reaching out to us, and that seemed like a good thing as we all have gotten older and are tiring of clichéd family feuds.

But as the week progressed, it became apparent to all of us that something was very wrong with my sister, there was no divorce, only foggy versions of some alternate world she had descended into quite rapidly, and suddenly it was no longer fun to gossip about: she was very sick, and somehow I, the most unstable card in the precarious house of cards we call a family, got the final call from my sister as she clung onto her last moments of clarity before she was admitted to a mental hospital the next morning. That call lasted seven hours, and I, being a good sister, helped find my sister a hotel in the middle of the night to escape the people supposedly chasing her, and my heart broke for her as I have been there before, on the precipice of madness, and there was nothing I could do to help, I just watched her fall over the cliff and cried for hours the next day because this is not just an internet column, or a book, or a television show, or a movie, this is my sister’s life unraveling, and all I can do right now is write, and write and write until the story is over and I am falling into that novice writer trap of not knowing how to wrap it all up neatly because there is no clever way to sum up what has happened.

It’s been ten years since I spent a long haul at a Mental Hospital in Denver, and I was in better shape than my sister is now, I think. I think, but I cannot be sure because we have to wonder whether we can trust our Narrator here, but I think I was just sad and needed a rest. Although I do remember I was quite sure if I took the knit hat off of my head that my head would roll off, and I am still not positive whether my roommate, a homeless girl with a name that sounded like a vacuum cleaner brand, crawled into my bed at night or whether that was in my imagination, but other than that I remember I loved my white pajamas with blue polka dots on them that I had gotten from the Gap and I wore them every single day. My only other memory of that time was trotting down the hallway every few minutes to answer another call on the hall phone, as I have lots of friends and a big family, and I remember trying to pretend everything was better than it was on the phone because I am uncomfortable being the center of attention. I called my sister the other day on the hall phone in her hospital and some guy answered the phone: “Pizza Hut!” and I remember thinking even back then that it was slightly inconvenient that other Mental Patients were answering the phone for me.

It’s remarkable to me how little I recall of that stay in the Mental Hospital: my Best Friend brought me baked goods every day at 4 PM because she worked in a bakery, and I had been visiting her when I had my breakdown so she was the only person I knew in Denver. At the time I didn’t know how serious it was, but now I am thinking this must have been very hard for my Best Friend from Denver to watch me crumble right before her eyes. I remember my Dad brought a friend to visit me in the hospital, some sort of military guy I see every so often on Fox News who was rumored years ago to have been romantically involved with my Mom while they were still married, and my friend from college who happened to be skiing in Colorado at the time brought a guy she had met on the Internet and a cute little outfit from Express for me as a gift.

I can still picture that smart skirt my friend from College brought me: it had flowers all over it and came with a matching blouse. I remember wondering if I would ever get out of the hospital and have a real job to which I could wear such a normal looking outfit, but for some reason I can’t remember how I spent my days in that hospital. Did I play cards with the other patients or did we just sit and watch television all day? Did I have friends in there, and nice, sympathetic doctors? Did I read all those great novels I was always too busy to read? Was I really sick and swatting at imaginary flies, or was I just broken hearted from my recent breakup with my boyfriend? I have no idea anymore, but hearing my sister on the phone last week after they admitted her seemed scarily familiar to me. I have been there before, maybe not exactly where she is, in that exact hospital or in that extreme state of paranoia, but I have been there before and my heart aches for her as I find myself hoping she has a friend who bakes nearby, and a pair of pajamas she loves and a good, sensible hat to keep her head from falling off, because I don’t know how I ever got out of that place but I know I would never like to go back.

While my sister sits in some hospital in St. Louis, there is no choice but to sleepwalk through my days and hope for the best. Maybe it’s just a small bout of insanity, a temporary break from reality, something long overdue for her as she has struggled her whole life with everything – just like everyone in my family she wrestled herself from the grips of the combination of a horrific childhood with a mentally unstable mother, and, I am certain, some sort of genetically obtained mental imbalance. My sister with the white blonde hair fought her way through her troubled childhood while I cried my way through mine – we all had our own ways of fending off the inevitability of a breakdown, and I guess my only surprise this past week is that it took my sister this long to finally give up fighting and lie down in that hospital bed and close her eyes for a little while. I hope this little break gives her the rest she needs, and that that is all there is to this story, because this is a chapter I write with dread and I can’t wait to finish so I can get back to writing about Sarahs, neurotic movie stars and non-committal boyfriends. This is one time in my life I wish I didn’t have a story to tell at all.  For this particular story, please, let this be: The End.