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Not the tree

Dead tree

I stopped at Charmlee Park in Malibu today — one of my favorites — and was reminded how dead southern California is (and it always has been, let’s not blame the drought). There are hopefully worded signs at the trail-head about respecting the “wildlife,” which turns out to be some bugs, a couple listless birds, and maybe a snake. Any object over three feet tall that isn’t a rock looks like it’s been through the wash too often, then forgotten on the clothesline. Beyond the park, the carefully preserved Santa Monica “Mountains” are eroded piles of dirt. Whenever I crest the highest, Sandstone Peak — another of my local favorites — my first impression is always “post-apocalyptic.” If you’d plucked fifteen-year old Tom from New Hampshire and dropped him off the beaten path somewhere around here, he’d have thought he’d awakened in an abandoned excavation site.

If one crops the memory enough, the beauty is there: the terrible, desperate beauty of survival. Acres of brown, wispy plants that cling to life for years without water; cities dangling at the end of hundreds of miles of pipeline; coastlines crumbling majestically into the sea. Is it really any surprise that the people of Los Angeles would become infamous for their “shallow,” “artificial” definition of beauty, when the shallow and the artificial in this landscape are some of nature and man’s most spectacular feats?

But is it possible that there is more to beauty than selective attention?

Even after twenty years, I compare southern California constantly to New Hampshire. The Granite State was a place possessed of many spectacular ways to kill you. One need only look at the license plates for the damage report: a state motto of “live free or die” (though locals preferred “live, freeze, and die”), and a state icon called the Old Man of the Mountain, a rocky outcropping on Cannon Mountain that was “old” its whole life and then collapse in silent agony after a protracted battle with nothing but New Hampshire.

But if my childhood home movies weren’t choked with black flies, if I’d never woken up with ice on my pillow because I “forgot” to fill the wood stove, if I’d never pulled ticks from my head, if I’d never seen a chicken coop emptied of life by a raccoon, could I have ever really acknowledged the majesty, the power, the importance of weeds pushing up from rotting ice, the boom of the wind in a million branches, the way fresh eggs stand up, the smell of newly split firewood? Tourists come for the leaves, natives stay for the trees.

In other words, maybe there are no mountains, only valleys in-between. Maybe there can be no beauty, heroism, joy, or redemption without the terrible soil in which those grow. Maybe love is a choice, not to ignore the bad, but to thank it for what it’s wrought.

In an era of air-conditioning and Instagram and TED Talks, most of us take our daily dose of the epic in small, canned servings, eased into adamantly pleasant lives in the form of bestselling books or social media quotes or inspirational videos. But those moments are as sterile as zoo exhibits or a vase of flowers. 

So lift the hood, take a good look at the greasy, leaky engine of life that takes us everywhere we go. When you realize that the reason that gorgeous white beach with its turquoise waters is so pristine is because nothing can live in that sterilized sand and water, you may lose a pretty moment, but you gain new appreciation for the buzzing, dripping, smelly, alive forest that encroaches upon it. If you let yourself admit that your food choices are an addiction, every skipped snack becomes as heroic as a knight de-horsing another giant guy in like a half-ton of metal. If you pass up a night out with acquaintances who care about only your “best,” you create a space and a hunger for friends who will respect you for where you started. When you acknowledge the fact that your heroes spent the other 99.99% of their lives making your mistakes, then suddenly the path to becoming a hero yourself is a tiny step.

In short, everything is terrible. That’s what makes everything amazing.

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Not a theater

I’ve had few more spiritual experiences than working in live theatre. I say this after 25 years in Christian schools and 39 in church.

My extremely conservative high school had been big on fine arts. A stage opened the door to singing something fun for a change, not to mention dancing. They never said it out loud, but we all got to live up there; the door from offstage might as well have been taken from a closet. I had some memorable experiences with my high school’s touring drama and chorale teams, both good and unfortunate (the older I get, the finer that line gets).

After high school, I dabbled in college, but by then theatre was Serious Business, and I was already spread too thin to invade yet another department.

After law school, I looked for opportunities in Los Angeles for years and found little within commuting range. I went to an improv class in Hollywood for a few months, even though I could barely cover cereal and rent with what NBC was paying me at the time. The teacher would remind us each class to say the first thing that came to mind: nothing was too dumb. Unless you were Tom. In his defense, what would come first to my mind was often a Bible verse or a bar study mnemonic or a New Hampshire expression, not things my classmates tended to recognize. After a few months, I drew the teacher’s wrath one too many times and decided to move on.

Then I started dating a girl who did theatre night and day. As it turns out, the next county from Los Angeles was community theatre nirvana. Gold mine! My fate was sealed.

Some of the cast and crew in the county would roam freely among the local theaters as their favorite productions came and went, but I had fallen in with a different crowd, one that had (often literally) grown up on the bowed, shadowy floors of our particular theater — my girlfriend spent time onstage in utero — and so there I stayed for my two-year career in community theatre.

The theater was a deceptively vast structure, every surface worn concave by decades of sweaty hands and amateur hammers. The walls were covered with hieroglyphics: the signatures of the casts of a hundred shows, crawling impossibly up the enormous walls and disappearing into the inverted forest of chairs and equipment that dangled silent and dusty from the distant ceiling.

I think the autographs were my first clue that I had stumbled onto holy ground. I’ve always had a thing for other people’s yearbooks: a sense of crushing nostalgia for lives that I’d never have a chance to experience. I have drawers of detritus from other lives: a scrunchy I found on a sidewalk; a CD that’d escaped my truck dealer’s attention; a crumpled list of desirable mate traits that fell from a dumpster… My most powerful memory from a week in Oaxaca, Mexico — crammed with food and art and petrified waterfalls — was actually a random alley with a rusty circular staircase and a wind chime and a basket of laundry, which I’ve preserved in a video I replay often. All my sacred shinies, moments of insight into someone’s life.

The theater was a syringe filled with pure, uncut moments like these. Every square inch was sticky with lost memories and expended passion: racks of costumes ragged from year after year of modifications; stacks of recovered boards with screw holes from a dozen sets; a hulking piano that had lived longer and seen more than most of the actors.

If I contributed any moments of my own to that building, they came during Singin’ in the Rain.

To be continued.

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Not a massage

Let’s put it this way.

There was a massive, entirely unimpressed oak tree where the dashboard used to be. The van’s engine was sitting on the floor between the front seats, and it was still running, a fact that somehow unnerved me more than the blood on my sister’s face. My mom was climbing over everything to get back to us. My sisters were crying with an odd lack of enthusiasm, like bored school kids practicing for a Christmas play. I was a lot farther forward in the van than I’d been a few seconds ago — having gone through the bench in front of me, more than over it — which meant Mom was about to cross my path. As she did, I put an arm around her neck and give her a kiss on the cheek. It was the first and only kiss I ever recall in my family that didn’t involve spouses or a baby. My mother would call it the one good thing that happened that day, but perhaps with a little too much determination.

So, no, we were not a touchy family.

Grandma’s theory was that I was going to massage school to find a wife. My actual goal had been to supplement my writing income without even more desk time, but given that I ended up not doing massage or writing afterward, if I had met someone in massage school, Grandma wouldn’t have let anyone hear the end of it.

I liked being in school again: syllabi, tests, new skills. My favorite class was Deep Tissue, even though the real deal proved to be stupefyingly painful. The teacher was a short, hysterically droll Ben Stein clone (“Bueller. Bueller.”) who seemed to have even more fun than we did. He covered (and uncovered) more in an hour than any law school class, and he inflicted a bruise on hundreds of us that no amount of Biotone cream could have mitigated when he lost an abrupt battle with cancer one year after graduation. The string of the ubiquitous disinfectant wipes that he gave my partner and I after our final exam — signed with phrases like “you have reached the pinnacle” — is still among the very small pile of personal possessions that I would rescue from a burning apartment.

My main partner was a small, dark-haired woman, a recent college grad who sought to humiliate me on every exam (at least I hope she did, or I’ve done her memory a very great disservice) and who kept me on my toes in class and on the table. We had as productive a friendship as I’ve had with the fair sex, and nobody agreed more than her boyfriend, who would remotely detonate our partnership shortly before graduation.

Spending several hundred hours around people in sheets desensitizes you thoroughly, but something weird about the hot-stones classes — the late hour, or the very enthusiastic teacher, or the fact that my prior relationship with rocks had consisted of stacking them on walls, not backs — kept me from getting into the right headspace for that one. Shiatsu was easier to absorb than I might have guessed, qi meridians and pressure points arranging themselves politely around computer commands, Bible verses, and masonry tricks in my head. Oscillation was a lot of fun — gently shaking people loose — but the one thing I couldn’t seem to shake in that class was the teacher’s conviction that I always tried too hard. That ruined the class for me, because really, I was in school to win.

That win-all mentality would eventually be adjusted, but not at the hands of a teacher. Massage school wrapped up with 150 hours in the school’s working, public clinic. We were told to practice only our basic Swedish massage, and the clients were told they could have any type of massage they wanted as long as it was a basic Swedish massage. Madness! I’d just finished 500 hours of anatomy, physiology, modalities, science! I wanted to check in with every muscle, predict every response, address every issue … not give people an oil rubdown! Then one day, a client — still in her sheet — asked me to take a picture of us so she could tell her friends what she’d done for her birthday. And just that quickly (and just that slowly), it occurred to me that massage was more about making birthday presents than earning As on exams that nobody was giving.

So that was the end of massage.

I graduated, got my license, and put it on the shelf for a better, future Tom.

Which means, to Grandma’s chagrin, I came out of massage school without anything tangible to show for it, as is my habit. A habit that is a curse, but also occasionally a blessing, like with the car accident. My sister was not as fortunate as me that day: she still has a scar across her forehead from striking the ragged edge of the baby seat in front of her, a defect in the seat design that could have netted us Big Bucks, according to the lawyer who appeared briefly in our living room after the accident. I remember him clearly. He wore an ugly tie. He sweated heavily. When my parents sent him away, he retreated loudly and without grace. My parents told me they loathed lawyers. That was my first impression of the profession of law. Ten years later, I’d go to law school.

I’ve never heard Grandma’s theory about that one.

(photo: Working World)

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Not a TV star

The TV show Heroes was written and shot at Sunset-Gower Studios in Los Angeles, which was fun, because Smallville had been shot in Canada, so most of us in Smallville‘s Los Angeles-based writer/post-production office had seen the actors and crew only once or twice a year.

One time at Sunset-Gower, we were shooting a Heroes “webisode” (a mini-episode for Internet release) and I was on set marking scenes for screen grabs to illustrate a web-based choose-your-own-adventure-style story that would star the same character as the webisode. We were holding for some lighting changes, and I felt out of place just standing there while everyone else was running around — “some guy from the network” — so I went off to one side to look as busy as one could with nothing but a clipboard and five hours of sleep. Around this time, one of the show’s senior actresses came on the set, promptly drawing a crowd of production assistants, writers, and assistant directors. After a minute, I heard people get quiet, and I realized the actress was calling me over. She asked who I was, and we ended up chatting for a couple minutes while everyone else stood there awkwardly for a change.

I enjoyed that more than I should have.

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Not the clock-radio

My clock-radio was dead. I was adrift.

So many of my childhood memories are of things that came to us free. The clock-radio had been old before it arrived on my sidetable. It may have come from the local dump, or been salvaged from one of Dad’s job sites, or been dropped off by Grandma. I didn’t know or care. I’d claimed it the instant it appeared. It was massive, with the clunky buttons and wood paneling of a Vietnam Era station wagon and an alarm that evoked Soviet invasions. I cleaned it meticulously, memorized each button, coaxed new tricks out of the thing like an old bear rescued from a circus. I invented reasons to get up early, even though I was a homeschooler in the woods with places to be only on holidays. I found a couple radio stations that trickled through the mountains, and I determined that these my favorite music, although I invariably woke to commercials anyway. I may have been born before smartphones and Nintendos, but I instinctively seized this thread of my destiny with the violence of a castaway spying a plane.

Then it died.

I couldn’t do anything to coax life from it. I finally even removed its case, slowly, sheepishly, like helping an elderly parent to the bathroom for the first time, but despite my collections of circuit boards (still smelling faintly of the dump from which I collected them) I actually had no idea what to do after that. The thing sat by my bed, day after day, massive, silent, hurtful.

One day my mom put us all in the van. We played on the floor of the giant Econoline while she did grownup things in the department store. She was in there even longer than normal. When she came back out, instead of bed sheets or underwear or toilet paper, she had only a small box. She was smiling like she had wrested it from a dragon in its lair, and we were all lining the windows in silence before she even reached us. She got in and handed me the box.

I don’t remember her exact words. I do remember her smile, the triumph. She had gone looking for clock-radios. At first they were too expensive, but she’d kept hunting with the persistence of a woman who could grow humans in the woods. And she had found one! The whole time that she was talking, my sisters were looking at me and the box with something like awe. One did not receive such special dispensations in a large family, not without the benefit of disease or birthday.

Finally, it was time for me to ruin everything.

While my sisters were dwelling on the human interest aspects of the story, or perhaps what they might get to even the balances, I’d been reading and re-reading the back of the box, all shiny and bullet-pointed. Next I’d studied the picture on the front over and over: so much smaller, sleeker, prouder than the old bear corpse in my bedroom! And there was a reason.

“Mom, this is just a clock.”

“What!”

I remember this part vividly somehow, the piece of the story that wasn’t mine: browsing past the clock-radios, drifting from the land of magic, wandering unwittingly into the mundane, the plain old appliances. Eyes alighting on price tags that finally aligned with what she had in her purse, rekindled hope. Excitement brimming as she returned to the van, eyes on my face.

“It’s perfect, Mom,” I said, too young to know why.

“Really?”

“It’s just what I want.”

She hadn’t believed me, of course. She hadn’t returned the traitorous box and reclaimed her grocery money because she was exhausted, maybe embarrassed, maybe behind on supper. My white lie had been unnecessary, even condescending. I’d replaced my magical circus bear with a dumb monument to clumsy deception.

If I still had that thing now, it would be even more ancient than the old bear had been. Its buttons would be crushed flat, the cheap gold surface worn off by a million touches, its bleeting tinny and prehistoric and hilarious next to my iPhone’s morning aural massage. It would have woken me over 10,000 times, through the cold welcome of high school, the terror of college, the numbing siege of law school. It would have been the harsh reminder of a hundred predawn flights to catch, the red glare over hundreds of overdue projects, the nagging that ended thousands of too-late nights. I would not be able to look at without remembering misspent grocery money and Mom’s falling face. It would be the only thing I have owned for thirty years straight.

I love it with all my heart.

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Not the rent

I’d seen a flyer in the law library and it seemed a little sketchy but I was tired of racing my roommate’s girlfriend to the shower so I drove out for a look. The girl living in the apartment told me that she didn’t want to give it up but she was doing a semester in London and didn’t want to pay rent on it while she was away and I wasn’t really listening because she’d opened the door and the place was so small that if you tripped on the threshold you’d fall out the back window but if you did you’d land on SAND, so much sand and surf and seagulls to the horizon. The rent was half the Los Angeles average, a fact that I was then too new to town to appreciate but which keep me here for the next sixteen years, long after I couldn’t hear the surf and SAND was in the cracks of all I owned.

I’ve changed jobs ten times; my landlord and three generations of their pets have passed away; I’ve outlasted a half-dozen housemates; I’ve replaced my favorite reading chair three times after salt and sun had their way; I’ve brought five girlfriends here, and I’ve also gone years without allowing a soul inside. Some months I’ve never seen the place in daylight, and other months I’ve spent less than an hour away a week. My first pictures of it were taken by cameras with film; my latest are videos with a phone. I’ve clung to this apartment as my most precious possession, and I’ve also raged at it like a cage while thousands of miles away my sisters grew from kids to moms of too many to remember and my parents had brushes with death. I’ve lived in it longer than the house where I grew up; I’ve shared an address with my landlady as long as my mom.

What if I’d never seen that flyer? Lived instead in an expensive Valley condo, forcing me to practice law or leave LA? Would I still love the sun? Would I have still adapted to months without the city and a social circle? Would I have had a dog that I loved or neighbors I hated, or experienced a fraction of the movies and books and games that now pack an imagination like a puzzle box with a picture too big for marriage and mortgage?

It’s cliche that life is the sum of a million decisions, yet half of me is made of one.

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Not the library

Last time I checked out a library book, I had to find it with a card catalog. The library was so crammed with books that I could have taken three steps down an aisle, dropped dead, and not been found for weeks. I emerged from the dim, bulging stacks unscathed, signed a slip drawn from my book’s cover pocket, and walked out, unwitting that a childhood spent utterly in libraries or their product had just come to an end.

This story may be curious to — if anyone at all — those who happen to know that I have continued to read daily, sometimes a book a day. Those thousands of books have come from friends, or garage sales, or the Internet, but not from libraries, and rarely from bookstores, because — I kid you not (much) — about twenty years ago, bookstores and libraries started giving me panic attacks. Within a minute of passing through the gates, my heart would be pounding, my stomach queasy, my hands sweating… Perhaps, in these two decades of desperately trying to keep every opportunity from slipping through my fingers, a library crammed with floors of unread material was an unsubtle reminder that I could not, would not ever do it all.

But today I checked out a book. The Malibu public library is mostly computers, all in use, rows of homeless men, one who sang “Flashlight” the whole time I was there, his headphones trailing down to some unseen device or maybe not. Around them was a single, thin line of book racks. The jackets on the shelves were faded to green or blue. There were familiar names everywhere I looked, brittle and gray, like a trip to one’s preschool. My heart did not pound in this place; my stomach was not queasy. I stayed an hour before selecting a souvenir. A woman who might have been a librarian helped me check out, apparently misreading my surprise at the door computer; she cooed a little as she talked, as if trying to keep my spirits high in this brave first step I’d taken against whatever impediment that had prevented me from using the computers.

In the parking lot I put my shiny County of Los Angeles Public Library barcode tag on my key chain and considered my choice of book. It reminds me of books I’ve liked: written by a young man, because older men write about themselves, older women write about no one who ever lived, and young women write for someone, someone rarely me. The cover has scars in the correct places, probably inflicted by the very person thanked for their donation on the inside cover. I recognize the year of their gift: the year I ran out of schools to attend, the year I began to wonder, deep down, if all of life was a library. It took fourteen years to reach today and learn, if not the answer, then the rest of the question.

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Not the bar exam

The instructions said that at exactly whatever o’clock on that Friday night, you were to type your test and applicant numbers into the web form and press Submit. You would then find out if you passed the California Bar Exam. It’s been four months since you took the darn test, so by this point you’re pretty sure you failed, no matter how you felt during the exam itself. (Me, I’d felt good at first. Then I had nightmares for months, the most common that I’d left too early and missed a fourth day of testing. By the time the results came out, I remembered the nightmares more clearly than the test.)

Unlike most people, my job at the time wasn’t contingent on me passing the bar. But I still needed a win badly. In an 12-week period earlier that year, I had graduated law school without any desire to go into law; found out my family back East had just changed forever; impulsively borrowed a ton of money to study for a bar exam I didn’t need; and watched on TV as planes went into the Twin Towers, which in itself made any plans I did have feel even more stupid and pointless. In fact, what lay beyond that “Submit” button was starting to feel like a verdict on my entire life: if I failed the exam, it put into question my decision to go to law school in the first place, a decision which had taken me away from my family during their most difficult time. In fact, if I’d gone into the Army instead, like I’d originally planned, I might even have been doing something meaningful while people who hated my country took flying lessons and pictures of skyscrapers.

And so went the minutes and hours and weeks before whatever o’clock on that Friday night. But finally it was time, and I Submitted. At which point the website of the State of California Bar Examiners crisply informed me that I “did not appear on the list of successful applicants.” And so. The next moments belong to me and God. (I don’t have any memory of them.) About twenty minutes later, my brain interrupted to point out that several thousand people had just Submitted to the California Bar Exam in that same instant, which in those prehistoric times probably resulted in a small electrical fire in a server room somewhere in Sacramento. So I typed in my exam applicant numbers again and Submitted again. And was rejected again. And then again. And again. For twenty more minutes, I failed the California bar exam, my family, and my country, one Submission at a time.

And then someone or something gave in and unceremoniously announced that those numbers did, in fact, appear on the list of successful applicants after all, and I was free to wallow on with the rest of my life.

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Not a book

One discovery I made soon after deciding to become a writer was that everybody in Los Angeles has a script or novel “in the works” too. I needed to distinguish myself somehow. So in 2002, I set out to, you know, actually write a novel.

Every weekday for four months, I got up at 5:45, wrote for three hours, went to work for nine hours, then went to Starbucks and wrote until they kicked me out. Weekends I spent in the desk chair. Within a few weeks, I started to dream about places in my book. On days off, I would sometimes have this sensation like my main character was somewhere behind me, sitting there in companionable silence.

The most important moment of each night was the ritual of recording my time-spent and total words written on a spreadsheet. Once I put down 8300 words; other days I netted a hundred … or less. One bleak week, I could only find 300 words in five days. But finally, one night, I opened the spreadsheet and discovered that I was just 3000 words from my goal of 110,000. One more scene — already outlined — and the novel would be finished, done, complete. Gone forever.

The next morning, I got up and went to work without writing.

I never finished that book. Thirteen years later, I can still go back to many of the scenes in my head, waiting there silently like a loved one without a living will: not here, but also not gone.