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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 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.