Aftershock

Amazingly, this blog entry, somewhat edited, served as Peggy's eulogy this past Saturday.
I am stunned and flattered that my words were put to that lofty purpose.
...see, there is a reason I am doing this after all. If I had simply shouted down a well, there wouldn't have been any entertainment at the funeral at all.

A Wink to Miss Piggy

When I was six, my mother handed me off to strangers, who led me into a cold room with cinder block walls, painted a shade of warm white and lit by fluorescents bleaching out the day. It was a place of isolation and solitude. It was peaceful and disturbing. It was a gateway. It was heaven. This old, authoritarian lady, smelling of cigarettes, came in and laid before me a Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 and a booklet sealed by an adhesive strip.

"Fill in the bubbles completely and I'll be back in a few minutes." she said as she drew the door closed behind her. In many ways, this was the last time I remember being a completely clean slate in my life. I was pure and unjaded. The moment you break that seal, though, you've unleashed the gorgons of time, you've unknowingly released yourself from the safety of childhood and embarked on a journey of standardized tests designed, specifically, to test your ability to take tests. This test, however, was different...

After I'd finished the bubble filling to the best of my ability, I turned to the last page, which was blank. "And essay?" I thought. Isn't this test little heavy to be throwing at six-year olds? But it was not an essay test. Rather, the directive at the top of the page consisted of one simple sentence that changed the direction of my life: "Draw a picture of a person."

My worn graphite lead seemed sharper, now...brought back to life by the freedom the challenge presented. "I can do anything here! A self-portrait!" I thought. Yes, I knew what I looked like! I'd looked at me thousands of times. And so I drew myself, full-body, wearing my zips, all the facial features, waving to the viewer, and I threw in a wink for good measure.

It turns out that the test was a skills assessment for The Stanley Clark School in South Bend Indiana. Though my reading comprehension was acceptable, I was vying for a choice spot in a class of 40 at a private institution with fierce competition clipping at my heels. I aced the test, but that was not enough to get me in. There was the issue of tuition, which, back in those days, was something like $1800 for the year. Now, I think it's something like $15k. We couldn't afford the school, however, so no matter how well I had done, there were still doctors, lawyers, and professors out there who wanted their kids to et the spot and were willing to pay cold, hard cash to make it happen.

My Mom, recently divorced, had taken a job there for $5.00 per hour as a secretary in order to support her two children. Initially, the idea of sending her children to this school was the main goal, not the measly salary, but we still had to get in legitimately and there had to be a way to pay for it.

Enter the lady who administered the test...Peggy Emery. I used to say, "Piggy Emery" in my head every time I saw her because of her upturned snout. An unemotional woman, a chain-smoker, and an authority figure who was instrumental in setting up the lower school from scratch, Peggy ran this show. As her team sifted through the applications and tests, acceptances to the right, rejections to the left, she dumped mine precariously in the middle. After this first round of evaluations, as was customary, they all stopped for a smoke break and resumed the task a few minutes later. From outside the room, shades drawn and smoke billowing out of the door vent, it looked like a dragons' lair. Peggy once again picked up my booklet and thumbed through it. Her eyes rested on the back page. Something caught her eye and she placed me in the acceptance pile. When it came time to hand out scholarships for students in need, I was at the top of the list. With that small act of recognition, my life changed from ignorance to bliss.

Years later, Peggy would say that the thing that separated me from the crowd was the wink. While other children drew more or less capable figures, mine was to one that stood out because it demonstrated an attribute of thought and action. My drawing made her FEEL something. That a detail so whimsically thrown in at the last minute could matter that much makes it all seem like an accident. That a woman who appeared so metallic and hard on the outside responded to the subtlest of details is incongruous to me. It is a mystery....and yet this is more or less how it all happened. Somehow, Peggy and I always had a connection, though it was never spoken and never acknowledged. I do not think I was her favorite student, but I would always be the one who, as a child of six, made a permanent impression on her psyche.

Stanley Clark was to become my home for the next eight years. I loved it. I loved school and reading and new supplies and lunch boxes. Mostly, I loved belonging to something. Coming from a shattered home, I now had a new family and the lessons I took from that place still have more of an impact on my daily life than did high school, or college, or my education after university. Peggy Emery handed me an identity. In some ways, this tough old bird was a kind of mother to me, a guardian angel who watched over me throughout my years at the school. I don't think I ever appropriately thanked her.

Peggy Emery was a prime-mover, a catalyst for learning, a cultivator of beautiful minds. She died Tuesday after a long battle with an Alzheimer's-like dementia. I don't know if anyone else from my class remembers or even recognizes her contributions to their lives. I do know that there are thousands of people out there who should. Thank you, Peggy.

My favorite Mnemonic

mne·mon·ic /nɪˈmɒnɪk/
Pronunciation [ni-mon-ik]
–adjective
1. assisting or intended to assist the memory.
2. pertaining to mnemonics or to memory.
–noun
3. something intended to assist the memory, as a verse or formula.
4. Computers. a programming code that is easy to remember, as STO for “store.”

Back when I was a kid, they had all sorts of devices to help us get through the hard stuff in school. Acronyms, mostly, for negotiating things like musical scales (Every Good Boy Does Fine for the lines and FACE for the spaces between them), colors in the visible spectrum (Roy G. Biv), the planets in our solar system (My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas). Of course now, the "Pizzas" don't officially count as a planet, but as a moon, so Mother Just Served Us Nothing. A couple of weeks ago on NPR I heard a guy reciting Pi to multiple thousands of places and he did it my relating the number phrases to musical patterns, another mnemonic...and quite beautiful to the ear to hear him do it, too.

There are also mnemonics related to rhyming: chemistry, "do as you oughtta, add acid to watta (water); grammar, "i before e, except after c"; and weatherr forcasting, "Red sky at night: shepherd's delight.Red sky in the morning: shepherd's warning."

I've been using devices like this my entire life. So when I found myself in the middle of car culture in L.A. following so many personalized license plates, I decided to go ahead and personalize the rest of them. If I saw a car with the plate 6frn311, I would call it "sick franny one one." And 3JRS654 would be "eight jurors: 6,5,and 4." I also thought this would be good training if I were in an accident and needed to remember some random numbers quickly. Though it might be jibberish to a cop if I suddenly blurted out "Free Jerry Tutu!" (3JRE022), at least it would stick in my brain to be later descrambled when I regained full consciousness.

When I bought my first car three and a half years ago, I had no idea what to call her, though. This was like christening a speedboat or an ocean liner, or a hot rod. I needed a sexy name. I needed a name with character and style. I needed to name this baby something that no one would expect. Having bought a black VW Beetle, though, nothing sext was really coming to mind. Frau Hitler didn't seem appropriate for a new Bug. A classic one, maybe, but not this one. All of the cool Bug names were taken, in fact, by people with custom license plates. Talk about no imagination! To spell it all out for the common public?!! Nigga,Pleeeease!!!! (Black Bug, people...we know who's allowed to say it.)
Then I thought, well, let's work with the plate and see what we get: 4RNZ258. I sounded it out...for..renze...258? No! For..renz..zo! Now rhyme it! Lor..renz..zo! LORENZO!!!! I had my car's name. It was a new Beetle, very design-ee, creative. It was a reinvention, a rebirth of an old idea. It was dark, like the dark ages...a reinvented idea emerging from the dark...and it was named in honor of a patron of the arts : Lorenzo de Medici. Now given his political entanglements, I'm not certain this was the most politic name, but it would have to do...AND it was a cool name for a car, as far as I was concerned. OK, it wasn't a woman's name..., but women thought it was cute and that's the point of having a car with a little sumthin sumthin anyway isn't it?!! Everybody wins. So Lorenzo it was!.

And so, for the next few three and a half years, I drove that Bug like nobody's business. It wa the biggest bug on the highway, just as Venom was to Spidey, Lorenzo was to Herbie. Bad ass. I would pass people on the 10 and the 101 and shout gleefully, "LORENZO!"...just like the little boy in Cinema Paradiso (Although he said "Alfredo!"). "LORENZO! I LOVE YOU!..." And Lorenzo had character. From the first moment I got into the car, it smelled like crayons. Everyone who sat inside said so. They loved how it smelled and to most it reminded them that the driver was just an overgrown little boy. I put a paintbrush in the flower-holder.

We pushed the limits.
Is it possible to camp in a bug? Yes. Most definitely.
Is it possible to make the SanFran to LA trip in 4 hours and 15 minutes? Fuck Yeah!
Is it possible to get laid in a Bug? Why do you think I wanted all that head and legroom, stupid?!

That little four cylinder Beetle worked like the Blue Ox for me. It got me from unemployment to where I am now. It got me across town in twenty minutes. And it even got me home after making it through a DUI checkpoint when I was clearly blotto.
And for this, I washed Lorenzo routinely, I maintained it regularly, I talked to it frequently, and I never got it impounded. I nursed it back to health when that asshole russian dipshit in his SUV hit me on LaPeer, knocking the front end completely off the car. For months I chanted my mantra: Lorenzo....Lorenzo....Lowenstein...uh, I meant "Lorenzo!"...until he came home, like new again.

But today, when it became apparent that my warrantee had ended, and that my next big car expense would put my fragile financial ass in a sling, and that I was now in a brief golden window to make the most of Lorenzo's trade-in value while he seemed to be having compounding maintenance problems, I decided to have a look-see around the block during my five hours to kill at the Glendale PepBoys. I wandered onto the VW lot and looked at every car and rejected them all until the guy said, well choose one and we'll run some numbers. Somehow it all just worked out and, whereas my big plan today was to spend fifty bucks this morning getting a smog check, my day ended with the purchase of a robust Jetta five cylinder that can shift from automatic to manual transmission on the fly. It's midnight blue. It's sexy.

As I transferred all of my crapola from the back end of Lorenzo to the Jetta, I swear it looked sad to me, somehow droopy and slightly less peppy than my baby boy had been passing all those wankers on the freeway. I took a few pictures and went inside as they drove him back onto the lot. I just couldn't watch.

For me, though, this was the perfect way for our relationship to end. Lorenzo, to me, signified rebirth: my rebirth finding freedom in L.A. after nine years of hitting dead ends in New York. But now, at a tumultuous time which I hope to turn into a personal Renaissance, Lorenzo allows me yet another reinvention of myself, another rebirth. He certainly didn't choose his time to go, but neither does anyone else. I can only thank him for standing by me so consistently.

There are no new plates on the Jetta yet, although I'm thinking of naming it Joan. I'll just commit the plate number to memory or write it down. No need for a new mnemonic device for a while...maybe not even until alzheimer's sets in. But I do know this: even when I'm in my golden years, old and grey, I'm going to remember that little car who befriended me through multiple breakups, one move, fifteen feature film gigs, 12 trips to San Francisco and back, one daring cat evasion, one subsequent cat rescue, and one steamy night on Santa Monica Boulevard in front of God and Everybody...thank goodness the windows fogged up when they did!

No, I'll never forget the most consistent player in my life during my egg stage in L.A....my friend...LORENZOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Z

seven intolerable hours later, it is in my chest and I am taking the medication not prescribed for me by 7 out of 8 doctors, although from what I recall the little mexican woman who sold it to me said that this was the drug for these symptoms and this is the dosage. my temperature has gone from 95.6 to 101.1 in an hour and a half. Time to call mom.

I'm no Joe Pendleton

I've been sick for days, trying to shake a cold that became a sinus headache, that became a toothache, that became an earache, that became pressure on my eyes and temples, that became a migraine, that became a stuffy nose, a runny nose, gridlock congestion, paralyzing coughing fits, phlegm reservoir as big as Lake Michigan, sneezing fits, chills, fever, and a chest cold that brings to mind the clammy depths of Gollum in those underground caves.

It is entirely fitting that at this point, with sleep coming in hour and a half increments, I am almost completely delusional. However, at this moment...1:35am, April 09, 2007, that delusion has granted me clarity.

While I recognize that outside factors may be the agents of change in our internal systems, I believe our health is mostly symptomatic, even the direct result, of the lives we lead. Sickness, while kicked off by a lack of sleep, is due to lack of attitudinal health. Carry around guilt, fear, and loathing, and your body carries it around with you.

So for the past few months, while I have worked long hours and chased a ragged schedule, I have carried a burden of guilt with me regarding the demise of an important relationship in my life that has been collecting bacterial debris every step of the way. I put it in a manageable place and closed the lid. Finally, when the job ended, when I let down my guard, when I finally opened the jar of my emotions, it all came rushing out...foaming, pussing, dripping, screaming, snotting, leaking, and oozing sickness reflecting the confused mess that lives inside me.

As if Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait, I find my body laid up in bed while in my mind I stand in the pillowy clouds of my consciousness, a new unforeseen possibility of a different life sets before me...well, as soon as I shake the fucking cough from this body, that is.

Long Slow Death Monkey

"I have to get this for my friend. It's perfect!" she said.

"Here, let me get it for you. But I think you should have a monkey, too. And I want one. I must have it. I can't not have it."

...so began the ballad of the monkey.

It was our first date and the moment I met her, I knew Heidi was spectacular. Quirky, eclectic, sharp, and willing to go with the flow...she was the female version of who I hoped to be. We met on the street, greeting each other as if we had been friends for years and serendipitously crossed paths at that moment. Of course, the entire thing was loosely staged, but I threw in the curveball of familiarity to see if she could hit the ground running. She was already in full sprint. I remember smiling for a solid couple of hours, mainly because we laughed a lot, witty couple that we were. After lunch and coffee, we headed into tschotchke shop on Franklin St. and looked around, trying to extend our first meeting more than searching for anything in particular to buy.

And so we came across these stuffed animal monkeys that had magnetic hands. The mitts would attach to the eyes, ears or mouth, however one chose to position them, to illustrate the owner's particular attitude about evil for the day. Given the current administration, I found myself wishing for a monkey with three sets of hands. As a revolutionary in spirit, I chose the Che Guevara Monkey, as did she. We got the Brit Pop Monkey for her friend. From that day on, I was simply known as Monkey, perhaps for my mischievous and playful nature as much as for the purchase.

For a moment (it seems like a blink in time now), I...WAS..."MUNKEE"! She would text me and leave me phone messages, always referring to me as her sensitive simian or some such nickname. She sent me pictures of monkeys she found online. She whimsically bought me the flying howler monkey who bellowed when you pulled its arms and shot it across the room. Somehow, the scream reminded us that I was the Monkey and she was the Monkey Lover. She made me a mix tape called Munkee Mix of Love, a nod to her 80's teenage roots. She adored me and I finally had a theme. I gave her a nickname, too, but it didn't really stick, mainly because I didn't follow through with the same consistency that she did. She was solid.

The nickname as my touchstone, we embarked on a series of small adventures. We went to flea markets and shopped for cheese at Laurent Bonjour's cart in Larchmont. We danced in the living room and watched movies. We brunched and kissed. Our lives were spectacular because we shared them with each other. We didn't need plans. We were the plans. Heidi always had her Munkee and I always had her right back. This went on for several months.

Then, as if with the change of seasons, I just just shut down growing emotionally distant, not sharing my thoughts...not having many thoughts, honestly.
In my usual pattern, I let my A.D.D. kick in. As interest waned, I grew tired of the routine. I saw the consistency as mundane, rather than as spectacular. We stopped sharing experiences. It had been months since we'd danced, kissed or hunted cheese on Sundays. When it finally came to an abrupt halt, we hugged and said goodbye in the most unspectacular way. It was just as without tension as was our first meeting....this time there was no laughter, though.

When we parted, I sat in my car confronted by a stuffed howling monkey sitting on the dashboard. He stared blankly past me. What had I done? I pulled its arms and it made its jungle cry. Looking in the mirror, I did not recognize the person who looked back at me.

There sat a stupid ape, devolving before my eyes...

If you are ever lucky enough be become someone's someone, embrace your primal instincts for as long as you can.

Gut Check

A couple of years ago I dated a woman who wanted to be a BIG STAR!
I have a theory that you find out the things that will define your realtionships with people in the first five minutes you meet someone. It's just a theory and not proven by any means, but so far it's held true for me. So in the first five minutes of meeting this woman I knew the following:

I was never going to be more important than her career.
She would always be the biggest personality in the room, no matter how big the room.
We were going to have hot sex very soon.
Her vices were more important in her life than they appeared to be.
She believed she was being sincere when she spoke.

That's a lot to pick up on, right?
As it turned out, she always spoke sincerely, but she acted insincerely. In fact, she cheated on me at least once. She gave me a ring as a sign of her commitment to me and then walked out on me. She welcomed me into her life, but blamed me for holding her back. And ultimately, despite her genuine desire not to be a Hollywood cliché, she ended up breaking up withme and moving in with her manager.
Her main vice was smoking, which she claimed not to do with any regularity, but which she did more and more throughout the entire time we were together. She liked coke, but didn't indulge in it around me. Although we never got into it, I know she resented my holding her back from certain kinds of fun and the manager she subsequently shacked up with has been described to me as "a Hoover." Drinking to excess was often a problem. It was a big problem.
We did, indeed have hot sex.
As someone in a Broadway show, she had a huge persona. But after meeting a plethora of other Broadway people, I found out that they're not all like that. In fact, most of them aren't. There are a lot of lushes and extroverts, but she was more than that. She was the kind of woman who needed to be adored...or to think she was adored...BY EVERYONE. She would often drown out more intelligent, thoughtful, sincere, more creative and talented people.
In fact, her career was job one. She left me high and dry in the middle of vacations for it. Ultimately she left me entirely for it.

A friend of mine, who is a director, said she was impossible to be around because even in a relaxed, social setting she was always auditioning.

Looking back on it, I made some mistakes. I should've seen the signs. I shouldn't have been taken in by her superficial beauty.
In the first five minutes, I also knew one more thing...she was not going to be a star. Her personality, despite its glamour, was painfully ugly...a little like looking at any woman in Orange County, just desperately trying to fit into a hideous mold of "perfection." She will be the woman who gets botox and a facelift that makes her look like she's been through a wind tunnel recently. She will get her ass tucked or lifted or whatever they do to your ass when it loses its tone. She will get the boob job when the manager gets bored of her and younger men stop looking. Although it's terribly hard for me to say these things because I spent four and a half years trying to see the positive aspects in her, the truth is that she has a dark hole in her heart that no one will ever be able to fill.

So yesterday when I met a real woman who is honest and entirely without pretense, who is positive and kind and exudes warmth ...and well, love... I was able to savor the moment a little more than I may have been able to once upon a time.

You gots to know the bitta to tastes the sweet!!

Urban Tumbleweed

Like most people who have transplanted their lives to LA or New York from parts unknown, I too have a mother back home whom I check in with often and who constantly tries to relate her world to mine. It's not always an easy task. South Bend, Indiana and Hollywood, California don't have a lot in common except for strip malls and aliens...only there, the aliens work at blockbuster while out here, they are rockstars and actors.

One of the ways my mother tries to relate to me most often is to apply the wisdom of the Unity church of peace and their generalized laws of coping to my far removed experiences. She commonly utters phrases like, "...this or something better, Lord..." or "everything happens for a reason, although you may not know the grand plan." I guess this is a reasonable approach to making sense of the universe, although I have always subscribed to the notion that if I simply take everything a bit less seriously and roll with it, it'll all work out in the end. I do not need to know why. I just need to adapt. I'm definitely a Darwinian.

So a couple of years ago, upon the occasion of my adopting a cat, my mother was all about the clichés. The story of how I got my cat is a little odd (some say outrageous) so you'll have to take my word that it's true. It goes something like this:

Driving back from a location scouting trip for a film I was about to work on, I sped along at about 80mph on the 134 freeway. It was about 9am and the Southern Cal September sun was beating down. As a pickup passed me, I noticed that the back gate was down. Because I once had an accident where something fell off the back of a truck and hit my car, I instinctually readied myself for this possibility. The pickup looked like a work truck...the kind that always has a lawnmower and gas tank in the back and is driven by Mexican laborers. Sure enough, something fell off the back of the truck and as I swerved to miss it, I realized that what fell off was a cat who upon hitting the ground, somehow maintained its balance and was skating and scrambling along on it's extended claws. The car behind me swerved as well, and the cat, now come to a halt, raced to the side of the highway, jumping over the railing.

As if this fall were not enough, the very spot at which this went down was also on an overpass, so when the cat took its flying leap, it plummeted 30 feet to the asphalt below. As I was on the phone with my Dad at the time, I got off and stopped the car to investigate. In the back of my mind, I was already entertaining the thought of saving this cat. I am allergic to cats, by the way, so this thought made no logical sense, but that's what I remember thinking. To my dismay, when I looked over the railing, I saw a cat with a purple collar sprawled out on the pavement with its tongue sticking out...it was the prototypical image you think of when you envision "dead cat." I imagined x's for its eyes, even. So I got in my car and drove away.

Arriving at Hugo's in the valley, I ran into a friend and told her about the trauma of seeing another living creature fall to its death and she asked me "well, did you go check it out?"

"Yes," I replied.
"And was it breathing?"
Hmmm. I thought for a moment. I didn't really investigate that closely.
What if the cat was still alive? What if it was injured and another animal was terrorizing it looking to scavenge some flesh? Shit...
"I have to go." I said.

So I drove back to Glendale and looked for the exit, but since the swan dive happened where all the freeways converge, it was not as easy as it sounds. Driving the other way, it's almost impossible to identify the spot on the opposite highway, what with the elevated roadways and such. Finally after searching a bit I managed to find the exit where all this madness occurred. I found myself in a strange, barren underworld, like something out of MadMax. Thunderdome was just beyond the railroad tracks. I climbed a fence and came to the landing area, but there was no cat. Damn, I thought, I really would've liked to have rescued that cute cat. It had definitely been eaten. that cat disappeared like a Queen of Hearts at the Magic Castle. I decided to give the search a couple more minutes. I saw a tuft of fur in some weeds, but assumed that it was a dead squirrel or a bit of fluff that accumulates in corners and barren wastelands, an urban tumbleweed.

The fluff unfurled itself to reveal a kitten. It struggled to its feet and tried to stand, reaching out to me in the hot sun. Holy Shit!! It's Alive!! It's so small! How did it survive that fall?!! I picked it up and took it to my car. When I walked in the door with a cat in a box, my friend Bill, who rented me his guesthouse and had a strict "no pets" policy, looked at me like I had crapped on his front lawn. I was pushing the bounds of our relationship...but this was not the time to get into it. I quickly told him the story and he said, "Well you and that cat were meant to find each other." All of the sudden, the dry-witted cynic sounded like my mom.

To make a long story short, I kept the cat and named her Ocho in honor of the life I saw her lose. She has become something of a legend. Because of this cat I found a kick-ass apartment in the Hollywood hills and got a break on rent, made friends with a classic blues musician who incorporated her into the lyrics of one of his songs, and won the hearts of a number of women in LA who are absolute suckers for a story about a man and the pussy he rescued.

So when I think about Darwin, about how only the strongest are fit to survive, I think about my cat. My mom responded with something about "the Divine order of the universe" and that I am "ready to give love to another living creature." That's all fine and good, but the way this cat fits into my meaning of life is much more simple and less mystical than all that: I did what needed to be done.

At some point in each of our lives, we witness another creature in distress when no one else does. It is at that point that you have a choice...turn a blind eye or do something about it. If you see a kid getting beaten up, a motorist who has crashed a car, a women being raped, an animal who is has obviously strayed from home...whatever the case may be...it is your duty to respond. Believe it or not, I have actually encountered every one of these situations and I have always intervened. It may be naive, but I sleep well at night. If you do step in, you can claim to be a part of the human race; if not, you are simply civilized detritus rolling along in the wind.