Hair Cut

Hair Cut

Sometime in November of 2007, my co-worker, Tommy Lee, who wore flip-flops to the office everyday and made more money than I probably ever will, saw me in the lunch room talking to my partner Jeremiah.  I was talking about how I needed a haircut, and how my roommate was trying to convince me to see his friend who cut hair nearby our apartment. 

Tommy said, “You don’t want a girl cutting your hair.  You want a gay guy.  You need to see a gay guy.  I’ll set you up with my stylist.  I’ll cover you, you just pay for the tip.”

“You don’t have to do that.  That’s way too nice.”

“Not a problem, I’m happy to.”

The next week I walked into West End Salon at the corner of La Cienega and Melrose around 7:00 on a Friday night.  I had called Justin, the stylist, a few minutes before and told him I would be there soon.  He said it was fine, he was just finishing up a blow-dry.

I walked into the salon.  It appeared empty.  I read a Men’s Vogue magazine, which featured an article by Dean Wareham, former frontman for the indie rock bands Galaxie 500 and Luna.  I was surprised to see him willfully associating himself with this magazine, but later discovered it was merely an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir.  Regardless, the article provided a feeling of warmth and comfort that few other waiting room activities could have topped.  This was definitely the place for me to get my hair cut.

Justin finished up his last client.  The rest of the salon was empty.  It was a dark Friday night.  Justin rented out his own room inside the salon.  He was an ex-coworker of Tommy’s when they both worked at Skechers Company. 

He asked me, “So, what brought you out to L.A.?”

I considered this an excellent opportunity.

“I left Chicago on August 21.  I had been living in the Lakeview neighborhood, just six blocks from Wrigley Field.  I got sick of living there and one of my best friends from college had decided to move to L.A. with his girlfriend.  They were going to ride across the country on a motorcycle.  I decided it would be a fantastic opportunity, as I was planning a cross-country road trip around the same time and it would be a blast to do it with this particular friend, Sam.   He just said he had to get his bike ready for the trip.  He had recently joined a biker gang called “Fawty Bluntz,” based in Brooklyn.  Anyways, I planned to meet him and his girlfriend at The Lost Sea, this underground lake inside of a cave in Sweetwater, Tennessee.  I couldn’t wait to get this trip started enough.  In hindsight, I wish I had stayed in Chicago until the legitimate end of my lease, August 31.  I lost a dresser, $100, and a good deal of mental reasoning because I couldn’t wait. 

“The first day I drove to Memphis and stayed overnight there.  I stayed the next night there too.  Then the next day, my friend Alec decided to drive to meet me in Nashville where I would be staying for the next two nights.  After that, I drove to Chapel Hill.”

“What, where’s Chapel Hill?” Justin asked.

“North Carolina.  So I stayed a night there and I talked to my friend Sam and he told me I would have to drive to New York because his bike wouldn’t be ready for a few more days.  And I said okay.  Now, the fact is I was waiting to drive to New York until a little over a month later, when my friend Giana was getting married, in early October.  I went to school in New York and most of my friends live there so I decided, I love New York, why not go twice?  So I drove from Chapel Hill to New York in one day.  I met up with Sam and his girlfriend, Kelly, the first or second night there.  His bike would be ready soon.  We would have to drive to her parent’s house in Larchmont, NY, and then we would have to drive to his mother’s house, in Meriden, CT, and then back to Larchmont before we left, because he needed to pick up some stuff for the trip.  After all of this preparation, when we finally made it back to Larchmont, on the eve of our departure, I get a phone call from my dad.  This was on August 27, 2007.  He starts off by saying that something really bad has happened, but that everything is, in fact, okay.  Then he tells me that my little brother Michael has been stabbed on his first day of class at University of Colorado-Boulder.”

“Oh my God,” Justin said, pausing the hair cut, covering his mouth with his hand, “That’s so awful!  Is he okay?”

“He’s fine now.  And I actually talked to him that night and he told me he was fine.  I had been planning to stop in Boulder on my way to California so I would be seeing him soon.  He told me it was fine to do that.  So did my Dad, paradoxically.  Because we left the next morning, and drove to Harrisburg, PA, and I talked to my sister Meredith from a motel room there, and she told me I had to defer my trip to a later date and return to Chicago immediately.  I told her there was no way I was going to do that.  She said she had to go to Boston, and I had to be in Chicago to support our family in this time of crisis.  I told her she just wanted me to go home so I could drive my little sister to school and take care of the pets, so she could move to Boston.  She told me I was the biggest jerk in the world if I didn’t do that.  She started crying on the phone.  Eventually she hung up.  Random friends from Chicago called afterwards.  They had seen my brother on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.  It was a major news story for the city.  The next morning my Dad called me and told me that I must return to Chicago, even though everybody there was flying to Colorado to be with my brother.  It made no sense.”

“We pushed on.  The next night we camped out in Natural Bridge, VA, and that was probably the most fun I had with my two friends on that trip as a whole.  The next day, we drove through the Blue Ridge Parkway, against my wishes.  Though it was very scenic, and great fun on motorcycle, I did not have as easy a time with it in my car, could not keep up with the bike, nor appreciate the scenery.  Later on that day just past Blacksburg near Roanoke, I saw in the back of my rear-view mirror some stuff flying off something.  I thought for a second that it might have been Sam and Kelly’s bike.  Maybe some of their bags had fallen off.  In any case, I thought, they’ll repack it and meet me later.  One thing I got annoyed about on this trip was how much slower I had to move with these two in tow.  I knew we couldn’t afford to stop at too many places.  About twenty minutes later, I got a call from Sam.  He was saying they had a wreck, they had gotten in a motorcycle accident.”

“Oh my God,” Justin said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, it happened.  I turned around and drove to meet up with them at the Progressive Auto Insurance office in Roanoke, VA, and we stayed at a Quality Inn there, and they decided they would have to return to Massachusetts.  Their bike was destroyed.  We never seriously considered piling into my car.  Their morale was crushed.  The next morning they got a rental car and drove to Massachusetts.  I drove to Birmingham, AL.  The next night I drove to New Orleans, and I had a great time there.  The next night I stayed at Houston, and ran up my biggest hotel bill at the Hilton there.  After that, I drove down to see my friend Andres in McAllen, TX, this town I had never heard of before, even though it had a population over 100,000.  It was right on the border of Mexico in the southeast corner of Texas.  I stayed there for a few days, my longest stop anywhere since my three or four days in New York.  After that I drove up to Austin, where my friends Jaime, Matt and Roxanne all lived.  I stayed there for a while too, and that was probably my single favorite part of the trip, to be honest.  After Austin, I should have realized that it was all going downhill from there.  I drove to Oklahoma City the next night and ran up too big a hotel bill and ate at a very expensive restaurant and did not have that great a time.  The next day I drove to Boulder, CO and stayed there for almost a week.  I remember September 11 passed while I was staying there.  After that, I drove to Hurricane (pronounced “Hurri-cahn”), Utah and stayed over there.  The next day I made it to L.A. and stayed with my friends in Venice Beach.”

By then the hair cut was finished.  Justin told me that Tommy had covered the price of the haircut.  I had forgotten Justin’s name.  I think I called him Harry.  He corrected me and told me his name was Justin and I said I should have remembered that because I had a friend named Justyn, only he spelled it with a y.  Justin said he sounded like the type of person that would fit right in here.  I gave him $20 for the tip, because Tommy shouldn’t have paid for the hair cut, I said, and felt bad just giving $10 when it was a $40 price.  Justin was very happy with the tip and I was very happy with the haircut.  That was a very good time, November 2007. 

Pre-Existing Condition

Pre-Existing Condition

                On my resume, I list that I worked for the company Nantucket Homes between July 15, 2005 and July 15, 2007.  That is not exactly accurate but it is a nice round date to use.  This company is my father’s business.  He fired me and rehired me several times.  I spent a month not working before I left.  I had been planning it for a while.  I had about $26,000.00 saved up in my bank account.  Many friends came to stay at my apartment in Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival from July 20th through the 22^nd.  We had a house party the night of the 20^th with a keg and it was a pretty good time.  I had bought a tent from a sporting goods store and we had set it up in our backyard concrete patio In between the apartment building and the six-bay parking garage.  We smoked bowls inside the tent, and after smoking so much and drinking so much beer, I was one of the several party-goers to vomit before the night’s end. 

                Drama that is unnecessary to delve into.  What matters is—why did I want to leave Chicago?  I had only worked for my father.  The job did not provide me much social interaction beyond the sub-contractors we would hire for our projects.  My co-workers and I rarely met except at construction sites, where they were supervising work.  After work I would go back to my apartment everyday and smoke bowls.  I was also working on my first novel—a story about a dozen or so young people in Chicago going out partying and wondering what to do with their lives. 

                On the weekends my roommate Joe and I would sometimes go out to bars and unsuccessfully meet girls.  There were a few close calls, but we were entire failures at this enterprise.  We would go to the Ginger Man Tavern, Schuba’s, Delilah’s, the L & L Tavern, Guthrie’s, and various others, never meeting anyone we could ask to return back to our apartment to smoke with us and sleep overnight with us.  After a while, Joe stopped smoking and I was the only one.

                I would also go running a fair amount.  I would run down Addison St., underneath Lake Shore Drive through a tunnel, and down the Lincoln Park bike path, usually to the overpass at North Ave., but sometimes further, as far as Navy Pier, and on at least one impressive occasion, to Millennium Park.  I felt as if I was in pretty good shape.  However, Joe and I did not get along so much all the time, which was probably my fault.  A year before the Pitchfork Music Festival party we had a problem, for example.   I had gone running and decided foolishly not to speak to him for the rest of the night.  Somehow we managed this odd arrangement all the way to the Hungry Brain, another favorite bar of ours, and somehow we parlayed this into talking to two girls.  At one point Joe went to the bathroom and another guy named Matt, friend to the two girls, arrived, and upon his return, Joe asked me if we should just get out of there.  I flicked some beer from my bottle at his face and then he punched me and stormed out of the bar.  It was the low point of our friendship. 

                But that was in 2006 and a year later we were getting along quite well and the summer just seemed, I don’t know, promising.  But our lease was up in September 2007 (we had extended it by five months after our initial sixteenth month run).  We were at a crossroads, and rather than continue on this path that had been so repetitive and deadening to me, I thought about this road trip.  I had it mostly planned out by the 4^th of July.  I would escape the grip of working for my Dad.  I would leave everyone I knew in Chicago behind and go back to seeing old friends who had better ideas of what to do with themselves in various other parts of the country.  The money was there.  I gave no thought to my extended future. 

                Sam decided he would move to L.A. with Kelly since he had a friend living out there.  We planned out complicated paths cutting through the United States.  My relationship with my father grew more and more careless as I stopped worrying about going to work for him forty hours a week.  He finally fired me and offered me a lucrative severance.  I packed all of my stuff out of my apartment and dropped it off in my parent’s house.  My LCD flat screen television, my stereo—everything I could fit in my car.  I left the essential items to travel with inside the apartment.

                Two nights before I left my friend Chuck wanted to have an appropriate farewell blowout.  Joe was out of town, at a wedding.  It was an unceremonious goodbye between us, none I can remember.  But Chuck told me to meet him in a bar with his sister there and her friend.  We had a margarita or two and then we got in a car, and none of us had any cash on us.  I was saving for my trip and I didn’t want to spend anything.  I ended up giving my last forty dollars in my wallet for a cocaine fund—Chuck was going to meet his dealer friend named Dream.  We rode a cab even though none of us had any money and Chuck’s friend Mike waited at the corner for us and paid off the cab driver.  We met the dealer, bought the coke and went into the night club there.  It was $10 to get in and Mike paid for us, again.  He had two Latina girls that he wanted to spend the night with, but we went out into his car parked a couple blocks away to do some of the coke before we went back into the club.  In the course of this, I went outside to pee in an alley and a woman drove up in an SUV and just stared at me going, and then stared at me walking back to the car.  We went back to the club and the bouncer wouldn’t allow us in because he saw some white powder still in or around Mike’s nostrils.  He promptly threw a fit and the girls talked to us outside briefly and then we got back in the car and drove around, it was about 3:30 or 4:00 AM at that point.  They wanted to find a bar still open in Wicker Park, but I told them it wouldn’t happen, and it didn’t and we spent another thirty minutes walking around there aimlessly.  Finally I convinced them to go back to my apartment, which no longer had a stereo, which was pretty much empty.  They did a little more of the coke and thankfully left soon after that and I went to bed just wanting to die the whole time.

                I don’t remember what I did the next day.  Maybe I picked up my new pair of prescription glasses that I bought on Broadway in Boystown, across the street from Reckless Records.  I thought the frames were cool.  But looking through them hurt my eyes a little bit.  I could see clearly through them, but it strained my eye.  It’s difficult to explain.  They just didn’t work as naturally as other glasses.  I was sure the prescription was correct though as I had just had a recent eye examination at the ophthalmologist for this very intended purchase.  I still have the glasses but now I mostly just consider them uncomfortable and it was pretty much a waste of $300.

                There were also the Kanye West-style big bug-eyed, thick white framed glasses, that I considered super cool, even though they didn’t have a prescription like my regular Ray-Bans which would always fall of my face whenever I leaned it towards the ground.  But I had bought those earlier and it is not worth getting into.  They were just a cherished item to me, and they had cost about $13. 

                I don’t remember what I did the day before I left.  Probably just packed my car and made final preparations.  Whatever I did, it wasn’t good enough, because the security deposit came back $100 short because I had left several items there that I had presumed my parents would remove from the premises.  But there would be a big rainstorm in the city a couple days after I left, and there would be a big mess in our basement, with most of the flooring destroyed, and their attentions were obviously focused elsewhere.  I just wanted to be out on the road, staying in hotels, smoking bowls, swimming in pools, drinking at bars, meeting people, having real life experiences.  I wanted to be with my friends again and have it be like it was before—when everything just worked out for us because we had exuberant attitudes.  Sam said we could get to L.A. and just start writing our own television show and get paid six figures.  He said it was so easy.  All you had to do was write crap.  I didn’t really know Kelly’s story.  I think she had dropped out of NYU after her freshman year or something.  She really seemed to love Sam and would trust him with all of the details of the trip.  I had met her a couple times and talked to her on the phone once when I had wanted to ask out this girl who was a secretary for the creative writing workshop studio that I had taken a class at in Chicago.  Thankfully when I went to ask this girl out she wasn’t there, because I later found out she had a boyfriend and it was completely out of the blue and would have been a totally awkward rejection. 

                The next day, August 21, I left for Memphis.

LSAT Prep

LSAT Prep

                I had signed up for an LSAT prep course, administered by Kaplan.  I had been telling people that I would apply for law school in the fall of 2008 for a fall 2009 enrollment.  I had talked to people about recommendations.  I had bought the Kaplan LSAT test prep book in March.  I had taken two tests.  I had originally signed up for the June 16, 2008 test date, but found a week or two before that I was not appropriately prepared, and changed my date to October 4, 2008.  On the two tests I believed I scored 147 and 150.  My friend Mike, who will be finished with law school in a few months, told me that I should take a Kaplan course if I didn’t score 160 or above on the practice tests.  Well, I signed up for the class, and it was beginning in early August 2008. 

                I had been working for M.L. Stern through my employer in Los Angeles, Accountemps, since July 14.  There was very little work to be done in my full-time eight-hour capacities.  This left me with an incredible amount of time to research law school (note that I was not researching specific schools, but the application process in general).  I had begun reading personal statements and started working on my own.  I stopped myself at doing test prep or writing at my workstation—I would only read on the internet.  But I signed up for that Kaplan course—and one of my attendant anxieties was the location.  I signed up for the UCLA location over the Downtown location—even though my home was closer to Downtown.  I just thought hanging out in Westwood would be more fun.  Plus the schedule was more flexible at UCLA, because half of the classes were on Saturday morning, which was better for my work sanity.

                A few days before my first Kaplan class, I decided I had to take my third and final practice LSAT.  I started around 5:00 in the afternoon, setting aside three hours for my time.  I couldn’t keep up at a standard pace to finish all the questions.  The first section in that particular practice test were the analytical reasoning logic games.   I had forgotten all of the tactics I had learned in the book to attack these problems and a wave of anxiety crushed me as I figured I got about zero of them right on that section.  By the time I moved into reading comprehension, on the next section, I was totally demoralized, worrying about how I would find the time to get dinner, worrying about how expensive gas was, worrying about working on my personal statement and my applications while doing this incredibly intensive prep course, worrying about paying for law school application fees when I barely had enough money to live on every month, after the rent, the cable bill, the cell phone bill, a few hours at the laundromat every two weeks, and food, at which point I had figured that I had $20 to live on every day after all of my required monthly expenses—and that $20 had to include gas allowances, car insurance allowances (another $100 a month plus to allocate, if I had been considerate of that).  After I had made these calculations I decided I could no longer afford to smoke prescription weed—for anxiety—which came to roughly $240 a month, quite a heavy expense to carry.  These thoughts rushed through my mind as I tried to focus on the LSAT test questions and in the middle of the second section I threw my arms in the air and gave up and smoked a bowl—which would be one of my last ones—and thought about how much of a failure I had become.

                The next day I called my Mom and told her I thought I wanted to go home.  I talked to my little sister Emma and told her that I was thinking about coming home and she was excited, as was my older sister Lindsay.  I talked to my Dad after and told him that I wanted to cancel the Kaplan course and cancel my LSAT registration and put it off for another year—even though I was already insecure about my prospective age going in to start law school.  He was remarkably sensitive and told me it was fine, just to refund him the money that he had sent me in order to pay for the course—some $1,300.  Later I found out I had to pay a $200 lease termination fee to my apartment management company and he was generous enough to pay for this as well.  Three weeks later, on August 27, 2008, a year to the date that my brother had been stabbed, a year to the date that I had been making our final preparations for our trip to depart from New York, I left Los Angeles and proceeded northeast.  I would stop in Boulder for a few days as a midway rest point, and I would be in Chicago the night Sarah Palin introduced herself to the world at the Republican National Convention.

Mystery Train and the Blue Monkey Bar

Mystery Train and the Blue Monkey Bar

                August 21, 2007: It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash.  We killed my parents and hit the road. 

                The only time I got lost through all of my map-quest trip planning was in the city of Chicago.  I got confused trying to find my way south out the city and probably wasted about an hour of time getting onto the wrong expressway.  In this time I made a playlist on my iPod while driving.  I do not recommend trying this for anyone.  It was horribly dangerous and I could have easily died before I had any fun, with $26,000 to my name.  Perhaps it would go to a highly-respected non-profit charity organization. 

                I should admit something.  Okay, two things.  First of all, I had facetiously told my parents that I was going to spend all of my money on the road and then kill myself.  Of course they didn’t like hearing this.  But I did have a dark plan in the back of my mind.  I did not see any way to succeed in this world.  I had been a total failure of a human being in Chicago.  I had suffered through loveless misery for far too long a time.  Here was the interesting part: Sam had a friend named Zach who had disappeared on the Pacific Northwest peak Mt. Ranier a year or two before.  Sam believed that Zach was still alive, and that we would go to Mt. Ranier and look for him.  I looked forward to this immensely, because Portland and Seattle were two of the cities I had been most interested in visiting for several years.  I also thought that maybe, if we didn’t find Zach, I could pull a Zach on my own. 

                The second thing: I am obsessed with indie rock.  It is the only thing in life that gives me joy anymore—smoking cigarettes in my car, blasting indie rock, singing along.  In my first two novels, I always include lots of my favorite songs and use their lyrics to highlight particular emotions which I have shared.  I wanted to say, if I had to pick a song to encapsulate my experience of living in Chicago between January 2006 and August 2007, it would be the Wipers “Window Shop for Love.”  And if I had to pick a song to symbolize the beginning of that road trip, that leg of the journey between Chicago and Memphis, I would pick the song that I chose to start that ill-advised playlist made on the expressway: “Letter to Memphis” by the Pixies.  When I realized I had found the right road, and was now on my way, I started up the playlist, heard this song, and felt a sense of total communion and happiness with the world around me.  I was living my dream and I couldn’t have been happier. 

                Five or six or seven hours later, I was in Memphis, and I found my hotel, the French Quarter Guest Suites, which was not close to the downtown area, but which was not very far away either.  It certainly was not in walking distance but it wasn’t more than a ten or fifteen minute drive.  I checked in, got to my room, which was $50 a night for a two-room suite, with a couch, two televisions, queen-size bed, and a whirlpool bathtub (the element which made me book the place).  I took out my bong—which I should introduce the reader to—the Ghost of Condoleezza Rice—named as such because it was the replacement for my previous bong Condoleezza—named as such for reasons that are relatively unclear at this time, but which I still find appropriate and hilarious (there were annoying rings on it that you could use to grasp it, but they always felt like they could easily break).  I took out the bong and smoked up and played music through my shitty laptop speakers.  I looked through the guest services guide and found that there were a few restaurants open at this relatively late hour nearby.  The Blue Monkey Bar appeared interesting and I decided that would be the place I would get dinner.  I picked up my copy of This Side of Paradise, put it in my messenger bag, left the hotel high as a kite, and walked a few blocks to the Blue Monkey Bar.

                I drank Bass beers there and am not sure what I ate the first night—probably chicken wings and mozzarella sticks—two of my favorite foods.  I had three or four Basses and was pretty drunk.  I sat alone in the corner, reading my F. Scott Fitzgerald, occasionally glancing at the other bar patrons, hoping that I could start a conversation and convince them to come back to my hotel room and smoke and spend the night with me.  But I was not so ambitious the first night.  I received my bill and found it to be surprisingly cheap.  The Basses were $2 each.  What a deal!  I loved Memphis.

                I had been excited to come to Memphis primarily because of the film Mystery Train, directed by a fellow alum of mine, Jim Jarmusch (if he is thirty years older than me, it makes no difference, we share indelible experiences).  I loved the final part with Steve Buscemi and Joe Strummer and I wanted to get drunk in the same area and smoke cigarettes and act like a badass.  I had no job.  I had picked up a carton for a very good price in Missouri.  I had nothing to prove to anyone and I had $26,000 to my name.  Well, now more like $23,000, after what I had spent in Chicago before I left.  Later I watched Mystery Train in Los Angeles and saw a familiar sight in that third part—a boarded up theater which I recognized as being a few blocks from my hotel. 

                I went back to my hotel room and Lost in Translation was on HBO late at night.  I smoked a bowl and watched the final scene of that movie, when “Just Like Honey” by the Jesus and Mary Chain is playing, and I felt totally happy and thought about how I was going to try to meet Scarlett Johansson when I finally made it to Hollywood. 

                The next morning I had breakfast not too far from my hotel, close to that aforementioned theater seen in the movie.  I read a short story from the Roald Dahl book Skin, which my creative writing workshop friend Dave had given me at a Sangria party he had thrown a week or so before I left the city.  I saw an advertisement for a studio apartment in Memphis--$400 a month.  I thought, what a deal!  I should get some friends together and we should all move here—it’s a wonderful place. 

                I loved Memphis, and I drove downtown that day to go to the Beale St. marketplace (or whatever it was called).  I should also mention that I came at the perfect time.  We were right at the 30^th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.  Signs of Elvis were everywhere.  Signs said, “Welcome Elvis Fans,” as Elvis tourism was probably at peak numbers the same two nights I stayed there.  I bought a poster from a store on Beale St. that said, “Devil’s Harvest—a good girl until she smokes a reefer!” picturing a 1920’s gentleman with a 1920’s flapper having a marijuana cigarette.  The man in the store was chatty with me and I talked about how I was from Chicago and used to live right by Wrigley Field. 

                At the moment, the Cubs were beginning their improbable run to the playoffs in 2007.  In 2006, the Cubs had one of their worst seasons ever.  I felt I had brought a curse on them by moving so close, and had suffered for it.  In 2007, just when they made the playoffs, I had to move away.  And in 2008, when they had one of their best seasons ever, I had to be in Los Angeles, and then in the suburbs the day they clinched, not six blocks away like before.

                I went to a mall downtown and bought tickets for an evening show of Superbad, a movie that had come out the previous weekend.  I went to a record store called Goner Records and bought a Be Your Own Pet single—“Damn Damn Leash”—and also a Richard Hell album “Spurts: The Richard Hell Story,” which I had wanted to get for about a year.  When I checked out I got a free bumper sticker, which now is on the top side of my laptop (I was about to say I didn’t remember the name of the store until I realized I had this sticker in a prominent place) and I asked the guy what he thought about Be Your Own Pet.

                “Are they good?” I asked.

                “Yeah, they’re good.  I’ve seen them once.”

                “Aren’t they from here?” I asked.

                “They’re from Nashville.” 

                Which was where I would be the next day.

I went back to my hotel room beforehand and smoked a bowl and wrote about Chuck Klosterman.  I had just finished reading Killing Yourself to Live and I wrote about how Chuck Klosterman had anticipated my literary style before I had been published and therefore was a genius.  I drove back downtown and had no problem parking.  Memphis may be a city big enough to have its own NBA team but it is never so crowded that you feel superfluous, like in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.  Everybody there seemed very much at peace with themselves and the world.  I could not sense any racial tension or resentment, which I could definitely feel in parts of New York or Chicago.  The prices were cheap, the businesses were performing and the people were happy.  I watched Superbad by myself and thought it was one of the funniest things I had seen in a while. 

                Later I went back to the Blue Monkey Bar for the second night and ordered a filet mignon and more Bass and worked on a letter to my friend—who figures very prominently in this story and probably does not wish to be called by his real name—Sycamore.  As I wrote this letter, waiting for my food, a girl came up to my table.  She asked what I was writing and I told her a letter.  She told me one of her friends at their table over there had been at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  I told her I had applied to that MFA program a year before and hadn’t gotten in, but that her friend was very lucky and cool.  She asked if I wanted to join them and I said as soon as I finished my steak I would move over to the table.  She left, my dinner arrived, and before I had finished, they had left.  This made me sad. 

                However, I met another group of people closer to my age.  One girl, named Caitlin, came up to me.  She was with her boyfriend, who had tattoos.  They had a couple other friends with them.  They were very welcoming to me.  I remember hearing the song “The Underdog” by Spoon in the bar, and writing to Mike that Memphis was super cool because they played indie rock songs in random bars, this before I knew the song had become something of a pop singles chart hit.  Also, “The Heinrich Maneuver” by Interpol—and the albums those songs had come from had come out on the same day and I had bought them.  We had a couple drinks and then this girl came into the bar.  She looked just like Edie Sedgwick—or more accurately, Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl.  Her name was Brittany.  I told her this at a moment of drunken glory and she was the friendliest girl I had met since my college years in New York—friendlier than any girl I had met in Chicago.  I asked her if she knew who Edie Sedgwick was and she said she did and that was a huge compliment.  What a girl!  I will never forget that face simply because it was such the spitting image of that famous socialite’s. 

                The night wore on and my new friends told me they were going to a bar and I should meet them there.  I ran back to my hotel briefly to get my car.  I really shouldn’t have been driving.  I was wasted.  I got lost looking for the place and found it shortly thereafter.  It was around 3:00 AM on a weeknight.  They all cheered when I showed up at the bar.  I felt like I had become part of their clique in just a few hours.  What great people Memphis had!  So friendly, so open-minded.  I was not at this second bar for more than an hour as it was getting very late.  I thought about inviting them over to smoke with me, but decided they probably wouldn’t have wanted to, for some reason. 

                The next day I had to check out by Noon and I was late and slow getting up.  I probably checked out around 12:15.  I was very hung-over.  It was okay though—the drive to Nashville was shorter than usual, only a few hours, three or four.

The Hike on Mt. Wilson

 The Hike on Mt. Wilson

               

Almost exactly five months ago today, on May 5, 2008 (today being the milestone date of November 4^th), I went on a hike with Sycamore and Molly, and a large group of co-workers and friends of co-workers from her workplace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a.k.a. NRDC, a.k.a. Nerdic.  Some of these people included Erin and Nathaniel whom I considered two amongst my very few friends in Los Angeles, Bart, an outdoor enthusiast and trailblazer, Jessica, a co-worker at NRDC who was very cute and who I would meet out one night a couple months later and not recognize, and Margaret, another co-worker at NRDC who I briefly had a crush on after first meeting her in late 2007 until I realized I was most assuredly not her type. 

                I drove with Sycamore and Molly and Margaret in Molly’s parents Toyota Prius, which they would borrow on again and off again and which was a great treat to them, getting significantly better mileage than their usual vehicle, an occasionally unreliable Subaru Outback.  We drove through the San Gabriel Valley, where Margaret had grown up.  We drove for about an hour and a half.  We got lost along the way a little bit.  Eventually we met up with everyone at an outdoor supplies store.  There was another group of people that none of us had met before, and after we left from this initial meet-up spot, to continue on to the hiking launch point, we saw them stopped on the side of the road.  They had pulled over and everyone in our car was very confused by their apparent inability to follow instructions.  We laughed, thinking they had no idea what they were doing.  We could hardly consider that they had their own reasons.  Eventually they met up at the launch point not much later than anyone else.

                We began the hike.  I did not realize it was going to be about ten miles and it was going to take us about eight hours.  We had somewhere between fifteen and twenty people in tow.  Most of them environmentalists, many of them vegan or vegetarian, and the majority of them seemingly happy, healthy individuals.  I reached for a cigarette and everyone started berating me. 

                “You’re going to start a fire!” they said.

                When I finished it, I was careful to put it out safely and calmly, making sure that no embers caused larger flames.  I buried it in a sandy part.  Behind me, Molly unburied it and started carrying it, to throw it away at the end of the hike.  I told her she was ridiculous and I put it inside a plastic bag inside a backpack pocket.  I argued with her and her co-workers about how forcing everybody to follow such a strict code was impossible, there were still people in nowhere towns in middle America that would never recycle no matter how much you convinced them it was essential to our survival, and how people would still always litter, etc.  I called them Nazis.  I was probably a bit out of line, and now I consider myself something of an “environmentally conscious” person—after I did some work for NRDC myself—and I deeply regret how poorly I failed to adjust.

I talked with Sycamore for a while and probably complained about feeling like none of these people would accept me, that I was one of the few odd persons out.  I don’t know what I must have talked about.  At some points during a hike, you may find yourself running at the mouth for a while.  You are just walking, climbing, heading down a pre-determined path, in search of natural beauty, or a scenic overlook.  You push forward and you talk about random things, but I must have had a rather negative bent because the two people I considered my closest friends on this hike had seemed to grow tired of me.

                “You know, it’s really easy to shit on everything,” Sycamore had said to me. 

                I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but it sounded like he was just exasperated with my negativity.  Later we had lunch, and Sycamore climbed a tree in the area, and I told him it would be awful if he fell because we still had several hours of hiking left and it would not be easy to carry on in an injured state.  After lunch, I think I had another cigarette, far away from everyone and no one seemed to notice or care.  Then we continued hiking some more, and as I recall this period was relatively free of peril.  Then we came to an impasse.  We could either continue the hike, up to the top of Strawberry Peak, or we could turn back and wait at the car for everyone else to leave.  I would have just as well gone home at that point, but Sycamore and Molly wanted to go to the top and I figured, it was wait and do nothing at the car, or it was go on, get some more exercise (even though we had probably done well enough for ourselves already), and see some height-enhanced beauty.

                Well, my complaints took on an even more absurd form at this point, as Molly began to grow tired and they began to fall back from the pack.  I caught up to Margaret and Bart and told them that I think I had offended Sycamore and Molly, that I had crossed the line somewhere.  I told them they were going too slow anyways, and the only reason I was going up was because they wanted to, at which point they probably wished they had never invited me to come along.  Well, Bart, Margaret and I made it to the peak, and we waited for Sycamore and Molly to join us.  After about ten more minutes they did, and I was so happy to finally start our final descent.  I lit another cigarette in celebration and this exasperated everyone.  At one point Molly started saying something about how I didn’t care about anything.

                “I care, I care!” I said.

                “No, you don’t!” she insisted, finally sounding as if she had reached the end of her rope.  It took us awhile but we finally met up with everyone else about forty-five minutes later, and I was able to throw out my three cigarettes in a garbage can.  Erin and Nathaniel had wanted us to follow them in our car and meet us at a place for root beer or something and we did, and we found the place was closed.  We rode with Margaret for a while and she talked about wanting to read William Faulkner.  One thing she and Molly had talked about that day was how they were the only two members of the LOVE club: Left-handed, Only child, Vegan, Environmentalist.  I don’t know why this pissed me off so much—maybe because I was left-handed but none of the other three and I felt left out. 

We got back to the supply store and Margaret switched cars to go back to Santa Monica and it was just me and Sycamore and Molly to go back to Silverlake, for me, and Hollywood, for them.  We didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.  Finally, after we made the final turn for the street, I had to make my apology.

“I just wanted to say, if I upset you with anything I said today, I hope you can forgive me.”

They didn’t say anything and I got out of their car and they drove home.  I didn’t hear back from them until May 23^rd, when they were the only people to show up to my housewarming party.

That night I was excited because I was going to drink a bottle of wine and read the Dennis Cooper novel Try—the same manner in which I had read it some four and a half years earlier, in Paris.  The experience was not disappointing.  A couple weeks later I would send out the invites to my housewarming party.  I sent an e-mail to Nathaniel asking him if Sycamore and Molly had ex-communicated me.  He said he didn’t know anything about it—maybe they just needed some temporary space.  He said that Bart had said we probably shouldn’t have climbed to the peak for the sake of all of our sanities.  I had been very bitter for a few days, that they had told me I should move to California only for them to turn their backs on me, and I had started work on a novel with the theme being all of my closest friends eventually betraying me.  I was very happy when they proved me wrong and things went back to normal.  Still, I feel now that I had been a child who had been given a “time out.”

Company in Nashville

Company in Nashville

                My friend Alec had called me when I was in Memphis and said he was thinking about getting away from his parent’s house for a couple days—would it be okay if he drove down to Nashville and took a mini-vacation with me?  I told him of course—I thought it would be great to have company so early on in the trip.

                It wasn’t that bad of a drive from Memphis to Nashville and I had picked out a Comfort Inn hotel at an area that seemed convenient, and it actually wasn’t.  The hotel ended up costing over $75 per night, and I would stay there two nights.  It was off a highway exit about nine or ten miles from the downtown area of Nashville.  I arrived in the late afternoon and waited for Alec.  I went on the internet and found out Modest Mouse was playing a show at the Ryman Auditorium the next night.  Johnny Marr had recently joined the group and I had been very excited to see them in this rather inspired incarnation.  Alec arrived sometime around five or six, not much more than an hour after myself.  We smoked a bowl or two and I played him “Chinese Rocks” off of the new Richard Hell album I had just bought and referred to it as the greatest song about drugs, ever, which in hindsight sounds a bit overblown.  We decided to try to find the “honky-tonk” bars on 6^th St. We stopped in a Jack-in-the Box across the street before we headed downtown.  We found a microbrewery restaurant and had a decent meal and asked the waitress where we should hang out and she told us to go to the Flying Saucer, which ended up being a pretty cool bar, I guess.  After we left we walked past this hotel that had been built out of a renovated train station and were quite moved by its magnificent architecture.  Also notable was a building part of Nashville’s skyline that appeared to have some kind of empty box as its antenna.

                The next day we went to Bell Buckle, TN to visit my college friend Kristen, who had recently taken up a teaching position at the Webb School, where she had gone to high school.  It took us a little over an hour to get there from Nashville, just past Murfreesboro in a tiny town called Bell Buckle, which mostly just contained that school.  For a while I thought I had gotten lost on my mapquest directions, but it turned out alright.  We talked with Kristen for about an hour in her faculty-appointed apartment inside a dormitory.  She seemed happy and it was sort of unreal to be seeing her.  I was so glad I was able to make it to such a random locale.  Afterwards we walked around the campus a bit.  I think she had a dog that she had recently gotten and we had taken it for a walk.  At the end of it we posed for a picture.  Alec and I went on our way and we stopped for gas, and I called my brother-in-law Steve, who had gone to school at Vanderbilt, and I asked him what he used to do when he went out in Nashville.

After that, we went to Grimey’s Records, which was one of the best record stores I had ever been to.  They had in-store appearances from Liars coming up.  It was a small store, but they had everything I could have wanted.  I think I bought a used version of the Nirvana Unplugged in New York album there.  I also bought the New Pornographers album that had just come out, Challengers.  We also went to a used bookstore and I bought a copy of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  Then we drove past the Ryman Auditorium as people were beginning to line up around for the Modest Mouse show, and I managed to buy a ticket off of someone there and I was very happy.  We drove back to the Comfort Inn and Alec said he was going to go and I took a shower and smoked another bowl and drove out and found a good parking space and walked into Ryman Auditorium and sat down next to a young couple. 

The guy seemed a little bit drunk.  I think he was drinking from a flask.  He asked me what I was doing in Nashville and I told him about my road trip and he got very excited, telling me that I was living his dream for when he got out of college.  I talked to another young couple on the other side of me and noticed that Interpol would be playing at the Ryman Auditorium soon from the flyer the guy was holding.  I asked if he was going to see them and he said he would probably just go to the in-store appearance at Grimey’s.  I couldn’t believe Interpol would even be going there—that store was great!  Soon after Modest Mouse took the stage and played a wonderful show.  We were all in benches there, it reminded me a bit of sitting in pews at church, but everyone was standing up and swinging back and forth to the music.  At the end I went back to the hotel, probably got some fast-food for dinner, and went to sleep.  Chapel Hill was next.  Nashville had been somewhat interesting, but I had to admit I had more fun in Memphis.  

Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

                It is time I make a bold announcement: this volume is being written in 30 days, for the sake of the NaNoWriMo contest.  One of the rules of this contest is that you must complete 50,000 words in one month of entirely new writing.  I am about to cheat a little bit.  I will make my target above 50,000 words by however long this, and ensuing (if any) cut and pasted sections contain.  For example, this is 978 words, so my new target is 50,978 words.  You may think I am just swimming against the current, but one of the most important elements to this story of Los Angeles is introduced herein:

So I’m sitting laying down on my dermatologist’s operating table, waiting somewhere in the range of thirty minutes for her to enter.  She enters.

“Oh, you’re making yourself at home I see!”

“Sorry, it was more comfortable than sitting up.”

“Oh that’s fine, I’m sorry, the 5:00 rush.”

She asks me a few questions about what I am taking (topical Cipro, mixed in an apothecary jar with cleanser, applied with a cotton swab at morning and night, SalHydro, applied with a cotton swab at morning and night, Zionen, applied at night, and Dr. Bussel’s—the founder of this medical office—Anti-Bacterial cleanser, washed with at morning and night) and she guesses that the Zionen is causing the dry, chapped abrasions at the lower right side of my lip.  She decides to give me a moisturizer.  Then she says she would like to do some injections. 

She says she hates doing them, and they are extremely annoying, but in a way they are almost like acupuncture.  It is soothing to be through with the pain, afterwards. 

“So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Dr. Goldring asks as she moves the needle up against my right cheek, near the ear.

“I’m going to Boulder, my whole family’s going there,” I say, grabbing my pants at the front waist, on the belt, squeezing. 

Pinch.

“Oh, I hate doing this.”

“It’s okay, that’s why I do the belt thing.”

“I’d hold your hand if I could, but then…”

“It’s okay I would probably squeeze it too hard and hurt you, or your depth perception would get thrown off with your other hand and you would miss your mark.”

“I know!”

I don’t remember how we got onto the subject, who brought it up, but I think it was her.

“So, what do you do again?”

“Well, I’m a temp for an accounts payable department of an investment company, but….”

“But you want to be a wr---“

“A writer, yes, but this weekend I had a horrible experience with this woman telling me that I should just quit because I’m never going to get published.”

“Oh, do tell,” she says, moving the needle down towards my chin.

“Well, I’ve been exchanging e-mails with this woman, we’ve corresponded about ten, or twelve times….”

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“Like at first she was being pretty nice, but really delicate, and then she said she could be harsh if I wanted her to be, and I said, yes, bring the harshness.”

“Right, constructive criticism.”

“Yeah, so then she starts telling me, a few days ago, that I was either a) lazy, or b) too afraid of failure to really try,”

“Well, that’s,”

“Right, like she knows anything about me, and then she said something like ‘For the love of God don’t say that you’re only twenty-four and you don’t have enough experience, excuses, excuses.’  Then she said  that her writing was at a “higher level” than mine, and then something like, ‘when we agreed to a mentor/protégé relationship, I didn’t expect so much resistance from you’ and I was like, ‘Aren’t we supposed to be having a discussion, or are you just telling me what the only possible truth is,’

“She’s just saying her way is the right way,” Dr. Goldring says, moving the needle to my left cheek.

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“Right, but then she’s making all of these assumptions about me, and I mention something to her about how I was talking to a friend and she asked me if I had finished my MFA applications yet, and I was like, I haven’t even started them yet, and then this woman starts getting on my case about that, saying, ‘How do you possibly expect to get something polished turned in?’

“Oh that’s a bunch of nonsense, I know plenty of people who waited up until the last minute and stayed up the night before turning in their med school applications, some people work better under pressure,” she says, moving the needle near my left cheekbone, towards the ear. 

“She just keeps telling me I need to revise, and I was like, ‘I get the point,’ but she doesn’t stop, she says I have to sit down with 20-30 pages of writing and revise it until it’s as good as it can be, and she doesn’t even respond to my side of things, which is, I finished this novel, and I was asking her if it was worth revising or not, and she never gave me a straight answer on it, and I started a second novel, because I wanted to do something new, I didn’t want to spend another two years revising the first one on top of the two years spent writing it,”

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“So I said I wanted to do something new, and she says I won’t learn anything by doing something new.”

“But don’t you think you get something out of doing that first draft?  It is an achievement in and of itself to finish something of that length.  You learn something by doing that.”

“That’s exactly what I was saying to her, but she wouldn’t say anything about that.’

“I think we’re all done here…How old is she?”

“Early to mid-30’s.”

“Is she married?”

“Yes.”

“Does she have kids?”

“Yes.”

“Well maybe she’s crazy, maybe we can psychoanalyze her!”

We laugh.  Oh, Dr. Goldring…

“I do think she is wrong about a couple of things, I’m going to go and get your moisturizer.”

I sit and wait and think about the errands I need to run tonight: Westwood Farmacy, Rancho Park Branch of the Public Library, Ralph’s at Venice and Overland, and I still won’t make it to Cinefile or Macy's to buy more pairs of socks until another night.  And I still won’t start my grad school application for another night; because It’s already 8:37, and I should probably go to bed in an hour.