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.

The Last Tea Party

The Last Tea Party

                On my way from Nashville to Chapel Hill, my odometer for a single tank of gas passed 400 miles around Asheville, NC.  This made me very proud of my Honda Civic.  It was a black, “special edition” EX, defined as such because of the spoiler atop the trunk, the special rims on the tires, and the six-CD changer in the dash.  Before leaving on my trip, my CD changer had been broken.  The only part that still worked of the audio apparatus was the radio and the AUX plug which I used for my iPod.  So far, it’s been adequate. 

                I stopped for gas in Asheville because my emergency level low-fuel light as I hovered around 400 miles to the tank (at the time, for roughly a 12 gallon tank, it would cost between $32 and $35 to fill).  Much of that leg of the trip was through the Smoky Mountains and I was glad my car had handled it so efficiently.  After Asheville, I headed towards Chapel Hill, my next stop.

                At this point I should mention my love for Superchunk.  All day—the date being August 25, 2007—I listened to all of the Superchunk albums I had on my iPod (all except their self-titled debut) in chronological order.  I was pumped to be driving into their hometown.  I thought I might catch a cool indie rock show, or might run into them by chance.  I had met their lead singer a couple years earlier at a Portastatic (his other band) show in Chicago.  I had bought their most recent album from in person as he sat alone at the merch desk, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.  I was surprised to see him smoking and it immediately made me like him more because we had one embarrassing thing in common.  I went up to him, quite soused, and told him that the bartender had asked me if I was there to see Portastatic, and I had said yes, and he had told me that I better slow down then, as I had about three Leinenkugel Reds in a span of thirty or forty-five minutes (watching Mary Timony amidst that, and making friends with an older guy who complimented me on my Sebadoh t-shirt and told me about how he once saw the Replacements at Maxwell’s in Hoboken).  I couldn’t resist.  They were $2 each.  This singer, an idol of mine, (I had told him I was a huge fan and he must have known that I wasn’t exaggerating) listened to my stupid story and seemed to think it was one of the funniest things he had ever heard.  He started cracking up.  I had made one of my idols crack up—a feeling of true happiness.  I told him I wanted to buy the new album but I didn’t have the cash so I was going to step over to the ATM a few feet to the left and get some cash, even though it was probably going to be a rip-off for the ATM surcharge inside a bar.  Surprisingly, it was only a $1.00 for that, and I pointed this out to the singer, and bought the album, and I have listened to this album (Bright Ideas) fairly regularly for these last three years.  The part of the story I don’t tell, however, is that due to my imbibing so many beers, I had to pee several times in succession.  After trying to pee in one of the urinals or toilets in a somewhat insecure stall or crowded bathroom, I could not go.  This is the bane of my existence and is probably the reason I will end up committing suicide one day.  It is a result of social anxiety invading the most usual of bodily functions and has ruined my ability to “go out” in any normal sense of the word.  I just wish more establishments utilized single-person bathrooms, then I wouldn’t have any problem.  (This actually happened to me at the Blue Monkey Lounge in Memphis, and I was able to hold it until I walked back to my hotel, but I nearly burst from how badly I had to go, but I didn’t feel like mentioning it then).  My solution, in this particular case, was to leave the bar every fifteen or twenty minutes or so and pee in a nearby alley.  After watching Portastatic for about thirty or forty-five minutes, for some reason I decided to leave.  I had the album and I was tired, drunk, and had to pee too much.  Still, despite all the attendant anxiety, it was a memorable and fun show—my first introduction to the Empty Bottle.

                But I drove into Chapel Hill that night, and school at UNC was just starting up and I wanted to find a hotel nearby the main campus strip so I could hang out in bars and maybe find a cool record store and maybe meet some cute college girls.  This was the first time I didn’t procure a hotel before leaving the previous town.  Sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t.  This was one of the times it didn’t.  I went to one really nice hotel in the middle of the campus strip area and the very nice agent at the front desk told me it would cost over $200 for a night and I told him it was outside my budget and he directed me towards Durham, where I could find a more reasonable room.  After driving around feeling like I got lost for about fifteen or twenty minutes, I finally found some low-end chain hotels.  I ended up staying at the Red Roof Inn and it ended up costing me over $70.  I smoked a bowl and looked at my stash and realized that there was almost nothing left.  This depressed me briefly as I considered I would either smoke my final bowl that evening, or the next day before I left for New York. 

                I drove my car back into the main campus area, parked, and tried to find an ATM along an abandoned area.  If there was a fun area to party in Chapel Hill, I definitely didn’t find it.  Somehow I got some more money (at 112 E. Main Carrboro, I read from an online statement) and I walked past a bar and saw a girl.  I asked her if the bar was cool and she said it was so I went inside and got a beer.  I talked to her for a second outside and found out her name was Amy.  Now we are still friends on MySpace.

                I went into the back room and picked out a few songs off the jukebox were people were lazing back against a couch.  I picked the REM song, “All the Right Friends,” a Link Wray song, “Jack the Ripper,” and a song by firehose  that I forget the name of but which was really awesome.  At the time, I was working on my letter to Sycamore, and I mentioned all of these by name so if you ever want the specific information you can feel free to ask him.

                Amy had told me that a band called The Last Tea Party would be playing there.  They were some kind of folk-bluegrass-punk band and I really liked them, especially their last song.  At one point there was an older gentleman in the bar, a record producer I think, who got very excited and bought the entire bar a round of drinks.  Amy introduced him to me and we chatted briefly.  He was exceedingly cool.  If I met him now I don’t think I would have that much to say to him, but I met him when I was at that very ecstatic moment in my life—ecstatic for everything except how little pot I had left.  I had a few drinks there and got a pretty good buzz on, asked Amy for her info so I could add her on MySpace, and asked what might be a good place to get some late-night dinner.  I was told to go to Gumby’s Pizza.

                I placed an order for a large pepperoni pizza at Gumby’s and waited outside for about ten or fifteen minutes.  I heard a Morrissey solo song while I was waiting, something off You are the Quarry, and I thought it was really awesome how I got to hear another indie rock song in a seemingly unlikely location.  I got my Gumby’s pizza, drove back to the Red Roof Inn, pigged out and ate most of it, saving a few slices for the long drive the next day, smoked my last bowl of weed, and passed out.  The next day I headed for New York, which was something like a ten or twelve hour drive.

Doctor's Note

Doctor’s Note

                On May 16, 2008, I drove from my new apartment in Silverlake to Venice Beach.  I had seen an ad in the L.A. Weekly for a medical marijuana clinic that welcomed walk-in appointments.  They had listed the price at $75 for a prescription. 

                The first time I got a prescription, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops.  First of all, I needed a California State ID.  I went to the DMV and just when I was about to get my picture taken, one of the tellers determined that my passport was not suitable for identification purposes, because the little plastic sheet over the picture had become unstuck (because I had foolishly sent it to the dry-cleaner in the inside pocket of my jacket).  This meant I would need a birth certificate, so I went online and ordered mine for about $50 or so and waited about a week and a half, or two, for it to come in the mail.  Finally it arrived, I went back to the DMV, I got my picture taken, and then they told me that I wouldn’t be able to get my actual card for another two weeks.  But they gave me a receipt that the ID had been instated. 

                This all after I had already met with Dr. Sonia Patel, who had given me a preliminary three-month prescription for my chronic back pain, insomnia, and anxiety, to be upgraded to a one-year clearance after examination with another doctor.  I had her note, but I needed my ID card.  That day I went to the Farmacy in West Hollywood with my DMV receipt and doctor’s note, and they said that would do just fine.  Thus I was allowed to get weed without going to a dealer, which was both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because it was perfectly legal, and a curse because it was pretty much always available for me to blow large amounts of cash on.

                But after three months my prescription ran out because I never had gotten around to getting that second opinion from a more probing general physician.  By that point I was living in Palms with my new roommate Brett who always picked up more pot than he needed and always sold me some, so I relied on this method for a while, until I moved into my own place, which was the killing gesture.

                I had been living in my own place for about two and a half weeks.  I had been surviving off of the last stash I had bought from Brett, and now I needed to take care of things on my own.  First, Brett told me to go to his doctor—Dr. Cohen. When I called Dr. Cohen he sounded very flustered.  I knew he wouldn’t make things difficult for me, but then he told me he had raised his price from $150 to $250.  I stupidly told him I would pay that exorbitant amount.  I made an appointment with him only for him to cancel it because of his own back pain.  We rescheduled for a new day and I drove to his office building in Beverly Hills and waited for him to arrive and about ten minutes after our scheduled time he called me to say he had been in a car accident, and would only be a few more minutes if it weren’t for the lady he had gotten into it with, who wanted to call the police.  I told him that was fine, and rescheduled for yet another time.

                I told my friend Sycamore about this and he told me this guy did not sound very reliable and that I should just be concerned about it because if he happened to lose his license, then I would be out of luck for my prescription, not to mention with the exorbitant fee already paid to him.  So I went to the pages of L.A. Weekly and decided a walk-in appointment for $75 sounded pretty great.

                It was right across the boardwalk from Muscle Beach—the outdoor gym where I barely ever saw anyone working out.  I walked up the stairs and signed in at the desk.  The security guard was making small talk with everyone waiting.  I wrote in my little orange notebook a list of things to do.  Among them were: buy invitations, find Ashleigh’s info, buy a house phone (which could be put off), get a new cell phone (which could be put off), return L.A. Story to the library, measure space in apartment for bar table, futon, find rug to go on top of carpet, get a bathroom storage thingy, do a practice LSAT on Monday, see Mike Toumayan on Sunday at 2:00, complete the 18^th and 19^th chapters of S/M.  The security guard asked me what I was doing and I told him I was writing in my journal and he told me a story about how he had found someone’s journal left on a bus before.  The TV in the waiting room was playing a hip-hop video countdown.  One of the assistants came up to tell the guy at the front desk that there was a guy on the boardwalk taking pictures of the front of their building and it appeared suspicious.  Two Latinos without shirts tried to sign in for an appointment and were turned away until they could find shirts to wear.  The wait was not very long.  They took my picture before they sent me into the doctor’s room.  They also asked for $150 for the recommendation fee—double the advertisement, but still much better than the alternative.

                I met Dr. Weinman, who was very friendly and nice and concerned.  He got a cup of coffee before we started the interview and said that it was his alternative to pot, which he had used to smoke but no longer did.  I told him about how I was going to take the LSAT and he told me to take a few weeks off of smoking before I did that—six weeks, he said.  I told him I wanted the prescription for social anxiety and depression and he said that would be okay.  He said in the case of depression, he wouldn’t recommend it.  He would recommend seeing a therapist.  He said he would recommend it for anxiety, however.  Then he asked me about how I smoked it and I told him through a bong and he explained to me the benefits of a vaporizer.  He was a very benevolent man, perhaps one of the few people I met in that entire year that did not cause me any fear or stress, perhaps the only person who truly seemed to be looking out for my well-being.  He gave the prescription and I was allowed to go into their on-site dispensary and I picked out a gram because I said that money was tight at the moment.  I drove home on an ecstatic wave, happy that now, I had my license to smoke, I had nothing to worry about.

The Launch

The Launch

                The drive from Chapel Hill to New York contained one hiccup—an hour-plus delay due to some graffiti over the highway in Washington D.C.  Someone had spray-painted some kind of message that I don’t remember, and all of the drivers had rubbernecked on the graffiti.  I had been listening to the traffic report on the radio and anticipating the site for a while, and it was rather underwhelming.  After that the traffic moved smoothly.

                On my way into New York I called my friend Gabe and asked if I could get an ounce off of him.  He said he could make that happen and I stopped at an ATM in an oasis along the New Jersey Turnpike to take out a few hundred dollars for the purchase.  An hour later I was on Manhattan in my car and parking it in the East Village.  This was the second time I had my car with me in the city—the first time being a little over two years before, when I had driven my sister to school in New Hampshire, and had visited my friend Sycamore up in Maine, and had driven down to New York and parked it in a garage because it was the convenient and easy thing to do. 

                I walked up to Gabe’s apartment and he measured out an ounce for me and I gave him $360.  I would find out a day or so later that I had bought the ounce immediately following a famous child star who had recently enrolled at NYU, and who had also bought an ounce.  No, not the Olsen twins—though they had enrolled in the same school within NYU as me, and we had actually attended for one shared semester—but Haley Joel Osment.  I thought this was wonderful good luck as I prepared to make my way towards Hollywood.

 Shirtless Joe Jordan arrived, named as such because he always walked around New York with no shirt.  Once he had been a finalist on the MTV show Yo Mama which contained infinite variations on “Yo Mama’s so fat…” jokes.  We smoked some and I had planned to stay with Wendy that evening.  I told Gabe and Joe that my car, with all of the stuff packed in it, was on the street, and they started making me paranoid that someone would break into it and rob me.  This had happened to a friend several years before—he had his guitar stolen out of his car after leaving it parked around 30^th St. overnight.  I made sure it was okay to go over to Wendy’s apartment, even though I had very little idea how to get there. 

                I got in my car and drove over the Williamsburg Bridge.   After some nervousness, I found Wendy’s place in Greenpoint.  She was waiting outside for me.  I parked right near the front of her building and came out and hugged her tight.  We went inside and I don’t remember much about the night except I am assuming we smoked and then I remember this awkward moment where I begged her just to hold me, or to let me hold her, and she sat stricken on the side of her couch, clearly not wanting to acquiesce to my demands, but doing so half-heartedly. 

When I woke up in the morning and went to my car, I found a parking ticket.  If I had moved it at 7:30 AM I could have avoided it.  My own stupidity—not paying close enough attention to the sign above the sidewalk.  Upset, I drove into Manhattan and found parking on University Place and went to my friend Mike’s apartment where I would stay for the next couple of days.  Let me say that I do not remember much at all about my trip to New York this time.  I remember finding that excellent spot on University Place, where it would remain for three days without any kind of parking restrictions, no attempted theft, and secure comfort.  The Fall semester at NYU had just started and thousands of students paraded up and down that primary artery of campus.  I would later go into the NYU bookstore and get and NYU bumper sticker for my car, as well as a New York University tank-top that was probably one size too small.  With the bumper sticker on it there, it felt even safer.  This would not be the case (in my own suspicious mind) three months later, but for now, all was happy and perfect.  I had spent a lot of money since starting my trip—a couple thousand dollars, at least.  But I still had a sizable amount remaining--$18,000 or so—and my car was parked on University Place, one of the happiest areas of New York City, and I was staying at my friend’s luxurious loft apartment on 12^th St. between University and Broadway, not three or four short city blocks to my car.

I went around and visited everyone I could in New York, but the specific experiences are always muddled in my mind.  New York is a state of mind and the events enjoyed there never really differ from what was done before.  Walk around the village, get some slices, go to Pluck-U at least once, get some 40’s, go to see some friend’s band that is playing that weekend, take the subway into Brooklyn, visit a friend who happens to be moving into a new apartment at the time.  None of it particularly revelatory or worth writing about—just comforting in its sameness, only less and less so as we grow older and our carefree college mentalities slip further and further into the past. 

Adam, my roommate for two years in college, had moved into a new place near TriBeCa, and I went to go visit him and met his new roommate, who had once slept on our freshman year dorm room floor and who I barely remembered.  I met Adam’s girlfriend, Chloe, who would not be going out with him much longer.  Though she was very sweet, I remember.  I sat outside on his concrete deck, where one month later he would host a party that I would also be able to attend.

I took the train into Brooklyn and met up with Wendy again and went to Eric’s birthday party, which was in a weird location of Williamsburg—behind some pizzeria—but we found it eventually.  There I saw the majority of people who had also been at my Pitchfork Party a month and a half before.

I also saw Charlotte, who had been one of my last great crushes of college, and who had become an assistant to a literary agent at the William Morris Agency, and who had agreed to take a look at my first novel, Daylight Savings Time, back that previous June, the last time I had been in New York.  We had met up at a bar near Union Square and she had talked with me for an hour or two—she had been very generous with her time—and told me that it was not up to the standards that she would want to represent.  I had not finished the novel yet at that point—I would finish it just a few days before August 21—but it made writing the ending feel a bit meaningless, though I do believe the last chapter was the strongest piece of the entire work.  Over the last year or so, I’ve come to feel that my first novel is good enough to publish if only the market were not so unfriendly to fairly unconventional work.  With that in mind, I wrote my second novel, Self-Mutilation, and I would love to be able to submit it to someone at the William Morris Agency, except Charlotte has recently begun her first year of studies at Harvard Law School.  Regardless I should still ask her if she might have a contact who would listen a little more closely to me than if I played my usual role of the anonymous, desperate, unpublished, querying writer.

The party at Eric’s was a great time.  That was probably the single happiest time I had on that particular trip to New York.  But I was focused on the road trip—better times were about to come, and I would be back in New York a month from then for a wedding.  (As a fun side-note on the present, I’ve recently made plans to attend my second wedding in New York a little over a month from now—some times prescience is divine.)

I talked to Sam on the phone and he told me to meet him in Larchmont, NY on the morning of August 27, and we would drive from Kelly’s parent’s house there up to his Mom’s house in Meriden, CT, which would take about an hour and a half or so, if that.  I found this annoying, but after he explained it, I realized it had to be done.  He also gave me an Adderall pill which made the extra side-trip a lot more fun.  We picked up the stuff from his house and found his brother Todd there.  I am always intimidated by Todd but this time I found him more mature than previous times and he did not make as many offensive attacks on my person.  We packed everything into my car, which I worried about more than I should have, and we headed back to Larchmont. 

There, parked in Kelly’s parent’s driveway, I received the phone call.  My Dad.  He had recently called when I was on my way from Chapel Hill to New York, somewhere in Virginia, to tell me that their basement had flooded, and all of my stuff that I had brought back from my apartment had been ruined.  I started to get upset, but then felt like there was nothing that I could do about it, but then he told me he was kidding.  Their floor was destroyed, but they had acted quickly enough to get my CDs and books and various items out of there before any damage could occur.  My mom wasn’t at the house then, she had been in Boulder, CO, helping my younger brother get settled.  I think she returned to Chicago on August 25, or August 26.

“Dad, what’s up?”

“Well, we have had a very serious tragedy occur here.”

“What!  What do you mean?”

“Before I say anything, I just want you to know that everyone is O.K.  We had a very serious incident, but thankfully it is going to be alright in the end.”

“What happened?”

“Your brother, Michael, was stabbed in the neck this morning on the CU Boulder campus.”

“Oh my God,” I said, not knowing how to react to something like that.

“He’s fine, he went into the emergency room and had stitches put in.  The doctors said that if it were just another centimeter away in either direction, he would be dead.”

“That’s insane.”

“Everything is fine, he’s okay.  It was this crazy man on the sidewalk.  He was screaming something about it being the end of the world.  And Michael walked past, and he grabbed him, and stabbed him in the neck, and then he started stabbing himself.”

“Jesus!”

“And a bunch of other students saw it occur, and they thought it was some kind of staged performance!  They thought Michael and this guy were acting it out for some kind of school theater thing!”

“This is so awful.”

“I know, but it’s okay.  We’re about to get on a plane to Boulder right now.  Call us in a few hours and we’ll update you on the situation.” 

I hung up the phone and told Sam and he also responded with shock.  It was the first of many times I would tell my friends about this occurrence and know beforehand that I would get to see the look of shock and sympathy and horror on their faces.  We unloaded the car and put all of our stuff together.  I thought this might throw the road trip a bit off, but we still re-packed the car to make everything fit.  We went to the garage and looked at Sam’s new bike that he and Kelly would be riding across the country.  I sat outside by Kelly’s parent’s pool and dozed for a few minutes on a bench there.  Then I called my Mom and talked to her and received more information and gradually began to feel more comfortable about the reality of what had just occurred.  I thought this would change everything forever.  No longer would I, the middle-child, inarguably the most depressed and fucked-up member of our family, carry all of the sympathetic attention.  No, now it would be my younger brother, who had been attacked, assaulted—a true victim—unlike me, who had everything handed to him on silver platter and still managed to ruin my life and everyone’s I touched. 

We went inside the house and I told Kelly’s parents about what had happened and they responded similarly in kind.  I was a random kid that showed up at their house, the friend of their daughter’s boyfriend, and immediately after meeting them, had one of the most shocking incidents of my family’s history to deal with.  They were very kind people.  We ended up watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the upstairs den, and I got into the show more than I ever did before.  Then, my brother Michael called me himself, and told me that he was fine, it was a really scary thing, but he was fine.  I didn’t ask him any direct questions about the incident, and I still don’t really think I have, more than a year later.  He told me it was fine though, and that I should just meet him in Boulder, continue with my road trip as planned.  I thanked him for being so understanding and selfless.  I told Sam and Kelly and we decided we would leave the next day.  Before we went to bed, we snuck out into the backyard at night and smoked a blunt.  Sam loved rolling blunts; I loved taking bong rips.  We went swimming in their pool after smoking and it was great.  We all went to bed and woke up early the next day.

We started off around 9 AM and found ourselves a few minutes later on the George Washington Bridge, proceeding at a slow crawl.  Sam had to walk his bike all the way across the bridge, I remember seeing.  Kelly was behind him on the bike, swaying back and forth in ecstasy to the music they were blasting, I remember seeing.  

Homeless Man in Westwood Village

Homeless Man in Westwood Village

                I don’t remember the exact date I arrived in L.A.  It might have been September 17 or it might have been September 19 or it might have been September 21.  I’m going to say the last one for the sake of the argument.  This is also something Sycamore could tell you for sure, as he has that letter in which I chronicled my entire month on the road. 

                He told me to meet him when he got out of work at UCLA Medical School for the day—at 5:00.  He said to try to find a parking spot near Wilshire and Westwood Blvd—the first time I would hear these streets names with which I would soon become so familiar.  I found a metered parking spot very close to the location specified, and was heartened to see the car in front of me display a prominent Fugazi sticker on their back window.  The first car I park behind in L.A. also digs Fugazi—this had to be destiny. 

I walked over to the Coffee Bean shop to spend another hour or hour and a half waiting for Sycamore.  In line I heard some people talking about where Spike Jonze was shopping.  I was really in Hollywood!  The first conversation I overheard was about a celebrity!  It was only a matter of time before I would meet one on my own and parlay it into a successful gig in the entertainment industry.  I was so excited. 

I order a caramel frappucino, or whatever the Coffee Bean equivalent of that most favorite Starbucks drink of mine happened to be called, and sat outside in the warm sun.  I opened up my laptop to do a little more work on the beginning of Self-Mutilation, the second novel I was now going to take on full-time.  Then I saw a homeless man come up near me, and he just started talking. 

The following is a journal entry I just found that I wrote on the day it happened (September 18).  As before, I will add the total of words I am cutting and pasting here to the 50,000 that I must write on my own during this month.  Thus, 50,978 now becomes 52,018:

9.18.07

Sitting in my car on Le Conte (near Westwood)

I’m waiting for Sycamore to get out from his job at 5:00.  I have thirty minutes.  I wish I had less, but in the time I killed (from 3:00 until now), I went and got a coffee and tried to do some writing.  I couldn’t do any (I did a few sentences of chapter six of self-mutilation) because a homeless man with AIDS talked to me for the entire time.  I couldn’t leave without giving him a dollar, though I’m sure everyone around considered me a sucker.

I had an iced vanilla coffee drink, which was very good, and the man was sitting outside and immediately looked at me and I thought he was some kind of older artist who was checking me out or something, but no, he was homeless, and I don’t believe he was gay.  But this is if I believe his story, which frankly I have a very difficult time believing, but I would like to believe it.  Of course it makes the world seem a much darker place than it really is.  Trying to write it down will only make me seem dumber for actually listening to him. 

He began by saying how he his family had a globally recognized name—which he later revealed to be Welch.  He had a PHD in Physics from UCLA and had been in the Air Force, until he snitched on them, and subsequently had his life destroyed, with the loss of his social security number.  The secret was, aliens had exchanged technology—apparently they laid fiber optic cables on the ocean floor to connect all continents. 

His father was very rich, and a murderer.  He shot his daughter’s boyfriend—he had slapped her at a gas station and kicked her out of the car.  She called to be picked up, and instead her boyfriend was brought back by two henchmen, and the father shot him.  The father also shot this man’s brother-in-law, who had been a homosexual who had married a daughter for the money, apparently. 

This man had been sent to the Shaolin Temple in Beijing at age 8, and then returned 9 years later to see the hippie era in full bloom.  He had also received oral sex as a 7-year-old from his “wet nurse” once a week prior to that. 

It hurt me to talk to him.  It hurts me to write this, but the man should have a story written for him.  I am hungry—I haven’t eaten since having a massive DQ “flamethrower” last night in Hurricane, UT.  I felt so sick after eating it, because here I am not trying to put on too many pounds, and I get this hamburger as a little snack after having beer & wings nearby, a little snack to make me full, and I ended up being full to excess.  I couldn’t even put a dent in the Blizzard Treat I got as the real reason I went to DQ.  I watched the end of Rope and the first half of Young Frankenstein on AMC, and tonight I want to convince Mike to watch Vertigo (There’s 7 days of Hitchcock on).

So, if what this man says is true, then all conspiracy theories are true.  I equate conspiracy theory with schizophrenia, unfortunately, and so this man was probably just mentally ill.  He maintains that he is not, but I have a hard time believing he would choose to be so down and out, when if he wanted to, he could be extraordinarily rich.  Very difficult for me to get along with anyone in the world, when I can’t tell if I’m being put on or not.  I hope I am not preyed upon while in L.A.  I would like to move here.  It is more affordable than New York, but just now I received my third ticket on this trip, which ends today, and which has lasted 30 days. 

Ticket #1: Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Parking my car outside Wendy’s house, not realizing I had to move it by 7:30 AM for the street sweeper.  $45.00

Ticket #2: Hardeysville, OK.  Going 40 in a school zone with flashing lights.  There was no one in the town.  It was tiny.  I even got out there to try and use a bathroom in a gas station, but the gas station was condemned.  The cop gave me a break by saying I went 35 instead of 40.  He didn’t search my car—I considered that the break.  $115.00

Ticket #3: Los Angeles, CA.  Parking 1 ft across the line in a metered zone.  I will be contesting this ticket, as I had paid the meter, and it is my first time parking in a metered spot in L.A. and I didn’t realize we have these “line” parameters to follow.  They should take pity on me, but they probably won’t, because IT”S THE LAW!  $35.00

Now, there’s 14 minutes until Mike gets out.  I’m going to sit in this spot and if any cops come, I will explain my ticket.  I just got a call from him.  He’ll be here in 5-10 minutes, so I should just shut this down. 

I enjoy L.A. and I want to get a sublet here in the next few days.  Good-bye Chicago, though I am missing it a bit.  I watched the Bears vs. Chiefs game on Sunday in Boulder, CO, and the game was in Chicago, and seeing the skyline made me a feel a pang of misguided nostalgia.  It is a beautiful city, yes, but filled with so many bitter people.  If I move to L.A., I will have lived in each of the three major cities of America by the time I am 24.  That is something pretty cool to say you’ve done.  I have soaked up the culture of New York and Chicago, and now I must suck up the culture of L.A., and with that knowledge, become the preeminent writer of our generation.  This is all for now.

Note: I believe I meant to write “soak up the culture of L.A.” for parallelism, but that typo is so unbelievably poignant that I can’t bear to correct it.