When All Else

I read this a few days ago at a literary event. I'm opting to not include the pics with this post.




Here’s me, four or five years old, a year or after so my mom and dad split up, living in our first place with the man who would soon become my adopted father. I wouldn’t see my real father for another fourteen years. This image sums up how I felt for a large part of my life.

Even back in my pre-school days in Yuma, AZ, I was a romantic. We had an oval track out back of the school, like a small race track that circled our playground equipment. I would take girls on “dates,” which consisted of cruising around the track in those little push-yourself cars, through a small enclosure that functioned as the Burger King that I would pretend to buy dinner from, after which we would park in the grass and pretend to watch a movie at the pretend drive-in while I described to my date what was happening on a pretend screen.

In third grade, our family was stationed in El Toro, CA. I developed a crush on our young twenty-something substitute teacher, Mrs. Langley, going so far as to write her a letter telling her how special I thought she was. In my mind, we would be married someday, and nothing about the circumstances pointed out to me that a woman in her early twenties would have no interest in an eight-year-old boy; that it would even be downright creepy. Because my parents never really treated me like a kid, I think that it allowed me to talk to other adults like a pseudo-adult, to always feel like I was seeing eye-to-eye with them, even if it was, at times, possibly, strange and inappropriate.

A year later, I transferred schools again. Here I met Misty Anthony. Every day I would ask her out, and every day she would turn me down. I did, however, manage to take this picture of us on a field trip. I made a note to myself on the back of the picture, “Misty Anthony, third from the right, WHAT A BABE.” I thought we would get married someday, if only we could make things work for the next ten years. This would not be the case.

The next year was Jennifer, my first true love. She had reddish-blonde hair and green eyes. We spent every waking moment together. Yet again, I knew we would get married someday. News came that she would be moving at the end of the school year, a common yet sad and inevitable occurrence that comes with being in the military. I imagined we would write each other every day after she left, visit each other every so often, live near each other eventually. The day before she moved, her parents took us to Disneyland; it was great, but at the end of it, once we returned home, she was asleep, and I wasn’t able to say goodbye to her. For days I sat at home, crying, while my dad played “Jennifer” by Eurythmics on repeat, which spoke of a girl with orange hair and green eyes. This did not help things.

Sixth grade, yet another school; a rich kids school with an advanced learning program. A different group of students, a week-long nature camp in the mountains, a crush on the older camp counselor, Emily, another letter, more dreams of being married when I was old enough, more delusion followed by disappointment.

Eight grade. Another school. This time on a military base in Japan. There was Cindy Groff, visiting from another base, there was I, sneaking out late at night to make out with her, praying to a God I’d never believed in to let things work between us. More false hopes, more crushed dreams, more exercises in futility.

Later that year, Jennifer Cooper. Who, even though she liked me, was Mormon, and we weren’t allowed to date, which I found out in a letter. We did spend a lot of time together, though, becoming really close. Before she left, we shared the last night holding hands near her house. After she moved, I stayed home for three days crying and listening to “Totally Confused” by Beck, wondering why my true loves, my hopes for someday starting my own family, were always taken away from me.

There were other girls, girls I had crushes on, girls I would meet on trips and spend a few days with, girls who were visiting where I lived for a few days. Fast, intense circumstances where we’d both imagine a bright future, only for things to never come to fruition. This still happens to me.

As an adult, the longest relationship was Sarah. Sharing a summer writing class with her when I was twenty-two, asking her out the last night of class; three years that proved difficult due to our shared inability to honestly deal with our emotions. We tried and tried, and while it was the closest I’ve ever actually come to getting married, what brought us together broke us apart. After three years, and I gave up. I spent months trying to work out of the anxiety, not eating, not sleeping, running four miles every morning to clear my head, losing twenty-five pounds in the process, trying to run from girl to girl, none of which panned out, never truly admitting to myself what I was dealing with, this great loss. Eventually trying things out with another girl, seeing that fail because I couldn’t drop my guard, even though, once again, I hoped we might get married. The weight of the last few failed years finally hitting me, back to not eating, not sleeping, running too much; this time even locking onto the sound of her car as she would pass by my work every day, me running outside just to catch a glimpse of her. More quick starts, big hopes, early finishes, every time left dazed, wondering when I would find someone to hold on to, some sense of permanence.

And then there was the Telluride Film Festival, where I would be taking part in a
college student symposium, arriving a day early and staying at a Days Inn, calling Sarah after a six-pack of Budweiser from my hotel room, trying again to reach out, seeing that fail.

There were intimate Q&A sessions with directors like Werner Herzog, who I kept running into around town; making enemies with Ken Burns, who really is a pretentious, snarky asshole; having a nice, parkside discussion with Noah Baumbach about Margot at the Wedding; sharing a cigarette with Marjane Sartrapi and her animator friend, both of whom are responsible for the great Persepolis graphic novel and its film adaptation. But what affected me the most that week was meeting a renowned theatre director, Peter Sellars, who spoke in our class about his approach to story and actors. He talked about breaking them down to find the real emotional core of their characters, about tapping in directly to the pain that everyone feels, which meant tapping into your own pain. I raised my hand, and told him that I’d been having my own rough summer, that I was still trying to properly recover. “To really transform,” he said, “to really shed that skin, to really achieve a rebirth, you have to let it pass through you, the pain, all of it, completely. You might feel like it’s destroying you, and it really is the closest thing to death that you can experience without actually dying, but it’s the only way to move forward without it killing you for the rest of your life.” He gave me a long look, then came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I can look at you and tell that you’re processing a lot. Trust me, it will pass. That means experiencing it completely until that pain dies.” It took everything I had to not cry right there, in front of him, in front of the symposium sponsors, in front of the fifty other students from around the country that I was meeting for the first time. After this session, our first of the week, we walked over to the introductory picnic for everyone attending the film festival. I ran into him, and stopped him and thanked him. He placed his hand on my shoulder again and said, “I know we’ve only just met, but I can tell you have this big, bright aura around you, and right now, it’s dark. You’re going to be okay. But you have to learn to be alone.” Another of the symposium attendees overheard this, and after he walked away, she stopped me and said, “Meditation. You really do need to learn to be by yourself.” “I can’t do it,” I told her. “I’m not good at that sort of thing.” I realized then that I’d never been good at that sort of thing, that being alone was my biggest inherent problem, that I was always running away from staring all of my pain and loss dead in the eye, acknowledging it, letting it go.

That was four years ago. That idea of the transformative process stuck with me, even if I haven’t completely broken all of my patterns. There have been more failed relationships, more months spent filling every waking moment with conversation, more trying to solve some riddle that couldn’t be solved, not in my favor at least. Frustration at the idea of disconnect, punching the ground in my front yard in the middle of the night crying. Pacing around a field out back of my band’s hotel room in Northampton, Massachussetts while on tour, leaving drunken voicemails late at night. More crying. Wandering around the worst parts of Oakland while on a different tour, on the phone with whomever might console me, more intense sobbing while the locals stared at me funny. For so long, I was stuck in this cycle of avoidance, and I’ve had this pattern of attracting girls who do the same thing. I connect with it, and again, it’s part of what both brings me together with these girls and breaks us apart. I understand the point now in letting it all out; I don’t stop myself from it any longer. But that search for permanence is still there, that intense desire to build my own family, to feel settled in a way that I never have. It still gets in the way of allowing my relationships to develop; it still ruins me when those relationships fail. I’m aware of all these things, but, at least, I’m able to look them dead in the eye and acknowledge them, no matter how much it still breaks me down from time to time. I’m constantly reminded of the need to let all of the bad things in my life pass through me, to move on from them in order to keep moving forward, no matter how overwhelming those periods can be. “Break it down to build it back up. Break it down to build it back up.” I tell myself, if nothing else, there’s that.

The Time I Should've Died

A hot-rodded out, barely-functioning '69 Nova.

Like this, but magenta and rusted:


My first car, $1000, a rolling death trap, no exhaust pipe, an ignition wire coming loose once as I pop the clutch driving up a hill to school because the wire was jammed into the fuse box, the car rolling down hill until I'm able to stop it. Weeks later, driving to a work party during rush hour right near where the 94 and the 125 meet, a sudden scraping of metal from the engine, the car comes to a stop in the middle lane. Throw on the hazards, wait a few minutes as cars drive around me, more worried about trying to run to the side of the road and seeing somebody hit the car, so a flashlight (it was dark out, early evening), opening the hood, and then waking up on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.

"What happened?"

"You were in a car accident."

"How bad is it?"

"It's pretty bad."

"That sucks. I was on my way to a work party to hang out with the cute girls from my work."

"You probably shouldn't talk."

Waking back up in the hospital, being wheeled to a room, a woman cutting off my shirt and pants, a tinge of embarrassment and then a realization that she deals with this all the time. I instruct the doctors to pull my wallet out and find the numbers for my parents and my bosses and my roommates. They stare at me wide-eyed.

Waking back up in the bed, everyone looking in, telling my mom about the party I was missing. More wide eyes. Tubes coming out of me. X-rays. A plastic surgeon arrives, I go under. Wake up in the morning, my knees not broken like they feared, I don't how many stitches in my face and head, missing teeth. My mom suggests not looking in the mirror. A wheelchair ride outside.

Unable to walk for days, to eat solid food, to smile. Eventually a denture for the tooth that's completely gone, but three badly cracked teeth besides that. A trip to the junkyard to see if the car is salvageable. It is not. The air filter and long bolt holding in are crushed. "I did that with my face," I say. More wide eyes.

A police report diagramming a car hitting mine from behind at around 45 mph, me sticking out from underneath the side of the car, twenty ahead. Somehow the car didn't run me over.

A man stuck in traffic on the other side of the freeway, a full view, a 911 call. Regret still that I never called him to thank him. Still curious how I was affected by all this.

A Dream

She is distant yet following, her family closer as I guide them to a safe haven as giant, dark clouds form and grow overhead. In the distance is looming chaos, but I tell them all, "follow me, I will keep you safe."