

## How Schopenhauer Got Me Through My Mid-Life Crisis

### CHARLES ALONSO

Copyright 2014 Charles Alonso

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

Ebook formatting by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopublished.com

_Everything in this book is true. For various reasons – personal and professional – I have changed some names, but mostly because I have children who may one day stumble across it._

Introduction: Reunion

_A_ few hours ahead of our 25th reunion at Mount Carmel High School in Los Angeles, five of us met for a little pre-party nostalgia soak at a classmate's house in Mulholland Canyon. A little liquid courage was needed – you can't walk into your past brick sober. You just can't. Two drinks in and I was already confessing that on the wall of our den at home, in a frame, I have a poster from one of our school dances:

" _The 1984-1985 Mount Carmel High Student Council presents 'The Untouchables.' All Girls Welcome. All Mount Carmel Men Welcome."_

I thought I was being a touch maudlin to have hung on to such _Antiques Roadshow_ ephemera so long, but it turns out I was not alone. Toshi, whose house we were staying in, pulled out his freshman year _P.E. uniform_ – navy blue shorts and light blue T-shirt with the Mount Carmel crest over the chest, in very good condition – from deep storage. James, our in-house archivist, took out a box containing not only flyers from school dances, but the seating diagram of our junior year prom.

_The seating diagram_.

And we didn't give him grief for it. We _pored_ over it.

"Ohmigod, whatever happened to Kathy Biletti?"

"She was such a horn dog!"

"No she wasn't."

"Not with you maybe."

"If you say you even fingered her, you're lying."

"Did you really bring Jenny Koruscki?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"No, I just, I had a crush on her and you barely even liked her."

"Yeah, but she liked me, and that's 90% of what makes a girl attractive."

"Do you guys remember Adrienne Kono?" I asked.

"The ice queen?"

"She wasn't icy. She was regal. She went to Yale."

"Regal? You always said she was icy."

"She was _aloof_ , maybe, but not icy. Plus aloof shades into regal," I added before changing the subject. "Toshi, you're gay. Who did you bring?"

"I didn't go. I think the priests would've frowned on me bringing Clay Gerrard, or been extremely turned on. Probably both."

"Clay was gay?!"

"Who didn't know that?" asked Toshi.

Mt. Carmel is an all-boys Jesuit school, so I developed my need for liquid courage by the second half of my freshman year. The only chance we had to interact with girls on an everyday basis was at weekend house parties and, in my case, high school musicals. In other words, there was no "everyday basis." I happen to hate musicals, but missed the deadline to audition for the school drama, so I tried out for the musical instead, and quickly found myself with an enormous crush on one of the extras, Adrienne Kono. I had heard from a friend that she thought I looked a little bit like the actor John Cusack, and that bit of gossip, along with a small bottle of Bacardi rum and a six pack of Coke, gave me the courage to ask her out on a few dates. I wouldn't say she said _yes_ – it's more like she consented not to say no – and I think it was right around our fourth or fifth "consensual outing" that I politely asked if I could kiss her. I did. I asked. With the rectitude befitting a Victorian clergyman. I think I need say no more on the subject of my high school love life.

"Was Calvin Wilts really at our table?"

"Who was Calvin Wilts?"

"You don't remember Calvin Wilts?"

"Did he go to Carmel?"

"Look at the diagram – he went."

"I think he might have been in Father Bernedetto's geometry class with me."

"No, you're thinking of Cory Wilson."

"Oh. Right."

"James, who was Calvin Wilts?"

"You guys don't remember? He's the one who smelled like corn dogs?"

Never having consumed a drop of alcohol – not to this day (his father was a functioning alcoholic policeman) – James is our clear eyed collective memory bank.

"Ooooh, Calvin. _Right._ God, I hope he comes tonight."

It was time to go; time, with the exception of James, for one more quick shot of bourbon.

Toshi drove two other classmates and I to the reunion in his orange 1984 BMW. I had seen him a month ago, and he had been driving a 1972 Pontiac. It was gone, traded in for the BMW. Toshi likes distinctive, yet unostentatious, older cars. Being the type of guy (I had just discovered) to hang on to his old high school P.E. uniform, I wondered if he hadn't bought the car yesterday just to show up to our reunion in something a member of the class of '86 might have _actually_ bought during high school. Toshi _commits_.

Climbing out of the little orange car, our buzzed group split apart. The oldest building on campus – brick, stone, neogothic – loomed in front of me. I had heard the school had bought the street behind the campus to expand some years after we had left. They had. I didn't even know streets were for sale. Now I know. Mount Carmel is a fundraising powerhouse that would make our two political parties look like shy kids peddling toffee peanuts door to door.

As I was passing the main building toward the inner courtyard where the tables and, thankfully, a bar, had been set up, I saw _him_ emerging from the rectory. No, not Calvin Wilts. Father Moore. Now Bishop Moore. He had been our principal. He is a short African American man with a beautiful, rich voice, a man who exudes dignity. Just being around him makes one stand up straighter. I was happy to see him. Genuinely so. He was a fan of musical theater and excessively polite kids, and that's probably why we had enjoyed a genial rapport. So it came as a bit of a surprise, when, crossing paths as he exited the rectory toward the courtyard, the first words out of his mouth were, "You still smart as shit, Charles?"

I was caught off guard by the bishop's casual use of the S-word – I guess this is how adults, even clergymen, address each other – but I was even more put off by the question itself. All I could stammer in reply to Bishop Moore was, "That's what they tell me," and I hurried off to chat with others.

* * *

When I was an infant, a gypsy in Spain told my mom I would "be a great man some day." I'm sure she thought she was just telling my mom something she would be pleased to hear. It worked. My mom relayed the words to me as I was growing up. More than once.

I wish she hadn't.

What's that lovely adage?

_Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising_.

Stupid, meddling gypsy.

## Contents

(31 WAYS TO FUMBLE FOR THE LIGHT SWITCH)

1. Why Schopenhauer

2. Drinks With Erik

3. Bliss

4. The Bridge

5. Character

6. On Checking Out

7. Character, Part The Second

8. I Love My Parents...Separately

9. A Day In The Life

10. Hope Hurts

11. The Agony Of Victory

12. Why Isn't It Enough?

13. Why My Mid-Life Crisis Is Special, Different, Better

14. It's All About The Frisbee

15. The Meaning Of Life

16. The Bars

17. We're Not All (Complete) Whiners

18. Flailing About

19. If I Should Be Doing Something Else, What Is It?

20. Getting Back To The Frisbee

21. Geschlechtsverkeher (sex)

22. Sex, With Your Spouse

23. Marriage And Meaning

24. The Four Condoms

25. My Entry For Whitest White Person Problem Of All Time

26. Gifts

27. Can't Get Away From The Frisbee

28. Just When You Think The Story Is Over – It Isn't

29. I'm Pretty Sure We're Approaching The End

30. Have I Learned Anything? Anything At All?

31. An Obituary
[ 1 ]

## Why Schopenhauer

_M_ y name is Charles Alonso. I am 44 years old. I live in Hercules, California, about a thirty minute drive from San Francisco. I am married to Nora Lathrop, we have two children, William, 16, and Tomas, 12. We are minority owners of a single family home in which the bank has the largest stake, we co-own two bars and a restaurant, I am a quarter-successful screenwriter, we have a dog, Buddy, a cat Tinkerbell, and there literally is a white picket fence toward the rear of the house which keeps Buddy from following through on any thoughts he might have of a better future elsewhere.

We are in the middle of the middle class. I know this with certainty because the college advisor I hired in a panic for William has just informed me that we are nowhere near poor enough to get aid, and nowhere near wealthy enough to afford a decent college for him.

We are, in short, living The American Dream.

* * *

On the floor next to my side of the bed are the following things:

...seven issues of "The New Yorker" magazine, each of them partially read, except for the cartoons – those I've "read" in full.

...a copy of a screenplay called _Meth Cats_ , about cats that go crazy after ingesting meth, which a producer submitted to me for consideration to rewrite – on spec.

...a copy of "The National Enquirer." Lead article: "50 Best and Worst Beach Bodies," purchased by Nora, but snatched away from her and "read" immediately by me.

...a Sound Oasis white noise machine to help me sleep – I have tinnitus in my left ear – a constant hissing, similar to a fluorescent light – from one too many punk shows.

...an e-reader, ostensibly to keep things like seven issues of "The New Yorker" from turning the floor into a refuge for dust bunnies.

...a bottle of Astroglide lubrication, for those days when Nora isn't in the mood but is kind enough to oblige me with a handie.

...a digital alarm clock which I turn to face the wall – no one needs to know just how bad their insomnia is (has the guy who invented klonopin received the Nobel prize yet? Can someone make that happen, please?)

...a box of tissues – for hay fever and masturbation.

...paperback copies of "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction," by J.D. Salinger, and "Night," Elie Wiesel's account of surviving Auschwitz, just to remind myself that no matter what, things could always be worse. Way worse. Auschwitz worse.

...and a copy of "The Complete Essays of Schopenhauer," green cloth cover, translated in 1942 by T. Bailey Saunders, given to me – although he alleges I stole it – by drag queen and queercore icon Vaginal Davis, my one very non-Mount Carmel friend who I met freshman year of high school when I was at Thrifty's drugstore buying ice cream and complimented him on his mod eyeglasses. He was dressed in what I believe he would now call "heteronormative" drag, i.e., a white oxford shirt and tan corduroy pants. The book is inscribed, "To Kayle from Kyle." I still question the coincidence of these two friends being separated by only one letter: you see, between Kayle and Vaginal, he has gone through many incarnations, among them Buster Beauté, Graciela Grejalba, Ravyn Cymone McFarland, Ada "Bricktop" Smith, and the Rt. Reverend St. Salicia Tate. So it's not entirely impossible that he inscribed the book from one of his selves to another.

When I recently e-mailed him to verify that it was indeed he who gave me the book, and that I didn't buy a copy which was coincidentally inscribed to another "Kayle," he promptly wrote back:

It had to be from me or you stole it from me as Kayle is a made up name that i got from the 1956 musical film remake The Opposite Sex of the 1939 George Cukor film The Woman where the lead character played by June Allyson of The Depends commercials is name Kay Hilliard and i just added an le at the end. Years later i found out that there is a green leafy vegetable called Kale. No one calls me by that construct of Kayle anymore other then my friend Marlou DeLuna and Red aka Rachel Diaz and the people i worked with at UCLA as that is the name i used.

Just was thinking about you looking at a pic taken in Nov 1983 with you modeling your little mod look for the LA Reader. This autumn this picture which is on the walls of my studio will turn 30 years old—-yikes. i never thought i would live to be so old. Hope you and your family are in good health. Just got back from the doctor and i have high blood pressure and i have to get a prostrate exam. That won´t be fun unless the doctor is attractive and in Germany good luck with that.

love and kissy kissyz

A separate book would be required to capture Kayle – and you may be thinking that's the one you want to read, but we'll leave that to the man himself. In another recent e-mail, he confessed to me that he still has a thing for "unavailable dorky white guys," and, after he saw a picture of me with our cat lying on my chest, asked if I "had turned into a lesbian."

So – whether he didn't care for Arthur Schopenhauer and was re-gifting, or whether he loved Schopenhauer and just wanted to share, or whether I flat out stole it – he was the first person to introduce me to the great man. And while I have no authority to pronounce the man "great," I will do so just the same, as I am acquainted with the usual philosophical smatterings one picks up on the way to a B.A. , and of those acquaintances, no one has spoken to me as personally and directly as Arthur. Lots of things land in my lap, but not all of them stay. Schopenhauer stayed.

He speaks plainly, something very difficult for most philosophers.

Just a brief sampling of his aphorisms:

" _Hope is the result of confusing the desire that something should take place with the probability that it will."_

" _The man who is cheerful and merry has always a good reason for being so – the fact, namely, that he is so. There is nothing which, like this quality, can so completely replace the loss of every other blessing."_

" _If we were not all of us exaggeratedly interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that no one could endure it."_

" _Vague longing and boredom are close akin."_

" _The bright and good moments of our life ought to teach us how to act aright when we are melancholy and dull and stupid...and the melancholy, dull and stupid moments should teach us to be modest when we are bright."_

" _Your friends will tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so."_

Oscar Wilde + Droopy Dog = Schopenhauer.

* * *

I better stop here a moment. Look, yes, I know there are orphaned kids who grow up as child soldiers in third world countries, I know people are stricken with catastrophic disease in the prime of their lives, I know many people struggle daily just to keep a roof over their head. And I am none of them. So if you're uninterested in middle class ennui, in coping with a sense of potential unfulfilled, in endlessly looping back over regrets or fretting over the future, this is not the book for you.

But I know I'm not alone. After attending the reunion, I realized my issues are not only not unusual, they are laughably common: Schopenhauer's vague longing, the boredom, the loss of youthful optimism and buoyancy. And so – for those of us whose lives outwardly look great on paper, but inwardly feel something fundamental is amiss and are trying to accept or even improve our internal lot – this _is_ for you.

Some 169 years ago, the German grouch and master of common sense wrote,

" _To live happily only means to lives less unhappily – to live a tolerable life....there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire."_

I'm looking, as you may have surmised, for that little room, and the maddening thing is, I'm pretty sure I once knew exactly where it was. That was in the "before" time: _before_ the endless second guessing, _before_ I filtered every experience through a bit of dirty gray gauze, _before_ the voices in my head tormented me.

Actually, it's just one voice:

For the purpose of this story, let's call him "Charlie Alonso." He never leaves my side. While I sit around enjoying a basketball game on TV with one of our two sons, or while my wife and I lie in bed for a few minutes after morning sex, he whispers questions like, "Shouldn't you be doing something more productive with your time?" "Weren't you supposed to be a wildly successful screenwriter by this point?" "Have you noticed that most people you see on the street appear to be younger than you?" "Funny how you exercise regularly, but your arms and chest seem to lose muscle mass anyway." Or, "Tell me again, why didn't you have sex with that unbelievably hot goth girl you knew in college, y'know, the one who begged you to 'fuck my brains out?'" "Are you sure you're doing all you can do to be a good parent?" "Don't you kind of think you've wasted your talents on frivolous pursuits?" "Dude, buddy, haven't we gone over all this 10,000 times already? Do we really need to rehash _again_?"

Yes. Yes, we do. Because – and I'll get to this – not dealing with him led me one glorious October afternoon a few years ago to the Golden Gate Bridge, where I peered over the railing and gave some serious consideration as to the best place to jump, and how to make sure I could be identified even if my body was never found.

[ 2 ]

## Drinks With Erik

_A_ few months before the reunion, my best friend Erik and I met for drinks at Slim's, a dive bar I co-own on the outskirts of downtown Oakland. At Slim's the lighting is low, the bathrooms unspeakably filthy, the music ear-splittingly loud. Erik is a lawyer and voracious reader who I've known since seventh grade – he devoured 1000 page James Michener tomes when we were 13 – _for fun._ His nickname in high school was Kirk – impulsive, passionate, charming. I was Spock – logical, reserved, uptight. We were a matched pair, sci-fi salt and pepper shakers.

I was excited to hear how things had been going for him at work. Erik is a lawyer for a state utility commission, and has been put in charge of leading the investigation into a disastrous gas pipe explosion which leveled an entire neighborhood, leaving eight dead and fifty two injured. His boss told him to clear his desk for two years for this massive undertaking. It's the biggest case of his life, the biggest in the commission's history, and he, my best friend since seventh grade, the Michener Man, was asked to tackle it. I'm so proud of him. He is at the pinnacle of his career.

After fetching us a pair of Jack and gingers, I leaned in and asked, "tell me everything, Erik – how goes it in the trenches?"

He stirred the ice in his drink a moment before answering.

"I'm bored."

My eyes lit up. Now – _now_ – we had something to talk about.

I went to my go-to authority on most matters concerning "the problem," as the philosophers put it, of existing.

Arthur, what say you on the subject of boredom?

" _The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two."_

That's right. You can worry yourself silly over war, famine, plague or wayward asteroids – or, _or_ – instead, just do what you can to avoid pain (think about how a toothache can absolutely _ruin_ your day), and boredom (recently researchers in Germany identified a fifth type of boredom. They were aware of the first four: indifferent, calibrating, searching, and reactant boredom, but were surprised to discover a fifth: "apathetic" boredom. They did this by asking college students – who one would think would be the least susceptible to weariness of life, restless dissatisfaction, and a sense of emptiness – to fill out a five point scale ranging from "calm" to "fidgety.") Turns out even college students know from existential ennui. Something most orphaned child soldiers probably don't have the time to brood over adequately.

The conclusion? On the whole, researchers found that boredom was – forgive the scientific jargon – _bad_.

Arthur was well aware of this. What happens when you slow down enough to realize how bored with jugglers, one night stands, and bungee jumping you really are? You come down with a case of what he called "vacuity of soul."

"So talk to me – boredom – what?" I asked Erik.

"The feeling is more like, I've succeeded at work, the kids are doing well, I'm remarried, I have a house – and....what about it? What's the next challenge? I feel stagnant." Since we spoke, Erik has joined an amateur tennis league and initiated a weekly "poker night" with work colleagues. Tomorrow he will also begin seeing a therapist.

A few weeks after meeting Erik, while in Los Angeles, I met for dinner with Toshi, who, like me, has dabbled in several careers: flipping houses, TV production, screenwriting; he has degrees from film school and law school, and has passed the bar. In his living room is a large white board with nine possible TV projects he's developing, all of which probably won't go anywhere. At lunch, exasperated, he said,

"I want a nine to five job. I want stability." He spoke wistfully of moving to Ohio. He wants to trade in what he called the "instability" of his thirties and early forties – his wild years – for a desk job. "I'm seriously thinking about adopting a kid, Charlie." He is the only Log Cabin Republican I know. He spoke to me of hush hush fundraisers he's attended, fund raisers that are held in the closet. Not because of his sexuality – this is Hollywood, California in the early part of the 21st century – but because of his conservatism. No one must know he voted for Romney, lest he be black balled.

In reply, I rambled on about trying to find something more meaningful than being a liquor merchant and less frustrating than being a screenwriter. We like to commiserate. We're good at it. But it wasn't until I said, "I feel like I'm wasting a fine mind" that he jerked up straight and said,

"God! I know! This is the theme of our generation."

And so here I sit typing, hoping he's right, and hoping all this navel gazing will resonate with a few of you out there. By the way, how much navel gazing is too much? No such thing, according to my five therapists (seen sequentially, by the way, not simultaneously. That – _that_ – would be excessive).

Another classmate at the reunion bitterly recalled the slogan of the Mount Carmel Man.

"'A man for others.' Right. It's like, you have to be a man for others because you are _better_ than other men. Total bullshit."

I hold it as a general principal that if I've thought or done something – _anything_ – others have, too. It's a numbers game. As of this writing, there are 7.093 billion of us on this planet. I also hold it as a general principal that it feels good to know you're not alone.

I lay some – but just some – of the blame for our "theme" at the feet of Mount Carmel High School. There was something implicit in the air there: we were being groomed to be the captains of commerce, industry, science – well, in any case, captains of _something._ Anything less meant that you weren't living up to the two dreaded "P's": your potential, your promise.

How _should_ I have answered Bishop Moore's query as to whether I was still smart as shit?

"Well, father, I took my brains and work ethic and am running two dive bars in Oakland, and working intermittently (is there any other way if you're not in Hollywood's Top Twenty?) as a screenwriter." Not sure which is more vulgar – selling liquor at a mark-up, or trying to write 90 minutes worth of leisure time diversion. "So you can see I've made good use of that 4.52 I graduated with. "

One therapist noted that by some standards I've been very successful and shrewd, not putting all my eggs in one basket, and following my bliss.

She, of course, was assuming that most people actually know what their bliss is.

[ 3 ]

## Bliss

_N_ early two centuries ago, Schopenhauer offered the most eloquent, concise defense of middle class problems I have come across yet:

"... _for to measure a man's happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator."_

Right. It's not what a man has, but what he _expects_ to have.

White people problems hurt, too.

What do I want?

Peace of mind.

But _specifically,_ what do I want?

A time machine. A big fat red do-over button. A chance to wring fate by the neck until it coughs up my daydreams. And always and in general, I want to be "more present." Because the present is all there is.

I carry in my wallet a scrap of paper with a quote I photocopied:

" _It is the height of folly to refuse the present hour of happiness, or wantonly to spoil it by vexation at by-gones or uneasiness about what is to come. There is a time, of course, for forethought, nay, even for repentance; but when it is over let us think of what is past as of something to which we have said farewell, of necessity subduing our hearts – and of the future as of that which lies beyond our power, in the lap of the gods."_

I promise to ease up on citing Schopenhauer, and not just because my friends and acquaintances begged me to. While I do think him the master of common sense, Schopenhauer is also a prickly pain in the ass who found most people contemptible and was a mess with women, beginning with his mother, who, when he was still a young man, wrote to him,

" _That I am very fond of you I'm sure you will not doubt. It is necessary for my happiness to know you are happy but not to be a witness to it. Every day you will come at one o'clock and stay until three, then I shall not see you again all day long, except on my salon days which you may attend if you wish, also eating at my house those two evenings, provided you will abstain from tiresome arguing."_

By my count, that's coffee and snack seven days a week, with two full meals, provided he restricted his conversation to the weather.

I am grateful that Irvin Yalom included several of Johanna Schopenhauer's letters in his novel, "The Schopenhauer Cure." Otherwise, _I_ might've had to do the research.

I, too, can be plenty misanthropic – I am 100% convinced that people who claim to "regret nothing" and "never look back" are lying, and if they aren't, they're just stupid.

On the other hand, today I wanted to hug the barista at Starbuck's who served me. He wasn't as peppy, chipper and vocal as his colleagues. He also, like me, had some gray in his beard, and bags under his eyes. But he also carried himself with a certain dignity despite what I perceived (projected? read into? completely falsely attributed to?) to be a sad weariness of life, a bit of dissatisfaction over pouring coffee for a living at this stage in his life, a sense that he was wasting a perfectly good mind. I felt a lump rise in my throat, and I wanted to hug him.

What on earth is going on here? Early male menopause? These last five or six years, I have felt less in control of my emotions than I ever have in my life.

And I'm not handling it very well.

[ 4 ]

## The Bridge

_R_ ecently I wrote a 79-word story entitled "The Perfect Witness."

Martin gripped the iron railing of the bridge, waiting for the perfect witness. It would have to be a younger man, someone who could recover from this. Martin would hold up his driver's license and yell "My wife's name is Annabelle." If his body was swept away, he didn't want to leave her wondering. A young man approached. Martin held up his license. The young man waved back and smiled. Martin let go of the railing and sat down.

"Esquire" magazine was holding an open contest for short stories that were 79 words in length. I lost.

On that gorgeous afternoon a couple years ago, when I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, stopped at the scenic overlook at the northeast corner of the bridge, got out of my car, walked along the bridge, and looked over the railing, I felt irrelevant. I felt I had constructed a life without meaning. I felt irredeemably flawed, selfish and weak. I felt I had wasted a perfectly good mind. But mostly, I felt irrelevant. I had let the gypsy down. I had let others down. I had let myself down.

I wasn't going to jump, but it's shocking to me – as I look back on it now – that I went so far as to take the time to drive across the bridge, pay the toll, stop at the overlook, get out of my car, and look down at the water and rocks below. More than that, I thought that to do this _correctly_ , in a way that would protect my wife, I would do what Martin did – make sure an eyewitness saw me place my driver's license on the ground (I can't apologize enough to you, Eyewitness!), but I would go further than Martin (more than 79 words can accommodate). I would also duct tape a second piece of photo identification – my passport – to my thigh, so that a positive identification could be made if my body did turn up.

As the intake nurse at the mental hospital where I spent the night put it, what I had was a moment of suicidal "ideation." By that time, the sedatives settling in, I felt embarrassed about being there at all. I tried to downplay what had happened, but she told me that if I didn't admit that I had given serious thought to taking my own life, my insurance wouldn't cover this $10,000 a night hotel room where shoelaces weren't allowed, and where locked double doors kept you from strolling the grounds. So I stuck with the truth. It had been a rough few years: I was being sued, Nora and I were having marital difficulties, my screenwriting career had become a hobby, I was suffering from chronic post-vasectomy pain, I was no longer a wunderkind at anything, and no teacher was patting me on the back and telling me I was short listed for valedictorian.

By the way, our _actual_ class valedictorian, who was also at the reunion, and who looked younger and more content than most of us, and who chairs the English Department at a well-respected university and has two published novels under his belt, not to mention a lovely family _and_ a Wikipedia page (we all agreed he had found the peace and bliss which eluded us), on reading this manuscript, wrote to me:

" _So your book was a great salve to me — I'm not alone, then, in this journey/ feeling this way? But it also made me despair a bit, b/c — well, how DO we solve this? But at least now...I'm thinking about it and i know that I'm not thinking alone."_

He also told me of a classmate in grad school, a bubbly young woman who wrote essays exclusively on the topic of volleyball, and who, two years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend still hasn't gotten over this. I totally get it.

[ 5 ]

## Character

" _C_ haracter is who you are when you think no one else is watching." Schopenhauer didn't say that. Don't know who did.

What Schopenhauer did say, though, was this – _"for there are many evil and bestial sides to our nature which require to be hidden away out of sight."_ "Evil" and "bestial" might be a touch strong, but two incidents from my childhood, that most unguarded and uncalculated period of one's life, should let you know all you need to know about my "natural" character:

When I was eleven, my mother and I lived in an apartment on the outskirts of Hancock Park, an island of the well-heeled in the middle of Hollywood. The street signs in our neighborhood were old fashioned hollow metal boxes mounted atop poles. Birds nested in the signs. After school, when we were feeling bored, just for the frisson of it, two of my friends and I would shake the signs until an egg or infant bird would fall to the ground. The birds were tiny, featherless, with bulbous blue eyes that I could make out under skin as thin as parchment. You could see their hearts beating. They would open and close their beaks as they lay there dying on the hot concrete, without their mothers to comfort or defend them. We stared, ashamed and fascinated, at the helpless creatures. We did this more than once.

I can't say for certain, but I'm fairly certain neither of my sons has done anything so wantonly cruel.

When I was fifteen, I was in the passenger seat in a car driving in L.A. with some friends. At a bus stop an old woman was waiting for her bus. We were stopped next to her at a red light. Just as the light turned green I was struck by inspiration. I unrolled the window and spat on her. My friends in the car laughed. If I found out today that my 16 year old son did this, I would slap him hard across the face and ground him – the hypocrisy isn't the issue – trying to beat his father's character out of him is. What kind of person spits on an old lady at a bus stop?

Turns out, me.

I also do volunteer work, I lend money to friends at no interest, I'm a good father, a decent employer, and I'm also the guy who spat on an old lady.

* * *

Wait – did I use the phrase "marital difficulties" earlier? Apologies, dear Reader. That is far too vague and self-serving. You deserve better. Okay: the "difficulty" was that I "almost" had an affair with one of my wife's friends. I didn't "actually" insert my penis into her vagina (although that may have happened eventually), but we exchanged enough "harmless" e-mails – which, as they always do, got discovered – to cause Nora great pain. I wrenched her guts so badly she had diarrhea for two days. That was the easy part of the ordeal for her. Shortly after the e-mails were exposed, I came home to find several articles on the dining room table which Nora had printed out, each of which made a very persuasive case that a "harmless" on-line affair was just as bad, if not worse, than a physical one. Sharing intimacies and secrets, flirtatiously chatting like lovers? That was far worse for Nora to digest than a one-night stand with a stranger. And I felt terrible – not for what I had done (my selfishness I could compartmentalize), but for the hurt I caused Nora.

And, of course, I handled the whole thing as poorly as I could have: letting the truth out in dribs and drabs, only under threat of further exposure – e-mail by excruciating e-mail – from the other woman and her husband. I was spinning the truth like a wobbly top, flailing to control the damage, but in the end succeeded only in exposing my cowardice. As Nora succinctly put it, "You're not the man I thought you were."

She believed I was the kind of man who wouldn't betray his wife. She was wrong.

All of my married male friends and I, _all of us_ , have talked about the possibility of affairs, and, with the exception of tee totaling James, who said – _and meant_ – "And risk all this?" meaning his relationship with his wife and son (if he has "bestial" and "evil" sides, he's done a magnificent job hiding them), have agreed that if we could get away with it, we could probably live with the selfishness and deception of an affair. What we all would have a harder time turning a blind eye to is the pain the betrayal would inflict on our spouses and the loss of respect from our children.

Nora chose not to tell the children.

I was 22 when we married. Nora is a few years older than I am, she was my first real girlfriend and the third woman I slept with. Having married young, essentially skipping my bachelorhood, my twenties, I came to believe I "deserved" more pussy (I have already told our older son William that he is not to use the "M" word until he is at least 28, and that he should have as much relationship fun/heartbreak/sex/courtship as he can before then). I have told him this not just because I know my "excuse" – having married too young – is a flimsy one: no one put a gun to my head at the altar. At the time, a few friends gently questioned the wisdom of me promising to forsake all others at such a young age, but I shrugged them off. I was in love and not to be deterred. Now I'm trying to pre-deter William so he won't wake up one day twenty five years from now and think, "Hmm, I deserve more pussy."

So when you cross that line, men, and get caught, sure, go ahead – buy the flowers, apologize profusely, clean the bathroom like it's never been cleaned before, but know this: at the end of the day, what will determine whether your marriage survives, assuming you want it to survive, is this: does your wife believe you acted in simple selfishness, or in selfishness muddled with contempt for her? What scars is she willing to live with for the sake of the children? Can you both hang in there waiting for time to exert its healing powers? Not long after the affair came to light Nora told me several times, "I don't hate you." Several months, a year, two years, later, she forgave me as fully as she could. We're good again. There is a scar there, but we rarely notice it. I've played the reverse scenario in my head, and have told myself I would be able to forgive Nora, too, but I've also imagined that I would rush into a burning building to rescue a complete stranger, and neither scenario has been field tested.

Once you are checked into a mental hospital, and processed by the intake nurse, you are seen by the on-duty psychiatrist, who interviews you to gauge just how whacked you are. I spoke to the psychiatrist about my worries over a lawsuit at one of the bars – a patron had been grievously injured in a fight with my doorman (he was in an induced coma with a tube sticking out of his fractured, battered skull) – and told him the stress of the suit had made me suicidal, but he correctly understood that the lawsuit was merely a side dish, an irritant. "Hire a good lawyer and shut up" were his only words on the subject.

"I don't think you are suicidal," he continued. "But if I call your wife to pick you up tomorrow, do you think she will say yes?" I had told the intake nurse about my "marital difficulties," and she had noted them in the report he was now looking over. My affair was the only thing that caught his attention. I guess he's been doing this long enough to know what really brings middle class men who don't have so much as an unpaid parking ticket to their name into a mental hospital.

Before being confined, I had punched out a window in our garage and confessed to Nora that I had drafted several suicide notes (as a writer, it might be the last thing you write, so you really want to nail it). But it was my uncontrollable crying in the ER that led Nora and the doctor on call to commit me to the nearby psychiatric hospital under a "5150" (threat of harm to self or others) – a 72 hour hold. The psychiatrist let me go after 24 hours, only because Nora agreed to pick me up.

If I'm being honest with myself – and one can never know this with 100% certainty – it was the fallout from my infidelity; _and_ the lawsuit; _and_ career frustrations; _and_ a sense of potential squandered; _and_ chronic nagging pain; _and_ boredom; _and_ flimsy moral character; _and_ far too much time on my hands to think about all these things, that put me on the bridge that day.

* * *

By advising us not to reveal them, Schopenhauer acknowledges that we do all have evil and bestial sides (you can't hide what's not there). This book, though, will not just be one long mea culpa; President Lincoln was on to something when he implored us to find and express the "better angels of our nature." But no self-respecting Mount Carmel man-for-others would indulge in any back patting until he has given his bestial sides their due.

And perhaps more to the point, as Erik put it, "Who wants to read about good behavior? That's boring."

[ 6 ]

## On Checking Out

_A_ surprising number of my friends have thought about suicide, too. Unfortunately, it's hard to do with dignity.

"When I used to ride," said Hector, a friend from college who owned a motorcycle he just gave away, "on bad days, I would think, 'a fatal crash wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.'" And he's right: that's suicide without the shame, without the stigma. "My wife and kids would be upset, but they couldn't hate me if it was a wreck." But waiting for a fatal accident is tricky. You just can't rely on it. Hector, by the way, is a successful computer consultant who recently went back to law school, graduated, and just won a privacy infringement lawsuit against a huge tech company right out of the gate.

Another friend of mine, Nigel, a film director and producer, is so successful it makes me want to puke. Literally, hearing about his success leaves me light headed and nauseous. A few weeks ago we were walking through the park, and he was talking about the sense of betrayal he felt from some long term work colleagues, among other things, and our conversation wandered to a mutual acquaintance who lost her fiancé to cancer. He said, "I don't know what's going on, Charlie. This is not how I think. I'm a sports-type guy. You lose one game, you move on to the next. You adjust, you stay positive, you have to....but...the other day I thought, dying of cancer wouldn't be the worst thing." Right. Because there's no shame there.

Anecdotal, unrepresentative, whiny ass bullshit? Perhaps. Perhaps not:

According to the May 3, 2013 issue of the CDC's riveting "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report," (you simply _must_ subscribe) in 2010, there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 deaths from suicide. The headline: "More Americans Kill Themselves Than Die In Car Crashes." From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent. The article offered no single or even several explanations for the spike – "vacuity of soul" was not mentioned, although I suspect it should've been.

But what it did offer was this: it's a bit of a guy thing. The suicide rate for middle aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000. I have always believed women are tougher than men. I don't know if it's the byproduct of having to deal with the pain of a small human exiting a part of your body normally designed to handle something no bigger than a large thumb, but the fair sex is just tougher, more pragmatic, and a hell of a lot better equipped to deal with life's vicissitudes.

[ 7 ]

## Character, Part The Second

_D_ o you weasel and obfuscate and avoid, even when it comes to mundane things, something as mundane as watching sports? If so, we're half way to a friendship.

There aren't two sides to every issue for me. There are, at minimum, 116.

It's not all affairs and suicidal ennui. Sometimes it's just about needling your family when you're bored.

Our son William is passionate about sports. Lives, dies, and punches holes in walls over his beloved local teams, The Oakland Raiders, The Oakland A's, and the Golden State Warriors. Pressed, he will even follow the San Jose Sharks (hockey, for chrissake!). My wife feels the same way about team loyalty, and my younger son, Tomas – well, he prefers playing sports to watching them.

Who you root for in our house matters.

Last year, when it became clear the Oakland Raiders had no chance of making the playoffs, I suddenly got very interested in the San Francisco 49ers, and would chatter on like a schoolgirl about how _amazing_ quarterback Colin Kaepernick ("C-Kap") was. When the Oakland A's were knocked out of the playoffs, I couldn't stop gushing about how the San Francisco Giants swept the Tigers in the World Series. And Pablo "Panda Bear" Sandoval hitting three home runs in one game? Well I just swooned.

"You're a flip flopper," said William.

It's only gotten worse: my loyalty these days isn't divided between two teams, it's now split into four. I'm an avid fan of European soccer, and all four of my favorite teams – Real Madrid, Barcelona, Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, have advanced to the final four of the UEFA Championship. That I can even _have_ four favorite teams horrifies my loved ones.

"You're the ultimate bandwaggoner," continued William, "because all four of your teams are in the finals. You're like the soccer equivalent of a Heat/Giants/Ravens fan – whatever team is doing well, you like them. It's disgusting."

When I try to defend myself, glibly claiming that I am being big hearted and "pan-bay," William answers, "It's wrong. You can't do that. This is not my opinion, this is a fact: you can't be a fan of two teams. You can't root for two teams throughout the season."

My wife Nora chimed in:

"You have no allegiance, no loyalty" (hello subtext?).

When I accuse her of seeing things only in black and white, and being unable to appreciate the nuances of the 50+ shades of grey in the world, she doesn't flinch:

"How can you truly invest in a team? There's no risk for you if one of your teams lose, because you have others in the wings. You're not willing to attach yourself. It shows lack of character" (wait – we are still talking about sports, right?).

I sooner will hold my tongue than offer an honest, unpopular opinion. Whether it's fear of disapproval or the need for approval I can't say.

* * *

Sometimes fear of disapproval will cost you more than the annoyance of your family. Sometimes it will cost you a friendship.

Max, who didn't attend the reunion, and I, became especially close during our senior year of high school. We spent many days on the beach, enjoying the easy, carefree days of that last summer before college. We both were heading to Berkeley to study architecture, and there we remained close friends. He had much more natural talent than I did. I never pulled all-nighters, getting my drawings and chip board models completed with time to spare, and he always showed up to our critiques at 9 a.m., bleary eyed, having been up all night, with a design project maybe 80% done, but always masterful. I remember a cityscape he made out of rusted bits of metal, coffee cans, painted balsa wood, and any and everything else he could find. I loved it. It was art. We both got A minuses – him because his work was just shy of complete, mine because I had crossed every I and dotted every T, but with no flash of his X-factor brilliance.

After college, he went back to L.A., bought an old man bar, and revamped it into something hip.

He also had aspirations to be a screenwriter, as did I, and so we began collaborating in our mid-twenties. I would write a first draft of something, he would revise it, and vice versa. We wrote about three or four scripts together, always trying to come up with something "commercial." We were chasing the marketplace. And we even took a meeting or two, but nothing ever came of it. And he kept the work habits he had in college: inspired, incomplete, delivered moments after the deadline.

At one point I became annoyed waiting for notes back from him on a draft, and so I decided, while I was waiting, that I would write something without regard for the marketplace, just to satisfy myself.

I didn't tell Max about it. I figured it might bother him that I was going solo, and figured nothing would come of it anyway, so why risk an uncomfortable conversation for something that would go nowhere?

Well, I was wrong.

The script I wrote while waiting for his notes was called _Uninvited_ , and it won the most prestigious screenwriting award out there, The Nicholl Fellowship. I remember explaining to him that I was tired of waiting and wanted to do something very personal, and, while initially I could see his hurt and jealousy, he put on a good face and was gracious about it all, even bragging to his father, while I was standing on the porch of his family's home, that my script was one of five to win out of 5000 entrants. He and his father both appreciate what it means to beat the odds – they're both fond of the race track.

I won the Nicholl just months after we opened Slim's – it was Max's vision – he found the old bar, knew it had great bones, knew what lacquered wood and red lights could do, and I was the one to come in and make sure the I's were dotted and the T's crossed.

Everything seemed fine between us. We opened a second bar, The Rustic, within a year. There was very little talk of screenwriting.

But after I got a lucrative writing gig on the film _Overdrive 3_ , he wouldn't return my calls. I finally wrote him a postcard – I found a vintage post card of San Francisco's Chinatown that I knew he would appreciate – and on it I apologized for what must've felt like a betrayal, for not being straightforward with him about writing _Uninvited._ I hoped that he could forgive me.

My phone rang three days later.

"Charlie, thanks for the sweet note, but it's totally unnecessary. I should be apologizing to you."

"What do you mean?"

"I've just been busy and wrapped up in work and neglected our friendship. The screenwriting thing doesn't bother me at all."

"Oh God, I'm so relieved – I mean, I still think I handled it badly – but I'm glad you're not upset about it anymore."

"Charlie: c'mon. Absolutely not."

I hung up feeling relieved and very proud that I had owned up to my bad behavior. Now our friendship could continue with the elephant in the room safely slain.

We haven't spoken since.

I was afraid to tell Max that I wanted to fly solo, and so I flew behind his back. And for my cowardice and deceit by omission, I lost a friendship. Secrets are corrosive. Just ask Nora. On the other hand, Max lied to mutual friends that he had "helped with" _Uninvited_. I was elated at this little bit of fudging and embellishment on his part: it's no fun when someone else has exclusive rights to the moral high ground. His high ground is still higher than mine, but at least he's not in the clouds.

What I offer by way of explanation, not excuse, for my behavior, is that I grew up learning to hate confrontation. Any confrontation. I saw an ugly version of it every night between my parents, and it did not sit well with me.

[ 8 ]

## I Love My Parents...Separately

_M_ y mother Helen never skimped with the pats on the back. I was too young to understand what the gypsy meant when she said it, but my mother made sure to clarify my status as latent "great man" to me many times when I was growing up.

Parents, you might want to rethink unconditional, constant praise: it's far better to have a peak to scale than one to slide down.

On the other hand, my father's constant refrain was "don't make the same mistakes I did." Charles, Sr. had been living a comfortable life as a mid-level government bureaucrat in Madrid when I came along. In America he caromed from job to job, working as a driving school instructor, correspondence teacher, and data entry clerk, among other things.

I know it's unseemly to blame your parents for your baggage after the age of, say, 21, but there's no getting around the power they have over you. My mother and father were married six years, my mother and stepfather have been married 24 years. The influence of my father – and my father and mother together – even though they were together for only one quarter the time my mom and stepfather have been together, far outweighs the influence of my stepfather, a very decent and good man who holds the car door open for my mother and treats her with respect.

My mom and dad were screamers. That was their fighting style, and I hated it.

We lived in a modest apartment on the outskirts of Hollywood. It was a large, ungainly house which had been subdivided into apartments. Our living room let onto a small hallway, where the bathroom separated my parents' bedroom from mine (I am an only child). I remember spending many evenings standing in the little hallway, hiding myself behind the doorway, watching my mom and dad yell at each other in the living room. Their arguments would regularly deteriorate to the point that my mother was in tears, and I remember darting out from the hallway to hand her tissues. My father would shoot me disapproving glances.

That was our ritual.

When I was six years old, I wandered into my parents' bedroom early one morning. Something was off. The open shelves containing my father's underpants, T-shirts and socks were empty. My mom was in the room, and she looked at me with pained concern.

"Where's daddy's stuff?" I asked.

She placed her hands lightly on my shoulders and said, "Well, Chato, you're the man of the house now."

* * *

When I was an infant, and we still lived in Spain, my mother told me that my father would walk several paces ahead of her, hands in his pockets, head hunched forward, so that no one would guess that the baby in the stroller, belonging to the divorcee behind him, was his.

The feeling I had that morning when my father's underwear was gone was not sadness, but relief. It was finally over. The yelling would stop. There would be no more fighting. No more tissues to hand out. I loved my mom. I loved my dad. Just not together.

I saw my dad every other weekend after that. He would pick me up on Saturday mornings and bring me back Sunday afternoons. We always walked to the movies, counting the blocks along the way. I believe our record was 68 round trip, from his apartment on Fountain Avenue to the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, to see, say, _Star Wars_ for the seventh time. Invariably he fell asleep during the movies, and when they ended, and the house lights came up, I would hold my breath and remain stock still, not wanting to wake him, so that we could sit through a second, sometimes third, showing of the same movie.

Twenty years later I would decide that I could best express myself by writing movies.

We would stop at Pioneer Chicken (long gone) on Western Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard for dinner, cross the street for a soft serve ice cream at a little taqueria (also gone), and then close out the day playing pinball at a seedy pool hall called "The Fun Center" (also long gone). This was the pre-gentrified Hollywood Boulevard of head shops, shuttered storefronts, and porno theaters, where I would always sneak an illicit glance at the raunchy posters.

At Pioneer Chicken my dad would pull out his pen and make me do math problems on a paper napkin.

But it is my mother Helen who is the hero in this story. She did the heavy lifting: she packed my lunch every day, scrimped and saved so that I could attend private Catholic school, she was there in the trenches day in and day out. Not being very handy or having much money, she would spackle holes in the walls of our apartment with chewed white bread painted over with liquid paper. For this alone she is a fucking superstar in my book.

When she volunteered as an interpreter for the 1984 Olympics (she speaks German), she would save the packaged lunch they provided her and bring it home for me, since she knew I was fond of croissants, and a mini-croissant was always included with the lunches.

What _did_ she eat while standing on her legs, plagued with painful varicose veins, for five or six hours?

After the divorce, I once walked into the living room at five in the morning and found her having sex on the couch with some guy. I ran back to my room in tears. She asked him to leave. The poor woman was scratching a very natural itch, and I soured it. She dedicated her life to me – she did not spend most Saturdays bringing guys home – she and I spent most of them lying on a comforter, eating grapes and watermelon, and watching _Three's Company_ and _The Love Boat_. We had – we _have_ – a great relationship. Perhaps that's the issue. Perhaps I take our good fortune for granted, which, of course, is not a matter of good fortune at all. It was and is a matter of her dedication, patience, and kindness. Her own parents, first generation German immigrants, beat her black and blue when they saw her walking home from school holding hands with a Mexican boy. She took that experience and vowed never to be violent with her own child, and she never was.

As for my father, perhaps I'm longing for something I never had with him, and hope that my own boys won't feel compelled to write wistfully about me when they are 44.

Charles, Sr. got to be fun dad. Pioneer Chicken, ice cream, movies, and after only one day, he got to turn me back over to Helen so she could get me to school, drive me to soccer practice, remind me to do the laundry and my chores, and all the other mundane and inestimably important tasks of parenting.

"Do you know your dad complains about how expensive you are?" she once asked.

I didn't understand. "But he only sees me on the weekends."

"I know. But he says it's expensive taking you out to restaurants and movies all the time."

This hurt. Fast food and a matinee – perhaps watched twice in a row – four hours killed for the price of two – was a burden to a man who paid the bare minimum in child support?

I never confronted my dad about this – you know my views on confrontation – and yet, I could not hate the man. My poor mother. Why couldn't I have just agreed with her once and said, "Why is dad such a cheapskate asshole?"

But the words never occurred to me. I felt too much pity, too much pain, for the man who walked ahead of his own child, who lived a provisional existence in a foreign country, bouncing from job to job, moving from one depressing studio apartment to the next.

My dad was 40 when I was born, and he let it upend his life. I was an accident. My parents weren't married, and he was from a traditional Spanish Catholic family, and my mom getting pregnant, unmarried and already once divorced, was a scandal – _for him_. So when I was a baby, they moved to L.A., mostly, I think, at my father's urging, in a vain attempt to run away from his problems (I found out years later that his sisters, my aunts, were furious at him for not letting them know I existed until I was four months old).

In high school I saw him less and less frequently as I became busy with my own life. And he, in turn, didn't push to see me more. When I moved away to college, he finally felt that he could return home. He moved back to Spain twenty years after he left, and I've seen him every two to four years since then.

I remember the last time I said goodbye to him. We were at his little condo – Nora, the boys, and I – along with his sister, my Tia Maribella, who lives with him. They're a very cute couple: he takes care of the bills and paperwork, she fries bread for his breakfast and irons his undershirts. Our suitcases were packed, the taxi was waiting downstairs.

As I was getting ready for the final hug goodbye, I made the obligatory promise to come back soon and he smiled and said, "Good. After all, you are my only son."

What happened next was so alien to me that I didn't know what to do except what I actually did. I ran into the bathroom and shut the door. I burst into tears. I didn't see it coming. The emotion hit me like a wrecking ball. I don't burst out crying. It's not what I do. Not until these last five years, anyway. In the bathroom I washed my face, composed myself, and came back out. We said goodbye – both of us acting like nothing had happened.

Schopenhauer came to lionize and adore his father, and disdain his mother (I don't disdain my mother one bit, but I do take her for granted). It was Johanna Schopenhauer, too, who did the heavy lifting. It was she who was chiefly responsible for young Arthur's upbringing and enculturation. It was she, through her popularly attended literary salons in Jena, who introduced Arthur to one of the few living people he actually respected: Goethe.

And his father?

When Arthur was 16, my son's age, his father Heinrich also looked over the ledge at the water below, but made a different decision than I did. When Heinrich Schopenhauer was 65, beset by ill health and financial trouble, he climbed to the upper loft of the granary of his Hamburg warehouse, and jumped to his death in the Hamburg Canal.

Arthur must have had conflicting feelings about his father's death. On the one hand, his father had pressured him to take over the family business, to become a middle class merchant, to force, in words Arthur would later pen when describing the need for a man to find his calling, "a valuable vase to be used as a kitchen pot." It was his father's suicide that freed Arthur to pursue his true calling as a scholar and philosopher, and not become a kitchen pot.

On the other hand, his dad was gone.

In his writings, Schopenhauer defends suicide at length. He considers the religious and legal condemnations of it to be "insipidities."

"... _it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than his own life and person."_

He goes on to quote Pliny:

" _Life is not so desirable a thing as to be protracted at any cost...the chief of all remedies for a troubled mind is the feeling that among the blessing which nature gives to man, there is none greater than an opportune death; and the best of it is that he can avail himself of it."_

But it would be a mistake to call him suicide's cheerleader. After criticizing various condemnations of it, Schopenhauer goes on to criticize suicide _itself_ – not as a crime or trespass against religious tenets – but as a conceptually flawed approach to problem solving:

"... _suicide thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. But from a mistake to a crime is a far cry..."_

Schopenhauer concedes that IF there is an afterlife, and most of his works suggest that he did not believe in one, we have no guarantee that it will be any better than this one, that we might inadvertently be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. And, of course, he is indirectly defending his father's decision, his father's "mistake."

I was 19 years old and living in my apartment in college when I got the call from Erik. He was sobbing.

"Charlie, Charlie, my dad – he's dead."

"What?! What happened?"

"He did it. He killed himself."

"He-when- _are you sure_?"

"My mom just called me."

"Ohmigod....ohmigod...Erik."

"He's gone, Charlie, he's gone."

There wasn't much more to say. We cried on the phone together. For two or three years after Erik's father took his own life (he was a dentist who prescribed himself to death during a nasty divorce), an uncharacteristic anger would burst forth out of nowhere: at restaurants or nightclubs Erik would tear light fixtures off walls, throw bottles through windows, all with a demonic smile on his face. He doesn't break things anymore, but he still says, "I'm mad at my dad."

Erik is now older than his father was when he took his life. As am I. We've both made it this far. I never told him about the bridge incident until he read this. He told me he would've been furious with me and never forgiven me had I jumped.

[ 9 ]

## A Day In The Life

_A_ fter we finished eating dinner at the reunion, another classmate, Anson, asked me to sit with him on a concrete planter away from the crowd. He looked me intently in the eye, leaning forward, hands together, and said,

"Tell me what a day in the life of Charlie is like." I was flattered and horrified. Anson is the number two or three finance man at a huge Wall Street firm, and I knew he was asking me because he figured I must be leading an intellectually exciting and challenging life based on the kind of person I was at 16. He had asked the same question of author Michael Lewis, who wrote "Moneyball" and "The Big Short," among other books, and who one day asked if he could tag along with Anson to get a feel for Wall Street. I couldn't come up with a plausible lie quick enough, so I went with my number two choice: the truth.

"Actually, Anson, it's not all reading Epictetus and working on the Great American Novel," I joked. "I get up, go to the same coffee shop every day, have the same bagel and banana, read the paper. Then I write for maybe 2 or 3 hours – there's no way I can go a full 8 – I'm strictly a sprinter, not a distance guy, and in the afternoon I play with the dog and cat, and I watch a lot of sports with my kids. It's bizarre: God gave me two jock sons. Me. "

Anson nodded inscrutably.

"So: what's your day like?" I countered with muted hostility.

"Well, I'm usually up by five to hit the gym before I catch the ferry to the city. And then from 7 to 7 it's meetings, putting out fires. I try to get home by nine."

"And you like it?" I followed up, hoping he would suddenly break down in tears and confess to me that moving piles of money around, and making gobs of it in the process, have left him with a mean case of soul vacuity.

What did he say?

"I love it, Charlie."

"That's great to hear."

"But my big passion project right now is founding an all-girls Catholic School (he has 4 daughters). I'm thinking of calling it 'Divine Heart.'"

"Well, that's, y'know, wonderful."

"But don't tell anybody about it yet. It's still on the drawing boards. Okay, tell me, Charlie, what books are on your night stand _right now?_ "

Shit. I don't even have a night stand – I have a vintage TV dinner tray Nora found at a garage sale. The Salinger would be okay, but not _great_ , to mention – should I say, I don't know, Pynchon or Joyce or something? And I felt weird about getting into Wiesel or "The Enquirer," so instead I again fell back on the truth. "Truth is, I love your Thomas Mann's and your Nabokov's – they always have a spot on my night stand – but my big guilty pleasure is true crime. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, this lady near where I live who stabbed her lover/psychiatrist to death. And uh, that last Franzen book, 'Freedom,' I liked that one, too."

Anson nodded. "You should come out to our beach house this summer." I told him I would consult my wife about that, and we rejoined our 298 classmates.

Anson and I have maintained a periodic e-mail relationship since the reunion, and I sent him one of my favorite books, "Lolita," to which he replied that he first gave it to his wife, who couldn't get past the subject matter. I can't remember whether I responded that it was precisely the fact that Nabokov, not even writing in his native tongue, pulled off the unthinkable: creating a compelling, charming pedophile, which, among other things, made it a masterpiece.

It bothered me that I had perhaps "disappointed" Anson, someone whose opinion did not matter that much to me in high school. Schopenhauer defers to another German on the matter:

" _Goethe declares that if we had to depend for our life upon the favor of others, we should never have lived at all."_

We were only acquaintances during our Mt. Carmel years and I considered Anson something of a lightweight. Now he is powerful and wealthy, and more than that, thoughtful and curious. He's not a lightweight, and he's kind. But what really bothers me is that I care so much about what Anson might think of me now, Goethe's advice notwithstanding. Surely there must be a numbingly long compound German word for someone who gives great advice which he himself is incapable of following.

I sent a copy of "The Complete Essays of Schopenhauer" to Anson a while back, and, while we were chatting on the phone – I wanted to pick his brain for stock picks – I asked him if he had had a chance to look at it yet.

"I tried Charlie, but god, I couldn't get through it. It's so _depressing_."

"What about the wisdom of low expectations? Seriously, Anson, if all you needed to be happy was a good parking space, wouldn't that be incredible?"

"I don't know. I mentioned it to a friend of mine and he said, 'Isn't that the book undergrads carry around campus to look smart?'"

"Well," I pointed out, "I carry my Schopenhauer quote discreetly, in my wallet." In reply he sent me Jim Holt's "Why Does The World Exist?" an open ended, but ultimately less cynical look at the "problem" of existence.

The next day I gutsily (for me) followed up with an e-mail telling him he must never slag Schopenhauer again, if for no other reason than this:

A few months ago I received a come-on e-mail for money. Someone had hacked the account of Amy, the lead actress in a small project I wrote and directed. According to the e-mail, a mutual friend of ours, Sacha, our cinematographer, had cancer, and needed financial help. I can't believe anyone falls for this crap. I've received e-mails from people in my contact list begging for money after supposedly being mugged in Bulgaria and losing their passport – _people who are in the same room with me_ – so I hit reply: "Hey, Amy, just a head's up: you've been hacked."

She promptly wrote back, "I wish. I just got off the phone with Sacha. You should talk to her. She's doing ok but it's overwhelming (as one would expect)"

What...The...Fuck.

I called Sacha. The diagnosis was Stage IV Breast Cancer. Her head was swimming. She was trying to figure out health insurance, treatment options, whether she could still work, all the while coping with pain and insomnia that had been worsening for months. At one point it had gotten so bad that she was in a morphine-induced stupor for three weeks. "I lost three weeks, Charlie. I don't know who fed my dog." We collaborated on two projects, and while I don't know her that well, I do know a few important things about her – she identifies herself as being "Bu-ish," half Buddhist, half Jewish. She smokes. She loves her dog Henry, a border collie, ardently. When, last summer, I took my first crack at directing, it was she who saved the production. My co-director Dean and I had little expertise when it came to running a set or even turning on a Fresnel light, and she, our cinematographer, our den mother, saved us. She put out fires left and right, from equipment not showing up on time, to helping us with the blocking of the actors. Cell phone in one hand, cigarette in the other, she would walk out of earshot, as if to spare us the stress, and solve the catastrophe of the moment. We gave her an unpaid "producer" credit – most of us were unpaid and out of pocket on the project. Dean and I bought her a nice camera in gratitude for all she did. It's still not enough.

Her mother died of breast and brain cancer at age 49. She is 40, but tells me that, unlike her mother, "I'm not ready to go, Charlie."

I made plans to see Sacha for lunch when I was next in Los Angeles. She looked good and her spirits were better than I expected, even for someone with her powerful and positive personality. She spoke of the silver linings.

"Y'know, on the upside, I have connected with people I haven't heard from in 10 years. Except for one douchebag, everyone's been amazing. And at the gym I get to use the hot tub all I want, and I don't feel guilty about it" (the hot water takes the edge off the pain). "But I'm scared. I mean, I know I'll beat this, but I don't know what's ahead of me." She was crying. "I don't know what I will do. Old things don't seem important anymore. This is changing me." She wiped away tears. "The good news is, they're letting me into this clinical trial. So cross your fingers." I crossed my fingers and made an X of my fork and knife for good measure. We await the results.

I told her that, according to my cosmology, "People like you don't get sick – you've stored up too much good karma – and even when you do get sick, you overcome. That's the order of the universe. You're like my friend Billy from high school who had Hodgkin's Lymphoma in college. He was too happy-go-lucky and mellow and kind to get sick, and at our 25th high school reunion, guess what – he looked better than most of us. You're Billy with tits."

She smiled. Now I know my cosmology is garbage – the Holocaust, Serbia, Rwanda, on and on, prove that bad things do happen to good people – but I still want to believe.

Several months back, after we finished our shoot in the warehouse space she lives in, she made me a glass of a thick green sludge (I can't remember what funky herbs made it green), and spoke of the energy boost it gave her. I drank it, along with a beer I had bought from the corner market, sat on her couch, and listened to the Stone's "Beggar's Banquet" while she attended to Henry and the day's e-mails.

We shot in November. Around Christmas, after treating the lump she found in her upper right breast with acupuncture and herbal remedies, she let a doctor examine her. He found a 14 cm diameter tumor, so big that it could not be operated on, not until it was shrunken, and there was no guarantee it would shrink. There were cancer spots on her liver and bones.

At our lunch together I pulled from my wallet the Schopenhauer quote and read it to her.

" _It is the height of folly to refuse the present hour of happiness, or wantonly to spoil it by vexation at by-gones or uneasiness about what is to come. There is a time, of course, for forethought, nay, even for repentance; but when it is over let us think of what is past as of something to which we have said farewell, of necessity subduing our hearts – and of the future as of that which lies beyond our power, in the lap of the gods."_

"I love it, Charlie," she said, and snapped a picture of it then and there and posted it immediately on her Facebook page. I was also quick to point out that I am no happy Bodhisattva, smugly sitting in a pool of my self-actualization. But whether I feel like a bit of a hypocrite or pompous undergrad because I carry Schopenhauer around in my wallet is beside the point; that it brought Sacha a moment of comfort, is.

"I haven't even thanked any of the people who have donated, Charlie. I feel terrible."

"Oh no – check it out: first of all, with a wedding – I read this in Ms. Manners, you get a full year to send a thank you note. A year. Cancer's even better – you get to make all the rules. You don't have to send one single card if you don't want to. This is your time. You get to make it all up, and there is no wrong answer."

Before leaving, I also mentioned Viktor Frankl to her, the psychologist and Auschwitz survivor, who, in his book, "Man's Search For Meaning," approvingly quotes Nietzsche: "He who has a 'why' to live for can bear almost any 'how'."

"That's good," said Sacha, "because I've got plenty of 'whys.'"

* * *

After relaying all this to Anson, he relented and agreed that Schopenhauer had some value. He also asked me for tips on klonopin dosage: a recent promotion has left him anxious and sleepless.

* * *

And then the voice spoke up: so what was it that was troubling you again, Charlie?

But that bit of self-castigation is too simplistic, and we all know it.

After my botched vasectomy, a doctor gave me a "pain inventory" chart to fill out. It had the diagram of a man on which I was to circle the area where it hurt (my left nut), and to rate my pain on a scale of 1 – 10.

This is ridiculous, I thought. One man's 2 is another man's 9. Our Schopenhauerian "denominators" are all over the place. This is useless.

But then I realized: the doctor wasn't going to compare my pain to anyone else's, he just wanted to compare my pain today from my pain two months from today. He wanted to compare me _to myself_ , my expectations, hopes, disappointments.

And trivial as these denominators are compared to the hurdles Sacha faces, the doctor had it right with his stupid little chart.

[ 10 ]

## Hope Hurts

_O_ ne of the first things we all realized at the reunion, partly because some jackass had the brilliant idea of making a large poster board with our senior year high school pictures on it, was how far we had tumbled.

It wasn't just the rising tide of gray hair and expanding paunches. The effervescence of youth is gone. _Gone_. You will never be as happy-go-lucky as you were the last time you passed Tommy K. on the quad on your way to Western Civ class in tenth grade. _And you didn't even fucking know it._

I looked at the pictures of me and my classmates brimming with optimism, enthusiasm, and hopefulness – the unearned gifts of youth – and realized why people say "youth is wasted on the young." Or, as Curtis from my Algebra II class lamented, "I can't believe I found a fucking white pube in the shower the other day!"

" _The cheerfulness and buoyancy of our youth are due partly to the fact that we are climbing the hill of life and do not see death that lies at the foot of the other side."_

It's not death waiting on the other side of the hill that troubles me. It's the loss of that "before" time. Even into my late twenties, I managed to hang on to those unearned gifts of youth, and I didn't need Ambien or Xanax or Klonopin to do it.

Why did I sleep well in my twenties? Why did it not bother me that I wasn't on my way to becoming a starchitect or great writer? I worked in small, lovely architecture office, doing quality work on single family homes for bosses who I really liked, and on the side, I would write puff pieces for magazines about rich people's homes. They were vapid magazine filler, but it was exciting to see my name in print, and it was nice to get the occasional $500 check for my work. Deep down I knew this wasn't meaningful work – if I had to bury a time capsule in the ground with doodads, gewgaws and totems representing who I am, these puff pieces would not make the final cut. But, and this is the point, it didn't really bother me. I just bounced along, happy to do it. I bounced along at work, listening to _Jane's Addiction_ in my headphones while drawing up electrical plans for homes or detailing the tails of roof rafters. At the end of the day, I would go home to Nora in our apartment which was only two blocks from the office – I often came home for lunch – and we would enjoy a movie or quietly read. On Thursdays, our routine was to bike to Julio's La Fiesta for super burritos (we didn't own a car), stop at Hellman's supermarket on the way home for chocolate chip cookie ingredients, then go home and bake up a batch in anticipation of that evening's episode of _Seinfeld_. And at no time during any of this did I say to myself, "Charlie, why haven't you taken a single exam toward earning your state architectural license? Where's your ambition? Why are you using your fine mind to write about which light fixtures some bored housewife picked out for a kitchen remodel that didn't need to happen in the first place? Why aren't the ghosts of Zoe, Vanessa and Adrienne haunting you? You were slated for bigger things – doesn't it kill you that you have taken the path of least resistance and settled into a content groove which doesn't challenge you?"

I can't pinpoint the exact moment when "before" ended. But I can relay a few hopefully relatable moments which might go some way toward explaining how disappointment and regret managed to kick contentment to the curb.

* * *

Hope hurts.

I was always driven to succeed, even at things I didn't like, like high school chemistry. What I didn't have was a solid primer on coping with disappointment and setbacks. The dominos always fell my way. Until they didn't. Or, as Schopenhauer put it,

" _Hope is the result of confusing the desire that something should take place with the probability that it will."_

The hardest part about being a working screenwriter without any big credits to your name is telling people you are a screenwriter, having their eyes light up for a moment, and then having them ask the most natural question in the world:

"What movies have you written?"

A year or so ago I ran into my first college roommate on the street, a guy who I shared a dorm room with for one semester before moving into the cheaper, more freewheeling co-ops (Pace Picante salsa jars were our glassware of choice), and I asked him what he was up to.

"I'm an anesthesiologist. We live in Marin." He was with his wife Maggie and toddler son Evan. I wanted to vomit. The man is _helping others_ – helping them fall asleep, take a super intense nap, when it's imperative they do so.

"What about you, Charlie?"

I could barely force out the words: "I co-own a couple of bars and I write screenplays."

"Bars? Really? That's great."

He seemed more puzzled than anything else.

"So what brings you to Hercules?" I asked.

"Maggie's family – y'know, the grandparents. Free babysitting."

We exchanged a few more pleasantries and he and his family left.

By the way, when I include bar ownership along with screenwriting in answering the dreaded "what do you do?" question, people always respond, "Which bars?" No one ever asks about the screenwriting. I guess, especially when you couple it with another job, it just sounds like instant bullshit.

What do you do? I'm a poet and a barista. Oh yeah, which coffee shop?

The one exception to this was when I was being deposed in a lawsuit. A couple of drunk patrons jumped my doorman when he tried to get them to leave, it turned into a twenty person brawl, and a patron got his head split open – the pictures were gruesome and horrifying – and I got sued. After two excruciating years, it all ended with an insurance settlement the day before trial was set to begin, but during my deposition, the plaintiff's junior attorney was asking me about my livelihood.

"Besides the bars, do you receive any other income?"

I glanced at my counsel, who gave me the signal that it was okay to answer.

"Actually, yes, I'm a screenwriter."

"You write movies?"

"Yes."

"Anything I would be familiar with?"

"I worked on _Overdrive 3_ – the film that saved the franchise. My own work tends toward grounded dramedy – it's been compared to _The Graduate_ and _Sideways_. Did you see _Sideways_ , the Alexander Payne movie about the two guys on a winery road trip?""

"I haven't."

"It's good. Anyway, so if you've seen _Overdrive 3_ , anything you like about it I did, and anything you didn't like the other guy did" (the lawyer smiled at the canned line).

"And why did you not reprimand your doorman after the incident?"

"I don't think he did anything wrong. I also worked on a Sundance short, but you've probably never seen it, and I've done some rewrite work for the studios."

"On page three of Exhibit A, your 'Employee Handbook,' it says 'doormen shall be polite and courteous at all times.' Can you expand on that?"

"It was crazy. After I won the Nicholl Fellowship, my phone and answering machine just blew up."

"That's in the Handbook?"

"I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?"

Sometimes I try to explain to people: "I've sold a few things, but what I didn't realize was that, for every 1000 scripts the studios buy, they only make one or two of them into actual films."

It all feels like I'm explaining away failure. One therapist, a very kind, sweet woman, pointed out that I was quite successful, having sold anything at all. What could I tell her? It's not enough. A screenplay is a description of a movie, and unless that movie gets made, all you have is this description – this object in limbo – that you can't even ask your friends to download onto their Kindles, because it's not available for download. And why should it be? It's not done yet.

If I were an NBA point guard playing in a big game, I think I'd rather be blown out than have it close. It's so much more painful to get close to your dreams, and then see them collapse, than it is to never have that hope raised at all. When you're thirty points down in the fourth quarter, who cares, just throw up a few crazy three pointers – it's not like things can get worse.

For a moment, I was close. Very close. I was just one point down, had possession of the ball, and just enough time on the clock to take the game.

[ 11 ]

## The Agony Of Victory

_W_ e'll look at this particular regret in some detail, dear Reader, because, if you're like me (and some of you must be – the numbers game), you comb _over and over and over_ the minutiae of certain events, certain decisions, and beat yourself to a pulp over them, even though, barring the imminent invention of a time machine, you can do next to nothing about them. You read Schopenhauer as he quotes Epictetus,

" _Man is not influenced by things, but by his_ _thoughts_ _about things,"_ and you know it's true, you know you should stick a ball gag in in your brain's mouth, but you can't. You just can't.

One of my therapists suggested I wear a rubber band around my wrist, and snap it every time I have "negative" thoughts. A rubber band to solve my existential woes? Are you fucking kidding me?!?

In 2002 I won a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.

We all have our own "Nicholl" story – being in line for a promotion; opening a bike shop; passing the bar exam; planting a garden; becoming a sous chef – and the ensuing dreams we finally dare to indulge in, the dreams we are certain are a mere breath away from being realized. And then those dreams go...poof! Or some pale version of them limps past. Sometimes in a day, sometimes in 3650 days. It doesn't matter what the specific _thing_ is. We all understand dashed hopes and gypsy bullshit. If you don't, I don't think we can be friends; but do tell me what antidepressants have been working for you.

What did winning the Nicholl mean?

It meant my answering machine filled to capacity with congratulatory phone calls from producers, agents and managers all wanting to read my script. It meant press mentions, interviews. It meant being flown to L.A. for a week of parties and presentations by industry people, and being put up in a nice hotel.

At my drunken acceptance speech – I swear, the waiters just kept appearing out of _nowhere_ with trays of champagne – I remember foregoing the three or four steps which led up to the stage, jumping up to the stage from the floor instead, and thanking Mrs. Gee Nicholl, the widow of the man who endowed the fellowship.

"Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. I'm just, y'know, I hope going to Catholic school messed me up just enough to be a little interesting, but really, you guys are so classy. I mean, like, blue blood classy. I've never stayed in a hotel with such good water pressure."

I jumped off the stage – eventually – and found my way back to our table. Nora lied and said I "did fine" with my speech.

Why was I happy and drunk?

I was happy and drunk because the world told me I was good at writing screenplays. And because I didn't know we were expected to give eloquent speeches until the day before we had to make them, and there was no way I was going to speak before a crowd sober. I felt good writing screenplays, and my talent had been validated by strangers. 5 winners were selected out of 5000+ entrants. I was going to have movies made, _my_ movies. I would have a _legacy_ of creative work of which I could be proud. When I am long gone, my kids and grandkids and their grandkids could get a sense of me by watching the movies I had written. My scripts are my attempt to say something about how I see the world, and I will have left something of that attempt behind.

In a few months the film _Overdrive 6_ will come out, the latest installment of the very successful _Overdrive_ franchise. I worked on the third installment with the director, Orin Kelsey, who also directed the fourth, fifth and sixth sequels. I have been invited to the red carpet premiere of number 6 by Orin, and will attend, even though it will be very painful for me to do so – numerators and denominators. Now if I was wise, I would attend the premiere and hover above it all with white gloves instead of green jealousy, pop a klonopin or two, smile and shrug.

I think about what happened at least once a week, and it happened eight years ago – _years_ , not months. It shows up like a wave that rises out of nowhere. I can be sitting on the toilet, driving in the car, watching a game on TV, and, boom, the wave rises and crashes. It dissipates into whitewash, of course, but still, I'm left on my back gasping for a few moments.

96 months ago my agent called to ask if my passport was in order. It was. He asked me if my passport was in order because in two days I would be flying to Hungary to work on _Overdrive 3_. Before getting off the phone, he encouraged me to call the director of the film, Orin, and thank him for the opportunity. "This never happens," my agent said, referring to a rookie, unproduced writer being brought in to work on a studio film two months before shooting was to begin.

I made that call, and in addition to thanking Orin, I remember saying something in jest like "I know we're still in the honeymoon phase, but still, I think this marriage is gonna be great." Turns out I would be righter than I knew.

About the honeymoon ending.

I met Orin in 2003, when my agent got _Funny Boys_ into his hands – a cancer comedy I wrote about two brothers. Orin recounted to me several times how he had been in the mountains on Memorial Day weekend, with a stack of scripts he was supposed to read (he was hot off his breakout Sundance feature, and was looking for his next project).

He told me that after reading _Funny Boys_ , he knew he had his next project.

The person I had developed the story for _Funny Boys_ with was a talented stand-up comedian who played the piano as part of his shtick and had, at that time, a late night cable show which was cancelled. Nora and I met him back stage in SF after he opened for Janeane Garafalo. He talked a lot about adobe houses. He knew I had been an architect, and he dreamed of building an adobe house one day.

The comedian was slated to star in _Funny Boys_ , and Orin would direct. We went out with the package, but there were no takers for a cancer comedy starring a little known standup comic and a young, but studio-untested director.

And now?

A month ago Orin was on the cover of "Variety." And the stand-up comedian? He had a last name that was hard to spell, but I'm a stickler and analytical (Nora points out that you can't spell "analytical" without "anal" – god I love that woman), and so I finally nailed down the spelling "G-A-L-A-F-I-A-N-A-K-I-S" – by pronouncing it "galla-fee-a-nackis" in my head. Zach Galafianakis. Two of us have been featured in Variety multiple times. One of us hasn't. I leave it to you to figure out who.

This isn't my ur-regret, though – this is just some garden variety _envy_ tangential to that regret.

Maybe a rubber band on the wrist isn't the worst idea in the world.

After admitting that envy is "natural to man" and a source of great misery, Schopenhauer offers perhaps the most obvious of his observations:

"... _if a great many people appear to be better off than yourself, think how many there are in a worse position."_

Right. Things could always be worse. Auschwitz worse. Child soldier worse. Stage IV breast cancer worse.

In 2007, unhappy with the writers assigned to _Overdrive 3_ by the studio, Orin pushed to have me brought on board, based on his love of _Funny Boys_ and the rapport we had developed.

My agent's words rang in my ears: "This never happens."

It was a wonderful experience, and not just because I got to fly first class for the first time in my life – did you know they serve you little bowls of warmed nuts before you even get off the tarmac in first class? I remember sitting in my office back at the studio a week before shooting was to begin, and hearing something through the wall that sounded eerily familiar. It took me a moment to place it. In the room next to mine the lead actor was rehearsing lines – lines that I had written. I got goose bumps and felt light headed. An agonizingly long five years after I won a "Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting," the most prestigious of all screenwriting contests, my words were finally coming to life. One of the PA's had typed the word "Writer" in big font on a white piece of paper, and taped it to the wall outside my makeshift office. When my family visited me while I was working in LA, they took a picture of me next to the sign.

"Writer."

Our sons, then five and nine, will never forget that trip: not because their father was working on a 90 million dollar movie, but because they got to stay at the Sheraton and a waiter brought them ice cream at the pool. You see, _they didn't have to go inside_. A young man in khakis and clean tennis shoes brought them dishes of ice cream while they swam.

I am going to take a break, leave the coffee shop, pick up some cat food on the way home, and not think about this for a little while, maybe snap a rubber band, who knows.

* * *

There are two photographs I love: one is in the bathroom, and I see it every time I pee. It is of our two sons, William and Tomas, when Tomas was 6 months old, and William was three. They are both sitting in the chipped up pink bath tub of our old house. Tomas's face is turned three quarters to the camera, his big brown eyes prominent, and he is – as is his habit – smiling. His skin was still very fair, like porcelain. He is being kissed on the cheek by his older brother William, probably after a good minute of pleading, bribing and admonishing from us, but it looks convincing. Will, our El Greco, with his long, slender fingers and face belonging to another century, is looking up past Tomas's face, to the heavens, even as he kisses him, and his skin, unlike an El Greco figure, is a beautiful warm olive.

The other photo is of Nora. I carry it in my wallet next to the Schopenhauer quote. Like a lot of people in their twenties, I went through a brief photography kick, photography being the "easiest" fine art to pick up. I never took the camera off "auto-everything." But I bought a light, a tripod, and took moody shots of power lines in Hayward and old plaster buildings in Cordoba, Spain, where my father lives. One day I badgered Nora into letting me shoot her. It was silly. I placed a bicycle wheel rim next to her; I had her lie on the floor and hold her hand up near her face with her fingers splayed open. I did a serviceable job of lighting her – creating shadows that were not too harsh – but the bottom line is that I could've lit her with a two dollar flash light, and she still would've looked gorgeous.

When she worked at delis and restaurants in L.A. in her twenties, she told me of how the actor Jeff Goldblum, married at the time (obviously no judgment here, just observation), out and out hit on her, and how others suggested she model. And not the kind of "L.A. modeling" performed on one's knees, either. This was the legit haute couture stuff. Nora demurred – she is modest and doesn't like the idea of people who crave the spotlight. All the photos I took of her that day – some in an LBD she had at the time, some in black turtleneck and tights (yes, I have a thing for the mid 60's, especially if they involve Audrey Hepburn), are just stunning. I recently brought in color photocopies of some of those pictures to the restaurant Nora co-owns, and showed them to her employees. Nora tried to grab the pictures out of my hand, but I'm taller than her, and held them up until I could shove them in front of her employees' admiring faces. "Wow!" "You are so beautiful." "Ohmigod." They met her circa now as a mother hen figure – granted, a beautiful mother hen – but they were dazzled to see what she looked like when she was their age.

I really like those pictures.

* * *

I am very impressionable. Debilitatingly so. An "attaboy" puts me on cloud nine, and the slightest disapproval sends me into a funk.

Screenwriting is one of the finest examples of a vocation in which you place your happiness in the hands of others: actors, directors, agents, producers and studio execs. Once you've typed "The End," you are dangling your junk out there, as vulnerable as an infant bird surrounded by brutish 11 year old boys.

The film critic Pauline Kael famously wrote that _"Hollywood is the one place in the world where you can die of encouragement."_

After I won the Nicholl, I interviewed with a handful of agents, and chose mine based on two things: 1) when I asked him what he would do with my winning script, _Uninvited_ , if I signed with him, he said "give it to John Cusack." There was no way for him to know that I wrote that script with the actor John Cusack in mind for the lead, and, of course, as a last desperate attempt to impress Adrienne Kono twenty years too late. My agent and I weren't just on the same page, we were swimming together in the pen's ink before it even touched the page. He also said,

"This is one of the best fucking scripts I have ever read." Dropping an F-bomb over my work? He had me at "best." The F-bomb left me looking for a fainting couch.

But that wasn't the problematic pat on the back. This was: at the time there were rumblings of a Writer's Guild (a union for writers) strike. If that happened, all screenwriting work, sales and development would screech to a halt. I was worried. But my agent reassured me, "don't worry, we'll have the script sold immediately and the movie shot before the strike."

Wait, _what!?_ My movie wasn't just going to get sold?? It would get made!?! And that quickly!?

Stars danced in my eyes. I didn't walk, I skipped. And when I didn't skip, I floated. And when I didn't float, I daydreamed of the premiere and Academy Award nominations. My agent wasn't worried about _whether_ my script would sell or not, he was worried about getting it into theaters in a timely fashion.

"Immediately" turned out to be 11 months later, when the script was optioned by MTV Films and Paramount, and there it languished in development hell and was finally left to die when _Wedding Crashers_ came out – of course I see _Uninvited_ and _Wedding Crashers_ as wildly dissimilar – in _my_ script two guys crash weddings AND funerals AND art openings AND 50th wedding anniversaries AND high school reunions looking for a false, but safe, sense of connection and intimacy, not because they want to bang girls, but, somehow, those nuances didn't quite matter to the people for whom it needs to matter.

Long story short: if any studio execs or wealthy orthodontists happen to be reading this, _Uninvited_ is still available for purchase and production. So please, queue up in an orderly fashion! No reasonable offer will be refused!

So, off a blustery comment from a Hollywood agent, a person whose job description is to make blustery comments, I spent five years wandering the streets, wondering why my screenplay hadn't been produced as my agent had.... _promised?_ No, I'm not that naive. And yet I wanted to grab him by his shirt collar, shake him and scream, "but you promised!!"

That's what I mean by perilously impressionable. An off-hand, over caffeinated comment by one person left me dazed for five years. "But you said...." I was finally going to live up to the Potential and Promise of The Mount Carmel Man, and instead, the last thing one of the young producers who I was working with on a rewrite of _Uninvited_ told me was, "I wouldn't keep a candle burning for this script, Charlie."

* * *

But all was not lost! I would be getting a second chance with my "this never happens" _Overdrive 3_ break. I still had the chance to prove the Nicholl gods had not made a mistake in dubbing me promising.

So what happened to my _Overdrive 3_ honeymoon, and why do I feel I should've been working on 4, 5, and 6? And, perhaps most important of all, why do I let it eat at me and chip away at some of the happiness that is there for the taking _now_?

Director Orin and I were having lunch at a café on the second floor of a strip mall just a few minutes away from the studio. Principal photography on _Overdrive 3_ had been completed. It had been a triumph for me. I hadn't been fired, and I had even been given a fancy gift basket from the studio. I received a phone call at my home in dinky Hercules from the Vice President of the studio one Saturday morning, thanking me for my work on the project. I remember the family and I were about to leave to spend the day at Stinson Beach when the call came in. I let the machine get it, until I heard her voice, then ran back in and picked up. I stammered something about "appreciating the opportunity."

_That_ was a good day.

I wish I had a video camera at my lunch with Orin. I wish I had a camera so the jury could see that I acted without malice – I didn't understand what Orin was asking of me. I remember him saying cryptic things about "the studio is doing us a favor" and "this is for legal reasons."

I didn't realize that he was simply asking me to share rewriting credit, so I relayed his comments to my agent. Obviously I should've just asked Orin then and there what he meant. But that might've felt a tad too...well... _confrontational._

A week later I got another call from the studio, from the executive in charge of _Overdrive 3,_ a young man who travelled with us to Hungary and who I got to know on a first name basis. I was prepped for the call. My agent had called me earlier to say that "they" (the studio? Orin? Orin's agent? I didn't ask.) wanted me to share writing credit with Orin. So rather than "rewrite by Charles Alonso," the title page of the script would read "rewrite by Charles Alonso & Orin Kelsey." That's what my agent said: "you ampersand Orin." He asked me how much work I had done and how much Orin had done. He wanted to know how many scenes I had written, and how many Orin had written. I thought of who bashed out the pages. He asked me for an estimate of who did more bashing. I told him I did.

"Good. Then the matter is settled," my agent said.

This should never have happened. My agent, the one who said "this never happens," should've been savvy enough to say, "Hey, Orin put a lot into this, he took a big gamble bringing you in, and he'd like to share credit. That cool?"

Of course it would've been cool! Not only that, Orin deserved to share credit. Whether I tapped out more key strokes than he did is irrelevant. A secretary, a court reporter, can type well – doesn't mean he or she put the prosecution's case together. We brainstormed ideas _together_ , he gave me notes that we discussed _together_ , most of the ideas were his, fleshed out by me. It was a _collaboration_ , and he was the captain of the ship. That's what a director _is_. Why did I not have the sense to see this, and why the hell didn't my agent translate all this correctly for me?

The phone call that led to career suicide lasted two minutes.

My agent called, patched in the studio executive – the one who I knew on a first name basis, the one who chatted and laughed with me as we hung out on set – and, as my agent and I had discussed just prior to the call, I would be asking for solo – no ampersand – rewrite credit.

"So that's what you're saying, that you did 90% of the work?" asked the executive. 90% of typing = 90% of the work, right?

"Yeah," I answered.

"Okay," he said, and a few moments later, the call ended. I didn't think much of it at the time.

A few days later I got a voice mail from Orin, something about "the past is the past. I know things now I didn't know before," and, suddenly, like that, I wanted to vomit. In an instant the magnitude of what I had done became clear.

I did everything I could to make it right: I did not attempt to ask the Writer's Guild for a credit arbitration review when only the first writer was proposed by the studio to receive credit, I apologized profusely to Orin. Over the next months I rewrote _Funny Boys_ for him a dozen times, for free, of course.

Orin and I have stayed in touch, we're friends, we've continued to work together, but _Overdrive 3_ is still a sore spot, even though we both proclaim ourselves to be "past it."

Why is all this such a big deal again?

First and foremost, because I have made it so.

" _Man is not influenced by things, but by his thoughts about things."_

And secondly, because it actually _is_ a big deal. Being on the poster, on the DVD box, entitles you to residuals from the film, as well as a huge feather in your cap (going from a lukewarm, unproduced writer to a hot, produced, credited writer – well, the velvet ropes are lowered and you're allowed into the VIP section of the club). Literally, you're "on the list." (the studios keep lists of "approved" writers). So – to absolutely no one's shock – I was not asked to work on the next three films.

I've had other writing gigs, but none that were the launch pad that this was, and I shot that missile right into my foot. I can't let it go. One of my therapists did make me feel a little better: he told me of another patient of his, a prominent academic, the head of her department at a prestigious university, who lay on his couch lamenting a paper she wrote that didn't get published.

"She's had at least 30 others papers published," he said. What possible evolutionary advantage could there be to regretting yourself sick over the one thing that didn't pan out, or in my case, the one thing you out and out fucked up on, rather than thinking fondly of the success and good fortune you have had?

"... _when all our affairs but one turn out as we wish, the single instance in which our aims are frustrated is a constant trouble to us..."_

Right, the one thing. No one dwells on all the teeth that don't hurt. It's the one that aches that seizes our attention.

...upon receiving the invitation to the _Overdrive 6_ premiere, I immediately told Nora, who said it sounded "exciting." I frowned.

...I thought of declining and just saying to Orin, "Do you know how excruciating it would be for me to attend, to bring into focus a regret which hums daily in the background of my head, like a refrigerator?"

...I fought like hell not to remember some of the figures bandied about by Orin over the years about how much I have not made in residuals, and how much the various other writers have been paid for work stints lasting from a few weeks to a few months. Calculator off!

...I immediately e-mailed the studio back, asking if I could bring a guest. There is no way I'm going to compound my humiliation and depression by walking into that shit alone.

...I texted the friend I wanted to bring with me, Dean – a guy I've known since high school (he is the younger brother of another friend of mine, and was my co-director on the short series we shot with Sacha, our cinematographer) who never fails to make me laugh. After the screening, at the reception, he asked the young man who brought us braised artichoke spears on toothpicks, "Wait. Will these make my cum taste funny?" The waiter pretended not to hear. "Thanks, but I better hold off," added Dean politely.

...I tried to remind myself that I am blessed to have a 16 year old who hasn't shot up his high school, and a 12 year who still asks me to play catch with him, and a wife who strokes my head when the klonopin doesn't quite do the trick and I still have trouble sleeping.

...I thought of Sacha battling stage IV breast cancer, and had the decency to feel a little ashamed.

...I thought of the alternate universe in which I never got the _Overdrive 3_ job at all. "This never happens." That's right, the whole thing _might never have happened_ in the first place, so why not appreciate the gravy rather than obsess over the canned peas?

Still...

Sometimes a good verbal haymaker is in order. Driving me to the airport for the premiere, Nora asked what else I would be doing on my trip to L.A. "Well, I'll be meeting with Orin about a new project. He has an idea for something."

"Great. That's good."

"Yeah, and it'll help take my mind off the fact that I should've been working on the last three—"

" _Stop it_. You can't say that. You made your decisions—look, it wasn't meant to be, it wasn't in the cards."

"I know."

"You've done well, you've made money. Most men are happy just to make sure they're doing a decent job taking care of their kids."

I said nothing more.

The poor thing. For the last eight years, I've verbalized to Nora maybe 10% of the thoughts over this that loop in my head. And, as you might imagine, 10% is more than anyone should have to endure.

"I'm an underachiever," she added, trying to back pedal and console me. "I'm happy with the way things are."

Happy with the way things are?!

MOTHERF&*%ER! She's doing better at Schopenhauer-ing than I am – at _securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire._ She genuinely appreciates the teeth that don't hurt.

" _In the case of misfortune which has already happened and therefore cannot be altered, you should not allow yourself to think that it might have been otherwise; still less, that it might have been avoided by such and such means; for reflections of this kind will only add to your distress and make it intolerable, so that you will become a tormentor to yourself."_

With friends like me, who needs enemies?

The premiere, by the way, went fine. Dean's an A-list storyboard artist who has worked with heavyweight directors including Spielberg, Fincher, and Bay. Before we left his apartment, catching up over a few beers (he's just back from six months in New York working on _Spiderman_ ), I mentioned the _Overdrive 3_ crediting debacle.

I hadn't told him about it before. He cringed as I told him the story. He's in the industry. He understands the import of what happened. As we finished up our beers and grabbed our jackets, I jokingly said to him, "OK, Dean, in three sentences or less, tell me why what happened was no big deal."

"I can't," he replied. "Sorry, dude. You sucked Satan's greasy cock, and now you're paying for it."

[ 12 ]

## Why Isn't It Enough?

" _Y_ ou've done well, you've made money. Most men are happy just to make sure they're doing a decent job taking care of their kids."

Are they?

After surviving Auschwitz, psychotherapist Viktor Frankl came to the conclusion that sex, pleasure and power are not our primary drives in life. Our primary drive is for logos – the Greek word for meaning. He called his approach logotherapy: helping people pile drive a bit of meaningfulness back into their lives.

I believe he's right. Provided you are not scrambling every day to put a roof over your head or food in your stomach or avoid the gas chamber, what man craves more than anything else is a sense of meaning and purpose. Relevance. The thing some of my friends and I haven't been feeling.

And if I'm honest with myself, then, no, doing a decent job taking care of my kids is not enough for me. I'm more ambitious than that.

I don't have a problem with ambition. If Jonas Salk wasn't ambitious, we'd still have polio. If Ricky Gervais hadn't been ambitious, no British _The Office_. If George Washington hadn't been ambitious, no United States of America.

Ambition is only a problem if it prevents you from enjoying the life you actually are living, rather than bemoaning the life, or accomplishments, or whatever it is, that you aren't.

In the song "Beautiful Boy," John Lennon wrote of his son Sean, "Before you cross the street take my hand. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." We've all seen the bumper sticker.

Three weeks after the album was released Lennon was shot and killed outside his home. His time with Sean was over.

* * *

At the reunion, after those first few giddy moments of recognizing faces we hadn't seen in 25 years, the conversation invariably turned toward what we were all doing for a living. Sometimes I would follow up and ask "Do you like your job?" and most of the time, the answer was "It's okay," or "It's a job."

Marcus, who I've known since 7th grade, simply said, "I'm a mortgage broker. I'm on autopilot. It's boring."

Another classmate said, "I'm a lawyer for the county, but in nine years, our boys will be out of the house, and I'm looking for a challenge. Charlie, I work with these guys all day long who all they're doing is looking forward to a pension and retirement at 52, and I'm like, 'Are you fucking crazy?' I'd go insane. I've got to do something with my mind."

A pension at 52? Maybe the theme of our generation isn't boredom or disillusionment, it's being spoiled. But I don't really believe that – that's not the issue. Lack of interest. Waning enthusiasm. Waiting for the clock to wind down. Auto-fucking-pilot. That's the issue.

But who knows themselves well enough to figure out their own sanity-preserving sweet spot between ambition and acceptance, between trying and resignation? We can't all be natural at it like Nora: "I'm happy with the way things are." What if you're the type who is never happy with the way things are – you just keep pushing the goal posts back? What if a good parking space is nowhere near enough to make your day? Just how much _is_ enough?

Someone somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance – let's call him a fracquaintance – who I've known since junior high school, and who introduced me to my current writing manager, had his birthday party at a small restaurant in L.A. Having reconnected after our high school reunion and the introduction of my manager, Eduardo invited me to his party, and there, introduced me to the restaurant's owner: Danielle, another classmate of ours from seventh grade. She is married to a working musician and they have a ten year old daughter. Danielle asked me about some of our old mutual friends, including Erik, the lawyer at the top of his game who proclaimed himself "bored."

"He's bored with what, his job?" she asked, picking at her curry chicken salad.

"No," I said, groping for the words, "it's more than that. It's hard to even describe. It's a pervasive feeling at this point – a lot of us have it – it's a kind of a....malaise." That's the word I used, _malaise_.

"Oh, he's having his mid-life crisis," she said, then went back to her salad.

Damn you females! Damn you for reducing our existential malaise to a non-malady so common that even at ten years old, I knew "mid-life crisis" meant "guy gets a toupee, a red sports car, and a bimbo blonde."

So why do the gray hairs matter? Why the sports car, the blonde, the fake tan, the bleached teeth, the rest of it? Now that I am in the crisis, I still sneer, but I do it sympathetically. I _get it_. I'm no longer on the outside looking in with contempt. I'm stuck inside with a bunch of other middle aged navel gazers.

What does it mean to be a 44 year old man?

I've heard people my age say "Thank God I'm done with my twenties" many times. Are they out of their fucking minds? Have they forgotten about the optimism? The hope? The compact, firm prostate? The buoyancy? The lack of worry about whether you are spending your time "productively" and "moving forward." They have no clue that regret and disappointment are slumbering peacefully, about to be awakened, primed to go for the jugular. Even Orin, who is a few years younger than I am, said to me recently, with gravity and urgency, "I feel it. The clock is ticking." He was talking about his professional life. Shit. Are you kidding me? The "Variety" cover boy, who has had oodles of concrete success in his vocation – the thing he finds _meaningful_ – still does not feel fully satisfied? Either his wiring is as ambitious, driven and fucked up as mine, or I should feel way, way shittier about myself.

Okay, so let's take apart the stereotype:

The expensive sports car – this matters because it shows you have the money to afford it. Assuming you didn't win the lottery or inherit the money, you probably worked for it. You succeeded. You are powerful. You are confident. That's hot.

The hair implant – we all want to look younger. Fine. Why? Because the older you get, the more sexually irrelevant you feel. This is nature taking its course. If we weren't meant to become sexually irrelevant, we wouldn't need Viagra and Cialis and women wouldn't need that stuff for vaginal dryness. Our bodies are shutting down, people! They are screaming at us: "Knock it off with the sex already." But the problem here is that the body's penchant for reducing blood flow to the penis and turning our muscles to flab is not in synch with our mind's ability to lust. In fact, at least for men, our lust grows more keen, comical and grotesque as we age. I am wired to ogle attractive 17 year old girls. At 27 I might've gotten away with it. At 44, it's time to call the police. And yet this is how we are made. When I think of the girls I found unattractive when I was in my 20's, I want to retch. Perhaps I found the shape of their face displeasing, or their calves too thick, or their hair too frizzy. My God, today, their carefree smiles and taut skin alone force me to look away when I pass them on the street. Yesteryear's "two" is today's "nine" or "ten." So we go to the gym, transplant our hair, dye it, whiten our teeth, etc., all in an effort to fake the natural sex appeal we had pro bono when we were younger.

But it's just so pathetic. I look at men and women who embrace their age – who wear age appropriate clothing, behave in a dignified manner, don't dye their hair, stay away from the plastic surgeon's knife, and I admire them. They are attractive because they are comfortable in their own wrinkled, spotted skin. _That's_ hot.

There is a scene in the Thomas Mann novella "Death in Venice," where the protagonist, professor Gustav Aschenbach, early 50's, in an effort to appear attractive to the 12 year old boy he has a crush on, goes to the barber, and there has his hair dyed, his cheeks rouged.

" _The presence of the youthful beauty that had bewitched him filled him with disgust of his own aging body; the sight of his own sharp features and grey hair plunged him in hopeless mortification; he made desperate efforts to recover the appearance and freshness of his youth..."_

After dying Aschenbach's hair, applying lipstick and rouge, the barber pronounces himself, with obsequious modesty, satisfied:

"' _The merest trifle, the merest, signore...now the signore can fall in love as soon as he likes.'"_

I used to look with titillation, contempt and derision at that scene. Now I have to fight to keep my hands away from the dye and the rouge.

One of the twenty-something waitresses at my old classmate's restaurant asked us how we knew each other.

"We were in the same class in junior high," I said.

"No!" blurted out Danielle, suddenly completely uninterested in her curry chicken salad, "you're thinking of my sister Liz. She was four years ahead of me. I met you later, in high school."

No. I hadn't. I went to class with her, not her sister. I know this because her sister has a different name than she does. Do women have mid-life crises? I don't know – I hesitate to equate the tiny vanity of lying about your age with something as grave as the.... _malaise_....because, as I say, I think women are simply more pragmatic about these things, but I was enormously relieved to hear her shave four years off her age. Not ten, just four, a perfectly plausible pruning of the numbers. She's human, just like me. But the speed with which she came up with the lie about her sister? Now that – _that_ – was impressive.

But I will say this: she seemed content to be running that restaurant, content to spend afternoons ferrying her daughter back and forth from piano lessons, content to be working on the remodel of her kitchen with her husband.

Women.

[ 13 ]

## Why My Mid-Life Crisis Is Special, Different, Better

_W_ ell, actually, it's not. There was the affair; I meticulously prune and pluck the gray from my beard, even though it's a losing battle; and the only reason I haven't bought a sports car is that I'm too cheap to do so.

[ 14 ]

## It's All About The Frisbee

_A_ nother interesting surprise at the reunion, besides the onset of white pubes, was the coming out of Noah, a quiet track star in high school. I didn't know him well back then, but I remember thinking, "For a jock, he's not that creepy."

Noah showed up at the reunion with his boyfriend Victor, who wore lip gloss and an ascot. Noah wore cherry red socks with his loafers. Most of us did not bring our spouses or significant others – who wants to listen to other people's inside jokes for four hours? But Noah was making a point. And the point was that he had found his real skin, and it was that of a proud dandy, and he was comfortable in it. That alone is worth envying. And daring to come out with a splash at your conservative Catholic high school reunion?

_That_ is a refreshing mid-life crisis.

At my dinner a few months earlier with Toshi at Café 101 in L.A., after commiserating about our existential and Hollywood woes, he and I, sick of bitching, actually talked about things other than the state of our navels. I mentioned how my twelve year old son Tomas and I have been trying to set our personal best record playing Frisbee: how many tosses we could get in without dropping the disc. We made it to 97 a few weeks ago. Everything was fine, we were three away from the century mark, and then my hand just misfired, and I flung the plastic thing sharply to the right.

"Dad! You spasmed!" cried out Tomas. Our previous record was 78, and so every toss after that became more and more critical, more and more nerve wracking, and though we counted silently so as not to jinx anything, I still shanked it. 3 short of 100 and I shanked it.

"How could you spasm, dad?!"

I couldn't help but laugh. Tomas must've picked up the word "spasm" recently in school. Recounting this little episode over our coffees, my old friend said,

"Wow, Charlie, you've got it made."

Normally comments like this roll off my back, but this time was different. After we said goodbye, I went back to the hotel that night, and felt a sense of warm liquid contentment and peace of mind that usually eludes me. I texted Toshi and asked if he wanted to meet again for breakfast the next day. He did. Again we talked shop, but the first thing I mentioned was the strange effect his words had on me, how for once they seemed to penetrate.

We laughed and decided I should have T-shirts made up:

" _It's all about the Frisbee."_

I know it to be true that we are all standing on peaks – or valleys – it's all in how we see it. Once again, and again is never enough for this 2000 year old insight, _"Man is not influenced by things, but by his thoughts about things."_

So that night, in the hotel, before taking a klonopin and drifting off to sleep, I had choices: I could think again about the _Overdrive 3_ crediting debacle, and torture myself silly over it.

Or, instead, I could think of the time when I was standing on stage delivering my epic Nicholl Fellowship "water pressure" acceptance speech, and maybe think about what I want to write next.

I could think about that gorgeous goth girl I didn't fuck in college, and how I chickened out because it was in the public commons room of the dorm and because, in the space of ten seconds, I thought of everything from contracting AIDS to coming too quickly to wondering if she would become too clingy if we slept together.

Or, instead, I could think of the wonderful time Nora and I had a few weeks ago when the local art house theater showed Hitchcock's action-comedy-suspense masterpiece, _The 39 Steps_ , on a big screen, and how we both, to this day, still love many of the same movies and music. Still laugh at the same things.

I could continue to tally up my frustrations and regrets, sitting at a dimly lit desk, wearing my green accountant's visor, or I could thank God and evolution and luck and hard work for the good health of my children, the career successes I _have_ had, and the nice neighborhood we live in.

And maybe all those calculations would all lead to one simple conclusion: it _is_ all about the Frisbee. By the way, three weeks later, at the park across the street from our house, Tomas and I shattered, demolished and obliterated our old record: we made it to 317 before I, yes, shanked a toss.

"Fuck!" I blurted out. "Can't believe I shanked it again! Fuck."

"It's okay, dad, I was getting tired anyway," Tomas said uneasily (I'm not an F-bomb guy, at least not around the kids), as I continued to complain bitterly about my lack of control.

And even though I know it might _really_ all be about the Frisbee, still I struggle to feel it in my bones. That liquid contentment spills right through my fingers all too easily.

How to beat – or at least befriend – the "malaise?"

Can money, for example, buy happiness? The answer is no, not really. Researchers have found that after a certain base level of income – let's say $40,000/year – enough so that a roof over your head and victuals are covered, happiness increases only slightly with a jump in income, whether your earn $400,000/year, or $4,000,000/year. After that first 40k, the happiness curve flattens dramatically. Going from a Honda to a Mercedes doesn't make you happier. The Mercedes might be a little more pleasurable to drive, it might fleetingly excite you when you first buy it, you might even feel a little special at the car wash, but it won't make you happy, it might not even bemuse you all that much after the first month or two.

So maybe I stumbled onto some accidental wisdom by being too cheap to buy the sports car. And maybe obsessing over Frisbee tossing, however "unproductive" it is, isn't the worst thing in the world, and maybe forcing myself – fake it 'til you make it – to think of my blessings, say, half as often as I think of my frustrations, is as decent a way as any of going mano y mano with the mid-life crisis.

[ 15 ]

## The Meaning Of Life

_I_ used to wonder what the "meaning of life" is. I don't anymore because I know the answer: the meaning of life is _to make life meaningful_.

I know, I know, it's a maddeningly unsatisfying answer, but I believe it to be true. And even if it is a bit unsatisfying, or at any rate frustratingly open ended, still it is less grim than Schopenhauer's opinion on the matter:

" _That human life must be a kind of mistake is sufficiently clear from the fact that a man is a compound of needs which are difficult to satisfy; moreover, if they are satisfied, all he is granted is a state of painlessness, in which he can only give himself up to boredom. This is a precise proof that existence in itself has no value."_

So we have to _give_ it value. And if you agree that it is left to each of us to create a sense of value, of meaningfulness, one still must confront the gnawing problem of defining what _is_ meaningful. Love? Work? Play? Family and friends? Self-actualization? Self-abnegation? A stew of all of the above? Tossing the Frisbee? Will I know it when I see it?

I was talking to two of my employees, my doorman and my manager, during their smoke break one night, and we got on the topic of advice given by the dying. Y'know, idle bar chatter. I'll never forget what they said. My manager said that the last thing his grandfather, a prominent physician, an eminent man, a card carrying member of the bourgeoisie, told him before dying:

"Never pass up a piece of ass. You may think you're not attracted to some girl at the time, but you'll regret it later." Thank you, Dr. Obvious.

My doorman's grandmother, before dying, told him, "It's all shit." This was not as self-evident as the good doctor's advice, so I asked for elaboration.

"I think she was basically saying don't sweat it. Stuff doesn't matter as much as we think it does. Least that's how I interpret it." I forgot to ask him if grandma happened to mention what the flipside of all this was: what in this life she thought _wasn't_ shit?

Perhaps my doorman's interpretation was spot on, and she was simply echoing Plato, as echoed by Schopenhauer: _"nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety."_ Buy into this world view and you probably won't have another unhappy day in your life. It sounds wonderful and it even sounds right – all of our daily worries, dramas, frustrations, regrets – are just not worth worrying about. But who can get there? Even the Dalai Lama, with his perennial bemused smile, travels and makes speeches and presses the flesh for the issues – the "human affairs" – he feels are important. I do love Plato's idea – I do – I just have no idea how to execute it. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be troubling myself writing this book. Maybe there is an ascetic in a cave somewhere who is living Plato's words, but the rest of us who are caught up in our own personal rat races, our human affairs, wouldn't know about it anyway – no way that guru is bothering to blog about it. Probably doesn't even have decent wireless, anyway.

The crux of it all for the rest of us is, would we be floundering in our mid-life crises of meaning if – using my own experiences – I was a successful screenwriter? Would that "fix" it? Is it just that simple? Would I have been tempted by Nora's friend, tempted into the ego stroke and excitement of the affair, if I felt better about myself and my career? Or would I be just as restless and dissatisfied if I was successful? What if I had not passed up that goth girl's ass back in college? That solve it? Maybe I just have unrealistic gypsy expectations? Why _can't_ I be content providing for my family? Where has the levity gone? Am I just bored?

Was Picasso ever satisfied with his work? Mies van der Rohe? Steve Jobs? Botticelli? Thomas Jefferson?

Probably. Fuck them.

Schools tend to teach "The Great Man" approach to history. This is a bad idea. They should teach the "regular guy" approach instead. Who was Jefferson's bookkeeper? Who stretched Botticelli's canvases? Who rinsed off Jonas Salk's petri dishes?

What did my Oma, my grandmother, say before dying? Not "It's all shit," but rather, "Your health is your wealth." She's right. And we're not just talking cancer and other comparable calamities. Have you noticed what begins to happen to your lower back, gums and eyesight beginning at about age 40?

A hypothetical: is it possible to buy a new sports car and not have a douchey mid-life crisis?

It is.

Erik, my recently remarried friend, the bored utilities lawyer, pulled up to the home of Hector, our mutual friend, the motorcycle riding computer consultant/newly minted lawyer. Hector and I were waiting on the porch for Erik to arrive so we could spend the day together in Briones National Park.

A shiny black Mercedes slowed down and pulled a U-turn.

"That Erik?"

"No. He drives a Camry," I said.

The new Mercedes – we could smell its newness from the porch – completed the U-turn, parked in front of Hector's house, and out stepped Erik, a big fat smile on his face. He looked completely different: here he was on a Tuesday morning, a work day, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, sporting a scraggly, attractive beard and unkempt hair, and driving a new Benz. He had mid-life crisis written all over him.

"What the hell happened to you?"

"Do you like it?"

"Yeah. It's not yours, though, is it?" I replied.

"Sure is." Now Hector, who bought his Audi several years ago, asked "What'd you pay for it?"

"$34,000 out the door. Memorial Day sale."

"Shit," said Hector. "I paid 40k for my Audi."

"Yeah, and now you're stuck with the poor man's Mercedes!" I blurted out, glancing over at my used 2002 Nissan Sentra.

Erik spent half the day needling Hector about how he had wasted his money on the Audi when he could've had a Mercedes. Hector came to regret bitterly his choice of the Audi. "But I got it with a bunch of extras," he added tepidly.

So why shouldn't this little story nauseate you and make you hate me and my friends forever and then some?

Here's why: the thing that got Erik not to shave his beard, to play hooky and buy a new Mercedes, was a ballsy act the likes of which I have never attempted.

He has three children – 4, 13 and 16 – to support, a huge mortgage, and, now, lease payments for the car. He didn't actually buy. He leased.

On a Friday two weeks before the three of us met that morning, after much soul searching and agonizing, Erik composed an e-mail in which he resigned from his big case – the tragic explosion, the case of a lifetime – jeopardizing his job. His bosses were asking him to sign off on something he thought unethical, and, possibly, illegal. He could've been fired for insubordination. Back room deals had been cut. The fix was in. After complaining through the proper channels and getting nowhere, he decided he just couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't live with himself if he did. At that moment, he discovered exactly where the line was he would not cross. The easy thing to do would've been to roll over, to go along to get along, and collect his paycheck, health insurance and pension contributions.

But instead, after a sleepless Friday night, he looked once more at his resignation e-mail, and hit "send" on Saturday afternoon.

The papers called it the "Saturday Night Massacre."

He and three other attorneys resigned that day. State senate hearings have been called to look into the matter. Articles have appeared in many papers questioning why, on the eve of the commission's biggest settlement, four lawyers quit in unison.

I asked Erik if he and the other three lawyers had made a pact to resign on the same day.

"No. We couldn't. We talked about our frustrations before resigning, but it's too big, too personal a decision. We didn't want any one of us counting on the other one to jump first. What if the other person didn't jump, but you did? No, each of us had to do this alone."

So, without a safety net in place, my best friend, the Michener man, the guy I've known since seventh grade, Captain Kirk, risking the comfortable niche he had carved for himself, closed his eyes and leapt off the cliff.

And, thank God, he wasn't fired. He was reassigned to some Mickey Mouse work. Which suited him fine: after two years of intense, stressful work followed by complete disillusionment, a little time off, and a leased, low end Mercedes, were just what the doctor ordered.

"Erik, you do realize this is your finest hour," I said.

So impressed was Hector that he was already designing their future together.

"With my ideas, and your experience, we should hang out our shingle. Leave that crooked, underpaid public shit behind. Let's go into private practice."

Erik wasn't quite ready to print up new business cards, but he was happy, relieved, and we couldn't have been more proud. _That's_ how you have a mid-life crisis. Step up for your beliefs and take a real risk, a risk that could jeopardize everything but your honor, pride and conscience. You can't pay a mortgage or lease a Mercedes with any of those things.

A month ago, Hector gave away his yellow and black Ducati motorcycle – for free.

"What?!" asked Erik. "Why didn't you sell it? Make some coin."

"I was done with it. Done. I didn't want to haggle, I didn't want to wait, I just wanted it gone. Even gave the guy my helmet." _Giving away_ , rather than _buying_ , a motorcycle, as part of your mid-life crisis? Gotta say, I like the twist.

Hector describes himself as "restless but relatively content" with who he is and what he does. Me, I've got the restless part nailed, but the contentment stuff not so much. He, on the other hand, worries about the day when he will be content and no longer restless – the very thing I aspire to.

"It'd be like I was dying," he told me. He mentioned a few of our peers who seem, as he put it, "resigned to dying a slow death. At least you aren't giving up, Charlie."

Not giving up, eh? Maybe that's how I should view the malaise?!! Maybe contentment and peace of mind are _the enemy_! Maybe I've had it upside down the whole time.

...nah.

[ 16 ]

## The Bars

_L_ ast night I dropped by one of the two bars I co-own, Slim's, and noticed a new flyer on the wall – a crude drawing, black pen on white paper, showing a demonic figure emerging from the side of a naked man, flanked by two people in shorts and black hoodies with _Black Flag_ logos, and the text, "Don't die doing drugs in your room – do it at Slim's!" featuring djs Dwnwrd Dog and Dilldog. I thought of the college roommate I had run into on the street. I guess owning a dive bar is sorta like being an anesthesiologist and helping people. They _do_ get anesthetized and feel better. I loved the crude simplicity of the flyer so much I began snapping pictures of it with my iPhone. Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

"I have more art if you want." A young man, smiling, stood next to me – whether it was Dwnwrd Dog or Dilldog I do not know.

"This is so great," I told him. "I am burnt on slick, computer done flyers, it's so great to see someone put pen to paper."

"Actually, I used Microsoft Paint."

"Ah! You never should have told me!"

"But at least it's an old school program, no one uses it."

"Okay, partial credit then," I said. "I'm Charlie, I'm one of the owners."

"I'm Ben, we've met before."

"Hey, so awesome that you played Eno and The Detroit Cobras."

"Thanks, man. Well, lemme know if you want more art," he said, and hurried back to the dj booth to put on the next song.

I thought of the 79 word story I wrote, how I imagined/guessed/hoped that a simple smile and wave from a stranger could prevent a man from taking his own life, and thought I wasn't that far off. This was just the less extreme case. I was in a bored, blah mood – after thirteen years of owning an old dive bar, the blush is off the rose – but this kid running up to me and offering me more "artwork" – that made my night.

Oh, and a month later, we caught Ben on camera dealing coke from the dj booth – seven sales in four hours. Gotta say: at least he wasn't exaggerating on his flyers – he did, in fact, do his drugs at Slim's and not in his living room. Had to fire him, of course, but definitely admired his candor.

I used to dj once a week, and nothing felt better than nailing it – putting on "Kiss" by _Prince_ , or "Blister in the Sun" by _The Violent Femmes_ , or "25 Miles" by _Edwin Starr_ , at _exactly_ the right moment, reading the crowd perfectly, and hearing them shout and watching their dancing become more and more frenetic. It feels like you're in the eye of a hurricane, hosting a decadent party out of Hesse's "Steppenwolf." One guy ran up to the booth once and said to me, "You've got me in the palm of your hand, you just got to bring me home." I'm pretty sure he was hitting on me. For those of us who aren't rock stars, it's as close as we'll get. When my radar is working, I own the room.

Oh, hang on, the voice has something to say: "Way to go, dude. Picking an obvious Prince song that everyone likes? Kinda like shooting fish – drunken fish – in a teeny, tiny barrel. Way to put those UC degrees and Fulbright Fellowship to good use."

Okay, so Prince is an easy button to push. But it's _when_ you push the button that matters. Put on "Darling Nikki" too early in the night and no one cares – you've shot your wad.

Shit, it's all fleeting anyway. The house lights come up, the façade tips over, the stage is broken down, and the dancing grinds to a halt. People disperse. The fevered dream is over.

It's the nature of the business. There are no real friendships in bars. There are only animated, drunken conversations that are as fragile as a hothouse flower. You can be talking to a stranger who is confiding in you about his or her girlfriend troubles, or how they're not drinking "that month," trying to dry out a bit, but the slightest distraction – another friend passing by, one of us needing to use the bathroom – and that connection is snapped. Gone. Because it was never really there to begin with.

So what I was told next felt like someone tore a hole in the clouds, reminding me that there is no such thing as bad weather. You just have to climb above the clouds, where it's always clear and sunny.

One of my bartenders, off work, was having drinks with a friend of hers. She told me how they had met each other at the bar, and how their friendship had solidified one night when we were having an "80's Party" – a party I dj-ed. She gushed and called Slim's "the city's living room." Thank God. Thank God for comments like that.

I like to joke "we're a community center that happens to sell alcohol to pay the bills." When my bartender called the bar a "living room," that hallowed place where families converge and relax, I believed my own words for once, and it brought me a moment's satisfaction that this was more than just commerce, that being a mere liquor merchant could be, if I just shifted my thinking a little...meaningful.

" _A bottle of wine,"_ says Schopenhauer, _"is not an uncommon means of introducing a mutual feeling of fellowship; and even tea and coffee are used for a like end."_ And also whiskey. And tequila. And Irish Car Bombs, too.

Our valedictorian asked me why I didn't write more about the bar business in this book.

Here's why:

Once, on a Tuesday night, I got the following text from my business partner Chris. "Are you coming to the clown party?"

What? Clown party? _Huh?_

I had heard nothing about it, but, in ten years of owning bars and seeing or hosting honky tonk parties, moustache parties, co-birthday parties for Elvis and Bowie (both born on January 8), zombie prom parties, live painting parties, _New Order_ and _Smiths_ tribute parties, as well as sock hop and dead celeb parties, I've never been to a Clown Party.

So of course I had to go.

I walked into our sister bar, The Rustic, and sure enough, I saw about a dozen clowns hanging out. These weren't your family friendly Ringling Brothers clowns, nor were they super creepy John Wayne Gacy type clowns either, but they were definitely a bit edgy.

Leather cross braces. I remember the leather cross braces.

It was a busy night, and once in a while, when it is busy, I actually get inspired to earn my paycheck and so I bar back: I wash dirty glasses, cut fruit, refill ice bins.

We have a little upstairs mezzanine lounge at The Rustic and I went up to clean off the tables. I saw a couple of clowns canoodling in a corner booth, but it was nothing more than the usual three drink snog, so I thought nothing of it.

I stacked as many pint glasses as I could, went back downstairs, washed them, then headed back up to collect more.

That's when I froze.

Half way up the stairs I locked eyes with one of the canoodling clowns. What I remember most is his big white 70's afro style wig and the surprised look in his eyes. Three stairs below him, bracing herself with the stair handrails, another clown, wearing a Raggedy Ann red wig, was bobbing her head back in forth in front of him.

So naturally the question occurred: _what does one do when one stumbles upon a clown-on-clown blow job?_

I thought I handled the situation with real class: albino-fro clown looked embarrassed and made a motion like he was going to zip up his pants (do clown pants even have zippers?), but I flipped up my palm and shook my head as if to say, "it's okay, I can come back later." So I turned around and went back down, wiped a few more glasses dry, and, a few minutes later, the canoodling clowns both took a seat at the bar and ordered a couple of vodka tonics. Sorta like mouthwash, I guess.

Later my bartender introduced me to another clown, the head clown (insert rim shot here); he handed me his card.

"The Porn Clown Posse."

Duh. Of course. How had I not put it together? A group of people dress up as kinky clowns and pick various places each month in which to have public sex. Just another club for grown-ups, like the Rotarians or Kiwanis.

Was this incident a little titillating and shocking?

Yes.

Did it snap me awake for a moment?

Yes.

Do people enjoy hearing this little bar life anecdote?

Yes.

Did it bring any sense of meaningfulness to my life?

No.

That's why I don't have all that much to say about the crazy exploits (upstairs apartment tenants throwing buckets of urine onto my patrons; patrons carrying machetes in their thigh high moccasin boots; bartenders so drunk they show up at 8 a.m. for their shift, thinking it's actually 8 p.m.; bathroom sex is too commonplace to recount, but I mention it anyway; idiots bludgeoning each other with pool cues because "their quarters" were there first, blah, blah, blah).

Basically the bar business boils down to this: it's what you think will happen when you mix strangers and alcohol in a dimly lit place.

" _There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life: for the whole object of it is to transform our miserable existence into a succession of joys, delights and pleasures – a process which can not fail to result in disappointment and delusion."_

So if Schopenhauer is to be believed, life's baseline is "miserable," and we try to escape it in worldly revelry – Irish Car Bombs and clown blowjobs and the like – but in the end, that only leads to "disappointment and delusion."

Hmm. Is it really so dire? Is there not another way?

[ 17 ]

## We're Not All (Complete) Whiners

_T_ he funk, the crisis, the ennui, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction, the daydreams of motorcycle accidents, the.... _malaise_... some of my friends and I are experiencing, is being gingerly side stepped by the wiser among us.

Billy and I were friends in high school, but not that close. We never socialized one on one – we always had, as we did at dinner recently, a third or fourth friend with us. I felt more comfortable with a buffer. I have no idea why, as Billy is one of the most easygoing, nonjudgmental people I have met. He peeled my mind open permanently one afternoon in high school by introducing me to Russ Meyer's psychedelic sex romp, "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls." We shared a love of B-movies and punk rock. He had a round, boyish face, unkempt hair and a happy-go-lucky grin. He never stopped smiling at just about everything, including the time a car flipped over on Interstate 5 and landed on the hood of his '65 Mustang. Had he been driving 2 mph faster, he would've been crushed. But – whether it is in his DNA or his upbringing (his mother allowed him to call in sick once a week from school – she backed him up and would write the excuse note: he literally skipped 20% of high school), he just skated through life. He never seemed stressed, the coolest girls liked him – always a year older, always taking him to see the hippest bands ( _X, Fear, Redd Kross, The Blasters_ , etc.). He took mushrooms in the parking lot during lunch in high school, then giggled his way through afternoon classes, still graduating Mt. Carmel with a respectable B average. Which is why I was so shocked when he called me out of the blue 22 years ago, while I was a student in college, to say that he just wanted to say "hi."

It turns out he wasn't calling to say hi – he was calling to say bye.

"I'm going in for a bone marrow transplant tomorrow, Charlie," he told me, his normally chipper, mellow voice filled with anxiety. He had contracted Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and his prospects were not good. We hadn't spoken in three years. After explaining to me what lymphoma was and what bone marrow had to do with it, I asked, "Is there anything I can do, Billy?"

"I guess just pray for me," he said.

"Yeah, absolutely. But Billy, if there's anyone who can come out the other side of this, it's you."

"Thanks, man," he said, and then added, "Well, I gotta few more calls to make."

"We will talk again. Soon."

We hung up, and while I certainly did believe that Billy, with his laid back personality and warehouse full of good karma – he took everyone as they came, never clique-ish, happy just to have another person along for the ride – could beat the cancer, I also remember him telling me with a forced laugh,

"Quack told my mom the odds of me making it are less than the odds of me not making it."

I quickly added, "That's why you get third, fourth and fifth opinions. That guy who told your mom about those odds could have a drinking problem. Doctors drink. It's a fact."

"Yeah," he said, and his voice trailed off. I didn't need to ask more to know that the "quack" was probably an expert in his field, probably the fourth or fifth opinion Billy's family did solicit.

Just like Sacha would twenty-plus years later, Billy was messing with my cosmology. And then...

At our 25th high school reunion Billy was among the best looking – and by that I mean he still seemed youthful and still had that boyish face – which I understood became very bloated during his grueling two year long cancer treatment. The treatment also left him sterile. Others looked bored and deflated, but not Billy. Maybe I don't need to chuck my bad things/good people wishful thinking entirely. Maybe I just need to tweak it: it's not that easygoing, happy people don't get sick, it's that they are better equipped to deal with it.

Billy and James (our tee totaling archivist) and I were having dinner together recently at Mexico City restaurant in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles before going to Billy's house to view his vintage movie poster collection and his wife's artwork. She is French. They met at a Valentine's Day party a little over a year ago.

"I moved back down to L.A. after breaking up with my girlfriend of five years," Billy recalled. "The last thing I wanted to do was to go to some canned party about love and romance. But it was that or mope." He chose not to mope.

The wisdom of Billy.

So Billy went to the canned party about love and romance, was smitten with a smart, French beauty, and four months later they were wed. James and I didn't get a chance to meet her, as she was attending art class that night.

"Here, check this out." Billy pointed to an urban landscape photo – skyscrapers, bridges – which she had altered with saturated reds, oranges, black.

"It's like 'Apocalypse Now' meets 'Repo Man'," I said.

"Yeah," agreed Billy "but she's actually moved on. She's into oil painting now."

"Once again," said James, looking at the photograph, shaking his head, "people with more talent than me."

James made the comment with no bitterness, no sense of disappointment, no sense of promise unfulfilled, of a fine, yet squandered mind, of disappointed gypsies. Here's what you need to know about James. We had five of six classes together freshman year, and I tortured him playfully, but relentlessly. I would scribble all over his algebra and German notes, when I wasn't outright tearing pages out of his textbooks. I stabbed him with pencils, blew into his ear. And in return? He invited me to his house to watch a TV movie he recorded on a new fangled contraption called a video cassette record (or "VCR" for short). Afterwards, we shot a few games of pool in his den.

James began losing his hair in high school, and by the time he graduated college, he looked like a monk who had lost his robe. This, in itself, is neither here nor there. What matters is how he handled it. _"Man is not influenced by things, but by his thoughts about things."_ To the extent that I can peer into his heart and soul, I genuinely believe James was not bothered by his hair loss. The billions that men in their forties and fifties spend to regenerate a few elusive strands, and he shrugged it off at age 20. Why? Because he was at peace with himself! Because he accepted himself! Because his sense of self did not reside in the mirror's reflection.

Because, I suspect, he _likes_ himself. When we went to the movies, he would fastidiously time the running length of the films. He collected records and comic books. He made annual Top Ten lists of everything. He has an extensive laser disc collection. And, for twenty years, he has worked at a major film studio, in the archive department. He collects and organizes movie stills, slides and other promotional material – groups and alphabetizes and files them. There is no career aptitude test that could've selected a more fitting job for this man. The pay is modest, but he loves his work. This is home grown, DIY logotherapy. Sure, James may genuinely think Billy's wife is more "talented" than he is, but his observation is merely a matter of bemusement and playful self-deprecation, not the blossoming of ugly jealousy.

I believe Billy and James have found the little room away from the fire Schopenhauer talks about, and are sitting comfortably in it. I wish I could figure out whether it's in their DNA, their life experience, or both, and if so, in what proportion. A clearly written recipe would be helpful. That wisdom, inherited or earned – now that – _that_ – deserves some ugly jealousy.

[ 18 ]

## Flailing About

_F_ or those of us not born with Nora or Billy's easygoing temperament, or James or Sacha's internalized Serenity Prayers, we have to do _something, anything_ : all this stupid ennui, and all the shame about feeling the ennui, is corrosive.

What to do?

Well, several things. Here's one shotgun approach.

I tutor middle school and high school students, I drive for Meals on Wheels, I volunteer at a soup kitchen, and I'm considering joining a book club (if I can find one where I can be, say, the second smartest guy in the room – first would be too showy), and I dropped acid for the first time. At age 44.

I did it with Hector and Erik – we spent the day at Briones Park – rolling grass hills and valleys dotted by oak trees. We brought along a Frisbee. Actually, we brought along three. But nobody wants to hear about someone else's drug experiences, myself included. Tripping balls was just a part of my flailing about – I literally was hoping to open new doors of perception, have an epiphany, and forever see things differently – and I did – for 12 hours – including the incredible sight of 1000 gophers crossing my path – but instead, what really mattered, what has stuck with me, is that Erik, Hector and I, while the outside world shattered into a million mirror shards, chatted meaningfully about a few important things.

Right around noon, when we became convinced the beads of sweat on our forehead were real and not imagined, we moved to a shady spot under a tree.

"It's weird," mused Erik, "on my dad's death certificate it said he was 140 pounds. But I always knew him as 175 pounds. Weird."

We haven't spoken directly about his father's suicide in twenty years.

"He never said 'I love you.' Ever. But it's okay," said Erik, lying back on a blanket we had brought. "He did it through money. That was his way, taking care of us."

"Don't worry," said Hector. "My dad's still alive and hasn't once said 'I love you.'"

"I'm not worried," answered Erik.

"My dad says it all the time," I added. "'I love you, Tito.' He kisses me, too – it's a Spanish thing."

"You mean he said he loved you when he saw you, which was, like, what, once a week?" asked Hector.

"Every other week."

"So he was touchy feely when he saw you, but he never saw you."

"It wasn't like that. It was okay. We had a cordial relationship. It was enough." It wasn't, but it was too hard to explain my conflicted feelings for the man, since I myself can hardly organize or understand them.

"Well," laughed Erik, "I don't have issues with my dad. He's dead. Can't bitch at him now!"

Hector and I smiled at the thought, but really what we were smiling at was Erik's ability to speak so breezily about his father's suicide, coaxed perhaps by what the acid was doing to his poor synapses.

A few moments later my thoughts drifted to an old friend.

"Schopenhauer says the first 40 years of our life is the text, the last 30 years is the commentary on the text."

Hector shot me an irritated glance.

"Shit, Charlie, that's depressing."

"Do you really feel that way, Charlie?" asked Erik, with what seemed to me to be uncomprehending concern.

A little defensively, I replied, "Yeah, sometimes."

"Guy's full of shit, Charlie. You don't even hit your stride until you're 40."

Spinning. I felt I had to do it. And quick. And I had to stop staring at the gorgeous, hovering oranges and reds of the plaid tablecloth Hector brought along for us to use as a blanket.

"Well, um, I think he meant that we spend our first 40 years just acting, plowing forward, not reflecting, and then the next 30 acting with more deliberation and forethought."

"Oh, okay, well, that's not so bad," said Erik.

"Still sounds depressing," said Hector. "Like life is over."

"I'm writing essays about all this," I said, working up the courage to admit, even obliquely, some of what I had been feeling. "But I can't settle on a title. It's down to 'Mediocrity and Me,' 'Never Listen to Gypsy Fortune Tellers,' or 'Schopenhauer, Charlie and Me.'"

Erik and Hector didn't blink. This surprised me a little. After all, I was "Spock:" rational, imperturbable, perfect. Erik – "Kirk" – was all impulse and passion. Erik got laid a lot in high school, while another friend noted that "Charlie doesn't shit. He just deposits two odorless white pellets a month." I didn't mind being painted as an emotionless, controlled, "perfect" alien. But once you've painted yourself into that corner, it can take a little courage to admit to old friends who know you as half-Vulcan that you see yourself as a mediocrity. But I find people are generally smarter and more perceptive than we think. That's why, for example, we let juries comprised of people off the street decide the fate of their fellow men and women.

Of course Erik and Hector didn't blink. They know I'm a mess, because they themselves are messes. Most of us are. That's why the James and Billys and Noras of the world pop out in such high relief.

Of my proposed titles, Hector correctly noted, "That last one doesn't even make sense. Charlie and Me are the same person – you."

"I know," I said, "but it does make sense, kinda – and I also have 'It Wasn't Supposed To Turn Out This Way....Unless It Was.'"

"Honestly, Charlie," Erik implored me, "about just this one thing, can you get off the fence, and decide?"

"No."

Never did unpack the Frisbees that day.

* * *

At a different reunion, one for the Nicholl Fellows, another winner from my year, in a video montage, said, "You're a Nicholl Fellow. You don't have the right to quit writing" (easy for him to say: he went on not only to have his winning script produced, but he also directed it), but still, petty envy aside, there was his image, ten feet tall on the screen, gently admonishing us – and I know I can't be the only one thinking about it, or they wouldn't have made the video at all – not to give up.

So I haven't.

And the flailing continues.

I wrote and co-directed, with Dean, my storyboard artist friend – Satan's greasy cock – a little three episode rom-com series for a YouTube channel. I've written three or four newish spec screenplays, I blog. I take general meetings with all good cheer and engagement, knowing that 99% of them won't result in anything more than a colon full of smoke.

Wait.

Stop.

Full stop right here.

I'm being dismissive of things I love and take pride in, and that's not fair, and it's not even entirely sincere.

The "little rom-com" is called _Rewind,_ and I spent six months designing it: writing, rewriting, re-re-writing the script; holding auditions and improv workshops; choosing the music; having the actress' earrings custom made; integrating the lead actor's singing (he's also a pop singer) into the story; staining the wife beater of one of the actor's to my exact taste; combing over the footage frame by frame with my editor. I spent four exhilarating and exhausting days shooting the thing, with the full support of Dean, my co-director, and Sacha, my cinematographer, the actors, and a patient, professional crew.

I am proud of that show. And not just because _USA Today_ picked it as internet comedy of the week (yes, the pat on the back was great, but for once, it was the byproduct, not the goal, of what we were doing).

I loved the experience so much that on my own dime, I wrote and directed two other shorts for the actress from _Rewind._

Little legacies.

Stop again: I am very proud of my scripts, even though they haven't been produced. They _will_ make the final cut for my time capsule. And when I'm writing, when I spend those two or three hours in the morning clacking away at the keyboard, I forget my cares, time evaporates, and I am so fully absorbed and engaged that I forget I even have a navel to gaze at, and instead just enjoy the process. For those few hours, I am not fretting about whether the script will or won't be sold. And that's a very good thing. Because so few scripts in Hollywood are ever bought and even fewer made, you better damn well enjoy the process of writing them, because that may be the only "payment" you'll get out of the whole thing.

Is it really just "vulgar" entertainment I'm churning out? No. That's just a defense mechanism, a way for me to accept yet another "pass" from a producer. No, I write about characters and situations that mean something to me. I am, quite often, working out my baggage on the page.

I vow to myself today: one day I will make my children read my best scripts, even if I have to pay them a modest fee to do so.

* * *

What else can one do to flail _meaningfully?_

I write twice a week for a blog to keep the tools sharp and because, unlike Hollywood's Development Hell, no one looks over my shoulder, and my work is guaranteed to be published, even if only a few hundred people read it, and even though the last thing the world needs is another blogger.

But what everyone does need is connection. And once in a while, the blog allows me to connect with someone who might be down the block or on the other side of the globe. I once wrote a piece on coping with post vasectomy pain (a very rare risk, but an absolute bitch if you draw the wrong card. I did, and seven years after the procedure, I still buy pants two sizes too big for me for the roominess in the crotch, can't ride a bike, and have bought, and thrown out, hundreds of pairs of underwear in the quest to find the perfect fabric, fit and cut that doesn't leave me feeling like I have a piece of sandpaper in my shorts). It's a toothache for your testicles.

Over a year after I wrote the piece, someone stumbled across it, and sent me this in the "comments" section:

Hindsight is a wonderful wonderful thing but also very very cruel.

I wish I'd done more research (read any!) into this so called "simple and safe" procedure, had I done I might have come across your blog and saved myself some total heartache.

Vasectomy November 15th 2011 and then diagnosed with post vasectomy bilateral scrotal pain on March 6th 2012 – game over in less than 4 months with a condition I had been told was only minor and extremely unlikely. As it turns out it is major and highly likely.

problem is I suppose us men don't like to talk or discuss pain down there.....anything that affects that part of us somehow affects our manhood and it is the subject we should never breach as if some sort of in built genetically coded taboo....sadly we only learn this is so very wrong too late in life and usually only after the Dr's have damaged our bodies.

I struggle with PVP on a daily basis, some days better than others but days like today have me nearly in tears. Waves of pain than don't stop for hours on end and a pain that is so difficult to describe to anyone, let alone a loving wife.

Definitely the worst mistake of my life, but I put a huge amount of the blame for that pon the surgery who told me "there is no evidence of long term risk to men's physical or mental health".

What does the future hold? Well according to my urologist the future holds the promise of more pain in the long term and for long term I should really view it as life....I'm 45 and now face a lifetime of pain to some degree.

No-one should ever consider a vasectomy if they value their partner / wife, if they want to avoid excess medication and extreme pain.

Best way I can describe a vasectomy is it is like Russian Roulette – the gamble is your homelife.

The title of my blog was "Pain, and the Strain on a Marriage." Nora was understandably pissed that I had aired some of our dirty laundry – "I see you conveniently haven't written about your affair" – but eventually, when she cooled off, and I showed her some of the responses the piece elicited (there were several like the one above), she came to see the value of being honest with the public about difficult things. Well, some difficult things.

I exchanged a few e-mails with the reader and gave him some recommendations on underwear selection and dealing with PVP, but more than anything, I think it was just encountering a sympathetic and understanding voice that brought him some comfort.

Look, as a general rule, whether it's your balls or your back, don't go under the knife unless you absolutely have to. Cutting yourself open needlessly? It's as stupid and reckless as it sounds. It _is_ Russian Roulette.

But, silver lining? Moments of connection like these shush the other Charlie and make one feel, let's all say it together now, relevant.

* * *

What _am_ I doing in the bar business? What does the bar business have to do with degrees in architecture and German, and an academic temperament? How does anyone go from driving on cruise control down an empty five-lane highway and end up fishtailing along a little dirt road that doesn't even have a name?

The only reason I'm in the bar business is that I'm a morning writer, and my previous job in architecture didn't allow me free mornings. The bar does, as we don't open until 4 p.m. Of course the truth is that time alone won't produce great pages: I won the Nicholl Fellowship with a script I wrote while working 9-5 in an architecture office. I've written great scripts (according, that is, to me) since then, when I had nothing but time on my hands, but some clunkers as well. I also wrote crap before winning the Nicholl. It's just so hard to predict when you're gonna throw a perfect splitter, and when that thing is going to dive into the dirt.

As to the bars: screenwriting is feast or famine, and the bars are bread and butter. I've got a family to support, and I'm cautious by nature, so, much as I love the rare bowl of lobster bisque, I'll settle for tomato soup any day. Tomato soup pays mortgages and health insurance premiums. And, as a small business owner, I do my best to be fair to my staff, and, in return, I trust that they will keep their thievery to a minimum.

But the bottom line is this: I don't want either of my sons taking over their old man's business. It's beneath them. I don't want them to feel ashamed when they run into anesthesiologist acquaintances or curious classmates at high school reunions.

" _A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot."_

My boys may or may not end up curing cancer, but I don't want them slinging drinks, or even overseeing those who sling drinks. I don't want them to "get" the "theme of our generation." I want them to use their talents in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. Maybe the malaise is an inevitable stage of life, maybe it's the restless suffering Buddha believed pervaded _every_ stage of life, but I want to cushion it as much as I can for them.

I don't want them to feel like they're being misused as a kitchen pot.

So I experiment, looking not just for the right hole, but the right peg as well. I don't just take acid trips – well, one trip – I volunteer, I tutor, I blog, I work on half-finished novels, fully completed screenplays and screenplay pitches, I sit in cemeteries and read, I jump up and down holding my head sideways trying to banish thoughts of career crushing two minute phone calls and the ghosts of goth girls past as if I was getting water out of my ear, and instead, I try to pour in thoughts and memories of my wife and children and parents, along with moments of lying on the beach, watching our dog eat sand.

When I tutor kids in writing at local middle and high schools as part of a wonderful, much needed program called "Writer Coach Connection" – there's that word again, connection (it's interesting: Schopenhauer is fond of quoting Goethe, but he neglects to mention Goethe's advice to "Be a whole or join a whole." I'm sure Schopenhauer saw himself as a whole in need of no other company, but I don't feel that way) – we sit in desks, side by side, one on one, and go over their rough drafts, their polished drafts, the drafts they haven't even thought about beginning. Whether they know it or not, every kid has something to say, and we're there to encourage them to find the words. I can't count the number of goose bump moments I've had watching a kid find a better word than "happiness" to express the concept of happiness, or seeing a disengaged kid find her way to a thesis on the book she was supposed to read, but didn't – _Lord Of The Flies_ – by thinking about her own life as leader of a street gang, and what it means to lead. I hate to say it, but it's just like the movies. People – okay, many of them white – from relatively privileged backgrounds can sit with kids for twenty minutes and actually make a difference. To see their minds click up a gear and watch their self-esteem rise before your eyes? Like the commercial says: priceless.

At the end of the semester, the teachers force the students to write us thank you notes:

"... _I have learned a lot from you and thanks to you, I'm super proud of my final project. You helped me build the structure, which, by the way, turned out great, and you were super nice and friendly..."_

"... _I think you were the best coach I could've gotten, my parents were so excited when they heard I got you! I don't think I would have made it without you!"_

I have carefully saved every one of my thank you notes – forced or not – because they bring a smile to my face and because my soul does not feel vacuous when I read them. And this from my favorite student of all time. He was proficient in English, but he had just the slightest of accents – I think English may have been his second language. He spent a semester working on a project about punk rock. His work was filled with spelling and grammar mistakes, but who cares? A computer program can fix a spelling or grammar error. It can't dictate tone or energy or an inimitable voice, which this kid had in spades.

" _Dear Charlie, Thank you for everything. For all that encouragement I still doubt about (on whether it was just to encourage me to write more, or to do something else)...but the biggest thing I want to thank about, is for giving me the chance to be myself and write and say stuff other people would have found offensive, cuz if it wasn't for you, it wouldn't even be there (as itself) right now..."_

His project was a mix of history, music, poems he wrote, first person accounts of punk shows, drawings and photographs. Sure, a couple F-bombs got tossed in there, but never as a cheap stunt or shortcut. It all felt organic.

"Look," I told him during our last session, "whatever you do in life, maybe you'll major in math, who knows, just never give up writing. You can't. I forbid it."

Just like my fellow Nicholl Fellow forbade me to give up screenwriting.

* * *

Until tutoring consumed too much of my time, I was a driver for Meals on Wheels, delivering food to shut-ins in Hercules and Pinole. A few times I dragged Tomas along. Whenever I drag Tomas or William along with me to do volunteer work, I use the same line: "I am responsible for your spiritual as well as your intellectual, upbringing." And if they still protest, I threaten them with the hammer: "You wanna sit through Mass instead?" That always shuts them up.

Geraldina Gomez is a very sweet old woman with a drooping left eye who doesn't speak a word of English. Our exchange is always the same. I knock on the door of her apartment, she opens up, I say "hola," she says "hola," then nods toward a couch just next to the front door, and says a few more words in Spanish which I've come to understand mean "leave the food on the couch." I do this, she again says a few words in Spanish, ending in "muchas gracias," to which I nod and reply "De nada," and that's it.

Owing to a quirk in his school schedule, when Tomas was 10, he had a few consecutive Fridays off, so I brought him along with me on the deliveries.

To my surprise, Tomas loved it. It's drudge work. You drive, stop, pull out a paper bag with food, leave it with the customer or in a cooler on their porch, get back in the car, repeat. For our first few deliveries together, I would walk with him up to the homes of our clients and watch him as he handed over the food. By our fourth delivery, however, he turned to me and said, "Dad, stay in the car." He's independent and proud, and he likes seeing other people's homes – one guy lives in an apartment complex reeking of marijuana and a courtyard filled with knee-high weeds and about a dozen broken down bicycles. Tomas returned from dropping off the man's food, and excitedly told me, "Dad, you missed it. I just saw the most beautiful garden in the world. It didn't just have flowers in it, it had _bikes_ in it."

So for two weeks he knocked on Geraldina's door, put the food on her couch, nodded, smiled and said "hola" and "de nada."

When he got back to the car, he told me Geraldina would smile at him and touch his hand. I told Tomas that old people love seeing him, that his youth and energy probably make them feel a little sad, but mostly happy. I think he understood.

But by week three, his school schedule had returned to normal, so I was back to doing the deliveries alone.

As usual I knocked on Geraldina's door, she opened it, but this time, a look of disappointment passed across her face. I put her food down on the couch, nodded, smiled, and this time, before closing the door, she handed me two small boxes of raisins – for Tomas.

At that moment I wanted nothing more than to race through town, yank Tomas out of class and take him back to the old woman's apartment. I wish I had. Geraldina passed away two months ago.

* * *

Okay, so maybe I'm doing all these things in a frantic, unfocused attempt to do something meaningful, satisfying and concrete with my life. But SFW. So fucking what?

It can be argued that this is just like porn or sports or dropping acid. Another distraction, another diversion, another way to avoid looking for a moment with a clear eye at life. But I know it's not. The sense of satisfaction I get watching two clowns blow each other is light years behind the feeling I have watching the effect my ten year old's smile has on an old woman living alone in a small apartment.

The opposite of flailing – of trying – is depression or indifference, or, short of that, ill-advised trips to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I typed the words "volunteer opportunities bay area" into my search engine and the machine spat back a list of 100 organizations that needed help. One of them was the St. Boniface Soup Kitchen in San Francisco.

After a brief five minute interview with the volunteer coordinator, who pronounced my "energy" good, I was given a start date.

I poured cups of juice for the diners, I scraped the remainder of their uneaten food into a trash can, but found the amount of wasted food demoralizing, and the smell of it nauseating, so I became the doorman instead, counting in diners by groups of five.

When I ask them, "How you doing?" the majority answer, "I'm blessed." _Blessed._ They tell me, in their tattered clothes smelling of urine and body odor, with their glassy, bloodshot eyes, and empty wallets, "I'm blessed."

Most of the volunteers are older, retired, and my respect for them is enormous. At 44 I am already feeling somewhat irrelevant and bored. What will I feel at 64, 74? How easy would it be to slip into depression, or to become completely misanthropic, complaining bitterly of telemarketers or crowded gas stations or feasting on the day's lurid news of murder and mayhem? My stepdad, 82, does all these things and describes himself as "a grumpy old house dog, barking at everything." It would be fine if he was content being a grumpy old house dog, but I don't think he is, and it sure is no picnic for my mother.

Many of the volunteers say outright that they were deliberately, consciously, pointedly, looking for something meaningful to do after their retirement. I imagine some of them must fight to get out of bed, come to the soup kitchen with arthritic hands or heart trouble or sore hips and muster the energy to slap slop on trays. Many of them are deeply religious – I often overhear the vets asking the newbies which parish they belong to, and the newcomers answer as if this was as common a question as where they lived or what their first names are. They find succor in God. They believe. They are not fence sitters.

Without faith to bolster you, sometimes you just have to put your head down, stop thinking, and charge forward. Sometimes I really don't want to go to the soup kitchen. It's like working out: you dread it, but when it's over, after the endorphin release, you're glad you did it. I know I've never felt worse about myself after a few hours serving, and it definitely beats the feeling you have after lying, or trash talking someone behind their back, or being snappy and impatient with your wife or kids. I have to believe my gut speaks some truth.

Sometimes, when I drag my sixteen year old William along, I treat him afterward to his favorite food – sushi. But not always: I don't want him to come to expect sushi as a "reward" for working at the soup kitchen. I want him to find working at the soup kitchen rewarding in its own right. It's like when the boys were little and, after they watched too much TV, I would be stewing, and finally, abruptly, I would stand up, turn the TV off, and explode: "Enough! You're reading for the next half hour!"

Brilliant. Turning reading into punishment. Way to go, dad. I want them to be voracious readers – to be Michener men – to find reading rewarding in its own right – and I don't think I could've designed a better way to turn them away from the written word.

What Schopenhauer had to say about reading surprised and delighted me. After all, he was as voracious a reader as they come.

" _When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid."_

Ohmigod, all that Shakespeare I haven't read? I must be a genius by now!

[ 19 ]

## If I Should Be Doing Something Else, What Is It?

_W_ riting fortunes for fortune cookies. Here's my million dollar idea: _Mis_ -fortune Cookies. You crack open a cookie and the little piece of paper says, "You really should have that mole looked at." That's all I've got so far.

I look with disapproval at the amount of time I spend babying our two pets – Buddy, our dog, and Tinkerbell, our cat. I will make it my day's mission to get Tinkerbell to lie on my chest for as long as possible. To this end, I will make no sudden movements, and if I do have to reach for a book or the remote control, I do it slowly and smoothly, and try to pet her enough with my free hand to distract her from the potential disturbance of my motion. One cough, one door slam, and that cat is gone. Fickle puss. Everything's always on her terms.

Buddy, on the other hand, lives to please, and delights in any scrap of attention he gets. He's a little wary, but definitely my kind of dog: anxious, needy, non-confrontational. He loves to be in the same room with us, and, when we go on walks, can't stand it if we separate – if Tomas runs on ahead of me, he stands between us, looking back and forth nervously, waiting for us to reunite, but not knowing how to make it happen. So he whines. When I exercise and get sweaty, I let him lick my face and ears. This disgusts everyone in the family.

"But he needs his salt!" I protest, lying on my back, covering my eyes, nose and mouth, while Buddy goes to town on my forehead, cheeks, and neck.

"Dad, that's so gross."

"But he must need it, Tomas," I point out, "or he wouldn't do it!"

"He only does it because you let him."

"When I was staying with the Phillips," recalls Nora (the Phillips were one of the foster families she lived with as a child), "Mr. Phillips would come home from work, take off his shoes and socks, and let their little Pomeranian lick his toes. It was disgusting."

Because his mutt legs (our best guess is Corgi) are too short for his body (our best guess is Golden Retriever), I have to cut his long Golden retriever butt hair so that it doesn't drag on the ground and get tangled up in his poop.

"Admit it," Nora says, "you like cutting his butt hair."

"No, it's something I have to do, it's a hygiene thing."

"Yeah, but you don't have to enjoy it."

"Cutting butt hair is way less gross than cutting butt hair with dingle berries stuck in it," I counter, to which Nora replies,

"I don't want to have this conversation."

I wasn't an animal person growing up. I was afraid of dogs – a German shepherd bit me on the butt as a kid – and, as I grew older, I ignored my cat Missy. She was old and sick, and when I came home from a weekend away one summer in high school, my mom, with all due gravity and compassion, told me she had to have her put down. I felt nothing.

But now I dote on our two animals, and I worry it's pathetic.

Of all the worries I _could_ have...

One therapist mused that I might have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, but he wouldn't commit to his diagnosis. "Maybe, maybe not," he said.

But I ran with his words. _Of course_ I worry that doting on the dog and cat is pathetic! Maybe _any_ choice I make about _anything_ is destined, fated, medically preordained, to leave me chewing my nails. Who knows?! Who knows, for example, how any of it would've played out had I gone left, not right, at the forks in the road: maybe I would've been a bitter academic, publishing bloodless papers read only by other writers of bloodless papers, or perhaps I would be teaching a class not of one hot 19 year old goth girl from 20 years ago, but a class of 15 or 20 of them, some of them who might come to my office hours and lead me to make a fool of myself and jeopardize my job and marriage. Maybe I would beat myself up for _not_ opening a bar. "Gosh, dude, you couldn't get out of your comfort zone, could you? Couldn't just take a break from good grades and pats on the back and take a shot at something as un-Charlie-like as bar ownership. Live a little! And you didn't even follow through on your screenwriting dream. Your first couple attempts went nowhere, so you packed it in. Way to stick with it."

Ohmigod, there is a whole alternate universe – perhaps multiverses – lawyer, architect, psychologist, FBI profiler – of regret and anxiety and existential restlessness, that I am missing out on!

But really, what kind of grown man has the time to plop his cat on his shoulder and walk around the house so she gets a better view of things? I do! What kind of man fussily trims his dog's butt and tail hair? I do! Should I really have been a lawyer, architect, psychologist, FBI profiler?

No. I'm a writer. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

[ 20 ]

## Getting Back To The Frisbee

_I_ never got those "It's all about the Frisbee" T-shirts made up. Maybe I should've. If nothing else, they would be a wearable reminder I would have to confront every time I do the laundry. It's very easy to say, "Life is wonderful, if you can only just see it," and if I haven't ripped that off from a movie ( _It's A Wonderful Life_?), then I most certainly deserve full credit for preaching it – to others.

As my conversation at the reunion with Marcus continued (he of the "autopilot" remark), his wife prodded him – "Tell him about Mitchell." So he did. Marcus told me about an e-mail he received on his birthday a few years ago from Mitchell, a client he had kept out of the housing debacle. Marcus is a mortgage man, and he told Mitchell in 2006 that he could not afford a house. Mitchell listened, and held off. Three years later he wrote Marcus an e-mail saying that he had saved his family from certain financial ruin.

"Marcus," I said, "you do realize you practically saved Mitchell's life?"

"I guess," he replied.

"Well, no, actually, you don't have to guess. He put it in an e-mail."

"Yeah....yeah, it was kinda cool – coming right on my birthday."

"I dunno, kinda offsets some of the autopilot stuff, I would think."

Marcus modestly agreed. His wife enthusiastically agreed.

"He's a hero," she crowed.

The Frisbee _is_ there. I – we – just take it for granted sometimes. Happiness, says Schopenhauer, is a "fleeting chimera," and it has to be – its fragility is what makes it special. And with a little squinting, and, hell, rubber bands on your wrist, whatever it takes, there might be a little more of it to be had.

I recently experienced a lovely little chimera, and it arrived in, of all things, my wife's smile.

A couple weeks ago Nora and I went to a friend's birthday party. It was Phil's fiftieth. We became friends with the birthday boy and his wife because our younger son Tomas is friends with one of their sons. It was a drizzly, cool Saturday evening and we stopped at a local wine shop to buy Phil his gift. My wife had also burned two CD's for him: _The Strokes_ and _The Buzzcocks_. Nora recently rediscovered _The Buzzcocks_ , and has been playing them around the clock.

Whenever we get into her car, I immediately turn down the volume, as I am guaranteed to hear "You Say You Don't Love Me" at ear splitting volume.

"How can you enjoy the song when it's this quiet?" she asks after I turn it down. "Isn't it more annoying to sorta hear it than not hear it at all?" That's how Nora rolls – windows down, singing along at the top of her lungs. Just wish she would do it in front of me and the boys.

Nora got hammered at the party. _Hammered._ It was wonderful. She kept asking me, "Where is my wine?" She must've asked me that question a dozen times. "Did you see where I put my wine?" Unable to find one of the six glasses she left scattered around the house, I would just open a new bottle for her each time. I could tell she was drunk; she doesn't slur or stumble, she just becomes a bit more animated and her cheeks flush. And I knew she would be wickedly hungover, so once or twice I gently suggested we leave, and she gently barked back, "No! I wanna talk to Andrea," or "What _time_ is it?" as if we had just arrived. And I'm glad I didn't insist on going. She was having too much fun. A hangover is just the cost of doing business.

The living room had been cleared of furniture, and one or two people finally got around to dancing to the 80's playlist Phil had put together. I saw Nora walking toward the living room arm in arm with Katrina, the mother of another one of Tomas' playmates. I didn't know what exactly Nora was planning on doing. She hates dancing.

Yet there she and Katrina were, shimmying along to _Flock of Seagulls_. I had to see this. Nora and I haven't danced since August 12, 1991. I'm sure of the date because it was our wedding, and we were expected to dance. We danced to our wedding song, "Twilight Time," by _The Platters_ , and may even have danced for half of _Fred Astaire's_ "Cheek to Cheek" before discreetly sprinting from the dance floor and leaving it to those more capable and less inhibited, like my mom and stepdad.

Nora beckoned me over with a smile. I joined her and Katrina, planting my feet firmly and moving only from the waist up (the only way a 6'-3" white man should ever attempt dancing) and Nora immediately turned away from Katrina toward me. I kept trying to move in such a way as to create a triangle of dancing – Katrina, Nora and myself – so that Katrina wouldn't suddenly feel abandoned.

But Nora kept turning toward me. What could I do? I put my arms on her shoulders, let them slide lightly up and down her hips. She danced with her hands in the air, and I was surprised at how fluidly and comfortably she moved.

But what got me, what I will never forget, was the smile on her face. It was wide – I could see all of her teeth – and it was frozen, not in a rictus of feigned joy, but in genuine drunken bliss. She looked twenty years younger, utterly carefree and happy. She looked hot, way hotter than any of the other moms there.

We danced for about half an hour, twenty six minutes longer than we had danced at our wedding.

Those empty, misplaced glasses of wine hit her the moment we left the house. The crowd had thinned out, guests were leaving in clumps. It's like the fresh air was an emetic, the poor thing. I put my right arm around her waist and held her left hand in mine, to help steady her walk. She was swaying heavily, and I did my best to right her.

Phil and his wife live ten blocks from us. It's a short drive. I held my breath as we turned the corner to park in front of our house. Not because Nora had puked – not yet – but because a police car arrived at the stop sign to my left, and had he, for whatever reason, stopped me, I know I would've spent the night in jail and the next six months dealing with a DUI. I wasn't drunk: I had maybe five beers over the course of the night, but I was fine to drive. After 13 years of owning bars, I have a pretty good sense of whether I'm fit to drive, no matter what a breathalyzer might say (I'm sitting at a plastic and steel airport right now – no wood to knock on, unfortunately).

The cop drove on, I exhaled, turned the corner and parked, and the moment I got Nora's door open, she puked. It would be a long, wearying journey to the front door. After puking the first time, she made it up the three steps to our walkway proper, and then stumbled for another step or two, before dropping to her knees and vomiting into the grass (I teased her the next morning by fishing out a maroon radicchio leave from the dried vomit) and showing it to her.

"How was the salad?" I asked.

"Great. I can get you some more, right now, if you want."

"Hey, I thought it was cute."

"Tell me no one saw me leave?"

"Okay: no one saw you leave."

"You're lying."

"You told me to tell you no one saw you leave."

"Who saw me?"

"Nobody. I mean, very few people. No one laughed, that's the main thing."

"You're not funny."

"But I'm trying. Never give up. Winners never quit, and quitters never win."

The night before, as Nora pronounced the steps a "good place" for her to sleep, I considered, but then dismissed, her proposal, and spent a good ten minutes cajoling, pleading and convincing her that while sleeping on the steps wasn't the _worst_ idea I've ever heard, it also wasn't the best, either. I dragged her inside and she flopped on "my" bed. It's a California King with room for 14, but for the last year or so, she's slept on the couch: no, we're not fighting, it's just that her moving around at night wakes me up, and the reason she moves around so much at night is my snoring. Well, "snoring" is a testy subject for us. I insist that I'm guilty only of "deep breathing."

"You snore."

"I might breathe deeply, even heavily at times, but I don't snore."

"You wouldn't know. You're not awake. I am."

"We'd really need an audio recording to sort this out."

In a previous life, when I was a hesitant young architect, I worked with my boss Leonard on the design of a home for a sweet couple in their 70's. The man would have a pint of beer with lunch. No other clients did that. I thought it was the coolest. And I remember being shocked and saddened that he and his wife had us design built-in cabinetry around two _separate_ beds. In my mind, I haughtily tsk tsked them for not sharing a bed – what kind of sham marriage was this? They must've _settled_ for each other. What kind of bloodless, sexless couple – well, we can't even call them a couple, can we? What kind of... _roommates_ , pals, were these people?

My god, twenty years later and I think they're the picture of intimacy. Deep breathing or snoring aside, at least they dared to place their separate beds _in the same room_.

And now Nora sleeps on our worn brown couch in the living room, and I sleep on a bed which takes up an obscene amount of space in a tiny bedroom. And the truth of it all? I love it. I sleep better. And a good night of sleep is like a taste of that peace of mind I crave.

And now here she was splayed out on _my_ bed. Damn.

"I can sleep here," she slurred.

"I know, but I think you'll be more comfy on the couch."

"No I won't, it hurts my back."

"But I snore terribly, remember?"

After pulling off her boots and holding a popcorn bowl under head as she hurled again, I got her water, aspirin, then gallantly dragged her to the couch and let her pass out.

Her vomiting had awoken Tomas. He came down the stairs to pee. The next morning he asked Nora,

"I heard you getting sick last night. Did you eat too much at the party, mom?" She nodded as she tried to put down a few nibbles of dry toast.

That chimerical smile was gone – a wicked hangover can do that – but when I close my eyes, I can still see it. I thought about initiating sex with her when we got home that night – she looked _good_ – but it probably would've qualified as date rape.

[ 21 ]

## Geschlechtsverkehr (Sex)

" _G_ ender traffic."

That's the literal translation of the German word for "sex." Our high school German teacher, Dr. Helmut Freihof, taught us that mellifluous word: Geschlechtsverkehr. It was my first and most lasting introduction to the breathtaking clunkiness of the German language.

And no book on the subject of human anything – meaning, purpose, hockey, cooking, car repair – would be complete without a few words on gender traffic.

Sex. It's a good 50% of the reason for going to any high school reunion – i.e., to see whether that quiet girl in your English class you had a crush on, but did nothing about, is still hot – and even though that quiet girl was absent at an all-boys school, we didn't let her non-existence prevent us from lamenting our missed chances at the plate, at-bats we had with the opposite sex at school dances and weekend house parties. "Why didn't we take more swings?" asked an old classmate, shaking his head in bemused disgust and regret. Good f-ing question.

As I've told our 16 year old son (multiple times), "Smile. It'll fix half your girl problems. Make them laugh, fake that you're comfortable in your own skin, and you'll never be without a date again. Think Kirk." I happen to believe that, and just want William to sidestep some of my own teen agony.

But again, sex is so omnipresent a topic it'd be like talking at length about breathing: the air today was clear, crisp, cold, had clouds in it, didn't have clouds in it, was windy, wasn't windy. Too obvious to mention. That's why I need to mention it.

I met Leonard for lunch recently – besides being an accomplished architect with many built structures to his name, Leonard is now, in his semi-retirement, a published poet. As we were saying our goodbyes in his living room, I asked him if he had any good books for that night stand I really need to buy soon. He pulled out Philip Roth's "Sabbath's Theater." I'm not quite done with it, but it's basically about a 65 year old man obsessed – _obsessed_ – with sex and mortality and regret. But mostly sex. Just as the good doctor had opined on his death bed.

Gender traffic. Even though Schopenhauer was German, he knew better than to call it something as unappealing as "Geschlecthsverkehr." Instead he called it " _a malevolent demon that strives to pervert, confuse and overthrow everything."_

Let's start with the numbers.

I'd like to propose a new rule for sex accounting: namely, the first time doesn't count. So when you're asked about your "first time," or the number of sex partners you've had, you simply delete the first. Omit it. Gone. Never happened. Think of it as a check swing in baseball. Just doesn't count. It might _look_ like you actually had sex, but, no, upon closer inspection, we'll just leave the score card at zero.

The rationale behind this new rule? It may actually make the memory of your first time a fond one.

Here's what happened on my first check swing: I was a junior in high school. One night I went to a midnight showing of _Rocky Horror Picture Show_ at UCLA with Erik and his ex-girlfriend Yvonne. She was cute, she wore lots of eyeliner (heavy eyeliner is my kryptonite). Anyway, Yvonne was cute, and she was easygoing with a bright laugh.

That night comes to me in nightmarish fragments. I remember going to the movie. What I don't remember is how Erik went home and I ended up driving back with Yvonne to her house in Bel Air. Her family was wealthy. I don't know what her father did for a living, but I remember he had a thick, lustrous moustache, which may go some way toward explaining why he let a sixteen year old boy spend the night in his house.

So this really wasn't even a proper date. I suppose it's more akin to what kids call "hooking up." Three of us set out on a three hour cruise, and only two of us returned from the island to Yvonne's house. Her parents were gone when we got back, or at least sound sleepers.

Yvonne suggested we play quarters in the garage. We sat cross legged facing each other on the concrete floor, bouncing quarters into a glass filled with beer. One thing forever burned in my brain is the moment when she – drunk or just faking it – rolled onto her back after missing a shot and I got a peek at her undies. It drives me crazy, but I can't remember what color they were. I knew then that her intentions were blessedly unwholesome.

Unfortunately, I was far too wound to enjoy them properly. I was torn so strongly by fear of sex on the one hand, and the desperate craving for it on the other, that it's a wonder my arms didn't pop off.

Well, next thing I remember is she's straddling me in the living room. She moved around a bit. I fidgeted out of rhythm. Mostly I prayed to god I wouldn't lose my erection. I didn't, and in the end, I didn't climax, either, and god knows she couldn't have. She went back to her room, and I lay on the living room floor, staring at the ceiling until daybreak.

I don't even remember departing in the morning. I do remember feeling nauseous back at home later that afternoon.

The pathetic coda to the whole thing is that I later invited Yvonne to the Christmas Dance. I still have that picture somewhere. She's looking very cute, a little Madonna girl with lace sleeves, black eyeliner and a sweet smile, and I'm in my finest vintage mod sport coat and scarf. We made a cute couple.

Later that night, at Nick Waverly's after party, I lost track of her. I looked around, wondering where my date went. By then, with the shock my non-first-time finally wearing off, I had a proper crush on her (it took me a long time to figure out that, at best, our little moment was just some drunken adolescent horniness on her part, or, at worst, a quick revenge fuck designed to annoy her ex, my best friend Erik, Captain Kirk).

I looked upstairs and down, but she was nowhere to be found.

Deep down I guess I'm kind of a romantic. The normal doggish impulses in me might daydream of the funky, nasty, awesome NSA hook up, but in the end, it's cupcakes and wooing and the electric tension of flirtation that crank my engine.

By the way, I did finally find Yvonne. Making out in the bushes with Nick Waverly.

In terms of an inauspicious beginning to my sex life, I am in good company. Far as I can tell, Arthur was a mess with the ladies.

The man who preached a life of _"sustine et abstine"_ – bear and forbear – of separating himself from the boorish masses, of hovering above humanity with white gloves, of living a chaste life of the mind, knocked up a servant girl when he was 31 (their illegitimate child died in infancy). He was successfully sued by another woman who claimed he pushed her to the floor (in his court testimony, he pointed out that she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while standing right outside his door); at age 33, he fell in love with a 19 year old opera singer, and at age 43 (one year _younger_ than myself), he was rejected by 17 year old Flora Weiss. _Seventeen_. The "malevolent demon" had gotten the better of him. Two years later he moved to Frankfurt, where he spent the next 27 years in the company of two poodles and a cat.

Arthur calls monogamy "an unnatural institution." Defending polygamy, he says, _"...since every man needs many women, there is nothing fairer than to allow him, nay, to make it incumbent upon him, to provide for many women."_

Hey, at least he was proposing to pay the bills for schtupping more than one lady at once (though I doubt he ever had the chance to do so). He also never married, noting _"to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties."_ It also means finding someone _willing_ to marry you.

"Sustine et abstine" was a quote of Epictetus' which Schopenhauer loved. Epictetus also said, _"It is the sign of a weak mind to spend too much time on things having to do with the body, such as exercising a lot, eating a lot, drinking a lot, excreting, sex. Such things should be done incidentally; let your attention be concentrated on your mind."_

Um, not enjoying a good meal or a good fuck? Why live?

* * *

I'm conflicted about porn. It's a good time killer, yet I worry that it's not a healthy hobby. One of my bartenders called porn "a cruel reminder of how much sex you're not having." And this from a handsome young man who gets more ass than a toilet seat at Dodger stadium.

I recently had drinks with another old friend, Felix, who has moved in with his grandmother to save on living expenses. She is 92, he is 46. This is, in its way, also about Geschlechtsverkehr, but I need to disabuse you that incest won't be part of it. Sorry.

Grandma disapproves of my friend going out, so when he threatens to make plans, she touches her chest and says, "I think this is the day." The day, she means, of her death. There have been many of them. He's taken her to the emergency room several times, and each time has been sent away with anti-anxiety meds, both for her and him. She needs a caretaker, he needs a break on the rent. They're stuck together. He desperately wants to move. Felix is an unemployed storyboard artist, and his little brother is Dean, the spectacularly successful A-list storyboard artist, and my co-director on _Rewind_. This, naturally, does wonders for older brother's self-esteem.

Felix describes himself and his grandmother as "masters of the slow burn." She expects him to cook for her, so when he's irritated, he pretends not to be home, so that she is forced to boil her own eggs. He does this by taping a note which says "I'll be out late" to the glass sliding doors which lead to the backyard of their condo, then he slams the front door loudly enough so that she will hear it, at which point he runs out through the glass doors, and crawls back into his room via a window, and stays there quietly, pretending not to be home so she won't pester him.

He claims she deliberately clogs the toilet with paper towels, and then, rather than telling him about it, calls her daughter, his mother, and complains that he clogged the toilet and is unable – not man enough – to fix it.

In turn, he takes all the money out of her bank account save for seven cents, prints out a statement reflecting a balance of 7 cents, shows it to her, prompting another fake heart attack, then puts the money back in.

It hasn't been lost on me that there is a sitcom or movie here.

Felix and I went out to two bars within walking distance of his home (he has no car, and told me not to meet him at home. "My grandmother doesn't think her wig looks good tonight," he explained). He put down a beer and three martinis in about an hour. Not that abnormal for us. Not when we were 18.

The first bar was located inside a large sushi restaurant. A Lakers game played on the four televisions mounted above the bar. Everyone cheered when the Lakers pulled off a last minute win. I quietly rooted for their opponents, my local team, The Warriors.

"I can't believe you're into sports, Charlie."

"I'm not. Not really. It's just how I connect with William."

He looked around anxiously.

"There's this hot bartender here, but I think she's off tonight."

"Well, the bartender working is kinda cute."

She didn't hold his attention. He was antsy.

"Let's go."

The second club was even larger – two stories – with several bars and a rooftop patio.

"You've gotta see this place, Charlie. It's full of these Mexican girls with badankadonk butts who wear tight jeans and cowboy boots."

"A country western place?"

"No, just guido meat market, but with a Tex-Mex vibe."

On the patio a young man with an acoustic guitar played _Smiths'_ covers (the Latin community _loves_ Morrissey).

I asked a couple at the bar to take our picture, and they in turned asked me to take theirs. In the photo, Felix and I look like a middle aged gay couple.

Inside, an 80's cover band played to a bunch of pogo-ing twenty and thirty somethings. I remember hearing _The Romantics'_ "What I Like About You" and _Depeche Mode's_ "Just Can't Get Enough." It was someone's birthday. The lead singer pulled four drunk women on stage and had them sing the chorus into the microphone _"...and I just can't get enough, and I just can't get enough...."_

A monitor at the patio bar showed live feed of the band playing inside, so everyone could see what they were supposed to be missing.

I turned to Felix and said, "You know what's amazing about this? Here is a band doing 80's covers in a cheesy meat market nightclub – in Burbank – and they will still get tons of pussy."

My friend agreed and lamented his "lack of game." At 46 he's still a very good dancer – light, quick, and nimble on his feet – but he doesn't see it as "having game." For the first time in our 30 year friendship, he told me he has a foot fetish. I was introduced to turn offs like "hammer toes" – one toe is bent and the others remain flat (I had trouble picturing the "hammer" of it all, even when he demonstrated it with his hand by bending a knuckle), but I could easily imagine how the other things he mentioned – bunions, callouses an so on – bothered him.

"It's cool because when I talk to a girl, I don't get in trouble for staring at her tits."

"They don't get weirded out when you stare at their feet?"

"No, they just think I'm shy. Hey, see that girl in the gold sandals?"

"Yeah."

"Look at her feet. You can barely see the veins."

As we left, Felix said, "This is my life now. Burbank on a Friday night. I go the gym by 6 a.m. to avoid my grandma, and she's already awake anyway." Earlier I had told him of my own darker moments (not the bridge stuff). I told him I had desperately sought meaningfulness elsewhere and everywhere – the soup kitchen, tutoring, delivering food, blogging. Parenting and husbanding – the Frisbee stuff – are, of course, part of the "meaningfulness" picture, but he's single, so I didn't think it'd be helpful to point those things out.

I was tired and wanted to go back to my mom's, where I was staying. Felix was pretty drunk, so I offered him a ride home – three blocks. He refused it.

"Felix, you were born with the art gene – that's a gift – you gotta get back into storyboarding."

"Yeah, but all these assholes want me to do their little bullshit projects for free."

"But you can build up a new portfolio that way."

"I know. I know. Gotta fix my computer first, though."

"Seriously, man, there are second chances."

He nodded. We hugged, and I watched Felix open the doors of the sushi restaurant and stumble back toward the bar.

The next morning I complained to my mom about how I had to retype an entire screenplay of mine which someone is considering optioning. I wrote it years ago on an obscure screenwriting program that nobody uses – nobody – but it saved me $25 at the time over the universal, standard program, so I bought it. Now I'm paying for that $25 with a week of my life, painstakingly retyping the 120 page document.

"Good," said my mom. "It'll keep you busy."

She couldn't be more right.

[ 22 ]

## Sex, With Your Spouse

_A_ ugust 12th is our 22nd wedding anniversary. That's two decades plus of fucking the same person. One nice thing about long term sexual monogamy is that each time you knock boots, there isn't a world of pressure on your back. Because you've had it a hundred times before, and will (hopefully) have it another hundred times, you don't have to sweat every outing. It's like football versus baseball. In pro football, every game is so precious, because there are only 16 games in the season – so the pressure to perform well each time is enormous. In baseball, you've got 162 games, so if you choke, or blow a save, or just don't have your best stuff that day, no big deal, you've got 161 other outings to make up for it. You both know it, you can both shrug it off. The world won't stop spinning.

I used to think masturbating-while-married suggested a problem in your married sex life. I no longer do. I now see it simply as a tool, like a flashlight keychain, that you keep on hand to _improve_ your sex life. Here's how it works: I can ask Nora if she's "frisky" (our preferred term), and, if she's not, I can sulk about it, or be terse with her, or review the catalogue of women I should've slept with when I was younger, or – _or_ – I can jerk off, scratch the itch, and, when we're both good and ready, and both really want it, go all animal.

Masturbation is man's answer to evolution's cosmic joke in mismatching the male/female libido. I'm not saying there aren't women out there who are just as horny, if not hornier, than their male partners (and if so, I certainly don't want to hear about them), I'm just saying men have evolved to spread their seed far and wide, while women have the hassle of dealing with nine months of pregnancy followed by the hassle of nine months of nursing followed by bodies forever changed followed by a deeper attachment to the creatures which, after all, went from a tiny egg to a bowling ball in their bellies, not ours. So, at this point in my life – our lives – and not being the kinkiest of couples (I, for example, am genuinely not curious about anal sex, nor is my wife – both of us agree that the butt is strictly an exit), what counts for us as "spicing it up" is waiting until both of us are ready to burst. And because, as a man, I'm ready to burst more frequently than she is, I let the air out of the balloon as needed.

But now I don't masturbate _resentfully_. The worst thing I do – and it doesn't even faze Nora – is that I occasionally "forget" to throw out the Kleenex by the side of the bed. It's just a little reminder, no different than a post-it on the fridge, that says "hey honey, no rush or anything, but we probably should think about fucking pretty soon." A handful of times I've miscalculated. I've assumed she wasn't "frisky" when she was, so I've masturbated and then an hour later she'll give me the "okay, let's do it" look, and, my powers of recovery not being what they once were, I'll tell her, "let's rain check. I already took care of myself." Fifteen years ago this would have been unthinkable to say. Not sure exactly why. Perhaps my Spock-ian prudery; perhaps that I had done it, y'know, resentfully. Point is, I can say it now, and we can both go back to reading or watching TV without believing our marriage is collapsing.

[ 23 ]

## Marriage And Meaning

_I_ love that actress Elizabeth Taylor was married 8 times to 7 different men. What was she thinking after the third marriage failed? Or the fifth? Or sixth? " _Those_ guys weren't the One, but _this_ guy, well, _he's_ what I've been looking for all along." With her track record, how did she find the optimism to still believe in marriage? She had money – she wasn't a gold digger. Was she just a romantic in love with the idea of a big wedding? Did she really think, as the stock market puts it, that "past performance is no indication of future results?" A friend once said, "you never know who you are marrying until you divorce." Maybe Liz just wanted to get to know her husbands better.

Nora and I will be spending our 22nd anniversary at a wooded estate south of San Francisco, Filoli Gardens, open to the public, which, judging by the photos Nora has shown me, resembles an English country manor. Nora is an Anglophile – she loves British literature, early Alfred Hitchcock films, _The Jam, The Buzzcocks,_ Indian restaurants in London, castles, palaces, manor houses, even humble stone cottages. For now, Filoli Gardens is as close as we're going to get to inhabiting a Jane Austen novel.

I met Nora when I was 16. She was my boss at an Italian restaurant in a mall where I rolled pizzas and served pasta salad. She is older than I am, and what first impressed me about her, besides her looks, was her reserved, yet kind demeanor, and the gutsy life path she had taken, so unlike mine. I was a good student, a grind, feared and revered authority, and always did what I was told. I read what was assigned to me, and no more. I followed directions perfectly.

Bored by Olympia, Washington (these were the pre-grunge, pre- _Nirvana_ years), Nora moved to L.A. in her early twenties with no other plan than to start life in a big city with lots of sun. She and her brother lived in roach infested hotels and worked whatever service jobs they needed to pay the rent. As a child, she was bounced from one foster home to the next after she and her four siblings were taken away from negligent, alcoholic parents. Dad would vanish for weeks at a time, mom would fall into a stupor of alcoholic nostalgia for "my beautiful babies" and a sepia-toned childhood that never was. The final straw came when the family was living in a station wagon, in a park, and Nora's older brother – then fifteen – finally decided he needed to tell his teacher about what was going on. Nora doesn't complain about these years, or dwell on them. Me, I would grab a megaphone and let the world know – daily – that I survived a completely fucked up childhood, and should be congratulated for doing so.

Nora is much better read than I am – and she reads for pleasure. This turned me on. She has exquisite taste in music, introducing me to _Elvis Costello, The Clash, Richard Hell and the Voidoids_ , and _Roxy Music_. She has long, thin legs, and high cheekbones. I remember Felix, who also worked at the restaurant at the time, staring lasciviously at Nora's legs (in retrospect, it was probably her toes), and saying, "Her legs go all the way up." To which I added, " _All the way up_ ," nearly wiping the drool from my lips. Nora said she was attracted to my bouncy walk and large nose, two things which, up until that moment, I had seen as flaws. I would give impromptu mock poetry readings in front of the pizza oven to impress and entertain her. Don't think they impressed, but she did laugh now and again.

We would marry six years later. I was 22. I'm 44 now. I got married too young. She knows this, too, as she once told me of a comment made by the husband of a married couple we are close to – in fact, Theresa was Nora's boss at the mall restaurant: Theresa was the manager, Nora was the assistant manager, and I was the pizza boy. Theresa's husband, too, married young to a woman several years older, and when she asked him about it, he said "Ideally, I would've met you seven years later." He didn't say it with any great rancor or regret; he was just being candid. And Theresa didn't fall on the floor in hysterics or demand that they file divorce papers. The comment didn't destroy their relationship. Far as I can tell, they're good together, and that, I suspect, is exactly why Nora mentioned it to me at all. That, and to give me some sense of why she was able to forgive me for the affair.

When I told my stepfather that our son William had lost interest in his current girlfriend, he said, "Well, yeah, you know, you gotta try out a lot of gals before you find the one that works. You were the exception. You fell hard early. Most guys don't." But I was wildly in love, and not to be deterred; and, in any case, in our twenty plus years of marriage, I have never met someone who made me think, "Oh shit, _that's_ the One."

But I don't actually believe in The One, anyway. How can I? What if "the One" is a yak herder in Mongolia? What are the odds I would meet her? Atheist or believer, there is no way you can believe that God or the universe has created one other person at the same time you happen to be on this spinning rock who is the only one meant for you. No way. The numbers just don't work. What I do believe in is the lower case "one." The "one" is the person you decide you want to share your life with, the one who you feel is worth working through all of your own baggage for, not to mention the baggage you create together.

It's a joy and it's a slog.

Yesterday, while we were walking the dog, Nora mentioned that one of her employees, normally an indefatigably upbeat girl, seemed a bit quiet and withdrawn. She was feeling a little lovesick. She asked Nora about our history, and, according to Nora, was impressed that we had been married so long. I admit that it is uncomfortable for me to tell people I was 22 when I married. I see 22 year olds today, at my bars, for example, and they just look so... _young_. They literally still have baby fat.

I love Nora. But obviously I missed out on some life experiences that are the province of your twenties. Adam Carolla, the former co-host of the radio program "Love Line," once said with characteristic bluntness: "You sleep with 19 girls, you marry the 20th." I married the second and a half girl I slept with. I struggle with this – obviously: the affair. The thought of going to my grave having had sex with only two and a half women is just a little bit horrifying to me.

Nora told her lovesick employee that our common passion for the same music and pop culture, and our similar senses of humor, were important parts of the success of our marriage, and I said I thought our contrasting, yet complementary temperaments (neurotic vs. not) were important, as well as our physical attraction to each other. And we both agreed that our friendship, which preceded our romance by two years, was the right way to start things off.

I remember, during our courtship, frequent picnics in Amir's Garden, a hidden little garden in the hills of Griffith Park tended by a sweet old Armenian man named Amir.

I remember flying paper gliders together in the park near our first apartment.

I remember Nora bringing me sandwiches from the deli where she worked when I was pedicabbing in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf (a pedicab is a giant tricycle used to haul around tourists). My ears were never filthier – when I showered, a trickle of black grime would run from them from all the car and bus exhaust, but I was in the best shape of my life, even if I always fell asleep by 9 p.m. in the middle of a movie Nora wanted me to watch. But she understood, and never pouted.

I remember when William was three and locked himself inside the house. Not the front door, thank God, but the heavy metal security screen door which we inherited with the house. Nora and I were on our hands and knees, pantomiming him turning the door knob and trying not to let our panic show through. Eventually we called a locksmith.

I remember when we were visiting my mom and William had the flu, and vomited. What did we do? Like any responsible parents, we drove him straight to the ER. _For a flu_. Even that, though, wasn't the pinnacle of our new parent anxiety: we once took him to the emergency room for diaper rash. _Diaper rash_. The doctor somehow suppressed a laugh and told us to go the drugstore and buy a tube of Desitin.

I remember when, some months after the affair had been exposed, and things were still very raw between us, Nora got me a Valentine's Day card which said, "No matter what, I still love you." I was shocked to find that those words were preprinted: guess there really are cards for _any_ occasion.

I remember how she cooked corned beef and cabbage one St. Patrick's Day, even though she hates to cook. She LOVES to bake, however, and her chocolate chip banana bread is the stuff of neighborhood legend.

I remember the time she backed into a mounted waste basket at a gas station, crushing it, and called me, rattled, because the owner was a jerk, and threatened to make this an insurance matter, etc., and how I was able to A) talk her down, B) dole out some cash to shut the guy up, and C) in the process, comfort my wife, and feel like a man.

I remember just a few weeks ago when she agreed to drop me off and pick me up from the airport so we could save sixty dollars on parking (the shock of college costs is beginning to set in) and she did so without complaint.

I think, overall, she is a better person than me. She is not as vain, selfish, or moody. She hasn't cheated. She cries during corny rom-coms. When we found our cat Tinkerbell abandoned in our backyard, just a few days old, her eyes not yet open, the stub of her umbilical cord still intact, it was Nora who bottle fed her three times a night, who wiped her bottom to stimulate her bowel movements. When Nora is short handed at her restaurant, and subs in for a waitress or barista, she takes none of the tip money offered her. She doesn't mind the hours I waste watching sports on TV. She's not perfect, either (she can be judgmental: she isn't comfortable with my best friend Erik, because he cheated on his first wife with the woman who eventually became his second wife, even though she agrees they needed to separate. I understand her disapproval of the way he did it, but she's held the grudge for eleven years, and because of that, I don't feel comfortable having him over to the house), but if you tallied up all the bad things about each of us, my side of the scale would hit the table with a resounding thunk.

Let's just put it this way: only one us, at any age, would've spat at an old woman at a bus stop, and it's not her. And I bet if I had the courage to sit down with Nora and have a difficult, but important conversation about Erik, who is also Will's godfather, we could come to some sort of compromise where he would be welcome in our home. Nora would probably make plans not to be in the house during his visit, but at least it would be a step toward dealing with a touchy subject, which I predict – though I'm no gypsy fortune teller – would probably lead to greater intimacy between Nora and I. But I'm not there yet. We've only been together 27 years – give me time.

Creating a shared history with someone you love, even with its blemishes, does feel meaningful. I know I don't appreciate Nora as much as I should, I know I sometimes only half listen to our conversations, I know I hold back certain things from her that I think might be too tiresome or prickly to deal with, and I'm sure she does the same, but in the end...well, I once said out loud to her, when he were fighting after the affair, that I was afraid we would spend the next thirty odd years driving around in a car that only had two wheels, and she was scared, too, but we both ultimately assured each other that we would work our asses off to get at least a third wheel onto that car, and cross our fingers that the skinny spare from the trunk would hold up as the fourth.

And it has.

Nora made an excellent choice in Filoli Gardens for our anniversary. It felt a million miles away, and a century ago. It is a beautiful brick Georgian mansion surrounded by even more impressive gardens with formal pools and hedges, and rare trees from all over the world, the gifts of visiting dignitaries. There is a ballroom, a sitting room, servants' quarters. The wealth hangs in the air like dust. The original owner, a certain Mr. Bourn, made his fortune in gold and water (part of his property was an adjacent reservoir). Only five or six years after moving into Filoli, however, Mr. Bourn suffered two strokes. He was confined to a wheelchair and could not speak. In the years before his death, he would have his army of gardeners leave the grounds and his valet would wheel him to a high spot on the property, the terminus of a long diagonal cutting through the garden, which allowed Mr. Bourn an expansive view of all he owned, including the water.

I wonder what was going through his head. Was he thinking, "All the wealth in the world won't get me out of this chair," or perhaps "What folly this is. This grand house means nothing to me now, it is just a container. Soon I will be gone." Or, as my bartender's dying grandmother put it, "It's all shit."

Or maybe Schopenhauer's pessimism has been rubbing off on me too much, and instead he thought, "I have lived up to the moniker I gave this place, and can die proud and happy." ("Filoli" is a made up word – FIght for a just cause; LOve your fellow man; LIve a good life.) "I have done well," he thought to himself, "I am king of all I survey."

Maybe he thought all these things, depending on the hour of the day and his mood.

At my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary, my mother prodded me to make a toast. I hadn't given it any thought, as my aunt and uncle have three grown children perfectly capable of making eloquent toasts, but it is also true that, in our family, I'm usually the guy who speaks at funerals and birthdays and so on, and, really, I think my mom just wanted to show me off – I am her only child. But I had nothing insightful to say – certainly nothing as heartfelt and personal as what their children could manage – so I quickly approached my aunt and uncle separately and asked them what the secret to the longevity of their marriage was. My aunt said "The grass always looks greener on the other side, until you realize you have to mow it." Perfect.

Then I approached my uncle, kneeled down, and asked him the same question. It took him a few more moments than his wife to answer. Finally he said, twirling his cane, "When you're fighting, and you're about to say something, stop and think about it. Then stop and think about it again. Then stop and think about it once more. Then, if you still have something to say, open your mouth."

Far as I'm concerned, those two comments are as wise as any I've heard on the subject of long term, licensed monogamy.

[ 24 ]

## The Four Condoms

_O_ kay, so I didn't bang that goth girl in college, and I chickened out or hesitated (hesitation is lethal – the moment is insanely fragile to women – if you don't seize it, the offer is yanked off the table faster than you can blink and say, "actually, no, I changed my mind, I do wanna have brain rattling sex with you.") with a half dozen others in high school and college.

But – _but, but, but_ – having a sixteen year old son is sorta like having a time machine, a do-over button, and that is about as close as I'm going to get to unmiring myself in regret over at-bats not taken.

And if I'm not yet able to see life through rose colored glasses – I remember first hearing that phrase in a derisive context, as if it were a _bad_ thing that someone saw only the good in this world (what crabby grouch ruined that phrase for me? It wasn't Schopenhauer – I would've remembered that) – well, I have my mini-me to put things right, even if that mini-me is now 6'1" tall and has to shave every other day.

"William could work for the CIA." This is what my mom, his grandmother, says. Our son is just that closed lipped about everything, especially the opposite sex. He's not prudish. When he was thirteen, I asked him to use tissue when he masturbates, and to make sure he throws them away when he's done, so his mother doesn't have to clean up after him. He didn't flinch, and has honored my request.

Recently, out of the blue, he asks me if he can have $56 for train fare to Mendocino. _Whaaa?_

"Mendocino? Why?"

"I want to see a friend."

"Who?"

"Just a friend."

"You're being sketchy. Is this friend female?"

"What do you care?"

"Who is she?"

"Just a friend. I'll be back by tomorrow."

" _Wait_ – an overnighter?!!"

"Dad, it's okay, her parents are okay with it."

" _Her_ parents, eh?" I wondered if her dad had a thick, lustrous moustache like Yvonne's.

"Is it okay?" William asked tentatively. Guess he mistook my giddy exuberance for disapproval. Hell, he could've asked me for $560, and I would've given it to him. I was done with my questioning, and pulled out my wallet. I left it to his mother to complete the interrogation, which he knew he'd have to submit to, if he wanted the money. Nora extracted the intel: he met his "friend" through Youth and Government, a state wide extracurricular program, where kids pretend to be state legislators, lobbyists, etc. They meet in Sacramento. And there he met a girl from Mendocino. A girl who liked him. A girl who, when she had access to a car, drove four hours to see him! We had no idea. He didn't need money for _that_ rendezvous, so of course we hadn't heard about it until now.

I was ecstatic. William is tall, dark and handsome, but doesn't smile much, and can seem – and I know _exactly_ where he gets it – aloof, remote and uninterested – downright Spock-ian. "I would've shown interest, but you always seemed so aloof." When I was his age, I heard some variation of that comment more times than I care to count (9).

Here I disagree with Schopenhauer, who says, _"If we do not want to be a plaything in the hands of every rogue and the object of every fool's ridicule, the first rule is to be reserved and inaccessible."_ Maybe if you've committed murder and are tempted to blab about it to your cellmate, but not when it comes to the ladies! My god, if I could go back in time, I would _leap_ at the chance to be a plaything!

So William, who doesn't yet drive, needed train fare to visit his lady friend. Well, well, well.

He had to catch the 1:18 train on a Saturday afternoon. His lady friend had made the reservation for him. That morning William had the SAT college aptitude test, and it was scheduled to let out at 12:30. I made the calculations, factored in any potential traffic, and figured we'd be at the train station by 1:00, tops. But the test ran long. Some kid – some goddamn idiot moron bent on crushing my son's love life – forgot to bring his ID, and the test administrators decided to hold up the test for this one cock blocker. Utilitarianism people: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few! Kick his cock blocking ass to the curb and get on with the damn test.

Didn't the world know, my son wasn't just going on a simple day trip – he was going to be staying _overnight_ at a young lady's house. That could only mean one thing: you will recall what happened when I stayed overnight at a young lady's house when I was exactly his age. Certainly it would be awkward, but, if I had any say in it, not disastrous. I had a whole ten minute lecture planned.

But because of that half-wit without the ID, William didn't get back from the test until 1:01. We had seventeen minutes to grab his backpack and get to the station. How was I to work in my lecture? Now I'm not a reckless driver. I don't have a single moving violation to my name, let alone an unpaid parking ticket, but that day, I hauled ass. I pushed my poor Sentra to its absolute limit. I screeched around one corner, then another. William was on his cell phone with the girl, confirming his reservation number.

Suddenly he blurts out, "Dad, we have to print out the ticket!"

Shit!

"You said we just needed the number!"

"I know."

"So _now_ you find out?"

"Dad, I just found out."

This was no time to bicker. My first time sex do-over was on the line. Screech! I took a couple more hard turns back toward the house. I California-rolled a few stops. I could still hear the girl's indistinct voice on William's cell. By the way, it was pulling teeth to get him to even tell us this gal's name. Getting him to cough up her last name was impossible.

"No. Wait." He looked over at me. "She says just the reservation number's okay."

"Are you sure?! "

He tried to calm me: "Yeah, dad. Yeah, it's okay.

It was 1:12. The station was half a mile away. I didn't care what laws I broke. Any cop, upon hearing the merest outline of my story, would surely not only not issue me a ticket, but put on his siren and clear the way for us, lead us at triple digit speed to the station. This is for you Yvonne! Zoe! Corina!

We had three minutes left to get there.

There was so much I wanted to say: about how having sex the first time is going to be awkward no matter what, but that it doesn't matter, since it'll be awkward for _both_ of you, how he should be patient, how the penis could be a crude, unreliable tool, which is why God gave us fingers and tongues, how excited and proud I was for him. But there wasn't any time!

But I still had one big asset: a locked, moving car – which, by the way – is a terrific parenting tool. I have decided to have all my delicate father-son conversations in moving cars: you have a captive audience, and, unless your children are willing to fling themselves out of a vehicle traveling at 30 mph, they will have to listen to you.

One hand still on the wheel, I reached into my back pocket, pulled out a string of four condoms, and tossed them onto William's lap. I blurted out something about how "a condom half on is like having no condom on at all." William nodded, taking it in stride.

"Do you know how to put it on, I mean, _really_ put it on?"

"Dad, they showed us with a cucumber in class." Really? Wow. Things have changed since I was a kid. I didn't have time to explain to him why I was giving him _four_ condoms, but I will share with you my thinking:

The first one he'll be so nervous opening it he'll tear it.

The second one he might get half way on, but then it'll pop off, like a balloon flying out of your hands.

The third one he'll get on, but he'll come in 30 seconds – if he's lucky.

And the fourth one? Well, after 10 or 15 minutes' recovery time (ah, youth!), the young chap will be up and saluting again, and desensitized enough by the first orgasm that he will be able to go a solid five to ten minutes. And contrary to what porn would have you think, I believe ten is more than enough. I believe this because when I was 12 or so, I remember reading an article in _Cosmopolitan_ magazine (which always featured one exposed boob shot per issue), in which the author, a female, said "If he can't get me off in ten minutes, he's not doing his job right." Thank you, my reassuring angel, whoever you are! If Will got to ten, fantastic. Five, that's still woo hoo territory!

He nodded, stuffed the condoms in his backpack and got out of the car. The train taking him to Deflower Town arrived not a minute later.

Now I have no idea whether he had sex that night or not. For all I know, he's already had it, or he hasn't, or he threw the four condoms into the first trash can he found. No matter. I had done my fatherly duty. I got him to the train on time, and got him the condoms. He didn't throw himself out of the car, and I got my do-over.

I took a picture on my cell phone of him walking to the train. I sat in the car for a minute. Time was collapsing. I was 6, 16, 26, 36. It was like acid, only fueled by wistful nostalgia instead of chemical wizardry. My boy was growing up. Even without the photo in front of me, right now I can close my eyes and see him walking toward that train, away from me, toward adulthood.

When I got back home from the train station, Nora was on the phone with the girl's mom. She looked pale. Shell shocked. She hung up, staring into space.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

"He was supposed to bring nice shoes."

Again, William had kept everything on a need-to-know basis. The girl's mother had told Nora that William was coming to Mendocino for her daughter's big spring school dance. My wife was mortified. The girl's mom explained that her daughter had spent the day before cooking William lasagna, and had bought him a shirt and tie for the dance. It was to be semi-formal. All she asked of William was that he bring "nice shoes." He has a pair of nice shoes. Black leather shoes. _That's all he had to do._

Nora couldn't bear to walk up the stairs to his room and see if he remembered to take them. "You have to go look," she told me.

"Are you sure," I asked tentatively, "maybe it's best if neither of us looks?"

"No, I have to know." I slowly trudged up the stairs toward his room. I stopped at the landing in front of his door and yelled back.

"Kids dress differently these days. Who knows what they mean by 'nice'?"

"Just go look." I entered his room. I knew where he kept his nice shoes. I looked. I went back down the stairs, took Nora's hand, and said, "I'm sure she'll understand."

[ 25 ]

## My Entry For The Whitest White Person Problem Of All Time

_I_ t's shocking the kind of vicious curve balls life can throw at you.

It's 7:45 am, and I have not left the house for my customary bagel / banana / coffee / antidepressant / fiber supplement / writing session at the local coffee house. I have not done this because the stars aligned to give me one of the rarest and most treasured of all gifts: the house to myself. Our two boys have left for school, accompanied by their mother, who volunteered to chaperone a field trip to the Museum of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

This left me, the dog, and the cat alone until 9:45, when I would have to leave for the soup kitchen. Two glorious hours to myself. As I sat reading the paper, I genuinely thought about just how lousy I would feel if I didn't write productively for most of those 120 minutes, and instead, caught up on the last episode of _Mad Men_. Watching TV at eight in the morning – this, this, is the height of dissolution and moral decay – sorry Al Qaeda! Hard cheese, that's how we roll!

I put a pot of coffee on, turned on the TV, and eased myself onto the couch.

At 7:52, seven minutes later, I hear someone trying the front door knob. I assume it's one of my younger son's friends stopping by to get him on the way to school. But no. It is my dear wife. She is having stomach trouble, and couldn't make the field trip. So now I sit downstairs writing – Nora is doing absolutely nothing to bother me, she isn't making a peep – and yet I feel accosted. I suppose I should take the larger view and A) be sympathetic toward her GI trouble, and B) appreciate with awe the capriciousness of the universe.

What god or chance giveth, god or chance can taketh away.

And now I feel I HAVE to write – _Mad Men_ isn't even on the table anymore – as I dare not risk tarnishing my image as the type-A grind of the family. How can I continue to scowl at Nora for watching TV in the middle of the day if I do it in the morning?

My poor wife is sitting on the couch, reading, waiting for the next bout of diarrhea, and all I can think is, "but what if that _last_ bout, the one that got you to turn around and come back to the house, _was_ the last one? You could've made the trip." To top it off, William uncharacteristically told her he wouldn't mind if she came along on this field trip. Normally he minds our very existence. "I feel bad," she said. "The one time Will reaches out and I can't go."

I forced myself to console her: "Well, there's no way you could've taken the risk, especially not on public transportation" (they were taking the subway to the museum). She agreed. And here I sulk.

Like my Uncle Johnny said, think once, think twice, think once again, then – _maybe_ – open your mouth.

Or don't.

[ 26 ]

## Gifts

_L_ et's take a minute to talk about shoulder bags, bikes, answering machines, and scalped tickets, because Frisbees come in all shapes and sizes, and because I think something bigger, something perhaps even – _meaningful_ – is happening here.

The best Christmas gift I ever got – hand drawn cards from our kids excepted (any parent will tell you that's an instant slam dunk) – was a nylon shoulder bag Nora bought me five years ago. It's just a practical ho hum object: a black bag with the "Shure" logo on it, but that simple bag revealed so much thoughtfulness that I was completely bowled over by it.

Before that bag, I used to lug my paperwork and records (not paper records – I'm talking about those flattened 12 inch circular vinyl platters from which music magically emerges) to the bars in paper or plastic bags from the grocery store, and, invariably, they would tear and fall apart after a week or two.

I said nothing about this to my wife.

And yet she got me a much better version of the same thing – a sturdy bag with a shoulder strap that left my hands free.

Do you know what this means?

This means she must've been watching me walk to the car with the old paper bags, and noticed that they were falling apart and that it was clunky for me to fish my keys out of my pocket while carrying them.

So she thought to herself, "hmm, that looks uncomfortable and awkward for him. What can I do to help?"

This, to me, is staggering in its compassion and care. Everyone in the family knows I love See's candies, a nice shirt, or jigsaw puzzles. All no brainers. And all very much appreciated.

But picking out this bag – now so worn that the clasp holding the shoulder strap is broken and some of the nylon is finally beginning to fray – was an act of love that can't be overstated.

Nora's robe and slippers are worn, and she's hinted she'd like new ones for Christmas. It's a hint she had to drop.

* * *

The second best gift I ever got our older son William – the first being nosebleed tickets to the final game of the first round NBA playoffs in which the Golden State Warriors, our local team, closed out the favored Denver Nuggets in Game 6 in Oakland – "after dad gave him the tickets, and you were in the shower, mom, Will cussed a lot," Tomas snitched to Nora and I. We shrugged. "William was just happy cussing, honey," we explained. The second most satisfying kind.

But when he was 12, William found himself in the middle of a sweaty mob of twenty somethings, engulfed in pot smoke, booze breath and an agro ear-splitting set by the metal band _Mastodon_. His lip was swollen from a flying elbow, his ears were ringing.

How did this happen? How did my little Will, whose biggest thrill in life just a few short years ago was sitting in the driver's seat of the Bobcat loader parked in front of our house, end up in the mosh pit at a _Mastodon_ concert?

I took him. For his birthday.

I drove him and a friend to the theater, told him to leave his phone on vibrate, made him promise he wouldn't tell his mom that I left him and his friend unaccompanied in the pit, and then retired to the peace and quiet of the lobby, where my brother-in-law and I sat on the stairs for three hours, praying to god that William and his friend wouldn't be flattened between some 200 pound _Mastodon_ fan and a 300 pound bouncer.

How could I _not_ take him to the show? His birthday is at the end of June, and I knew he would never see this gift coming. This is the one thing, besides cash and all you can eat sushi, that he actually would want. Hell, I remember piling into Erik's dad's Volvo station wagon at fourteen and being dropped off at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip to see _The Untouchables_. That experience is seared into my mind, and now, here, all these years later, I got a chance to be the cool dad, too.

And it almost didn't happen.

Through the bar world, I'm acquainted with the manager of the bar at the venue where _Mastodon_ was playing. While talking to him one night about the surprise birthday gift I was planning for my son, he offered to get me four tickets to the show for free. "I'll hook your boy up, no problem," he told me. I bought him another round and toasted him. "I can get any tickets anytime I want, Charlie." Ten years of selling one of the last legal drugs, of being ripped off by cokehead bartenders left and right, of dealing with brawling customers and fellating clowns, had finally paid off in this well connected acquaintance. I would take Will and a friend to see one of the hottest shows in town. My acquaintance assured me it was no big deal, that all I had to do was text him the day of the show, and the tickets would be waiting for me at will-call.

So of course, on the day, I strode confidently up to the will-call window to find that no tickets were waiting for me. In an embarrassed panic, I offered the clerk every permutation of my name – Chuck, Chad, Champ – but nothing turned up. I turned around, mortified, to see my son and his friend looking at me in a way that said, "Dude, don't worry, we never thought you were that cool, anyway." Ugh, that was it! I did not need their pity and I certainly did not want their contempt! Just then, of course, a patron of mine from the bars, a real hipster with cool glasses and baroque facial hair, gave me a quick hug and walked gingerly past me to successfully retrieve his tickets from will-call.

Desperation must've been writ large on my face, because within 10 seconds, a scalper was offering me tickets.

"Sixty bucks, brother."

"Face value is forty," I replied.

"Sixty bucks is cheap."

"But the first four bands have already played."

He looked at me, then at William and his friend.

"Fifty."

"It's for my son's birthday," I added with a needy grin.

"Okay, shit, forty bucks."

Done. That was it. I did it! For the first time in my life, I bought scalped tickets. And I haggled successfully. That's right Ticketmaster – you can suck it!

And it couldn't have been more worth it.

My kid loved the show, _loved_ it.

He even answered his cell phone from the mosh pit every one of the half dozen times I called to check in on him. I wasn't being a helicopter parent: some guy was actually hauled out of the mosh pit on a stretcher, and he outweighed my boy by a good 75 pounds.

When the house lights came up, William ran out of the theater. Half deaf from the show, he was talking loud, fast, and animated.

"Dad, look at my lip!"

"What happened"

"Some guy – I think he was drunk – elbowed me!"

"Are you okay?"

"Totally, I kneed him in the crotch."

Will's friend chimed in: "There was this other guy who kept telling Will he had to be 21 to operate a cell phone."

"Everyone was smoking pot, dad!"

"Well, y'know, it comes out of the ground – it's a plant. I don't smoke it, and you can't, but some people do." In the car he proclaimed the _Mastodon_ concert the best show ever put on by any band anywhere, _The Beatles_ final appearance included.

And once home he proudly told his mom how he survived the mosh pit.

"You left him alone?!" Nora asked.

"We were in constant cell phone contact, and occasional visual contact." She disapproved of it all, of course, but ultimately decided she was just glad she hadn't been there to see it. William looked at me with gratitude. For a moment, my almost-sullen teen and I were a team, reveling in the night's slightly naughty thrills. For once we weren't talking about his grades, how clean his room was, how much time he spent playing video games, or how late he could stay up.

Sometimes it's okay to let the toothpaste out of the tube, the cow out of the barn, even if it gets a fat lip, a contact high, and is deaf for three days.

" _Give your son luck,"_ says Schopenhauer, quoting an old Spanish proverb, _"and throw him into the sea."_ I couldn't control the luck part – that took care of itself – but I could throw him into a sea of sweaty, stoned humanity.

* * *

I sent my mom a telephone answering machine for Mother's Day two years ago.

Now before you accuse me of being a cold hearted sonofabitch and hopelessly out of date (an _answering machine, really_?!), hear me out. My mom lives in So Cal, and I live in the Bay Area, and the only gift she ever wants – Christmas, birthday, Mother's Day, you name it – is a gift certificate to her favorite masseuse up here in Danville.

So of course there was no question as to what I should send my mom for Mother's Day: another Pamela gift certificate.

But then something which I'm calling "inspiration" struck. I visited my mom just a few weeks ago, and she was complaining that her current phone/answering machine was dying on her. Specifically, the volume level was dying out, she said. I dared not tell her I thought that it might have something to do with – gulp – aging – and hearing loss, so I humored her and let her call me on that line from her cell phone. But it turns out she was right. I could barely hear her. The damn thing _was_ dying.

So when it came time to pick out a gift, it just dawned on me: a new telephone. At first, even I, a practical Virgo, took pause. A phone? Really? I mean, isn't that the type of thing banks used to give out you when you opened a new checking account? But then I thought about it some more and decided that yes, actually, this was the perfect gift. Because we live four hundred miles apart, our relationship happens mostly over the phone, so that impersonal piece of plastic is actually an integral part of our relationship. In the end, I decided it was the most thoughtful gift I could've chosen, trumping even flowers, brunch and massages.

I sent along a card that said on the outside "Good Mothers let their kids lick the beaters," showing a picture of an electric cake beater covered in chocolate batter. On the inside it said, "Great mothers turn the beaters off first."

To this I added my own note: "And really, really great mothers still cook their sons salmon when they visit, and put them through Mount Carmel High School."

My mom called to thank me for the gift, using the gift I just bought her to make the call. It turns out she had just been browsing for a new phone at Best Buy, but couldn't find the exact model she already had, and so didn't buy anything, afraid of the unknown. It took my maverick thinking to convince her that it was okay to switch brands.

She was grateful, genuinely grateful, and I was happy.

And then she thanked me for the inscription on the card. Here's where things got a bit uncomfortable. I have a very hard time telling someone how I feel about them in person, so if I do it at all, it's usually in writing. But I have an even harder time when they _respond_ – especially positively – to my words. My mom asked about the inscription, "What brought Mount Carmel to mind?" She was genuinely surprised that I had thought of high school, and her role in paying for it, after all these years.

And this killed me, absolutely killed me!

It made me realize she doesn't think that I think very often of all the sacrifices she made for me, like sending me to a private high school. She was a first generation immigrant, a single mom with no college degree, raising a son in L.A. When the public elementary school I attended started getting a little too hairy, and the punks from the junior high up the block regularly jumped us, and my fourth grade teacher told her my mind was being wasted, she decided to put me in private school.

On a secretary's wage.

Well, of course she didn't have enough money for tuition, and the child support from my father was meager. So she took a variety of second jobs, working as a cashier in a health food store, as a clerk in a tennis club, handing out towels and rental rackets. I remember going with her sometimes to the tennis club at night – she worked the 6 p.m. – 10 p.m. shift – and sitting around bored in the little snack lounge. I think I realized why she was doing what she did – not that she ever brought it up – she's just not an emotional blackmailer or martyr, period, but as the years went by, and the natural self-centeredness of adolescence gave way to the slightly less self-centeredness of adulthood, I came to really appreciate it.

And now I think often about all she did for me, and it just drives me crazy that she perhaps doesn't realize it. And it drives me even crazier that I have such a hard time telling her. She's 70 and in very good health, so I'm counting on her being around for a good while. But what if something happened? What if I she didn't know how I felt?

Is there room for a new kind of drunk dialing? One where you get plastered, and instead of calling an old girlfriend, you call up your mom all maudlin and nostalgic, and ramble on about the big croissants she used to buy you, or how she picked you up from the police station when you got caught drinking a wine cooler in a parking lot in high school, and didn't read you the riot act, or how, to this day, still buys you "Ice Cubes" chocolates when you visit, even though you don't like them anymore, but don't have the heart to tell her?

Whenever I hear "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" by _Roberta Flack_ , tears come – no, jump – into my eyes.

"Sounds like it's very emotional for you," said one therapist. Really? You think so? Wow, I never would've put that together. Tears and emotion, huh? "First Time" was one of my mom's favorite songs when I was a kid, and she played it often. But somehow, when I hear that song now, all I can think and feel is, "Was she as happy in her life as she deserved to be?"

* * *

A year before they divorced, when I was five, my parents bought me a red Schwinn Stingray bicycle with a sparkly white banana seat and big goofy handlebars. My first, and most beloved, bike. I wanted to do the same for Tomas.

Because, really, besides apple pie and internet porn, is there anything more American than a dad buying his son his first bike?

This time I did screw up, and can't blame it on sleazy bar managers overpromising things.

For months Tomas had been asking for a BMX bike (what I would've called a dirt bike back in my day – the preferred brands being Mongoose, Diamond Back, and, most coveted of all, Red Line).

A few weeks earlier I had checked out the small bike shop up the block. They had all kinds of BMX bikes, but they were all in the $300 – $500 range. And being a premature curmudgeon, this struck me as outrageous. Plus I had indulged some of Tomas' fleeting passions in the past – the electric guitar, saxophone and two dead rainbow fish come to mind. I'm not saying he killed the fish when he got bored with them, but he really could've stuck with the musical instruments a bit longer.

But he's an active, outdoorsy kid, so a bike made total sense. Off to Target I went. Not only did they have BMX bikes, they had a Schwinn BMX!! My first bike wasn't a Mongoose, Diamond Back, or Red Line. No, it was a red Schwinn Stingray. I was almost tearing up. This was fated. History was about to repeat itself. Plus it only cost, like, a hundred bucks. I bought a giant red bow to put on it, and hid it in the garage until Christmas.

Over the next few weeks I turned in an Oscar-worthy performance not letting on to Tomas that he would be getting a bike. My poker face was perfect. Two days before Christmas he confided to his older brother William that he didn't think he was going to get the BMX bike, but that this was okay.

Christmas morning I got up extra early to make sure I would beat Tomas to the living room. I wanted to film him when he first saw the bike. I had the camcorder rolling when he walked in and saw the red and white Schwinn. He was happy, certainly, but not ecstatic, which just isn't like him. Tomas eats life, and is wildly enthusiastic about just about anything. Nora wasn't saying much, but I knew she thought something was off, too. But he seemed happy enough.

"What do you think, Tomas?"

"Thanks, dad."

He rode the bike around all winter and seemed to enjoy it, but lately, in the last month or so, he would often come home in tears after riding around with his little pack of friends. Turns out they were teasing him mercilessly, telling him his bike was a crappy Schwinn from Target, and wasn't even a true BMX bike at all.

That was it. I was pissed. At Tomas. I thought this showed weakness of character. I distinctly remember the description on the little tag at Target containing those three letters: B. M. X. Since then I've wasted my time on-line schooling myself on gyros, foot pegs and seat styles, but just the same, even if it isn't exactly a textbook BMX, it is a perfectly fine bicycle. Hey, at his age I wished I had a Red Line, but I didn't get one, and I'm pretty sure I'm better for it. I had to own my Schwinn – emotionally – and figure out how to make it a source of, if not pride, than at least an object lesson in how not to let other kids control your emotions.

"Tomas, you do realize there will always be kids who will find some reason to tease you – your haircut, the brand of shoes you wear, your bike, whatever – and if you let them get to you, you lose." He nodded and wiped his tears. "Jesus, Tomas, you have a perfectly fine bike." I shook my head. "And if they know you're a sensitive kid and vulnerable to teasing, they will circle and attack. Don't give them fresh blood. You will never be able to buy your way out of your problems."

"I know dad. It's fine. Can I go?" I nodded.

By this time Nora was convinced that we had messed up. It wasn't about price, she said, it was about him wanting a BMX bike, and us getting him the wrong thing. She was right, but still I was torn. I secretly wished we were poor, like my parents, not the middle of the middle, so that there would never have been the option to get him a nicer BMX bike from the store up the block.

But we _are_ the middle of the middle, and seeing how much he actually loves to bike, getting him a new one would not be a boondoggle like the sax or guitar. But I wasn't quite ready to give in.

Tomas still came home in tears. And I still tried to talk him out of it.

"Tomas, you have to get over this. You're spoiled. This is ridiculous."

Tomas' birthday was coming up in two weeks. Obviously I knew what he wanted. Even though part of me still wanted him to thicken his skin against the other kids, part of me had to admit to myself that I probably did buy the wrong bike, and there was this decent dirt bike on sale up the block for $229.

I knew then that I'd be getting him a new BMX bike as an early birthday present.

So after soccer practice one day, I took him to the overpriced local bike shop.

"What are we doing here?"

"Your birthday's coming up."

"Yeah."

"And I'm guessing you want a different bike?"

He nodded, tentatively, uncertain of what kind of character-building exercise I might have in store for him. After the young salesman showed us a few bikes in our price range, he asked Tomas if he wanted to test ride one. Tomas looked at me.

"Go for it. Take your time. Really make sure it's the one you want."

He took the blue bike around the block a few times, and the expression on his face told me everything I needed to know.

"You go ahead and ride home. I'll finish up here."

Tomas jumped back on the bike.

"Hang on, your helmet!" He was already wearing it, but I constantly fret that it's not on properly, that if, God forbid, he ever got in a wreck, it is so poorly strapped that he might as well not be wearing one at all. So he swallowed his impatience and waited for the clerk to adjust the straps properly – I can never figure it out.

Then he bolted, hell on two wheels. He hasn't left that blue bike alone since. I warned him about theft, and so he doesn't even leave it in the garage. He parks it in the living room. He loves it, absolutely loves it.

Did I do the right thing? From a parenting textbook standpoint, I don't know. Did I miss an opportunity to help build his character? Maybe. Hopefully not. Hopefully all my stern speeches and (almost) waiting until his birthday made some impact.

I made the best decision I could at the time I made it.

I'm happy about the decision, but there's still a bittersweet tinge to it. He loves that bike, that's not the issue. I just wish the bike he came down and saw that Christmas morning was the one he really wanted. He would've been out of his mind with joy. Fatherhood passes quickly, and their childhood even more quickly. Blink and you miss it. Some things happen only once. Like the first time you walk into the living room on Christmas morning to find your dad has almost bought you the bike of your dreams.

* * *

I haven't pulled off anything as elegant and thoughtful for Nora as that nylon shoulder bag she got me, but for her birthday this year, I at least tried buying her something she didn't tell me in advance to buy.

She did, it's true, spell out Season 1 of the 60's TV show "I Spy," which I bought – but I came up with two things on my own I'm very proud of: an old _Buzzcocks_ record from the early 80's – not to listen to – just to frame for the wall of our basement den, and a folding cover for her iPad, so she can prop it at an angle when she reads it. The cover thing doesn't actually work for her – she prefers to hold the iPad in her hands – and I knew that even as I bought it, but I was going for the gesture. I figured it would show that I was at least _trying_ to think of something that would improve her life. Not just a life, but _her_ life, how _she_ lives it.

She unwrapped the iPad cover and hugged me tight.

"I love it. It's perfect."

[ 27 ]

## Can't Get Away From The Frisbee

_I_ hate it when people use my own words against me – I much prefer to do it myself. Earlier I said that I believe "The meaning of life is to make your life meaningful." And unless I was being glib, which I quite often am, I believe that to be true. Obviously I've floundered a bit on that front – creating a sense of meaningful purpose in my life – but that moment of unforced contentment I felt after dinner with Toshi; Nora's drunken, open smile; watching William walk toward the train; breaking down and getting Tomas his bike; that dumb nylon shoulder bag; even the phone; was there something to it all? Was something in my innermost me trying to break through the crust of regret and dissatisfaction I had baked for myself?

"Charlie, you once told me something in college that I'll never forget."

Oh shit.

Hector and I were talking about the malaise, and he said to me, "You once told me that the best we can hope for in life is not to mess up our children too much. You said everything else is probably beyond our control."

"Did I say that?" I responded. "Man, I was a wise motherfucker."

Hector has two daughters and he frets constantly about their upbringing, their education, their well-being. Even though he absolutely does not have the temperament for it, he's considered home schooling them, convinced that no one else on the planet can be trusted to do the job properly.

"If marriage is all about compromise," he added, "then raising kids is all about putting someone else's needs ahead of yours." He thought for another moment. "Well, at least 85% of the time, let's say."

There is real wisdom there: shooting for the stars but happily accepting the moon; turning your focus away from your own navel to the navels of others; cherishing emotionally what your body demands you cherish biologically. My genes want William and Tomas to be happy, happy enough to spread my genetic material forward.

And so does my heart.

I know I want more – a creative legacy that's not merely _pro_ creative; recognition and pats on the back; a time machine; a big red do-over button; to be more fully present with my loved ones; and the ability to savor it all. And if I have been in that little room safely tucked away from the fire the whole time, and just haven't been able to see it, the joke indeed is on me.

And, frankly, it's just not that funny a joke.

[ 28 ]

## Just When You Think The Story Is Over – It Isn't

_D_ epression was once described to me as "the inability to imagine a future." Toshi described it to me as the two weeks he recently spent in bed with the blinds drawn, unable and uninterested in doing anything besides "watching hours of Youtube videos."

"It crept up on me, Charlie. I just felt like nothing was worth doing. At first I stopped washing the car, then I missed appointments, then I stopped showering...and I didn't care that I hadn't done any of those things. I just thought, 'Why bother?'"

"Did you talk to anybody about it?" I asked.

"Not even my shrink. I just...couldn't. Didn't want to."

"Toshi, if you ever get that low again, you have to call me. Right away. Remember that stuff I told you about the bridge?"

"That was _real?_ "

I assured him it was.

"Well, I'm not exactly out of this funk – I can still feel it pulling at me."

"What got you to the coffee shop today?" I asked. The coffee shop where we had laughed about the Frisbee just months before.

"On Youtube I saw this video by this doctor talking about how this one diet can increase your life expectancy. If you eat what he recommends, you can live another 50 years."

"So that means you find the idea of living another 50 years appealing?"

"Yes."

"Great. So you don't think 'it' is over?"

He gave it a moment's thought.

"No. I don't."

He smiled. So did I.

"Any of the food help yet?"

"I dunno, but this cute guy working the register at the market gave me _that_ smile."

"Ah," I said, "even better than living longer – hope."

"Absolutely. His look gave me a little hope. Pathetic, huh?"

No. Not pathetic. Not pathetic at all. And _if_ pathetic, then undeniably human. Gay or straight, the loss of sexual relevance – of feeling desirable – is no small matter. Of course we had also been talking about screenplays and teleplays and pitches. Toshi, too, remember, is trying to sell scripts, but nothing is moving.

"I just need one little click of the dial forward and I think I'll be okay" (perhaps the sub-text of this book is just to stay the hell away from show biz).

Lack of imagination. Lack of hope. A sense of creeping irrelevance. Toshi was feeling it all, too. It certainly was what I was feeling on the bridge that day. And most of the things I've just described in "Gifts" happened _after_ the bridge incident. I can't imagine that in addition to fucking over my survivors royally, I was also considering what an Oakland beat cop once described to me as "a permanent solution to a temporary problem," or, as I see it, slamming shut a book that hasn't yet been finished. There were – and _are –_ I discovered, chapters yet to be written. It took unalloyed selfishness and a colossal failure of imagination on my part not to see it.

About a year ago I walked into The Rustic during the day, before we were open, to do some paperwork, and noticed a post-it stuck to the register. It read, "Charlie. Movie? (818) xxx-xxxx." Whatever. We get some weird calls and notes: a lot of people think we're a radio station for some reason and call to reach a certain dj, or to ask that we change our format to all Christian all the time, or they call to rent out the bar to shoot a student film or music video, so I didn't think much of it, but this time I did hold on to the note.

_(818)._ The area code. That was the thing. Maybe this wasn't a wrong number or just another student wanting to shoot a scene where a guy gets shot down by a girl he's hitting on. (818) is Burbank. (818) is the home of Universal Studios and Warner Brothers and Disney.

I decided to try the number.

The phone number belonged to the office of Allen Lowe, V.P. at Warner Brothers. He wasn't in, but I left a message with his assistant.

I met Allen twelve years ago. He was a producer hot off the success of "Elf," and I was a writer hot off the success of the Nicholl Fellowship. He didn't want to buy or make my script at the time, but he liked my writing, and wanted to meet me. It was a general meeting, and it went well: we laughed, I mentioned some ideas he liked, at the time he was intrigued by "competitive eating" and the Nathan's hot dog eat eating contest, which was then dominated by the skinny kid from Japan, Kobayashi. We never ended up developing a project together, but that's okay. It was a typical general meeting, and we ended on what I thought was the typical high note of empty promises to work together in the future.

Ten years later he runs into _Green Day_ bassist Mike Dirnt in Paris. Turns out Allen's girlfriend and Mike's wife are besties. I met Mike years ago through my former bar manager Loomis. They were punk rock kids who came up together, and obviously Mike's musical career had gone stratospheric. I walked into Slim's one night and saw some guy slicing lime wedges for drinks – the barback's job – on the bar top. Only he was sitting on the wrong side of the bar, the customer side.

I was getting ready to lecture Loomis on the dangers of providing tipsy customers with knives, when he introduced me to the customer: Mike Dirnt. Mike was sober and happily slicing limes, so I let him continue working for me for free.

Out of curiosity, Loomis had asked to read my Nicholl script, _Uninvited_. Apparently he actually read it and for whatever reason, unbeknownst to me, passed it on to Mike, who also read it. Five years later I would get a call from Milan, Italy.

"Charlie, it's Mike. Mike Dirnt. Loomis gave me your number, I hope that's cool. Hey, we're thinking of turning 'American Idiot' into a movie, and wanna see if you'd like to throw your hat in the ring."

I was stunned. A few seconds later I sputtered back,

"Absolutely. I need to buy a hat first, but, yes, absolutely." I love _Green Day_ and think "American Idiot" a masterpiece, along with their much under rated fifth album, "Nimrod."

Several meetings later I was hired to write the drama version of "American Idiot." It was never made – the musical version was – but I got to spend a week on the road touring with _Green Day_ to get to know the guys better, and wrote a script I'm immensely proud of for a band I love. When they got off stage, right around midnight, there was a bowl of guacamole waiting for them the size of which I had never seen before – it was "taco night;" the tour buses had individual guest bunks with individual televisions and individual air conditioners; unwinding in the hotel after the show, we played cards and toilet papered the four polster bed of a roadie who had fallen asleep.

Basically, I was having a week long sleepover party that most 12 year olds can only dream of.

And _still_ the book isn't done.

Allen and Mike are talking movies in Paris last year, and Allen apparently asks Mike which screenwriters he likes. Mike wonders if Allen has ever heard of a guy named Charlie Alonso, who wrote a script Mike loves even more than _Uninvited_ : it's called _Funny Boys_.

Mike had asked to read that one, too.

Well, there aren't that many Charlie Alonsos working in the film biz, so yes, the name rings a bell to Allen. At the time, I had no agent and no manager. My agent and I had fallen out over the _Overdrive 3_ crediting disaster, and my managers had both gone on to other firms without asking me to join them. I was no longer hot off the Nicholl. I wasn't hot off anything. I was just forcing myself to churn out a few more specs, a few more blogs, because I couldn't stand the idea of answering the question, "What do you do?" by saying only, "I co-own two bars." Suddenly I found that I needed to be able to say "Write screenplays and co-own bars," even if the follow up question was, "Oh really, which bars?"

So Allen's assistant had plugged my name into a search engine, and eventually linked me to The Rustic Bar, and, twelve years and one post-it note after meeting him, I saw Allen again, this time in his spacious office on the Warner Brother's lot.

Allen wanted to make a movie which would somehow capture the history of punk music; I came up with a take he liked; he introduced me to some producers on the Warner Brothers lot; and now?

Now I am reviewing the storyboards for the animated pitch I just sold to the producer. It's a modest job, but I'm thrilled to have it. In this corner of my life, I feel relevant again. And I owe it to a post-it that could easily have fallen to the floor or been tossed in the trash...by me. It may be a shame that I need a 26 page contract to boost my esteem, but I am who I am, and if I had given up on screenwriting, or been too bitter to take that little yellow note seriously, I never would've discovered that the story had a twist I could never have foreseen, a chapter I would have completely overlooked.

[ 29 ]

## I'm Pretty Sure We're Approaching The End

_W_ hy do we do what we do? Every second of our life calls for a decision to be made – from choosing butter or cream cheese with our bagel, to figuring out whether we do or don't want to have children, to deciding whether we want to be bankers or bee keepers – and I ask myself, why did I begin life as a petty, cruel, smart, decent kid, then jump into the practice of architecture, make an abrupt U-turn into bar ownership and screenwriting, have a family, have an affair, take on a few volunteer projects, and visit the Golden Gate Bridge?

At the reunion, after drinks and dinner, my classmates and I filed into a campus lecture hall for a slide show. Photos of us as teens, and even a few old video tapes – yes, _video cassette tapes_ – were shown. How can I describe the feeling in that room as we 44 year olds watched our 16 year old selves playing sports, smiling, laughing, our arms draped over each other's shoulders?

It was devastating; it was hilarious; it was wonderful. One thing was clear when the lecture hall lights came back up: we were all in the shit together.

Kierkegaard (of whose work I don't even have enough knowledge to fake my way through the first round of "Jeopardy") wrote,

" _Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards."_

K.

So is my present so intolerable that I have to spend the majority of it dwelling on the past or fretting about the future? Is all this just a case of funky genes, too much time on my hands, or am I genuinely so far off track with my decisions that even the most easygoing of people would find themselves in a similar funk – excuse me – _malaise_? Will this pass? Will I look back in ten years and think, "What was all the fuss about?" or will I say, "You thought it was bad then? You didn't know how good you had it."

Why, again, isn't it enough to make money and take care of your family? Why isn't it enough to connect with your loved ones? What do I – you, any of us – really want out of life? Will I ever stop, exhale, and appreciate what I have, not gnash my teeth about what I haven't? Get out of your head, dude, or change what's in it. Didn't Buddha or JC say that?

When I was telling one therapist about the life I _should've_ had as an Academy Award winning screenwriter, or celebrated academic, or razor sharp attorney, or college student with dozens of sexual conquests under his belt, or what have you, he said something that shut me up but good:

"How do you know any of those other paths would've worked out? Charlie, you always fantasize about how everything goes _perfectly_. Why don't you ever take the time to fantasize about how _badly_ things could've turned out? And even if you had all those things, can you say with certainty you would be any happier?"

Christ. This was no rubber band bullshit – the man had hit on the crux of the matter – I never fantasize about how many things could've gone _wrong_. Instead I obsess exclusively on what coulda and shoulda gone right, never bothering to think that any other path would be fraught with its own set of perils, real or imagined.

I often console my young bartenders, who are taking one class here or there at junior college, or making jewelry or textiles or playing in a band, or often, all of these things at the same time, and who don't know what they _really_ want to do, and – this is the point – _feel bad about it_ – by telling them, "Hey, I'm an anal Virgo, and I jumped ship completely when I was older than you. Don't sweat it. It'll all unfold."

My former agent asked me to explain what was going through the head of the protagonist in _Uninvited,_ a story about a dropout theology Ph.D. candidate who crashes other people's lives – funerals, art openings, wedding anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, etc. – and when I stumbled through half an answer which satisfied neither of us, I turned to my former beloved boss in architecture, Leonard, who is married to a psychoanalyst, and asked him to help me answer the question. He said my agent was wrong to expect my protagonist to have an answer at all. "You never ask the patient what's wrong. He won't know. He can't."

Great. So according to the actuarial tables, I only have 36.2 years left to figure out why I shook the bird out of that sign, why I spat on that woman, why I have been kind to, and also hurt, the ones I love the most, why I played the dilettante, switching careers, why I sit on fences, why I'm so afraid to say yes to one thing for fear of saying no to another, why I wish I definitively did, or didn't, believe in God, and why at times I'm way too hard on myself, and at others way too soft. Just a big fat pile of why's.

When I do figure out the answer, I hope I like it.

"You die three times," said Erik. He, Hector and I were chatting late one night. "The first time is when you physically pass away; the second time is when the last person who personally knew you dies; the third time is when the last person sees whatever work it is you left behind."

"Yeah, but even that's, what, maybe 100 years at best?" said Hector.

"Well, no, think about Caesar or Napoleon," countered Erik.

"Okay, but if you're not Caesar or Napoleon?"

"I think the Rolling Stones will still be listened to in 100 years," I chimed in.

"Neither of my kids has even _heard_ of the Stones," said Hector.

"Then you're not doing your job as a parent. But really? You don't think people will be listening to the Stones a century from now?"

"Name me one song you know from 1913."

"Well," Erik said, "what about Cole Porter or those guys?"

"Hey, what about Mozart and Beethoven?" I added. "I guarantee you their work will still be known a _thousand_ years from now – they're timeless – that's the mark of great art."

We all agreed that Mozart and Beethoven, and maybe even the Stones, would make the cut.

I finally understand tombstones (and the stamps left in concrete sidewalks by contractors – two blocks from our house I found a beautiful one: inside a gothic shield are the words "Schnoor Bros." along with five small stars, and, outside the shield, the date: "1927.") It's not as crisp as the day it was poured, of course, but it is perfectly legible. _The Schnoor brothers have left their mark_. Their grandchildren and their grandchildren's children can walk along the sidewalk, stop, and say, "My great grandfather made this."

I never gave tombstones much thought, or concrete stamps for that matter, but I get it now. People have tombstones made because they want to leave something behind, and worry that something as intangible as a loving relationship with your wife, husband, kids, parents or friends, or a stack of unproduced screenplays – well, that's just ephemera, isn't it?

But maybe ephemera is under rated. Maybe my wife and kids and grandkids won't give a shit about whether my scripts were produced or not, whether I would've been more satisfied with a different career, whether my ennui is chemical or emotional. Maybe what they'll remember fondly are the day trips to elaborate gardens, the condoms I handed out, the Frisbees we tossed.

Besides, as Leonard pointed out over lunch recently, even a tombstone isn't forever. "Thomas Hardy was a better poet than he was a novelist," he said as we were walking back to his house from the deli. Leonard's smart and insightful and an author himself, so if he says Hardy is a better poet than novelist, then Hardy is a better poet than novelist. He recited a line from a Hardy poem about tombstones: "Down their carved names, the rain-drop ploughs."

I replied that I would have my tombstone made of titanium.

* * *

Recently I attended the annual Volunteer Appreciation Dinner at the soup kitchen. It's a special day. The volunteers come dressed nicely in blouses, dresses and sports coats. The head chef and the students in the "Kitchen of Champions" program, many of them trying to pull their lives together after creating/experiencing/being subjected to, genuine hard times, made us a gourmet meal of roast beef, stuffed chicken breast, pasta salad, tiramisu. It's the one time of year when we volunteers don't see each other in plastic aprons, latex gloves and hairnets. In this crowd I suddenly am not so self-conscious of my graying hair and shrinking muscle mass. My own petty vanity, egoism and insecurity, amplified by two businesses – nightlife and Hollywood – which celebrate youth and sexiness, fade for a few moments and some people still address me at 44 as "young man." In fact, a few years ago a woman with the jangly body of a crack head came through the line saying something to her friend about wanting to give me a blow job. Two other volunteers, older women, overheard the comment and giggled. I smiled and remarked, "Still, it's nice to be asked."

It's a fact: I'm proud that a homeless woman offered me a hummer.

The appreciation dinner was, as it always is, a touching affair, and not just because "dinner" is served at 4 p.m. to accommodate the retirees' schedules. The young woman who runs the program, Angela (she is working at St. Boniface's before returning to grad school), came up with this year's theme: "The Missing Piece."

"You, the volunteers, are the pieces of the puzzle that make this program possible," she said to us. Then she handed out our goodie bags. Inside, along with two bleacher seat tickets to an upcoming Giants game, a St. Boniface pen, a button announcing the 75th year of the San Francisco branch's service, was a small metal charm in the shape of a puzzle piece: on one side it reads "Without me." On the other side it reads, "the puzzle is incomplete."

I don't have a crush on Angela; I probably should.

After we had eaten, and a few speeches had been made, Angela asked if any volunteers wanted to say a few words.

Several did.

A man with an English accent stood up, took the microphone and said, "After I retired, I started working here on Mondays. I needed some way to mark my time. Coming here meant it was Monday. _Monday._ Another week in my life was beginning."

Another man, who began volunteering while still working, said, his voice trembling, "the three hours I spent here with you guys and our clients once a week were more meaningful to me than the whole rest of the week at my job."

These men are forging ahead heroically. They are not giving up. They stared irrelevance in the face, and didn't blink.

* * *

The other night I walked into The Rustic and saw a dapper looking older black man nursing his drink. He wore a Panama hat, clean, pressed trousers, and several pounds of jewelry – two watches, multiple rings, and several necklaces. We both caught each other's glance as I was about to order a drink.

I recognized him, and he recognized me, but it took us both a moment to place each other.

"Hey, you're from the soup kitchen, right?" I asked.

"Hmm?" He couldn't quite hear me.

"I've seen you at St. B's, right?"

He nodded and said, "I thought I recognized you. I'm Gary."

"Charlie, hi."

I bought him a scotch and soda. I like this guy. Not just because he dresses well and sits up straight, but because, when I work the door at the soup kitchen, he always tells me "You look like an actor. Are you in the movies?" Flattery will get you _everywhere_ with me.

From his wallet he pulled out a card. On it the words "Youth Rising Up" were printed. "This is the non-profit I help run, to help straighten out kids."

"That's great."

"I'm from the black bourgeoisie. I'm 72. I was quarterback of my high school team, and a captain in the marines. I was an officer." I couldn't help but think he was telling me this to offset whatever assumptions he thinks I may have had about him as someone who patronizes a soup kitchen.

He pulled out another card – laminated – his Veteran's ID.

"Today a young black man doesn't have a chance. There's no family, no church, no uncles, no aunties, not even grandparents. They don't believe in anything, so they fall into drugs." That there often aren't mothers and fathers around to help was apparently too obvious for him to mention.

"Do you have any kids?" I asked.

"Mmm hmm," he nodded. "Four. A boy and a girl here, and two kids in the Philippines I never met." He looked at me and spoke like a school teacher. "In the Filipino culture, women are raised to serve men. They were whores, but it wasn't like people think. Of course there was the sex, and we gave them money, but we took care of their families back in the country, too. They all came out to the bases. Naturally."

"What did you do in Vietnam?"

"I was a sniper. I get $3500 cash a month to this day. They only give that to certain officers."

"Not bad."

"I've been on disability since 1973. Got out in '67. But we didn't call it post-traumatic stress back then. I worked a few years for Xerox in a blue suit and red tie after I got out. They wanted officers. When you dress like that, there's nothing you can't sell."

"What you were saying about kids with no direction, no faith – I once did some research, and do you know who handle their own deaths the best?"

He shook his head.

"Those who absolutely believe in God, and you know who else?"

Again he shook his head.

"Those who absolutely don't believe in God. It's the people in the middle who are scared out of their minds."

"In POW camps, among whites, Mexicans and blacks, do you know who flipped the least, who kept their mouths shut the most?"

"Who?"

"Black guys. 'cause we had faith. I mean, I'm a hypocrite, but I go to church, I try."

"Hey, I do the laundry, some of the grocery shopping, and I cheated on my wife. But I try, too."

"Well, we're all a little hypocritical."

We hesitantly toasted our hypocrisy.

* * *

Today I finally worked up the courage to call my friend Sacha the cinematographer, and ask her how she was doing. She answered the phone on the second ring.

"Charlie! How are you honey?" She spoke so loudly and ebulliently that I practically had to hold the phone away from my ear. The news couldn't be better. "I'm a medical miracle!" she crowed. In the four weeks that she's been on the experimental drug, that nasty unwanted houseguest in her upper right breast has shrunk to half its size, she is no longer in pain, and she can sleep.

"So no chemo or radiation or cutting or anything?" I asked.

"Nope, just four pink pills that seem hollow. It's like there's invisible little soldiers in there!" "So your hair isn't falling out and you're not nauseous all the time?"

"No, but it did change my metabolism. I've lost weight, which I wanted to do anyway."

"Jesus, Sacha, you've had the Cancer Makeover!" We laughed at her good fortune.

I know the trial has just started, and there a lot of unknowns, but, for today, this moment, the ten minutes we spent on the phone, she clearly holds the coin of happiness in her hand.

I mentioned I would be coming down for the _Overdrive 6_ premiere, and she immediately asked if she could be my "plus one." She didn't care if I had mishandled a moment in my career and spent inordinate amounts of time and energy – _still_ – combing over and over it, still letting its cloud ruin an otherwise sunny day. How trivial and petty it would all seem to her. The voice piped up: "You spinelessly took some bad advice and now you don't get royalties and you've missed out on a few fat paychecks and the momentum of your career took a hit. Gosh, that's almost like having a grapefruit in your chest and being in so much fucking pain you can't sleep, thinking all the while of your mother who died at 49 from the same thing that you have just been diagnosed with." Sacha just wanted to go to a fun, frivolous party.

But I had already invited Dean, our mutual friend, and she understood.

* * *

As I proof read this, several months after having begun it, I am dumbstruck: Sacha and I have plans to develop a series for HBO. After being diagnosed with cancer, she revealed to me that her "day job" was shooting porn – apparently Emmy nominations alone don't pay the bills (she was nominated for a documentary she shot), and we had begun some preliminary work on a grounded look at the porn business – "The Daily Grind." After battling cancer, she no longer cared what others thought of how she paid the bills. I hadn't heard from her in a while on our next steps for "The Daily Grind," but it was near Christmas, and even though she is Bu-ish, I assumed she, too, got caught up in the frenzy of the Christmas holidays.

Dean called to ask if I had heard about the two seizures. I hadn't. After disappearing from her breast and liver and bone, the cancer had made its way to her brain, which was riddled with lesions. The first seizure shook her so violently she tumbled off her bed and broke her shoulder. The second, a few days later, left her drifting in and out of a coma. Within a week she was gone.

Her memorial service, held at the beach, was more Buddhist than Jewish, and her close friends and family spoke movingly about her, about the positive, infectious energy she radiated. I knew it first hand from our brief time together. Per her wishes, we all wore white and spent some quiet moments watching the sun descend.

Dean had been at her bedside the day before she died, and told me that, in semi-lucid moments, she spoke of the martinis we would all soon enjoy again. More than that, he said that she was at peace about what she called "the next step."

" _Man is not affected by things, but by his thoughts about things."_ Sacha embodied the words of Epictetus with a grace I did not think possible.

[ 30 ]

## Have I Learned Anything? Anything At All?

_I_ think I have.

There are the basics: from the soup kitchen, tutoring, and giving and receiving simple gifts, I have learned that turning outward, as so many philosophers and thinkers and people on the street other than Schopenhauer can attest, feels good. We are all cogs in a larger wheel, and bringing comfort – maybe even joy – to others, feels meaningful and satisfying and boomerangs back to us. Call it enlightened self-interest, call it what you will, I dare you to find me a person who feels worse, who feels their soul becoming more, not less vacuous, after doing something for someone else. From forcing myself to write blogs or yet one more spec screenplay that won't be bought, or this book, I have learned that you sometimes just have to keep busy. Grind it out. Get a hobby. Schopenhauer was absolutely right about the corrosive impact of boredom. Idle hands _are_ the devil's workshop. He may have been a pessimistic misanthrope, but he kept _very busy_ writing about that pessimism and misanthropy. But what I also learned from him is that his "pessimistic" world view can actually be comforting. If you can align your expectations with your circumstances, you might come to realize that a little room away from the fire, perhaps just tossing the Frisbee with your son, is a fantastic place to be, and that asking for anything more might be just a touch greedy. From Nora and Sacha and Billy and James I have learned what qualities are worth envying (I'll settle for "envy" until I can actually integrate): reasonable expectations; a certain levity about things; taking cheer over anxiety and regret when life's menu gives you a choice. They're so far away from Schopenhauer that they've actually come full circle and, in my view, are standing right next to him. The only difference is, they're smiling.

Those are the relatively "easy" lessons to learn. I think most of us would agree that their value is self-evident, and it's just a matter of how deeply we can make them part of our fabric, our DNA, our way of being in the world, that is the open question.

But there's more.

I woke up at 4:17 this morning thinking A) some of my bartenders are probably just getting to bed, and B) all this navel gazing had paid off, that I have learned something absolutely elemental about finding that little room away from the fire. And the best part of all? I dozed back off and woke up again at 7:34, _still_ thinking I had learned something.

At the reunion dinner, at one of the two dozen tables dotting the courtyard, I sat next to Claudio. Now Claudio was always an intriguing figure to me. In high school he seemed like a bit of a himbo – very good looking, giggled at everything – but a himbo with dimension. I sometimes didn't know if he was acting goofy, or if he really was certifiably goofy. He would approach me between classes, and in a slow, monotone voice, with unblinking eyes, ask me what I thought of _Echo and the Bunnymen's_ B-side "A Promise," or he might remark that he envied my large nose. By the way, Erik – Kirk – delivered the all time best line about my nose: at lunch with our usual group, I had just been making fun of jocks, calling them morons or troglodytes or whatever, and Erik played varsity football. I had a particularly nasty red welt of a pimple growing in the exact middle of my forehead. Erik paused and simply said, "Wow, Charlie, for once your nose is only the second biggest thing on your face."

Bam!

With Claudio, on the other hand, I couldn't be sure that he didn't _actually_ envy my huge proboscis. With his unblinking stare and wry smile, his delivery was wonderfully uninterpretable.

Once, at a pep rally, while we were getting ready to take a sledge hammer to an old card painted with our rival school's colors, he sat down at a piano and played a piece by Chopin. And he played it well.

"I'll never forget what you once told me," he said at the dinner.

"What?"

"You said, 'I was a promising pupil, but that I lacked discipline.'"

That is _exactly_ the kind of thing I would've said to Claudio. But here the P-word – _promising_ – was neutered because we both knew we were putting each other on.

From what I could gather, Claudio had been a tennis pro and was now doing something vaguely financial – might've been a real estate agent, I'm not sure. Or maybe he was just a kept boy, I don't know.

He was one of the few alumni to bring his wife.

"You guys should talk," he told me. "Anna's also a screenwriter."

Claudio, who was sitting between us, leaned back so I could talk to Anna.

"Is it weird having such a handsome husband?" I asked. "I love his hair," I added, and ran my fingers through it – he has a shock of gray hair, each strand perfectly erect – and it looks great on him. And you could see he wasn't sweating this little change in melanin levels at all. Why should he? He's Claudio.

"Isn't it great?" Anna added, and soon we were both running our fingers through his hair. He smiled and said, "It feels good."

I was dreading talking shop with Anna. I had heard through another classmate that she had written the movie _Governor-in-Law_. I hadn't seen it, but it had been produced. Unlike me, she had a proper answer to that perfectly natural question, "Oh really? What movies have you written?"

"What have you worked on?" she asked me.

Shit.

"Um, well, not much you'd know. I've had some sales – not yet produced, but I did work on, of all things _Overdrive 3_ – even though my own stuff tends toward grounded dramedy."

She nodded.

"Well, if you've seen _Overdrive 3_ , whatever you like about it I did, whatever you don't the other guy did."

She smiled. "Mmm hmm."

"What about you?" I asked.

"Well, _Governor-in-Law_. But I don't like the way they executed my script."

Ha. Now it was my turn to smile – I bet if she had liked the way it was executed, she would be wondering why on God's green earth the Academy overlooked it at Oscar time. And if she did get the Oscar, she'd probably wonder why her _other_ scripts haven't been produced. Anna I understood.

"Claudio says you live up north, right?"

"Yeah, about an hour outside of Oakland."

"How did you get in to screenwriting?"

"A contest, actually. I lucked out. I got a Nicholl Fellowship," I answered.

Her eyes widened.

" _Ohmigod, you're a Nicholl Fellow?"_

"Yeah"

"Do you know how many scripts I've submitted to the Nicholl Fellowship?"

I shook my head.

"Ohmigod, tell me, was it amazing?"

"Actually, yeah, it was. They put you up in hotel with great water pressure for a week, they're a classy bunch."

"Ohmigod, Claudio, do you know what a big deal it is to win a Nicholl?"

"I have some sense of it, but it still feels amorphous," he answered.

"But you've had a script _produced_ , that's amazing," I said.

She, however, wanted to talk more about the Nicholl. So I obliged her. And for once, it was nice not to feel like I was apologizing for myself.

But that wasn't what woke me up this morning at 4:17.

This was:

I hate change.

I was the last of my friends in the last century to get a CD player (my first one was a gift from Erik), the last to give up my electric typewriter for a laptop, the last to get a cell phone, and I'm still not on Facebook.

I take some measure of perverse pride in my unwillingness to change with the times.

But it occurred to me this morning that I don't like change on a deeper level, and it was not always so. When I was in high school, tearing pages out of James' notebooks, or performing a silly little pas-de-deux with Claudio, and even into my twenties, I had a fluid sense of myself. Nothing was set in stone, and I was just following, if not my bliss – then whatever it was that held my attention at the moment. I was open to a sense of self that shifted and changed, I didn't take myself so seriously, and I didn't soak myself in regret and second guesses.

Even the old grouch himself knew enough to admire this quality:

" _So if cheerfulness knocks at our door, we should throw it wide open, for it never comes inopportunely; instead of that, we often make scruples about letting it in. We want to be quite sure that we have every reason to be contented; then we are afraid the cheerfulness of spirits may interfere with serious reflection or weighty cares."_

But then something happened. To me. By me.

I took the conservatism I have toward advances in household electronics and turned it on myself. "Reflection and weighty cares," not happy animal instinct, took over. Right around the time I won the Nicholl, I decided on a fixed version of myself: I was Charles Alonso, screenwriter, and secondarily, bar owner. I was husband and father, and would live up to my promise and potential.

That's it. I was done. To fall anything short of becoming a famous and well respected screenwriter and perfect family man was to be a failure.

A few months after my one-day-nervous-breakdown, while in session with therapist number four, she stopped me for a moment and said that perhaps what was going on with me was that I had built a sense of self around the notion that I was "perfect," and now that things weren't all going my way and I had made some mistakes, "Maybe you're having a hard time integrating the imperfect half of yourself."

Ding! Ding! Ding!

A fissure in my hardened self-conception had become a chasm, and I didn't know what to do about it. Her advice was to acknowledge that I am both perfect and imperfect, good and bad, strong and weak, blah, blah, blah, all good stuff, basically advising me to let myself off the hook by not trying to live up to the gypsy fortuneteller's expectations, by acknowledging and accepting and trying to improve my flaws, rather than attempting to deny them, and, finally, by admitting I don't shit two white odorless pellets a month.

She was right. I had carefully built up a rigid self-image that in truth was as flimsy and vulnerable as a cardboard cut out. From one side it looked great, but peek behind, and you could see it was held up by nothing more than corrugated paper and white glue.

I'm a good father.

I'm a good husband.

I'm a good boss.

I'm a good writer.

I'm a good son.

I'm a good friend.

I'm also...

...a bad father.

... a bad husband.

...a bad boss.

....a bad writer.

...a bad son.

...and a bad friend.

I ask myself about my myriad regrets, "Did I make the best decisions I could at the time I made them?"

I'll never know the answer to that question – would I have had blisters on my dick if I slept with Zoe, the goth girl? Would I be all that happier if I had become the go-to script doctor for the _Overdrive_ franchise? If I had become a prominent academic whose texts were read in colleges across the country?

The truth is this: the decisions I made at the time were _the only decisions I could possibly have made at the time, given my particular constellation of flaws and strengths. It could not have been otherwise. Because otherwise it would not have been me._

Can I come to terms with that?

I'm trying.

I do at least acknowledge that my shit stinks. And that's okay. It may take decades for me to embrace the paradox that I can not be other than what I am, yet what I am is constantly changing. Or, in Schopenhauer's words,

" _A man's nature is in harmony with itself when he desires to be nothing but what he is."_

But I'm pretty sure that if I _can_ accept that – if I can accept what I am, even if it is fluid and flawed – and giggle about it from time to time, then the door to the cozy little room will open for me.

[ 31 ]

## An Obituary

_I_ do remember Calvin Wilts. James had to remind me that he was in German class with us. We didn't talk much. I was the teacher's pet sitting toward the front of the class, Calvin sat in the back row in the corner. What I do remember most about him is that he always looked like he had just come back from Palm Springs: he had a year round tan. At the reunion I found out that the color of skin was related to a congenital problem he had with his adrenal gland.

I also found out that several years ago, while battling nothing more than a case of the common flu, the gland did not perform as it should have, and Calvin died.

I wrote about Calvin in a blog, which another classmate forwarded to his father. In the comments section, Mr. Wilts wrote back, "We appreciate your sentiments concerning the death of our son Calvin. Just for the record, he died of an Addisonian Crisis in 1996 (it seems like yesterday). Calvin was diagnosed with Addison's Disease when he was a boy and quietly coped with it all of his short life. It destroys the Adrenal Gland and requires constant monitoring especially under stress. Thank you again for your kind thoughts."

The "problem" of existence, as the philosophers put it, was literal – not existential – for Calvin. As it was for Sacha. When she passed, I did write a proper obituary for her – which I posted on-line – and at her memorial service, was taken aback when her best friend, who I had never met, upon learning that I was the one who had penned it, threw her arms around me and thanked me profusely through her tears. "You said what we all felt. Thank you." She held onto me until I could feel her tears through my shirt.

* * *

And as we writers are as egotistical as we are insecure, her reaction did prompt me to think about my own obituary. I often read obituaries in the paper, and marvel at the lives ordinary people lead – the war heroes, the entrepreneurs, the home makers – and find myself especially touched when they include pictures of the deceased when they were both young and old – five or six decades captured in two grainy black and white snapshots.

I'll start with the inscription for my titanium tombstone: the upper portion will have my name and dates of birth and death, of course, and below that, a blank space will be left for my family to fill out if they wish. But below their words, I will include an uncharacteristic moment of empathy and vulnerability from Arthur:

" _We should treat with indulgence every human folly, failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have before us are simply our own failings, follies and vice."_

Guess he finally realized he didn't shit white pellets, either.

Okay, the obituary. It's a pretty important document, the summary of your life. This next question may best be suited for the hallway of a college dorm at one in the morning, but I will ask it anyway: If you had to write your obituary _today_ , what would you say?

Here's a first crack at mine:

Charles Alonso was born in Madrid, Spain, but unfortunately, he never learned Spanish. Later he learned German, but that proved to be useless. He can, however, proficiently order a burrito in Spanish at the local taqueria. As a young man, he had romantic notions of being an architect, and it took him a mere eight years to figure out that while he was a decent architect, he would never be a great, or even very good, one. He finally stopped ignoring his passion, writing, and took it up as his vocation. He was also a liquor merchant.

But it was the writing which gave him purpose.

But not the writing alone: he married Nora, his first love, who was his boss when he rolled pizzas at Genova's Pasta Café (no longer there) in the Sherman Oaks Galleria (still there). She let him use the phone when she shouldn't have. She was beautiful and independent and light hearted. They had two sons, William and Tomas, who, combined, love baseball, soccer, football, tennis, track, sushi, death metal, cooking, video games, and bird watching. If you knew Charlie, you would question their paternity. There is a photo in the bathroom of his two sons when they were one and four, in the bath tub together, that brought a smile to his face every time he saw it. In his wallet he kept a photo of his wife he took years ago, as well as the handwritten note she left him one summer when he was in college (they weren't romantically involved at the time, but Charlie was in love with her, and believed she loved him, too).

" _Charlie, you have been so important to me this summer that your leaving is unbearable. I have so much fun when we go places and I love just being with you. Gosh, I'm going to miss you so much! Seeing you on holidays and visits is of no consolation to me now. You are such a terrific person and I love you. Please have fun at school and remember, do not: overpressure, overexert exhaust or punish yourself over your studies, okay? You can be your hardest judge and sometimes not a fair one. Take care of yourself for me._

Love always, Nora."

Re-reading this, he could picture their young, happy smiles, so carefree, so unguarded. He has old photos proving just how happy, carefree and unguarded they were. He was madly in love with her. He was a better man then. He didn't let his daydreams and ambitions and regrets run amok. He and Nora would ride their bikes all the way from Hollywood to the beach, they would picnic at Amir's Garden, they would watch movies in her apartment. They spent hours and hours in each other's company. It would be another six months before he worked up the nerve to kiss her.

Charlie thought of himself as a good father, but he was never quite sure whether he was too strict or too lenient, whether he should be a distant authority figure or a buddy. So he winged it. His children will miss him, but he hopes that one day they will read some of his work and get a sense of the man. But more than that, he hopes that they, and Nora, and his parents and friends, will think fondly of the time they spent together, appreciate his good points, and forgive – or at least understand – his mistakes and flaws, both those he was aware of, and those he had no inkling about.

One day, long before the children were born, when he and Nora were living in a small apartment in Berkeley, Charlie had a bad cold, and was sitting on the railing of their back porch, admiring the garden Nora had planted. There were carrots and radishes and onions, but he remembered the sunflowers most vividly – they were tall, so tall, so full of life and color. He thought of nothing – not of whether he should go to grad school, become an architect, or when and whether to have kids – perhaps the cold was strong enough to knock the fretful thoughts from his mind for a moment, perhaps he hadn't fully turned the corner on youth, but for one moment, time stood still, and he remembers a sense of contentment and peace so deep that it felt like he had been given a secret glimpse – just a teasing glimpse – into a possible world of serenity and contentment infinitely superior to the one he was constantly constructing. The moment passed, as he knew it would, but he never forgot it, and strove all his life to recreate it.

In moments he succeeded.

He was blessed. Whether he knew it or not is another matter.

