The interview was on a Monday. Not that that meant anything to me. But I had treated the weekend like I’d earned it and now approached the interview with a belly full of Manhattan silly, even though a.) it was not a corporate gig and b.) it was the only job I’d ever been overqualified for. I had tremendous babysitting faculties and I was much better at lacrosse than 99.5% of the U.S. population (the math checked out). Silly nonetheless as I wound my bicycle through the crepe myrtles and California live oaks to the terracotta clay-roofed, stucco’d Escobarian estate that was The Brentwood School. The bike ride from Venice was trying. Not physically—I relished an arduous and pesky incline. After the hard part, where things flattened out and I pedaled past Bundy, past the place where OJ got really mad and so rudely interrupted Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals between the Knicks and the Houston Rockets, I started to think. And that never ended well. Yes, sure: the Knicks would win Game 5, but OJ and the Bronco interruption cast a strange, unsavory pall over the series. The Knicks lost in 7 and there I was, nearly twenty years later. It didn’t take a conspiracy theorist to pin the tacks on that one.
The what-could-have-beens rained down on me like frogs and out from the privet hedges popped former selves, the Me’s of yore I’d have to plead my case to, reason with and explain to them where I was going. They popped out like shooting targets or Fun House hobgoblins. The eleven-year-old Me was nice, just wanted to talk about that series he was still grappling with, reminding me that two inches in the final seconds of Game 6 was all that Starks needed to be a hero, so he’s still one to us, never forget. But everyone else was a prick. And who could blame them? At thirty-one-years-old I was on my way to interview for a gig as a middle school lacrosse coach, a position that is, historically, a volunteer role. But me? I was not doing it to give back. This was not charitable. I could not afford to be a “good person”. I just desperately needed the very little money they were offering.
“So heckle away!” I yelled at nobody as I chugged up Barrington, all the while outlining, in my mind, a pilot script for this exact scenario. And for that, I wished to be stabbed. Another small, sad circle.
Everything is prologue to this, but here is where the story starts. My bike was nice and I loved it—-a Carolina Blue Fixed Fuji Feather—-but the things that I loved were even starker reminders of who I wasn’t, or worse: who I was. I had my own apartment and I was lucky and happy about that, or, rather, not happy but worried because those days were numbered. Luck made me fuck it up. I had a dog and I loved him and I had…my bike? And a La Creuset that wasn’t mine? I was supposed to have things by then. Tennis lessons and Aesop hand soap. New restaurants I just had to try. The finer things. Thread counts. Seven years I’d been here! I could blame this town, the city of desperate hopeful hopelessness. Or I could curse myself for not getting into finance out of college. But I would have fucked that up, too, chuck another punky log on the sad fire of things I never thought I was smart enough to do so subsequently never considered trying. Unsurprisingly, somewhere back there, I thought I was just not dumb enough to be a screenwriter. It felt like the dullards’ medium. So all of my Simpleton Road led me to San Vicente Blvd., biking to The Brentwood School in the early spring of 2014, plenty written and nothing sold, wondering how everyone had a Range Rover and if there were any minor adjustments, little tweaks, tiny rumples in the fabric I could make if I, in the far off chance, happened upon a time machine.
🤌🏼💋