“Hey, Nick, is Simone here yet?” I asked.
“Uh, dude, she quit and moved to New Jersey or something,” he said, as he shook a martini with one hand.
“What?”
“Yeah, I think she told the managers a couple weeks ago. She didn’t say anything?”
“No. I only see her on Fridays. I just thought she was off last Friday or sick or something,” I said.
“Damn. Sorry, man.”
“Eh, it’s okay. Just weird,” I replied.
“Onto the next bone down. That’s what it’s all about,” he said.
I was stunned. This was the second time I’d dated a waitress who’d broken up with me by skipping town altogether. I walked back to the napkin-folding station and tried to perform an autopsy on this newly deceased relationship. Normally, after a breakup, it would take me days or weeks of feeling down in the dumps, mulling over all the things that went wrong, before I started making sense of it and feeling better. But this time around, I arrived at a conclusion almost immediately: I was ready to be in a relationship that would evoke some kind of emotional response from me if I ever found out that my girlfriend had slept with a guy I worked with and/or had moved across the country without telling me. I was looking for someone I could fall in love with, someone who would give her dying rabbit painkillers.
I’d Rather Not See You Sitting Next to Me on a Friday Night
I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday inside a tiny linen closet at the Villa Sorriso, with six other waiters and an overweight line cook named Ramon who had a teardrop tattoo on his cheek that may or may not have signaled that he killed a man in prison.
“Happy birthday,” they whispered as Ramon handed me a tiramisu with a single candle flickering in the middle of it.
They were whispering because management had implemented a new rule prohibiting more than two employees from congregating on the restaurant’s grounds during work hours, which made this gathering feel more like an underground Communist meeting in the 1950s than a celebration of my first quarter-century of existence. Despite the unnatural volume of our voices and the smell of cleaning supplies and dusty linens, it was a touching gesture by my friends.
“I didn’t get you a present. But I shot a pig in the head on my cousin’s farm and I made carnitas. I’ll save some for you,” Ramon said.
As I blew out the candle and my colleagues very quietly applauded, it dawned on me that I’d also spent my seventeenth birthday working at a restaurant, which meant I’d been working in restaurants for the last eight years. I was no longer the fresh-faced kid chasing his dreams; instead I was in danger of becoming the bitter lifer who uses dated pop-culture references and depresses younger employees. I had moved to LA to break into screenwriting, and while I’d sold a script during my first year there, these days I was doing very little writing and working seventy to eighty hours a week at the restaurant. I had upped my hours for the simple reason that I needed to save money to fix my truck, a 1999 Ford Ranger that started only half the time and had a set of brakes that made a high-pitched shrieking noise my mechanic had eloquently likened to “the sound a girl makes when you fuck her good.” Coincidentally, that was a sound I’d become unfamiliar with in real life, as I’d also hit a huge dry spell with women.
I had been single so long that, on the rare occasion when I had a sex dream, it tended not to involve actual women—only visions of me pleasuring myself to pornography, as if my brain had forgotten what sex was. I was so desperate to be in a relationship that, when I did go out on dates, I usually scared off my companions by trying to lock them down for future dates right away, or asking them repeatedly, “Are you having fun?” There’s nothing less fun than someone asking if you’re having it.
My life had fallen into a rut so slowly that I didn’t even know it was happening, until I walked out of that linen closet to go take the orders of a dining room full of hungry septuagenarians and realized I was anywhere but where I wanted to be.
A few weeks after my birthday, I found myself with the first weekend I’d had off in months. All my friends were working at the restaurant and there was no way I was going to spend that free time alone in my dumpy ground-floor apartment in Hollywood—which had begun to stink more than usual, thanks to my pothead neighbor’s new favorite hobby, which was catching rats with a mousetrap, then hurling their corpses over the fence into my backyard when he thought I wasn’t looking. When I caught him in the act, he pretended to be offended. “Maybe it jumped, and thought there was gonna be water on the other side, but then there wasn’t and it died or something?” So, with nowhere to go and in need of a break from LA, I tossed some clothes into a trash bag and headed down to my parents’ house in San Diego.
I pulled up to their house midday on Friday and knocked on the front door. My dad opened it and stood in front of me wearing a gray sweatsuit with royal-blue racer stripes.
“Whoa. What in the fuck are you doing here?” he said.
“Just thought I’d come down and see you guys for a couple days. Sort of spur of the moment,” I replied.
“Oh. Well, all right. Good to see you, son. Come on in and quiet yourself. I’m watching a show about dark matter.”
After I set my things down I called my best friends Dan and Ryan, who still lived in San Diego, to see what they were up to. Unfortunately Dan was going out of town with his girlfriend to visit her parents, and Ryan was trying to track down a man with a goat so that he could talk the guy into letting him milk it. He asked if I wanted to join him, but it seemed like there were a lot of ways for that to end badly, so I declined.
My mom came home from work a couple hours later and was thrilled to see me. She whipped up some pesto and the three of us took our seats around the dinner table in the living room.
“It’s such a nice surprise to see you, Justy. What are you doing down here?” my mom asked, dumping a ladle full of pasta onto my plate.
“He hates LA,” my dad said.
“I don’t hate LA,” I replied.
“Look, I’m on your side. All that traffic, people pissing and shitting on the street. No kind of place to live,” he said.
“No one is going to the bathroom on the street, Sam,” my mom said.
“Bullshit. There’s rivers of excrement. I could fucking raft down them. Trust me. I know. Connie and I had an apartment in Brent-wood for three years,” he said, referring to his first wife.
My dad didn’t talk about Connie very often. She had died of cancer when my brothers were one and three years old. Connie’s death, and the seven years that followed before my dad met my mother, was a part of his life he didn’t revisit often, and one I knew almost nothing about. On the rare occasion when he mentioned Connie, I tried as gently as I could to ask about his life with her.
“Did Connie live in this house?”
“I bought it for her. Then she passed and it was just me and your brothers. They were in diapers,” he said.
“You should have seen this place when we started dating,” my mom chimed in. “Every room was just medical books and fishing poles, and the only thing in the cupboards was peanut butter,” she added, with a big smile on her face.
“Guess what? I like medical books, fishing, and fucking peanut butter. And plus, I didn’t give a shit. I had given up on women,” he added.
“Oh, please. You drove an Alfa Romeo Spider convertible and wore a leather jacket,” my mom said.
“I said I gave up on women, not on getting laid,” he replied.
“You wore a leather jacket?” I said, laughing.
“Yeah, it’s a garment commonly worn by individuals who get laid.”
“You’d be surprised. He’s very charming,” my mom said, getting up to retrieve something from the kitchen, leaving me and my dad alone.
“How long after Connie died did you start dating?” I asked.
“A while. Not sure exactly, but a while.”
“Did you go out a lot?”
“Oh, yeah. I went up an
d down this goddamn city. I was going out a couple times a week at least.”
“What’d you do about Dan and Evan?” I asked.
“I took them with me and had my dates wipe their shitty asses. What do you think? I put them to bed, then hired a babysitter.”
“Were any of them girlfriends, or just a few dates and that was it?” I asked.
“Mostly that,” he said, taking a drink from his bourbon.
“Why do you think none of them worked out?”
“Son, my wife was dead and I was lonely. That’s a pretty shitty place to start from,” he said.
I had never before heard my father confess to being lonely. This is a man who wakes up at 4:30 in the morning for the sole purpose of spending a few extra minutes alone. He even takes vacations alone. “It doesn’t matter where I go, just as long as no one goes with me,” he says. “I could vacation in my own home if everyone would leave me the fuck alone.” I also couldn’t imagine him dating. He hates small talk, which is exactly what most people suffer through on first dates. I wanted to know how he’d gone from a guy lonely enough to engage in a conversation he hated, with a woman he probably didn’t care about, to a guy comfortable enough with himself to walk into restaurants and ask for a “table for one . . . with no other chairs.”
With little else to do, I spent the next two days thinking about my dad’s transformation while going to the beach and taking hikes with my family’s dog, Angus. On Sunday night, after a restful, rejuvenating couple days, I dumped my freshly laundered clothes into a new trash bag, threw it in the passenger seat of my truck, and said good-bye to my parents on the front porch. When I went to give my dad a hug, he handed me a check. It was for seven hundred dollars, and on the memo line he had written, “to fix your fucking car.”
“Oh, wow, no, you don’t have to do that. I’ve been saving up,” I said.
“Let’s not go through the fucking dog and pony show here. You’re broke, I got a little money, your car is a piece of shit that needs to be fixed. Is any of that incorrect?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Okay then.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I know you been working like crazy, so let me suggest something.”
“Sure.”
“Fix your car, cut back on some of your hours, and take a little time for yourself. Get your shit right. I like seeing you, but I’d rather not on a Friday night. Catch my drift?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“You are welcome here any time,” my mom interjected.
“Well, of course he is. That’s not what I was saying,” he said.
“I know that, but I wanted to make sure he knew that,” she replied.
“He knew it. He’s not slow. Tell her you get fucking subtext,” he said to me.
“I understand subtext, Mom.”
“There you go. Now get the hell out of here. I’m taking your mom out to dinner,” he said.
The next day, back in LA, I took my car to the shop. They spent a week fixing everything from the starter to the air-conditioning, which for years had been blowing warm, uriney air at my face. I cut my shifts at the restaurant back to five nights a week and suddenly found myself with more energy and two full days off on my hands.
As soon as I had a moment to myself, I started thinking about what I was doing in LA. I called myself a writer, but so did my rat-hurling neighbor. In fact, when I’d run into him in the parking garage a few weeks before, he’d told me he was almost finished writing a comic screenplay about “an alien that comes to earth but people just think he’s a gay.” If this guy could finish Gaylien (his title, not mine), I told myself, I had to be able to finish the scripts I’d been working on. I was determined not to spend any more birthdays inside a closet, eating the same preservative-laden dessert that my restaurant gave away for free to children under five who ordered the chicken fingers. I decided to pour myself into my writing.
Over the next eight months, I spent any free time I had either working on a screenplay or trying to figure out if I was going to go bald. Both endeavors proved productive: I finished one script and concluded that my head hair would soon be a thing of the past. My dry spell with women continued, but I did my best not to obsess over it. I did develop a recurring dream in which a woman in a tree hurled oranges at me while repeatedly screaming, “I hate you, Jason!” Although that’s not my name, I was fairly confident that my penis was sending me a message that it was furious at me for rendering it useless.
Nevertheless, with each passing day, I had an easier time focusing on writing and having fun doing it. By the end of those eight months, I went to bed at night excited to wake up the next day and start writing again. I’m not sure if this is what my dad had meant when he told me to “get my shit right,” but at least I was no longer feeling the urge to toss my clothes in a trash bag and head to my parents’ house in San Diego on a Friday night.
A few weeks after that, an artist friend of mine named Theresa invited me to a show of her work at a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. The gallery was inside a refurbished warehouse and held a good-sized crowd, of which I was probably the only guy who didn’t have a mustache, a twenty-four-inch waist, and either a scarf or a porkpie hat. I felt like I’d walked into a Wes Anderson movie. So, after saying hello to Theresa and looking at her work, I was ready to take off. But then, just before I left, I noticed a friend of Theresa’s standing by herself in the middle of the show, looking as lost as I felt.
Her name was Amanda. I’d met her once before when she had come to visit Theresa from San Francisco for a couple days, but had spoken to her only briefly. She had wavy brown hair that fell just past her shoulders and a cherubic face that was lit up by two sparkly light-blue-green eyes. Unlike the rest of the girls in the party, she had actual curves that filled out the navy-blue dress she was wearing. She flashed a nervous smile at me and gave one of those quick waves you give someone when you’re not sure if he remembers you. I smiled and waved back, and she walked over to where I was standing, near the exit.
“I don’t know anyone here, and everyone is cooler than me,” she said.
“So you picked the least cool guy in the place to come talk to,” I replied.
“We can be uncool together,” she said.
I stayed at the show for another hour talking to Amanda. She was quick and funny and a little self-deprecating, but not in a way that seemed like a defense mechanism for a truckload of self-loathing. I tried my best not to weird her out and largely succeeded, except perhaps for one point when I described myself as looking like “Jason Biggs with a terminal illness.” It was the first time in as long as I could remember that I’d enjoyed a relaxed conversation with a woman.
“We should hang out sometime,” I said as I was leaving.
“I’m flying back to San Francisco tomorrow,” she replied.
“Maybe someone will call in a bomb threat and you’ll have to stay another night. Wow. That was a really terrible joke. I don’t know why I said that.”
“No, bomb jokes are always funny to people who are about to board a plane,” she said, laughing. “I wouldn’t worry, anyway. You’ve told way worse jokes within this last hour.” She gave me a hug good-bye.
I thought about Amanda quite a bit over the next few days. The situation seemed kind of hopeless, since she lived five hundred miles away, but my brain didn’t want to acknowledge the distance. I tried to put her out of my mind, to buckle down and finish a second screenplay I was working on. Then, a couple days later, as I was working in my living room, I heard a loud clang on my barbecue. I walked out to my backyard to find a rat splattered on the top of my grill.
“Hey! Stop throwing rats in my yard!” I yelled over the fence.
There was no answer so I grabbed an old newspaper from the recycling bin, used it to pick up the rat corpse, and tossed it back over the fence.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I heard my neighbor yell from behind the fence.
r /> “Dude! Stop it! I’ve had enough of this crap!” I shouted.
“Okay. Shit. Chill out, man. I’m sorry. You don’t need to Nolan Ryan that shit at me, man.”
I went inside, washed my hands, and felt a huge sense of accomplishment. Sure, maybe getting a man to stop throwing dead rats into my yard wasn’t exactly on par with building schools for underprivileged Iraqi children, but at the time it felt significant and invigorating. I sat back down at my computer, opened up my Gmail, and sent Amanda an e-mail with the subject line, “I just threw a dead rat at my neighbor.”
Don’t Make Me Take Up Residence in Your Fantasy Land
When I was thirteen, my dad barged into my room after dinner one night while I was doing homework. Before I could set my pencil down, he said: “You’ve been jerking off a lot.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I shrieked.
“Relax. I could give a shit. Good for you that you can find the time. I can’t get a second to myself. But there’s two things I need you to know: one, I’m going to be doing the laundry for the next few months because your mom’s studying for the bar exam; and two, I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna reach down into the laundry basket and pick up a towel that’s crunchy like a fucking Dorito ’cause you did your business in it, okay?”
He stared down at me. I was frozen in shock and humiliation.
“Say okay. I need to hear verbal confirmation,” he said.
“Okay,” my voice cracked.
“Thank you. Now that we got that unfortunate business out of the way, I figured now’d be a halfway decent time to bring up something else,” he continued.
“Really, I don’t do that, though,” I interjected.
“Are we going to talk like men or do I have to take up residence in your fantasy land?”
“What were you going to say, Dad?”