Intro and Chapter One

This is not for you.

 If you think every story has a happy ending, you’re crazy.

If you want to read about people you can sympathize with, this may not be your story.

If you think there are redeeming qualities in everyone, you are wrong and have no reason to continue reading.

If you think, despite all the weirdness some people have to deal with, that they can come out on top if they just stay strong, you’re an idiot.

Stories with happy endings only have them because timelines never run long enough. Thanks to convenient timing people aren’t allowed to see how everything falls apart and decays, how absolutely nothing is ever perfect and nothing good will last forever. The story that ends with the perfect kiss doesn’t go on to show how the man ends up giving the woman bruises she’ll have to make excuses for, or how the woman can smile and kiss him hello fifteen minutes after fellating the gardener. The story that ends with the hero riding into the sunset never shows how he spends the rest of his days pathetically defining himself by his one shining moment before dying, drunk and alone.

Some people deserve no sympathy, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be heard. Sometimes the people who have been through most challenging situations have the most to say, even if you’d never want to hear it from them face-to-face. Some people cannot be sympathized with, simply because some people go through things that can’t even be imagined by outsiders. Some people get sucked down by their weirdness, beaten down to never, ever get back up again.

If I wanted to tell the story of my life and give it a happy ending I’d wrap it up somewhere around age twenty-two. Granted, that’s kind of young but it would leave whoever decided to read it cheering me on, wishing me well, and seeing unlimited potential in my future, because that’s what I saw. It would show me overcoming adversity, it would be a soaring testament to the human spirit, and it would be a glaring sin of omission to anyone who knows better.

I’m going to start this part of my life story on my twenty-seventh birthday, in a gym on Sunset Boulevard. I’m going to end it on my twenty-eighth birthday in a camper van on the side of a highway somewhere in Washington. I don’t expect any kind of sympathy or understanding, I just want the story to be told, and I think the screaming gibberish from the pilot would be a more compelling account of a flaming tail-spin than that of someone watching from the safety of the ground.

Chapter One

I always liked using the chest press machines at my gym. They were located directly in front of one of the ceiling height mirrors that lined the back wall and it afforded me a great view of myself as I worked out. I spread my towel on the seat and sat down, watching how my forearms rippled in the mirror as I adjusted my grip on the handles.

      I began steady breathing, preparing myself for ten reps at my new goal weight. As I strained against the resistance of the machine I counted my lifts in my head, silently reciting a personal motivational mantra as I did so.

      One. I want the perfect body.

      Two. I want the perfect job.

      Three. I want the perfect car.

      Four. I want the perfect toys.

      Five. I want the perfect hobbies.

      Six. I want the perfect house.

      Seven. I want the perfect friends.

      Eight. I want the perfect wife.

      Nine. I want the perfect children.

      Ten. I want the perfect life.

      The weights clanged down as I relaxed back in the seat, looking at myself in the mirror. If I were to examine it closely enough I would have been able to find plenty of minor faults that I didn't like about my body; the odd mole here or there, the thin stubborn layer of fat that still slid over my abdominals despite tens of thousands of sit-ups, the birthmark that looked like third nipple below the left. But my reflection, dressed in its tank top and shorts, was solid, lean, smooth muscle.

      I finished up my work out and headed out into the pounding morning heat of summer in Hollywood. It was nine o’clock in the morning, the sun hadn’t even risen high enough to shine past the tops of the buildings to the streets yet, but even the shade was a miserable mix of left over heat from the day before and the exhaust fumes that settle windless between the buildings.

      Sitting in the one beam of sunlight cutting through the surrounding buildings, the interior of my car was a sweat lodge and cranking up the A/C did nothing but force hot air against my face. The BMW M3 was the stand-in for the perfect car I planned to eventually own. I got it cheap and used, a little worse for wear, but I put dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars into that car to make it clean and flawless, but the air conditioner was still a little touchy. I knew that one day I'd be able to afford an M3 brand new off the lot and that would be my perfect car, but until then I was going to love my used beauty, cold air or not.

      Windows down, I drove across town to do something that I found a way to do every year on my birthday since I was eighteen. It was something I'd never told anyone about and some years I had to sneak away to do it, but that day it was easy. I actually had the day off and my trip to the gym had me covered for being away from home for a few hours. I didn't need to be where I was going for a long time, just a few minutes like every other year.

      I reached into my gym bag and felt around for the folded up piece of paper that I'd stashed there before I left the house. My fingers came across the age softened slip and pinched it tight, but I didn't remove it from the bag. I drove down Sunset Boulevard, through the tourist traffic that was just getting ramped up for the day, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other absently fiddling with the paper in my bag.

      The street I finally turned on to was residential, lined with immaculate gardens and lawns in front of mansions that had been recycled through ninety years of celebrities and moguls. That was the street that Lucille Ball had lived on. Nelson Eddie and both Gershwins had lived on that street. There was a young couple with a map to stars’ homes wandering up the sidewalk as I passed. Check the map, give a little gasp, snap a quick picture of the house that Jack Benny had lived in and move along. Check the map, give a little gasp, snap a quick picture of the house that Jimmy Stewart had lived in and move along.

      Tucked off between the glitzing, mansion flanked avenues were side streets with smaller houses. Houses with smaller floor plans, smaller price tags, and smaller histories. Among them was a squat two story craftsman style home with gables and a black front door set back behind two towering eucalyptus trees, and that was my destination.

  

     I don't want to go into details, but when I arrived in Hollywood as a seventeen year old runaway with no plans and precious little money I quickly learned that Hollywood proper was not the kind of place to live on the street. Not that there is a great place to live on the street, but it was dirty, violent, and downright scary and it didn't take me more than a week to migrate west to the quieter streets of Beverly Hills. Sometimes it can be surprising how easy it is to hide in a place where no one else thinks they can hide. Beverly Hills, with its security cameras and house alarms and two minute police response time was seen as much more trouble that it was worth to other street people, but I was able to hide in plain sight. I posed as a tourist and walked the streets during the day and was able to find hidden little places where the police would never find me to bed down at night. Eating was never a problem, no one at any of the ninety nine cent stores that I stole from ever seemed to notice, and if anyone did they didn’t give a shit

      Doing my daily time killing walk I passed a family getting out of their car on the other side of the street. In the two weeks that I had been bumming around Beverly Hills I had not once seen a family. I had seen sharply dressed men coming and going in beautiful luxury cars, nipped and tucked women in sport utility vehicles that would never be used for anything sporty or utilitarian, and privileged kids cruising by in sports cars with over powered sub-woofers, but never a family.

      I pretended to examine the star map that I had stolen the day before to make my tourist front more convincing, but I was really watching the family across the street. Families were a novelty to me, happy ones doubly so, and that one looked happy. The man and woman, father and mother, were still youthful, maybe in their mid-thirties, and the two little girls could have been twins they looked so close in age. The girls jumped out of the car, one chasing the other around the trunk of a eucalyptus tree before the father ran over and scooped the girl being chased, laughing, up into his arms. The girl that had been doing the chasing wrapped herself around her father's leg, sitting on his foot and weighting his leg down like a giggling ball and chain. His pretty wife kissed his cheek and took the squirming girl from his arms. With the other girl still hugging his leg, the father hobbled up the steps of the front porch, unlocked the black front door, and they all went in and out of sight.

      I walked to the corner and sat on the curb. I knew that I had missed out on a normal childhood, whatever that was, but that quick scene drove home how much I'd missed out on by not having a family. Sitting there on the curb I took a pen from my backpack and began writing on the back of my star map.

 

      I parked across the street from the house with the black front door and got out, still holding the piece of paper from my gym bag. Standing in the same spot that I had been when I saw that happy family almost ten years before, I began unfolding the star map that I'd been pinching between my fingers. It had been folded and refolded so many times over the years that it was weak at the creases, the little yellow stars that indicated celebrity addresses faded to an almost white.

      I flipped the map over and read, for the who-knows-how-many-th time, what I'd written on the back while sitting on the curb;

        The Perfect Life

          I want the perfect wife and kids. I want to live in the perfect house and drive the perfect car. I want to have the perfect job. I want perfect friends and to have perfect fun.

      And written in a different color ink below that;

           And I want the perfect body.

      Two weeks after I wrote that, after I saw the happy family go into their happy home with the black front door, I had a job. A month later I had a room in a cheap motel. That was followed by enrollment in a GED program, and that by a flea bag apartment, that by junior college. Every year I made it back to that perfect house, my life was a little better than the year before. Every year I wanted to knock on the front door and introduce myself to the happy family, tell them who I was, where I had come from, what my quick glimpse into their life had meant to me and show them how far I'd come. I wanted to show them my car, a picture of my fiance, tell them about getting through school and landing a job with a law firm and working toward the Bar exam. I wanted to say to them, "This is because of you! You drove me to a better life, toward my perfect life, and you didn't even know it."

      While contemplating whether or not that was going to be the year that I actually knocked, a sudden and mysterious sense of misgiving cropped up in the back of my mind. I folded up my star map and walked across the street, unsure of what to make of that new worry. I crossed the neat lawn between the eucalyptus trees and slowly mounted the steps of the happy home's front porch and steeled my nerve to knock on the door.

      I raised my hand to knock and the source of my new doubt resolved itself. Every year when I thought about knocking on that door and meeting that family I had something new that I'd be able to tell them about. That day was the first time that I had nothing to tell them about that I wouldn't have been able to tell them about the previous year. There had been no huge bounds in my life that year, and realizing that momentarily scared the hell out of me. I dropped my hand, jumped down the steps and jogged back to the safety of my car.

      My perfect car. My almost perfect car. It was an accomplishment, but with room to improve. I knew that I had been improving, but the fear that maybe I had plateaued, that the entirety of the past year had been personal stagnation began to send vines through my brain and I couldn't put them down.

      I had to get home. Turning the corner I saw the young sight-seer couple again and briefly wondered if they were homeless and hiding out in Beverly Hills.