Easy Street, page 2
I envy those in the throes of mania, elated with lofty ideas, capturing everyone’s attention with their glaring personal light, however brief, however ill-fated. I envy their moments of brightly felt life.
I envy rugged Americans who fight for their ribbons; here in L.A., we get them at parties and forget what purse we stashed them in.
I envy J. D. Salinger and Virginia Woolf. I envy Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Walt Whitman, and Nikos Kazantzakis. I envy Anne Sexton. I envy Sylvia Plath, her “Daddy”—“you bastard”—and The Bell Jar and even her grand exit and all that sweet, sweet posthumous fame.
I envy independent bookstore owners in Napa Valley, with their handwritten “store favorites” tastefully presented on papyrus cardstock with deckled edges. I didn’t even know what that was, deckled edges. I had to look it up.
I envy Greek fisherman who wake at dawn. They rub arthritis from their hands and throw coir nets over their sparkling, wine-dark sea, and then while away the afternoon drinking ouzo until the evening when they dance their Zorba-the-Greek dances and dine on fresh fish and olive leaves and collapse into bed lulled by the repetitive rhythm of their rippling waves.
I envy Krista Tippett, host of the NPR spirituality podcast On Being. Boy, did she play her cards right.
I envy wise old women on their deathbeds, whispering to their children and grandchildren gathered in close. “May your lives be as marvelous as mine,” they murmur so kindly it grieves me. “Have wonderful adventures and think of me fondly. Good night.”
I envy most people, really, for something they have that I lack. And what makes it worse is that I should really be able to appreciate my life and not be looking around, because I know what it’s like to be in a situation where appreciation of even the smallest pleasure is impossible.
I suffer from a form of OCD called pure O. For the last fifteen years, the symptoms have been rather negligible, but I have had two flare-ups, which became raging conflagrations that tore through my life.
The spark of my OCD was itself fiery: a fear of hell.
I learned about hell in Sunday school, where I needed to assent to a series of propositions about a historic event, feel bad about my past behavior, and resolve to be better from then on out. If I did these three things sincerely and in good faith, all my sins would be forgiven. Except one: blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
What was blaspheming the Holy Spirit?
The answer: Nobody knows. Just don’t do it.
With this confounding directive, fear of hell nestled itself right in there beside me as my shotgun companion through childhood. When I was nineteen, after my increasingly unmanageable fear had erupted right before Christmas my sophomore year of college, I wound up at an Evangelical mental hospital called Grace Point, a last resort. You might think it would be problematic to seek treatment for the fear of hell from an Evangelical facility that holds as one of its prime doctrines the notion of an eternal hell. And you would be correct. But I did receive a type of help at Grace Point, what in the early days of Christianity might be called succor.
I was diagnosed with a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by an excessive concern with moral and religious doctrine. This idea of “scrupulosity” has a long tradition of devoted religious sufferers, including Protestant reformer Martin Luther. With encouragement, the help of a doctor, and a cocktail of three psychotropic medications, I was able to complete college. Little by little, the punishing theology became less convincing and the notion of divine retribution troubled me less and less. For the next several years, I experienced relative mental stability until, at twenty-five, I was seized once again by terror.
This time around, oddly, there was the hell fear, but without the actual belief in hell, so I was experiencing terror over a doctrine in which I had ceased to believe. My body stubbornly refused to be convinced by my conscious mind’s revision of reality. My frontal lobe was calmly articulating the equivalent of the monster we thought was under the bed is not real, and all my nerve endings were shrieking back, The monster is too real! It’s right underneath the bed!
I had a reemergence of a obsessive childhood tic as well, a self-punishing mechanism that had first snatched hold of my mind when I was eight. I would find, when I was worrying about blaspheming the Holy Spirit, that a part of me would devilishly repeat the word blasphemy in spite of myself. In my eight-year-old mind, these mental outbursts were clear and apparent evidence of my ultimate damnation.
The prohibition once again created a self-referential feedback system, what writer Douglas Hofstadter refers to as “a strange loop.” The more I tried to stop the word blasphemy from arising in my mind, the more I summoned it forth. My lack of control over my own thoughts scared me and then my fear itself frightened me until the terror bloomed into full-blown panic; an even stranger, more damning loop.
Now, at twenty-five, I began to wonder, what if I started doing the same thing? Started to repeat the word blasphemy like I had done all those years ago?
And I did, but this time with a strange twist: The word blasphemy morphed into the term blastoff. So blastoff was what I began repeating.
I recognize that everything about this phenomenon is lunacy, and really embarrassing lunacy at that. Even the word blastoff is preposterous. But more than embarrassing, I find this mystifying mechanism terrifying. It’s a chill I can’t shake because, since I’ve never been certain how I was able to stop the previous looping cyclones that tore through my mind, I’m aware they could return at any moment, if the conditions and pressures were just right. I would be left defenseless.
So I suppose I’d say that most of all, I envy people who do not feel that their sanity could be whipped away at any moment. Those with the great mental health privilege; those hearty, healthy souls who have not crashed through to the terrifying basement of their psyches, who tread easily on the floors of their minds, undisturbed by the acute awareness that the beams beneath could give way at any moment, without warning.
Their minds have always been something they can rely on.
Must. Be. Nice.
But for now, I’m relatively healthy. On solid mental footing. For the last fifteen years, in fact, I’ve suffered only mild manifestations of what I call “looping.” So I should be grateful. What mercy! What grace! A relatively functional ordinary mind! Who cares about the other stuff?
Well, I do, unfortunately. Which is not very grateful and not very nice. And I know it.
I know I’m responsible for this dingy cramped ego space, full of resentments and jealousies I’ve crammed myself into. I am not proud of my pettiness and puniness. Who would be? Plus, here’s the really shameful part: Do you know why I want to expand beyond my myopic self-focus? Because it sucks for me. That’s why. Dedicated self-focus does not bode well for my future. I know I need to put my desires outside myself, onto another ship, so to speak, so that when the worst happens, there will be something still afloat. And since I don’t have kids, which are natural other ships, I must figure another way to do it.
I understand that letting go of my own happiness to focus on the happiness of others so I can ultimately increase my own happiness is contradictory and bound to fail.
But that is where I find myself at the beginning of this Los Angeles tale. It’s a simple time, really, this starting point: when minor struggles still seem major, when common unhappiness is confused with singular misery; a time before obsessive looping returns to snarl up my mind, before an act of casual generosity becomes a formal responsibility, and before a lunch at a charbroiled chicken franchise alters my life forever.
2
Larchmont Ladies
My husband Jim met Joanna ten years ago. I remember the morning clearly. Jim had returned from the barber and was not happy with his new haircut.
“Shit,” he growled, walking up the three steps from our patio to the kitchen door, “he gave me a Ryan Seacrest cut. Now I’ve got ‘young-guy hair, old-guy face.’”
“Young-guy hair, old-guy face” is a Hollywood fashion faux pas we like to keep track of. Robert Redford is the most notable offender.
Jim is close to sixty and his naturally blond hair had been feathered on the sides and tousled on top, a style fashioned perfectly for a member of the latest boy band. He pulled at his roots, as if he could yank his hair back to the way it had been that morning.
My husband is fifteen years older than I am, but I suspect most people don’t pick up on the age difference.
“Your boyish charm saves you,” I said.
There’s something familiar about my husband. He reminds you of the casino host that gave you the free ticket to the buffet that time, or the stand-up you saw once, or the funny guy at RadioShack. New Jersey roots roughen the edges of what could be considered a Hollywood smoothness, just like many years of smoking cigarettes have graveled his voice and his laugh, perfected over many years on sitcom sets, that both invites and commands you to laugh along with him.
Jimmy can also be exuberant, approaching life like a rambunctious kid jumping up on a bridge railing and peeking over the edge, sometimes almost literally. Like when we approach a construction site walking to the store on our way to grab Hot Pockets (or Lean Pockets if we’re on a health craze) and Jimmy spies a large, gaping hole in the ground where a building has been razed.
Pure celebration. I have never met anyone in my life who loves the sight of a sprawling, mighty hole quite like my husband.
There are certain people walking around in the world that, when they break into a smile, you are just . . . done. Movie stars can do that, of course, but so can my husband. The night we met at the bar in a comedy club with the delightfully braggadocious name of “The World Famous Hollywood Improv,” he flashed me one of those smiles and I thought, Well, isn’t that like taking a little vacation? I pulled over a bar stool and sat next to him.
For some reason, though, the moment that sticks with me from that first night was Jim’s interaction with an elderly man who had been drinking alone beside us. At around 11:30 p.m., the man awkwardly jostled off his bar stool without losing his composure and made his way to the door with the assistance of a cane adorned with printed butterflies. It was a cane, I surmised, he would not have chosen had it not been on sale at Rite Aid.
The man said goodbye to nobody, and nobody said goodbye to him, but just before he reached the door, Jim called out to him in a sharp, clear voice, “Straight home!”
The man turned, surprised.
“Straight home, you hear me?”
Everyone in the bar laughed but no one more than the man himself.
“Got it. Will do,” the man said, lifting his butterfly cane in a waggled farewell.
“No monkey business, alright?”
“No, no.” The man shook his head, still laughing. “No monkey business tonight, I promise.”
And I was, as they say, “in.”
There is the typical Hollywood humor and then there is Jim Vallely’s humor and I noted the difference right away. My husband’s humor is generous. It includes rather than excludes; his humor is an invitation to participate in the joke.
Humor as an invitation. That is what is spectacular about his talent.
With the children in our life, he does a character I love named Tortilla Man, where he secures a flour tortilla to his face with a pair of dark glasses. Tortilla Man does not speak, but he waves, dances, and shakes his hips. As Tortilla Man becomes increasingly excited, the waving and hip shaking becomes more frenzied until finally Tortilla Man “eats his face,” by using his hands to shove the entire tortilla into his mouth.
“No!” the kids yell, “Noooo, Tortilla Man! Don’t eat your face!”
It’s true my husband has a genuine charm, but with me—and I know this is a by-product of his ease with me after all these many years—this charm is not always forthcoming. With me, Jim will often be reduced to monosyllables by his phone or the television or whatever shiny thought he’s rolling around in his head like some marble he won’t let me play with. On this particular day when he returned from the barber, I had wanted some charm. I wanted to hear funny anecdotes. I wanted to be amused.
“So how was Gary?” I asked as soon as he walked in the door. Gary is Jim’s barber.
“Oh, you know,” Jim said, pouring a cup of coffee from the cold pot and putting the cup in the microwave.
“No, I don’t know.”
“Gary’s great.” Jim stared at the microwave intensely as if the heating process required his unaverted gaze.
“How so?”
“You know . . . you can tell Gary anything.”
Jimmy’s focus was laser-like. If anything went wrong with the microwave, he would be the first to know.
I was determined to get at least five sentences of conversation out of him. “What do you tell him?”
The microwave dinged and Jimmy removed the cup, checking the heat with his finger.
“Gary’s, you know. He’s a gay man with five biological children, so . . .” He trailed off as he walked over to the table.
I follow him. “So . . . what? What does that mean?”
“So he’s pretty much seen it all.”
It’s an odd conclusion, but this is gossip and I like gossip. Even if it’s about a barber I’ve never met. “Do you think Gary knew he was gay when he was having the children?”
Jimmy pulled his phone from his pocket. “I don’t know. He’s Gary.”
Jim takes a picture of himself and looks at it.
“Shit.”
“What does that mean? I don’t know Gary. What’s Gary like?”
“You know, you gotta love Gary.”
“Why? Why do you gotta love him?”
Jim started texting.
I slapped the table to get his attention. “Just tell me one thing you told Gary and then I’ll let you go.”
Jim appeared to use all his strength to haul his gaze up from the screen to meet my eyes. “Okay,” he heaved, displeased but willing to go along. He dropped his elbows onto his thighs and rubbed his forehead. This was not easy, he was letting me know, what I was putting him through here.
Finally he sat up, his expression easing. “I told Gary about this mother and daughter I met in front of Koo Koo Roo who knew my name from The Golden Girls,” he said quickly. Then his gaze snapped back to the phone, his inner resources exhausted.
“Uh, what?” I knew he was holding out on me. “Come on, husband, I want to hear the story.”
I finally got it out of him that on his way to the barber, he stumbled upon two women panhandling in front of the charbroiled chicken franchise Koo Koo Roo.
“I give them five dollars and I tell them not to spend it all in one place. The older one laughs for like a solid minute.
“She says I am very funny,” he went on. “And she tells me I should write comedy for a living. ‘Los Angeles is the perfect place for a comedy career,’ she says. ‘You have talent. You might have a shot.’ She says her name is Sunny, and she introduces me to the younger woman, who hasn’t said anything up to this point. ‘This is my daughter,’ she says. ‘She knows I’m right. Right, Joanna?’
“Joanna agrees with her mother that comedy would indeed be a good line of work for me, and I talk to them for a while before finally admitting that, in fact, I do write comedy for a living in Los Angeles. They want to know how I got my start, so I tell them I got my first real job on The Golden Girls.”
“Which they’d seen,” I prompt, happy to have extracted the story.
“Yeah, the younger one, the daughter, Joanna, she shouts, ‘The Golden Girls. The Golden Girls! He wrote comedy for The Golden Girls! The Golden Girls is our favorite show!’ Then Sunny asks me my name and when I say ‘Jim Vallely,’ Joanna starts jumping up and down. She goes crazy. ‘I’ve seen that name! Vallely! Jim Vallely!’ she shouts, grabbing at her mother’s arms with both hands. She’s squeezing so tight I think she’s going to leave marks.”
Jim explained how Sunny had calmly and expertly quieted her daughter’s wild enthusiasm. Sunny then confided that she and Jim had a lot in common, for she herself was a kind of a comic.
“‘I used to send jokes to Reader’s Digest,’ she says. ‘And some of them even got published.’”
“Wow,” Jim had said with, I’m sure, his usual forthright generosity toward strangers.
“Then she asks, would I like to hear one of her jokes? ‘Sure,’ I tell her. ‘I’m always up for a joke.’”
“What was the joke?”
“‘Why does Tiger Woods always carry an extra pair of pants?’”
“Why?”
“‘In case he gets a hole in one.’”
“Ah,” I said, “I bet you gave her a nice big laugh.”
Jimmy shrugged.
And that’s how it started.
For the next several months Jimmy gave me regular updates on his adventures with Sunny and Joanna. Every time he passed the two women in front of Koo Koo Roo, which turned out to be their regular spot, he would give them a few dollars, until one day he said, “C’mon, ladies, I’m buying you lunch,” and marched into Koo Koo Roo with the women in tow. After that first meal, Koo Koo Roo lunches became a monthly thing, and the fifth time, as much out of curiosity as at Jim’s insistence, I joined them.
Sunny, who Jim had depicted as about seventy and the well-mannered and relatively taken-care-of partner, had sunbaked skin that made her look like an outdoorsman at the end of a long life spent under the sun. Her hair was matted, dyed jet black by a product that stained her hairline as well as the tops of her ears. She clumped along in laceless men’s athletic shoes several sizes too big for her feet, drawstring sweatpants, a stained T-shirt unassisted by a bra, and an 1980s suit jacket with shoulder pads broad enough to qualify as protective equipment.
Her daughter Joanna’s presentation, however, suggested something more awry. She seemed to be in a heightened state of alert, as if prepared for anything to come at her from anywhere at any time. Static electricity had shocked her mop of frizzy hair into standing up from her scalp as if in alarm. Her eyes managed to express vacancy and hyper-focus at the same time. A yellowing paisley housedress hung unevenly from her thick shoulders, Wicked Witch–striped socks puddled at her ankles, and a bulging macramé purse, whose soiled inner lining protruded like a distended organ, seemed ready to split from the pressure of her double-fisted squeeze.
