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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (5 page)

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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Doug and I meet in Silver Lake. It doesn’t take long for us to start discussing who we are and where we have been. Doug explains that he started out as an actor but then he began managing a bar ten years ago.
 
“It’s weird,” he tells me. “I just started doing it, and I realized a few years ago that I loved it. I love taking care of people. So why stop?”
 
There is something so refreshing in that statement that Doug becomes more attractive by the confession. And Doug is relatively attractive. Although he is in the transition stage of going from a thin-haired man in his thirties to a bald man in his forties, he looks a bit like many of the soap opera stars on whom I had a crush when I was a kid. I can imagine being eight, watching daytime TV during summer vacation, and drooling over the likes of a young Doug.
 
Doug tells me that he was born and raised in L.A. He laughs, “I know. There are only a few of us.”
 
People from L.A. always tell that to transplants like me. Mimi once told me that she and a guy named Phil Bower are the only native Los Angelenos in the city. But that is another Los Angeles myth because there is an enormous number of people who are born, raised, and never leave here. And I understand. When you have seventeen different universes all within the space of one city, why bother?
 
But the one thing we all ultimately do is leave Hollywood. The big dream. The song and the dance. The famous hookups and the belief that we could have been a star. Whether you were raised here or not, this might be a town of broken dreams, but at one point, we all had one that was alive and well.
 
I find out that acting isn’t the only dream Doug has lost. As he gets quiet and explains that he is still taking care of the cats he ended up with from a divorce a few years back, I sense another stalled hope in Doug’s story. I can see why giving up acting might not have seemed like such a sacrifice set against a happy marriage, and why now, in its failure, there is the feeling that much more was lost than just a relationship. Doug doesn’t go into details, refers to the whole thing as back story, but I know what back story is. Back story is when the wife leaves you and the pets, and then you’re a single dude with three cats.
 
He smiles sadly and says, “As much as I love them, I have to say, they’re getting old. And I’m kinda looking forward to traveling freely without always having to find someone to take care of them.”
 
I am sure in their passing, those cats will give him more than just physical freedom. I can see that it takes a long time for the wounds of divorce to heal, and even longer for the scar to fade. And though I might have watched women fall in love, marry, go through divorce, and fall in love again, maybe I’ve been lucky that I have been spared that pain. I so often think of marriage as the ultimate prize that I forget it’s not necessarily permanent. And might not actually be the dream to which I have pinned so many hopes.
 
Doug and I have a nice enough dinner. It’s a little loud in the restaurant, and he’s kind of a low talker, and I am kind of a little deaf, this makes me nod and smile a lot. But maybe that’s better. I tell him how one day I hope to be a writer—that I have loved books since before I could read.
 
“So, you’re really smart, huh?” he asks.
 
I want to say:
Yes, I am
. And you have no idea what a pain in the ass that is. Back in 2002 when I moved to Hollywood, I once had my own starstruck dream. Long before I found myself answering phones at a nonprofit downtown, I thought I was going to make it big. I moved out to L.A. with one screenplay, half a novel, and a laptop. I thought that between the jacaranda trees and the Hollywood sign and the lights of the Sunset Strip that some kind of fame might be mine. After two years in Los Angeles, I met and fell in love with Oliver, a successful Hollywood producer who I thought would be the answer to that dream. I would write books and screenplays, and he would make them into movies, and I too would see my Hollywood star rise.
 
But that wasn’t reality. At the time, I could barely pay my bills. I would go to the local gas station, and it would be me and a bunch of female CHAs in their convertible BMWs. For all I know, they might have had PhDs in nuclear physics, but I get the feeling that their M3s came more from modeling gigs and wealthy older boyfriends. And I hated them. I wanted so badly just to have their good highlights and small button noses, and then I wouldn’t have to do anything more than ask for a light in order to find love. Though being well-read and asking the tough questions and being considered a challenge to the men I dated might have helped me feel better about myself, I would wonder whether it was all worth it. Whether the CHAs had this thing figured out with a lot less thinking and a lot less disappointment.
 
I don’t know how to respond to Doug’s question. So I cock my head to the side and say something to the effect of, “On good days,” which makes no sense. As though on my bad days, I become a blithering moron. It’s actually on the bad days when I am too smart, when I overthink and overdose my head with thoughts about who I am and where I am going and why some things just aren’t meant to be.
 
We finish dinner, and I need to get going. I am picking up my friend Siren to go to a party at the Standard in Hollywood. Even though I don’t live there anymore, even though a part of me has moved on since that dream, I still like to visit the universe next door from time to time. Doug and I leave the restaurant, and I am laughing. I feel totally comfortable.
 
And here is where the dilemma is revealed: Would I like to go out with Doug again?
 
Sure.
 
Would I like Doug to be my boyfriend?
 
No.
 
And why not?
 
I don’t know.
 
For all my smarts, I know even less.
 
6
 
Date Six: Desperado
 
I hang up the phone with my father and stare dumbly at the porch of my friends’ beach house in Oxnard. My friends John and Teresa stay in this house every winter. It is one of those Big Easy rentals that make real life feel very far away—an old wood cabin with wind whistling through its walls. We have to climb out a window to get to the backyard, but it’s well worth it because the backyard is the roiling Pacific. We come home smelling like salt, and every November I look forward to this time with my friends, lounging in blankets on the cold, wet sand.
 
Though this weekend is technically not a date, it feels like it has pushed me closer to love than any encounter I have had so far, and I wonder whether that is all these dates might be: real experiences in the search for this thing called love.
 
If that’s the case, then next week my visit to my dad will probably be one of the most important dates of my life. I will be face-to-face with him for the first time in years, and for the first time since I got sober, and though there is a part of me that wants to see him, that has dreamed of seeing him, there is also a part of me that is really, really scared.
 
My father was arrested when I was four. I don’t remember it happening. He was in Panama City with his mistress at the time, and my mom and I were down in Ft. Lauderdale, staying with my grandmother because everyone, except for my father, could feel that the end was near. I should say it wasn’t the first time my father had been arrested. Before I was born, he had spent time in Mexican prisons, escaped from every jail they had put him in, and by the time I came along, had graduated from small-time pot dealer to one of the biggest marijuana smugglers working in 1977. Certainly not a cottage industry then, if ever.
 
I am consistently told that I loved my daddy like no one else on earth. I could be balling my eyes out, but once I was up and in that man’s arms, it was all I ever needed. To be cradled by his love. He would lift me up and my back would straighten, and, according to the uncles who later played my fathers, I would instantly become a preening Queen of Sheba. To some he might have just been a big-talking con, barking orders while coke fell out of his nose, but to me he was the King of Diamonds, my Ace of Spades. And later, when I too became a big-talking con, barking orders while coke fell out of my nose, I thought I might actually be him. I would imagine him standing at the head of some table, leading his men into the next job, and I would try desperately to feel him in me even when he was far away. I would look for him in the lines of blow, in the shots of whiskey, in the loose memories I had of him all before I was five.
 
After the big arrest in 1981, I remember the police coming and taking the car away from my young and confused mother. She was begging them not to leave us stranded, and then when they threatened to take the Hartmann suitcases and the Louis Vuitton carry-ons, she began to cry because we would be left in this motel parking lot, with no way home, with the last things we owned laying in a pile on the pavement. I remember running up a green, grassy slope because I just wanted to get away, I just wanted to put space between me and the pain that had been struck into our life. Everyone knew the odds, including my mother, but I know that they were also hoping that my father was being honest when he promised that he was bringing in the last big load. The one which would allow him to retire and invest in legitimate businesses, and those years in the illegal drug trade would become a dark, distant memory for us all. But things rarely go that way, and so instead, I remember the nice police officer leading me back to my mom as she watched the very shaky deck of cards that had been our life fall all around us in a motel parking lot in South Florida.
 
I know that I went to the hearing, though I don’t remember much besides running off again and walking back in through the wrong door, positioning myself between the judge and the lawyers’ tables. I remember people laughing and being led back to where my family sat. I’m not even sure if these are real memories. Or if somehow, I had fantasized it all at such a young age and still carry it as truth. This image of me standing innocently between the judge and my father, making some sort of stand about the injustice of it all.
 
My father was initially sentenced to sixty-six years with no parole because whatever one might be able to say about his success rate as a smuggler, he had been more than successful at pissing off every US Marshall, DEA, and FBI agent along the Eastern seaboard. Because the fact is, my daddy is a career criminal, a drug-smuggling con, an outlaw and a cowboy, and he isn’t going to stand for anyone telling him what to do. And if you want to find an archetype that creates a romantic figure that forever leads you into impossible romances and irresponsible love, well, there you have him. When my dad was officially sent away, I would catch my mom crying while she drove me in her Buick Regal. She would hear some song like “Desperado” by the Eagles, and I’m sure she would wish that this man with whom she had naively fallen in love would come to his senses, would stop riding fences, would let someone love him, before it was too late. But it was too late, and he never came home again.
 
Twenty-six years later, my dad sits in yet another federal penitentiary. Lompoc. Danbury. Allenwood. I know them all. You wouldn’t think to look at me that I would. It always comes as a surprise to people that an educated young woman with preppy clothes and a deceiving set of dimples could carry such baggage, but I do.
 
My dad still thinks the big load is on its way and that the only reason he wears an orange jumpsuit everyday is because the system fucked him. For a long time, I was on his side. I worked at
High Times
and wrote articles about legalization and the best head shops in the country. Whereas other young writers were out doing their internships at
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
, I was celebrating 4:20, the international pot-smoking hour, with aging hippies and hemp dealers named Dolphin. I believed in the romanticism of drugs and the lifestyle we once led, before the cars were taken and the suitcases were emptied, and the only reason we survived was because my grandmother had the foresight to steal $20,000 my father had hidden in her couch during one of his drunken stupors. She was terrified to do it; she cringed every time he would come over and sit on that same couch, but she knew one day it would just be my mom and me, and no amount of half-hearted promises from a convicted felon would be able to pay our bills. Growing up I knew very little of the dark side of my father. All I knew was I wanted to be a Desperado too.
 
But things change. I went home to Dallas to cease my own drunken stupors, and I discovered that not all cowboys have to live on the range. Not all cowboys need to gamble their lives away in order to prove they have lived. Because by my second month in Dallas I met someone who showed me that true cowboys work hard to be there for their families; they fight hard to protect what they love, and live hard not because they don’t care but because they care so damn much. By my second month I met Louise, and Louise changed everything.
 
Louise is the type of woman who traditionally would have intimidated me. She wore tall Tony Lama cowboy boots and wild fringe jackets and had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe covering her entire back. But I was so desperate for help, I was willing to sacrifice my fear, and so I complimented the belt she was wearing the first night I saw her at a meeting, and we became quick friends. Louise is fifteen years older than me and, at the time, had two years of sobriety, and I was willing to believe anything she said. She became my first sponsor, and when she told me that we could do anything as long as we were sober, I believed her.
BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
5.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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